Outsiders S01e01

[Helen Francke]

BeforeNadia Bolz-Weber became famous as a foul-mouthed pastor and bestselling author, she was an alcoholic and stand-up comedian. This episode is devoted to the insight of outsiders, and how Nadia learned to confront her own demons with hard truths, good company and a delightfully inappropriate sense of humor.

1. At the beginning of the episode, Kate describes Nadia as the kind of person that she wants tell all of her horrible problems to. Not the fun secrets, but the genuinely awful stuff. Who are those people in your life that you want to tell all your horrible secrets? What makes them trustworthy in that way?

7. Nadia and Kate suggest our capacity to be unafraid of suffering relates to our capacity to hold joy. Do you agree? In your opinion, what habits, practices or experiences cultivate joy? When have you experienced deep joy in your life?

8. Kate and Nadia both wonder how we hold onto the lessons that life and pain teach us. Nadia hopes that rather we would grow in wisdom. Where would you say wisdom comes from? How have you cultivated it in your own life? Who is someone in your life you would describe as wise? What makes them so?

9. Nadia reflects on the transformative power of authentic, shared community. She says that in this kind of community we all take turns being disappointing and offering grace. What do you think of this? What transformative communities are you a part of? Who offered you grace in a moment of disappointment?

Before Nadia Bolz-Weber became famous as a foul-mouthed pastor and bestselling author, she was an alcoholic and stand-up comedian. This episode is devoted to the insight of outsiders, and how Nadia learned to confront her own demons with hard truths, good company, and a joyfully inappropriate sense of humor.

This podcast is produced by Beverley Abel and Alison Jones. Sound engineering is by Dennis Foley with assistance from Ivan Panarusky. Special thanks to Amanda Hite and the Be the Change Revolution team and Random House.

LONG LIVE THE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE.

@mcnallyrobinson is my favorite bookstore in Manitoba and I had to stop in while I was there to get a recommendation on what to read next.

John, the McNally Book Whisperer, recommends the novel "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by @kate.beaton . It`s a gorgeous story of hard work, beauty, exploitation, and loneliness.

This is the kind of story that stays with you.

(Also, please enjoy the fact that John and I went to high school together and he also managed the 7-11 where I had a Coke slurpee every day BECAUSE I SAID SO IS WHY).

Outsiders is an American television drama series created by Peter Mattei. Set in the fictional town of Blackburg in Crockett County, Kentucky, the series tells the story of the Farrell clan and their struggle for power and control in the hills of Appalachia. It is WGN America's third original series, which debuted on January 26, 2016. On March 11, 2016, WGN America renewed Outsiders for a second season which premiered on January 24, 2017.[1] On April 14, 2017, WGN America announced that the series had been canceled after two seasons, with the then-forthcoming last episode of the second season airing as a series finale on the channel.

Set in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, the series revolves around the interaction of a group of mountain folk known as the Farrell clan and the locals in the nearby town of Blackburg, Kentucky.

The Farrells are an isolationist group who shun normal society and live a spartan existence in the woods. Extremely paranoid of outsiders, the Farrells have lived on Shay Mountain for over 200 years. The mountain is now coveted by a national mining outfit for its coal deposits.

At the start of the series, Asa Farrell, a cousin of the ruling family, returns to the mountain after leaving a decade prior in order to experience life in normal society. His arrival coincides with the family matriarch Lady Ray Farrell announcing her intention to cede power to her son, "Big Foster" Farrell. Big Foster, who never forgave Asa for leaving his family, has Asa imprisoned in a cage for six months until he is freed due to his ability to read after an eviction notice is posted at the entrance of the mountain.

In town, the mining company has gained approval to evict the Farrell family from the mountain and seeks to expedite the process so mining operations can begin as soon as possible. Deputy Sheriff Wade Houghton is assigned the task to carry out the eviction process. However, Houghton suffers from alcoholism, opiate addiction, and PTSD due to previous encounters with the Farrell family and the death of his wife. Houghton attempts to warn his superiors that any sort of eviction process will be bloody, result in loss of life on both sides, and will eventually devolve into a lengthy siege with the Farrells holding the advantage through their extensive knowledge of the mountains.

