When we stepped into the Lawn Club in downtown Manhattan last Thursday night, we immediately knew we were among our people – reality TV people, that is. Reality stars, producers, casting directors, content creators, podcasters and journalists, all together in a room listening to the dulcet tones of John Denver as remixed by DJ Kyle Cooke, thanks to Vulture’s Reality Masterminds event.

The wide-ranging content package and celebration were a great reminder that reality television has become a legitimately important piece of the entertainment industry, complete with its own media ecosystem. After 10+ years of covering reality television as journalists, podcasters and cultural critics, it's satisfying to see that ecosystem taken seriously and given its due. Plus, we got a great party out of it.

So on this week's podcast, we decided to gossip. We review Kyle's DJ-ing, discuss which members of the "Summer House" cast were there to support him, and talk about our favorite reality sightings -- Boston Rob and Rob C. hanging out together! Kristen Kish! Kathy Hilton! Andy Cohen! Ariana Madix! Various gorgeous realtors! We also got into the Jenn Fessler-West Wilson drama that came out of the night and then share all of our many thoughts about the latest episode of "Summer House."

In the back half of the episode, we wanted to dive into a few other things that have been on our minds, including the way that Threads is melting Claire's brain, and the intense discourse about Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dresses and bloomers. Are her fashion choices subversive? Tools of the Epstein class? Somewhere in between? Emma and Claire have slightly different viewpoints on this topic, but we can agree on one thing: Social media platforms are where nuance goes to die.

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In 2006, “The Devil Wears Prada” was already on the brink of being a paean to the bygone glory days of magazines. The hollowing out of print media was already well underway. The brief boom of digital media was in the offing, but that would quickly collapse as well. The prosperous era of Vogue that the original movie was satirizing has ended. Twenty years later, we are all – magazine editors, digital journalists, freelancers and self-employed newsletter purveyors – fighting over the meager scraps that remain. 

This is the world that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” places us in. A world where plucky journalist Andy Sachs has found professional success and acclaim, neither of which protect her from her insolvent publication laying off its staff. A world where Miranda Priestley’s Runway still has prestige and cultural impact, but must chase web traffic and produce fashion spreads on shoestring budgets. And a world where, just as in this one, tech billionaires treat vital industries like playthings. 

It is the sad state of the media that brings Andy, who has just been laid off via text while receiving an industry award, back to Runway. The magazine has been savaged online for spotlighting a brand that a later exposé revealed to be using sweatshop labor, and their prodigal daughter, now a respected and unemployed investigative reporter, is hired to restore the publication’s journalistic gravitas. Meanwhile, Miranda is fighting to save her promotion to global head of content for Elias-Clarke, which owner Irv Ravitz has been dangling over her head. But before their happy ending, Andy and Miranda also must navigate McKinsey consultants, tech bros, and billionaires who see no distinction between the art of fashion and A.I. slop. To save their careers, ultimately, they have little recourse but to find a billionaire they trust more than the other billionaires.

In this episode, we discuss the film’s depiction of a media industry that has been ravaged by late-stage capitalism, of goofy tech billionaires, and of billionaire divorcées. We get into the idea of the “good billionaire,” who uses her wealth benevolently, and why it always seems to be a woman. We also talk the changing face of fashion, as unevenly depicted as it was in this movie. And we discuss “TDWP 2” as a girlboss movie (complimentary?!), and the space it makes for female ambition.  Hope you enjoy! xo

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"Summer House" and "The Valley" are two Bravo shows about young(ish) people on opposite coasts working through a plethora of banal relationship horrors. In this episode, we dive into the last few episodes of both shows.

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It was only a matter of time before the tradwife novels arrived. Not only have we been fascinated by these women – and their addictive yet alarming blend of aestheticized nostalgia porn, motherhood and domestic arts tips, and veiled (or not-so-veiled) reactionary politics – for at least half a decade, they are public figures optimized for projection, psychological speculation, and sheer fan fiction. After all, how well do we really know these women? Beneath their carefully constructed images, the precisely curated videos and photos of maternal and wifely bliss they show us, what are they truly thinking? What drives them? And what darker or less wholesome parts of themselves are they cropping out of the frame? These are not the self-narrativizing, confessional mommy bloggers of 20 years ago: they're the opening scene in a horror movie or a thriller, and we're just waiting for the grisly reveal.

This week, we're discussing the book du jour, Caro Claire Burke's buzzy tradwife novel "Yesteryear." This isn't the first tradwife novel – for example, our friend Jo Piazza published an extremely fun murder mystery set in this world last year, "Everyone Is Lying to You" – but it is at the center of the cultural conversation right now. So this seemed like an excellent time to discuss not just Burke's literary take on the topic, but also the unique allure and unique problems of the tradwife novel.

