Freedom fighting, writing, and microdosing | Ayelet Waldman & Michael Chabon | Big Think Edge
Hello everyone, welcome to Big Think Live. Today's topic is freedom fighting, writing, and microdosing. Naturally, those three things always go together: the days and nights of Violet Waldman and Michael Chabon. I am Maria Konnikova, and I am here with Michael and Ayelet. Ayelet is the author most recently of "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life." She's also a wonderful novelist who's written a number of novels, including "Love and Treasure," "Red Hook Road," "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits," and "Daughters Keepers," and essay collections "Bad Mother." That one speaks to me because I actually—the first thing that I read by Ayelet was her essay in the New York Times from over a decade ago, 2005, called "Truly, Madly, Guiltily," and I just fell in love with her the moment I read that essay.
We've actually never met each other, but that was the first thing that I read by Ayelet. She's also edited many volumes of really important writing, including "Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons," and most recently, she and Michael co-edited "Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases." I should mention here, since we're talking about the ACLU, that before she became a fantastic writer, Ayelet was a federal public defender and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. She taught a wonderful course—I think it was wonderful; I'm assuming it was wonderful. I wish I could have taken it—on the legal implications of the war on drugs. We'll talk a little bit about that because we'll be discussing microdosing.
So now onto Michael, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. The first thing I ever read from Michael was not an essay in the New York Times but "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," which is phenomenal and for which he won the Pulitzer. Is it horrible to say that the book that has a special place in my heart is actually "The Yiddish Policemen's Union"? I just love noir, and I thought it was just the most perfect neo-noir ever written. There are lots of other novels that Michael has written; I think I've struck a chord. I'm not quite sure. He has many other novels. I suggest that you read all of them, and I suggest you read everything by both of them. Also, watch everything by both of them because in 2019, they co-wrote "Unbelievable," which was a series on Netflix. They're now working on adapting "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" for the screen, and we'll talk a little bit about that.
Also, we have to mention "Star Trek," and that is something that's also close to my heart. My first book ever was about Sherlock Holmes, so everyone knows that Sherlock Holmes and "Star Trek" go hand in hand. I was very excited about that, and I just wanted to see Picard. How can you not love it? Michael Chabon and Patrick Stewart—I mean, if you haven't watched it, what are you even doing with your life?
So much mind meld! It's amazing. I'm really looking forward to this. That's a great term—mind meld! Well, let's actually begin their mind meld. Since we have both of you, and you're married, and you're both writers, and you've worked together so often, let's talk about that. Do you have a mind meld? How does that collaboration happen?
Michael: I think we do have a mind meld, and it's really quite useful. But sometimes, we're trying to get work done. Yeah, but I mean we definitely can. After all these years of being together, living together, we can look at each other and understand we're having the same reaction to something someone is saying that she is, or something like that. Absolutely!
Ayelet: I mean, most couples have that when they're married, or at least they have that kind of connection. But we can work together too. I mean, it can be a great shortcut. For example, if we're working on something and one of us starts to say “uh,” we will often have this thing where I’ll begin a thought, and Michael will be like, “Yeah, I don’t even say, let’s do that.”
Michael: It could be a little frustrating for people who don’t work with us because they’re sort of, you know, they may be one step behind. It can also be disconcerting when we have an argument, and you don’t know what the argument is about because we’ll be like... I’ll say something, and we’ll be like, “No, but...” and we’ll be arguing about this, you know, point in the margins, an unspoken thing. But you know, we can be pretty bombastic when we work together, which is fine when we’re alone. But if there’s like, you know, it can be disconcerting…
Ayelet: Yeah, because we’re not arguing; we’re just getting very intense. I was in a musical with a guy who sort of... it was great! Peter Lerman, who’s a composer for Broadway and lyricist. The first time we kind of had this huge argument over something while we were working on this musical, he kind of stared at us. But by the end of the process, he was right in there fighting!
Michael: Yeah, so when I was reading about your work process, it was so foreign to me because I actually don’t show my writing to anyone until it’s done—my editors, it’s the final draft. I mean, if it’s not the final draft, then we work together, but I can’t have people look at it as I’m working. I’ve read conversations with the two of you where not only do you read each other’s drafts, but you can be pretty hard—or you can be pretty harsh with one another, and I want to hear more about this.
Ayelet: I mean, it’s not the trusted writer friend, but in every game, for example, I may say to Michael, “Am I on this? Do I have the voice in this, or do I have to go back?”
Michael: The most important advice at that moment is to keep going, right? So that’s what you don’t—like, sometimes you don’t want to parse out your language when you’ve just begun something. You don’t want someone sort of making you worry about things that are outside stuff.
Ayelet: You know what? But I destroyed that for you. I have totally messed that up for you. I’m thinking of at least once where I raised a political issue that then completely crippled you to the point he wanted to throw the book away, and that was recently.
Michael: Can you guys talk a little more about... it’s when you finish a first draft and you’re going to go to the second draft next; that’s when you need to be told these parts are really working for me. Because I feel like this part is a different story entirely. It can find a way to integrate it into what you got, and if you can’t find a way to integrate it, maybe consider losing it.
Ayelet: That thing seems like you’re writing about this. Is that what you’re writing about?
Michael: Then you’ll say, “That is what I’m writing about.”
Ayelet: And then, well, maybe you should take a look at that novel or this reference work or whatever and see if you call it or talk to someone. I met who does that same thing, and you can talk to—so it can be really helpful to have that outside perspective as you’re sort of because after a first draft, a lot of times, and that’s when you find out what you’re actually writing about.
Michael: The pneumatic mail delivery system in Paris is really cool and interesting, but it has no part in the story whatsoever!
Ayelet: Something, and then you know after subsequent drafts, it becomes… more about...
Michael: I thought that you did that in "Fountain City" with the pneumatic…
Ayelet: Right, like the beginning of another project we can—Ayelet, where did you find that?
Michael: I think we each have different strengths as readers and editors that are different from each other, so, you know, for me, I think Ayelet has a really strong sense of character and what characters would and would not do based on everything that she’s read about the character.
Ayelet: So, what a lot of times, toward the latter quarter of a novel, you know, you have this plot in mind or this thing that you’ve been thinking all along was going to be the thing that happens toward the end of the book. Often, by the time you get to that point, the characters have changed a lot. And the thing that you thought this protagonist was going to probably do toward the end has really suddenly become something that…
Michael: …could probably or she probably wouldn’t do. But you’re sort of stuck, and you’ve been working towards this goal for something like a stop in years.
Ayelet: I know I’ve said to you a few times, like, “I don’t buy it!”
Michael: Right. Or she’s gotten kind of upset like, “I can’t believe you had her do that!” or whatever it is. Like, it doesn’t work.
Ayelet: But when it was "Kavalier and Clay," there were so many agile cattle or do, and I just burst into, like, hysterical resentment at that point where readers—smart readers know the book better than the writer because she’s just read it. You know, she and she just lived it, and she lived it sort of edged, you know, for the first time. So when she gets to that point, and it feels wrong or let everything you said before about this character makes me feel like that’s not what happened now, you would make the other choice or whatever.
