David Shields
Special guest
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty books, including_ Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), _The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (Knopf). The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel was released by First Pond Entertainment in 2017; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books (21st Century Essays series) in March 2019. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
David Shields has been a guest on 11 episodes.
-
Episode 267: Lack, Excess and the 2024 Election
November 18th, 2024 | 52 mins 55 secs
In this episode best selling author and filmmaker David Shields returns to the show. We have a wide ranging conversation about the recent Presidential election. We consider what it tells us about Trump, the culture, and most importantly ourselves.
-
Episode 264: Behold The Pierced One, with David Shields
July 18th, 2024 | 1 hr 9 mins
In this episode Scott is joined by return guest and friend of the show David Shields. The two talk about the assassination attempt on former President Trump, the messianic response by some, and what it means for the upcoming election.
-
Episode 263: Biden's Tragic Flaw
July 12th, 2024 | 1 hr 14 mins
In this episode Scott is joined by return guest and friend of the show David Shields. The two talk about the strange political moment the country faces and what might be the Shakespearean tragic nature of it all.
-
Episode 262: The Cultural Politics of the WNBA, with David Shields and Josh Rosenblatt
June 21st, 2024 | 1 hr 23 mins
In this episode Scott talks with authors David Shields and Josh Rosenblatt about the cultural politics of the WNBA. Much has been made of two of the NBA's prominent stars: Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. What are the racial and political implications of the coverage of these two athletes? What do they tell us about wider American culture as a whole in a tense election season?
-
Episode 247: The Very Last Interview: with David Shields, Nick Toti, and Rachel Kempf
January 3rd, 2021 | 1 hr 30 mins
My guests are David Shields, Nick Toti, and Rachel Kempf about The Very Last Interview (Shields' forthcoming book), film-adapted by Toti and Kempf and released this month. Shields is the author of over twenty books including Reality Hunger, Other People, How Literature Saved My Life, The Trouble with Men, That Thing You Do With Your Mouth, etc. While The Very Last Interview will not be released until early 2022 by New York Review Books, Toti released the 30 minute short earlier this month via Vimeo.
-
Episode 237: Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump Revisited, with David Shields
August 6th, 2020 | 1 hr 34 mins
My guest is David Shields. He's the author of numerous books including "Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention." It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the “collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump,” and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse—a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump. The book’s central thesis is that we have met the enemy and he is us. Who else but David Shields would make such an argument, let alone pull it off with such intelligence, brio, and wit, not to mention leaked off-air transcripts from Fox News?
-
Episode 223: Pre and Post President Trump, with Bradley S. Klein and David Shields
May 30th, 2020 | 1 hr 17 mins
My guests are Bradley S. Klein and David Shields. Klein has played golf with Trump, written about him as a sports journalist and consulted on his golf courses. David Shields has written one of the most provocative and revealing books about Trump, Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump. If you're looking for an interesting Trump conversation in the midst of Corona, this is it.
-
Episode 175: Two Guys Talk Chesterton in New York City, with David Shields
August 31st, 2019 | 39 mins 25 secs
My guest is David Shields. In this episode we talk about G.K. Chesterton and his insights into the human condition on a beautiful hotel patio in New York City.
-
Episode 174: Marshawn Lynch: A History, with David Shields
August 31st, 2019 | 1 hr 12 mins
My guest is David Shields, New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books. He has just written, directed and produced a documentary film, Marshawn Lynch: A History. The film explores the silence that nonconformist NFL star Marshawn Lynch deploys as a form of resistance. Culling more than 700 video clips and placing them in dramatic, rapid, and radical juxtaposition, the film is a powerful political parable about the American media-sports complex and its deep complicity with racial oppression.
-
Episode 153: The Trouble With Men, with David Shields
March 21st, 2019 | 1 hr 6 mins
My guest is David Shields. His new book, "The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power" is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), "The Trouble with Men" is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint.
-
Episode 127: Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention, with David Shields
September 27th, 2018 | 53 mins 36 secs
My guest is David Shields. His new book "Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention," is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump.