Episodes
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Blending personal narrative and investigative reporting, Emmy Award-winning journalist Cole Kazdin reveals that disordered eating is an epidemic crisis killing millions of women.
Women of all ages struggle with disordered eating, preoccupation with food, and body anxiety. Journalist Cole Kazdin was one such woman, and she set out to discover why her own full recovery from an eating disorder felt so impossible. Interviewing women across the country as well as the world’s most renowned researchers, she discovered that most people with eating disorders never receive treatment––the fact that she did made her one of the lucky ones.
Kazdin takes us to the doorstep of the diet industry and research community, exposing the flawed systems that claim to be helping us, and revealing disordered eating for the crisis that it is: a mental illness with the second highest mortality rate (after opioid-related deaths) that no one wants to talk about. Along the way, she identifies new treatments not yet available to the general public, grass roots movements to correct racial disparities in care, and strategies for navigating true health while still living in a dysfunctional world.
What's Eating Us is an urgent battle cry coupled with stories and strategies about what works and how to finally heal—for real.
Cole Kazdin is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety (St. Martin's Press 2023). Selected as a Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read, the book blends personal narrative and investigative reporting to reveal disordered eating as an epidemic crisis killing millions of women. Cole has written for TIME, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, MEL Magazine, and more, and was a regular contributor to VICE. She has produced television for Good Morning America, Nightline and World News Tonight. Cole has told stories live on The Moth's Mainstage across the country, The Moth Radio Hour on NPR,, and has performed storytelling all over Southern California where she is a proud, three-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. Her solo performances have garnered national praise and been optioned for film. A contributing author to the bestselling book, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, she coaches and teaches writers all over the world, as well as leading workshops and classes for corporations and universities and currently teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. -
Lena Nelson is a writer, teacher and citizen historian who has spent seventeen years researching and documenting the story of Samantha Smith and creating www.SamanthaSmith.info, the online archive of news articles and videos about Samantha Smith. She was a nominee for the Allegra Johnson Prize and has worked with numerous news, educational, and humanitarian organizations around the world. She lives with her family in Southern California.
America's Youngest Ambassador: The Cold War Story of Samantha Smith's Lasting Message of Peace, explores how nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union in 1982. Samantha Smith, a fifth grader from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey that helped transform the hearts and minds of two nations on a collision course. -
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Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, Jentel, and National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with Gettysburg National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). Her poetry and essays can be found at Acentos Review, Huizache, LA Review of Books, The Offing, [Pank], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. She is the director of Women Who Submit. Inspired by her Chicana identity, she works to cultivate love and comfort in chaotic times.At the heart of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press 2023) lies an exploration of love in its many forms. Bermejo crafts poems that celebrate the enduring bonds of family, the unwavering strength of compassion, and the necessity for defiance. "Bermejo's Incantation do more than conjure hope for a vague future; they demand accountability and enact the healing we need now," writes award-winning author Carribean Fragoza. These poems dance like flames in rituals of resistance and resilience, casting light on paths that lead to a future unburdened by the chains of misogyny, white supremacy, and state-sanction violence.
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Elba Iris Pérez is from Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and spent her early childhood in Woronoco, Massachusetts. She taught theatre and history at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo, and now lives in Houston. Her debut novel, The Things We Didn’t Know, was an instant USA TODAY bestseller and the inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us First Novel Contest. She is also the author of El teatro como bandera, a history of street theater in Puerto Rico.
The USA TODAY bestselling inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us contest, Elba Iris Pérez’s “wonderfully compelling” cross-cultural coming-of-age debut novel explores a young girl’s childhood between 1950s Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts factory town. As Andrea navigates the rifts between her family’s values and all-American culture, she must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood. -
Kelli McNeil-Yellen is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Drama. Her first feature, The Baltimore School of Charm, won first place at the UCLA Extension Feature Film Screenwriting Contest and was a top 15% finisher in the Academy’s Nicholl Awards. Most recently, she’s been screening her authentically cast feature film, DARUMA, on the festival circuit. After two sold-out screenings at Slamdance in 2024, two-time Oscar winner Peter Farrelly joined the film as executive producer to raise the visibility of the film and called it "great". She is repped by Dannie Festa of World Builder Entertainment.
