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I may not have been an OG fan of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” but I was a dedicated one. I watched Countess Luann incessantly discuss her cabaret show, I knew all about the fish room and the lower level, and I couldn’t wait to watch the boat ride from hell.

And yet, in 2021, deep in pandemic-land, I found myself dreading watching RHONY. The once vibrant show’s 13th season was… a total bummer. After a formal investigation was launched into allegations of racism made by the show’s first Black housewife Eboni K. Williams and a staffer against RHONY lifer Ramona Singer, the network decided to scrap the season 13 reunion altogether and then to clean house.

It was a risk, and many Bravo fans wondered if it would pay off. Could the magic of RHONY be realized again? It turns out, for me at least, the answer is yes.

The show’s new era, which began on July 16, feels fresh, fun and filled with the absolutely petty kinds of drama I crave from my housewives. (Catch! Cheese plates! Debatably ugly lingerie!) New cast members Brynn Whitfield, Erin Lichy, Sai De Silva, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank, Ubah Hassan represent a different vision of what it means to be aspirational in New York City than their Upper East Side counterparts did. And while I loved to hate watch Ramona Singer, it was time for a change. (Plus, I’ve been utterly obsessed with Lyons since her J. Crew days.)

Author and journalist Jessica Goodman, who interviewed the new cast for Cosmopolitan, joined me to discuss the delights of a revamped RHONY. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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The first thing I noticed when I stepped into a Brooklyn movie theater at 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, the day before “Barbie” opened nationwide, was the palpable buzz of anticipation.

Before the Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” even began, you could sense the hunger of the audience; the sense that we had been waiting for something just like this. When the lights came up about two hours later — after watching Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) leave Barbie Land for the Real World, discover the horrors of patriarchy, and the beauties of being a human woman, rather than an idea or an object — I was surrounded by a diverse group of people in varying shades of pink, with wide smiles and wet eyes.

As we were walking out of the theater, a man dressed in varying shades of pale pink turned to his friend and said matter-of-factly: “I didn’t realize how much that movie would fuck me up.” Same, dude. Same. A movie that starts with Helen Mirren opining about the history of baby dolls and ends with gynecology? Ideal!

And then it hit me: this is the ecstasy of feeling seen. The unfettered joy of a big, splashy, cultural moment that unapologetically speaks to you.

Growing up in the ‘90s, my relationship with Barbie was a fraught one. Barbie (full name Barbara Millicent Roberts) first hit shelves in 1959, joined two years later by her ultimate accessory, Ken. So by the time I discovered her, it just seemed like playing with and idolizing and eventually hating Barbie was a fact of girlhood.

She was everywhere, wrapped in plastic and fantastic 😉. She had so many jobs and so many high heels. She was beautiful and adult and aspirational, and also a site for cultural critique; a battlefield on which larger gender battles were fought. She represented oppressive beauty standards, weight anxiety, and the continued power of light skin and sleek blonde hair. As I began a decades-long (maybe life long?) During my brief tomboy phase, I sold all my Barbies at our neighborhood yard sale and bought a bike with the proceeds. Except one, who I dubbed Space Barbie. She got to stay.

All of this is to say that I wouldn’t have assumed that a movie about Barbie would leave me feeling so much, so deeply.

And yet it did! Maybe it’s the beauty of participating in a true Cultural Event, or maybe it’s that this doll loomed so large in my own girlhood, or maybe it’s because I adore Ryan Gosling, or maybe it’s because Michael Cera’s portrayal of tender masculinity in Allan tugged at my heartstrings, or maybe it’s because the movie is so unashamed about participating in campy femininity, or maybe it’s because a lot of terrible shit has happened in this country in the last decade and it just felt fucking great to laugh and weep and wear bright pink.

Though “Barbie” centers the experiences of women and girls, it’s also a film that is deeply interested in masculinity. We learn early on that being a Ken is a frustrating, isolating experience. Kens needs the Barbies attention in order to have any self-worth or identity, I and when it isn’t freely offered 100 percent of the time, they resort to force and control. But even domination doesn’t feel all that good. Stealing Barbie’s dream house and turning it into a Mojo Dojo Casa House filled with horse decor doesn’t fix the fundamental emptiness and disconnection that so many of the Kens seem to feel. The Kens are in conflict with each other more often than they are bonding. And though there’s just one Allan — allegedly BFF to Ken — none of them ever really talk to him. “Barbie” wants us all to remember that patriarchy hurts men too.

