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Episode 145 -- Mailbag Episode, Part 1 (Patreon)

Published:
2026-07-21 06:26:44
Imported:
2026-09

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To celebrate 3 years of podcasting together, we are going through the amazing listener questions you all posed here on Patreon a few weeks back! The results ran a little long, and so this is only the first part of the resulting mailbag episode (this one is main feed, the next one will be Patreon-only)! We decided to delve into more general questions first, so the topics include: updates on Moira's squirrel, Adrian's adventures in art history exam taking, some thoughts about student AI use, and the pronunciation of Adrian's name!

Thank you all so much for the amazing questions, and thank you also for your support of this show over the years -- it means so much to us!

Comments

In Bed With the Right

Oh, and sorry but don't expect the second installment right away! Next week we have an episode with the amazing Sarah Marshall on deck that we don't want to keep from you any longer, and a deep dive into lesbian nuns for the Patreon!

SPUM

If you and Moira's wife made her listen to the Klemperer/Ludwig/Wunderlich recording of Das Lied von der Erde that would deliver on the AI promise of a podcast created literally specifically for me. Maybe we can't Mahler-pill her but we can Wunderlich-pill her

MWD

It's wild to start out the term telling undergrads that university leadership is actively undermining their education through pushing AI

Lu

I would love to hear about classical music. Musician myself, I am a big fan of baroque opera. I think the whole castratto thing is an interesting subject regarding gender. Also, I love the fact that baroque opera now feels super queer. When they don't have a countertenor, they either put a female singer in male drag or just gay it up by genderbending. Baroque opera does not have the status of romantic and late romantic opera (which is seen as " the Opera"). It's more niche, played on historical instruments, sung in a different style. Having experience in historical music praxis, I can confirm that most people singing/playing early music are some flavour of gay or nerd. I loved l'incoronazione di poppea, version from 2018 salzburger festspiele, les arts florissants, nerone played by kate lindsey (There may or may not be a full show on yt - oedipus coloneus...)

Loraine

Thank you so much for the delightful and interesting answer to my question about Adrian's name! 🥰

Laura

I resubscribed after this lovely ep to say a) Moira, Shulamith Firestone is my personal problematic fav and it’s so funny/unusual to hear her brought up and b) Adrian, your daughter might also enjoy The Highwayman, The Ballad of East and West and Night Mail :)

Marie

Thank you for this! I (Swiss) was also wondering about the Name thing. I first thought the Name was Dobb. Also very pissed to share country with the NZZ (and Weltwoche ofc).

Laura Cullen

It's not just snobby to say audiobooks aren't reading, it's also ableist AF (speaking as an English teacher). And as I hope Adrian's (and Moira's) comments demonstrate, it's not inherently easier to listen to a text, especially if comprehension is what's needed.

Laura Cullen

I promise I reread the Harry Potter series as audio (or most of it, anyway) when I started teaching, and besides the shitty racist names and TERF stuff (which either hadn't happened or at least was not known for years), it really is kinda mid. And I say that as somebody with three cats (all 7+ years old) with names from the series.

Loraine

So did I! But that would have been unusual, too, as a German surname

isa

omg Carmina Burana episode PLEASE!! My choir did it recently and it’s so bizarre

William Knight

Oh man Adrian’s commentary on his name hit home as someone married into a family whose German name has been becoming increasingly unrecognizable since the early 19th century. It’s a German American Tradition!

William Knight

I said this elsewhere but this is such a long tradition with German American names! My spouse’s has lost an umlaut and the pronunciation of a consonant or two since his family arrived in Philly from the Palatinate 250 years ago.

William Knight

RE: ultimate dad books my friends my spouse and I are re reading Patrick O Brian’s Aubrey Maturin series for like the 4th time.

Loraine

Even more fascinating to see it happening in real time, right?!

Nina V~

nerdily taking notes in the dork-forward space of the combination podcast studio/cheesecake factory 😅

Rebecca Skirvin

I was about 25 when the first book came out and after I read it I had the same reaction. I had Wizards of Earthsea, The Harper Hall of Pern, and The Dark Is Rising series when I was a kid. Those all have their own problems, but in terms of writing quality, world building, and emotional depth, Harry Potter doesn't hold a candle to them.

Joy

absolutely worth waiting when there is a lesbian nun discussion on the horizon!!

