Comedian, writer, and podcaster Jamie Loftus has always known about Alcoholics Anonymous. As a kid, she loved the album where her dad kept all his AA chips — that little piece of plastic that marks a day, a month, a year of sobriety. Now as an adult, Jamie wanted to understand where that little chip came from. What she found is that imbued in that little chip is a hidden history — from Prohibition to women’s suffrage — of America’s relationship to gender, religion, and morality.
This is one of the most disappointing episodes I have ever heard broadcast on 99pi (and I have been a loyal fan for several years). I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous when I started a relationship with a female recovering alcoholic (whom I later married) in 1990. As she introduced me to AA and Al-Anon, I learned the history of the movement, warts and all. Is it a perfect institution? No. Has it done an immense amount of good for people and their families for almost a century? Yes.
J Loftus is so determined to attack AA on the basis of 2026 social mores that they completely fail in the historian’s basic task – to give a fair view of what the people in past years and eras actually understood and thought. In my time inside the world of AA and Al-Anon, I have found it to be much closer to the thoughts of the Buddha than of the Pope – “accept the things you cannot change”, and yes, to live “one day at a time”.
In the program we are taught not to “take another person’s inventory”, meaning not to diagnose the faults of our fellow travelers on the road. I would instead ask, no plead, with J Loftus to go back and work the 12 Steps, in order, with a sponsor. When they emerge on the other side of that experience, then get back to me.
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This is one of the most disappointing episodes I have ever heard broadcast on 99pi (and I have been a loyal fan for several years). I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous when I started a relationship with a female recovering alcoholic (whom I later married) in 1990. As she introduced me to AA and Al-Anon, I learned the history of the movement, warts and all. Is it a perfect institution? No. Has it done an immense amount of good for people and their families for almost a century? Yes.
J Loftus is so determined to attack AA on the basis of 2026 social mores that they completely fail in the historian’s basic task – to give a fair view of what the people in past years and eras actually understood and thought. In my time inside the world of AA and Al-Anon, I have found it to be much closer to the thoughts of the Buddha than of the Pope – “accept the things you cannot change”, and yes, to live “one day at a time”.
In the program we are taught not to “take another person’s inventory”, meaning not to diagnose the faults of our fellow travelers on the road. I would instead ask, no plead, with J Loftus to go back and work the 12 Steps, in order, with a sponsor. When they emerge on the other side of that experience, then get back to me.