Anne Helen Petersen (no relation) is one of my favorite cultural critics. When I was a baby writer just starting to collect bylines, Anne was someone I consistently looked up to. She can write about ANY topic--even one you think you might be bored by--and reveal what's interesting about it.

I will talk to Anne about anything any time, so when she asked me to come on the Culture Study podcast to talk about recent momfluencer trends, I obviously said fuck yes. I hope you enjoy our conversation about Brooke Raybould (always and forever); the trend of postpartum family communication (??); and much more. And if you're not already subscribing to Culture Study, you can do so here. Some of my favorite Culture Study eps/posts include:

Taylor Swift And The Good Girl Trap

"This Book Occurs Exactly At The Place The Far Right And The Far Left Meet"

Your Kitchen Objects Are Filled With Feelings

What's With All This Eldest Daughter Discourse?

How Your House Makes You Miserable

Anne and I have also collaborated on this essay about Kate Middleton's cancer remission video, and this analysis of the launch of the Ballerina Farm electrolyte powder. To quote Rufus Wainwright, oh what a world we live in!

This week, Emily and I talk about the very real consideration of what to watch, what to read, and what to listen to on any given day. There are SO MANY buzzy new shows, hard-hitting podcasts, and novels everyone is talking about. If one has a job, has relationships, and goes to bed at 9:30 PM (for example!), how does one prioritize media consumption? If you're on a book bender, do you let TV fall by the wayside? Can you read simultaneous books? DO YOU EVEN LISTEN TO MUSIC EVER?

Also: Are you guys interested in a Consumption Club? ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Sound off in the comments!!

Last week, I wrote about Lee Tilghman's LATEST reinvention, which has triggered quite the response. Some of my favorites include this essay by fitness and exercise writer Anna Maltby and this incisive analysis by Mallory DeMille.

In her book, Lee Tilghman wrote about how the wellness influencer economy exacerbated her tendency towards restriction, tracking, and disordered eating. Not even a year later, her online presence is effectively rewriting this thesis. In Tilghman's "method" launch, she includes a before/after photo; props her own body up as "proof" that her "method" works (ie will make you lose weight and appear toned); employs "beautiful from the inside out" marketing language; and places moral weight on particular foods. In other words, Tilghman's launch might be triggering for anyone who is actively steering clear from diet culture, anti-fatness, and wellness as a stand in for worthiness.

Emily has discussed her relationship with disordered eating and eating discovery recovery on a few of our eps, and I wasn't sure she'd be up for talking about Tilghman's rebrand, but she was, and both her insight and her unique perspective made for a fascinating conversation. Because this episode contains personally vulnerable content (and because I get a little spicy lol), we've paywalled it as a bonus ep for premium subscribers at around the 15ish minute mark. If you'd like to upgrade so you can listen to the entire conversation, you can do that here. Premium subscriptions are either $5/a month or $50 a/year and give you access to one extra essay per week, access to the entire archive, and commenting privileges. They also enable this newsletter to exist! Thank you!

Emily and I have had several mini conversations within larger conversations on the pod about aging, vanity, and the various facets of beauty labor we in which we both invest. But today, we're going all in on botox. Disclaimer: I hope it's obvious that people's faces are their business, and we place no judgement on individuals' choices! This conversation is focused on the way the beauty industry (and women's media) has sold botox and injectables to various audiences. It's also about the difference between how women in their thirties talk and think about aging/botox and how women in their forties talk and think about aging/botox.

We were inspired to make this ep after listening to this positively brilliant ep of Diabolical Lies, a podcast that is regularly delightful and absolutely worth subscribing to. We also reference this essay by Haley Nahman, this one by Emmeline Clein in The Cut, and this piece by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

It's summer. The season of beaching, swimming, romping through flower gardens, and enjoying barbecues. But for Emily and I, depression can hit just as easily in the hopeless doom of February as it can in the sunny bliss of June. So if YOU TOO find yourself mired in sadness from time to time, this one's for you. We attempt to describe how our respective depressive moods feel, what triggers them, and also identify the particular shape of our central sadness. So yeah, TOTALLY a fun summer ep, but fear not, we cackle throughout, and maybe even land on some consoling truths.

