News Brief: The Casual Soft Eugenics of Self-Help "Friendscaping" Content
Citations Needed
Citations Needed
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this public News Brief, we discuss a recent advice column in the New York Times advocating upwardly mobile professionals dump their fat and depressed friends and how it's part of a much broader trend of pop sociology repackaging cruelty and soft eugenics as "science-driven" self improvement.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to A Citations Needed News Brief. |
| 0:06.4 | I am Neema Shirazi. |
| 0:07.4 | I'm Adam Johnson. |
| 0:08.6 | You can follow the show on Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed and become |
| 0:12.7 | a supporter of our work through patreon.com slash Citations Needed Podcast. |
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| 0:20.5 | We are 100% listener funded so your support goes such a long way. |
| 0:25.6 | And on today's news brief, Adam, it's been a long, hard year and sometimes we read |
| 0:32.5 | in the media that it's about time to drop some of your loser friends. |
| 0:38.1 | Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an article which had been one of |
| 0:42.1 | a previous article written by the same person. |
| 0:43.8 | There have been several other similar like it telling us that we need to quote unquote, |
| 0:47.0 | Friendscape, reject our friends who are bad for us. |
| 0:50.8 | Now in principle this can be perfectly good, right? |
| 0:56.0 | Maybe the pandemic is an excuse to great reset your friends, right? |
| 0:59.1 | To say like, maybe this thing is not something I, that's worth keeping now that I've gone |
| 1:03.1 | a year without having social connections. |
| 1:05.2 | However, there is a cottage industry of friendscaping articles for whom that is not the criteria. |
| 1:11.6 | The criteria is are these people depressed, substance abusers or overweight at which point |
| 1:18.0 | they need to be summarily removed. |
| 1:20.1 | And this was not in an obscure clickbait website. |
| 1:23.1 | This was the whole list of the whole of these New York Times. |
... |
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