Darren Hughes

Given how you mention in this episode that you already have a deep backlog of episode ideas, I hope it's not bad form to make a request? I'd love to hear a discussion of the WNBA. I think I'm just annoyed that Sophie Cunningham showed up as a ring girl in a recent MMA event that featured convicted rapist Conor McGregor. So gross.

Tobias Heal

I haven't dared to re-read the harry potter books for myself since JKR revealed herself to be a terrible person yet. I'm well aware of all of the criticism and I agree with them all (or at least, all of the ones that are in good faith), but on some level I don't want to quite give up on this part of my childhood that brought me such joy in difficult times. I kind of wonder whether how well/not well written the Harry Potter books really matters. I, and so many other people had an emotional attachment to them, and like Adrian says, it hurts to have to give that up. Like, worlds smallest violin, obviously, but that doesn't mean I don't feel sad about it

Jamie Madden

On parasocial meetings in real life - I'd listened to this show for quite a while before learning that Adrian used to give me cassettes at the Swarthmore college language lab

Murphy

OMG I get so much shit for not loving Freud.

Katie Muñoz

omg yes more classical music analysis please

Nick

I’m like 90% sure I’ve seen Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame say she is actually related to Richard Wagner of Ring Cycle/antisemitism fame?? Can anyone confirm??

Lu

Yes, same. I tried to reread it a few years ago and I couldn't. But I also didn't get too attached to them as a kid. I was obssesed with Percy Jackson. Soft spot for me, but the books are terribly written. Series of unfortunate events, though. I reread it every few years, it still holds up. Yes, there is a character that's neither a man nor woman that didn't age quite well. But the whole package: writing style, themes etc. is very very good in my opinion.

Emily

Me, with exactly zero expertise: Freud is WASHED

Nina V~

one way i've found to bang out papers or lab resports quickly without the use of ai is dictation/ voice to text. my brain and my mouth often work faster than my fingers, so i let myself word vomit my rough draft thoughts and then edit them into some form that makes slightly more sense. another benefit of this is, like listening to something, you can physically do something else as you're rambling.

Nina V~

sadly, i know many dictation softwares use some form of ai, but this way it's at least your own words on the page. plus, there's something less mentally intimidating abt bullshitting out loud vs in a blank word processor

Lu

Also, I don't know how many people followed the trajectory of Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson. He kinda feels like JK Rowling from the parallel universe. There are so many books and spin-offs that I've lost count. After the main series he wanted to put some more representation in his books. There were so many queer, disabled, poc characters which was commendable, but like...you could feel he tried to fill a quota. Anyways. Every type of "dumbledore is gay" tweet by jk rowling was made cannon in Rick Riordan's books.

Rhysograph

I work at an arthouse cinema and loved hearing y’all talk about them! My favorite experience here was watching Verhoeven’s Showgirls in a house packed with queer folks all about my age, just a touch too young to have initially seen it in cinemas. HIGHLY recommend!

Kathryn I

Omg, I also loved the Lady fo Shalott as a kid! Lorena McKennitt's sung version was my favorite song for most of elementary school

Jenny

I appreciate the discussion about teaching undergrads how to read and write, even though "bullshitting essays" is a fraught and painful topic for this former international student. In the mid 2000s, I was a biology major at a hoity-toity Ivy League school, having had a public education from Taiwan and Canada and thus no idea how American elite education really worked. I was encouraged, by the sheer workload, by example from all my classmates, and by a lack of helpful guidance otherwise from instructors, to bullshit the writing for my humanities / social science classes -- something I was extremely ill prepared for as a non-native English speaker and a conscientious goodie-two-shoes with an overenthusiastic idea of academic integrity and What Higher Learning Means. The end result was I developed a raging anxiety disorder about writing that took me out of college for a year and then, a decade down the line, took me out of my doctoral program during dissertation proposal. (I did manage to come back and finish both degrees.) To me, "forcing you to write / argue when you're not really ready" has always felt like a humiliation ritual, a kind of gauntlet that American (elite) academia puts its students through to push us to "fake it till we make it" (itself another deeply American ethos that my stick-in-the-mud Asian self simply could not abide.) This is the first time I've heard the value of bullshitting undergrad essays articulated in a way that isn't just pure self deprecation or cynicism, and I'm chewing on it for myself and for the young (future college-bound) people in my life. I'd love to hear more from both of you about teaching, higher ed, and how to support students to become better thinkers and people. (And yes I do listen to American Campus by Lauren Lassabe Shepard, thanks to your episode featuring her about university trustees!)

