60 Minutes - 08/16/2026: A Psychedelic Journey, The Mardi Gras Indians, The Indomitable Margaret Atwood

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

The Veterans Administration announced it would begin funding clinical trials to explore the use of psychedelic drugs for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and addiction. However, these trials are small, and even if successful, it will likely be years before veterans can access psychedelics at the VA. Many U.S. veterans struggling with PTSD aren’t waiting. Thousands of them are traveling overseas seeking relief at psychedelic retreats where these substances are legal to use, mostly in indigenous ceremonies. Correspondent Anderson Cooper follows nine veterans on a psychedelic journey to the west coast of Mexico, where they hope to find healing. Katie Brennan is the producer. Every year on Mardi Gras, Black revelers roam the backstreets of New Orleans in dazzling hand-sewn suits that take an entire year to create. Correspondent Bill Whitaker meets the Mardi Gras Indians, also known as Black Masking Indians, one of America’s last secret societies, who are preserving a culture that dates to at least the 1800s. It’s a tradition marked by resilience and resistance that honors their ancestors. Nichole Marks is the producer.Correspondent Jon Wertheim profiles literary titan Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. At 86, with 64 books to her name, Canada’s best-known author has been called the “prophet of doom” for her uncanny ability to write about catastrophes in her fiction before they happen in real life. Wertheim talks to Atwood about her memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, why she thinks The Handmaid’s Tale became a cultural touchstone, and how she refuses to be silenced by an increasing number of bans on her books. Nathalie Sommer is the producer.

The vets drank psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in some mushrooms, put on blindfolds to shut out distractions and lay down. The retreat was organized and paid for by the Heroic Hearts Project, a nonprofit that's helped more than a thousand U.S. veterans with combat-related PTSD access psychedelics. Them seeking this type of unauthorized therapy is just another indication on why we need to study this further and get it to a safe and effective medical environment. Every year on Mardi Gras Day, an extraordinary site emerges from the back streets of New Orleans. They call themselves Mardi Gras Indians or black masking Indians,

and they roam the neighborhoods in dazzling hand-sown suits. Tonight, we will show you the sights and sounds of one of America's last true secret societies. Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Margaret Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners. Her books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex?

What is it? I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Leslie Stahl. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. In 2024, the Veterans Administration announced for the first time it would begin funding its own clinical trials to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and addiction, using two psychedelic drugs, psilocybin, and MDMA. Even if the trials are successful, it would be years before the VA could prescribe either drug for its patients.

But as we first reported last year, thousands of veterans who are suffering or not waiting. Desperate for help, they're attending psychedelic retreats in countries where the drugs are legal to use, mostly in indigenous ceremonies. We were invited to join nine veterans who traveled to the west coast of Mexico for a psychedelic journey they hoped would finally help ease their pain. They came to Mexico from all over the United States, a group of nine veterans with invisible wounds, that are hard to heal. Their destination, a remote village near Puerto Vallarta,

for a week-long psychedelic retreat. It was a voyage into the unknown, but a risk worth taking for T.J. Duff, a former Navy sailor. Are you optimistic? Being optimistic is hard for me, because I've been through a lot of therapy, a lot of different treatments, and not a lot of success. Duff was 18 when he joined the Navy,

months into his first deployment, deployment aboard the USS Cole, he says he narrowly escaped death when two suicide bombers attacked the ship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. Everyone around me was killed. There's bodies alive and dead being piled up in the midships, and I think that's really where I just started holding everything in. I don't have it where I'm jumping in ditches when I hear loud noises. My PTSD's is kind of a self-destructive form. Randy Weaver is a police. police officer in New York, a former staff sergeant in the Army, he was diagnosed with PTSD in 2007

after returning home from tours in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's the constant, you know, what if I had done this? What if we did that? You know. Are those things you want to revisit while you're taking the psilocybin? Yeah, if I could revisit them and see them maybe from a different perspective, like not, or I failed somebody, Is there a particular incident that you feel you failed somebody? Yeah, so March 18th, 20 years ago. In 2004, Weaver's platoon was caught in a firefight in an Afghan village. Two soldiers were killed, one of them his friend, Staff Sergeant Anthony Lagman.

