Alituen-gbpodcastProvincetown, MA and Cape Cod64a1adcc-3ca1-5d9f-bb96-aaed33471e7dweeklyhttps://irawood.comepisodicirawood10@gmail.comIra WoodIra WoodIra Woodfalseb6346959-51e3-4e47-becb-2f34413cea81The idea of achieving personal happiness is big business. Books, podcasts, TV shows, workshops, health clubs, and drugs, all purporting to enable us to experience a baseline of perpetual bliss are selling one of the most persistent illusions of modern culture. In reality, biological evolution and scientific research have shown that humans were never designed to be happy all the time. Our brains developed, instead, to keep us alive and reproducing and those terrible emotional swings we all sometimes endure—anxiety, fear, sadness, and loneliness—serve to help us avoid potential threats and recalibrate our mistakes. If our ancestors felt completely satisfied and happy all the time, they’d lose the motivation to hunt, gather, build shelter, and create the relationships with other humans that kept them alive. We may not like them. We may beat ourselves up for having them. We may spend lots of money avoiding them. In his book The Opposite of Happiness, Professor George Loewenstein, a founding father of behavioral economics, explains why negative emotions play an important role in our lives.

]]>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:30:32 GMT00:30:44full202620262424Ira Wood551c5cde-179f-4470-a6a8-e3040ab3d668With the daily avalanche of headlines, alerts and updates, it’s never been harder to know or easier to doubt the what’s real. And that’s no accident. For over a hundred years, big industry has been trying to shape modern culture, diet, healthcare, and consumer habits by altering public perception, often without the public realizing a campaign is even taking place. Whether its calling climate change a hoax, pushing a war to save us from weapons of mass destruction, or trotting out bogus experts to question the link between smoking and lung cancer, it’s all a part of a polluted information eco-system created by PR firms, think tanks, lobbyists, and university research. Award-winning journalist lays it all out in our discussion of her book Brought to You By.

]]>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:10:05 GMT00:30:58full202620262323Ira Woodbb5b39bf-8f77-4bf8-bcfa-18f61079fef1Today we're talking about old age — seen by some as the first time in their lives they can unapologetically enjoy themselves, and by others as a living hell, especially those in bad health and with few resources. To put it bluntly, we're not good at old age in America, a country whose core values are built around youth, productivity, and extreme independence. The very notion of aging triggers anxiety in people who fear isolation and physical decline, and resentment in those who feel old people have ruined their future. The animus is so intense that most Americans fail to prepare for it, leading to crises in care, finances, and housing. In Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old, Lucy Schiller, a young writer investigates the frightening world inhabited by our elders, and one that inevitably awaits all of us.

]]>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:30:29 GMT00:31:13full202620262222Ira Wood9b2238af-cf6f-4c71-9f1a-2c2793795db8For over 250 years, the American military has tried to define what a man is supposed to be: tough, aggressive, and dominant. Those ideals have traveled beyond the battlefield, shaping schools, politics, pop culture, and expectations of boys and men. In journalist Jasper Craven's new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't, he examines how military academies, ROTC programs, and other institutions have popularized that narrow model of masculinity, revealing a culture built around hierarchy, discipline, and service, but also marked by hazing, misogyny, racism, violence, and the suppression of vulnerability.

]]>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:58:04 GMT00:30:17full202620262121Ira Woodef0875ac-b67b-4e92-b381-89c397bed365The N-word is the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language. But how can a word used to dehumanize Black people be a used by the Black community to express affection, humor, and defiance? That's one complicated word. But it all gets explained by Richard Pryor's daughter, now a history professor at Smith College, who unpacks the N-word's long ugly story and talks about growing up with the man who pioneered its use on stage.

]]>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:26:38 GMT00:30:30full202620262020Ira Wood64067166-ab08-47ca-820f-22467545e54dOverwhelmed by 20 years of back-to-back unsatisfying sexual relationships, queer, award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos decides to go cold turkey to see what she can find out about life, sex, and love.

]]>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:47:37 GMT00:29:38full202620261919Ira Wood0cf4004b-ddf3-41e4-af67-adfad46253b2Justin Kaplan was an award winning biographer, a literary icon, and one of the most famous writers of his time. To his daughter, however, he was a complete mystery. In her new memoir biography, Hester Kaplan attempts to find the father who would never even let her call him 'dad.' Where to begin? In his Pulitzer prize winning biography of Mark Twain...an iconic writer whose history of loss and emotional pain mirrors Kaplan's own.