Maxwell

feel free to delete this and scour me from the face of this patreon, because I’m very annoyed to be a reply guy like this, but!: Jonathan Shedler’s “Psychoanalysis: That Was Then, This Is Now” is a good introduction/overview to the (now fairly firmly established) empirical effectiveness of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy. He establishes, fairly conclusively imo, that psychoanalysis, properly understood (i.e., not the pop psychology understanding of the clinician slapping an interpretation and calling it a day), is in fact non-inferior to the more modern modalities y’all referenced, like CBT and DBT.

Tobias Heal

I loved Percy Jackson when I was a kid but yeah, I definitely got some of those vibes from the later books. I kind of petered out on them after a while though, I changed as I grew and while I'm glad they were such a formative part of my youth, and I've heard that Rick Riordan's adult books are decent, but I've never felt much desire to go back to them

Nicola Collett

Rest assured that River is in a long tradition of little girls obsessed with The Lady of Shalott. For me it was part of my Anne of Green Gables phase, and I would listen to the Loreena McKennitt setting on repeat while using the hearth rug as a boat. If you and she have not listened to Loreena McKennitt I truly cannot recommend her highly enough.

Ariel

Partenope is great for textual cross-dressing, although it’s not a common production, since it requires two countertenors. Unfortunately, because of the textual cross-dressing, using a mezzo in a pants role to play one of the countertenors does lose some of the impact. But if you ever get a chance to see it, do!

Ariel

I don’t know if there are any recordings of it, but I first saw it at the San Francisco Opera in 2014, and that was a truly fantastic production.

Maren

I'd be interested in the episode subjecting Moira to Mahler, but I think an Alma Mahler episode would be more in line with the podcast and less problematic copyright wise.

Ariel

At least in my case, most of the attachment came from the community around the books. I think in high school? I got involved in fandom communities that were reading against text for Harry Potter. Trying to do economic, political, feminist, etc. analysis of the society presented in the books, and then building from there. Which means I’m not attached to the books themselves anymore, but I am still involved with that portion of the fandom. People have such different experiences with Harry Potter fandom and engaged with it in such different ways that even within fan and former fan communities, people can completely talk past each other when talking about how they handle the text, merchandise, JK Rowling, etc. There’s common fan experiences that I have literally never seen or engaged with.

Ariel

I wonder if Adrian can get his daughter into the Ballad of Tam Lyn to have some variation. That feels about right for that kind of kid.

Lu

Händel's Partenope?

In Bed With the Right

OMG I (Adrian) have started that series three times now, and I *love* it each time, only to run out of steam!!!

Elizabeth De Coster

Not a lawyer but if Stanford has a performing arts librarian, they could maybe help with music rights. As a faculty librarian I help my department faculty with image rights for their books and articles, and I know our arts librarian does similar for arts faculty as well as keeping the library catalog updated regarding permissions and licenses.

William Knight

It’s very much worthwhile. I don’t know how far you got but highlights include the second novel, which is a kind of tribute to Jane Austen, the third which kind of sets the mould for how the novels work and the fifth through the 7th which are just tours de force. But the tenth novel the far side of the world is probably one of the oddest ones. It features Polynesian lesbian separatists and European Utopians trying to impose their vision of paradise on the south seas. It’s utterly wild. They didn’t include most of that in the movie (which was loosely inspired by it and like half of the other 20 books). If you like Audio books I really recommend the ones narrated by Patrick Tull which you should be able to get through Libby with most library memberships.

Laura Cullen

I don't blame anybody for being upset about feeling like they've lost that important part of their childhood/earlier life. I basically renamed two of my cats (if anybody can think of a version of Ron/Ronald that's less Potter-coded, I'm open to suggestions for him, too), I meant it more from the parenting perspective. And I know that it can probably hurt not to share something with your children, but I was just trying to say the younger generation won't be missing out on that much. There's plenty of awesome kid lit that isn't lining the pockets of the Queen of TERF Island (and full of antisemitic goblins, etc)

William Knight

“I loved it but I ran out of steam” describes me and Moby Dick speaking of often homoerotic sea stories with unreliable narrators and an off kilter sense of humor.

