In this week’s episode, both of the storytellers share stories about moments when life just wouldn’t let up.
Part 1: After giving birth to her second child, Julie Raskin doesn’t know how to handle his constant crying and need to nurse.
Part 2: As a new immigrant and surprise cancer patient, Emmanuel Paul navigates the complexities of the US healthcare system ... Show More
Feb 2024
Aaron J. Jackson, "Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities" (U California Press, 2021)
Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with major physical and intellectual disab ... Show More
31m 14s
Feb 2025
Can You Inherit Trauma - And If So, Can You Inherit Healing?
JVN sits down with journalist and author James Longman to explore one of the most fascinating questions in mental health: can you inherit trauma? Drawing from his deeply personal journey and his new book The Inherited Mind, James unpacks the science behind genetic predisposition, ... Show More
57m 47s
Feb 2024
Laurence Ralph, "Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him" (Grand Central Publishing, 2023)
In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five y ... Show More
48m 50s
May 2023
Parenting and Mindfulness
Today I sat down with Nadia Davis to discuss parenting and mindfulness. Nadia is the author of Home Is Within You: A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption (Girl Friday Books, 2021).Nadia Davis is the mother of three sons, a writer, attorney, kundalini yoga teacher and former executiv ... Show More
58m 57s
Jan 2025
‘Do I need to lead this lifestyle to succeed?’ The mental health crises that forced faculty members to change tack
Hilal Lashuel and Dave Reay join Michelle Kimple to talk about faculty mental health and why it is often overlooked.A heart attack in 2016 forced Lashuel, a neurogenerative diseases researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, to question success in scienc ... Show More
37m 7s
Aug 22
The Medical Matchmaking Machine
As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition didn’t work. He had months to live, if that. If he was going to survive, he was ... Show More
1h 1m
Feb 2025
Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A ... Show More
1h 16m
Dec 2024
Stacy Torres, "At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America" (U California Press, 2025)
To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and ... Show More
1h 10m