🌎 Touch the World ❤️ American Hysteria's Chelsey Weber-Smith 🍏
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
An episode of The Daily remembers that nearly 30 years ago, George Floyd told a high school classmate he would “touch the world” someday. Who would have known how strongly his dream would be realized? (Certainly not the cops who thought his life was completely without value.) George Floyd’s lynching has touched my world and yours, and we all have spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how.
The murder of George Floyd has had a huge impact on the podcasting world, too, impossible to ignore if you’ve been tuned in. Just scroll through your queue to see how shows have decided to participate in the black out, scurried to put out something in response, shifted their entire programming schedule, or resurfaced after retiring to make a valuable statement. (Like The Nod, Running From COPS, and Somebody.)
And it’s not just the United States (as made clear in this fantastic episode of Rough Translation.) The entire world is responding. In London, Broccoli Content has created the Equality in Audio pact, which urges people in the audio industry to pledge to 5 simple actions. In short: 1 . Pay interns 2. Hire LGBTQIA+, minorities 3. Release race pay gap data 4. No longer participate in panels that are not representative of the cities, towns, and industries they take place in 5. Be transparent about who works for your company, as well as their role, position and permanency. Read more here.
Almost 200 companies have signed. It’s been a tough year, but this is something to feel hopeful about. Will we hold ourselves to this? Will we remember our outrage? I made a calendar reminder for myself in one year to see if we do, and if the companies who have signed will uphold their promises!
xoxo lp
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American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith
Chelsey Weber-Smith is the creator and host of American Hysteria. Follow American Hysteria on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
Kindly introduce yourself.
I’m Chelsey Weber-Smith, the writer, co-producer, and host of American Hysteria, a show that investigates our moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and archetypes, basically our special brand of fantastical thinking. We do so using extensive research, sociology, psychology, and even biology to explain why we fear what we fear from the Puritans to the present.
Outside of this show that seems to have taken over most of my life and my thinking, I once was a poetry grad student at the University of Virginia, and much of my summers used to be spent hitchhiking or living in the canopy of my truck, Old Handsome. I’ve traveled to almost every state this way, and currently live in Seattle where I grew up in the nearby suburbs. I love shooting BB guns, camping and obsessing over the campfire, playing music and writing, watching TV, going for really long walks where I don’t know where I am going while listening to true crime podcasts or country music.
There is NOTHING LIKE American Hysteria. How do you come up with ideas for the show?
I grew up with a weekend dad (you know what I mean) who was a conspiracy theorist and fantastical thinker. He believed the world was going to end on December 21st, 2012, a date that would finally come when I was in my early 20s. When nothing happened, as I expected (though I did go sit by the ocean all night and dramatically accepted my death just in case), I started a slow dissociation with the fantastical kid he helped raise, while trying to keep the good parts. I was obsessed with mysticism my whole life, believed in the Illuminati (minus the anti-Semitism and racism I later discovered), and distrusted science. My brain chemistry, like my dad’s, means that something times the world becomes suddenly flush with beauty and meaning, and then gray and dismal as dry dirt. It took until very recently to figure out the best ways to channel both parts of myself into my work. Much of what I thought I knew has been confronted as I make the show. So it is as much a form of self-education and therapy as it is a historical show. Also, I have been obsessed with ghosts and human potential stuff since I was a kid, and my favorite thing to read about and study were urban legends. My favorite childhood book was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which led me eventually to a love of analyzing why these stories carry through in different forms, and what they mean about being human. The format is essentially an academic essay each episode, I’ve been an academic all my life. But I find academia to be so deeply inaccessible to those outside of it, but also the place to go for expert analysis (not always of course). I am also a nonfiction writer, so I try to combine poetic writing with humor and history because I think poetry makes everything more accessible, makes everything easier to feel. There is very little feeling in academia, and I think feelings, despite their apparent opposition to rationality, are the real path to personal and political change.
Some of your episodes are potentially polarizing, yet you find a way to make them seem really friendly. How do you maintain that balance?
