Slow Burn - Decoder Ring: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… Will He Want a Welfare Check?
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
Adults have a long history of trying to find morals and lessons in children’s literature. But what happens when a seemingly innocent book about a boy and a hungry mouse becomes fodder for the culture wars? Over the last decade, Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie has been adopted by some on the right as a cautionary tale about government welfare. In this episode, we explore the origins of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the history of adults extracting unintended meaning from children’s books, and try to figure out how this particular kid’s book became a Republican battle cry.
This episode was written by Cheyna Roth. It was edited by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung. It was produced by Sofie Kodner. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
In this episode, you’ll hear from author Laura Numeroff, book critic Bruce Handy, economist Rebecca Christie and former journalist Max Ehrenfreund.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Willa. For those of you who have been listening to Decoder Ring here in the Slow Burn feed for the last few months, I've got something special for you before our newest episode. A little preview of Season 10 of Slow Burn. The new season looks at the moment in the early 2000s when a cultural and political force, unlike any other, shakily got to its feet and then started shaking the |
| 0:21.7 | world around it. I'm talking about Fox News and it's far from inevitable, but ultimately inexorable |
| 0:27.2 | rise. The trailer for the new season just dropped. You should please go listen to it. It is very |
| 0:31.7 | captivating. And I'm here with Slow Burn's editorial director and the host of the new season, |
| 0:37.2 | Josh Levine, to talk about it. |
| 0:39.1 | Hi, Josh. |
| 0:40.0 | Hello. |
| 0:40.9 | So tell me about this new season. |
| 0:42.5 | This new season is about a television network that I think most of us have strong opinions about. |
| 0:51.3 | It is, I think, one of the few things in American life that has undeniably |
| 0:57.8 | changed the way that we live, the way that we think, the way that our country operates |
| 1:03.1 | in the last 30 years, and, like, didn't exist 30 years ago. And so it's something that I |
| 1:09.8 | had lots of thoughts about, but in kind of classic |
| 1:13.0 | slowburn fashion, didn't truly understand where it came from, what it was in the early |
| 1:19.5 | days, and whether the form that it's in now was inevitable. So those are all questions I was |
| 1:25.7 | fascinated by. What's something that, like, you learned putting the season together that you think listeners |
| 1:33.3 | might also learn that, like, they just will not have had any idea about? |
| 1:36.7 | Well, I mean, the kind of fundamental thing that people were wondering about Fox from the very |
| 1:43.8 | beginning was whether it would be conservative. And this isn't a |
| 1:49.2 | question that emerged like three years or eight years later. It was a question that sort of dogged |
| 1:56.4 | Fox or followed it from the day that, you know, Rupert Murdoch had a press conference announcing |
| 2:02.6 | that he was doing this thing with Roger Ailes. Like, you know, people weren't naive about |
... |
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