Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller

With the Harvey Weinstein tsunami of sexual misconduct allegations, it has everyone asking, will this be the moment when everything changes? And if it is, what will it take to balance the power between harassers and their victims? And what about the enablers--Is this all one big conspiracy? I talk with sexual harassment and internet privacy lawyer Carrie Goldberg to find out. Inflection Point is brought to you by FreshBooks—less time dealing with invoices and expenses, and more time to change the world. Get your first 30 days free at freshbooks.com/inflection and enter “Inflection Point” in the how did you hear about us section. And—Women’s voices have never been more vital. Your monthly support will make them be heard. Become an Inflection Point patron.

Jennifer Brea was an avid traveler, a Harvard PhD student and a Princeton grad. She was engaged to be married to the man she loved. Then one day she couldn't get out of bed with an illness that went undiagnosed for over a year. Until finally she started to meet other people--mostly women--who had the same problem: a misunderstood illness, generically described as "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" or what used to be called "hysteria." To take control of her life--and to be taken seriously, she started to film herself, others like her and the few experts there are. Her film is called "Unrest." Inflection Point is brought to you by FreshBooks’ new cloud accounting software that makes it easy to invoice, track expenses and get paid online. Try it free for 30 days.

Whitney Bell got tired of receiving unwanted sexually explicit photos from men, and decided to do something about it: She gathered 200 of these images and put them on display in an art gallery show entitled "I Didn't Ask For This. A Lifetime of Dick Pics." This is “Part 1” of our convo. Be sure to listen to Part 2 for more about her feminist activism.

Part 2 of our conversation…To hear about Whitney Bell’s gallery show “I Didn’t Ask For This: A Lifetime of Dick Pics” please check out “Part 1.” In this episode, we move onto the response Whitney got from an article she wrote about abortion for Teen Vogue; why she posed for Playboy and how she handles the backlash from her feminist activism.

Most of us don’t know what to say when we are grieving or how to reach out when the people we love go through something awful. Dr. Kelsey Crowe’s own experiences with grief helped her realize that so many people suffer alone because the people around them don’t know what to do or say. So Kelsey actually shifted her career focus to understand what grieving people want, and what they don’t. She surveyed 900 people about their experiences with grief, founded Help Each Other Out to provide empathy bootcamps, and wrote a book about what she learned. The title of her book sums it up: There is No Good Card for this: What to say and do when life is scary, awful and unfair to people you love.* Lauren talks with Kelsey about what she learned and how we can all help each other out. Thank you to our sponsor: Rent The Runway - Unlock an endless wardrobe. Get 25% off your first month when you enter the code INFLECTION at checkout. Visit them here: RentTheRunway.com/Unlimited. Thank you to our Patrons! Get rewarded when you become a monthly supporter at Patreon.com/InflectionPoint

Ashton Applewhite is on a mission as old as humanity itself -- to change our attitudes about age and ageing. Her book is "This Chair Rocks. A Manifesto Against Ageism," and her Ted Talk received a standing ovation. She's onto something. This week on Inflection Point, she talks with Lauren about how she plans to end what she calls "the last acceptable prejudice."

When she was young, Jeannette Walls wanted nothing more than to escape her crazy, chaotic family. She grew up in poverty, in a crumbling home, where her parents couldn’t always put food on the table. They moved from place to place and school to school. After putting her past behind her to become a successful journalist and author, Walls finally revisited her upbringing in her memoir, “The Glass Castle.” Now it’s been adapted into a film, and this was my chance to talk with her about how she rose out of a seemingly impossible situation.

When Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, MO in August, 2014 and the protests began, Sabaah Folayan felt the media’s coverage was overly focused on the looting, rioting and property damage, and not nearly enough on the stories of the people who rose up. So she dropped everything and went to Ferguson to see for herself what was happening on the ground and to talk with the people who live there. The result is her documentary film Whose Streets? She shares what it was like to be there and how she made her film in such extraordinary circumstances. Whose Streets comes out August 11th, 2017.

“The biggest trick is how do we teach women at any stage to keep knowing what they want and asking for that,” says Leanne Meyer, Program Director of the Carnegie Mellon Leadership and Negotiation Academy for Women. Meyer’s work focuses on two main components that inhibit women’s progress in the workplace: the environments at work and school, and the habits of women themselves. Meyer educates women on the stereotypes and biases holding them back; teaches them to network; how to seek out and make use of the support of sponsors and mentors; and how to understand their environments and not sell themselves short in negotiation. Thank you to our sponsor: Rent The Runway - Unlock an endless wardrobe. Get 25% off your first month when you enter the code INFLECTION at checkout. Visit them here: RentTheRunway.com/Unlimited. Thank you to our Patrons! Get rewarded when you become a monthly supporter at Patreon.com/InflectionPoint

What if the root of all the world’s problems is the imbalance of masculinity and femininity in our leadership? Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers has spent over twenty years investigating the power of femininity to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. We discuss how she discovered that leading with the feminine can help anyone–male or female–find their purpose and their passion. Thank you to our sponsor: Rent The Runway - Unlock an endless wardrobe. Get 25% off your first month when you enter the code INFLECTION at checkout. Visit them here: RentTheRunway.com/Unlimited. Thank you to our Patrons! Get rewarded when you become a monthly supporter at Patreon.com/InflectionPoint