Well, being a codependent person helps immensely. I use that word to mean that I am overly concerned with the feelings of others over my own, something I have to work on constantly to maintain my own needs. I care a lot about what people think, and I feel like I am trying really hard to reconnect two disparate national sides. My values for myself, the way I feel like I can be effective in my goals, is to invite people from as many sides as possible (because there are far more than two political identities), to engage with difficult content in a “safer” way. I use my own personal narrative in hopes, and I try as much as possible to call myself out for my problematic parts, so others can do that work themselves rather than closing down when they are accused of the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that our show often centers around. I want to be clear that these are my own values for myself, I don’t expect others not to use their own strengths, which can definitely include confrontation, something that can be effective, but that I am not very good at. There is a need for all the communication strengths that each individual can add. American Hysteria is a gentle show, and I think the humor of it breaks up the ugly things about our past and present that are hard to stomach and can cause combative feelings.
What has the response been to your show?
From what I have seen, overwhelmingly positive. But my sensitive ass does not read the reviews. I get a lot of messages that give me hope and push me forward. All I want in the world for the show, besides finding a way to make enough money to get by, is to help others take self-inventory to better relate to those they might feel are ‘others’ and help those that have been ‘othered’ by our culture to feel more understood in their righteous anger and their sadness, as well as their exuberance and strength, to give context to the present moment and untangle the weeds of the archetypical characters we have created out of one another. I trust the opinions of my friends and Rod, Riley, and Miranda, the three beautiful stars that also work on the show, and I look to those in my life to tell me if I am veering off course. I know I have been accused of being in the Illuminati, which is fun for me. I know reviewers get pissed because I apparently blame everything on white men. I sure don’t think I do that, but I guess these big boys are relating a little too heavily with the white dudes of the past. We have plenty of white guy listeners who want to hold themselves accountable and don’t feel attacked at all, so whatever. There is always someone waiting to hate you, isn’t there? I am terrified of the internet most of the time.
What has been the most fun episode to record? The most difficult?
I think the most fun show has to be Phantom Clowns. It was just so hilarious and I am such a die-hard horror fan, so getting to talk about that, and also finding a way to heighten the archetype of the clown into a pretty hilarious philosophical being felt fun for this poetry dork. The hardest, man, so many of them are so hard. I’d say our Terrorism series, just in terms of how to lay it out, I rewrote most of it the day before recording late into the night, and my partner Miranda who also works on the show, let me pace and pull of my hair while trying to form sentences and being really kind to me, same with the episode called Dangerous Teens. Trying to confront some of the harder realities about school shootings that could go against our cultural narrative is SCARY. Also, Monsters, and trying to figure out how to talk about this particularly horrible history of racism as a white person. That is always the hardest part—being careful, making sure I am using the right sources, making sure I am educating and speaking as an outsider trying my best to understand and then pass that on.
What have you learned about yourself making American Hysteria? What have you learned about America?
In terms of America, I think the biggest thing that has been confirmed to me is the damage our extreme polarization has done to what it means to be a human. Each and every person is a complicated infinitude of parts, sometimes productive, kind, and malleable parts that serve a higher social purpose, and sometimes ugly, destructive parts that degrade the march toward a just society. It has always been this way, two sides digging in their heels, and of course, one side I always agree with far more than the other. But for myself, I work to understand the other side as much as I can stomach, and it’s often really fucking hard and really fucking gross. There are so many people that are too long gone for me to even dream of reaching, but there are millions who waver between red and blue, who feel that both sides are no longer representing them, and likely never did. The work I have done means that I have traced prejudice all the way back to the Puritans and their early explorer counterparts and the narratives they told to justify what they wanted, and then to follow those threads and ways of thinking all the way through our history until the present starts to make more sense. We inherit who we are and what we think; we are responsible for changing that, but we are also responsible for understanding that that process is more complicated than internet shaming, and more about the systems that make problematic individuals than the individuals themselves.
🚨If you only have time for ONE thing🚨
This week, the TV show COPS was cancelled and HBO Max pulled Gone With The Wind. I beg you to listen to Dan Taberski’s Running From COPS, which pulls back the curtain of the TV show and highlights how truly problematic it is. Re: Gone With The Wind, Karina Longworth produced an episode in her Six Degrees of Song of the South series on Hattie McDaniel. Hattie was the first black performer to win an Oscar for her role as “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind, and was criticized by the black community for propagating outdated stereotypes in this role, and others. But it’s impossible to not think of Hattie as a trailblazer, and her complicated story is worth knowing.
💎BTW💎
🎙️It’s impossible to sum up racism in a single podcast episode, but American Hysteria’s What We Inherit: A Brief History of American Racism does a nice job of reviewing racism through the lens of it as a hysteria that has taken over our country. Chelsey (from above!) goes back to the beginning of racism in our policing and the KKK, leading up to the present so we can trace our own histories and see the deeply embedded racism we have inherited in language, symbols, biases, and laws.
🎙️Shapearl Wells popped into our feeds with a bonus episode of Somebody with "Democracy in the Streets, where she talks to Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute to share some thoughts about George Floyd, racist policing, the protests, civil resistance, Scoop and Run, dismantling our current police structure, police culture, and how we can make meaningful change at a practical level. (I know, it’s a LOT for a 22 minute episode. It’s amazing.) I was momentarily stopped when Shapearl said: “You’ll be surprised what you learn you can do when your back is against the wall.” There were so many quotes from this episode that stopped me, actually. Please listen.
🎙️Code Switch has a knack for creating helpful episodes about really important things that I think we all should know about but many do not. “Outside Agitator” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot right now, but I didn’t now the history of how it’s been weaponized to silence activists. Listen to Unmasking the ‘Outside Agitator.’
🎙️The Constant is one of my favorite storytelling shows. For each episode, host Mark Chrisler weaves a fascinating history tale with the enthusiasm of the best professor you’ve ever had. It’s clear Mark is super-knowledgeable about his quirky topics, and that he has so much joy in telling us about them. It doesn’t sound like a podcaster is telling you a history lesson, it sounds like your friend is telling you a hilarious story from one of his adventures. I highly recommend you listen to the five-part series The Fool Killer, but the most recent two-part series, The Cold Hard Truth, about the first person to reach The North Pole is a delight and about so much more than that. Mark has perhaps TOO much fun going into DEEP descriptions of scurvy, gross! But I loved every second of it.
🎙️Invisibilia’s Trust Fall tells the story of a man who is fighting an invisible force, causing him to distrust everyone, including Hanna Rosin, who is interviewing him for the show. What happens when you lose trust in everything, or when trust in a person or community does not even exit, is interesting, and not as unusual (or terrible) as I thought. It’s a jaw-dropping story with an important lesson in the upside of a little bit of paranoia.
🎙️The Sporkful dropped a new episode, A Reckoning At Bon Appétit, which lets us hear about the mess at Bon Appétit from a person of color, Nikita Richardson, a former editor there. (The whole problem with what’s going on at BA is that they are only giving voice to/PAYING white people, so if you want to hear the best version of what has gone down, listen to Nikita.) They also dropped an old episode, When White People Say Plantation, which has us tagging along as Dan Pashman finds white people who have used the word “plantation” in food products and recipes and asks them what their intent was, what feelings they were trying to evoke. It’s a wonderful montage of ignorant, stubborn white people clinging to the idea that “plantation” embodies anything but the violence and horror of slavery.
🎙️Waiting on Reparations is a show about Hip Hop and politics hosted by Dope Knife, a rapper and visual artist, and Linqua Franqa, a hip hop artist and politician. The two look at public policy history through the lens of Hip Hop and talk about how Hip Hop is shaping our political future. Start with episode 2, Wiretap Raps, which explores how Black revolutionary and cultural organizations have been surveilled by the US government, and how Hip Hop has reacted to that through art.
🎙️Whatever you are expecting from an episode called A serious conversation about UFOs (The Ezra Klein Show,) you are wrong. If you’re expecting UFO talk, you will get it, but Ezra’s interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka goes through Diana’s UFO research as it relates to religious scholarship. It’s actually a conversation about faith, what we cannot know, purgatory, Catholicism, mysticism, and metaphysics. I got so much more from this episode than I had hoped for. It’s worth a DOUBLE listen.
🎙️I wondered, listening to an episode of Nocturne, how I could possibly be so entranced by an audio piece on owls. I never would have though it possible! Two Owls tells the story of a woman who sweetly stalks an owl who moves into a bird house she has built in her back yard. The sound on this episode is transformative, and the writing is so good it paints the owls as almost human—I found them to be funny and personable. Weird thing about me: I used to hate owls. (I get bothered by textures and something about their necks gross me out?) But this episode made me fall in love with them. Good podcast episodes can do this! Turn hate into love! Podcasts are magical and powerful! As is Nocturne in general.
🎙️The new season of Slow Burn is here, with a focus on David Duke. There were so many small moments in the first episode that deserve an unpacking, I had to listen to the episode twice. The genius of David Duke was his ability to wrap his radically racist messages into larger, more easy-to-swallow conservative ones. This allowed him to run for a spot in the US Senate, and encouraged him to influence America in ways that resonate now. It seems wildly relevant that this series is unfolding now. It’s almost chilling. But then again, when is David Duke ever not relevant? Unfortunately, we could always be talking about him and tying him to current events.
🎙️Days after the country music group Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A, and amidst a time white women everywhere are finally learning about their own participation in white supremacy, Smarty Pants released The Antebellum Feminine Mystique, a story about white female slave owners in the South we often think of as too disempowered and sweet to participate in the brutality of slavery. Historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers proves that, among other things, white women were responsible for making female slaves to be wet nurses (aka forced to be pregnant through sexual violence) so their breast milk could be used to nurse white babies.
🎙️The View From Somewhere is back and continues to push boundaries and be fantastic. (From last year, I highly recommend How Black Lives Matter Changed The News.) The End of Extractive Journalism points us to journalists who are making journalism democratic, when it should always be. Writing about poor people at less than an arm’s length. Doing stories that do things for the people the stories are about, instead of just outraging rich white people who aren’t affected. I wish this wasn’t a radical thought, but it is!
🎙️Who is the genius coming up with episode ideas of The Pessimists Archive? The episodes are stories of things (like mirrors and birthday parties) that we used to greet with suspicion, but now embrace fully. Why did we once disdain these now common items? How did we evolve into accepting them? This brilliant episode, Faces! is about new technologies (like bicycles) that were once believed to physically deforming our faces. (Bicycle-face was a thing.) We haven’t outgrown this habit—it wasn’t too long ago (but since it’s the year 2020, it feels like it’s been centuries) that we were convinced that looking at our cell phones was causing us to grown horns. This is a fascinating treatment of a weird topic. (BTW, at the end of the episode, host Jason Feifer points out that someone on Twitter suggested the episode.)
🎙️On Pindrop, Saleem Reshamwala plops listeners into places all over the world to explore ideas that feel particular to the place. In Nairobi, we discover AfroBubbleGum, an art movement that demands pieces are fluffy and fun—there is even a Bechdel-style test to make sure they don’t evoke sadness or depict war, poverty and devastation, which is a common trope in African work. Learning about a place’s art is so telling. And we learn about matatus, Nairobi’s loud and colorful party buses. (I’ve been on one!) I know that the whole point of matatus and AfroBubbleGum is to counter a country’s darker sides, but this episode made me feel JOYFUL and it was a reminder to me that even in the strange times we are living in, we can still laugh and dance and sing and think about stupid, non-depressing things.
🎙️Oh my lord, I was so excited to see Dana Schwartz back on You’re Wrong About. (Her episode with Marie Antoniette was a hilarious blast.) Dana brought so much to the Anastasia episode, and much like Mark Chrisler she seems like an enthusiastic, fun professor who breathes life into her lessons. She knows her shit. The story of Anastasia is full of intrigue and horrifying details and a bit of mystery, sort of. But Sarah, Michael, and Dana turn the story into a DELICIOUS, tragic, comedy piece. (I laughed out loud when they were talking about Rasputin.)
🎙️What a WEIRD coincidence that the same week You’re Wrong About drops an Anastasia episode, The Alarmist does the same. Although because it’s The Alarmist, host Rebecca Delgado wraps up the history part pretty quickly and sets out to answer the question: WHO’S. TO. BLAME. with humor. Listen to You’re Wrong About First, then you’ll have a wealth of knowledge for the episode of The Alarmist. Anastasia is such a fascinating character that her story deserves all the treatments, on all the podcasts. It’s no wonder that Disney picked up this story. (Even though it truly doesn’t feel like a story for children.)
🎙️If you need any evidence that Beyond Belief is doing some heavy lifting and not just a show gawking at “woo-woo” things, look no further than the episode The Conjure is Political, which explores conjure, root workers, hoodoo doctors, and priestesses. Dr. Kinitra Brooks, a scholar of BADASS (and of conjure and its representations) joins Jerico to discuss why racism and white supremacy has caused us to vilified and fear The Conjure Woman, which denies black people of their power, and even how even white people have erased magical, mystical parts of their histories for the sake of being American.
🎙️In a two-part investigation The Moving Border, Latino USA paints a picture, with incredible reporting and storytelling, that paints exactly how and why it’s so difficult for refugees to seek safety in the United States via its southern border. Together the Trump and Mexican administrations have created a policy wall that pushes asylum seekers further and further south. A search for a missing person, a kidnapping, and a peek inside the lives of the people desperate to cross into America, this story is a shocking look that adds depth to the way we look at US immigration, and the nearly impossible hurdles refugees have to clear.
🎙️In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, hundreds of women have gone missing, and bodies are showing up in groups, in dump sites, with strange carvings on their bodies, their wrists bound with shoelaces. If I didn’t know better, I would say this was the plot for a fiction podcast, but Forgotten: Women of Juárez is a true-story investigation that sets out to find out who is responsible. (A serial killer, organ traffickers, a Satanic Cult?) I wouldn’t be able to stop listening if it was fiction, and I really can’t can’t can’t stop listening because of the urgency I feel knowing it’s very real.
🎙️Those Happy Places’ Birds of Paradise series (start here) covers the history, cultural impact, and storytelling implications of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. I have been CRAVING Disney World content and will listen to anything Disney-related (I have no standards, send anything along) but this was literally fantastic, for anyone, including you. It tells a story of American’s love for Tiki culture, and why the Disney attraction is so much more bizarre than I’ve ever realized. This episode is thorough, intelligent, and a lot of fun.
🎙️Every time I see that a new episode The Boring Talks has popped into my feed, I’m like “that sounds boring. PASS.” And then, because I am a loyal listener of The Boring Talks, I remind myself that the episodes are always the opposite of boring—beautiful, funny, heart-felt stories about potentially mundane things. I almost skipped this episode on car boots (because I mean, really?) But it’s a poetic story that finds surprising beauty and intrigue in something I have hardly thought twice about in my entire life.
🎙️I don’t know where on earth I was when HQ Trivia had taken the country by storm, but I have no memory of it. (ICYMI it was a free app and mobile game show developed by the creators of Vine that let people compete for prize money.) Behind-the-scenes of the wildly popular game, a shit storm was brewing, that led to the death of one of the founders. This is a WeWork/Fyre Fest/Theranos-esque “what the fuck just happened?” story with shocking twists and turns, and unbelievable moments, all told in the show Boom/Bust, which I binged over the weekend.
🎙️Gender Reveal has an interview with Morgan Givens (creator of Flyest Fables) about Black trans allyship and queer racism, and it is one of the best interviews I’ve heard in awhile. Morgan’s story is always relevant, but especially now—a Pride Month that has white people examining our own racism. Morgan talks about his feelings about the police. In his pre-podcasting life, believe it or not, he was a cop.
🎙️I recently discovered Matthias Roberts’ Queerology, which explores the intersection of queerness and faith with theologians, psychologists, poets, and thinkers. How can a bisexual be a practicing Catholic? Does theology have a role in activism? I am still working my way through this backlog, but am eating every single episode up. To get hooked like me, start with Cameron Esposito’s episode.
🎙️I continue to be enthralled with The Missionary, the story of Renee Bach, a non-doctor who started a malnutrition program in rural Uganda that may have ended up killing hundreds of children in her unlicensed clinic. The Barbie Savor episode pokes a lot of holes in the Christian Missionary industry, which went from being a life-long sacrifice or death sentence and has now turned into flashy voluntourism. It also interviews the people behind the satirical Barbie Savior Instagram account, which is hysterical. (And great inspiration for my mom’s own Barbie Instagram account, Barbie Snack. Follow her!)
🎙️If you’re simply in the mood of a truly fucked up story, listen to This is Actually Happening: What if you swallowed 48 bags of cocaine? In an effort to try to get rid of his student loan debt, a guy becomes a drug mule and almost dies. YES he goes into graphic, gory detail. YES you really must place your judgment aside. I love these interviews because Whit really takes the back seat and lets his guests tell the story in their words. You forget that Whit is there, but that speaks to the excellent editing of this show.
🎙️Pod People's second original podcast is here! RomComPods is a fiction romcom show (season one is called "Honeymoon for One,”) a perfect escape and great way to get into fiction if you think FICTION PODS = apocolyptic / sci-fi / horror. RomComPods is the show you treat yourself to after a long day of work. No surprise here, the sound is soooo good. And you KNOW how much I love Rachael!
🎙️The 5th season of Revisionist History drops this week, but in the meantime, Malcolm shared a bonus episode The Limits of Power taken from the audio of his book, David and Goliath, about a riot that took place in Belfast in Northern Ireland. It's about the divisions of religion and class, instead of race. But the story resonates with what we are seeing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, as it speaks to the privilege of having power, and the consequences if you don’t use it.
🎙️I love you!