Michael: I think that really seriously—and I’ve changed endings many times, or latter parts many times because of that. Michael is one of the first living writers—the best personality, first language, and can do with language things that nobody else can. I mean, you know, there are a lot of writers I love, but he’s the best.
Ayelet: It’s very true.
Michael: I remember once, that it was a final draft of a novel and I hated—this is what if we were still doing things on paper? So, he handed me the stack of manuscripts, and it was typical of it; it was just full of "reds."
Ayelet: You’re my man—full, full, full of it.
Michael: I had a bunch of women writer friends we called a writing group. It tried to be a writing group, and then it collapsed under the weight of its own insecurities.
Ayelet: That snack?
Michael: Yeah. And they gasped, I mean, they all felt like everyone was like, “Why would my husband ever dare to feast?”
Ayelet: I was done, but for me, it was great. I mean, it was just like, “Okay, yeah, this sentence sucks. How am I going to fix it?”
Michael: Sometimes, I mean, the note that was both the best and the most aggravating was the best and motivating: when Michael just raised the BE, which means “do better.”
Ayelet: We feel like business isn’t working well; it’s a testament to the strength of your marriage that you’ve survived.
Michael: Like working how?
Ayelet: I mean, I think, when I was talking to the kids sometimes—GDP—so how do you guys decide when you’re going to collaborate and what it’s going to be about? Because you’ve done, at this point, a few different collaborative projects both for screen and the written page. How is that process like, and how do you decide this is the topic?
Michael: We are committed to working together on TV projects. So, vacuuming—that's been the sort of formal place where it was almost not a discussion. Like, “Okay, TV is something we’re going to do together.” We do joint company. We have a joint deal.
Ayelet: We do have independent projects within that.
Michael: "Star Trek" live came in with, and he started working together. I loved doing "Star Trek." It was not a success, and she’s got TV projects, but that’s sort of our realm.
Ayelet: We have a system that we’ve worked out that works really well, where we break the story together, and we create outlines together. When it's time to write it, it's the first draft. I think the next job of the adapters is that we alternate cast. That allows us to bring our perspective strengths.
Michael: I would say like I say, I do this first draft that’s very workmanlike. It’s like everything that needs to be done and said, all the scenes, ordered, and then Michael comes and just makes them beautiful, makes them gorgeous, makes them magic.
Ayelet: But then I come back, and I take out a little bit of the magic. I think it works. That alternate draft 100% works.
Michael: Because we each have our, when it comes to prose writing, we have our own style, and they’re idiosyncratic.
Ayelet: I’ve been—I know there are people who write novels together. First of all, I wouldn’t presume. I don’t mean to sound like… I’m not trying to blow smoke up your ass, but you know, I’m really proud of my novels. I think especially in… "Love and Treasure." There’s one section of it that is probably the best thing I’ll ever write, but—
Michael: Oh my God, there’s a little break coming!
Ayelet: I can’t believe I’m about to do this! [Laughter]
Ayelet: Everybody, I can’t imagine I could ever turn sentences I have written and worked on over to anyone else—to have them there; I could only trust my editors, and it means fine, but with screenwriting, it’s the dialogue.
Michael: I mean, there are little bits of narrative action elements, but those are, you know, the prose style of notes is quite minimal and very underwritten, and that’s okay.
Ayelet: So handing out drafts, that issue of how it has to feel is less of an issue when it comes to the other kinds of collaborations.
Michael: Typically, so far those have been things like "Fight of the Century."
Ayelet: This anthology and projects we did a collection of anthologies called "Kingdom of Olives and Ash," where we brought writers from all around, really amazing writers from all over the world to Israel and Palestine, had them taken around, and went over into the occupied territories and ended up writing essays about whatever they wanted to that they had seen while they were there.
Michael: That was something we did together, and then that led, in turn, to this ACLU collection where, again, we reached out to primarily American writers because it’s the ACLU, and it’s a constitutional question, and each of them chose a landmark case, landmark ruling from the history of ACLU, and were done essays about that, and that was something that we collaborated on.
Ayelet: So the other outside of screenwriting's nature on collaborations has tended to be less about the writing.
Michael: Perfect timing since we were just moving on to "Fight of the Poetry." Mike was telling me all of the writers had actually chosen their case because I was about to add—did you decide which cases you were going to feature?
Ayelet: Some writers right away just instantly knew what they wanted.
Michael: Right! So, there are writers, for example, who for whatever reason of their biography… The case that Loving vs. Virginia, that we should celebrate the anniversary of last week, is very important to them.
Ayelet: Right!
Michael: You know, Alexander Damon is in a traditional marriage, and that really felt a connection.
Ayelet: There are other—for example, she heard about the Scottsboro Boys, and from the second she thought about the project, that’s what she wanted to write about.
Michael: There were other writers who wanted to do something. I mean having this was compared to the first anthology I was talking about, "Kingdom of Olives and Ash," where in some cases, it took a little reassuring, cajoling, and massaging.
Ayelet: A lot of people just didn’t want to set foot anywhere near that project. This one… I mean, we could barely get the words ACLU out of our population before people were just like, “Yes! I want in!”
Michael: But then, um, they weren’t totally sure where to go with it, and so we had a list prepared of landmark cases of what they were about, what they’ve decided around, and usually people found it pretty simple.
Ayelet: Obviously, you—I, Ayelet—you were a lawyer before, and that was—you actually worked on these from the other side almost. Rather than collecting writing about the cases, you were actually know on the front leg from the front lines, in a sense.
Michael: So when you’re working as a public defender, the cases that mean the most to you serve in your day-to-day work are like cases that have to do with due process and things like search and seizure, the kind of Supreme Court cases that you don’t necessarily understand how profoundly and important they are.
Ayelet: So for example, when you’re working, when you’re working as a public defender, one of the most critical things that happens with your clients is a search. Right, because that’s when they find things that result in your prosecution, incarceration.
Michael: So, so, so the intricacies of the laws of search and seizure, and the fundamental principles, which is that we as human beings should be able to go through our days without having the cops stop us and frisk us, and certainly not based on the color of our skin, is—you kind of live those principles.
Ayelet: But I think what we don’t think any of us expected is how much we would all be living constitutional principles right now, and how, as a country, it is amazing how profound the important things are when they start getting taken away, right?
Michael: Or when a spotlight is shown on how they have never been granted to certain people.
Ayelet: I feel like as a nation in the past three-and-a-half cataclysmic years, we have all begun to have a familiarity with constitutional principles that we never had and probably never really wanted, you know?
Michael: But to a certain extent, that’s amazing. I mean, you know, the fact that we are now having a conversation about police brutality, about over-policing, about the priority we as a nation have put on arming, militarizing a police force that doesn’t actually solve crime at all, but that acts just, you know.
Ayelet: The— I think somebody said that the number of felony arrests an average police officer makes in a year is between one and three, so…
Michael: When you think about that, like, I don’t know if Trump hadn’t been president—trust me on this worth it—but if Trump wouldn’t—would we be having the same conversation?
