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Each week, host Jason Gots surprises some of the world's brightest minds with ideas they're not at all prepared to discuss. Join us and special guests Neil Gaiman, Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Dawkins, Maria Popova, Mary-Louise Parker, Neil deGrasse Tyson and many more...

01 June, 2019

Eve Ensler (author, activist) - No way out but through

For all the women in the world who never got the apology they needed, and all the men who haven't found the words, and above all for herself, Eve Ensler (THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES) wrote THE APOLOGY. In this searing, unflinching, often surprisingly funny conversation we talk about trauma, compassion, and what it means to apologize for real.

Jason Gots

Think Again Podcasts

"I think in the case of men, the more they are separated from their tenderness, their vulnerability, their hearts, their tears... their questions, the more violent they become."
"Language changes everything. It's like saying the word 'vagina'. If you can't say it, you can't see it. If you can't see it, you can't talk about it. If you can't talk about it a lot can happen it to it in the dark without your permission."

NOTE: I feel I should let listeners know that this episode of Think Again is about surviving and thriving in the face of unspeakable trauma and sexual violence. And in order to get to the thriving, we have talk about the trauma, which may be painful for some listeners and inappropriate for kids. But I don't want to scare anybody off—I think it's one of the most valuable conversations we've ever had on the show.

For a human child growing up, trust is the foundation of everything. We learn how to regulate our emotions, how to see the world as relatively stable and safe through the connection with the people who care for us. Severely neglected children can suffer all kinds of harm to their ability to think, connect with others, and learn. But what happens when the caring bond is not only missing, but is horribly abused? Distorted through incest and sexual violence? How do you build a self and life after that? And let's say you somehow manage to survive to adulthood…to thrive, even. How do you fill the place in your heart where the love and the trust is supposed to be?

My guest today has had to answer all these questions for herself. She is the playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler. You may know her as the creator of the Vagina Monlogues. What you might not know is that all the horrors I'm talking about happened to her as a kid. Let me take that out of the passive voice: her father did that to her, and more. And he died without saying anything remotely close to "I'm sorry". So Eve wrote his apology for him—her book THE APOLOGY is a letter to her—to Eve—in the imagined voice of her dead father, retelling what happened, why it happened, and trying to figure out in these twisted circumstances what an apology would even mean…

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Jared Diamond on immigrants and innovation

The first church to marry gay couples in Oklahoma. The merging of a congregation founded by a white supremacist with the members of a black Pentacostal congregation. The film American Heretics explores the complexities of religious life in the Bible Belt as it intersects with politics and race.

Think Again Podcasts

Oklahoma is "either your past or your future…it's a microcosm of America…the issues around racism, politics, the blurring of church and state…"
Come for the cultural politics…stick around for the unlikely connections to LSD, mushrooms, and the Salem Witch Trials…

In spite of all the weird ways the word has been abused since the 2016 elections, I think of myself as a liberal. As a basic value, I try to be open-minded. And like many liberals, I live in a big, liberal city where I rarely meet anyone who doesn't share my values, religious outlook, and political beliefs. As a result, like it or not, I'm in a bubble. And when I'm not being careful about it, I'm vulnerable to seeing "the Bible Belt" and the American South as one monolithic, mostly white, evangelical, anti-abortion, Christian Right-leaning mass. As some kind of living history exhibit of a past us New Yorkers have left behind.

And I know lots of people in some of the same bubbles I occupy who are quick to point to religion as the cause of horrors throughout human history. People who see reason and science as progress, religion as unequivocally retrograde, and who point to data showing that people everywhere are getting less religious as a hopeful sign that humanity might be moving in the right direction. But just as it doesn't have a monopoly on morality, religion doesn't have a monopoly on intolerance. And reason alone can't give us values like love and kindness. Religion's one of many ways that people organize their lives and like everything we make, it's subject to both our courage and our cowardice. The best and the worst of us.

A recent Pew survey says that 63% of Americans believe in God. In Bible Belt states like Oklahoma, where that number is much higher, there are fierce political battles going on for control of the Christian narrative—pushback against fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible as aligned with conservative republican values. These battles, invisible to most of us out here on the coasts, are the subject of AMERICAN HERETICS, a powerful new documentary by my guests today, Jeanine and Catherine Butler.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Michael Pollan on the history of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in America

Elif Shafak - the story no one hears

"We live in an age in which there is too much excessive information, less knowledge, and very, very little wisdom." Elif Shafak has faced trial and investigation in her native Turkey for giving voice to the voiceless in her novels. We talk about her book THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE and the fight for nuance in a world of binaries.

Think Again Podcasts

"To say that there are two stories to the same issue…doesn't mean [they] have the same power. Sometimes one of those stories will be the story that no one hears….that is suppressed and erased and forgotten and pushed to the margins."
"I think faith is way too important to leave it to the religious. Just like politics is way too important to leave it to career politicians. And I've started to believe that technology is way too important to leave it to tech companies and monopolies."

After four years and just over 200 conversations for this podcast, I'm feeling the need for a new kind of politics. One that would champion uncertainty, fragility, emotional vulnerability against the tyranny of opinions that push us one way or another. I used to think that art was sufficient for this purpose. After all, it was books like J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey or Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, bands like the Smiths and the Velvet Underground that gave a much younger me courage to embrace ambiguity as a great teacher.

Art's an open door, but you have to walk through it. And it's the politics and culture around you that shape your ability to do so. We're hurting and hungry for connection. Sick of misunderstanding and violence. I think this is true all over the world. I think it runs so deep it's like an underground river, one whose presence we can only guess at from the contours of the surface earth.

I'm very happy to be talking today with Turkish-born global citizen, novelist and activist Elif Shafak. She's the author of HONOR, THE FLEA PALACE, and THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE, among many other books. In her writing and public speaking, she's one of the most eloquent voices I know of this new politics that doesn't fit easily on any flag.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Pete Holmes on #metoo and binary thinking

30 years on, Captain Tracy Edwards, MBE on her historic race around the world

"You're all going to die" was one typical comment about the all-woman crew of the sailing ship Maiden, the first of its kind in the Whitbread round-the-world race. 30 years later, its captain Tracy Edwards, MBE reflects on the documentary MAIDEN and an act of will and teamwork that changed the world.

Think Again Podcasts

"My mum always used to say, 'if you don't like the way the world looks, change it.'"
The surprising role King Hussein of Jordan played in championing equality
Women's freedom fight, then and now.

What's the hardest thing you've ever done? The thing everyone said was impossible, that you knew you had to do anyway, and that you doubted a thousand times while it was underway that you'd be able to see through to the end?

There's a good chance you can think of at least one example. And an even better chance it doesn't even come close in monumental, soul-smelting intensity to what Tracy Edwards put herself through back in 1989 to 1990, along with the all-female crew of her racing yacht Maiden. In that year, with the dismissive, derisive, mostly male eyes of the racing world upon them, this 9 member crew proved beyond a doubt that they could sail every bit as skillfully and fearlessly as their male competitors in the Whitbread Round-the-World-yacht-race.

They crossed the southern ocean from Uruguay to Australia, surviving icebergs and deadly waves to win the most difficult leg of the race, then beat their closest rival, move for move, in a tactical sprint to New Zealand. By the time they made it home to England, derision had long given way to admiring awe.

Tracy and her crew did a thing everyone thought was impossible. And in doing so they gave hope to countless others. The documentary film MAIDEN, out from Sony Pictures Classics, captures every leg of their incredible journey, and shows the full cost and rewards of Tracy's single-minded persistence.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Explorer Erling Kagge on journeys and solitude