Talking with Amanda Knox, Microdosing, Drinking Coffee, Reading Negative Reviews (not all at once)
And urging broken Minnesotans to give themselves grace
Amanda Knox faces her past, her prosecutor, and her future
My guest this week is Amanda Knox.
After being wrongly accused and convicted of murder and spending four years in an Italian jail, Amanda Knox would have every reason not to return to Perugia, Italy, the site of her ill-fated period of studying abroad. It’s where her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was brutally murdered, where Amanda was made out to be a psychotic monster by a zealous prosecutor and where that portrayal of “Foxy Knoxy” was eaten up by the press all over Europe. She didn’t do it, of course. A guy named Rudy Guede did and was convicted, even before Amanda and her then-boyfriend Rafaele Sollecito were convicted as well and Amanda was sentenced to 26 years in jail. The conviction was overturned, she returned to Seattle, then she was convicted again, and then finally exonerated.
So, yeah, why go back? But she’s gone back several times and those trips are documented in the Hulu special, Mouth of the Wolf: Amanda Knox Returns to Italy. She has done so to speak out on behalf of other wrongly convicted people and, in the climax of the new documentary, to have a direct conversation with Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who led the effort to put her in prison and did so by saying all sorts of wild shit about her. Mignini no longer believes that Amanda did it and tells her so, albeit in a kind of halting “If I did something wrong” kind of way, which sat bad with me. But Amanda, though she says that no good apology begins with “If”, was pleased he had come even that far.
To me, the center of our interview, of her documentary, and really of Amanda’s story is when she talks about how a lot of people who experience trauma think they can get back to who they were. And she disagrees. She says it’s more about making peace with the person you have now become.
I also kept getting, I guess, nagged in my own mind about another injustice done to her. Yes, there was the huge injustice of being wrongly accused, convicted, and spending years in jail. But there’s also the baggage forever associated with her name. Amanda did not kill Meredith. But for most people in our society, if they hear the name “Amanda Knox”, they’re going to think about the murder of a young woman anyway. I ask Amanda about that and she says that’s a reality that she’s been working on her whole adult life.
Amanda is full of hope and optimism. And that’s an inspiration to me. Give a listen.
…and we are still under siege in the Twin Cities so I have to talk about it
Here’s the transcript from this week’s episode.
Soon after my brother died, suddenly by suicide, I was in the underground parking garage of a public library in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. Backing my car up, I absolutely crunched into a huge concrete pillar. It was clearly marked and had reflective paint. Smacked right into it.
And I felt bereft, sad, angry at myself, just a mess. Freaked out. Way more than the event merited. Because I was insured. Shit happens. Recounting the event to a loved one, I was told, “Of course that happened. You’re broken. Your mind isn’t working normal right now because of Rick.”
After that, I tried to forgive myself for things. Decreased productivity at work (very understanding employer helped), shorter attention span, missed household chores, not as present for people. Because this new horrible thing was suddenly consuming huge amounts of mind space.
Why should - how COULD - anything be normal when I was living in a reality where something so NOT normal had just gone down. It was a different world than before and in this one I was bound to be disoriented. The concrete pillar was a completely logical result of what had occurred.
Rick’s death was a traumatic event. I saw his body in the ER just before he finally passed. It’s a different than the shared community trauma of the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities but they are both traumas and I think we are collectively experiencing a trauma response.
I keep hearing about people here just not functioning like they otherwise would. Productivity, attention span, organization, just keeping one’s shit together, it’s all suffering. And I think it’s a response to the world itself being out of kilter. We can’t function because our world won’t either.
Our neighbors are killed for no reason. We’re patrolling the streets when we have busy lives to lead. We’re guarding our kids schools instead of letting our government do it.
Liam Ramos. In his blue bunny hat and backpack. Which are now reportedly missing.
This is an ongoing traumatic situation and we’re behaving in response to that.
So all sorts of things that wouldn’t make sense before make plenty of sense now. We fight, we fly, we freeze. We fail to reply to emails and texts. We forget why we walked into a room. We cry at weird times and in weird places. We back our cars into pillars.
A person’s natural habit is to blame themselves, especially someone prone to depression or anxiety.
It’s not your fault.
Give yourself slack and patience and care and kindness.
It’s trauma that is still happening and will for a while at least. Then we’ll live with it forever.
There are people to blame for the harm being afflicted on Minnesota. You aren’t one of them.
Forgive yourself.
Return the email tomorrow. Vacuum some other time. And maybe check one more time before backing up.
Since I recorded that, Liam Ramos has been freed and returned home. His abductors either found his bunny hat or he got a new one. There are still thousands of children being held in detention centers.
IN OTHER NEWS… you know what’s messing up children’s mental health? Short videos!
This according to a recent meta-analysis:
Across the studies included in the review, higher levels of short-form video use were consistently associated with poorer mental health outcomes, particularly among adolescents and young adults.
The most commonly reported associations included:
Higher symptoms of negative mood, depression, stress, and anxiety.
Higher levels of loneliness and lower emotional well-being.
Greater risk of problematic or compulsive use.
Lower sleep duration (sleep quality was not measured often).
Importantly, these associations were strongest when use was frequent, emotionally driven, or felt difficult to control, patterns that reflect how and why young people engage with these platforms, not simply how long they use them.
Microdosing is about as effective as a cup of coffee for depression, says study
But it’s actually the other way around. Coffee doesn’t do much for depression and neither does microdosing.
The study has not yet been published. But MindBio’s CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was “in front of the curve in microdosing research.” He called it “the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing.” It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20μg, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called “active placebos,” like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.)
This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing.
“It’s probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression,” Hanka says. “It probably improves the way depressed people feel—just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful.”
Brilliant phrase turning about a movie that’s apparently ghastly
Leaving aside the obvious bribe that the film Melania represents, it seems to suck really bad among critics compelled to see it. Negative reviews are one of my favorite forms of writing.
From the Independent:
“First Lady is a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda” and “the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like…Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet”
From the Guardian:
“Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest” and “it’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”
From the Nation:
“It is a little surreal to watch an oligarch bribe a president in such a public fashion, and then try to present it to the American public as entertainment—or worse, an important historical document. As the latter, it’s more accurately described as propaganda, and I’ve had root canals that were more entertaining.”
From Variety:
“The movie opens with a lengthy sequence, scored to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter,’ in which Melania enters a car to leave Mar-a-Lago, puts on sunglasses, exits that car, boards a plane, removes her sunglasses and sits down, her head hitting the headrest just as the “Rape! Murder!” chorus of the song kicks in.”
Unrelated cleansing image:
Todd Stashwick and I get very excited about Bigfoot on Sleeping with Celebrities
It’s my favorite topic out of all topics. Todd’s too.
Actor Todd Stashwick’s IMDb page is miles long, with appearances in Laws & Orders OG and SVU, Angel, Buffy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Riches, Phineas and Ferb, and Star Trek: Picard and the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe Disney+ series VisionQuest. He’s also a Bigfoot enthusiast. Not a big foot enthusiast, a fan of the cryptozoological creature also known as Sasquatch. Alert followers of host John Moe know that he shares this interest as well, and deeply. John and Todd compare notes on what is actually a soothing activity: poring over YouTube videos, reading first person accounts, and speculating on whether the “Bigfoot as transdimensional traveler” angle is possible or just a little too far. At various points in this interview, John gets a bit too excited about Bigfoot and, remembering what our show is, producer Gabe Mara calms him down.