Kasspatz

Thanks for this! Here in the German-speaking world, psychoanalysis is a respected field alongside CBT and psychodynamic psychotherapy and the training for it is quite rigorous (bachelors degree in psych, masters degree in psych and then multiple years of training followed by a board exam). I know a lot of psychologists (mostly CBTs) and I’ve never heard any of them poo-poo psychoanalysis as being inferior. “Heilpraktiker” and “coaches” on the other hand…

S

I am an American and if someone German wanted to tell me how my weird uncommon last name is actually pronounced I’d believe them over myself and my own family.

Ariel

Yes!

Tess B

As a kid who also loved the Lady of Shalott, your daughter will love the song by Loreena Mckennitt

Tess B

Came to say the same!

Christine

Appreciate the clarification about Adrian’s name! Not really the same but my german-from-Germany mother’s maiden name is a mild insult in german, similar to doofus in english, and according to family who still have it, native speakers occasionally intentionally mispronounce it assuming it’s a typo or mistake. It’s my middle name and when I was getting my passport, the worker at the consulate let me keep my middle name as a double last name until he realized what it was. Made me cross it out on every form, haha. Let me be a doofus, Germany! 😡

Alex

I was listening to a classical music analysis podcast last year & the way they got around music copyright issues was by using MIDI versions of the pieces, that would probably be hard to bear for Mahler symphonies though

Jane Jackson

I'm a native English speaker and I also developed severe anxiety around writing as an undergrad. I was an adequate writer and a good test-taker, but my executive function issues were exacerbated by the face that I was perfectionistic, mentally unwell, and struggling to make ends meet. And at the time, all of those felt like moral failings. So, pretty much all of my papers were turned in late, if at all. I wish I'd been better able to lower the stakes in my own mind. Really, I wish my educators had done that as well. Treating this kind of writing as an exercise I think is a helpful framing.

Maxine Iglich

Oof, the ignoring mispronunciation as a form of assimilation is such a generational divide. I’m 37, a 2nd gen Slovene American, and I *insist* on people pronouncing my 2 syllable last name correctly after growing up being teased for it in rural Maryland. On the other hand, my family who immigrated here in 1949 to Brooklyn could not care less- during her 40 years of professorship my mother was known as “Doctor E” to both peers and students, and my Aunt Jana was consistently called “Jan-uh” instead of “Yawn-uh” by her coworkers for decades.

Jenny

Solidarity to all students put through the wringer by US higher ed!

Ben Schwabe

It's fun to have Europeans pronounce my family name correctly though my family has been saying it wrong for generations.

testosteronefemme

re: the college question. in case they're going into STEM - they really consciously need to choose to learn about the ethics behind the technology that they are learning about and how it's used and its impacts because their major will not teach them. at best, ethics classes for engineering majors in my experience, more or less boil down to lessons in IP, and that is it. re: the broader endumbening problem, I kind of worry that I'm going to sound like someone who was raised on Tumblr, but well I was, and being exposed to analysis, pieces of books (even if I didn't have the entire book), or news that hadn't been covered anywhere else (like, I learned about the Ferguson protests on Tumblr), combined with a really intense ability to read and enjoyment of reading/challenging my priors, are all traits/experiences of mine that made a really big difference in my engineering skills, frankly. in part because a lot of the actual practical application of engineering is translating user requirements and needs into design features or into specific test protocols or stuff like that. to be able to design something well means that you have to be able to synthesize a lot of different inputs, and that requires being able to talk to people, being able to get them to relax around you and tell you the truth (esp in mfg contexts), and to be able to turn these softer pieces of information as well as *relevant* technical information into a document that can actually be used to hold your suppliers, or your own process accountable. in a good engineering program, the skill of developing engineering judgment is going to be hammered home as part of courses like heat and mass transfer, among others. it's just going to be an intrinsic part of the curriculum. however, given the rise of AI, I worry that this is going to collapse, essentially. not because AI is capable of teaching this skill, but because administrators will force AI use, which is incompatible with developing this skillset. when I was a TA in 2017, I was already seeing worrying signs of the literacy crisis that is now upon us - kids in Intro to Engineering who couldn't write a coherent paragraph or spell simple words correctly (or simply didn't care, because many of my brethren have a very dumb fucking animosity towards writing - never mind that the engineering jobs that are *always* available require a shitload of writing but what do I fucking know), and given the general contempt for humanities courses that engineering majors tend to have (which is in part engendered by a brutal and technically complex courseload that makes learning the mushy-seeming humanities stuff like a waste of time and effort, even without engineering-specific, and, well, *male* valorization of "hard" sciences), I worry that trend has only intensified. so, if your kid can read and likes reading, and writing, and likes learning and wants to think analytically about the problems that they are posed, that's really going to be the difference. aside from literally never, ever using AI. essentially, a very long-winded way of saying i concur with Adrian's point.