Of course, “Barbie” isn’t a radical feminist treatise. It still centers whiteness, and its interests still lie in the gender binary. Plus, it’s a studio film, produced by Mattel. One can only assume that Gerwig was given a relatively long creative leash because executives knew that they would be able to sell the shit out of an ungodly number of different Barbie products in the film’s wake. More people in seats means more people buying not just Barbie dolls, but Barbie suitcases, Barbie jewelry, Barbie living room sets, Barbie pool floats, Barbie candles, Barbie Crocs, Barbie scrunchies, Barbie roller skates, Barbie toothpaste, and Barbie bacon cheeseburgers. (Yes, for real.)

As with all complex cultural products, that somehow both challenge and reify the worst of the world we live in, I am thinking about “Barbie” as a catalyst for dialogue and self-reflection. The movie’s Feminism 101 and $100 million dollar marketing budget are worthy of discussion, as are its dissections of the performance of manhood, and the contradicting demands of womanhood.

We all see different things in “Barbie”: Susan Faludi saw the aftermath of Dobbs, Allison P. Davis saw Greta Gerwig’s own professional history, Jessica DeFino saw craven merchandising. I see pieces of all of these things, and I’m sure I’ll see more when I see the movie for a second time, maybe even a third. But no matter what you see, and how it changes over time, it’s worth taking “Barbie” and its place in the film canon seriously.

To begin unpacking all that “Barbie” is, and what it isn’t, I enlisted my friend Liz Plank, a brilliant writer, podcaster, newsletter-er and filmmaker. We discussed what we loved about “Barbie,” as well as the film’s inherent limitations. And we asked ourselves, what do our mixed up feelings about Barbie say about us and the world we live in? Hope you enjoy! Xo

“For The Love Of Ken,” Liz Plank, Airplane Mode with Liz Plank

“I Saw ‘Barbie’ With Susan Faludi, And She Has A Theory About It,” Jessica Bennett, NYTimes

“The Dark Side of Barbie: Crime, Racial Issues and Rampant Sexism,” Abby Monteil, Rolling Stone

“What Is Greta Gerwig Trying To Tell Us?,” Allison P. Davis, NYMag

“The Hunger Fed By Taylor Swift and Barbie,” Michelle Goldberg, NYTimes

“Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don’t Have To),” Jessica DeFino, The Unpublishable

“Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job,” Willa Paskin, New York Times Magazine

“Why Barbie Must Be Punished,” Leslie Jamison, New Yorker

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We’re back to recap the second batch of episodes of “And Just Like That,” a show that we love to watch and also love to obsessively critique. And boy did a lot happen in episodes 3-6.

We got breakups, breakdowns, a Gloria Steinem cameo, an odd amount of petty crime, a particularly creepy scenario which involved a MILF list and grown-ass women checking out a teenage boy (no thank you!), and Carrie’s literal run-in with a very sexy Mr. Mariska Hargitay (yes please!).

We sped through at least three different seasons within four episodes. One minute, Charlotte and Harry are sending their kids off to camp over summer vacation, and the next there’s a literal bomb cyclone blizzard potentially preventing Carrie and Lisa from going to their respective book and film events. (Carrie is doing a book reading at a convention unaffectionately dubbed WidowCon, at the Sheraton. Lisa Todd-Wexley is being honored at MoMA, natch.)

By the end of episode 6, our gals seem ready to move on to some new chapters. Miranda and Steve’s not-quite-divorced stasis comes to a head, and we got the tee-up for the event that has been teased since months before the season even premiered: the inevitable return of Aidan Shaw.

The show remains a complete grab bag, both in terms of tone and character development. AJLT still doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to say or accomplish. But at least we’re having more fun with Carrie & Co. along the way.

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“The Bear” season 2 deserved better than what it got. After a highly acclaimed and buzzy first season (which just snagged 13 Emmy nominations), the FX culinary comedy/drama released its whole second season on Hulu in one drop. Instead of savoring one new episode a week — and having a whole day or more of discourse about standout episodes, like the celeb-studded anxiety attack “Fishes” or the meditative Copenhagen capsule episode “Honeydew” — we blew through all ten of them in just a week.

So we decided not to get carried past “The Bear” too quickly. This week, we circled back a whole three weeks in the cultural conversation to dive into the second season of this show — a season that slowed down the pace and opened up its scope as the plucky staff of The Original Beef retrain and rebuild toward an eventual reopening as a fine dining establishment called, of course, The Bear. This season takes Tina and Ebra to culinary school to brush up on their technical skills, while Richie and Marcus stage at Michelin-starred restaurants to find purpose and creative inspiration. Syd has become the glue of the restaurant, with her single-minded determination to earn a Michelin star keeping the whole team on track. Carmy falls in love, losing his own single-minded focus on work for the first time. This season gives space to each member of the ensemble as they venture out of the chaos of the kitchen and take on new challenges.

