Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry

In life, the only certainty is death. And yet, we have an almost superstitious aversion to talking about death–an aversion that is probably doing us all harm. Our guest this week looks at death differently. Alua Arthur is a death doula. Her new book Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End is available at bookstores everywhere on April 16th.

In their frenzy to completely control women, the Republican party is attacking every aspect of our reproductive health. This includes not only access to abortion care and birth control, but also is having serious and chilling effects on access to in-vitro fertilization. Amanda Zurawski knows this all too well, and she joins us today to discuss.

One in four women in the United States will have an abortion–and that doesn’t even take into account trans men and nonbinary people. The barriers to care and stigma attached to these people is so unfair, and so crushing. Our guest this week is Asha Dahya. Asha is a filmmaker trying to break that stigma and tear down those barriers with her new short film “Someone You Know.”

For half a century, Roe vs. Wade was the law of the land. While states continued to attack the rights of pregnant people to our bodies, we had that basic fact to give us some refuge. That is now gone, thanks to an extremist Supreme Court. To discuss where we are and where we might go, we’ve invited Rickie Solinger and Krystale Littlejohn–co-Editors of the new anthology “Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade” onto the show.

Ballot initiatives can be an important way for citizens to directly legislate when their government refuses to listen. But now, politicians in some states are working to weaken citizen initiatives and increase veto power over them. To discuss, we’ve invited Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, Executive Director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center onto the show.

The world is a dangerous place for LGBTQIA people. Not only do they have to fear hate and discrimination in communities–which would be bad enough–but now many of our governments are actively attacking their very existence. The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative is working to make sure safe spaces exist for LGBTQIA people across the nation, and we’re joined by Stacy Lentz and Angelica Christina to discuss.

The United States is in the midst of an opioid crisis, driven largely by the greed and deceptive marketing practices of large industrial corporations. However, it might shock most of us to know that the US, along with Britain and other Western nations triggered an opioid crisis in China that lasted for more than a century. In his book “Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories,” renowned writer Amitav Ghosh explores the history of ...

Intro: Somehow in 2024, we still live in a time where white people in power, mostly men, are trying to erase the contributions of Black people, and especially Black women, to our history. Our guest this week, Dr. Jenn Jackson, is asserting those feminist histories and lessons in her new book Black Women Taught Us: A History of Black Feminism.

When Natalie Weaver's daughter Sophia was born, she knew she was in for a whole new life. Born with facial differences, Natalie and her family had to navigate hate cruelty. But when her state tried to reduce essential health care benefits for medically complicated children, Natalie was forced to publicly fight for her family's well-being. What followed was a success in the activism realm and more hate from the social media...

The National Rifle Association has been one of the most powerful and most dangerous gun lobbying groups in America. But now a corruption trial is underway, and their visibility and potentially their influence is collapsing as a result. To hear more about it, we’ve invited Hudson Munoz onto the show. Hudson is the Executive Director of Guns Down America, a gun violence prevention advocacy organization

Our world seems more divided than ever, and bad actors are committed to exploiting and deepening those division. So how do we fight these divisions? How do we find our way to unity? Our guest this week is Denise Hamilton. Denise’s new book “Indivisible: How to Forge our Differences into a Stronger Future” is available February 6th, 2024.

In what is becoming a tradition at Sorry Not Sorry, for Martin Luthor King Jr. Day, we are revisiting one of our all-time favorite episodes of Sorry Not Sorry with Kwame Alexander. When this episode first aired, Kwame's remarkable book "Light for the World To See: 1,000 Words on Race and Hope" had just released. As always, we need to continue having challenging conversations, and we need to do so in a spirit of hope a...

What does it mean when other people feel entitled to our bodies? This is the reality that larger people have to deal with every day. From cruel comments online to fatshaming from well-meaning friends, relatives, and medical professionals, fat people navigate in a world where it is somehow socially acceptable to behave this way. Kate Manne argues for a better way. She is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University and...

The intersection of youth, technology, and sexual violence has proven to be a dangerous place. In her new book When Rape Goes Viral, Anna Gjika explores the origins, effects, and extent of this problem as well as the social dynamics that enable it. Listeners should be forewarned that this episode contains frank discussions of sexual assault.

Evangelical voters have been a key constituency for the GOP for decades. But as that party veers to Trumpism and extremism, often with words and actions that fly in the face of their faith, will evangelicals stay with them? This week, we’re joined by Tim Alberta. Tim is a staff writer for The Atlantic whose new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in the Age of Extremism” is now available.

I like to think we’re living in a more consent-aware world than we used to be. We speak about the sexual ideal of enthusiastic consent required before engaging in sexual acts. And yet, recent research demonstrates that in the medical community, what happens with our bodies is often far outside that consent, with almost 90% of medical students being asked to perform pelvic examinations on patients under anesthesia. Our guest this we...