In "Yesteryear," we follow the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a Christian tradwife influencer whose profile is unmistakably inspired by the ur-tradwife, Hannah Neeleman (known as Ballerina Farm). She has five photogenic children and one on the way; she has a handsome cowboy of a husband; she has two nannies, and an on-site content producer. She has a closet full of expensive dresses and cashmere sweaters that she wears each morning to collect eggs from the chicken coop, and a rustic kitchen with hidden appliances. But one morning, she awakens in a version of her life that she barely recognizes, a wholly unromanticized homestead with no microwave, no cashmere sweaters, and no nannies. Instead, she has four children she doesn't recognize, and a hardened, weathered husband who will brook no disagreement. As the novel progresses, we learn more about how Natalie built herself an influencing empire, and the scandal that was threatening to destroy it – and, ultimately, why she ended up back in 1855.

It's an irresistible premise, especially for those of us who have contemptuously dismissed tradwives as living out a safe, cosplay version of a past that was always more dangerous and oppressive than their content seems to admit. What would a modern tradwife do if she awoke on a real homestead? She couldn't hack it! Right? Burke is a compelling writer, and her heroine is unlikable, unreliable, and deeply fascinating. The novel plumbs her psyche for all the resentments and wounds that have formed her into such a bitter and calculating person – and, ultimately, an unstable one. There's a lot in the book that makes it an obvious hit (no wonder it's already been optioned for a project starring Anne Hathaway!). But we also found some aspects of the book disappointing or perplexing.

In this episode, we dug into the idea of tradwife fiction writ large, and the challenges we see as inherent in the genre. We also talk through the whole of "Yesteryear" (so a huge spoiler alert here!) and touch on some of the major themes. And we discuss some of the aspects of the book that didn't work for us, like the glossing over of her experiences of pregnancy, postpartum, and the effects of having a large number of children, as well as the relative absence of broader political context. And did that big twist work for us? We're a little bit torn!

We hope you enjoy! xo

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During the season 3 premiere of "The Valley," there is a scene that lit us up with rage.

Kristen Doute's fiancé Luke Broderick is having a heart-to-heart with fellow castmate Jesse Lally about his relationship. “Our relationship is completely lacking intimacy, which is tough,” he says. “[Kristen] shuts down every advance. At what point do you stop trying?” On its face this seems like a normal thing to express frustration to your friend about... until you realize that Luke is whining about not getting enough sex from his partner who is just THREE MONTHS POSTPARTUM. The man legitimately wants a gold star for not pressuring Kristen for physical intimacy before she has been medically cleared by a doctor.

This scene also made us think about similar conversations we've seen between Jace Terry and Mikayla Matthews on the latest season of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives." And then, in episode 2, not only did Luke bring these "issues" up again, but we saw a similar exchange between Danny and Nia Booko! Three makes a trend, so we knew we had to discuss. We got into why so many men seem unable to grasp that their partners might need some physical space after a traumatic medical experience like birth, what it says about how male partners use weaponized incompetence, and how the Bravo community is responding to these on-screen issues!

In this podcast episode, we also take a slight detour to discuss our April 6th outing to see Mark Ballas and Whitney Leavitt together in Chicago on Broadway! We recap what the show was like, the energy in the room, Whitney's theater-kid vibes, and what this means for how she is constructing her career trajectory outside of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives."

Hope you enjoy! Xo

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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote at the outset of her 1979 essay collection "The White Album." This was always descriptive, rather than self-congratulating. It's not that our souls are fed by art, but that we need to convince ourselves that our lives are more than random chaos. In order to continue on, in order to give meaning to lives filled with pain and drudgery and confusion, we must edit and construct. We must, as the girlies say, romanticize our lives.

And wives are asked to endure a great deal by romanticizing it. Perhaps that is one reason we are so gripped by their raw confessions.

In two much-discussed recent memoirs, Lindy West and Belle Burden puncture the fairy tales of wifehood that they once bought into, reiterated, and sought to embody. In "Adult Braces," West's followup to her hit memoir "Shrill," she reconsiders the triumphant ending of her earlier book: her marriage. In "Adult Braces," she admits that her marriage was troubled from the start by her husband Aham's insistence that they embrace polyamory, a desire she hoped to dispel by becoming the perfect wife. She learns that Aham (who has since come out as nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns) has secretly acted on their arrangement and has a girlfriend, Roya; as she processes his betrayals, she rents a van and road trips to Florida to find herself. When she returns, she is ready to turn their couple into a throuple. Her vision of a happy marriage has been revised.

