Flashbulb Memories with Melissa Mann

Dubious Scrapbooks

How accurate are your autobiographical memories? In this episode, I take some time to check in on my own memories with my guest, Melissa Mann, currently director of donor communications for Reason Foundation, a national media organization and think tank that publishes Reason magazine, produces original videos, and uses in-depth public policy research to educate policymakers, journalists, and option leaders on the ideas of individual liberty, free markets, and the rule of law. (She writes a lot about a wide variety of political and cultural trends.) She started at Reason in 2001, took a detour in 2018 to let her hair go gray, and rejoined the organization in 2020.

Mann earned a bachelors' degree in diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles and attended graduate school at Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, where she also worked as a policy analyst in the German federal parliament. She has been, at various times, a drive-time terrestrial radio personality, a commercial voiceover actress, a journalist, a homeschooling parent, and a screwer-on of factory cogs. She is mom to Rook, who lives in the Seattle area, and the hu-mom to Charlie, a generally disinterested but sweet husky mix. She and her husband Michael Johnson, a retired movie propmaster, recently joined the California exodus and moved to a temperate rainforest in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina.

Melissa and I discuss episodic memory, focusing primarily on our memories of the death of John Lennon.

For more information, visit the Dubious Scrapbooks Podcast at https://dubiouspod.show/.