Rachel Cohen, a journalist working at Vox, explores what she calls "Millennial Mom Dread" in her article “How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.” Rachel thinks there has been at least a decade long campaign of cultural messaging to women that having children is something that will ruin your happiness, your autonomy, and your ambition. Is it really just holding your breath for 18 years and then you get your life back? How did we get here and how do we separate this conversation from the current conservative drive to warning women to get married and have children or face a lifetime of unhappiness?

On today’s episode I speak with Alexander Stille, the journalist and author of the book The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune which looks at the history and ideological underpinnings of a group called The Sullivanians which operated from 1957 through 1991 in the Upper West Side of New York City. His book looks at the group’s mission to build a “utopian world based on the principles of free love, collective living, self-actualization, and a commitment to socialism,” and the different ways this project succeeded and failed. We talk about malleability of the self, the nature of social control, if abuse of power is inevitable, and the potentials of communal life.

For this episode I speak to Sarah Brouillette, a professor of English at Carleton University about her essay "Domestic Heteropessimism" that she wrote for Post 45’s Heteropessimism cluster. We discuss the resource inefficiency of the nuclear couple and alternatives to the supremacy of the nuclear family as the only place structurally to receive care, safety, and sustenance. We also discuss the concept of familial love and how it can be used to exploit women.

Today we are talking with Emi Nietfeld the author of the memoir Acceptance. Emi made it through a lot of difficult life circumstances like homelessness, mental health struggles, abusive relationships, assault, and navigated herself to safety as much as she could, finding success at Harvard University and in a career in software engineering. But she also thinks critically about the pressure to be a “perfect overcomer” and what effects that has had on her. Her story is an American Dream narrative and a critique of that narrative.

Alex Sammon a political journalist, went to Michoacán a state in Mexico that produces 80% of the United State’s avocados and a third of the global supply. It’s a multibillion dollar industry which draws avocado cartels and eco-democracies like the town Cherán whose indigenous people called the Purépecha kicked out loggers, police, and the local government in 2011 to start their own self-governed town that outlawed the growing of avocados. 

Alex's article for Harper's is called "Forbidden Fruit."

For our first episode I talk to Kate Flannery, the author of the book Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, which details her time working at American Apparel in its heyday. We discuss the of the founder of American Apparel Dov Charney, insights into his psychology and her experiences with him, what makes an American Apparel girl, third wave feminism, and "puritanical tribalism."