A quick outline of their history.

He thinks that prioritizing the animal over the question could lead to inferior science. You were jealous. Yes, it felt like-- I know it sounds silly.

I mean, science conferences are not exciting places. She wants to avoid confrontation. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. I guess I'm nervous for how long it could take, and to get too tired.

And so I continued to do the cowardly thing, and continued to do the selfish thing. You're already thinking of how you can move on from this, instead of just sitting with the awful knowledge that I've been sitting with this for six years. And I'm tired of talking about it. I mean, if 99% of all animals are not them-- and it was even crazier than that. It was more in the nature of an admission than an apology. He sees it as standing up for himself. We know a lot about them. He said one of the few responses he's gotten from men since he apologized was a guy who reached out to say how he felt frustrated that Dan had quote, gotten away with it, end quote, and he hadn't. (8 minutes), We start with someone getting up the nerve to do something that really, it would be nice to see more often — an apology. All content for This American Life is the property of This American Life and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting.

And then after that season, you know, I got overt about my feelings after it was wrapped because then-- and said, oh, I love you. Dan was Megan's boss, the creator of a TV show that was pretty much all consuming for the writers who worked on it. But it looked to me like in the vertebrate talks there were more people watching. She was really attractive. Dan tweeted, quote, "This was truly the year of the asshole, myself included. Yeah, that's the perfect summary. There's estimated to be something like 10 million species out there-- most haven't been studied at all and a few have been studied a ton. It's the only way I can describe it. Oh, man. Like for instance, he would do something, say something to me that I wouldn't take as inappropriate.

He sent me a photo of his notebook. And because I finally got to the point where I said to her, oh, this is-- you know, I love you, because that's what I thought it was when you target somebody for two years. A great guy and I feel bad for ghosting him. Let's go. That's like, why I come here. She's now an executive producer on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This American Life is produced in collaboration with WBEZ Chicago and delivered to stations by PRX The Public Radio Exchange. I do not want to be married anymore. Have you seen any concrete changes at all? And yes, some of them definitely agreed, ghosting is bad. People who put today's show together includes Bim Adewunmi, Emanuele Berry, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Whitney Dangerfield, Neil Drumming, Hilary Elkins Damien Graef, Chana Joffe-Walt, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Yeah, like we've been only looking at just a tiny sliver and we thought it was the whole world. I didn't know I was doing it when I did it. And you start doing this thing just because you're bored out of your mind? And they'd often end up doing what co-workers do. And when you do it, it makes me unable to know whether I'm good at my job. How did they get there, to forgiveness? Malcolm Rosenthal, he's a scientist, a behavioral ecologist. You can't watch that 1,000 times without getting a little bit attached. The end was basically a call to action. Nope. 05.12.2019 - By This American Life . Jackie's excited to explore their new neighborhood and Malcolm is still thinking about that fight.

And so I let myself keep doing it. I was humiliated.

I'm talking about the ones where they've agreed that something did happen, something bad. You know, we talk about the natural world and all the animals in it and all the things they do.

Lazare says a complete apology has to start with quote, "an acknowledgment of offense, i.e. First, how does this bias limit what humans know about the animal world? On a fundamental level, I was thinking about them as different creatures. I don't know, it just kind of-- I find it almost hard to imagine. Anyway, here's how the drama started. The question of, what are men supposed to do? I really want to be careful about that language. Please, don't you understand that focusing on me like this, liking me like this, preferring me like this, I can't say no to it. But Dan was impressed with Megan from her first script and he favored her flagrantly, insisting it was only about her work.

And second, what should we do about it?

Jackie's at home during all this. A few weeks later, Malcolm had to attend a mandatory training session about biosafety techniques-- nine hours of training and videos about proper glove use, lab coats, a three hour presentation on how to use a special kind of biology cabinet which are for like-- never mind. She has three pet rats that have cages, but they sleep in her bed and they chew through her sheets once a week. Malcolm said that even some of his own friends, his bird friends, also skipped the symposium. And we were getting cheers and fist pumps from the audience. And I would say, oh, don't worry about it.

Which brings us to Act Two, Act Two of our program, Because You're Spine, I Walk the Line.

So it's not even like it's all birds.

Here's Nancy. I don't want to get into answering all their questions and making them feel better about themselves or giving them feedback, you know? And then he stopped getting me weed and--. So we start dealing with somebody getting up the nerve to do something that really, it would be nice to see more often. I probably should have saved this till I got home tonight. She ghosts unapologetically. I don't need to be pissing off people who might later be able to give me a job.

Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. So I was bored. I mean, I hate to just throw numbers out instead of emotions, but birds and mammals together are less than one half of one half of 1% of all species and they represent half of all papers published in the past 50 years. This writer told him, when you focus on me, praise me so much, pick my jokes-- if you were doing it for the wrong reasons, even a little bit, that would undermine me devastatingly. They read part of the paper, got mad, and then didn't read the rest. Our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld and Miki Meek. BEEPED VERSION. By admitting them openly, he chose her well-being over his own comfort, maybe for the first time in their whole relationship. Dan kept saying, I want to do the right thing. Yeah, I mean, instead of in that moment thinking, oh, my god, are people picking up on something here that I'm not picking up on? I just didn't hear it. I mean, it sounds like there's some kind of an element with her, just like, ah well, yeah, you know, now you know how it feels. The person Dan Harmon was talking about is another writer, Megan Ganz. Malcolm says he's not arguing that there should be 450,000 papers on beetles for every one paper on starlings, just that maybe things are so out of whack that we're missing things and we don't even know what we're missing.

Could their path be a map for anyone else? And in about 20 minutes we're going to start the service. And, knowing he messed up, he ghosted the guy-- his first ghost, he says. Dan ended his apology with a lot of hope. Over two hundred people wrote in, facing big, life-changing moments, and some smaller ones.

And I just wasn't responding as quickly or as often and we weren't making plans.

People were yelling at me from the seats. I'm finally able-- I'm admitting, OK, I did all the things. Integrity meaning integrity is a writer, learning her craft. I guess maybe that's affirmative action. wrenching your brain away from its justifications and putting yourself in the other person's place." How does that make you feel? My PhD advisor just casually said, oh, well, of course, it probably has something to do with the fact that it's so much harder to get things published when you work with invertebrates. But when it came time to start the big two part conversation, they began by asking the audience, who here works with vertebrates? Malcolm's her husband. A real estate guy named Jason had a slightly different way of looking at this. I'm not talking about situations where a man denies anything happened. And most of the responses she got were positive.

Not everyone sees it this way.