But for Burden, the happy marriage disappears into a puff of smoke. After almost two decades of marriage, during which she gave up her legal career to raise their three children, she discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. Soon after, he walks away from not just Burden, but their children, their home, and their entire life. Left to pick up the wreckage, she spends the memoir sorting through her ideals of marriage, wifehood, and motherhood, trying to understand how she surrendered herself financially and emotionally to a man who could sever himself from her so abruptly.

Both West and Burden find themselves grappling with the crumbling of the stories they told themselves, and reevaluating the wifely roles they sought to embody. They linger over the value that being married to men granted them in the eyes of the world, and the terror of having that taken away; they consider how their anxiety about being a perfect wife (and, in Burden's case, mother) may have made them brittle and exhausted. But we also see what relief they find in being able to sink into having a partner to protect, if not control, them. If there is a cost to pay, well, it's a bargain they were happy to make.

In this episode, we discuss both books (and West's ill-fated rollout, the fevered discourse around the state of her polyamorous marriage, and Aham's furious public response). We delve into their conceptions of ideal wifehood and how they revise them as their marriages founder. We discuss the much-rumored death of millennial feminism, and whether embracing the right ideology can ever really make you happy. And, of course, we discuss how being a Good Wife always, always means doing PR for your husband – and consider whether a divorce memoir is so alluring because the author can finally stop spinning.

Hope you enjoy! xo

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It became clear that "Love Story," the FX-Hulu limited series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, had broken through in a major way when Curbed ran an article titled "Kennedy Cosplay Is Eating The City."

Young women were flocking to C.O. Bigelow, the pharmacy where Bessette shopped for her headbands, in droves. Panna II, where the fictional Kennedy and Bessette went on their first date (likely apocryphal) was being discovered by a new generation of New Yorkers and tourists. The same thing was happening with Bubby's and The Odeon and even the stoop outside of the couple's former Tribeca loft. "It seems the city is caught up in 'Love Story' mania," wrote Clio Chang.

Except it wasn't just New York City. Seemingly out of nowhere, we were all being deluged with reels and TikToks about how to recreate Bessette's '90s minimalist style or style your boyfriend like JFK Jr. or shop for vintage Calvin Klein and Yohji Yamamoto. A mini-series had officially become a cultural flashpoint.

"Love Story" itself, executive produced by Ryan Murphy, is a totally passable, very schlocky, incredibly imperfect cultural product. But what felt more interesting than the piece of art itself was interrogating why it was able to pierce through in an increasingly atomized pop cultural ecosystem. What is it about JFK Jr. and CBK that still has us collectively in a chokehold, nearly 30 years after their tragic deaths?

To interrogate that question, I felt like there was only one guest that could fill in while Claire was out on vacation: writer and iconic New Yorker Glynnis MacNicol. Not only is Glynnis a friend, but she also happens to have a somewhat outsize knowledge of '90s New York and Carolyn Bessette. She even wrote a fabulous essay for the NYTimes about the "Love Story" phenomenon: "Carolyn Bessette Was Living the Dream. Then She Met John.Carolyn Bessette Was Living the Dream. Then She Met John."

In this episode, we get into the mixed critical reactions to "Love Story," why '90s nostalgia has gripped the masses, the intersection of fashion, politics and Hollywood wrapped up in JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's pairing, and whether this "love story" is actually more of a horror story. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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We watched Netflix's latest experiment in romance, the age-blind dating show "Age of Attraction," with a blend of boredom and horror that eventually shaded into a spicier blend of horror and fascination. The show's finale dropped this week, and we are finally ready to weigh in. So let's go!

"Age of Attraction" brings together a group of mixed-age singles to explore relationships without learning each other's ages, in the interest of showing that age is just a number, that we shouldn't put each other in boxes, yada yada yada. The show concept is not only ludicrous on its face, as singles can see each other while dating and should be able to assess what age their potential partners are, but is quickly given the lie during a quick montage midseason, which reveals that all of the couples who turned out to be close in age were summarily cut from the show. (You guys age-blind dated too hard, sorry!)

This is a show that invites us to both gawk at and romanticize relationships between people who are decades apart and in completely different life stages. We are asked to consider the deeper compatibility between a 38-year-old father of tween daughters and a 22-year-old who seems just about old enough to be hired as their babysitter. After all, he is young at heart, and she is desperate for a man who is emotionally mature enough to listen to Taylor Swift without spontaneously combusting. (Dear God, are the Gen Z lads okay?) We are told that a 33-year age gap has nothing to do with the breakdown of a relationship between a 60-year-old man who treats his 27-year-old girlfriend like an underperforming intern; they simply didn't share communication styles.