Morgan Fay

I can’t wait for the Daphne Du Maurier episode! It’s perfect timing because I’m almost done with the Margaret Forster biography. There’s no one I’d like to listen to talk about her work more than you two!

Paul Crider

omg I've been a terrible fan lately and I haven't listened to every episode, but I really enjoyed this (and I've bought tickets to the SF show). I've been wanting to ask the question about the pronunciation of Daub ever since I heard Adrian pronounce it "dobb" once. I'm glad someone else finally asked it. (Btw, y'all should come to the Weihnachtsmarkt in Mountain View this year!) I'm also a STEM guy by training and have always sort of assumed that Freudian theory was wack, but was always worried that was just STEM bias. It's one of those things you just have to find people you trust for their perspective if you don't want to invest years. I love the characterization of the feeling we have when we learn something we love is too problematic to continue holding onto in the same way as grief. That's just a beautiful and perceptive way to describe the feeling, which is unique enough that it feels like it ought to have a name.

Astraea

Your cat Ronald can just be a cat with a human name! There's also the diminutive/nickname "Ronnie," if you prefer a bit more distance. (Source: my Dad's name is Ronald so I have Feelings about how acceptable it is as a name in general. :P )

Astraea

You could also go with an older/non-English version of the name, e.g. Ranald. You might be correcting the spelling at your vet until the end of time though....

Laura Cullen

That's fair. Even before, I rarely added the surname unless he was in very big trouble for doing something like peeing on a sock that I knit, but at the vet's office, he just has mine like all the other cats. And since my other cats with human names are from a different (less ubiquitous) book series (I switched to The Magicians in 2020), hopefully it does slip under the radar.

Laura Cullen

Oh, and I have one calico named Dolores after Dolores Huerta. She was part of a litter of kittens that got labor-themed place-holder names because I wasn't going to keep them, but things fell through with her adopter. 🤦

Carsten Brombach

Ulysses discussion with River as guest - I‘m here for it :-)

Lu

At this point you can be happy she is a Dolores and not Lolita

Enname

As a medievalist, I cannonly dream in a Carmina Burana episode, my fav Goliards and some early University Campus Cancel Culture are mentioned. It can even have a Thomas Aquinas cameo! Also given my area of study is thirteenth century inquisitors, if I was to stop reading due to them being problematic then I would have no research. Humbert of Romans? Can't stand the man, but obsessed by his work. The difference is that I already knew who he was when I read it.. It is very much that loss when someone reveals themselves to be something else. I am with Adrian on the inability to watch a series, but absolutely able to down several movies all at once. Especially new or off the beaten track films.

catalina neacsu

PLEASE MAKE THE EPISODE WITH MOIRA’S WIFE. I BEG YOU!!!

Ace

I quite love the end here — the grief of having art and nostalgia tainted by the horrible actions of those artists. It always feels so complicated to have joyful memories of art while also wanting to remove yourself from an artist’s work after you find out something terrible about them as humans. I think it does make sense as a root for people’s upset about cancel culture- though the hurt gets redirected at the “woke masses” rather than unpacking the complicated feelings about artists as humans capable of great art and irreparable harm. It’s very difficult (and I’m holding Talking Heads close to the heart). Really appreciate the nuance, and thanks for all the lovely questions! X

MWD

I'm listening to What Tech Calls Thinking and it is hilarious that the reader reads like he is doing the voiceover for a thriller trailer. As in not at all like Adrian.

JanaKat

Thank you for the lucid explanation of Freud's role; that inspires a lot more confidence than I expected. I really wish he were irrelevant in clinical practice though. You haven't lived as a trans person until your psychiatrist has refused to approve a surgery on the grounds that it would be "killing the image of your father within yourself" or some such drivel.