Weaver's worn this bracelet with Lagman's name on it since coming home. You've been wearing that for 20 years? Yeah, every day. Weaver says he's tried nearly every treatment for PTSD, the VA offers, including talk therapy, exposure therapy, meditation, and antidepressants. You get to a point where you're so mentally exhausted and you've created so much destruction that your demons tell yourself that your family would be better off without you. And when those demons tell you those things every day, it's something hard to ignore.

Will this help with that? I hope so. The retreat was organized and paid for by the Heroic Hearts Project, a nonprofit that's helped more than a thousand U.S. veterans with combat-related PTSD access psychedelics. I came home super angry, super anxious, hypervigilant. You know, that led to a pretty nasty divorce. Ed Glover was in Afghanistan with the Marines. He's been a firefighter for 22 years.

I feel like one or two traumatic events you may be able to recover from, but kind of seeing it day in, day out, really, takes its toll. As the vets talked, it became clear. Some of their struggles began long before they joined the military. My family life was just always this constant conflict. Navy vet, Michael Giardina, had an emotionally abusive father who killed himself 17 years ago. His sister died by suicide five months before he came here. My daughter asked my ex-wife if I was going to kill myself, and I'm not. I just want to get better. To qualify for this retreat, they had to work with their doctors to wean off any antidepressant or anxiety medication they might be taking because of how

it could interact with the psychedelics. They also had to have a medical screening and no family history of psychosis or schizophrenia. When we were there, a local doctor was on site, but no mental health professionals. I appreciate you guys for putting the faith in me, the faith in us coming here. Jesse Gould, a former Army Ranger, founded the Heroic Hearts Project in 2017 after he tried another psychedelic, ayahuasca, at a retreat in Peru. Gould says psychedelics can help veterans revisit traumatic moments in ways they may be unable to with other therapies. The value, what we're finding with psychedelics is it's a very individualistic journey. You know, it comes at you. It brings up the emotions. It heightens your senses.

And so you're having to face it. And so that's why you see such big revelations, because, it's giving you the tools to actually get there. Do you worry that some who see this as sort of the last hope may end up disappointed? I worry that we're at the situation where people are having to go to other countries for their last hope. That indicates a major flaw in the system. The orange one? Okay. Heroic hearts hired traditional healers to conduct three psychedelic ceremonies.

The first two with psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in some mushrooms. It's been used as medicine by indigenous communities. in Mexico and elsewhere for centuries. You don't need to be strong. All we need for this experience and to receive the healing is humbleness. The healers stirred ground-up mushrooms into a tea. The vets drank it, put on blindfolds to shut out distractions,

and lay down. At first, it seemed like the group might have traveled thousands of miles for a midday nap. But then, about an hour in, we saw Michael Giardina raise his hand for help. His foot soon started to shake, followed by his whole body. By hour three, it was clear the psilocybin had kicked in. Randy Weaver and T.J. Duff barely seemed to move, while firefighter Ed Glover appeared caught between rapture and deep sorrow.

Five hours later, when the psilocybin began to wear off, the vets removed their eyemass and found the heat of the afternoon sun. The next day, the group gathered to discuss what they'd gone through. It literally felt like an exorcism. My foot was going crazy. I could kind of feel like my body was convulsing. I felt like I was taking every last breath of any victim, patient, or friend that I had lost. So I really struggled to breathe yesterday.

I've never done anything like that before. Randy Weaver appeared to find some of what he traveled all this way for. One thing that I remember very vividly was flying back with the guys that we lost. Like being on that medevac, even though I wasn't there in the real world, I was there spiritually with them. T.J. Duff, however, found it unsettling. time scary. I've heard a lot of your guys stories and I did not get as immersive as you guys did. I'm kind of glad I didn't, honestly, because I was kind of afraid of that.