The immaturity on display is immense, and it is mostly from the older partners, who are drawn to the youthfulness of their younger loves but also easily retreat to the authority of their bigger ages to regain control in their relationships. This is particularly unsettling when it involves one woman being pressured for sex by her older boyfriend, who clearly hopes to defeat her boundary through superior debate skills. But it's not just Vanelle and Jorge; unhealthy dynamics are all over this show.

In this episode, we discuss the show's concept and structure, the cultural moment it's speaking to, and how the central relationships unfold – plus, that reunion trailer and how it hints at the state of these romances today. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Season 4 of "Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" is a dark one, but its darkest moments arrive in the second half of the season. Most of them involve star Taylor Frankie Paul, whose toxic cycle with her ex Dakota Mortensen is fully reignited as the season progresses, even as she's gearing up to star on "The Bachelorette." By the end of episode 10, it's abundantly clear that Taylor is in no way prepared to cut off Dakota, responding with coy ambivalence when he asks her to save him a rose. And she's in no way prepared to take on this role.

As we were preparing our coverage for the second half of this season, more news broke: Taylor and Dakota were involved in a domestic dispute last month, and both have alleged physical violence by the other. The police were called, though no arrests were made. Dakota has also reportedly accused Taylor of other assaults, and of abusing their young son. There is an ongoing investigation with DCFS, as well as with the local police, regarding these allegations. (Note: We will be discussing these allegations in some, though not excessive, detail in this episode. Please listen with care.)

Taylor has said very little publicly about these reports, and ABC and "The Bachelorette" production have said even less. It appears that the show will air as scheduled; the network clearly hopes to weather the storm. But the backlash to ABC's decision to cast Taylor, who already had a documented history of domestic violence (she was still on probation for the prior incident while filming the show) has been intense.

In this episode, we discuss what we see unfold between Taylor and Dakota in the last five episodes of "SLOMW," as well as the current allegations and the implications for "The Bachelorette" and the reality TV genre as a whole. Then we turn to the other women's storylines for this batch of episodes, notably Whitney and Jen's falling out, Layla opening up about her struggles with an eating disorder, Jessi and Jordan's functionally defunct marriage, and Jace and Mikayla's separation.

Related Reading and Resources:

National Domestic Violence Hotline

"Taylor Frankie Paul’s Turn on ‘The Bachelorette’ Is Coming Under Fire," by Shivani Gonzalez, NYT

"‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ filming on pause amid Taylor Frankie Paul investigation, sources say," by Rebecca Cohen, NBC

"Cinnabon Cuts Ties With ‘The Bachelorette’ and ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Amid Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen Domestic Violence Investigation," Jack Dunn, Variety

"Taylor Frankie Paul Breaks Silence After Domestic Violence Investigation News: 'It's a Heavy Time,'" by Liza Esquibias and Benjamin VanHoose, People

"Taylor Frankie Paul Says Domestic Violence Headlines Feel 'Like the End of the World' in First Televised Interview Since Scandal," by Rachel McRady, People

"Taylor Frankie Paul's ex Dakota speaks out amid domestic violence investigation," by Sarah Hearon and Ryan Coleman, EW

"The Price of Perfection: Layla Taylor on Mormonism and the weight of belonging," by Shaquille Heath, The Cut

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There are few moments more off-putting in season 4 of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" than when Jessi Draper's husband, Jordan Ngatikaura, earnestly tells the camera that "DadTok is a lot funnier than MomTok." But in a way, it also sets the tone of the season.

"SLOMW" is now a reality show about Mormon (and lapsed Mormon) mom content creators who have become bonafide celebrities. And that celebrity status is kind of upending everything in their lives – most prominently, their patriarchal family structures and their wider ambitions.

Many of the husbands are navigating stepping into primary caregiver roles and trying not to lose their own identities in the process. Some, like Jordan, are lashing out and resentful as a result. Others, like Connor, are purely magnanimous, while the rest of them fall somewhere in the middle. DadTok becomes a refuge for a lot of the male partners (or in the case of Dakota and Chase, former partners), which is part of why Jordan is so desperate to insist that the brand can stand apart from MomTok.

At the same time, the women are getting a plethora of opportunities outside of MomTok – "The Bachelorette," book deals, modeling gigs, "DWTS," Broadway shows, major brand deals – while still keeping one foot firmly planted in MomTok world. It's these two overarching dynamics which create the majority of conflict throughout season 4. And then, of course, there's Taylor and Dakota. Those two are a hurricane of toxicity that stands alone.

In this episode, we'll get into all the major action of episodes 1-5: Jessi and Jordan's marriage, DadTok heading to Vanderpump Villa, Whitney and Jenn moving to LA for "DWTS," Taylor and Dakota's total inability to detach from each other, and the fascinating pre-"Bachelorette" storyline the show is crafting for Taylor. In a separate recap next week, we'll dive into the back half of the season.

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