Ayelet: I was a public defender during the years of Bill Clinton, our supposed, you know, thank you being a hero of the Democrats, and those were horrific years to be working in the criminal justice system.
Michael: The Clinton administration was a profoundly evil administration when it came to mass incarceration, when it came to the prosecution of people of color, when it came to grotesque over-prosecution. You know, people were carried about the drugs from point A to point B, who were looking at 20-year sentences, so you desperately try to plead them down to ten because then at least they might be able to like, you know, have a life.
Ayelet: So, I mean, you’re awaiting for them—mandatory minimums—like something that happened with that in the movie.
Michael: Yeah, I mean there was… Look, when I was raising money for Obama early on, and it doesn’t mean I kept telling people that all I wanted was the opportunity to be disappointed by Barack Obama—which we all got.
Ayelet: But to the point...
Michael: I mean, how many Trump as president it’s disastrous as it has been. It’s also become a point around which we can actually organize.
Ayelet: I mean catalyzed for change. Would we be having this conversation about the police? Would we be looking at cities having a majority of council members voting to shift police budgets in order to fund mental health facilities and funding of intervention?
Michael: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so, actually. I mean, maybe we could have gotten there in a less painful way, but…
Ayelet: Can I do it for the... [Pause] You know—I think there are that has been.
Michael: It’s both terrifying and exhilarating over the past couple of weeks.
Ayelet: I was surprised when I would read all the essays, just how immediate the book felt. It felt like I had just conceived a bit, you know, last week, and here you guys go—all these issues that you had in mind.
Michael: I have to admit that I was a little surprised because, you know, I’m a big ACLU supporter, and I really value the work they do. But some of the cases—you know, they leave you with a little gross feeling in the sense of I can’t believe you defended these people.
Ayelet: But you have to understand, they force you to actually grapple with these sorts of questions. I mean, like with the anti-Semitism cases, I’m Jewish, and I’m thinking, how can you defend this?
Michael: Well, enough that when we wrote the introduction, you know, one of the things that we talked about, and then came out in the introduction is that for both of us, you know, coming of age as teenagers in the late 1970s and beginning to understand politics and the government and the way America works and what’s important to what’s not important, and trying to evolve the politics of your own at age 14 or 15…
Ayelet: Right; I remember this moment where we actually begin to understand both what the ACLU does and the Bill of Rights itself was the Skokie case, was the case that Morial Rahman writes about in the collection. You know, Nazis are bad, right? We used to know that in this country. We used to have applauded them or tell them they were good people.
Michael: But, I mean, two Jewish kids, we’re looking at these Nazis that marched in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago, Skokie and other places, and that’s bad, right? Like that’s clearly bad, and then there’s the ACLU that we sort of have a good thing—I have these fond feelings toward them as a teenager because my parents were all members, they had stood up against…
Ayelet: Madalyn O’Hair Murray from Maryland, where I had grown up, and I was very into—like, I don’t pledge allegiance; nonsense!
Michael: I had this sort of firm notion, but wait, now they’re defending Nazis? Like how does that work?
Ayelet: And to sort of work your way through that to the point, which is first-person limit rights to, you know, assemble peacefully protest then—and that was a watershed moment when the light went on for me.
Michael: I see that the ultimate value here is the Bill of Rights, constitutional rights itself. Like, that is where the value lies. The value doesn’t lie in thinking Nazis are bad—that’s secondary to the primary virtue of defending freedom of expression of right to assemble—all kinds of words that are guaranteed in the First Amendment.
Ayelet: It’s interesting too; I remember when I was teaching law—when I was teaching a criminal law to first-year law students—you would talk about an append; also, criminal procedure—you would talk about the protections of the Fourth Amendment, and you would talk about due process.
Michael: And at some point when I was—I think it was the first time I was teaching—I realized that there was a fundamental disconnect that is sort of related to this that the kids were feeling like they were reading about a bunch of laws designed to protect criminals, right? People who had committed crimes.
Ayelet: And what I had to explain to them—yes, there were laws designed to protect criminals, but actually what the laws are designed to do is to protect you because the idea is that both the guilty and the innocent can be caught up by the police.
Michael: So we’re not saying, “Yes, the punishment is, we’re going to exclude the drugs that were found during this illegal search so that you can’t prosecute this individual because there’s no evidence of the crime,” but it’s not because the...
Ayelet: … we feel different deeply as a nation about the result, the rights of someone to carry—I’m sorry, carry cocaine in their backpack.
Michael: It’s because we, as a nation, are committed to the rights of individuals to walk around that having their backpacks.
Ayelet: Personal understanding that as children about the Skokie cases, but they still… You is a real watershed moment.
Michael: It’s ours—it's the same thing where people think linear criminal defense lawyer. People just—the first thing they always ask you, “Have you ever represented someone you knew was guilty?” and the answer to that question has ever come up from me.
Ayelet: Well, what the hell is that?
Michael: Yeah, wait, that’s not the point! The point is that everyone is entitled to the best defense, right? That’s what is so that we all can have…
Ayelet: …everyone is about it, including people who actually may have committed a crime, of which they are accused, but, you know, that’s the larger point.
Michael: Yeah, and I think, you know, the way that we always explain it is, because if you take that right to assemble away from the Nazis to peacefully assemble to be clear, there’s not have to walk around poking AR-15s and blowing, you know, sorry boots, sorry please symbol away from the Nazis.
Ayelet: The first people whose rights will be taken away will not be, you know the next group will not be the Nazis; it will be, you know, a group of young Black activists whose rights will be taken away.
Michael: Which we’ve seen so starkly, right? I mean, our nation’s police force did such a wonderful job of peacefully protecting the right to assemble in the right to protest of machine-gun-carrying white people, and yet as soon as, you know, young people, Black people, Brown people went out to the streets to protest being murdered, suddenly there was tear gas and rubber bullets.
Ayelet: I kept saying to my God, I can’t believe I’ve been working on Palestinian rights issues for decades and the first time I got tear-gassed was in Oakland.
Michael: Yeah, the police were there when they made this announcement. “Oh, we’re just here to support your your right to peacefully assemble.” And then twelve minutes later, with no warning, setting up—there it is.
Ayelet: It’s that those protests done at best.
Michael: Yeah, so since we’re talking about this and since we’ve got, you know, legal minds in the house, talk us through a little bit what defund the police actually means and what, you know, what the way forward for this is.
Ayelet: I think the first thing to understand about defund the police is that though we as a country have this notion that a police force is critical to having a civil society, that is not necessarily the way that it has always worked. It’s not necessarily just, you just leave it… Sorry, Michael, but that’s not the way other countries view their civil structure.
Michael: So basically, what we’ve done in this society is we have taken a lot of the funding that would normally go and does normally go in other countries to things like mental health support, to things like youth activities, to things like economic support, and we have put all of that into these massive, build-multi-billion-dollar police budgets.
Ayelet: So essentially, police are doing way more than they are trained to do and way more than they even want to do.
