Definitely / Definately
My favorite dictionary asked what word you’d respell if you could. My pick? Definitely = definately. [BuzzFeed]
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Filtering by Tag: PRESS
I'm a Ghost
The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating story about ghosting written by Stella Tan and illustrated by Liana Finck. Nota bene: “But those who disappear on their paramours have their reasons for going silent.”
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Data Baby Is a New York Public Library Book of the Day
Thank you so much to The New York Public Library for making my memoir, Data Baby, a Book of the Day!
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The Most Important and Least Important Things That Happened to Me This Year
The Morning News asked me and a gaggle of other journalists, writers, and thinkers: “What were the most important events of 2024, and what were the least?” Read my answers and a host of others at TMN.
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ICYMI
In case you missed it, my interview with “To the Best of Our Knowledge” host Angelo Bautista about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which aired the other day on NPR, is also on Wisconsin Public Radio. You can listen to it or read the transcript here: “Looking for the Story of Her Life.”
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Data Baby Featured on NPR's The Sum of Our Data
I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. The episode is “The Sum of Our Data,” and it includes interviews with The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life author Lowry Pressly and The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care author Carl Öhman. You can listen to it here.
From the description:
“Every click on your computer, every swipe on your smartphone, leaves a data trail. Information about who you are, what you do, who you love, the state of your mind and body... so much data about you, expanding day by day in the digital clouds. The question is—do you care? Would owning your data, or having more digital privacy, make life better? And what happens to all that data when you die?”
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I Was 758
New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro interviewed me about my life story and my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for her widely-listened-to Family Secrets podcast. The episode is entitled “I Was 758,” and it’s available on most podcast distributing platforms. Thank you to Dani for doing this intimate interview. You can buy Data Baby from the retailer of your choice here and read more about it here.
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The Other Hollywood Reporter
AVN, aka Adult Video News, is The Hollywood Reporter of the adult industry. It’s been around forever, and I miss getting the paper version in the mail. In any case, the folks over there were kind enough to mention my recent story on Forbes: “How The Hardest Working Director In Porn Gets The Job Done.” Thanks, AVN!
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Thanks, Naked Capitalism
It was nice to see that Naked Capitalism shared a link to my 2017 story about financial domination. Thank you!
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Thank you, Travis and Sigrid
I’m a longtime fan of Travis and Sigrid, who, if you don’t know already, are a famous duo in London. Travis is a cyclist, Sigrid is an all-white, blue-eyed, deaf Norwegian Forest cat, and together they ride around the city, bringing joy and excitement to all they encounter, including quite a few celebrities over the years. Recently, Travis wrote a nice post about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, on his Instagram feed, which was really kind. Make sure to follow Travis and Sigrid on Instagram and order their book, which I highly recommend: Sigrid Rides: The Story of an Extraordinary Friendship and An Adventure on Two Wheels.
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A Trip Home
Yesterday, I flew up to the Bay Area, where I was doing a brown bag book talk at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. I got there early, and that gave me a chance to have breakfast, visit Pegasus Books where I was happy to see my book on a shelf, and go to my childhood home and knock on the front door (more on that in an upcoming post). After that, I went to Cal for the talk. I was interviewed by journalist and producer Cecilia Lei, who did a wonderful job asking insightful questions, turning what could have been bearing witness to a Q&A into a three-way dialogue with the audience, and prompting me to think about some of the deeper themes in and larger issues surrounding my book in new ways. Thank you to everyone who came. I’ve been doing a lot of promoting of my memoir this month, these last couple weeks in particular. After I’m done with the last event, which is this weekend, I’ll be writing a longer post about everything I learned about marketing one’s book. The photo is of the courtyard at the J-school. It was a bit overcast, but so are most days in the Bay Area in spring.
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The Unhinged Interview
What happens when one former child lab rat interviews another former child lab rat? Things get unhinged. Seth Fischer, who was himself studied as a child by his psychologist parents, and I talked about growing up under a microscope, the consequences of being a human guinea pig, and what happens when the subject sets out to tell his or her own story. Read the rest of our scintillating, strange conversation in the newest issue of Air/Light: “‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin.”
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I'm at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books This Weekend
This weekend, I’ll be a panelist at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel, “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” is on Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 pm., it’s moderated by Amy Alkon, and my fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannon, and M.G. Lord. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And, you can read more about the story behind my book here.
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The Other Hollywood
Ahead of The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, where I’ll be a panelist—see: “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology”—The L.A. Times shared “The 50 Best Hollywood Books of All Time” and asked readers for their suggestions on the best Hollywood books not on that list. My suggestion made it to “19 Great Hollywood Books We Missed, According to Our Readers.” Find out my suggestion here.
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Listen to an Interview with Me About Data Baby on ABC Radio National's All in the Mind podcast
I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment (read more about my book here) for a recent episode of ABC Radio National’s podcast about the human mind, “All in the Mind,” out of Australia. The episode is “Being a Human Lab Rat for 30 Years: What Happens Next.”
From the episode’s description:
“Researchers knew Susannah better than her own parents.
They may have even known her better than herself.
Today, how spending thirty years in a psychological study warped journalist Susannah Breslin's life.”
Listen to my conversation with host Sana Qadar here.
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Data Baby Is The Morbidly Curious Book Club's April Pick!
I’m super happy that The Morbidly Curious Book Club has chosen my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment—you can read more about my book here—as the April pick! The Morbidly Curious Book Club is very cool, and I’m honored that Data Baby is in the company of their previous 2024 selections, which include Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom, Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton, and Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy. You can join TMCBC here, check out the rest of their 2024 selections and follow TMCBC on Instagram here, follow TMCBC on TikTok here, and find various other relevant links for TMCBC here, including a link to the podcast, for which I’ll be doing an interview later this month. Thank you, TMCBC!
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Listen to an Interview with Me About Data Baby on NPR's The Pulse
I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for a recent episode of WHYY’s The Pulse, which is part of the NPR Network. The episode is “Discovering Your True Identity,” and the interview I did with host Maiken Scott starts at the 34 minute mark. (Read more about Data Baby here.)
From the episode’s description:
“Identity's a complicated thing — a mixture of nurture and nature, ethnicity, gender, culture, conscious decisions, coincidences, and more. In many ways, though, who we think we are boils down to the stories we tell ourselves; stories based on our origins, our families, and how we came to be. But what happens when those stories change? When we discover that the narrative of our lives is completely different from what we've always believed?”
Listen to the episode here.
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An Interview with Me About Data Baby on CBC Radio's "The Current"
CBC Radio’s “The Current” host Matt Galloway interviewed me about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. We talked about “The Truman Show,” growing up under a microscope, and the rise of surveillance capitalism. It was a terrific interview. You can listen to the whole thing here.
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An Interview with Me About Data Baby on Identity Theory
Matt Borondy of Identity Theory fame interviewed me about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. That Q&A is: “Secrets Laid Bare: An Interview with Susannah Breslin, Author of Data Baby.”
An excerpt:
“If you think of the main character of your memoir as just that, a character, she must be a product of her environment. In my case, she is studied by researchers who assign her a number and spy on her through one-way mirrors. She has a mother who touches her rarely and resents being a mother and sometimes says to her daughter: ‘I don’t want to be a mother anymore.’ Her father leaves her with her depressed mother who the main character feels like she has to parent or save or fix. Do you think this character is going to freely express her emotions, be vulnerable? No, she’s not. That has been studied, grinded, strangled out of her. There is no fixing her. She is what she is.”
Read the rest here.
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An Interview with Me About Data Baby on Daily Blast Live
Daily Blast Live interviewed me about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Watch.
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