July 22, 2026

How to Fall in Love with a City

1 hour 20 minutes

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Are you struggling to figure out the joys of your new home? Do you keep comparing it to a city you fell deeply in love with before? Maybe you're visiting a new city soon and just want tips on how best to appreciate its pleasures. Lilah Raptopoulos has spent so much time in her personal and professional life amassing tips on how to fall in love with a city — and this conversation is such a font of wisdom (about tourism, about living), with a ton of small, mid-size, and under-appreciated city boosterism. We talk about a bunch of US cities — but also a bunch of cities all over the world. I already know the comments on this one are gonna rule.

An aerial view of Cadiz, Spain (Marco Bottigelli, Getty Images)

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Show Notes:

Follow Lilah on IG here (she's one of my favorite follows) and learn more about her work here (a truly aspirational personal website)

Loved Lilah's guide to her home neighborhood of Red Hook

This is Lilah's third time on the pod! Listen to our previous episodes on Cooking in the Age of Infinite Recipes and Figuring Out How To Feel About 'With Love, Meghan'

You can find a backlog of Lilah's city guides for the Financial Times Globetrotter here

We're currently looking for your questions on the following topics:

HOW WE SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY — how we narrativize our lives, what's changed, what's weird, what's still important and keeping us on these apps... with the great Kathryn Jezer-Morton

CONVENIENCE CULTURE: From dinner to groceries to daily news to hailing a cab to finding a playlist-- we're used to getting a lot of things we want in a "convenient" way. What's that doing to us and our society? How have you embraced or eschewed convenience in your life?

WOMEN'S FITNESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. As our co-host Zoe Rom puts it: "Women are told they need to do fasting, creatine, lifting, fueling, and recovery differently than men. Sometimes the science backs it. More often the "different" is a marketing mechanism: invent a gendered problem, sell a gendered protocol, collect the markup." What's going on here? Where have you seen it, what pisses you off about it... take this wherever you'd like.

Anything you need advice for/want musings about for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything — it’s literally the name of the segment.

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By Anne Helen Petersen

4.6

694694 ratings