Two kids. Same house. Seven years apart. And somehow both of them grew up to do essentially the same thing with their lives: help other people become the best version of themselves. He does it with young athletes. I do it with… whatever it is I do. Same instinct, pointed in two directions. (Maybe we got it from our mother, a nurse. Go figure.)

So tonight I finally got my brother on the mic. Francesco coaches volleyball, from local youth teams all the way into the Italian national team pathway, and he has a gift I’ve watched my whole life: he can take a kid and build them into someone. Someone who tries. Someone with purpose. I wanted to pull that gift out into the open.

What he said is better than anything I could have written for him:

“Talent gives you possibilities. Learning turns those possibilities into reality.”

“I don’t want them to avoid failure. I want them to understand that failure is information, not identity.”

“The goal is never to make them depend on me. The goal is to help them become independent and to need me less and less. That’s when I know I’ve done my job well.”

And the reason this episode exists at all: I went looking at the research on what sport actually does for a developing kid, and the magic isn’t the sport — it’s the coach. One steady adult who believes in you is one of the strongest protective factors a child can have. It doesn’t just make them better at the game. It makes them resilient, and it follows them out of the gym and into the rest of their life.

I got to grow up watching my brother become that adult, for hundreds of kids by now.

Go be someone’s steady adult this week.

— L.

The research I mention

* Holt, N. L., Neely, K. C., Slater, L. G., Camiré, M., Côté, J., Fraser-Thomas, J., MacDonald, D., Strachan, L., & Tamminen, K. A. (2017). A grounded theory of positive youth development through sport based on results from a qualitative meta-study.

* Zhang, N., Du, G., & Tao, T. (2025). Empowering young athletes: The influence of autonomy-supportive coaching on resilience, optimism, and development. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1433171.

Broader picture, if you want to go digging: there’s a substantial literature on sport as a protective factor for kids facing adversity — building self-esteem, self-efficacy and belonging, buffering against stress and burnout, and carrying life skills into adulthood. The recurring finding across all of it is that the coach–athlete relationship is the active ingredient.

Grazie, Franci. And to every coach who understood that it’s a game, and games are played for fun.

Seven in the morning, on my mother’s birthday, I got a message telling me to call a clinic back because I was a match, a bone marrow match, for a fifty-two-year-old woman with leukemia I’ve never met. Out of everyone in the registry, my particular little genetic fingerprint was the one that fit. I could save her.

I said yes with my whole heart, instantly. And then, the next morning, my own body took it back. They found the Ehlers-Danlos in my file, and it took me off the list. The perfect match who couldn’t.

This episode is about being handed the chance to save a life and then having it pulled away, not because I said no, but because a condition I didn’t choose made it too risky. It landed in an already-brutal week, and for a full day I decided it was proof of something cruel. Then I found the truer version: being discarded again was not a confirmation or a sign of anything, really. It was the system protecting me for once, a woman who thinks she can do everything had to be told, “not this time.” And I decided I’ll keep showing up to help anyway, because that’s what makes me, me. If someone out there needs me, they only need to reach out.

Most importantly: somewhere out there is a woman who still needs a match. She doesn’t need me, she needs a match. And it might be you.

Joining the registry is a cheek swab. That’s the whole first step — swab the inside of your cheek, mail it back. And if you’re ever called, most donations aren’t even surgery; it’s closer to a long blood draw, and it’s all paid for. A few hours in a chair to hand a stranger the rest of their life. Look up the registry where you are — in the US it’s the NMDP (formerly Be The Match), much of the world has DKMS, and in Italy there’s ADMO. Find yours. Swab your cheek. Get on the list I got pulled off of.

Be the match I’m not allowed to be. If you’ve got a cheek and a heart, you’ve got everything it takes.

— L.

No studies this time. Just unconditional love and support sent your way.

Apologies, something happened to this episode and it’s all messed up now, but here we go again, I guess.

I called the moon “she” one day, in English, and a friend looked at me like I’d said something a little witchy, but of course she’s a she — la luna. And the sun’s a he — il sole. In Italian, every single thing has a feminine or a masculine: the chair, the car, the spoon, the problem. There’s no “it.”

