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The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy and Emily Nussbaum discuss Levy’s “painful, funny” new memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply.”
When 38-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.
In “The Rules Do Not Apply,” Levy tells the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules—about work, about love, and about womanhood.
“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
Levy discusses her "grieving, hopeful, painful, funny" memoir with Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic for the New Yorker. 
From The New York Times bestselling author of THE ORGANIZED MIND and THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever.
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.
It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks! Louise Gray came into talk about her new book, The Ethical Carnivore. Fed up of friends claiming to care about where their meat comes from, Louise decided to follow the argument to its logical extreme and only eat animals she kills herself for a year.
Recorded in London, February 2017
Louise is former Environment Correspondent on The Daily Telegraph. She has been freelance since 2014, specializing in writing about food, farming and climate change for, among others, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Scottish Field, Country Life and the Spectator. Louise has also featured on BBC TV and radio.
You can find out more about Louise at www.louisebgray.com or follow her @loubgray.