The eviction leads to a power struggle, as Lady Ray believes that the impending eviction is the apocalyptic event foretold in a family prophecy. Because of this, she pardons Asa, freeing him from the cage, and announces a delay in turning over authority to her son. She continues to refuse to change her mind when Big Foster, upset at being denied power, arranges a raid in town of a local gun owner that goes badly and costs the life of Big Foster's youngest son.

The series, first titled Titans, was created by playwright Peter Mattei, and produced by Peter Tolan and Paul Giamatti for Sony Pictures Television and Tribune Studios.[7] WGN America announced a 13-episode straight-to-series order in August 2014.[8] Production began in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area on May 5, 2015 and ran through September.[9] Mountaintop exteriors were filmed in Henry Kaufmann Family Park in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, while interiors were constructed at 31st Street Studios in the Strip District. Scenes in Blackburg, Kentucky, the fictional town at the base of the mountain, were filmed in Millvale.[10] WGN America renewed the series for a second season. Production resumed in mid-2016 using the same locations around Pittsburgh.[11]

On review aggregator Metacritic, Outsiders holds a score of 63/100, based on 17 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[38] On Rotten Tomatoes, the first season has an approval rating of 78%, stating "Outsiders' gritty performances keeps the backwoods drama intriguing, even when the story gets stuck in the mud."[39]

SR: Hello and welcome to "Democracy in Question," a new podcast series that reflects on the crises of representative democracy in these troubled times. I'm your host Shalini Randeria, I'm the director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and director of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.

As an academic, I have studied the ways in which the workings of law shapes our daily lives in a globalized world. I am interested in how citizens use both the streets and the courts to, not only protest and monitor the use and the abuse of power, but also to protect and to defend democracy.

This series comes at a time when the liberal democratic order established after the Second World War is under unprecedented strain. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a view that authoritarian rule was confined to the dustbin of history and Western-style liberal democracy would reign supreme the world over. But today, even in the cradle of modern democracies, in the U.S. and in Europe, that assumption looks flimsy. After 1945, the United States saw itself as the guarantor of western values, including democratic government. Its system of divided government was designed to protect against autocracy, ensure power sharing, checks and balances, while ensuring the rights of voters, initially though of course only those of propertied white men. But the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency and his questioning of the very norms of democratic government has shaken the fundamentals of Jeffersonian democracy and raised serious concerns about its survival. Does Trump represent a blip in America's long experience of representative government? Or does the current crisis of democracy in America highlight an underlying malaise?

Helping me to answer this question is Timothy Snyder, he's the Richard C. Levin professor of history at Yale University and a public intellectual who is a permanent fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Tim, it's great to have you here and I really look forward to our discussion. I'm going to start with a book you wrote two years ago, "The Road to Unfreedom," in which you coined an intriguing term for Trump's vision of populism and you called it sadopopulism. Could you explain how it works and what makes it so successful in the USA?

TS: The basic assumption of a certain kind of western political thinking is that everybody wants pleasure. We're all pursuing happiness. And since we know that we're pursuing pleasure, all we have to do is rationally calculate what it will take to get us that pleasure. That is, I think, a spoken or unspoken assumption of a lot of what passes for political thinking in the west. But what if that's not true? What if it's also the case that people not only experience pain, but can be manipulated by pain? What if you can have a politics which is based not on people pursuing their rationally-understood best interest in being happy but a politics which is based upon some people hurting other people, pleasure being taken from hurting other people?

SR: You also coined, in that book, a really memorable phrase for me, and that is "the politics of eternity," to describe the current dismantling of democracy by strong men, not only in the U.S., but Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey. We could take many, many examples. Elected leaders who are all afraid of a change of government. So, eternity politics seems to function by manufacturing crises that can then be instrumentalized to whip up emotions around it. Trump really seems to be a master of this game. Will it pay dividends for him this November?

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