Join us on Sundays at 7:00 a.m. for episodes of The Detour, a show about people and ideas from Oregon Humanities. Listen live at 99.1 FM in the heart of Portland, or online anywhere at PRP.fm.

Many of us grew up thinking that being coupled with one person—and codifying that union through a government institution—was the ultimate expression of romance. But why do we continue to conform to traditional coupledom despite the data against it? In this episode, we discuss love and ambivalence with Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love and Love in the Time of Contagion. We’ll also hear from Jamie Passaro, a writer and editor based in Eugene, reading from her 2004 essay “Consider the Wedding.”

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic, essayist, and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of seven books, including Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis (Pantheon, 2022).

Kipnis has published essays and reviews in the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, Slate, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and New Left Review. She is professor emerita in the department of radio/television/film at Northwestern University.

Jamie Passaro is a writer whose articles, interviews, and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post parenting blog, The Atlantic, Full Grown People, Utne Reader, and other places. She runs an obituary business called dear person and officiates the occasional wedding. She lives in Eugene.

For a full transcript of this episode as well as additional resources and further reading, visit the Oregon Humanities website.

Alexandra Powell Bugden
Latest posts by Alexandra Powell Bugden (see all)