How Katie Herzog Drank Her Way to Sobriety

The debate about immigration brings out some of the deepest anxieties and biggest disagreements in America. And right now, all of it feels like it’s coming to a head. In 2022, there were over 2.76 million illegal migrant crossings at the Southwest border. That’s roughly the population of Chicago, America’s third largest city. To address this unprecedented surge, President Biden recently announced tougher restrictions and made a show of visiting the border himself.  But unlike a decade or two ago, when the immigration debate was mostly about economics, today it’s an issue that’s subsumed by the culture wars and our polarized discourse. Republican governors bus migrants to sanctuary cities and they’re called “xenophobic” and “cruel” by the left. But what happens when a Democratic governor does much the same thing, bussing migrants from Colorado to New York City and Chicago? Is it still a heartless political stunt? Or is all of this just an inevitable consequence of our broken immigration system?  So today: a debate moderated by guest host Kmele Foster between Alex Nowrasteh and Jessica Vaughan. Are current levels of immigration helping or hurting America? How do we balance humanitarian concerns with America’s economic and security needs? Should we be trying to enforce more or less restrictions at the border? And what exactly should we do to fix our immigration policies? Alex is the director of Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Jessica is the director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that describes themselves as “pro-immigrant but low immigration.” While Alex and Jessica couldn’t be more opposite in their approach – Alex favors free immigration, while Jessica argues for restrictionist policies – today on Honestly we look for common ground, debate the facts, and search for solutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

17 Tammi 20231h 15min

From Biden getting on board the classified documents train to the raw milk revolutionaries who are skeptical of Big Dairy, today we bring you a roundtable to discuss, debate and pull apart the news of the week beyond the headlines. New York Sun columnist Eli Lake hosts this week's conversation with guests Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and writer at The Atlantic, and Honestly's very own Bari Weiss, with a special appearance by Free Press columnist, Suzy Weiss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

13 Tammi 20231h 7min

When my wife Nellie was pregnant last year, we became obsessed with Economist Emily Oster’s book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know. Amidst a barrage of conflicting and confusing pregnancy advice, Oster laid out the data on everything we needed to know. Despite what doctors said, sushi, cheese, and the occasional glass of wine were all okay during those nine long months. It gave us the much needed calm we needed during a time of so much uncertainty.  With her two subsequent books Cribsheet and The Family Firm, Oster popularized a new phenomenon that has defined our generation of parents: data-driven parenting. It ditches the long lists of paternalistic rules, and instead examines peer-reviewed evidence and lets parents make their own informed decisions about their kids based on risks and tradeoffs. Nowhere was the Oster mentality more front and center, and more divisive, than during Covid. She argued very early on in the pandemic for less draconian and more nuanced policies. She wrote pieces in the Atlantic like, Schools Aren’t Superspreaders and Your Unvaccinated Kids Is Like A Vaccinated Grandma, when those words were considered heresy. And while she made quite a few enemies on the left over the last few years, recently she wrote Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, and earned herself some enemies on the right as well. Today, my wife Nellie Bowles joins me to talk to Oster about why a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University decided to become a parenting guru, how she used her parenting framework to become a leading expert on pandemic policies, and the unwinnable position of… actually following the science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Tammi 20231h 20min

David Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best selling books: Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays On Ice, Barrel Fever… just to name a few. He’s also one of my favorite writers of all time.  What makes Sedaris – who got his start on NPR back in 1992 with his, now famous, Santaland Diaries essay about the time he worked as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s – so mesmerizing and funny, is his ability to find something meaningful and true in the utterly mundane, the way he finds humor in the most horrific moments in life, and his commitment to the lost art of making fun of ourselves.  Nowhere is that more clear than in his newest book, Happy-Go-Lucky. Like most of his writing, it’s a book about his beloved and crazy family. But it’s also a book about some of the most contentious societal issues of the last few years. For the writer who so many think of as a public radio darling, the pages of Sedaris’ new book are not like what you find on today’s member stations. He writes about observing Black Lives Matter protests and COVID lockdowns with such candor – and without agenda or moral ideology – which results in something not only hilarious and relatable, as usual, but also extraordinarily refreshing.  So for today, if you find yourself tuning in from an overcrowded plane, a car full of bickering cousins, or maybe you miraculously get a quiet moment to yourself on a long and snowy walk, this is the perfect episode for you… and, hopefully, the perfect holiday escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

