Willow Defebaugh

speaker

874 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Willow Defebaugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh · Maria Popova on Turning Matter Into Meaning · 12 May 2026 podcast

Especially when we are also stardust and we are also many other species that coexist within our bodies.

Now that we've set the table, I want to speak a little bit to how we met.

The first thing that you said to me, you approached me and said...

Did you know you look just like the portrait of Mary Shelley?

I said no, but I thought in my soul, I wish I did.

I mean, I can't imagine why, where you would have gotten that from.

But you had just spent seven years in Mary Shelley's world, writing your new book, Traversal.

What drew you to Mary Shelley?

Not to mention also the legacy of Frankenstein has been twisted and warped and turned into its own creature.

You know, when in reality, the original story holds so much wisdom for our world today, not just about ambition and power, but also about what happens when we treat people as, I'll say monsters and how treating someone as monstrous turns them monstrous.

And I mean, look at our world today.

Hurt people hurt people.

So as you mentioned, Traversal interweaves the narratives of a number of revolutionary scientific and literary minds.

But it also really reads to me like a love letter to chemistry, chance, connection.

Would you say that these are the central forces of your life, all life?

I mean, we're talking about this happening with the Cold War as the backdrop, right?

And so who's to say what role she played in preventing that from becoming

I'm reminded of what you were sharing last night about the transit of Venus, right?

Which was in a lot of ways the first truly global scientific experiment.

And you were sharing how that's kind of a welcome reminder for this moment we're living in where it feels like science is really under attack.

Showing 481–500 of 874 · page 25 of 44