CNN called DARUMA the first film to star two leads with a disability in a narrative not about overcoming a disability. The film recently completed a successful festival run with two sold-out screenings at Slamdance. DARUMA is a heartbreaking but uplifting dramedy and ultimately a story about friendship, fatherhood and found family. -
Teresa Yang, DDS is the author of the award-winning book, Nothing But The Tooth: An Insider’s Guide to Dental Health. She has practiced dentistry for over 30 years. Yang has taught clinical dentistry and patient management at UCLA School of Dentistry, where she is a member of the Board of Counselors. She is also a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board and has written extensively on dental topics. Dr. Yang lives in Los Angeles, California.
Have you ever visited a new dentist and been told you need a “smile makeover,” with the implication that if your teeth were whiter and straighter, you would be more successful and happier? Or maybe you’ve never had a cavity – and now, you have a half dozen that require immediate attention. Root canal, crown, or implant: which procedure is best for your situation? NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH is a ready guide to dental health. It begins with the most important question: how to choose a competent and ethical dentist – and ends with a discussion about technological advances in the dental field. Let this book help you communicate better with your dentist. -
Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Randolph College.
And Not / And Yet comprises a series of poems exploring death, foreignness, ancestry, and form through the lens of Buddhist scripture, specifically texts that detail a person's harrowing journey as they transition away from the realm of the living. -
Michael Jann is an Emmy-nominated late-night comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for over two decades. Michael teaches screenwriting at UCLA-Extension. He co-wrote and co-produced the short animated film Bug Therapy (www.bugtherapy.film). It’s a story about a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood. This story is deeply personal: Mike’s son suffered a severe mental-breakdown at age 29, resulting in hospitalizations and psych wards. His ongoing recovery (fingers crossed) has fueled Mike’s passion to fight the stigma of mental illness. Mike lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and writing partner Michele Jourdan. Michele’s the funny one; Mike's the pretty one.
In Bug Therapy, Citronella, a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood, nervously waits outside her first group therapy session, while the Pill Bug therapist, Dr. Pill tries to calm a neurotic group of bugs, each suffering from a mental-health issue: An OCD germaphobic Fly freaks when he runs out of hand sanitizer. A Dragonfly couple struggle with co-dependency; she's literally on top of him. A Grasshopper, addicted to coffee, is so jumpy, he launches himself in mid-sentence. A Praying Mantis who doesn't pray because she thinks she is God. A terrified Spider is deathly afraid of -- spiders. And, a perfectly-camouflaged Stick Bug complains that no one ever "sees" him. Throughout all this, Citronella battles her urge to flee - while Dr. Pill implores her to share her "embarrassing" problem. -
Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her MA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA.
In Sylvia’s Second Act, Sylvia’s husband’s cheating on her. She hates Boca. Sylvia is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. She’s moving back to the city of her dreams—with her best friend, Evie, in tow. When sixty-three-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with the floozy of their retirement community, she’s shocked and furious...at first. Sylvia realizes that actually, this isn’t what she wants anymore. So she enlists her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, to join her in setting up a new life in Manhattan. Sylvia doesn't want to be twenty-five again. Her age gives her wisdom, experience, and perspective. A career, sex, fun, and a new romance—her entire second act is stretched out in front of her. -
I Was a Teenage Dominatrix is the true story of one woman’s quest for self-education, in academia and beyond. Kenney wrote a sex work memoir before the term ‘sex work’ was commonplace, unwittingly becoming part of what the New York Times dubbed the ‘sex work literati’ of the early 2000s.
Shawna is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, and most recently, Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital 1988-1998 (Rare Bird Books) Her arts journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Pitchfork, Vice, Bust and more. She serves as a Contributing Editor with Narratively Magazine and leads international writing retreat Hamlet's Hideaway in Denmark every summer. -
Jarrod Shusterman is the New York Times and international bestselling author of Dry, Roxy and Retro. His collaboration in Gleanings, the fourth installment of the bestselling Scythe trilogy, is being adapted for the screen by Universal. He writes for the screen and teaches courses at UCLA in creative writing.
