Episode 545: Jennifer Senior

Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her article ”What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Her most recent article is ”The Ones We Sent Away.”

“I'm at the point where I'm only thinking about the big questions and the difficulty of being a human as what matter most. That's what I want to keep focusing on. Our common frailties, our common bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right? … But we can bond over our kids with disabilities. About the fact that we grieve, that we love, that we lose people. That we have friends that we love, friends that we hate. We have friendships that we miss, we have friendships that we can't live without.”

Show notes:

• jennifersenior.net
• Jennifer Senior on Longform
• Jennifer Senior on Longform Podcast
• 00:00 "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind" (Atlantic • Aug 2021)
• 01:00 On Grief (Atlantic Editions • 2023)
• 01:00 "The Ones We Sent Away" (Atlantic • Aug 2023)
• 02:00 All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (Ecco • 2014)
• 03:00 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Bessel Van Der Kolk • Penguin • 2015)
• 03:00 Senior's New York Magazine archive
• 04:00 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande • Picador • 2017)
• 05:00 Senior's New York Times archive
• 12:00 Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Annette Lareau • University of California Press • 2011)
• 17:00 Heavyweight (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet)
• 18:00 "#25 Becky and Jo" (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet • Oct 2019)
• 18:00 "#2 Gregor" (Jonathan Goldstein • Gimlet • Sep 2016)
• 28:00 "It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart" (Atlantic • Feb 2022)
• 42:00 Patient H.M. (Luke Dittrich • Random House • 2017)
• 47:00 "What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID" (Atlantic • Feb 2023)

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