In this conversation, we discuss where this season takes each of the characters, what genres the show is playing with, how it depicts trauma and family dysfunction (and how it depicts healing), the heated shipping wars that broke out over Carmy-Sydney and Carmy-Claire, and the unexpected but resonant parallels between “The Bear” and “Ted Lasso.” Hope you enjoy! xo

This is part two of our two-part Q&A about motherhood and non-motherhood. You can listen to part one here.

CW: In this podcast, we discuss pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with those topics. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that questions around pregnancy and “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

So much about diving headfirst into Big Adult Life Decisions is about embracing the unknown. And few things require more leaping into the unknown than becoming a parent — the first time or the third time or not at all.

The unanswerable questions are literally endless: How will your body react to pregnancy, should you want to and be able to (both big ifs) become pregnant in the first place? What will labor be like? Will your child be healthy? How will your body recover from childbirth? Will you still feel like yourself, and if not, for how long? What will your ambition look like? How will your friendships change, whether or not you have kids? How will you balance work and parenting? If you never have children, what will your older years look like? If you want children and are single, how should you preserve your fertility? If you aren’t sure if you want to have kids, how do you broach those conversations while dating? What will the world look like in 50 years if you choose to bring new humans into it?

In this episode, we dive into more of the thoughtful, thought-provoking, difficult-to-answer questions we got from you, our community. We discuss things like financial readiness, maintaining friendships across parent/non-parent lines, and how to maintain your sense of self if you decide to have children. We also try our hand at giving some advice: on egg freezing, on dating while grappling with whether you want kids, and on feeling like being a “baby maker” is somehow “unfeminist.” Like in our first installment, we come to few hard and fast conclusions, but like so many things, the beauty is in the discussion.

Hope you enjoy this candid conversation! Xo

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CW: In this podcast, we discuss pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with those topics. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that questions around pregnancy and “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

A couple of months ago, we asked our wonderful listeners for questions and suggested topics for a discussion on motherhood/non-motherhood — and received a deluge of outstanding submissions. This week, we finally got around to answering some of them! In this episode, we focused on questions about deciding whether, when, and how to prepare for having kids; choosing not to be a parent; the experience of pregnancy and childbirth; and the logistics of having kids while working and living in the city.

Many of these questions are profoundly personal, and really have no “right” or universal answer. We tried to balance speaking honestly about our own experiences and feelings with trying to circle some broader takeaways, despite the fact that everyone’s experiences and feelings on these topics are unique and can’t be distilled into simple rules. Doing these episodes on the motherhood question have been nothing if not a challenge to examine where our own emotions and beliefs about having kids took root — the values we grew up with, the examples we were shown, our own personality quirks, the lucky and unlucky breaks we’ve gotten along the way — and to reflect on how we really decide what to do with our lives.

We hope you enjoy, and stay tuned — we’ll have more coming soon, with questions about money, working motherhood, how having/not having kids can affect friendships and your relationship with yourself, and advice!

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And just like that… we’re back in the saddle with Carrie & Co.

Carrie is experiencing the instability of the podcasting industry, Miranda is in Los Angeles with Che (yes, Che Diaz is still around), Charlotte is grappling with her role as a mom now that her children are bonafide emo teens, and Samantha is still absent (but going to make a one-scene appearance!) Our new leads are finding their footing: Nya is estranged from her musician husband after telling him she doesn’t want to have a baby, Che is filming their ill-fated pilot, Lisa is trying to do it all and have it all, and Seema is being utterly fabulous at practically all times.

Also… they’re all going to the Met Gala for some reason. And boning to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” (except for Nya), in an opening montage so gratuitous one has to assume that it was written as an explicit answer to critics’ concerns that season 1 was oddly sexless for a “Sex And The City” show.

In short, season two of AJLT is both totally deranged and also enjoyable — though its first two episodes, which dropped on June 22, are among the weakest of the seven that were shared with press.

In this episode, we dig into the insanity of those first two episodes — Anna Wintour obviously has to approve Met Gala +1s!!!!! — and also look ahead at what this season of AJLT might promise. Because despite our critiques, of which there are many, there are delights to look forward to: The return of Carrie’s former Vogue editor Enid Frick (Candice Bergen), a Gloria Steinem cameo, some attempts at humanizing Che, and — finally! blessedly! — some sex that’s bad and embarrassing and comedic and brief. The kind of sex that drove much of what made SATC such a fun and special romp each and every episode.

AJLT will never be SATC. It simply can’t be. Too much time has passed, the world has changed too much, the show remains too Samantha-less, and the writers still don’t seem to know what they are trying to say about these women in this stage of their lives. It’s all over the place — “mesmerizing in that wobbliness,” as Vulture’s Jackson McHenry put it. But for those of us who loved the original, there are glimmers of hope in this second season amongst the boatloads of cringe.