Sofía Lapuente is an author, screenwriter, professor at UCLA, and avid world traveler who immigrated from Spain to the United States to realize her dream of storytelling. Jarrod and Sofía have a passion for collaborative storytelling across many mediums, with love and multiculturalism as an ethos, and enjoy traveling the world and learning new languages. Since then, she has worked as a producer and casting director on an Emmy nominated show. They've received starred reviews, from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Blooklist and more!
In the novel Retro, Things were never supposed to get this out of hand. When Luna receives an opportunity to win a scholarship to the college of her dreams, she’s all in. It’s called the Retro Challenge, where contestants live without modern technology. At first, the challenge is fun. But then things get dangerous. Kids start disappearing, including Luna’s friends. There are voices in the woods. Markings on the trees. Secrets. Lies. Betrayal. The weight of her family on her shoulders. There’s so much on the line for Luna, and she’s falling in love with the last guy she expected. Unless she can figure out the truth behind who’s sabotaging the challenge, the next person to disappear may be Luna herself. -
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre writer, she has published work in New England Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and several journals and anthologies. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting her manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” Daniel’s transcontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022), was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Review’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. An alumna of Yale University and the University of Michigan’s Writers’ MFA, she turns to her third and fourth books, supported by fellowships from Brown University and Cave Canem. Holding a PhD from USC, she is recalled to California for the third time as the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.
In the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Mary-Alice Daniel confronts culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals animate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, the poems stray inside speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It engineers an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime. -
Jeff Bonnett is a writer/filmmaker who began his career in Hollywood as a script reader. From there, his first pitch and subsequent screenplay became a film released on the Hallmark channel in 2015, titled “Love by the Book”.
His latest screenplay, “Falling for Christmas” was released on Netflix last November, where it premiered at #1, was in Netflix’s Top Ten movie list in 92 countries, and was the top U.S. streaming movie across all platforms in its second week running. Before the holiday season ended, it had been viewed over 78 million times globally. Dubbed by IndieWire as “the Citizen Kane of Netflix Christmas movies”, Falling for Christmas is about a newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress who suffers from amnesia after a skiing accident, and finds herself in the care of a down-on-his-luck widower and his daughter at their quaint ski lodge in the days leading up to Christmas. -
Nancy Pine holds a PhD in Education and is a professor emerita at Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles, where she directed the Elementary Education Program and the Bridging Cultures US/China Program. She has done cross-cultural research in China and the United States for over 20 years, has published over 30 education and research articles, many related to China or cross-cultural learning and has given talks and workshops throughout the United States and internationally. Dr. Pine has spent extended periods in rural China, including five lengthy visits to one village to teach teachers from neighboring communities, consult in the local school and learn about rural life. Her recent book, One in a Billion: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey through Modern-Day China, grew from that experience and challenged her to move from academic to narrative writing.
One in a Billion is a powerful account of how one stubborn, hardworking Chinese man has lived by his values, stood up for his convictions and succeeded against all odds in the authoritarian environment of China. Despite grinding poverty, hunger, reeducation campaigns and attacks from jealous peers, An Wei has launched one innovative project after another, including a democratic congress in his own village. Resilient to the core, he has continuously worked to overcome corruption, improve the world and build understanding between China and the West. As tensions rise over human rights in China and potential military threats grow, An Wei’s story becomes ever more significant. -
Denise Cruz-Castino is a Latina screenwriter whose first produced movie, 5 Weddings premiered at Cannes in 2018. It starred Rajkummar Rao of the Oscar nominated film The White Tiger, with co-stars Bo Derek and Candy Clark, and played in 52 countries. Her latest animated children’s horror shorts that she sold to DreamworksTV are on Peacock’s streaming series Spine Chilling Stories. She sold a live action short, The Fountain, to Disney, her horror short, Imaginary Friends, was produced by Raving Eejit Entertainment, and did the festival circuits. Her comedy short, Things Look Grim was produced by Sasha Goldberg. She and her writing partner Johnny Harrington have a sitcom about Denise’s crazy family that’s Mexican on one side and Jewish on the other that’s currently in development. She’s getting ready to go into production to direct her first short in 2023 for a strong female lead dramedy. Her scripts have placed in Final Draft Big Break, Fade-In Screenwriting and Nicholl’s Fellowship contests.