]]>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:40:16 GMT00:30:21full202620261515Ira Woodb55412df-3ca1-4c3c-973a-d4972ee29628Writer/researcher Jennie Durant spent 10 years following beekeepers as they trucked their hives across country to keep industrial farms pollinated...hives that face parasites, pesticides, punishing travel, and climate extremes. It's a tough life for these high demand service providers who pollinate one third of all the food we eat.

]]>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:34:36 GMT00:32:03full202620261414Ira Wood7e25d6d5-b857-4375-a915-5dedaa1e776cDrawing on 50 hours of previously sealed interviews, correspondence from 18 archives and fresh conversations with friends and collaborators freely talking after Sondheim's death, biographer Dan Okrent reveals the emotionally turbulent life of the man who reinvented the Broadway musical and what drove him: a monstrous mother, decades of alcoholism, a war against critics, and an inability to fall in love until he was 60 years old.

]]>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:47:31 GMT00:31:30full202620261313Ira Woodc2a80fcc-6c40-4801-84c9-61399169178dJosh Owens spent 4 years as video editor and field producer at Infowars, a media universe where unproven conspiracy theories were delivered with absolute certainty, having sprung from the manic mind and unhinged fantasies of the infamous Alex Jones. Owens talks about the lies he perpetrated, the communities he put in danger, the useless 'supplements' Jones sold to make himself rich, and with unflinching honesty, the damage he did while enthralled with the internet's most notorious conspiracy theorist.

]]>Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:00:50 GMT00:31:07full202620261212Ira Wood84c90074-bc3a-47bf-8eb2-2134a1cdfe56Award-winning science journalist Carlos Orsi talks about the history of the world's most popular and enduring pseudo-science, Astrology: how it morphed from a 5,000 year old vehicle for telling fortunes into a multi-billion-dollar business popularly used for personality analysis; why generic and banal descriptions of peoples' character are so easily believed; how newspaper astrologers get away with 'predicting' the future; the reasons its beloved by society's under-represented people and the ways a daily game-like pastime can cause harm.

]]>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:19:43 GMT00:30:26full2026202699Ira Wood57706996-238a-4f29-8cb1-099397c6cc7fHistorians rank eyeglasses as one of the most important inventions in human history, but why did the Catholic church throw the inventor in a dungeon for 13 years? What did people do before glasses? Why was wearing glasses equated with devil worship? Why are they so expensive? Historian David King Dunaway answers all these questions and more as we talk about his book The Four Eyed World.

]]>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:46:26 GMT00:30:33full2026202688Ira Wood43b72582-e394-4978-966d-faa97d243513When Genevieve Wheeler Brown, a decorative arts expert from The Antique Road Show, was asked to evaluate a collection of blue and white pottery, hidden away for decades in an exclusive Manhattan townhouse, she had no idea that it told the centuries-old story of women's role in a ceramic that travelled from the Middle East to China to Holland and then to Gilded Age New York and eventually the China cabinets of ordinary New Englanders. This is fantastic story of Delftware.

]]>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:29:33 GMT00:29:59full2026202611Ira Woodb7f0ac46-7415-4dcb-8f87-791a2e8589d7Brad Gooch is an award winning biographer of such gay iconic gay artists as Keith Haring and Frank O'Hara. Having lost his first love to the AIDs epidemic, he was lucky to fall in love again, with a guy who desperately wanted kids and a family. His new book Good Morning Moon tells the story of their quest, in late middle age, to make two kids through in vitro fertilization and his own discovery that, like his own kids, his own parentage is not what is considered 'normal' in our society.

]]>Tue, 26 May 2026 19:46:00 GMT00:29:44full2026202622Ira Wood89424061-4c73-4384-bcbe-6240a5e055d9After World War Two, 'The Greatest Generation' returned to America determined to enjoy the freedoms of a world liberated from fascism but another group of Americans were equally determined to finish the job Hitler started by annihilating Jews and relocating Blacks to Africa. In his book The Secret War Against Hate, USC Professor of History tells the largely hidden story of those who risked their lives to fight homegrown fascism in America and how its roots still flourish today.

