Sarah and Miranda move through their own climate change cognitive dissonance with the help of Elizabeth Doerr, author of the Cramming for the Apocalypse project. We discuss how parenting lends itself to climate action, how facing the climate reality can actually make you less anxious, and how mothers can give prepper stereotypes a much-needed makeover.

Links:

* Scribente Maternum

* Cramming for the Apocalypse

* How Do You Plan For a Future That Might Not Exist? by Liz Plank

“I miss my 2015 brain, the one unburdened by the weight of relentless catastrophes, and I miss my 2015 problems, those small, manageable worries that felt so monumental at the time. But more than that, I mourn the 2025 happiness I once allowed myself to envision, a life shimmering with possibility, untouched by the shadow of all we’ve lost. I grieve the future I was so certain would be mine, the life I thought I was building towards. I can’t pinpoint the moment it slipped through my fingers, but I know it’s gone. Most of all, I ache for the version of myself who believed in that future, who had the audacity to imagine a world that was bright and brimming with promise.

What we’re all feeling is grief. Not the tidy, private kind, but a vast, collective mourning that binds us together. We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit.”

* What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and her Climate Action Venn Diagram

* Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article about the Cascadia Fault Earthquake

* Ecopsychological Development and Maternal Ecodistress During Matrescence by Aurelie Athan

* Twilight Greenaway’s Substack, The Window, with regular climate news coverage

* Donate to Baby2Baby’s fire relief support

* More links from Liz:

* How to pack a go bag

* Our Children’s Trust

* Families for Climate

* Anya Kamenetz's Substack The Golden Hour

* Liz Doerr and Brekke Wagoner’s 10-week preparedness guide

* Britt Wray's Generation Dread takes on climate grief head-on

Katie Beck is a Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics where she helps municipal leaders design more child-friendly cities. She joined us to chat about what child-friendly, care-centered city design really looks like, and who is doing it well. We talk about Bogota’s revolutionary ‘care blocks,’ what happened when Athens experimented with using a few parking spaces as a park instead, and how easy it really can be to make cities more child-friendly now. We dig into the ways that everybody benefits when cities are designed (or re-designed) with caregiver well-being in mind, and how we can advocate for care-centric urban policies and design in our own cities.

* Links:

* Witch podcast from BBC

* Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

* Bogota’s Care Blocks: Creating Time for Caregivers: Care Blocks as pathways to social inclusion in Bogotá

* More than 90% of the world’s children breathe toxic air every day

* The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath

Sarah & Miranda kiss winter break goodbye with a chat about resolutions, witchy solstices, cyclical time, Pamela Adlon, school start times, time jelly, and more!

This episode is for our beautiful *paid subscribers* (thank you!) and could also be called Winter Break: The Good, The Bad & The Either Way It's Almost Over.

How are you all holding up out ther…

Author Mac Barnett and author and illustrator Jon Klassen join Sarah and Miranda to explain what makes a great picture book and why kids might be better readers than adults. Plus, preschoolers with hammers, Where the Wild Things Are is a true story, the sad blunting our “keenness” as we age, and why we still love our bullies.

LINKS:

* Looking at Picture Books

* The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell (Miranda’s Bake Off mystery)

* Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

* Shape Island on Apple TV

* “How Does Santa Go Down The Chimney” by Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

* Reagan Iran Contra SNL Sketch

* Jon & Mac on Margaret Wise Brown over on their substack, Looking at Picture Book

* The Elephant and The Bad Baby

* Eloise Rickman on Children’s Rights

* The Marginalian

* “I’ll Fix Anthony” by Judith Viorst

* Mac and Jon on Wild Things

* Children’s book author Remy Charlip

* Children’s book author David Crews

In this bonus episode, Sarah and Miranda talk the best parenting advice for kid explosions and their reactions to the new Nightbitch film. Also, Sarah offers a “Hannukah Surprise,” the Nightbitch theme song she’s been working on for a year.

Links:

* Dan Siegel and the “Flipped Lid”

Poet and author Nancy Reddy joins us to discuss her forthcoming book, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom (pre-order it now!). In it, Nancy explores the historical, cultural, and scientific roots of many of our modern ideas about ‘goodness’ + motherhood, like attachment parenting. Spoiler alert: they’re pretty sketchy.

