DACA, Louise Hay, & an All-Female Lord of the Flies

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:

• We discussed the recent history of DACA and its unique policy history; we all found this Vox article by Dara Lind helpful.
• New Age pioneer Louise Hay died last week, leaving millions of her readers and followers bereft. We discussed how her strain of positive thinking has shaped the self-help genre, as Boris Kachka argues in New York, and that it has early origins in 19th-century New Thought, a movement Harvey Green explores in his book Fit For America. Natalia referred to Barbara Ehrenreich’s searing critique of the world Hay helped create in her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America .
• Lord of the Flies is being remade with an all-women’s cast, but with an all-male writing team. We debated the limits of this strategy as a form of feminist liberation, and Niki cited an article in The Lily that made that argument.

In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History:

• Natalia discussed Esther Perel’s article in The Atlantic “Why Happy People Cheat” and surmised that it signals a shift in American morality.
• Neil commented on a new interpretation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) put forth in the New York Times: that the measure often used by historians as an example of failed idealism actually succeeded in changing the nature of global warfare.
• Niki talked about the “better baby” contests of the early 20th century, which exemplify how eugenics and Progressivism converged.