Political Junkie
Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast
Episode 7: You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin
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Episode 7: You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin

A conversation with historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela about her new book, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession"
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In this episode, I welcome my friend and New School colleague, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, to join me in a conversation about the history of exercise culture in the United States. Her new book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023), tracks the history of Americans’ investment in fitness.

Taking her readers from late nineteenth-century performances of bodybuilding through today’s glittering gyms, elite studio classes, celebrity instructors, and extreme sports, Petrzela—a scholar, journalist, and podcaster who has a not-so-secret life as an IntenSati leader—both explores an American obsession with fitness and health that is, at the same time, out of reach for so many.

Step aerobics, circa 1990. Photo credit: ShinyFan/Wikimedia Commons

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Program notes:


Short takes:

  • This week’s primary social media news was Elon Musk de-platforming six journalists—who cover him—from Twitter. It was stunning and led to a massive jump in my followers on Mastodon and Post: I suspect this was true across the board because Mastodon always gets a little janky when volume spikes. But as Jason Abbruzzese, Kevin Collier, and Phil Helsel noted at NBC.com, what happened next was even more shocking. Musk joined a Twitter Space devoted to talking about the incident “before an audience of more than 30,000 listeners,” snapped at everyone, and left. Minutes later, Twitter Spaces was disabled for all users. Later, Musk tweeted: "we're fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow." The guy has a bad case of fuckingnutsitis. (December 16, 2022)

  • How do intelligent people spend their twenties getting some of the best educations the United States offers but with few prospects for employment in the work they were trained to do? At Jacobin, historian Hannah Leffingwell breaks it down for you. As she argues, academic life is not unlike a cult. “Lots of people at the bottom, paying for trainings and working for free,” Leffingwell writes, “sacrificing more and more of their lives to prove their loyalty to the organization; and a small handful of people at the top, reaping the benefits, perpetuating an `illusion of hope’ that those at the bottom can succeed too if they just work hard enough.” (December 13, 2022)

  • I re-subscribed to The Atlantic just to read this profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene by Elaina Plott Calabro. “She did as she was supposed to do, graduating from South Forsyth High and then packing up and moving an hour and a half away, to Athens, for four years at the University of Georgia,” Calabro writes, tracing Greene’s evolution from a fairly ordinary, upper-middle-class existence in a Georgia suburb to one of the whackiest of all whack jobs in Congress. But Calabro emphasizes one thing: she’s smart. And that’s why she’s so dangerous. (December 5, 2022)

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Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast
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