JanaKat

Seconding the Loreena McKennitt rec. Her music has seen me through many a rough day.

Roisin Muldoon

This was another super fun episode. The conversation about how to say Adrian’s last name really tickled me. I’m Irish and I have a fairly common Irish first name (Róisín) which has two equally correct pronunciations. I grew up in the north of Ireland, where is is pronounced in one way (rosh-een) and this is how I think of myself but in most of the rest of Ireland it is pronounced in the other way (row-sheen) and now that I live in Dublin I often introduce myself with the second pronunciation because this is what people expect to hear. And I think it’s because I grew up with my parents both saying it differently (my mother says it in the second way and my father has never been able to pronounce it correctly and calls me ‘russian’) and then I lived in England for 20 years where a) nobody could say it correctly (in either version) and b) would not attempt to say it correctly even after being corrected because they think Irish names have illogical spelling (they don’t! It’s very logical IN IRISH) so I stopped trying to correct people. All of which is to say, I completely related to the feeling of just… answering to anything that vaguely approximates my name, haha!!

Forest 🐞

I'm one of the people who got their heart broken by jk. I was a HUGE hp nerd as a child, but what breaks my heart still is that my mom got me the first book as a kid and she passed away when I was 14. I had to tear a part of my memories of my mother bc jk got her mind broken by twitter. Also, I'm trans and have trans friends in the UK. Fuck jk forever

testosteronefemme

examples of what I mean about the history/ethics of the technology they're studying: if pursuing CivE would highly recommend focusing on the history of redlining, the way interstates are used to carve up cities & demolish Black neighborhoods, suburbanization, city planning and environmental racism (e.g., pipelines). if pursuing MechE, the Ford Pinto, the history of leaded gasoline, the history of automotive safety regulations (and how safety improvements were largely the result of activism) & testing (and the gendered lack), the fact that women are more likely to die of heart attacks but the only artificial heart doesn't fit 80% of women (again: this is a design question, who was at the table when the design was formed? what information was missing or discarded? questions that good engineers always ask themselves, and will be drilled into you in technical contexts in school, and made very obvious to you in engineering internships in mfg), the lightbulb cartel of the early 1900s (a really good example of the perversion of engineering skill mandated by businessmen), that sort of thing will be really relevant. my professor also recommended the book Peace Engineering to me when I talked with her about the ethics of being an engineer/pursuing work or internships as an engineer given the defense industry. I haven't gotten around to reading it, but wanted to pass on the info I have. would also recommend Engineering Without Borders if they're interested in using engineering to help people. the way engineers of my cohort are taught to valorize our own intellect while never having to fucking read or consider arguments, history or context is genuinely the bane of my existence, and these comments are just me trying in vain to provide info to a potential future engineering student (mostly because STEM & engineering disciplines in particular are extremely popular for undergrads) lmao.

testosteronefemme

it's wild how much of a stranglehold that book series had on me as a kid. i read the whole thing 7 times by the time i was like, 10. i think a lot of it was the fantasy of being plucked out of a shitty life, and the ability to bend reality to your will, but i remember even at the time (probably after a few rereads) picking up on the rape implications in Order of the Phoenix and and going...?? like Umbridge sucks but why are we doing... that. the fact that they're so mid, given how obsessed with them i was as a child is kind of irritating in its own right, but i suppose children shouldn't be held accountable for poor taste as children 💀

Rosie

The thing about clinical evidence and approaches to psychotherapy is, they necessarily describe averages. So it's definitely useful information to know what clinical evidence there is for various theories, but for me it is far more important to find a therapist who isn't a quack and with whom you can have an actually therapeutic relationship. This criticism of empirical/hard science approaches to psychology has a name but I forgot it. Regardless, as someone who has suffered acutely with mental illnesses my while life, mostly stemming from neurodivergent-related life stress as opposed to an identifiable "root cause", it's taken decades to let go of my STEM-ish attachment to empiricism and realise hey, my brain isn't average, so what good does knowing average responses to psychotherapy do me? In the UK at least, the best advice I've had is to look for legitimate accrediting bodies like the BACP when looking for therapists, rather than going by flavour of therapy. That said, person-centred psychotherapists have (almost) never steered me wrong. For CBT-like therapies that tend to be better at handling neurodivergence, you could try DBT or CAT (cognitive analytic therapy - psychodynamic plus cognitive behavioural approaches ! It's like a therapy smoothie)

Rosie

I vote for this too please!