This episode travels from there to a gender studies classroom at Mount Holyoke, where I read the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling arguing, provocatively, and by her own admission tongue-in-cheek, that even the biology of sex doesn’t fit two neat boxes. And I put my hand up and connected it to language: if my grammar never once lets a thing be in-between, does that make the in-between harder to see?

I’ll be honest about what the science can and can’t prove: the famous “your grammar makes you see objects as masculine or feminine” study actually didn’t hold up, and I land somewhere cool. Wanna listen?

— L.

A little science

* Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993) “The Five Sexes” & (2000) “The Five Sexes, Revisited,” The Sciences.

* Winawer, J., et al. (2007). Russian blues

There have always been two versions of me people clocked early: the girl who smiles, and the girl who writes. This episode is about both but more of the second one, even if one leads to the other, even though, for most of my life, people have not understood this at all.

I’ve been reaching out to strangers since I was a kid in Italy, even calling MTV contests, writing out my English word for word so I could read it down the phone and I think I never stopped. I wrote music bands. I wrote celebrities. I wrote to friends all through adolescence, to people I loved, even into the silence of COVID. I still write messages of support to people I barely know, when I watch them disappear into the noise.

And I get asked: what’s the goal? Reaching out for what? The whole episode is my answer. There is no goal. When I write to show support, the support is the entire message. We’ve gotten so used to everyone wanting something that a person who wants nothing reads as suspicious, or naïve, or stupid. Fine. I’ll be the naïve one.

There’s a story in here that turned the whole thing for me: a colleague in Australia who once told me that smiling at a stranger can save a life, and why I turned the girl who always smiles into the girl who writes. There’s the letter I wrote to President Obama, and the honest truth about what came after. And there’s the reason I make this show at all: every episode is a letter, sent into the noise, hoping someone out there feels seen.

You’re the one I’m writing to. Write yours tonight.

— L. Buona notte.

There are words you can only say in the language they were born in, because other languages doesn’t have them or don’t have the same meaning — and I don’t mean just the word, I mean the whole feeling underneath it.

Like Magari. Meriggiare and my untouchable favorite, freschino — my local dialect word for a very specific, cold-damp, slightly-off smell that I have never once managed to explain to anyone in any language, not even my own as the rest of the country doesn’t use the same word. (”It smells like eggs?” No. “Wet dog?” No. Not quite…)

It’s the holes one language has, shaped exactly like the things another one can say, and the slightly spooky idea underneath them: that a word is a flashlight. Name a thing and you start noticing it everywhere. Leave it unnamed and you walk right past it.

I used to feel the missing words as a lack, like my second language failing me. Turns out it’s the opposite, it’s a surplus. Like having a smell you don’t even have a word for. Wink, wink.

— L.

A little science, if you’re curious

* Lomas, T. (2016). Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: 216 “untranslatable” words pertaining to well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 546–558.

* Winawer, J., et al. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. PNAS, 104(19), 7780–7785.

First year of high school, a British writer came to talk to us and she said something I never let go of: you know a language has become yours when you start dreaming in it. I was already dreaming in English. I was thirteen, journaling and writing lyrics in a language that wasn’t mine by birth but was somehow mine by soul. It felt like a secret getting confirmed out loud.

This episode is about the parts of a language you don’t choose — the ones that escape. The language you count in (mine’s English, mostly — there’s a parking code from a hospital in Italy that I can only retrieve in English, and I cannot for the life of me drag it back into Italian), the language you swear in, and the one that got me: the language your inner voice runs on.

Because mine runs on two. The voice that scolds me — dai, svegliati, wake up, come back to what you know — is always Italian. The one that says “I’ve got this” is English. My inner critic speaks my mother tongue. My inner cheerleader speaks the one I chose, and it turns out that’s not random, it’s wired deeper than habit, in a way I’ll let the episode explain.

If you count in one language and curse in another and dream in a third, you’re not strange. You’re just carrying receipts.

Good night,

— L.

A little science, if you’re curious

* Dehaene, S., Spelke, E., et al. (1999) & Spelke, E. S., & Tsivkin, S. (2001). — Exact numbers get filed in the language you learned them in; that’s why a code or a times-table won’t always translate on demand.

* Harris, C. L., Ayçiçeği, A., & Gleason, J. B. (2003). Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(4), 561–579. — Childhood reprimands (”shame on you”) spike the body hardest in your first language. The scold is wired to the mother tongue.

So I had someone else on, today.