]]>Wed, 20 May 2026 19:11:26 GMT00:30:47full2026202633Ira Woodde294000-1690-40ee-b771-9b86287d3b2eJournalist Danielle Crittenden lost her 32 year-old daughter to a sudden brain tumor and with that death life as she knew it. She talks with Ira about her new book, Dispatches from Grief, in which she describes how she, and all those who lose a loved one, are dropped into a unfamiliar new landscape without a map.

]]>Wed, 13 May 2026 17:34:36 GMT00:31:08full2026202644Ira Wood15a5fff8-6e75-4bc6-90ec-92c5e209f38bTwo pioneers of the Reproductive Rights movement, Byllye Avery and Loretta Ross, talk about transforming the landscape of reproductive care in the United States and ensuring three core human rights: to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

]]>Mon, 04 May 2026 23:03:12 GMT00:30:03full2026202655Ira Wood48985666-e603-4dee-9eb4-0f668a3a36fbDo you hate to disagree with people? Avoid arguments? Shy away from conversations with anyone who is likely to contradict your ideas? It's understandable why many of us in today's contentious society try to minimize discord. But it comes at the cost of friendship, information, and connection. Harvard social psychologist Julia Minson talks about science -backed research that teach you How to Disagree Better so that debating may broaden rather than shrink your life.

]]>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:59:43 GMT00:31:36full2026202666Ira Wood08f06e5a-130a-4802-b7f3-4d68080862c5Longtime Wall Street Journal editor Paul Vigna gives us extraordinary take on where money came from, how it evolved, and how it became ‘almightier’ than almighty god.

]]>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:23:19 GMT00:29:49full2026202666450b5a26-e98a-49d1-b312-962467082636Since her death at the age of 15, the name and image of Anne Frank have become archetypal symbols of hope for victims the world; her diary adapted for film, television, theatre, dance, classical music, opera, anime, and indie rock. Award winning biographer Ruth Franklin talks about the life of the real Anne that's often overlooked.

]]>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:20:28 GMT00:31:18full2026202677Ira Wood8e55c45e-32ab-4f25-94d9-552d7ea1946bLindy West is a best-selling author, a comedian and an activist known for her sharp humorous work on feminism, body image, and on-line harassment. She talks about the reality of being a fat role model, contentedly living in a polyamorous relationship, and how she sometimes get a lot of crap for both.

]]>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:02:51 GMT00:30:12full2026202688Ira Wood418d84ce-4347-4a8a-b2c2-d43f4f5d9330Jessica Mitford was born in a wildly eccentric British noble family, a socialist among fascists, and became the best loved, bestselling muckraking writer in America. Award-winning biographer Carla Kaplan talks to Ira about her fierce and unruly life.

]]>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:01:35 GMT00:32:17fullIra Wood4598779f-9241-4a19-9d92-7ad44c91a1c8Ebony and Jet Magazine Music Writer Margena Christian talks about the woman who wrote some of Motown's biggest hits, and saved the career of Stevie Wonder, but whose name is all but unknown, Sylvia Moy.

]]>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:42:51 GMT00:30:22full20262026Ira Woodf5e595b7-586c-48b8-8c8e-1c97d5a3ab26Brian Raftery is a journalist and podcaster specializing in pop culture, film history, and entertainment. He joins Ira to talk about his new book Hannibal Lecter: A Life which traces the history of America's favorite fictional villain and his creator, the enigmatic and rarely-seen novelist Thomas Harris.

]]>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:05:57 GMT00:30:07fullIra Wooda252d9ba-9f64-446b-96d3-5ddfacd907b4Part memoir, part natural history, David Gessner's Return of the Osprey recounts the hilarious story of one young nature writer's obsessive quest to document the reemergence of one of America's most majestic birds of prey to the shores of Cape Cod.

]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:52:30 GMT00:30:08full20262026333c76b53c-2405-4c9c-ac4d-c50ed156ebffNY Times bestselling author Jennifer Wallace talks to Ira about her new book, Mattering, which exposes the ways in which a many Americans, feeling unseen and unappreciated throughout their lives, go on to do harm to themselves and others. Their discussion offers a roadmap and actionable takeaways to remedy the problem.

]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:35:13 GMT00:29:01full2026202622aabe34d9-ec51-47fd-a73b-a4490913624bIra talks with bestselling author Daniella Mestyanek Young, cult survivor, US Army veteran, and Harvard-trained organizational psychologist about the proliferation of cults in American society today.

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