The Breakup Theory

About The Breakup Theory

Conversations about collective liberation and ending things Follow and support us at https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory/

Publisher

The Breakup Theory

Category

society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

10 Jan 2024

Latest episode

23 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

35 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Jun 2026

   Episode 35 - Give Out But Don't Give Up with Josh Rivers and Conner Habib

   Hi everyone! I have been putting up episodes less frequently, but I'm hoping to change that. I just turned in the manuscript from my next book, which took over a bunch of time. But I am planning for some great conversations coming up over the next months, so stay tuned. This is a special episode. I got to talk with two beautiful thinkers and doers, Josh Rivers and Conner Habib. Josh makes the podcast Busy Being Black, where he hosts deep, heartfelt discussions with Black artists, writers, and philosophers. I love Josh's openness in his approach, the way he forges connections with his conversation partners, and how he brings so many strands of ideas and practices together. Conner makes Against Everyone with Conner Habib, where he also hosts discussions with thinkers, writers, and artists about political, spiritual, and creative questions. Conner digs deep into the material and always has so much wisdom to offer. Also, make sure you check out Conner's harrowing debut novel, Hawk Mountain. It hit me somewhere deep, familiar, unnerving. I loved it. If you listen to the Breakup Theory, you may already be familiar with Conner, since we have recorded multiple times together. But if you haven't checked out Josh's or Conner's work, you are about to find a huge catalog of important topics and amazing people in conversation. Go do it now! Josh and Conner are honestly two of my favorite people to talk with. My favored approach to thinking is in dialogue with others, not following any specific plan, but moving associatively through the meeting of our thoughts, references, and questions. I love going into something not knowing how I will come out of it, welcoming in discovery that fires me up and sets me on new paths. Both Josh and Conner are the kind of people who thrive on this approach too. This is what we do in the following conversation. It was sparked by a series Conner made on his podcast called A New Spiritual Society, inspired by one of Conner's spiritual teachers Rupdolph Steiner's idea of fourfolding. Conner follows this framework to plumb the depths of the spiritual heart of culture, politics, and the economy. You don't have to listen to this series to understand our discussion, but I highly recommend that you do. Conner specifically gears his thinking to our current situation and provides insight into how we might reframe the way we do things and the way we are situated in the world. The series is really a feat of the imagination, and also very helpful. Josh and I came in to follow the thread of the spiritual heart, bringing in our own current projects and thinking. All of us have different passions, with some overlapping, and this makes for a wide-ranging conversation. At the end, Josh prompts us each to ask a question of the other two, which kind of works to sum up the lines of thoughts we follow. JOSHUA: How do you care for what you love? CONNER: If you let go of the set of capitalism vs communism (or socialism) what's left in your view of how to change the world? SHULI: How do you open things up so that you have a new and altered view? At the end, Josh then invites us to dance. Maybe you will find that desire in yourself as well. I loved this conversation and I'm still energized by it, so I hope you find it inspiring too. I won't go on longer because our talk is substantial. Let me know what you think! Before we get into the conversation, I'll do my usual rundown of ways you can support this project. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! I love hearing from people about their thoughts—but as always any questions you might want us to tackle on the show. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or using the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories. Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me. If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more.

2. 

   5 May 2026

   Episode 34 - A Listener Letter with Amar: All Relationships have some form of pain

   Today, I tackle a letter with an old friend, Amar, who some of you may know from his work on The Final Straw Radio. He is one of the reasons I am making this show, as The Final Straw invited me in to start recording conversations. In past Final Straw episodes, Amar and I have tackled different internal and external struggles with people addressing conflict or proposing new paths for social relations. Amar's curiousness and openness has always been personally helpful to me when trying to chew over difficult feelings and ideas. He has a capacious understanding and gives so much grace to the experience of problems we run into while we are trying to do good. Now, this letter has actually been sitting in my inbox for a while, and I feel bad that I let it go for so long. I can make excuses, like last year involving a bunch of personal stuff that took up most of my attention, and then the need to finish my new book. But I'll also admit that at first I wasn't sure how to tackle the issues the letter writer raised in a way that honored all of the feelings. There were many factors going on in a time of great crisis and I wanted to try to hold them all together. I kept batting around ways to approach it, until finally I realized Amar would be the perfect person to bring into the conversation. And as you will see, I was not wrong! In our conversation, we tackle the breakup of a long monogamous relationship and the debut of a new polyamorous life, an international romance beset by war and geopolitics, and the sudden letdown of planned encounter canceled at the last minute. There are so many big feelings here that the letter brings up and each one could be the focus on its own conversation. Bringing them all together surely tangled up the writer who was trying to sort out a new phase of life and a new way of relating to lovers. I hope the writer is still listening to the podcast and can find some support in our conversation here. It is likely that their life has moved on in ways, but perhaps there is some feeling lingering here that can find some reflection in our engagement. But of course, I imagine that our discussion will reach other listeners too. With this letter episode, my wish is to spark some more correspondence. It hasn't been the focus of the most recent Breakup Theory shows, but it is one of my favorite things to do and I know listeners love to hear these discussions—whether they are the one who wrote or not. We are all getting hit hard out there. So please write, or tell your friends who are struggling to reach out. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or use the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories (the latter is encrypted and anonymous). Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me with your question. I really love hearing from you—and so do the other gay anarchists and friends who listen. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me I will be hosting a book club on our discord server June 3 at 5pm eastern on the  queer anarcho-nihilist journal baedan (the first issue), a hugely influential text for me. Subscribe and join us, whether or not you read the book! Everyone is welcome! As Amar says at the end, go find The Final Straw Radio. It is a long-running resource to learn about anarchist actions, struggles, analysis, and ideas. The show is so wide-ranging in its subjects and guests, it will surely open up your horizons. Plus, they make zines out of the transcripts of different episodes. You can print them out for the event you are tabling at. You can find them on any podcast app and select radio stations. But also support them at https://www.patreon.com/tfsr There are different tiers of membership that help fund the transcription. You can get gifts like zines, stickers, and pins. You can even get your zine sent to an incarcerated comrade. You can find their tremendous back catalog at https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/ If you search, you will see the episodes I contributed (under an old name). I'm linking to a conversation we recorded with Vicky about a really interesting essay put out by Your Lazy Comrades in the year following the George Floyd uprising and another on misogyny in anti-fascist movements. https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2022/04/10/the-interregnum-roundtable-with-vicky-osterweil/ https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2021/08/09/combating-movement-misogyny/ The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at channelzeronetwork.com