That night, Duff took part in another psilocybin ceremony, but the next day he left. He later told us the whole experience caused a dangerous decline in his mental health. He's now back on antidepressant medication. The last ceremony of the retreat was with 5MEO DMT, a powerful and fast-acting psychedelic, secreted from a toad. After returning home, the vets had several virtual meetings with a heroic heart project to counselor. I think my biggest takeaway was making sure I make the time to take care of myself. The Veterans Administration warns against self-medicating with psychedelics or using them as part of a self-treatment program. But when we spoke to its top doctor, Sharif El Nahal, in 2024,

he was enthusiastic about their potential. Do these retreats concern? They can concern me because there's no way to monitor, certify, make sure that they're actually safe environments. They're seeking these therapies because they do not see our current options for them to be effective enough, and they're in a state of desperation. And that in and in of itself, them seeking this type of unauthorized therapy is just another indication on why we need to study this further

and get it to a safe and effective medical nurse. environment. In 2024, the FDA rejected a pharmaceutical company's application to use the psychedelic MDMA in combination with therapy as a treatment for PTSD. After an FDA advisory panel said there wasn't enough evidence, it was safe or effective. The VA is now involved in 20 clinical trials using psychedelics, including MDMA and psilocybin, to treat several mental health disorders. Dr. Elnohal told us a small phase two trial by the VA using MDMA, MDMA and therapy to treat PTSD completed two years ago showed real promise. 45% have gone into complete remission, which is essentially a normal emotional state

that is unheard of with prolonged exposure, cognitive processing, and certainly SSRIs, the current standard of care options. Almost half of the people who came in with PTSD and did MDMA therapy at the VA were cured? Yes. So you have no doubt that this works. We need to do larger phase three clinical trials. That's the best way scientifically to understand what the true adverse events are and whether we can reproduce these results in larger populations of veterans.

I'm very optimistic. We will be able to demonstrate that. How long do you think it'll be before veterans can go to the VA and get this therapy? It could be another couple of years. The incoming administration is going to take a pretty bold stance on this. When makes you optimistic that the new administration is going to be a believer in this? We've heard the nominee for HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talk about what he thinks the potential breakthrough therapy is.

We'll see what the stance is of other health officials. But that's really promising. Nearly a year after that retreat in Mexico, we checked in with the nine veterans who attended. Eight of them told us their symptoms had improved and called their experience with psychedelics life-changing. Ed Glover said he felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. How are you doing? Very well. Shortly after coming home from the retreat, he decided to retire as a firefighter. Prior to the retreat, I thought about taking my life just about every day. I had a very close call. You know, the note, the gun, that is no longer the case.

You haven't had thoughts of killing yourself since then? Not one. And Randy Weaver says his suicidal ideations have stopped as well. I don't have any of those thoughts since going through this journey. That's remarkable. I would say, yeah. You had told the group afterward that you had visualized people on a MEDAVAC helicopter that you had served with. What was the impact of that?

In combat, things happened quickly. One minute you're talking to your friend and the next minute, you know, you're putting him in a body back. That causes a gap in your psyche. So to be able to revisit those incidences, you know, seeing those helicopters come back with friends, it brings a little piece to you. In April, President Trump signed an executive order seeking to accelerate the research and approval of some psychedelic drugs as mental health treatments. including psilocybin and MDMA, by directing federal agencies to ease restrictions that have long limited scientists' ability to study them.

On Reddit, true crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves. Every Tuesday on crimes of Reddit, we read these posts out loud. I'm Sabrina DeAnnevoga. And I'm Alexis Linkletter. One of us brings the story, the other goes in blind, reacting in real time just like you. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Listen to and follow Crimes of Reddit, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Every year on Mardi Gras morning, something extraordinary emerges from the back streets of New Orleans. Groups of black revelers most tourists will never see. They call themselves Mardi Gras Indians or black masking Indians, and they roam the city's neighborhoods in dazzling hand-sown suits. As we first told you in April, the tradition dates to the 1800s as a way to honor their ancestors,

and, according to Mardi Gras Indian lore, is rooted in profound respect for Native Americans, said to have sheltered enslaved Africans who had escaped. It's an expression of joy, protest, and pride passed from generation to generation. Tonight, you'll meet the artists and musicians preserving the culture and take in the sights and sounds of one of America's last true secret societies. If you're lucky enough to find them, you'll discover a vibrant tapestry of African, Caribbean, and Native American threads,

part of the cultural gumbo that is New Orleans. These extravagant suits, plumed, bejeweled, beaded and sequined, are handcrafted in secret for, an entire year to be unveiled on Mardi Gras Day. Chawa, that's Big Chief De Man Mlansan of the young Seminole hunters, announcing his arrival. Chawa! Who the best?

