Past Due with Ana Marie Cox and Open Mike Eagle

To celebrate With Friends Like These 200th episode, we talk with Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith about how he helped inspire the show, what the pandemic has taught us about grief, and being careful about who you call a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CW: Eating disorders, dieting.Aubrey Gordon, of Maintenance Phase and “Your Fat Friend,” joins to take us through the twisty history of Weight Watchers and its founder, Jean Nidtech. Stops on the tour include Heinz ketchup and Maya Angelou! Aubrey’s new book is “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the National Guard descended on Minneapolis to enforce an 8PM curfew on the streets, advocates for those living on the streets bought a block of rooms at a shuttered Sheraton to house them. The volunteers decided to impose as little authority as possible, hoping that a radical approach to harm reduction would empower the residents. But their experiment went terribly wrong.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Martinson was a radical anti-racist activist in the 1960s: He ran for mayor in Berkeley as a socialist. He was arrested in Mississippi for participating in Freedom Summer. And then he authored the academic paper that became the political justification for “tough on crime” policies. He’s forgotten; can he be forgiven? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson guides us through his tragic story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York Magazine senior writer and Friend of the Pod Rebecca Traister joins to talk us through how Biden’s missteps around issues of gender and race made him the white guy who could win in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer comes on to talk about the inauguration and the future of this fragile democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We love to love mothers, except when we don’t — like when they’re Black, or queer, or too thin, or too fat, or want to end their pregnancy, or do it alone, or have a glass of wine. Friend of the pod Lyz Lenz joins to discuss her new book, “Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The only sustainable foundation for a changed world is internal transformation” — that’s the message of Sonya Renee Taylor, author of “The Body Is Not an Apology.” Her mission is to take us out of the realm of mere “body positivity” or “self-acceptance” and into a place of “radical self-love.” That means not just creating a world where all bodies are celebrated, but also embracing who we are, exactly as we are. Which part of that mission sounds harder to you? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Derek Black thought he was done with the white nationalist movement when he wrote a public letter renouncing the ideology he grew up in. Then he realized that white nationalism wasn’t just the racists that used to listen to his white nationalist radio show and read his white nationalist website — white supremacy was everywhere, people just weren’t talking about it. (With a new introduction; this episode originally aired 06/12/20.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Santa isn’t the only myth we use to keep children in line! In the 1990s, evangelical churches bought and gave away thousands of copies of the book, “Left Behind,” hoping its overwrought depiction of the End Times would frighten unbelievers into the arms of Christ. That is not what happened. Amy Frykholm, author of “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America,” explains what did. Originally aired 8/7/2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices