SUPD Presents : Ana Marie Cox "Getting Better" with guest A.J. Daulerio

A.J. Daulerio is the creator of The Small Bow, one of my all-time-favorite newsletters, which he began publishing in 2018. It’s about addiction and recovery and also about family stories, big memories, stubborn feelings, and experiencing grace. The fact that I, a not-sober person, find it so resonant with my experiences suggests some of the expansive excellence you’ll find within. I consider The Small Bow a newsletter about being an accountable, self-aware adult, which is a topic area that is oddly underexplored in … the world?

A.J.’s personal history is pretty well documented. He was an editor at the sports website Deadspin before becoming editor-in-chief of Gawker in 2012. That year, he published clips of a sex tape that featured Hulk Hogan, who ultimately sued Gawker for $100 million and won. The suit ended Gawker as a company and threw Daulerio’s life into utter disarray.

Ana Marie Cox is a political columnist for The New Republic and a culture critic whose writing has appeared in Texas Monthly, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, and NBC.com. Through 2022, she wrote a “Sober Questioning” column at The Cut. She hosts the science fiction and political science podcast Space the Nation with Dan Drezner (created to fill the hole in their hearts when The Churn was canceled). She’s a regular on the Stephen King podcast The Losers Club (a favorite episode is this one on recovery themes in King’s work). Her memoir, “Just Like Your Mother” — a reported account of addiction, recovery, and intergenerational trauma — will be published by Random House.

She hosted "With Friends Like These," a podcast from Crooked Media from 2017-2022. During the pandemic When we recognized there was a pandemic, she had a regular Instagram Live check-in with John Moe, that archive is here.

She conducted the "Talk" interviews featured in the New York Times Magazine from 2015-17. She was the senior political correspondent for MTV News from 2016 until they pivoted to video. She is on cable news more often than she'd like, which isn’t that often.

Since starting the snarky political blog Wonkette in 2004, she has worked at a bewildering variety of outlets, including Time magazine, GQ, Air America, and The Guardian. Prior to Wonkette, she was an editor at Mother Jones and at the webzine Suck.com. She is the author of the romantic comedy novel Dog Days.

Ana gained attention in 2008 for being an early, enthusiastic adopter of Twitter and quickly amassed a following of 1 million. She is not on Twitter anymore (because Nazis) but you can follow her on Instagram and Bluesky (@anamariecox on both).

You can hear her story about being a suicide attempt survivor here. You may have read that she's a Christian now, too.

After ten years in the frigid Midwest, she returned home to Austin, TX in December 2020. She is accompanied by her dog, Exley, named for the author Fred Exley, her murder kitten, Molly Ivins, named for Molly Ivins, and her cat-shaped void, Bram Stoker, named for Bram Stoker.

Ana Marie Cox Website

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