Who got the best bee work? Who got the best rhinestones? Who could sing the best? Who got the biggest tribe? Who don't? That's what it is. There are dozens of groups calling themselves tribes. The leader is known as the big team.

chief, who along with his big queen and their crew strut through historically black neighborhoods searching for other tribes. When Big Chief De Man meets another big chief, they square off in mock battle, competing to show whose suit is, in their words, the prettiest. We saw DeMond face down tribes all over the city. What does happen back there? It looked like he just bowed out. But you won. Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

We're on fire. We're on fire. We're on fire. We don't fire you. Who are you on Marty Grande? When I put that suit on, I'm big chief de Maimon Malone. Is that different from the demand who's sitting here in front of me now? Yes, indeed.

How different? Somebody that's ready to honor everything that I was taught by my elders. And I'm ready to kill you there with the kneeling trade. Needle and thread to do the work of his heart and hands. Big Chief DeMond and his wife Alicia, meticulous as surgeons, sew beads the size of chia seeds on a canvas and stitch rhinestones in place with dental floss. Painting with beads, making artwork for his suit.

What to you makes a suit pretty? The hookup. What do you mean? How it's laid out, how the velvet gets around it, how you break the feathers. how you manipulate the feathers, how many rows of rindstones you have around the bee were. That's the perfection of knowing your hookup

if you're that good. Oh, wow. This year's suit tells the story of the Amistad, a slave ship seized by the captive Africans in 1839, led by a man called Sin K. This panel shows when the Africans won their freedom in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Look at this.

John Quincy Adam. He was one of the lawyers on the case. My God. So you're doing this, like, nonstop? I sold some six in the morning and 12 at night. And this is every day? Every day. Every day. Why?

I said, man, without these beads, I couldn't breathe. And every breath is hard earned. It can take thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to design and sew a suit. For years, Big Chief Demand. was laying concrete and cooking lobsters pouring all his spare time and money into his creations. He now makes a living as an artist. This year's suit costs $25,000.

But this flamboyant display is not a beauty pageant. It's the flowering of deep roots. The community is what makes me, it's my fuel, the people. Your fuel. Yeah, it fuse the fire. Because you're doing it for them. Like, you do this for your community and your people. It is the greatest kept secret in America.

Been throughout the world today is the Mardi Gras Indian culture. This culture is date back to slavery days. I have hope. Howard Miller is the president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council, a governing body for the tribes, and chief of the Creole Wild West. He told us it's a culture shaped by resistance to oppression and sustained by resilience.

How would you explain the Mardi Gras Indians to people who don't have a clue what they're about? Well, we weren't allowed to go to those big parades and stuff. So this in our community was about a lifting our people in a proudly manner. There's no one definitive origin story, but historians have found references to the tradition dating back to the mid-1800s. According to stories passed down through generations, when enslaved people escape New Orleans, Native Americans in the bayous gave them refuge. Today, many tribe members claim indigenous and African roots. Masking, some say, began as a way to honor those indigenous tribes

while disguising or masking their African identity. Because here in America, especially here in the South, everything about Africa was forbidden. So we went behind a mask as innings to practice our culture. Was it easy to join a tribe? No, it wasn't. In 1969, it took then 12-year-old Howard Miller six weeks just to get in the door of a big chief's house, the tribe's headquarters. I had a friend of mine, he was in it, and I would go around there with him trying to get in.

But they wouldn't let me in the gate. Wouldn't even let you in the gate? No, I had to stay outside of y'all while he'd go in there. Eventually, I got on the porch, and I was watching all this here magic with the suits and what they was doing and installed a rainstorm. thunder, lightning, raining hard. I'm getting wet. And the chief said, that boy's still on the porch.

And somebody said, yep, tell that boy to come on in here. That's how I got in the house. We visited the home of Joseph Pierre Boudreau, better known as Big Chief Monk of the Golden Eagles tribe. Big Chiefs aren't just heads of their tribes, their mentors and community leaders, and Big Chief Monk is one of the most respected.

