The Holy Shiver
7/10/202638 min
Lauren Brown gets goosebumps. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. When her partner, writer Carmen Maria Machado, noticed it...she couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does she get them in so many different situations? What’s happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it. We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.
Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rupik
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by Maria Paz Gutierrez
Produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan
Fact-checking by Angely Mercado
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Videos -
- Hallelujah (https://zpr.io/6ak2f), performed by Rufus Wainwright, accompanied by 1500 singers
- De Ushuaia a La Quiaca (https://zpr.io/PcYbN)
- Alysa Liu wins the Olympic gold medal for the United States (https://zpr.io/Q7pPNkYSTGVd)
Books -
- Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
- On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, by Bonnie Tsui (https://www.bonnietsui.com/)
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSoren Wheeler· Host0:02
Oh, wait. You're listening [laughs] Okay. All right.
Lulu Miller· Host0:04
Okay.
Soren Wheeler· Host0:06
All right.
Lulu Miller· Host0:07
[clears throat] You're listening- You're listening- ... to Radiolab.
Soren Wheeler· Host0:10
Radiolab.
Lulu Miller· Host0:11
From- WNYC. C.
Soren Wheeler· Host0:15
Yeah.
Lulu Miller· Host0:15
[laughs] Hey, it's Lulu. Gonna kick off today with a little ghost story for you. So there's this woman, and she's going through weight loss surgery, and when she gets home, she starts hearing these gurgles and creaks, and realizes she is being stalked by the former bits of herself, her flesh that she has cut away. Or there is a house that is maze-like and haunted by quiet cruelties that occur between you and your partner, and it feels like there is no way out. These are some of the stories of the prize-winning writer Carmen Maria Machado. Some of them are true, some of them are fiction, all of them are charged with this sense of spookiness. I have spent hours of my life being pleasantly spooked by her, and so I was totally delighted when she wrote into our show wondering about something that had happened with her partner of four years, Lauren Brown.