Just imagine for a moment—you are swimming in the cold dark of the Pacific Ocean, trying to find the lost remains of your father. But you aren’t alone. There are shapes moving in the gloom, great, dark shapes. Shapes with mouths. That’s what happens to Jay Gardiner in the latest novel by award winning author (and collaborator with Guillermo del Toro) Daniel Kraus. Caught first by a giant squid, then swallowed whole by a Sperm whale, Jay has one hour to get out alive. If he can get out of his own head, first. The thing is, If you were swallowed by a whale… it would be a VERY big GULP. And you know who can tell us about gulps, right? Mary Roach. Because on tonight’s special VIP edition of Authors Hosting Authors, Mary will talk to Daniel about the ins and outs of being, well, in—and out. Because while the story might be fiction, the trial of our protagonist is based in scientific FACT. Join us for a wild night and learn the best possible escape routes out of an 80 ft, 60 ton whale. You never know when that will come in handy!

Episode was recorded live July 25, 2024.

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How much do looks really matter? In society, whether we like it or not, how we look affects how we are treated—and even what opportunities we might have in life. A one-time New York prison commissioner, Henry Solomon, once stated that “physical defects…might conduce to crime” because a man with a poor physical appearance would have an easier time stealing a dollar than getting hired to earn one. That outlook wasn’t new then, and it hasn’t really gone away. In Zara Stone’s amazing book KILLER LOOKS, she writes that “people have instinctively understood the societal benefits of conventional beauty” as a kind of social currency. It’s literally like having money in the bank. “Beauty privilege is real,” she writes, “and it’s real uncomfortable.” By the early 1980s, cosmetic surgery was firmly established as a path to economic success. Looks were so important that a new branch of therapy was created: cosmetic behavior therapy. If that sounds strange, just wait. Imagine a program that offers cosmetic changes to inmates as a means of lowering the crime rate—that instead of teaching us to lose out biases about looks, society is pretty willing to give in to it. Do looks really affect crime rates? More likely, appearance bias instead creates a situation where a person is both less likely to have opportunities AND more likely to be accused or arrested for a crime. What does appearance bias mean for us now, or for the future? Find out on July 11th, live with Zara Stone only on the Peculiar book club!

Episode was recorded live July 11, 2024.

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What happens when racism is not a bug in the system—but in fact IS the system? And the Health System, at that. Imagine being a high-achieving person of color, courted by prestigious medical institutions, but then denied the support you needed when you got there? Fighting through burnout and the grueling pace of residency, only to wind up a cog in a bureaucracy that sees patients as broken bits on an assembly line. “With] ninety-ninth percentile MCAT and Step and Board scores as entrance keys to the profession,” writes author Anthony Chin-Quee, “we too often neglect to screen for traits that truly matter: the self-awareness and strength of character necessary to weather the devastating emotional trials that are sure to come; the humility and grace required to be an effective, collaborative, and avid lifelong learner.” Chin-Quee’s memoir, I CAN’T SAVE YOU, doesn’t just present the trauma of our medical education system, but the trauma of living and of caring in a narrative described by NPR as “messy” but provocative—an “assemblage of shifting narrative perspectives, poetry, anecdotes, and hallucinatory performance, represents the structural equivalent of a mixtape.” Guess what, y’all, it’s Medical Humanities. Yes, like that journal I happen to be the editor in chief of… and I cannot WAIT to chat live with Anthony about how we have lost—and how to regain—the human at the center of medicine. Don’t miss this livestream on Jun 27th, only on the Peculiar Book Club.

Episode was recorded live June 27, 2024.

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