But the working-class neighborhoods that sustain the tribes have been thinned and scattered by Hurricane Katrina and gentrification. 84-year-old monk Brudrow is determined to hold on to the community and legacy and is preparing for his 72nd year of masking. We can't do it. We can't do it. Let the world know that we're here and we've been here. We ain't just got here.

We've been here. You didn't go see that. We joined the Boudros in a sewing circle before Mardi Gras. For decades, Big Chief Monks sewed suits for his children and grandchildren. This year, they gathered and helped him sew his. My whole family's talent, you know, by just sitting there watching me for all these years, you know, as kids. They were always right there while I was sewing sitting right there. All night long, all night long.

All those long hours of sewing inspired a song. In the 1970s, Monk was one of the first to marry Mardi Gras Indian chants to New Orleans Funk. His albums earned two Grammy nominations. His son Joseph and grandson Juan often sang backup. We met them, Monk's daughter Winoca and grandson Marwan, at one of Monk's favorite New Orleans clubs, Tipitinas. What's his impact on the culture? The impact that Michael Jordan had on basketball.

Yeah, I'll put it like... It's like, you can't mention Madagraud without Mok. Yeah. I'll achieve you. I never saw him take a break. Like, I never saw him say, oh, this year I'm not coming. You know, my father, he took something that was made for the culture in the streets, and he was one of the pioneers that took it global.

There's not a person in the city of New Orleans that soles an Indian suit and they don't put on his music. Big Chief Demand included. Lord. That man makes me cry. Like Monk. He'd do me something. He's moved by the music and the weight of his calling. The expense almost left him destitute.

You've sacrificed a lot to make sense. these suits. You lost a house because you were so consumed with making your suit. Yeah, yeah. Because it's hard. I know it's hard, but losing a house didn't make you stop. What? Why? Why? Because you got put out of your house. No, indeed. I'm preserving the culture. And the fine art world has taken notice. His suits and beaded portraits have been displayed in museums and galleries all over the world. It's allowed him to buy a new house, every inch of which was covered with plumes and patches the evening before Mardi Gras.

Y'all ready? After working through the night, Big Chief Demand emerged transformed in a suit that stood more than 10 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds. He used a U-Haul to move from place to place, but he tells us there was something else carrying him along. The spirits come down every time we put it on, especially with me. You know, my elders live through me, and it's an opening of the gates. What do you mean? That means they came down, they're coming through me, to walk in their shoes on the streets of New Orleans, like they taught us.

So what we're doing is we preserving it for that nice generation to be able to walk like I walked. It's going to change my life. The spirits, it seems, are opening other gates for him. This suit is currently on display at the Venice Biennale in Italy, the world's most prestigious art exhibition. Do you think your success in the art world will encourage a younger generation to carry on with this culture? I pray it does.

And I pray one of them picks up a need and want to do what I do. You know? Preserving tradition for the next generation. We heard that a lot here. It's what big chief monk Monk lives for. But this year he was too weak to march with his tribe. Just before Mardi Gras, he was diagnosed with cancer. But he came out on his porch to see the tribe off with the Mardi Gras Indians most sacred hymn.

What's it like for you to see your tribe march off and you're not joining them this year? Well, I knew that time was gonna come, but I didn't know where. But you got to see it this day. Yeah, right. Well, I was going to see this day. And the day is coming, he told us, for him to pass his crown on to the next chief. Like I say, if you don't keep it going,

if you lose it, it's gone forever, finished. You know, I think it's just disappeared? Not here in New Orleans. Not here in New Orleans? No. Uh-uh. You keep it rolling. Keeping it rolling and chanting and showing off, a culture in full bloom, too pretty, too rooted to fade, just yet.

The Anatomy of a Showdown. It's a war film. It's basically a bad. At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. You're an 86-year-old titan of literature, have been for half century now. You're Canada's best-known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly, you find your work on lists of banned books scrubbed from 135 American school districts. Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. But you've also been censored for work like the Testaments and the Blind Assassin,

both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly worded opinion pieces. But as we first told you last fall, if you're the indomitable Margaret Atwood, you don't stop there. Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners by torching an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit Pan America, a nonprofit that champions free speech. Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt,

anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peaved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? You've had any indirect sex lately? Second wave feminism here. Outwood speaks as she writes, with a mix of wisdom and deadpan wit. Last fall, she invited us into her Toronto home. Do you know offhand how many languages your books have been translated in? Well, we say over 50 for everything.