Michael: We also have a very limited training program for our police officers. You know, in Scandinavia, you need to go to school for two, three years to train to be a police officer. I think it’s like 20 weeks of training, comes a high school diploma in most American states.
Ayelet: So the idea for defunding the police means essentially taking some of the money that we give these vast budgets that these police forces have and shifting them to mental health support, social support, things that the police aren’t actually competent or trained or even eager or willing to do.
Michael: So for example, if I call 911 because there’s a homeless man on the street who I think might be dead, is an armed police officer the right responder to that call?
Ayelet: No! The right responder to that call is someone who could be someone who is a, you know, an EMT or a paramedic; it could be someone who is an expert in mental health, a social worker who can handle that kind of call.
Michael: The police don’t know what to do with that call. They can’t do anything except, you know, rouse the guy, point their guns.
Ayelet: So the idea of defund the police, which is a catchy phrase, is really to reallocate police funding.
Michael: It’s the best way to describe it, and you know the reason police are funded so massively is that if you’re a politician you can—if you say the words law and order, you’re going to get a lot of frightened people voting for you.
Ayelet: Yeah!
Michael: The only clip that people have traditionally been unwilling to cut is police and military, so you get these massive police budgets.
Ayelet: And the police have so much—honestly, they don’t know what to do with, so they—so what do they do? They have these arsenals, this riot gear, and all of these things that make that enhance the perception of police as a—if you’re dressed in riot gear, I do feel like a militarized agency, organism, and the people out of the streets—those are the people you’re invading; those are the people you’re—those are your enemy, right?
Michael: Yeah, so it creates, in itself just by the very nature of their costumes, a relationship that we need to change.
Ayelet: So in short, defund the policeman’s reallocate police funds to places where they could be more useful to encouraging a peaceful and continued society.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, very, very eloquent.
Ayelet: I think we could spend the next five hours talking about the phrase. It’s got so many people so anxious.
Michael: I mean, people who, you know, I... so I’ve been doing prison rates for a long time, and that means I king up a lot of my friends for money for these boys' organizations.
Ayelet: And those people who opened up their pocketbooks to organizations that work on human rights for women, for people in women’s prisons have expressed anxiety to me about this phrase because what they think of is, if I call 911 because my house is robbed, is someone going to answer?
Michael: I’d like to point out that you could call 911 in Berkeley and Oakland, and, especially Oakland, it would take a long time before anyone comes to your house being robbed.
Ayelet: But you know the other thing? What if someone gets raped? Average police departments have about a 22% sob rate on the rates that are reported to—that’s only a small fraction of breaks.
Michael: But I think it’s really important to say to people nobody is saying that we’re not going to have a crime-fighting force.
Ayelet: But we—but the idea is to have a crime-fighting force the size of the crimes we have, which is very small, and also to also we can consider the things that are designated crimes.
Michael: Exactly. Like, why is someone who is mentally ill and collapses or a substance user—I mean, collapses? Why is that?
Ayelet: From what? Poverty!
Michael: It does seem like a lot of the cases that are in your book are actually about trying to roll back what is a crime.
Michael: Ayelet, you chose "Ulysses" and James Joyce, and you know, I thought it was funny to read that because I vaguely knew that this had happened, sort of, I knew there had been some sort of case, but I’d never been at the details, and talk about police not caring about certain people and certain—I thought it was hilarious that they had to try to bring the book in multiple times!
Ayelet: Yeah, I mean it—I’d like you, I mean I was aware of the "Ulysses" case because I loved the book. You see, up until about mid-1980s, up until about 1986, I think—the ruling judge Woolsey’s ruling in that case was always published right up front in the book.
Michael: So if you picked up "Ulysses," the first thing you were faced with was this court ruling that had made the book legal. So, you know, I love that really—I always would read it when I’d be "Ulysses."
Ayelet: It’s very well written; it’s charming; it’s well worth reading.
Michael: But that was the extent of what I actually knew about the case, so it was fun for me to research it to discover that it really was this kind of like a heist—like an "Ocean’s Eleven" kind of operation.
Ayelet: Like that the mark was all—did you know? They were going to bring down—they were going to get the obscenity law changed or lifted or waived in some way that would enable this book to be published—that "Ulysses" published in the United States.
Michael: And then this amazing lawyer, Morris Ernst, who was a very active early participant in the ACLU—was among the first lawyers to, you know, bring cases for the ACLU—he engineered the whole thing. He recruited the team; he would—this guy was going to handle that.
Ayelet: They had a guy whose whole job was just to bring the book into the country, and as you meant, when he comes into the ship docks in New York City, and he’s got a copy of "Ulysses" that he’s bought at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, who were the only licensed publishers of the book at this point in the early 1930s?
Michael: It’s in his luggage, and the idea was he was going to go through, you know, customs, and it’s going to get seized because it’s illegal; it’s contraband, and that will initiate the proceedings so they can bring this case.
Ayelet: And the customs guy that picks up the book, he’s like, “Yeah, everybody just lets a guy go.”
Michael: And the whole claim is about—he arrives, and he sheepishly at the offices of, you know, one fist!
Ayelet: He wanted to be seized, more experienced than the lawyer actually takes the book and goes back down to the deduction.
Michael: And he’s buttonholing customs people so he can find one who’s willing to seize it!
Ayelet: Yeah, it’s a great—you know, I really love learning all of that about how it all came to be.
Michael: You know, that we owe to that case not just "Ulysses," but, you know, that was really that started the ball rolling throughout the rest of the 20th century for, you know, there are other famous cases, the "Powell" and "Lady Chatterley’s Lover," and you know, these "Lolita," there are these famous cases, and each of them in turn was based on rulings from that "Ulysses" case.
Ayelet: So, you know, it really is this history of gradually, you know, lowering the barriers of the empathy and understand—is something that is about sex or sexual feeling or sexual drives or bodily functions of other bodily functions can be as a work of art, and it’s not automatically to be labeled obscene and to be thrown onto the trash—you know, the pie pi pornhub!
Michael: Exactly!
Ayelet: And you know, I love thinking about, though, how arbitrary it is, right? You have "Ulysses," and he’s like, “Yeah, everyone brings it in.” Now imagine that this happens with, you know, marijuana before it’s legalized, or with some other drugs!
Michael: Yeah, you know, everyone brings us in, it’s fine.
Ayelet: Right, right!
Michael: Yeah, you know, I think times had changed, you know. I think with "Ulysses," what was going on was times have changed.
Ayelet: Yeah!
Michael: We had these Victorian, truly Victorian censorship laws—they’d come stock laws in this country that had grown out of British laws of the mid-1850s, and then the US sort of followed in England’s footsteps and had similar kinds of laws.
Ayelet: So that, you know, these elaborate codes had to be used in like books that were published as sort of about marital hygiene, you know, and like that.
Michael: But people, by 1933, the world was different. I mean, and you can see it in like pre-code movies, for example.
Ayelet: Obviously—but I mentioned the code—the code, like censoring, was still very full and enforced. It was about to come down hard on college movies, right around the same time, the Ceases—what’s happening! But still, you know, people understood that adults did certain things.