This one’s a conversation with my friend Giulia — Jules — the friend I dedicated episode two to, who heard episode one and decided she let me know how much she liked it and how she always wanted to have a podcast herself. We’ve known each other for the better part of twenty years, and we picked right back up like no time had passed at all.

Her topic is one I’d never thought about much but it does make sense, about how the TV shows and movies you watch can quietly rewire the way you speak another language. Jules learned her English not from school — she’s very clear on how useless that was — but from binge-watching at sixteen with the subtitles on, and she didn’t just pick up words. She picked up a whole accent off a character she loved. She started swearing more because a show retrained her register, until her sister told her to cut it out.

We get into all of it — the shows that shaped us, the ones we refuse to watch until everyone’s stopped talking about them, the teenage crushes that doubled as language teachers (one of whom, it turns out, ended up named in one of my first books). And Jules, being Jules, also let some real life into the room — lightly, bravely — with more to come if she wants to.

It’s looser than the first two. No thesis, no big turn — just two people and the strange, lovely fact that we’re both partly made of the television we grew up on.

If there’s a character secretly living in your accent, tell me which one.

The soundtrack for today’s episode: Ræyne - Loss of Faith

Ræyne’s Insta for those who are interested in the music.

My book: Angels and Nightmares

…if you’re interested in reading it.

A little science, if you’re curious

Jules isn’t imagining it — there’s a whole research literature on picking up a language from the screen:

* Peters, E., & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 551–577. — You absorb real vocabulary just from watching, no studying required.

* Pujadas, G., & Muñoz, C. (2019). Extensive viewing of captioned and subtitled TV series: A study of L2 vocabulary learning by adolescents. Language Learning Journal, 47(4), 479–496. — Especially as teenagers — exactly Jules’s sixteen-year-old origin story.

* Montero Perez, M., et al. (2013). A meta-analysis on captions and L2 vocabulary learning — subtitles measurably help. (The accent-catching part — soaking up a character’s pronunciation — is less formally pinned down, but well documented anecdotally by basically every bilingual who learned from TV.)

Did you know that if you speak multiple languages, you also have multiple personalities? Okay, calm down. No. It’s not that we’re special…

This episode is about why the switch between language and personality is real — and why it’s not a glitch, or a mask, or a disorder. There’s actual research on it: people who take the same personality test in two different languages come out as measurably different people, in ways that line up with each language’s culture. There’s a name for it. And there’s a quieter, harder layer underneath, about which language your feelings actually live in, and what that means when you finally try to face the heavy stuff. I won’t give away the turn.

I also talk about that Modern Family scene where Gloria (Sophia Vergara), fed up, asks if anyone has any idea how smart she is in her own language. If you’ve ever been met as the translated version of yourself, you’ll feel it.

This one’s for Jules, who told me episode one made her want to make her own. Giulia — vai.

Make yourself a coffee. Or if you’re going to bed, a soothing chamomile. Press play.

— L. Buona notte.

Things I mention in this episode

* Ramírez-Esparza, N., et al. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(2), 99–120.

* Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2014). Emotionality differences between a native and foreign language. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1055.

* Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25(2–3), 204–222.

* Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge University Press.

Here’s something I’ve never said out loud properly: my coffee order comes out wrong almost every time. Different city, different barista, Boston, Melbourne, here. Doesn’t matter and I was completely sure the problem was me. My energy. My face. Something I was doing wrong and couldn’t find.

Turns out the thing I’d been searching for was never on my side of the counter.

This is the first episode of the Nightnight at Laura’s… PODCAST! Lol, more a wannabe podcast really, but oh well. It’s also the first time I’ve put my actual voice out there instead of hiding behind the page, which, you know, is not a small thing. In Italian we say metterci la faccia: to put your face on it, to show up and let yourself be seen. I tried to avoid that my whole life. So, here we go.

This one is about accents, and being misheard, and the reason it keeps happening, with two pieces of research that explained it all. Maybe. I won’t spoil the turn. But maybe it makes sense for others like me, out there, who thought they were the ones doing everything wrong, when, in fact, they were not.

PS. It’s raw and real. It’s my first attempt. Please, be kind. I’ll get better, with practice.

Things I mention in this episode

If you want to go down the same rabbit hole I did:

* Donald Rubin (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531.

* Lev-Ari & Keysar (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096.