Renee

Very fun mailbag episode. As a Canadian with a very long Dutch last name, I was tickled by Adrian's story about his name. My generation has anglasized our last name because it's how everyone can pronounce it but every now and then a Dutch person will scold and correct me. They seem to enjoy that activity though so it's a win all around.

Bruce

My last name is German (my father emigrated to the US in the 1950s) but it can be pronounced two different ways in English, both of which are different from the German pronunciation. Complicated, now made more so by a German super market chain with the same name coming to the US, and they pronounce it differently than we do (in English). Basically, we'll just have to accept that as the new form, I expect. We'll survive regardless.

Leil Bean

stay covid safe! order in!

Hrisyana Doytchinova

Thanks for the thoughtful discussion on the trade-offs to convenience vis-a-vis genAI use!! Haha was literally taking notes and missing uni!! (i think a lot of jobs by default require nowadays to basically be in a echo chamber and repeat previous results, somehow now with chatbots that feels even easier and cheaper, latter which worries me most, ah the times we live in!) Excited for your book Adrian, I really enjoyed What Tech Calls Thinking!

Sam Maloney

So glad to learn more about Stuart. Loved this episode. Looking forward to more weird Opera content!

ZMS (she/her)

For what it is worth, the amazing scholars Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman did a multi-year podcast called Witch Please (which can now be found under Material Girls) that analyzed the Harry Potter series from a truly remarkable number of critical theoretical lenses (from feminist theory to critical dis/ability studies to animal studies to fan studies). It's a really terrific listen for folks who have nostalgia and fondness for the series but are looking for critical lenses for the texts (and author). I suspect listeners of this podcast will love that one.

Jenny

Yesss I had a molecular biology / public health training, and my husband is a structural (buildings) engineer -- and we both think that STEM students should be required to take history of science classes (directly related to their disciplines) to develop the skills to understand and critique the contexts in which they hope to operate professionally. Science is part of society! Doing science is part of building society! You can only move so fast and break things before something irreparable gets broken!

testosteronefemme

yes!!!!!! the ways ppl use terms like 'pseudoscience' to maintain the validity of important scientific knowledge frustrates me so much sometimes bc, like, i get why they do it but they don't realize that by doing that they risk giving shitty science legitimacy! i also think like, education around indigenous ways of knowing & epistemology/ways to define truth is also really necessary for STEM undergrads, bc like. that's part of how you define the problem! a central skill in the sciences! like this is one of the reasons why neil degrasse tyson bugs me so much (aside from his predation), bc he treats questions of like, how are we defining something as just stupid humanities shit. like as an example: does it need to be literally true that a plant holds a spirit for animist beliefs to be a useful social technology? i don't think so. the Ancient Greeks called rocks & water dead matter, which engendered a different relationship to land than say Anishinaabe peoples. bc while water may not be alive, a river sure is. and treating it like a being you have a relationship with, which you want to maintain, is a useful way for our social brains to keep ourselves from doing harm to the ecosystems we depend on. but, typically, the question of defining life stops at a biological definition, and treats that as the only reasonable or worthwhile source of information and it sucks!!

Astraea

Hard agree on Tyson. "How do you define this" has genuinely been a massive part of my professional career - and I am an astrophysicist! We do get some history in undergraduate training. It's pretty incidental, but enough that Tyson should know that definitions definitely DO fucking matter. Like, most of our naming conventions come from a time when we didn't understand what we were looking at, so we today have to constantly explain to the public that planetary nebulae having nothing to do with planets. (Side note: I would love to create a class on the history of scientific thinking worldwide, to include things like Karl Popper's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (would also force me to actually read that book, which has been sitting on my shelf for years...). But also, I'm really not qualified to create such a class, because my training is on STEM and not history. And there is a legitimate time concern, because astrophysics is already a very course-intensive major and it can be hard to finish in four years as is....)

gretchen anderson

FYI search up license free Mahler (or whatever) and you can usually find something good enough to make a point.

testosteronefemme

this is basically the same problem for an ME degree - you have students barely keeping their head above water in their coursework (and internships with GPA requirements, and working multiple jobs), and probably already have a baseline discomfort with humanities courses (never mind disdain), and the program loves to make students suffer a little (or a lot, see: weed-out courses and the design of UCSD). all of which means that when your brain is getting put in a blender trying to do heat and mass transfer or fluids (the let's draw a triangle! lecture is diabolical), you're gonna be primed to absolutely resent any distraction from the problem of "get the fucking math to make sense", especially when it *seems* like extraneous information. and that's not even touching the incentives of using chegg or AI (e.g., getting penalized for wrong HW which impacts your final grade, despite fuckin smoking everyone on the test because you're actually using the HW the way HW is meant to work 💀 incredible how I'm still a lil mad about that years later). honestly i'm in the camp of make engineering programs a 5 year degree bc I came to school with 42 credits and still took 4.5y (granted, i had co-op semesters), and i think ppl hit a ceiling when it comes to info absorption around 16 credits tbh. all this to say - i also want a designated humanities for science/engineering majors course every semester until the capstone semester but i foresee the same bandwidth/capacity problems you see w/ astrophysics. but fr i think it's really sad how many STEM programs kinda make you hate learning (esp when prof ego comes into play. getting asked if you're stupid at 8 am for asking a question uh... sucks).

Astraea

I had the same issue! I started listening and I could tell it was Adrian's words but it was definitely not his way of speaking. Threw me for a loop for the first couple chapters.

Ton Jeagan

Would love to see Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell invited to the pod (for her takes on Wagner but also anything else)!

Susan Olson

My inner high school band kid is literally begging you for a Carmina Burana episode

Ben Alpers

SNL's The Californians was also about people in Southern California obsessively discussing the best way to drive between any two points (since in SoCal it's rarely the way that appears most direct). Every conversation in the skit eventually becomes about which roads a character did or didn't use. And also the characters use the definite object before road numbers. As a native of NoCal, I can attest both these things are very regionally specific to the south of the state.

ALY

I thought Adrian’s last name was Dobb for several episodes at first.

Alexander Smith

I fully support the Mahler episode. I think digging into the eighth symphony would be a good fit for the podcast. It has Goethe, the redemptive power of the eternal feminine, Latin and German texts. Plus, it just sounds bad ass. Not to mention the rich biographical exploration that could accompany a look into Mahler’s works: a Jewish (later converted Catholic for social reasons) man living in fin de siècle Vienna, a wife with creative aspirations stifled by the need to support her husband’s success, a champion of the music of Richard Wagner, an exquisite and talented composer who is still referred to as “the conductor” in his home town. There’s a lot there. I also think that any of his symphonies could be used to explore the traditionally gendered nature of the sonata form, but my vote would be for the first movement of the seventh symphony.

s

Tirra lirra!!!!

clara drummond

If you are writing about daphne du maurier you have to talk about how while writing Rebecca she plagiarized Brazilian novel A Sucessora (The Successor) written by Carolina Nabuco in 1934 and translated to English and French.

Kori Sparks

~20 years ago I bought Adderall to write a 10 page paper for Sex, Love, and Relationships in Society class by noon the following day. When I became very sleepy around 8pm I looked up the pill. It was an antidepressant 😭 napped for 2 hours then busted it out, effects of death in romantic relationships 💯💯💯 SKILLS … now my brain is a pleb.

WGM

Audiobook and name talk reminded me - in right wing women audiobook Moiras preface has the narrator pronounce Donegan "Dun-egan"

Sierra Wilson

Yesss this was also me with the Loreena Mckennitt and Anne inspired Lady of Shalott era! Even if other touchstones from that time have soured beyond repair (Mists of Avalon), listening to Loreena and Enya are forever

Sierra Wilson

Fairport Convention has a version!

Sierra Wilson

Also WIDOW’S BAY!!!! I devoured it on a transatlantic flight last month and it softened the blow ending my vacation considerably.

Rebecca Ross

I can’t thank u enough Moira for the eloquent way you talked about how much Freud got right about sexual trauma and validated it for his patients in The Aetiology of Hysteria and then completely betrayed and turned on them when the wealthy male aristocracy that funded him objected and pushed back. He then did the opposite and told women it was all made up and just a fantasy. I will never forgive him for it either and all the damage it did and still does do. Thank u thank u thank u for making that history visible. 💜🌹

fiona

i think listeners would totally buy y’all’s annotated books