Ayelet: And the fact that Joyce even wrote the book at all is a reflection of change.
Michael: It just took the law, as it often does, a long time to catch up with that. That’s kind of the history of the law in this country.
Ayelet: A lot of it is catching up to actual human behavior, maybe it’s due that.
Michael: You know, we had this recent case where Gorsuch blew the minds of the entire nation by writing an opinion that said that you can’t discriminate—that discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation or gender is sex discrimination.
Ayelet: I mean, I didn’t expect it.
Michael: I’m sure no—but certainly, the people who educated for his seat on the Supreme Court didn’t expect it.
Ayelet: But when we read that opinion, I remember saying to you, “Well, look! We actually Gorsuch, and I went to law school together!”
Michael: Alone, and I didn’t know him at all!
Ayelet: You can’t be a person our age in the world and not have met many, many gay people, and maybe what we are finally seeing is this is the law catching up to the fact that the vast majority of people in this country have the experience and don’t even question the idea that, of course, you shouldn’t be fired because you’re gay.
Michael: Because nobody knows people; they love people!
Ayelet: I mean, to be clear, you know, Anna’s younger and, of course, he doesn’t seem to understand!
Michael: Yes!
Ayelet: Well, I have tons more questions, but we’ll do some reader questions now or listener questions, and we’ll start with one that’s a pretty good transition from what we’re talking about right now because we're talking about, you know—is the law going to follow? We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about microdosing yet, but a lot of the listeners are curious about this.
Michael: I know that you had so many legal counselors as you embarked on the project to make sure that you wouldn’t be sued—that nothing would happen because, I mean…
Ayelet: Stupid.
Michael: Like whatever this is, the book that really good, you know, knows all because I am a white woman.
Ayelet: Because I am a woman of means, I could take the risk of publishing a book about breaking the law, and if I were, say, a young Black man in Detroit, I could not have taken that risk with any confidence that I wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Ayelet: Well, it's actually why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because I felt like these issues needed to be exposed and brought into the light of day, and as a person who faced relatively minor risk for writing the book, I felt like it was important that I do that.
Michael: I think that’s actually one of the less things when you’re trying to hold your about privilege. If you have privilege, you have to not just recognize it; you have to use it to make the world a better place. That is the burden of it.
Ayelet: But I did, I had like, you know, I had a team of lawyers going through the manuscript to make sure that I wasn’t risking myself too much!
Michael: And the real risk that I considered responsible is promoting prosecution.
Ayelet: Because, you know, it was a relatively minor amount of drugs, but the real risk was part of social services. Because using drugs in many jurisdictions is per se evidence of parental unfitness, and your kids can be taken away from just for using even illegal drugs like marijuana.
Michael: She can publish their children because they used marijuana for medical reasons, so that was my one concern.
Ayelet: We actually had a plan for what would happen if… because I started an investigation, but luckily nothing happened because everybody's like something that you… and many other people would do in an attempt to treat almost an eating disorder could embroil you in this insane system, incarceration, that prosecution at least tripled.
Michael: Glass is completely ineffectual and incredibly difficult...
Ayelet: Even drug laws!
Michael: When it’s, you know, just…
Ayelet: It’s clearly some question that urgently—LSD, MDMA, other psychedelics, you know, they urgently searched—carefully, scientifically.
Michael: And there’s enough there! So every day there’s more evidence, there’s more than that evidence suggested by that.
Ayelet: And it’s so impossible to do it in this country—not impossible, I think we are shifting.
Michael: I think there is, you know...
Ayelet: I can't provide a saying this when I was teaching the seminar on legal social implications of the war on drugs. I never anticipated this change, but I do think we are getting closer to a moment where there will be a medicalized use of some psychedelics in certain contexts to treat because we don’t have effective treatments for depression.
Michael: We don’t have effective treatments for PTSD, and these drugs seem to be more effective with less of a side effect results outcome than, you know, the drugs that we are relying on now.
Ayelet: I mean, the side effects of SSRIs, for example, are very intense, and many people don’t find any relief from them—and the side effects so far that we’re discovering of psychedelics used in a medical context and the support in medical context are very minor.
Michael: So progress in that way?
Ayelet: That’s great.
Michael: And Michael, people are wondering kind of from your perspective—how did this, you know, how did this go? What did you notice? How did it work? And how did the two of you navigate since you mentioned the children, explaining it to the kids, and trying to figure out how are we going to do this as a family?
Michael: Well, first of all, I mean it was evident from the first day—this was a 30-day experiment. It was evident from the first day that there was a difference.
Ayelet: I mean, there’s almost instant difference. And so maybe it’s placebo factor—maybe it’s whatever. Like there’s a certain like—and you know Ayelet has been looking for ways of doing it, you know, her diagnosis for a long time.
Michael: I had tried all kinds of out things, and some of them instantly were terrible, and it seemed to be helping—and turned out not to be... So you know, at first, there’s a sense of like, “Well, we’ll see; like this seems promising.”
Ayelet: But then, you know, over the course of that 30-day period, it was just clear it was making a real difference!
Michael: I just thought that’s what we were supposed to say. Is it still?
Ayelet: So, you know, that was—it was received effect. Great, you know, fine.
Ayelet: But in terms of talking to the kids about it, it was a secret initially. Just somebody—that was trying a new drug in the one morning I was sweet finding a tornado.
Michael: It’s not my usual, and my one who was then a teenager was doing, and she said, “Oh my God, what is wrong with you?”
Ayelet: Ever you want?! Acid?!
Michael: And they responded as appropriate to their age. The oldest kids were, um—they thought it was cool and interesting.
Ayelet: And they, one was in high school, was like “Ooh, I’m gonna be soooooo—everyone’s gonna love me! It’s cool because I’m gonna have the crazy LSD mom!”
Michael: And the younger kid, who was a middle schooler, was horribly embarrassed, um, and did not—was just gassed.
Ayelet: But, I mean, other people would know about that!
Michael: The best way—no, there’s nothing you can do as a parent!
Ayelet: I only got to high school, it would be all fine!
Michael: But, and it’s true because by the time he’s done high school, now nobody remembers.
Ayelet: You know, the memory of your average 14-year-old is—but they all think it’s better!
Michael: You know, we’ve always had—or tried to have—as much possible harm reduction approach to drugs in this house, and to not pretend that they don’t exist, to not pretend they’re not everywhere, to not pretend our kids telling us they’re not doing things doesn’t mean they aren’t necessarily the case.
Ayelet: So we assumed they will be able to try—we assume they’ll try marijuana, used to be—no trial acebos, try anything anyone puts in front of them.
Michael: And then, you know, to try to be do—to not be much in denial about those things.
Ayelet: It’s a struggle to not let the immediate— the grip of fear and panic that, even though we are committed to your harm reduction, to having truth be out there about drugs, or not even kind of propaganda like Dare and so on, that just like, you know, take a puff of marijuana and end up doing heroin in the gutter, that you know, even though we know that’s a false narrative, we’ve been so indoctrinated, both of us, from the time we were kids and getting that first wave of the anti-drug messages from the 1970s that, you know, we have to overcome a certain what feel like the truth but isn’t, and say: “Okay, what? What is the harm reduction approach?”