Let us know what you think of this one! We might record a part 2 since (as usual) we ended our recoding session feeling as though we'd barely scratched the surface. We actually recorded this ep after a listener wrote in requesting it, so PLEASE always let us know what you'd like us to talk about next. We love hearing from you!

Summer is officially here and vacations are being scheduled and planned and enjoyed—or at least endured!—en masse. While the word alone may put some people’s entire body at ease, others may freeze up at the thought of endless decision making, managing children on the road, and a grab bag of unexpected costs. So this week on the pod, we’re discussing all things vacation!

In fact, Sara is on a vacation at this very moment! And so it’s Emily here, while Sara (according to all she revealed in this ep) is hopefully laying comfortably in Cape Cod with a book right now and hopefully not managing a crew of small children bickering over sand toys. 

In this ep, we discuss our ideal vacations and why, only to realize how devastatingly limited our imaginations have become. And yet, isn’t the acceptance of limitation our only real shot of happiness? We talk about the trade-offs of adventure vs. comfort, the impacts of age on our desire for the unknown, and whether it’s possible to bring the concept of “vacation” into our everyday life. An hour went by in a blink unpacking the heft of decisions and preferences and implications behind this single, innocent-seeming word.

Both Emily and I are huge fans of Amil Niazi. She writes about middle age, motherhood, womanhood, and most recently ambition. You might be familiar with her excellent column at The Cut, where she always manages to write about the exact thing I've been fruitlessly ruminating on with clarity, humor, and insight. She's a delight. And so is her new, bestselling book, My Life After Ambition: A Good Enough Memoir.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Stefanie O'Connell about ambition, and it feels like a topic that can be endlessly excavated. Especially for women. Amil's book is the book I needed to read when I was 25 and depressed that I hadn't "succeeded at life as an adult" yet. And it's the book I still need now that my definitions of success have changed. We had the absolute best conversation, delved deep into our personal histories of ambition, and came out on the other side ready to fuck up with abandon.

In which Emily and I discuss the many revelations of Famesick, a book positively brimming with Hollywood gossip (Adam Driver! Jenni Konner! Nora Ephron! Fucking Bruce Springsteen!) and themes near and dear to our hearts (feminism! bodies! performance of self! people-pleasing as women!)

We also review our personal histories with Girls and whether or not we were on the right side of history as it pertains to the gleeful misogyny of Lena Dunham Hating in the mid-aughts. We top everything off by playing a little game of compare and contrast with Famesick and Lindy West's Adult Braces.

As mentioned in Wednesday's newsletter, which was a self-indulgent rant about my hair woes and from whence they sprang, Emily and I spent an hour talking about why hair haunts us. And listen, while much of the episode is us bitching like BFFs at a slumber party, I legitimately think we landed on some actual insights as to why HAIR is such a fraught fucking thing for so many of us. Plus, a lot of you got in touch to say you liked us ranting about DINNER so perhaps we make this a regular thing? Chime in in the comments to let us know what very basic everyday thing we should bitch about cover next!

HAPPY WEEKEND AND HAPPY HAIR!

This week, Emily and I talked to Anna Rollins about her beautiful memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl

Anna grew up in an Evangelical Christian community in Appalachia and was taught from a very young age that gender, sexuality, appetite, and thinness were toxically intertwined. Eating disorders were very much normalized in her community, and girls were taught to fear their desires. It's an incredible book, which both Emily and I tore through. Emily has written before about her history with disordered eating, and listening to both Anna and Emily exchange their personal insights was such a privilege. I got so much from both Anna's book and our conversation, which TRULY covers the gamut of why ideals of womanhood are Very, Very Bad.