Political Gabfest - Rural Arkansas Explored in an Extra Gabfest Reads
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz are on vacation, but Emily taped an extra episode of Gabfest Reads for everyone. She sits down with author Monica Potts to talk about her new memoir The Forgotten Girls. They discuss growing up in rural Arkansas, Monica’s childhood best friend Darci, and more.
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, David, Emily, and John chatter about what’s making them happy this summer, an article about how bad things really are, and more.
In the June edition of Gabfest Reads, Emily talks with Peter Singer @PeterSinger about his book, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed.
Email your chatters, questions, and comments to gabfest@slate.com or Tweet us @SlateGabfest. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth
Research by Julie Huygen
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Slate Political GabFest. |
| 0:07.0 | For Thursday, July 6th. This is the bonus GabFest Reads episode. I'm Emily Bazlan. I'm a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Yale Law School. John and David are out this week, so we're going to do something a little different. We have a great extra GabFest Reeds. I'm joined by Monica Pots, who is the author of The Forgotten Girls. Hey, Monica. Hey, Emily. Thanks for |
| 0:39.4 | having me. Oh, so glad you're here. So I want to set the scene for your book a little bit. The setting for |
| 0:45.1 | the book is your hometown of Clinton, Arkansas, population about 2,500 on the southern side of the |
| 0:51.7 | Ozarks. And you write that almost everyone in Clinton goes to an evangelical church. |
| 0:58.0 | And in the halls of the town's only high school, everyone knows everything about everyone else or seems to. |
| 1:03.6 | Who you dated, where you bought your clothes, how you acted on weekends, and even your destiny inherited from the generations that came before you. You grew up in |
| 1:13.1 | Clinton. You left when you were 18 to go to college and have a career as a journalist. And then |
| 1:18.7 | you moved back. Tell me about that. Why did you come back to Clinton? What were you thinking you |
| 1:25.0 | might find there? So in 2012, there started to be a series of studies showing that life expectancy was declining for the least educated white Americans. |
| 1:35.4 | And that was especially true for the least educated white women. |
| 1:39.0 | They were losing years of their lives. |
| 1:41.0 | It's really uncommon for any demographic group to lose life expectancy. |
| 1:45.8 | Normally, we are always increasing the amount of years that people live. |
| 1:49.9 | Life gets better and better with medicine. |
| 1:52.4 | And we do that at different rates, but for a group to start falling behind is really unusual. |
| 1:57.7 | And I had the sense as soon as I started reading those studies that this was really |
| 2:01.0 | about the kind of place that I had left behind when I left college, that I felt like I knew the |
| 2:06.5 | populations that were being left behind by medical progress, that were backsliding and having |
| 2:12.3 | worse lives than the generation that came before them. And so I started to come back to Clinton |
| 2:17.0 | to think about |
| 2:17.8 | what I might find in regards to that, the kind of personal stories that might show why it was |
... |
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