The Lowdown with Ira Wood on WOMR-FM

When I was a kid, every spring we took a family vacation and on every one of those long and tedious drives my father would pull over at every commemorative plaque we passed along the highway and repeat the same lame joke: “Hey, look. Another Hysterical Marker.”

In retrospect, every one of them marked the site of a battle or skirmish where people lost their lives; or a stop along the Underground Railroad; or a bloody labor battle. And yet they meant little more to us than a place to have lunch or stretch our legs or pee...

Here in the United States, we spend more on health care than anywhere else in the world and get some of the worse results, which is astonishing for a country known for its medical innovation. So, the question is why. Why is it so hard to find a primary care doctor? Why are health insurance premiums so high and why do they deny coverage that doctors deemed necessary? Why do drugs cost an arm and a leg? Why do we have to wait months for appointments? And why is it next to impossible to get a human on the...

Roughly half of American households have at least one dog. And the bond goes back a long way, evidence suggesting that dogs were viewed as family members even before the dawn of agriculture. And why not? Dogs keep us company, ease our stress, watch over the house, and give us the kind of support that never judges. But how well do we really know them? How much of what we see is the dog, and how much is just us, reading our own feelings into them? What's actually going on in those heads? And what can we do we...

If you watch crime dramas on Britbox or PBS, then you definitely know the work of today’s guest, the bestselling British mystery writer, Ann Cleeves. She created DCI Vera Stanhope, the rumpled detective of Northumberland with a brilliant mind and a fierce compassion for the underdog; Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, of the Shetland Islands, who absorbs the grief and trauma of the people around him; and DI Matthew Venn, the quiet and meticulous gay detective operating in North Devon, all of whom are fan favorites with American viewers and mystery readers. She’s won numerous awards including the Diam...

The 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...

With 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...

Today 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 pr...

For 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.

The 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.

Overwhelmed 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.

Justin 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.

Writer/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.

Drawing 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.

Josh 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.

Award-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.

Historians 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.

When 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.

Brad 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.

After 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.

Journalist 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.

Two 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.

Do 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.

Longtime 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.

Since 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.

Lindy 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.

Jessica 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.

Ebony 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.

Brian 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.

Part 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.

NY 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.

Ira 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.