How old are you? Over 50. How many books have you written? Over 50. How many awards have you won? Over 50. I thought so. Under his eye. Under his eye. Published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship,

where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite. Give me children or else I die. The book would sell more than 10 million copies and spawn an Emmy-winning Hulu series. Beyond that, its scarlet costume would become a uniform of real-life protest and resistance. Shame! Shee! Handmaid's Tale is your magnum opus.

You think? You're a great Gatsby. How are you with that? Well, I would question the premise. It was? Yeah. It's not due to me or the excellence of the book. It's partly the twists and turns of history.

With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Handmaid's tale began for many readers to feel eerily prescient. Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on. a shelf somewhere and people would be saying, I'm jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen. Or didn't it?

In 2003's Orix and Craig, for instance, Atwood wrote of environmental collapse and a global pandemic. Pick a catastrophe, any catastrophe. Before the real world did its thing, she warned about it in her fiction. It wasn't, you know, this is

going to happen without a doubt. This could happen. This might happen, so you should be on the watch for it. What is your relationship with this idea that you're the prophet of doom, this Cassandra, the forecaster of dystopia? I think I'm very positive if I didn't kill everybody off at the end. You know, some people do. These are rare books.

A lot of them are pretty obscure. If Atwood can see around corners, it's because her visions have historical precedent. They come rooted in actual events. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Atwood is archived stacks of her. research. That is the hundreds of news clippings that substantiate her plots. So this is folder upon folder of your research for handmade's tale. Oh, yeah, lots of bit. She writes by a strict rule. If it didn't happen, somewhere at some time, it doesn't make it into the pages of her fiction.

Women forced to have babies. Communists are making women have babies. Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state. It's not all doom and gloom. Atwood showed us the cover she designed for her first volume of poetry. She also writes short stories and children's books. For her new book, a new genre. Her memoir, Book of Lives, published last November,

takes the full sweep of her life, starting with a free-range childhood spent in the deep wilderness of Quebec. She was homeschooled until the age of 12, while her father did fieldwork on insects as an entomologist. You wrote some family stop for ice cream on the side of the road. You stopped for infestation. We stopped for infestation. So what was that like?

You screeched to a halt. Father would get out of the car with his tarpaulin and his axe, and he would go to the infestation. He would spread the tarp out under the tree and hit the trunk with an axe, and then the things would fall out, and he would collect them. And you're in the backseat thinking what? Oh, no. We were usually out of the car watching.

watching him do it. What did you learn watching him go to work? I think probably growing up with the biologist makes you quite particular about details, because you're not saying that's a butterfly, you're saying what kind of butterfly, you're not saying that's a tree, you usually know what kind of tree. That's what draws people to reading. Intent on spinning details into prose and becoming a writer, Atwood enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

Well, poetry was the big form in Canada in the 60s. A young poet, she hit the reading circuit and performed in student plays and reviews here at Hart House, one of Canada's oldest theaters. No, I'm not, I'm just to show off. And when Margaret Atwood wants to show off, you surrender the stage. You have to stand over there. Hold my purse. Here's not just any curtsy, but she informed us the 17th century Jacobian court curtsy, she learned for a college production. We told you she's a stickler for detail.

How do I respond to that? Oh, you bow. Thank you. You remember that? Why are you so surprised that I remember things? Before we left the theater, Atwood showed us another party trick. I'm not getting vibes. Okay.

You're not getting vibes for me? No. We're doing the classic Renaissance hand reading. Yes, she reads Ponds, another mode for investigation. People might think that you're just a very reasonable sort of rational person, but in fact you have this other, this intuition. So some people stop there, and they're very logical, and that's it. You were not one of those people.

And we can see that you'll never be a murderous dictator for which we are pleased. I got that going for me. Back to our protagonist, when she graduated in 1961, Canadian writers were encouraged to pursue careers outside the country. Give us a sense of the Canadian lit scene when you were in college. What Canadian lit scene? Still, Atwood stayed and helped found the country's now thriving literary institutions. Along the way, she met another writer, the late Graham Gibson, who would become her long-time partner.