Michael: To how can we make sure, fundamentally, what our goal is as parents is that they— they don’t die, but that they get to be—they have to enjoy things that people are going to seek out and do.
Ayelet: They’re gonna do it secretly, or they’re gonna do it openly, or they’re gonna do it somewhere on the spectrum between secretly and oblivion sometimes.
Michael: No matter how open you are, they do—teenagers like testicles!
Ayelet: So, like, even in our house, which we’ve had a very clear policy, it’s just all about harm reduction; they snuck, hits, difference.
Ayelet: So, like, for example, I have a box with a box in our cupboard of, we have to not consider quarantine of, um, well, testing kits—anions that are designed, and your component—you know, we—I got ours from Dan safely—get them all over the place.
Michael: Any you take that if you have a pin all! I mean, I get it at a little party, and sometimes if it’s molly, this test will tell you what it is so that you don’t accidentally adjust something like a synthetic cannabinoid or methamphetamine or whatever it is.
Ayelet: I’m talking about something that’s keep killing you, like if you get been smaller—better said that it can happen, right?
Ayelet: Something so will just make me unhappy, so—but do you know what you’re taking, and want them to be able to do the sneaking around, we know they're gonna do, but get the pill testing kit because from our point of view, much better they don’t die and that they—
Michael: Right, they—that we are comfortable!
Ayelet: So, what are their friends like to get in the situation where you have to hide everything you do?
Michael: You’re so terrified of your parents finding out what you’re doing because they’ve told you you can’t absolutely—
Ayelet: And it does seem like a lot of the cases that are in your book are actually about trying to roll back what is a crime!
Michael: Michael, you chose Ulysses and James Joyce, and you know—I thought it was so funny to read that because I vaguely knew that this had happened sort of, you know, I knew there had been some sort of case, but I’d never been at the details, and talk about police not caring about certain people and certain—I thought it was hilarious that they had to try to bring the book in multiple times!
Ayelet: Yeah, I mean, I’d like you—I mean, I was aware of the Ulysses case because I loved the book.
Michael: You know, right up until about mid-1980s, up until about 1986, I think—the ruling judge Woolsey’s ruling in that case was always published right up front in the book.
Ayelet: So if you picked up Ulysses, the first thing you were you faced was this court ruling that had made the book legal.
Michael: So you know, I love that really—I always would read it when I’d be Ulysses.
Ayelet: It’s very well written, it’s charming, it’s well worth reading.
Michael: But that was the extent of what I actually knew about the case, so it was fun for me to research it to discover that it really was this kind of like—a heist, like an Ocean’s Eleven kind of operation.
Ayelet: Like that the mark was all—did you know?
Michael: They were going to bring down—they were going to get the obscenity law changed or lifted or waived in some way that would enable this book to be published—Ulysses—published in the United States.
Ayelet: And then this amazing lawyer, Morris Ernst, who was a very active early participant in the ACLU—was among the first lawyers to, you know, bring cases for the ACLU—he engineered the whole thing, and he recruited the team.
Michael: He would—this guy was going to handle that.
Ayelet: They had a guy whose whole job was just to bring the book into the country, and as you mentioned, when he comes into the ship docks in New York City, and he’s got a copy of Ulysses that he’s bought from Shakespeare in Company, Paris, who were the only licensed publishers of the book at this point in the early 1930s?
Michael: And it’s in his luggage, and the idea was he was going to go through, you know, customs, and it’s going to get seized because it’s illegal; it’s contraband, and that will initiate the proceedings so they can bring this case.
Ayelet: The customs guy that picks up the book, he’s like, “Yeah, everybody just lets a guy go!”
Michael: And the whole claim is about—he arrives, and he sheepishly at the offices of, you know, one fist!
Ayelet: He wanted to be seized, more experienced than the lawyer actually takes the book and goes back down to the deduction.
Michael: And he’s buttonholing customs people so he can find one who’s willing to seize it!
Ayelet: Yeah, it’s a great—you know, I really love learning all of that about how it all came to be.
Michael: You know, that we owe to that case not just Ulysses, but, you know, that was really that started the ball rolling throughout the rest of the 20th century for, you know, there are other famous cases, the Powell and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and you know, these Lolita, there are these famous cases, and each of them in turn was based on rulings from that Ulysses case.
Ayelet: So, you know, it really is this history of gradually, you know, lowering the barriers of the empathy and understand—is something that is about sex or sexual feeling or sexual drives or bodily functions of other bodily functions can be as a work of art, and it’s not automatically to be labeled obscene and to be thrown onto the trash—you know, the pie pi pornhub!
Michael: Exactly!
Ayelet: And you know, I love thinking about, though, how arbitrary it is, right? You have Ulysses, and he’s like, “Yeah, everyone brings it in.” Now imagine that this happens with, you know, marijuana before it’s legalized, or with some other drugs!
Michael: Yeah, you know, everyone brings us up; it’s fine, you know.
Ayelet: Right, right!
Michael: You know, I think times had changed, you know. I think with Ulysses, what was going on was times have changed.
Ayelet: Yeah!
Michael: We had these Victorian, truly Victorian censorship laws—they’d come stock laws in this country that had grown out of British laws of the mid-1850s, and then the US sort of followed in England’s footsteps and had similar kinds of laws.
Ayelet: So that, you know, these elaborate codes had to be used in like books that were published as sort of about marital hygiene, you know, and like that.
Michael: But people, by 1933, the world was different. I mean, and you can see it in like pre-code movies, for example.
Ayelet: Obviously—but I mentioned the code—the code, like censoring, was still very full and enforced. It was about to come down hard on college movies right around the same time—the Ceases—what’s happening! But still, you know, people understood that adults did certain things.
Ayelet: And the fact that Joyce even wrote the book at all is a reflection of change.
Michael: It just took the law as it often does a long time to catch up with that. That’s kind of the history of the law in this country.
Ayelet: A lot of it is catching up to actual human behavior, maybe it’s due that.
Michael: You know, we had this recent case where Gorsuch blew the minds of the entire nation by writing an opinion that said that you can’t discriminate—that discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation or gender is sex discrimination.
Ayelet: I mean, I didn’t expect it.
Michael: I’m sure no—but certainly, the people who educated for his seat on the Supreme Court didn’t expect it.
Ayelet: But when we read that opinion, I remember saying to you, “Well, look! We actually Gorsuch, and I went to law school together!”
Michael: Alone, and I didn’t know him at all!
Ayelet: You can’t be a person our age in the world and not have met many, many gay people, and maybe what we are finally seeing is this is the law catching up to the fact that the vast majority of people in this country have the experience and dont even question the idea that, of course, you shouldn’t be fired because you’re gay.
Michael: Because nobody knows people; they love people!
Ayelet: I mean, to be clear, you know Anna’s younger and, of course, he doesn’t seem to understand!
Michael: Yes!