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After Emma’s meticulous crash course in “Vanderpump Rules” and, more specifically, the Scandoval, we were both feeling prepped and ready as hell to watch a finale and three entire reunion episodes about the wild on- and off-screen events of the past season. The finale kicks off with Ariana and Sandoval’s raw on-camera confrontation about his affair — featuring Tom’s weak excuses and Ariana’s entire range of emotional reactions, from cold judgment to incandescent rage — and the ride doesn’t slow down until the closing moments of the reunion, in which Raquel sniffles as she admits that she and Sandoval have continued to lie about the extent and timeline of the affair.

The finale, we agree, is art; the reunion got a bit bloated with shrieked recriminations and dramatic stomp-offs by DJ James Kennedy, leaving us with three hours of TV that verge on ritualistic public shaming. In this episode, we sift through the new revelations, try to make sense of Sandoval and Raquel’s often bizarre emotional reactions to the reckoning they’re facing, and attempt to parse the difference between accountability and mob justice. Hope you enjoy! xo

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We are GOING ON (mini) TOUR! If you live in the Philly, Boston or New York City areas, come hang out with us and see Love To See It LIVE! We’ll be recapping an iconic — and hilarious — vintage episode of “The Bachelorette” with some very special guests: “Normal Gossip” host Kelsey McKinney, BIP alum Jill Chin and comedian Arden Myrin. Get your tickets here.

This week, we took a quick break from weighty topics — like major life decisions and very important reality TV drama — to watch the latest teen rom-com offering from the Jenny Han cinematic universe: “XO, Kitty.” The Netflix series centers around the bubbly kid sister of “To All The Boys” heroine Lara Jean, and this time Kitty (Anna Cathcart) is sorta grownup and ready for her own perfect love story.

As the series begins, Kitty is headed off to Korea to spend her junior year of high school at the Korean Independent School of Seoul. She’s hoping to connect with her late mom (who spent her own junior year as a student there) and her long-distance boyfriend Dae (who is a current K.I.S.S. student). Best case: she gets both a new understanding of a mother she barely remembers and her elusive first kiss with Dae.

Instead, everything immediately goes wrong — Dae is in a (possibly fake) relationship with a gorgeous heiress, she’s been assigned to a boys’ dorm room, and she stumbles upon her mom’s best friend from K.I.S.S. but the woman won’t even acknowledge their relationship. Soon she’s caught up in an unexpected maze of love triangles and squares, and she’s neglecting her schoolwork while trying to unravel a mystery about a secret baby born while her mom was in Korea.

“XO, Kitty” is an unabashedly silly show in many ways; the plot turns are implausible and powered largely by truckloads of unlikely coincidences, and Kitty’s emotional range (which ranges from somewhat disappointed to irrepressibly perky) rarely seems to match the truly soap-operatic rollercoaster the series takes her on. It draws liberally from the K-drama genre, and revels in every campy twist. But the stories it has to tell about connecting with a lost loved one, and about the beauty and impermanence of young love, felt true enough to really hit home. By the end, we were right back in the rich hormonal and emotional stew of our own teenage years.

We talked about all of this, plus Kitty’s queer storyline — the first for a lead in a Jenny Han show — in this week’s episode. Hope you enjoy! XO, us.

If you liked this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

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We are GOING ON (mini) TOUR! If you live in the Philly, Boston or New York City areas, come hang out with us and see Love To See It LIVE! We’ll be recapping an iconic — and hilarious — vintage episode of “The Bachelorette” with some very special guests: “Normal Gossip” host Kelsey McKinney, BIP alum Jill Chin and comedian Arden Myrin. Get your tickets here.

Content Warning: In today’s podcast, we will be discussing pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with deciding whether to grow our families. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that the question of “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

It’s been nearly two years since we’ve had a conversation about motherhood on this podcast. Now felt like a good time to bring this loose series back. Claire is pregnant with her second child. Emma is watching so many people around her experience the joys and pains of parenthood for the first time, and is still confused about how she feels about having those experiences herself.

So consider this episode a casual check-in, one in which we try to be honest and raw about a topic that is so thorny for so many people. This conversation is far from the totality of our thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes, but it is a start.

We are working our way through all of the excellent questions and topics that listeners suggested when we said we were thinking of doing more motherhood/non-motherhood episodes. We plan to dig deeper into topics like the money question in future episodes. And we also are hoping to have guests — friends and experts who have lived experiences that we don’t.

Hope you enjoy. Xo

Check out our previous conversations on motherhood & non-motherhood below:

Bridging The Motherhood Divide (Ep. 1)

Mom Fashion & The Nap Dress (Ep. 2)

The Egg Freezing Boom (Ep. 3)

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

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