So quintessentially Canadian, their courtship peaked with a canoe trip. We were both the kinds of people that if the canoe trip hadn't worked out, that would have been it. Good barometer for a relationship. Yeah. If you can deal with the canoe trip, you can probably deal with lots of other things, too. And they did. Gibson came to the relationship with some baggage, a quote, undivorced wife and two kids. In her memoir, Atwood confront the complications of the blended family. Could I ask you to read a bit for us? Yes.

There are several letters in this book for me to my inner advice columnist. Everybody has one. Dear inner advice columnist, sorry to bother you. Atwood uses the columnist device to confess that though she and Graham have a daughter of their own, she wants more children. We are back at the farm after Scotland, and I've brought up the subject of a second child. I would like one, but Graham has said that a total of three is enough for him. I feel deprived, resentful, and disrespected.

If that sounds harsh, listen to the columnist's response, the advice she gave herself. Oh, for heaven's sakes, count your blessings. Some people don't know when they're well off. Many would give the shirt off their back to have your luck in men. Suck it up. Cherish your child. Get another cat. Your inner advice columnist.

You can chase he's rather severe. That's a very get-over-yourself advice you gave yourself. Very get-over-your-self advice, but Canadians are pretty get-over-your-self people. The Handmaids' Tale! Humility aside, Canada's leading literary figure has become something of a cult figure and a leading voice on all things Canadian. We asked her about the recent chill between her country and the United States as President Trump raises tariffs and threatens to turn our northern neighbors into a 51st state.

Atwood says the Canadian. response is best summed up by one phrase. It's a hockey thing, and it was this character called Gordie Howe, who is a very revered hockey player. Elbows up is when somebody gets you into the corner, and you block them by putting your elbow up. And it means, don't mess with me. And for those who speak of the 51st state, I do point out that it wouldn't be just

one state. What do you mean? It's very big. You can't make the whole thing just one state. And anyway, Quebec would never stand for it. You think you're going to make them part of a unilingual big entity? Think again. Atwood is a student of government, power, and the overreaches of both.

She wrote much of the Handmaid's Tale on a rented typewriter in 1984 West Berlin. She recalls hearing sonic booms from the other side of the wall. In her ventures to the Eastern Bloc, she witnessed policing, paranoia, and the absence of freedom. In her memoir, too, she addresses the... the erosion of democracy. You say the overriding ordinary civil liberties is one of the signposts on the road to dictatorship. Do you see the U.S. on that road right now? I don't think I would be wrong if I said it's concerning.

There's certain things that totalitarian coups always do. Like what? One of them is trying to get control of the media. But the other thing is making the judicial arm part of the executive. In other words, judges just do what the chief guide tells them to. If you're saying the signposts, the signifiers of totalitarian society are... There's some warning lights flashing for sure. Amid the warning lights, a series based on the Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale,

began streaming on Hulu this year. But just when you think you can predict on which side of the political divide Atwood falls, she confounds by saying something like this. Just for the record, I've always been attacked more from the left than I have from the right. Why's that? Well, I think the right thinks I'm irrelevant. And the left thinks that I should have been preaching their sermon, whatever it may happen to be, and that I am therefore a traitor for not having done that which they themselves would do.

And what's your response to that? It's unprintable. It involves a finger. Do I see a little blush? Do I see a little bit of blush? She may turn us red. She did not turn us to stone. I'm paraphrasing here, but in your memoir you say you sometimes cut this medusa-like figure with a medusa-like stare with interviewers.

I feel like we're doing okay. The earlier me. The earlier me. Now I'm a nice old lady, so you don't have to be worried. Why the pivot? I've gone older. I became a blonde. This was my way of saying.

enjoyed this conversation. Oh, is that your way of saying it? So why aren't you a scary old witch? Is that weird your way of saying it? Critically acclaimed series, Colin from Accounts returns for a brand new season. But what is it? We're friends.

We have together Lee. We're friendly together. With a dog. Colin from Accounts, new season, streaming September 10th, only on Paramount Plus.