5 Weddings follows an American journalist, who travels to India to cover Bollywood weddings. Interwoven with the joy and fun of these traditional ceremonies, the film goes beyond the fluff -- to explore the human component of Hijras: a sect of transgender dancers who have been an integral part of Indian weddings for centuries. -
Sana Balagamwala grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied English Literature at the University of Southern California, and has a Masters in Education from Loyola Marymount University. Her debut novel, House Number 12, Block Number 3 was published by Hidden Shelf Publishing House in 2021 and won the Foreword Indies Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. It has also been nominated for the Martin Cruz Smith Award by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her family and is currently working towards her MSt. in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge.
House Number 12 Block Number 3 narrates the story of a young woman's journey towards confrontation and healing. Nadia, 19, has long struggled with bouts of unresolved illness and trauma as a result of assault she experienced as a child. But unable to share her truth, Nadia keeps her tragic secret to herself. Her family, unable to find a reason for her illness begin to wonder if she is possessed by a jinn, cursed, or worse, inclined to madness. House Number 12, the house she lives in, is the only witness to the crime that has all but devastated her, and narrates her story. The novel explores gender roles, and the misinformation and social taboos that surround mental illness and sexual violence in many South Asian cultures, and shines a light on both the personal and the political, as it chronicles a time period in Pakistani history riddled with political strife. -
Tamika is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is author of speculative fiction collection, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of horror novella Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.
She has producing credits at Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, as well as at NBC and ABC News. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at tamikathompson.com and on Twitter and Slasher @tamikathompson.
Unshod, Cackling, and Naked
A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she’s not free to break her pose. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die? -
Julia Camara is a Brazilian writer/filmmaker. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, she freelanced for years as a Portuguese translator for film and television subtitling. She has written and directed several award-winning short films. Her feature directorial debut In Transit, an experimental drama shot mostly in one day and with improvised dialogue, won Best Experimental Film at four different festivals. Julia also wrote the sci-fi feature Area Q (starring Isaiah Washington), the road movie Open Road (starring Andy Garcia, Juliette Lewis and Camilla Belle. Julia teaches Screenwriting at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and works as an advisor for Sundance Co//ab.
Stronghold is a feature film about a mother-daughter duo living alone in a post-apocalyptic world. This indie thriller is written and directed by Julia Camara. Written in 2012 before the pandemic, this almost prophetic story captures the feeling of isolation the world felt during the 2020 lockdown. -
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia served social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, she currently serves as faculty in The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension and Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine.
Synopsis:
In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation.
In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power sought to destroy. Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited. -
Keyonna Taylor got her break into the television industry as a staff writer on the Apple + hit workplace comedy Mythic Quest. There she penned Breaking Brad, starring Snoop Doggy Dogg. Next, she got the absolute privilege of working as story editor in the longest running live action comedy of our time, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Writing on IASIP she co-wrote The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7, the third in The Gangs trilogy of remakes of the 1987 American buddy cop action comedy franchise. In 2020 Keyonna teamed up with Rob McElhenney and sold her first show to FX, titled MeWe. An anthology that gives you a snapshot into the lives of Americans killed by systemic racism.
Keyonna is also Chief Creative Officer at Adim. Adim is a community of storytellers, fans, and friends working together to create and own the next generation of content, in order to build a more inclusive future for entertainment and a new era of creativity for us all. We are about to kick the door of mainstream creativity down and let anyone in. No gatekeeping. Adim is a space for any and all creators to share their ideas, create collaboratively, and come together to see their ideas bloom. We are facilitating the next generation of storytelling, utilizing technology to enhance our characters and track creator ownership. Adim hopes to allow all dreamers to create faster, engage with their creations more, and interact with that of others on a global scale. - Show more