3. 

   8 Apr 2026

   Episode 33 - Opening Up the Personal Essay (Trans Style) With Megan Milks

   Today I talk with the great writer and friend Megan Milks about their new essay collection Mega Milk, published this year by Feminist Press. I just have to say that Mega Milk by Megan Milks is maybe the best title/author combo that will ever exist. But beyond that amazingness, Megan's book contains many paths of exploration through milk both literal and metaphorical toward questions of names, transition, family history and dynamics, nourishment, connection, and human relationships with animals, agriculture, business, and land. The book is vulnerable, freaky, kinky, funny, and informative, all at once. As I say to Megan, I find the genre of the personal essay to be one of the most difficult types of writing to pull off well. You need to find something singular enough to make broad connection with an array of readers, and often the most successful type nestles such a memoir inside a tangential impersonal narrative based in research and fact. With a book, there is typically a thematic line (here, milk) that is able to hold the essays together loosely without strangling them. The key is for the writer to open the essay up to all of the contingent possibilities while still maintaining a formal hand to guide the reader. It is not a genre I have delved much into, stopping immediately at the vulnerability. One of the most interesting things to me about the trans personal essay collection in particular is how it gets at transition askew. It is not a transition narrative, from A to B (the classic kind). Nor is it a realist stylization of trans experience. Where transition comes in, it is in pieces, resisting linear time, often becoming incidental to the thoughts, feelings, and research of the writer. And yet, transness is somehow always there. I think it is an exciting place for trans literature to go, navigating out of the genre stereotypes that congeal every half decade or so. As with names, which Megan and I discuss, there is perhaps a kind of ambivalence towards the representation of transness. I bring up Ralph Ellison's essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," which ruminates on his near namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, placing Ellison into a particular relationship to American literature, a burden of an inheritance to take on as he also aimed to escape the nightmare of history into invisibility. The name works retroactively, creating meaning where maybe there was none. This pertains too to the trans narrative, told retroactively often with an attempt to make it seem fated from the beginning. Megan's name is not hidden, but they wrestle with its potential fatefulness, with transition coming in as a kind of freeing or loosening while still retaining that meaningful burden. Okay, I'm getting all lit crit on you. And perhaps this veers away from Megan's own thinking here. So I will let Megan talk for themself in our conversation. But first, I can't recommend this book enough, so pick it up at your favorite bookstore. Megan has two other books with Feminist Press, the novel, Maragaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body—which I loved so much as it plays with the kid detective genres of my childhood—and Slug, a collection of short stories. Get them all! Megan is also out on book tour. If you listen to this when it comes out, you can still catch Megan in Chicago on April 10 at Women and Children First (https://womenandchildrenfirst.com/).  Also 5/14 in Decatur, GA at Charis Books as part of Sam Ace's Meet Me There Series, with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (another beautiful writer). And  6/11 in Boston at the Model Cafe - T4T Reading Series. You can follow Megan on Instagram @sklimnegam . Megan often offers workshops, which you can learn about there. Before we get into the conversation, I'll do my usual rundown of ways you can support this project. If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! I love hearing from people about their thoughts—but as always any questions you might want us to tackle on the show. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or using the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories. Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me. If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing. If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me I will be hosting a book club on our discord server April 22 at 5pm eastern on the anarcho-nihilist book Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski. Subscribe and join us, whether or not you read the book! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

4,818,331

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

17 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

22 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 54 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

50

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

51