Ordinary Unhappiness Patrick & Abby

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick power through COVID brain fog to process Sunday’s announcement and the past few weeks of relentless breaking news. What do times like these do to our ability to process time in general? What do the timelines of presidential campaigns, news cycles, and breaking stories do to our subjective experience of time and the other timelines that structure ...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2023 memoir Sink and a new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Set over the course of a single, chaotic day in a North Philadelphia hospital, Thomas’ novel unfolds across a multiplicity of geographies and timelines, and weaves together a dense network of human attachments in all their pleasures and pains. The conversation ranges widely as Abby, Patrick, and Joseph discuss what “trauma” means in popular discourse...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe season is here. The time is now. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes (again). And to help navigate it all, Abby, Patrick, and Dan are launching a new series: Gerontophallocracy 2024. In this first installment, they outline the goals for the series, explain what the Goldwater Rule is and isn’t, and unpack how psychoanalysis can help us get some p...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan are joined by writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman (author of the recent book The Riddles of The Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle) to unpack the dense knots of overdetermination and fantasy that make up the recent rom-com "The Idea of You" (2024). It's a world where Anne Hathaway is a 40-year ol...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman, author of The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, a book that’s part personal memoir, part cultural history, and part meditation on what it means to care about meaning in the first place. In typically overdetermined fashion, the three talk about the complex interweaving of language, sexual difference, and the vicissitudes of our appetites for food, clues, accomplishments, ...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan turn to one of Freud’s earliest and strangest works: an untitled “psychology for neurologists,” begun in shorthand on a moving train, which went unpublished until 1950. Grappling with the text in terms of its significance and genre, they explore how abandoned experiments and seeming dead-ends can still yield insight and how, when it comes t...