If you lost touch with reality, how would you even tell the difference?

That's the question Sarah Labrie confronts after her mother was found on the side of a Houston freeway in the midst of a schizophrenic break, along with the question, "Am I next?"

In this deeply candid conversation, Sarah discusses growing up between extremes of adoration and abuse, witnessing a parent’s mental illness, struggling with perfectionism, and looking for healthy relationships, until the weight of her own artistic ambition almost brought her to a complete collapse.

We explore parallel worlds—of mother and daughter, of friendship and rupture, of the selves we become, the selves we might have been, and the selves that might yet be out there, somewhere. We're talking about Sarah's memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Walter Benjamin's Arcades project, as told by Wikipedia.

Sarah LaBrie is author of No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2024), a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the Writers League of Texas Book Award. She's also a television writer whose credits include Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, Love, Victor and Beauty, a Beauty and the Beast prequel for Disney+. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Austin Film Society. Her work has been performed at the Apollo Theater and at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Learn more at sarahlabrielivesinlosangeles.com.

Dogs didn’t just become our companions. They helped make us human.

They've been by our side for tens of thousands of years, helping us herd and hunt, migrate, heal, grieve, fight war, imagine the afterlife, and more. 

Religion and environmental studies scholar Laura Hobgood joins us to explore the long, complicated co-evolution of humans and dogs—how humans have loved, used, protected, and sometimes harmed them in return. Her book is called A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans.

Whether you love dogs, miss one deeply, or have never thought much about them at all, this episode will change how you see our oldest animal partner. Even if you aren't a dog person, you're still kind of a dog person!

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Dr. Laura Hobgood is co-chair of the Environmental Studies program and past chair of the Religion program at Southwestern University. She also holds the Elizabeth Root Paden Chair in Religion and Environmental Studies. Hobgood received her Ph.D. from St. Louis University and her M.Div. from Vanderbilt University. She is author of A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans. 

Some songs take decades to reveal what they’re really about.

Back in the 90s when 20-year-old Steven Page wrote “What a Good Boy,” he understood it as a plea to ease up on restrictive gender expectations that harmed boys and girls. But as he performed it over the years, he realized it was about much more than that.

The stirring anthem has become a greater exploration of gender identity and sexuality, a perennial wrestle against a binary world's hostility to people who don't fit the mold—trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, gay, or otherwise.

Page, a founding member of the smash-hit band Barenaked Ladies now enjoying his solo career, has spent much of his life writing songs to explore vulnerability, humor, grief, and joy, a signature blend of comedy and tragedy.

In this discussion, Page reflects on how "What A Good Boy" came to be, and what it's like to have his creation become part of someone else’s becoming.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. But you'll want to hear this one!

David Friend, "Steven Page project takes political turn with new album," Toronto Star (Sept. 21, 2018)

Steven Page is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and founding member of the music group Barenaked Ladies. Since going solo, Page has released five albums, he performs with groups like the Trans-Canada Highwaymen, and he publicly advocates on issues including mental and behavioral health. He has three sons and lives in New York with his partner, Christine Benedicto. I'm not sure if he has any dogs or cats, and I forgot to ask him. Join his Patreon at patreon.com/c/stevenpage.

When George M. Johnson was a kid growing up in New Jersey, they loved Black History Month. They were thrilled to learn about the people who shaped American history for the better. But as they got older, they started noticing things were missing—hidden stories that might have meant the most to a queer kid like they were.

George was especially drawn to one of the most dazzling moments in Black history, the Harlem Renaissance. They went searching for what had been covered up, forgotten, or erased, and resurrected those stories in their book, Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known. It's a celebration of the Black queer writers, performers, and activists of 1920s America.

George M. Johnson joins us to talk about Black and queer culture—how it impacted the past, how it enlivens our present, and how it can open up new possibilities for the future. This is a conversation about truth-telling, lineage, identity, and the stories that save us when we finally get to hear them.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"

George M. Johnson is an award-winning Black non-binary writer, author, and activist. They are the author of the bestselling Young Adult memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue discussing their adolescence growing up as a young Black Queer boy in New Jersey. Their other books include Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known, and There's Always Next Year. George has also published in places like Teen Vogue, The Root, Essence, Ebony, THEM, and The Grio.

Is it possible to raise kind, feminist boys in our era of manosphere misogyny?

Sonora Jha, an Indian-American immigrant and single mother, says yes. But it takes a lot more than good intentions. 

She reflects on raising her son across cultures, teaching empathy through film, talking frankly about sex, consent, and body image, and modeling apology without demanding forgiveness. She pushes back on the idea that feminism harms boys, showing how it can actually free them from shame, silence, and isolation.

Sonora Jha joins us to talk about her book, How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

After a career in journalism in India and Singapore, Dr. Sonora Jha became a professor at Seattle University. She is author of four books, including How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021). Her novels include The Laughter, which won the 2024 Washington State Book Award for Fiction and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker, NPR, and others, Foreign (2013), a finalist for the Shakti Bhatt Prize and the Hindu Prize, and her latest, Intemperance. 

Adoption is often framed as a loving and selfless decision made by women who want to give their babies a better life—but many relinquishing mothers say it doesn’t actually feel like a real choice at all.

Private domestic adoption in the U.S. operates under conditions of high demand, limited supply, and deep economic inequality. Researchers say women rarely choose adoption over abortion or parenting, and many relinquishing parents report long-term trauma. 

Sociologist Gretchen Sisson draws on a decade of interviews in her book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood to examine who adoption really serves—and who it leaves behind. 

She invites us to rethink adoption from the ground up, and asks what real support for families would actually look like.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Gretchen Sisson studies abortion and adoption in the United States as a sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years.

We’re a little over halfway through January and already it's been...well, a lot. The Trump administration kidnapped the de facto Venezuelan president. The chairman of the Federal Reserve announced he’s being targeted for prosecution because the president wants to control monetary policy. A queer mother in Minneapolis was shot in the head in broad daylight by ICE, who is occupying the city, and the government has been trying to portray her as a terrorist. And etc.

Andrea Pitzer is one of my favorite political analysts right now, and I asked her how we might make it out of this mess. She explains why the current moment feels so destabilizing, how mass detention becomes normalized, why exhaustion and disengagement are themselves political dangers, and what history tells us about stopping things before they get worse.

This is a conversation about realism without despair, urgency without panic, and about how ordinary people can still matter. Especially when the future feels uncertain.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author, known for her books One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, and Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (2021). She hosts the popular podcast Next Comes What and writes the newsletter Degenerate Art.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to outlaw abortion, has had devastating consequences for women across the country—especially because the American health care system was already making pregnancy more dangerous and more unequal in blue states and red states alike.

In her new book Unbearable, journalist Irin Carmon tells the stories of five women whose experiences uncover the realities of pregnancy in America: infertility, abortion, miscarriage, criminalization, racial inequality, and more. Their stories reveal a central truth: America has made choices that make pregnancy more unbearable for more of us. They also reveal how none of this is inevitable or permanent. 

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York magazine and co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her latest book is Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. 

What happens when you stop chasing romantic love entirely?

After ending a catastrophic relationship, acclaimed author Melissa Febos took an unexpected step: despite being a serial relationshipper, she decided to take a personal vow of celibacy.

What began as a three-month break became a full year that transformed how she understood desire, boundaries, people-pleasing, and love itself. In her latest book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, Febos reflects on addiction-like romance, the freedom of solitude, feminist role models across history, and how abstaining from sex helped her reclaim agency to build healthier, more generous relationships. She joins us to talk about it in this episode. 

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller Her new memoir, The Dry Season, was published by Alfred. A. Knopf in June 2025.

The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Black Mountain Institute, LAMBDA Literary, the American Library in Paris, and others, Melissa's work has appeared in publications like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.

She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. From melissafebos.com.

We grow up swimming in gender stereotypes: men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are rational and women are emotional. The binary cliches are everywhere, but are they true?

Daphna Joel is a neuroscientist who wanted to know what the science actually says. When she looked at real brains she discovered that each person carries a unique mix of traits, a true mosaic that defies the old binary.

Daphna Joel joins us to talk about her groundbreaking book Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Daphna Joel, PhD, is author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain. She is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She has combined her expertise as a neuroscientist with her interest in gender studies to revolutionize the field of sex, brain and gender.