JUNE READING LIST

WATCHING: The Deep End Docuseries

This is frustrating and engrossing, beautifully filmed and scored - documenting Youtube spirituality guru Teal Swan’s effort to prove that her following, and the community around her teachings, are not a cult (spoiler…well, you can guess). She is a genuinely magnetic and intense person, but preys on the deeply wounded, lost people in spiritual pain - and her complicated fabrication of being someone who has also experienced extreme trauma has connections to implanted memories and psychologists during the Satanic Panic era. The Gateway Podcast explores more of her complex nonsense.

READING: Out on the Town Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex

“Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital. James J. Conway introduces a foundational text of queer identity that finds Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — deploying both sentiment and science to move hearts and minds among a broad readership.”

LISTENING: There Are No Girls On The Internet: Why did the right wing media spend money spreading anti- Amber Heard content?

If you have been lucky enough to not hear about this trial between two messy people that should absolutely not have been televised - or come across memes at Amber Heard’s expense - this episode breaks down why the internet’s reaction and the consequences of the ruling (both for setting precedent and for survivors in the future) are much darker than just tabloid fodder.

Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus

This series investigates the modern incarnation of American Spiritualism - which originated in upstate New York in the mid 19th century with the Fox Sisters who famously could communicate with the dead. Now the small practicing spiritualist community calls Cassadega, Florida its home.