Ayelet: Well, I have tons more questions, but we’ll do some reader questions now or listener questions, and we’ll start with one that’s a pretty good transition from what we’re talking about right now because we're talking about, you know—is the law going to follow? We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about microdosing yet, but a lot of the listeners are curious about this.
Michael: I know that you had so many legal counselors as you embarked on the project to make sure that you wouldn’t be sued—that nothing would happen because, I mean…
Ayelet: Stupid.
Michael: Like whatever this is, the book that really good, you know, knows all because I am a white woman.
Ayelet: Because I am a woman of means, I could take the risk of publishing a book about breaking the law, and if I were, say, a young Black man in Detroit, I could not have taken that risk with any confidence that I wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Ayelet: Well, it's actually why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because I felt like these issues needed to be exposed and brought into the light of day, and as a person who faced relatively minor risk for writing the book, I felt like it was important that I do that.
Michael: I think that’s actually one of the less things when you’re trying to hold your about privilege. If you have privilege, you have to not just recognize it; you have to use it to make the world a better place. That is the burden of it.
Ayelet: But I did, I had like, you know, I had a team of lawyers going through the manuscript to make sure that I wasn’t risking myself too much, and the real risk that I considered responsible is promote prosecution.
Michael: Because you know it was a relatively minor amount of drugs but the real risk was part of social services because using drugs in many jurisdictions is per se evidence of parental unfitness and your kids can be taken away from just for using even illegal drugs like marijuana.
Ayelet: She can publish their children because they used marijuana for medical reasons so that was my one concern.
Michael: We actually had a plan for what would happen if… because I started an investigation but luckily nothing happened because everybody's like something that you and many other people would do in an attempt to treat almost an eating disorder could embroil you in this insane system of incarceration that prosecution at least tripled.
Ayelet: Glass is completely ineffectual and incredibly difficult even drug laws when it’s you know, just it’s clearly some question that urgently LSD, MDMA, other psychedelics, you know, they urgently searched carefully scientifically, and there’s enough there so every day there’s more evidence there’s more than that evidence suggested by that!
Michael: And it’s so impossible to do it in this country—not impossible, I think we are shifting!
Ayelet: I think there is, you know…I can’t provide a saying this when I was teaching the seminar on legal social implications and war on drugs; I never come anticipated this change, but I do think we are getting closer to a moment where there will be a medicalized use of some psychedelics in certain contexts to treat because we don't have effective treatments for depression; we don't have effective treatments for PTSD and these drugs seem to be more effective with less of a side effect results outcome than you know the drugs that we are relying on now.
Michael: The side effects of SSRIs, for example, are very intense, and many people don't find any relief from them and the side effects so far that we're discovering of psychedelics used in a medical context and the support in a medical context are very minor so progress in that way that’s great, and Michael, people are wondering kind of from your perspective, how did this go? What did you notice? How did it work? And how did the two of you navigate since you mentioned the children, explaining it to the kids, and trying to figure out how are we going to do this as a family?
Michael: Well, first of all, I mean it was evident from the first day—this was a 30-day experiment; it was evident from the first day that there was a difference.
Ayelet: I mean, there’s almost instant difference. And so maybe it’s placebo factor—maybe it’s whatever, like there’s a certain like—and you know Ayelet has been looking for ways of doing it with, you know, her diagnosis for a long time.
Michael: I had tried all kinds of out things, and some of them instantly were terrible, and there was certainly something that seemed to be helping and turned out not to be… So you know, at first there’s a sense of like, “Well, we’ll see; like this seems promising.”
Ayelet: But then, over the course of that 30-day period, it was just clear it was making a real difference!
Michael: I just thought that’s what we’re supposed to say—is it still so?
Ayelet: So you know, that was…it was received effect. Great! You know, fine!
Michael: But in terms of talking to the kids about it, it was a secret initially. Just somebody—that was trying a new drug in the one morning I was sweet finding a tornado!
Ayelet: Not my usual either! It was my one who was then a teenager was doing, and she said, “Oh my God; what is wrong with you?”
Michael: “Ever you want?! Acid?!”
Ayelet: And they responded as appropriate to their age; the oldest kids were, um—they thought it was cool and interesting.
Michael: And they—they one was in high school was like “Ooh! I’m gonna be so…”
Ayelet: Everyone’s gonna love me! It’s cool because I’m gonna have the crazy LSD mom!
Michael: And the younger kid, who was a middle school is–horribly embarrassed, um, and did not—was just gassed.
Ayelet: But I mean, other people would know about that!
Michael: The best way—no, there’s nothing you can do as a parent!
Ayelet: I only got to high school; it would be all fine!
Michael: But, and it’s true because by the time he’s done high school, now nobody remembers.
Ayelet: You know, the memory of your average 14-year-old is…but they all think it’s better!
Michael: You know, we’ve always had—or tried to have as much possible harm reduction approach to drugs in this house, and to not pretend that they don’t exist, to not pretend they’re not everywhere, to not pretend our kids telling us they’re not doing things doesn’t mean they aren’t necessarily the case.
Ayelet: So we assumed they will be able to try—we assume they’ll try marijuana; they used to be—no trial acebos; try anything anyone puts in front of them.
Michael: And then, you know, to try to be do—to not be much in denial about those things.
Ayelet: It’s a struggle to not let the immediate—the grip of fear and panic that, even though we are committed to your harm reduction, to having truth being out there about drugs or not even kind of propaganda like Dare and so on, that just like, you know, take a puff of marijuana end up doing heroin in the gutter that you know, even though we know that’s a false narrative, we’ve been so indoctrinated, both of us from the time we were kids getting that first wave of the anti-drug messages from the 1970s that, you know, we have to overcome a certain what feel like the truth but isn’t, and say: “Okay, what? What is the harm reduction approach?”
Michael: To how can we make sure, fundamentally, what our goal is as parents—
Ayelet: Is that they—they don’t die but that they get to be—they have to enjoy things that people are going to seek out and do!
Michael: They’re gonna do it secretly, or they’re gonna do it openly, or they’re gonna do it somewhere on the spectrum between secretly and oblivion sometimes.
Ayelet: No matter how open you are, they do—teenagers like testicles!
Michael: So, like, even in our house, which we’ve had a very clear policy, it’s just all about harm reduction—they snuck hits difference.
Michael: So, like, for example, I have a box with a box in our cupboard of we have to not consider quarantine of, um, well, testing kits—anions that are designed, and your component—you know, we—I got ours from Dan safely—get them all over the place.
Ayelet: Any you take that if you have a pin all! I mean, I get it at a little party, and sometimes if it’s molly, this test will tell you what it is so that you don’t accidentally adjust something like a synthetic cannabinoid or methamphetamine or whatever it is.
Michael: I’m talking about something that’s keep killing you, like if you get been smaller, better said that it can happen!
Michael: Something so will just make me unhappy, so—but do you know what you’re taking, and want them to be able to do the sneaking around we know they're gonna do, but get the pill testing kit because from our point of view, much better they don’t die and that they—
Ayelet: Right! They—that we are comfortable!
Michael: So what are their friends like to get in the situation where you have to hide everything you do?
