What The Moby-Natalie Portman Row Reveals About Entitlement & Truth-Telling; & Are Women Without Children Happier?

The High Low

Society & Culture

4.8 • 9.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2019

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dolly talks bird-feeding and rabid Game of Thrones fans who want to re-make the ending; Pandora ponders what Spice Girl merch to get her hands on; and we discuss Oxbridge's first appointment of its first black female master.

In this episode, a talk-gone-viral from Hay Festival, by behavioural scientist and LSE scientist Paul Dolan, who claimed that women without a spouse and children are happier. We call on the words of Grace Dent, Corinne Fisher and Terri Gross; Simone de Beauvoir and Jacqueline Rose in order to try and determine what makes a happy woman (and is it ever possible to contrast two very different lives?)

We also muse upon the Moby vs. Natalie Portman row, after the musician claimed in his memoir that they dated when she was 20; she says they didn't date - oh and she was 18. What does this story tell us about about entitlement, fact-checking and truth-telling?

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The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Years and Years, on BBC iPlayer

Mothers, by Jacqueline Rose

Hadley Freeman on the pro-life lobby, for The Guardian https://bit.ly/2HFQmjg

Eva Wiseman on why life is shades of grey, for The Observer magazine https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/26/why-are-arguments-always-so-black-and-white-reality-television

Terri Gross on not having kids, on The Longest Short podcast https://longestshortesttime.com/episode-79-terry-gross-on-not-having-kids/

The C Word on Luminary: https://bit.ly/2HHhVsz

The Scarcity Mindset by Octavia Bright: https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a27527675/scarcity-mindset-competition-women/

Laura Snapes reviews The Spice Girls reunion show: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/25/spice-girls-review-nostalgia-live-croke-park-dublin

Nina Stibbe on The Adam Buxton podcast: https://soundcloud.com/adam-buxton/podcast-ep90-nina-stibbe

Wait by Galway Kinnell: https://poets.org/poem/wait

Grace Dent and Sian Harries on not having children: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jd32d

Arwa Mahdawi on Moby and nice-guy misogyny: https://bit.ly/2HDM7op

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Highloat, the weekly current affairs and pop culture podcast brought to you
0:19.4	by Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes. How was Hay Dolly? There's one talk from now that's
0:24.6	on Barrow, which we're going to talk about later. Mine. Hay was heaven. I had such a good time. I was
0:31.9	interviewed by Clemencey Burton Hill who is just the most brilliant skillful interviewer. So we had,
0:39.6	I just really, really loved our event and the audience was lovely. And also it was so nice doing
0:43.8	Hay this year with the book having taken on a bit of a life because last year I did it, the book
0:49.0	was quite new. So the majority of the audience were like basically men in barbers who had like
0:55.4	an hour to kill before Simon Sharma who just had no idea who I was. So I just felt like the audience
1:01.0	were more responsive and more kind of understanding of where I'm coming from. Yeah, which was really,
1:07.2	really enjoyable. I really liked it. Had a cup of tea and a gossip with fortunately's Theon Jane
1:13.6	which was basically a dream come true. I actually when I was in the middle of talking with them,
1:17.8	I was thinking if I wrote like a charity dinner and this came up as like a prize in a charity
1:24.2	auction, I would have bid up to £150 for it. And there I was just eating lemon drizzle cake for
1:29.5	free doing it in the green room. It's great. Oh, so yeah, they were lovely. I also had a hilarious
1:36.5	encounter with Philippe Sands. Sexiest voice ever. So Pandora and I recommended a Radio 4 program he
1:44.1	did a few months ago called the Rat Line, which was brilliant and very, very interesting. About
1:49.7	Nazi's escaping out of Germany post-war. But the thing that Pandora and I also noticed in his show
1:57.8	is that he has this very, very seductive voice. Clemmie when I arrived in the green room said,
2:03.4	I've got someone that you have to meet and she took me over to this man and was like, this is
2:08.4	Jolly from the Highloat, she and Pandora are the ones who said you had sexiest voice ever.
2:14.2	And with the most booming voice, he embraced me like an old friend and said that all his kids and
2:20.6	his kids friends have told him about it. He then marched me over. I was so embarrassed. He marched me
	...

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