22 Joulu 20221h 18min

Ro Khanna is a progressive congressman representing California's 17th District, the wealthiest Congressional district in the U.S. He's the Silicon Valley congressman, and his constituents are the coastal elites of the elites. But if you didn't know any of that, you might think Ro Khanna is a congressman from a place like Indiana. He wants to revitalize American industry, bring manufacturing back home, and really sound the alarm on who the digital revolution has left behind. In fact, when you hear Ro Khanna make the case for the dignity of working people, the negative effects of globalization, and campaign with slogans like “​​make more stuff here,” and “buy American,” he kind of sounds like… Donald Trump. That tells you everything you need to know about our current political moment and how the old rules about what is left and what is right, and which party represents the working class is totally up for grabs. And Khanna thinks that Democrats should be dominating on these issues. On big tech, Khanna’s policies are not exactly the ones you'd imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think big tech needs to be broken up, but he also was one of the only Democrats to diverge from his party's censorious impulses, when he reached out directly to Twitter in 2020 to criticize its decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, as we reported in the Twitter Files story. In an era where the Democratic Party and big tech often seem to be marching in lockstep, Khanna says, hold on. Maybe we should be skeptical of this kind of corporate power. And isn't that the core of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about? And if not, when did that change and why? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

16 Joulu 20221h 6min

For the last month, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been all over the internet with his conspiratorial, antisemitic tirades. Most recently, he went on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show with White Nationalist Nick Fuentes and said things like, “I love Nazis” and “I see good things about Hitler.”  Last month, there was also Kyrie Irving sharing a link to a video that claimed that blacks are the real Hebrews and the Holocaust didn’t happen. There was also the Black Hebrew Israelite march outside of Barclays Center that got almost no media coverage. All of this, took place in a country where Jews still suffer the largest total number of hate crimes, year after year.  What’s happened over the last month isn’t about one celebrity or basketball player. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and I talked about recently, the antisemitic ideas we’ve seen in the news lately are not new in America. Especially not in black America.  Black-Jewish relations in America have a long and dynamic history, from the shared struggle during the Civil Rights movement to the horror of the Crown Heights Riots in 1991. Throughout all of it, it’s hard not to think about the outsized influence of Louis Farrakahn, often dubbed the most popular antisemite in America.  So today, an honest conversation with guests Chloe Valdary, Bret Stephens, Eli Lake and Kmele Foster about the history of these two communities in America, and how, as a society, we should respond to public figures who spew antisemitism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

9 Joulu 20221h 41min

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a polarizing figure. For some, he's the ultimate defender of the State of Israel, willing to do whatever he thinks it takes to protect the one Jewish state located in the most volatile region of the world. For others, Bibi symbolizes everything that's wrong with 21st century Israel: the state's rightward turn and its never ending conflict with the Palestinians. His supporters chant “Bibi, King of Israel!” at his rallies, while at protests, his enemies call him “crime minister.” Bill Clinon said: “you should never underestimate him.” Barack Obama said he was “smart, canny, tough” but that they “did not share worldviews.” And Trump called him “the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with” but then later, infamously “f— him.” But there's one thing that everyone can agree on: Benjamin Netanyahu is the reigning master of Israeli politics. And despite being ousted from the Prime Ministership just over a year ago, Bibi is back. For a third stint. Why is Benjamin Netanyahu the man that Israelis just can't quit? And what does it mean for Israel that he's attempting to form a government with some of the most radical, far-right parties in Israel?  Today, an interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu on the eve of his return to power and on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bibi: My Story, an autobiography about his evolution from soldier to statesman. We talked about how he draws moral lines as a leader, about the prospect of peace with the Palestinians and the prospect of peace with the Saudis, and about how he plans to uphold Israel's delicate balance between Judaism and democracy as he steps in to lead his country once more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

30 Marras 20221h 5min

A few months ago, I had writer Freddie deBoer on the podcast for an episode we called, “Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?” We talked about his experience living with severe bipolar disorder and the dangerous ways in which mental illness has gotten wrapped up in our growing cultural obsession with identity politics. It’s almost like sickness, he argued, has become chic. We spent some of the conversation talking critically about a New York Times article by writer Daniel Bergner about a movement away from medication and more towards acceptance. A movement that replaces words like “psychosis” with “nonconsensus realities.” This article, in Freddie’s view, was exemplary of the very phenomenon he was calling out.  A lot of people responded extremely positively to my conversation with Freddie. Others, not so much. One of those people was Daniel Bergner. So I invited him on the show. Today’s episode is not just a debate about how society should handle the epidemic of mental illness. It’s a model for how to disagree with someone productively, respectively, honestly. It’s a reminder not only that it’s okay to come out of a conversation strongly disagreeing with someone, but that it’s of vital importance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Marras 20221h 12min