Episode 352

with Adam Gopnik, Elena Passarello, and Blossom

Luke Burbank reflects on the lessons he learned from a day without his iPhone, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik shares his 40-year nostalgia theory and how sex with a long-term partner can reach civil war reenactment status, essayist Elena Passarello coins the term “animalsonified” while examining humans’ complicated relationships with famed mammals, and RnB singer Blossom performs the brand new track, “Possibilities.”

Adam Gopnik
Writer

A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball" appeared in May of 1986 and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. That year, he left New York to live and write in Paris, where he wrote the magazine’s “Paris Journal” for the next five years. His expanded collection of his essays from Paris, Paris To the Moon, appeared in 2000, and was called by the New York Times “the finest book on France in recent years.” Website • Twitter

Elena Passarello
Writer

Elena Passarello is an actor, writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her first collection Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012), won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among other publications, as well as in the 2015 anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essay. Passarello has performed in several regional theaters in the East and Midwest, originating roles in the premieres of Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel’s Wild Signs and Holler. In 2011, she became the first woman winner of the annual Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon and teaches at Oregon State University. Website • Twitter

Blossom
RnB Singer

Originally from Trinidad & Tobago, singer Blossom calls Portland, OR home. She spent her childhood playing in a steel drum band with family members and that set the tone for her taste in instruments & energy that she uses in her music today. Blossom is an eclectic R&B jazz-singer who today feels right at home on stage. While it took her some time to grow in confidence, since 2014 she has been creating and performing non-stop. The positive effect music has had on her life is something Blossom now strives to share with the youth in her community.  Listen