Links:

* Take our survey about parents and the pandemic (thank you!)

* The Good Mother Myth by Nancy Reddy

* Nancy’s piece in Slate on the Golden Hour

* The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood

* Jessica Valenti on Mother Tongue

* The Texas OB-GYN Exodus (The New Yorker)

* Marielle Heller Profile (The New Yorker)

* Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths & Stories Of The Wild Woman Archetype by

* 1996: The Year That Shook Hip-Hop

* Pre-order The Good Mother Myth and join Nancy and Maggie Smith in February for a live conversation!

If any season is movie-watching season, it’s now. When we knew we wanted to make a Christmas movie-focused episode, 2008’s A Christmas Tale and 2005’s The Family Stone sprang to mind right away: These are matriarch-centric Christmas movies that take the whole mom-at-Christmastime thing to the Nth degree. Each in their own way, they put the intense time we spend gathered together with our families of origin at the holidays under a microscope. So, what do The Family Stone and A Christmas Tale have in common? Just about everything, except that one is American and has Dermot Mulroney at his hottest(?) and the other is extremely French and involves a LOT of people smoking cigarettes non-stop. We get dig under the surface of these two films — both of which are centered around big families gathered at the holidays around powerful, complicated matriarchs — with our (new) friends Andie and Sabrina of the Pop Culture Moms podcast.

Links:

* A Christmas Tale

* The Family Stone

* Pop Culture Moms on Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and Spotify

Feminist writers Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei join Sarah and Miranda for Part 2 of our discussion on relationships between men and women (listen to Part 1 here). We talk about the post-election landscape of gender relations — including the rise in both misogynistic rhetoric interest in boycotting men. Is this a gender war or a war on women? Is feminism responsible for the young male Trump voter? What do men and women owe each other, and what do we do with the men in our lives?

Links:

* Sophie Kemp on Gen Z Men (LA Review of Books)

* Jia Tolentino on the Gender Wars (The New Yorker)

* The Warrior Mamas Who Elected Trump: Why Tradwife Ideology Continues To Matter (via In Pursuit of Clean Countertops)

* Blue Marriage and The Terror of Divorce by Anne Helen Petersen

* A feminist utopianism : Sophie Lewis argues against the 'fatalism' of both 4B and heteropessimism, and calls for a collective movement built on solidarity. (via TCF Emails )

* It’s not the economy. It’s the misogyny. (via Mad Woman)

* The “Your Body My Choice” movement

In Part 1 of our jam-packed conversation with feminist writers Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei, Sarah and Miranda attempt to unpack why this has been such a big year for examining sex in hetero-marriage, the specter of patriarchy haunting all of our marital beds, and whether or not good sex is possible anymore in a hetero-marriage.

Links:

* Amanda Montei’s “Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One? Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One?” in the New York Times Magazine

* Liars by Sarah Manguso

* All Fours by Miranda July

* Tracy on The Endless Repetition of Heterosexuality

* Want by Gillian Anderson

* Anne Hathaway’s The Idea Of You

* Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl

* Ester Perel

* Tracy Clark-Flory’s fabulous newsletter, TCF Emails and her book, Want Me.

* Amanda Montei’s fabulous newsletter, Mad Woman, and her book, Touched Out.

Culture Recs:

* Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women and the related television series

* Brian Jordan Alvarez

Writer Janet Manley joins us to break down her recent piece, “Pity the Dadfluencers: Their content is for men, but their audience is all women.” We dig into all of our favorite -isms: sexism, feminism, social media-ism (just roll with it), parasocial relationships, plus Wild Robot, Nightbitch, and what the heck you’re supposed to do with all those baby teeth.

Links:

* Chelsea Conaboy on The Wild Robot

* Arnold of the Ducks

* KAFKA'S BABY Janet’s newsletter

* The Real Sarah Miller by Sarah Miller

* Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal

* Attachments by Lucas Mann, and our interview with Lucas

* Drawing Links by Edith Zimmerman

* Looking at Picture Books by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen

* Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt