Lindy West, Charles Schulz, and Paul Lynde!
Lindy West, Charles Schulz, and Paul Lynde!
This week on The Love Boat! Not really. But here, though. With loads of videos!
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Lindy West on Depresh Mode
Lindy West is my guest on the pod this week. She lives in the forest, out on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. It’s kind of an apt symbolic location for the approach she’s taken to navigating her career and public life in recent years. She was very much in the spotlight for much of her career, with opinion columns in the New York Times and the Guardian, as well as the best-selling book Shrill. That, combined with being a fat person (a term she’s comfortable with) has meant she was the recipient of a great deal of criticism and trolling, much of which got pretty nasty. And that can take a lot out of you, especially if, like Lindy, you’re a person with depression and ADHD.
But now, like I said, she lives in the forest, doesn’t have those high profile by-lines and is doing more stuff she likes to do and stuff that feels healthier. Like writing a very silly newsletter called Butt News. And getting to a deeper understanding of her mental health, which has involved fairly recent diagnoses of depression and ADHD.
Lindy says a lot of people were trying to silence her and she supposes it kind of worked. She’s quieter now. In the forest.
She lives there in the forest with her husband and a third person who is essentially a third spouse, a subject that has, predictably I guess, drawn out a whole new wave of haters online.
It’s a delightful interview with a smart and very funny interview about figuring stuff out and sometimes dealing with jerks.
Lindy also hosts the podcast Text Me Back, which you may find delightful as well.
Our kids’ mental health is shattered by smartphones unless it isn’t
You might have heard of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. And if you have, it might have been accompanied by lots of exclamation points, because people are freaking out about it. There’s also a backlash against the book from people who think the book doesn’t really establish much of a threat at all.
Vox has a pretty good rundown on the argument as it stands today. It’s probably a good thing to read so you’re up on things.
By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto them have lured the world’s youths away from those activities that are indispensable to healthy child development — such as outdoor play, face-to-face conversation with friends, and sleep — and trapped them in a digital realm that saps their self-esteem, drains their attention spans, and forces them to put on a perpetual, high-stakes performance of their own personalities.
…
For years, prominent psychologists have been accusing Haidt of fueling a moral panic. In their view, there is “no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” They insist that Haidt’s case against smartphones and social media apps owes less to the available data than to humanity’s perennial anxieties about new technologies and kids these days.
Was this item just here to give an excuse to give you a Paul Lynde clip? Noooooooootake it away, Paul Lynde!
Closer opens up about mental health struggles
It’s getting to be as common as a torn ligament or something but I will keep highlighting it because a) it’s great that Hoby Milner is talking about his struggles and b) I’m still amazed that this kind of stigma-busting is happening in pro sports at all.
Meds have worked out great for Hoby:
“I went without anxiety medication for a long time, and I was like, ‘I just don’t think I could do this without it,’” he said. “It keeps me level. It keeps me able to sift out all the ‘what ifs’ and the negativity. Even the good stuff, it’s like, ‘It doesn’t matter, I’m just here to do this and then I’ll go home to my family.’”
Oh look here’s a video too:
Spend 20 peaceful minutes watching Charles Schulz draw his comics
Great video surfaced by the folks at kottke.org.
From Schulz:
Unfortunately, I’m not highly educated. I’m merely a high school graduate. I studied art in a correspondence course because I was afraid to go to art school. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I and this way I was protected by drawing at home and simply mailing my drawings in and having them criticized.
I wish I had a better education but I think that my entire background made me well-suited for what I do. If I could write better than I can, perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist and I might have become a failure. If I could draw better than I can, I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist and would have failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist.
Marsha Warfield of Night Court on Sleeping with Celebrities
I was really excited to talk to the comedian and actor Marsha Warfield for Sleeping with Celebrities, which I had to contain because it’s a show that attempts to put people to sleep.
Honestly, we haven’t had that many people on our show who have started entirely new religions. Most of the time, if someone wants to be religious, they simply follow one of the existing faiths that are out there in the world in great abundance already. But Marsha Warfield, who played Roz the bailiff on the classic sitcom Night Court and who appears in that show’s newer reboot, has developed a religion that is all about empowering women. And there’s no need to convert to the Church of She-sus since if you’re a woman, you’re already a high priestess. Congratulations. Let Marsha give you a religious experience as you drift off to sleep.