Ayelet: You’re so terrified of your parents finding out what you’re doing because they’ve told you you can’t absolutely—
Michael: And it does seem like a lot of the cases that are in your book are actually about trying to roll back what is a crime!
Ayelet: Ayelet, you chose "Ulysses" and James Joyce, and you know—I thought it was so funny to read that because I vaguely knew that this had happened sort of, you know, I knew there had been some sort of case, but I’d never been at the details, and talk about police not caring about certain people and certain—I thought it was hilarious that they had to try to bring the book in multiple times!
Ayelet: Yeah, I mean, I’d like you—I mean, I was aware of the Ulysses case because I loved the book.
Michael: You know, right up until about mid-1980s, up until about 1986, I think—the ruling judge Woolsey’s ruling in that case was always published right up front in the book.
Ayelet: So if you picked up Ulysses, the first thing you were you faced was this court ruling that had made the book legal.
Michael: So, you know, I love that really—I always would read it when I’d be Ulysses.
Ayelet: It’s very well written; it’s charming; it’s well worth reading.
Michael: But that was the extent of what I actually knew about the case, so it was fun for me to research it to discover that it really was this kind of like—a heist, like Ocean’s Eleven kind of operation.
Ayelet: Like that the mark was all—did you know?
Michael: They were going to bring down—they were going to get the obscenity law changed or lifted or waived in some way that would enable this book to be published—Ulysses—published in the United States.
Ayelet: And then this amazing lawyer, Morris Ernst, who was a very active early participant in the ACLU—was among the first lawyers to, you know, bring cases for the ACLU—he engineered the whole thing, and he recruited the team.
Michael: He would—this guy was going to handle that.
Ayelet: They had a guy whose whole job was just to bring the book into the country, and as you mentioned, when he comes into the ship docks in New York City, and he’s got a copy of Ulysses that he’s bought at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, who were the only licensed publishers of the book at this point in the early 1930s?
Michael: And it’s in his luggage, and the idea was he was going to go through, you know, customs and it’s going to get seized because it’s illegal; it’s contraband, and that will initiate the proceedings so they can bring this case.
Ayelet: The customs guy who picks up the book, he’s like, “Yeah, everybody just lets a guy go!”
Michael: And the whole claim is about—he arrives, and he sheepishly at the offices of, you know, one fist!
Ayelet: He wanted to be seized, more experienced than the lawyer actually takes the book and goes back down to the deduction.
Michael: And he’s buttonholing customs people so he can find one who’s willing to seize it!
Ayelet: Yeah, it’s a great—you know, I really love learning all of that about how it all came to be.
Michael: You know, that we owe to that case not just Ulysses, but, you know, that was really that started the ball rolling throughout the rest of the 20th century for, you know, there are other famous cases, the Powell and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and you know, these Lolita, there are these famous cases, and each of them in turn was based on rulings from that Ulysses case.
Ayelet: So, you know, it really is this history of gradually, you know, lowering the barriers of the empathy and understand—is something that is about sex or sexual feeling or sexual drives or bodily functions of other bodily functions can be as a work of art, and it’s not automatically to be labeled obscene and to be thrown onto the trash—you know, the pie pi pornhub!
Michael: Exactly!
Ayelet: And you know, I love thinking about, though, how arbitrary it is, right? You have Ulysses, and he’s like, “Yeah, everyone brings it in.” Now imagine that this happens with, you know, marijuana before it’s legalized, or with some other drugs!
Michael: Yeah, you know everyone brings us in; it’s fine, you know.
Ayelet: Right! Right!
Michael: You know, I think times had changed, you know. I think with Ulysses, what was going on was times have changed.
Ayelet: Yeah!
Michael: We had these Victorian, truly Victorian censorship laws—they’d come stock laws in this country that had grown out of British laws of the mid-1850s, and then the US sort of followed in England’s footsteps and had similar kinds of laws.
Ayelet: So that, you know, these elaborate codes had to be used in like books that were published as sort of about marital hygiene, you know, and like that.
Michael: But people, by 1933, the world was different. I mean, and you can see it in like pre-code movies, for example.
Ayelet: Obviously—but I mentioned the code—the code, like censoring, was still very full and enforced. It was about to come down hard on college movies right around the same time—the Ceases—what’s happening! But still, you know, people understood that adults did certain things.
Ayelet: And the fact that Joyce even wrote the book at all is a reflection of change.
Michael: It just took the law, as it often does, a long time to catch up with that. That’s kind of the history of the law in this country.
Ayelet: A lot of it is catching up to actual human behavior, maybe it’s due that.
Michael: You know, we had this recent case where Gorsuch blew the minds of the entire nation by writing an opinion that said that you can’t discriminate—that discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation or gender is sex discrimination.
Ayelet: I mean, I didn’t expect it.
Michael: I’m sure no—but certainly, the people who educated for his seat on the Supreme Court didn’t expect it.
Ayelet: But when we read that opinion, I remember saying to you, “Well, look! We actually Gorsuch, and I went to law school together!”
Michael: Alone, and I didn’t know him at all!
Ayelet: You can’t be a person our age in the world and not have met many, many gay people, and maybe what we are finally seeing is this is the law catching up to the fact that the vast majority of people in this country have the experience and don’t even question the idea that, of course, you shouldn’t be fired because you’re gay.
Michael: Because nobody knows people; they love people!
Ayelet: I mean, to be clear, you know, Anna’s younger and, of course, he doesn’t seem to understand!
Michael: Yes!
Ayelet: Well, I have tons more questions, but we’ll do some reader questions now or listener questions, and we’ll start with one that’s a pretty good transition from what we’re talking about right now because we're talking about, you know—is the law going to follow? We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about microdosing yet, but a lot of the listeners are curious about this.
Michael: I know that you had so many legal counselors as you embarked on the project to make sure that you wouldn’t be sued—that nothing would happen because, I mean…
Ayelet: Stupid.
Michael: Like whatever this is, the book that really good, you know, knows all because I am a white woman.
Ayelet: Because I am a woman of means, I could take the risk of publishing a book about breaking the law, and if I were, say, a young Black man in Detroit, I could not have taken that risk with any confidence that I wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Ayelet: Well, it's actually why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because I felt like these issues needed to be exposed and brought into the light of day, and as a person who faced relatively minor risk for writing the book, I felt like it was important that I do that.
Michael: I think that’s actually one of the less things when you’re trying to hold your about privilege. If you have privilege, you have to not just recognize it; you have to use it to make the world a better place. That is the burden of it.
Ayelet: But I did, I had like, you know, I had a team of lawyers going through the manuscript to make sure that I wasn’t risking myself too much, and the real risk that I considered responsible is promote prosecution.
Michael: Because you know it was a relatively minor amount of drugs but the real risk was part of social services because using drugs in many jurisdictions is per se evidence of parental unfitness and your kids can be taken away from just for using even illegal drugs like marijuana.
Ayelet: She can publish their children because they used marijuana for medical reasons so that was my one concern.
Michael: We actually had a plan for what would happen if… because I started an investigation but luckily nothing happened because everybody's like something