Three great interviews
Wallace Shawn, Lewinsky/Dunham, and more
Touching in to share some new writing of my own, along with three interviews so salient I couldn’t help but boost.
Meanwhile, thank you and congrats to my colleagues in the WGA for our newly ratified contract, with updates and FAQs here.
arts
📚 My piece in Book Post on the recent renaissance of Southern author Nancy Lemann.
labor
🎧 A wonderful Wallace Shawn discusses his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, running through May 24th, and the role of Deborah Eisenberg in his political evolution.
“Deborah was born a rebel and a leftist. By the time she was around seven, she knew that society was all fucked-up, completely. And she wasn’t trying to convert me… I am a cowardly person, and I always was a cowardly person—but for three or four years, I was so obsessed with finding out about these things that I kinda lost my fearfulness.”
🎧 Storied character actor Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin Brockovich) covers a history of American political economy since the New Deal. A challenging but richly informative listen.
“The minimum wage is still $7.15 an hour. That means if you work 40 hours a week, at the end of a year, you’ve made $15,400, which is less than the federal poverty guideline. That’s legal in the United States… The taboo in this society is to discuss money in meaningful terms.”
media
🎧 Monica Lewinsky interviews Lena Dunham in a wide-ranging conversation about dark nights of the soul and the ongoing challenge of self-definition (video).
“There were so many experiences [my grandmother] never told me about until she was 96 and dying, because there was no space for imperfection. And now, of course, because there are so many eyes on everyone, whether they’re a high school girl who sends a nude or a woman in the public eye who gets her phone hacked or goes through a gnarly divorce or a mental health crisis, we see it now. We see people having to either collapse or regather their life… I think that especially as women, it’s almost impossible to set the record straight. The record will just continue to be set for you and your words will be clipped. If you’re lucky enough to have a story that meets people, it will be perceived and misperceived. But I wanted to tell my story back to me.”
