If Books Could Kill – Details, episodes & analysis

Is social media to blame for the teen mental health crisis? It's complicated!

Thanks to Emily Weinstein, Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski, Dean Burnett, Michael Mullarkey and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz for help researching and fact-checking this episode!

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Emily Weinstein's book, "Behind Their Screens"
• Positive and negative uses of social media among adolescents hospitalized for suicidal behavior
• The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics
• The Relationship Between Online Social Networking and Depression: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies
• Online "predators" and their victims
• The Coddling of the American Parent
• No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
• How technology is transforming the ways in which children play
• Banning mobile phones in schools in Spain
• No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing To Teens
• Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media
• Smartphones are bad for some teens, not all
• How Smartphones Affect the Social-Emotional Development of Adolescents
• Social media use and its impact
• Time Spent on Social Network Sites and Psychological Well-Being
• A School-Level Analysis of Adolescent Extracurricular Activity

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

To celebrate ("celebrate") Donald Trump choosing JD Vance as his running mate we are re-releasing our "Hillbilly Elegy" episode. Enjoy!

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

"There are two kinds of political scientists: The types who deal with noisy data and post on Twitter with a bunch of caveats. And then there are the types who write books about identity politics."
 
Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Sam  Huneke's "Yascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man"
• Jacob T. Levy's "The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics"
• Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's "Elite Capture"
• Aaron Huertas's "We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists"
• Mary Lin Elementary under federal investigation
• Parents refute claims of segregation at Mary Lin Elementary School
• School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000
• 60 Years After Brown
• School choice and racial segregation in US schools
• Student Population Has Significantly Diversified, But Many Schools Remain Divided Along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic Lines
• U.S. public school students often go to schools where at least half of their peers are the same race or ethnicity
• The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences
• Why The Democrats Have Shifted Left Over The Last 30 Years
• Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change
• Trump, the 2016 Election, and Expressions of Sexism
• Changing Norms Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: The Trump Effect on Prejudice
• Changes in Americans’ prejudices during the presidency of Donald Trump
• The CDC slide presentation
• Model-informed COVID-19 vaccine prioritization strategies

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

You stare, mouth agape, at the bookstore display. It’s a self-help book, but with curse words in the title?! This must be a revolutionary new framework, not simply the same dull, reactionary ideas repackaged as hip and new.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (Blog Post)
• Where A is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009
• We’ve Been Handing Out Participation Trophies for 100 Years
  Positive Disintegration‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%!’ Review: A Blunt Philosophy

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In 1996, a frustrated screenwriter got a fellowship in Italy. Twenty years later, Beyoncé released "Lemonade." 

Content warning: This episode includes a mention of suicide.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell”
• Kelly Link's "White Cat, Black Dog"
• The Half-Century in Bullshit: On Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” and Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”
• A Book of Anecdotes, 1957
  The Little Brown Book Of Anecdotes
• Fear Nothing: Self-Fashioning and Social Mobility in 50 Cent’s The 50th Law
• The fear of conflict leads people to systematically avoid potentially valuable zero-sum situations
• The Immigration Dilemma
• You Can Win But I Can't Lose
• If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups
• Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
• A Genesis of Conflict: The Zero-Sum Mindset
• Forbes Winslow’s Physic and Physicians
• The role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review
•  The Strange, Sad Story of Joe Orton, His Lover, and 72 Stolen Library Books 
• A Failure Of Initiative
• New Orleans reaches settlements for police shootings after Hurricane Katrina
• Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Retailers have been sounding the alarm about a shoplifting epidemic driven by organized criminal syndicates. In a shocking twist, it turns out that their story is mostly made up. Join us as Peter tries to figure out where this panic originated and as Mike finally comes clean about his criminal past.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

This week we're tackling "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," a book that dares to ask: What if everything that experts think about homelessness is wrong, and everything that one crank on Twitter thinks about homelessness is right?

Thanks to Ned Resnikoff for helping us with the research for this episode!

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Inflection Points in Community-level Homeless Rates
• How Housing Costs Drive Levels of Homelessness
• The 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report To Congress
• The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness
• San Francisco Homelessness Benchmarking Report
• Homelessness is a Housing Problem
• A randomized trial of permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless persons with high use of publicly funded services
• San Francisco Department of Public Health Update Report on Mental Health Reform
• Civil Commitment in the United States

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Have you ever wanted to escape the grind and follow your dreams? This week we're discussing "The 4-Hour Workweek," which reveals that all you need is a plan, a willingness to take risks and a modestly sized fraud operation built on Third World labor.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Fraud and the Four-Hour Workweek
• Revisiting "The 4-Hour Workweek"
• New! Improved! Shape Up Your Life!
• From Productivity to Psychedelics: Tim Ferriss Has Changed His Mind About Success

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!