It’s been thirty years since My So-Called Life premiered—thirty years since Angela Chase fell for Jordan Catalano and quietly redefined what teenage angst looked like. This week, Under the Influence rewinds to 1994 for a nostalgic deep dive into the one-season show that changed how we saw adolescence, parents, and ourselves.

Emily Crandall, a political theorist with a PhD from CUNY who moonlights as an underemployed adjunct and podcast maker (“Yay, capitalism”), and Esme Shaller, a clinical psychologist and professor at UCSF whose middle school daughters are currently reading The Babysitters Club, join the conversation. Together, they explore how My So-Called Life captured the confusion and loneliness of being fifteen, why its portrayal of parents feels so different through adult eyes, and how it laid the groundwork for every coming-of-age show that followed.

It’s a love letter to the nineties—a time before phones, when friendship was analog, music was everything, and watching a boy lean against a locker could still break your heart.

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For decades, menopause has been treated like a medical afterthought—a punchline, a whisper, or something to “just get through.” But millennial women are starting to hit perimenopause, and we’re not going quietly. The hormones are unpredictable, the rage is real, and the information gap is staggering.

Psychotherapist and author Lauren Tetenbaum, who wrote Millennial Menopause: Preparing for Perimenopause, Menopause, and Life’s Next Period, joins the show to unpack how an entire generation is redefining what it means to age. The conversation moves from sleepless nights and hormonal chaos to the deeper stuff—mental health, careers, sex, friendship, and the ways the medical system continues to fail women.

With humor and clarity, Lauren explains what perimenopause actually is, why most doctors aren’t trained to recognize it, and how millennial and Gen X women are demanding better care, better research, and better conversations. This isn’t the end of anything—it’s the start of women taking ownership of their bodies and rewriting the story of midlife.

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Tradwife influencers are selling women a dangerous fantasy — that dependence is aspirational. It’s not. In this episode, we dig into the real cost of giving up financial agency with Steph Wagner, National Director of Women & Wealth at Northern Trust and author of Fly: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom and Living a Life You Love.

We unpack why budgets fail, how a weekly money date can change your life, and the four principles every woman should know to actually grow wealth. Steph shares how losing everything after her marriage ended became the catalyst for her financial awakening — and why owning your money is the ultimate rebellion against tradwife culture.

Buy Steph's book Fly here.

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Therapist, writer, and content creator Vanessa Spinarsky helps women untangle the cultural scripts that shape how we mother. Her viral message to “unf*ck your conditioning” has resonated with thousands of mothers who are tired of feeling like their worth depends on self-erasure.

This conversation dives into the myths of the “good mom,” the performance of control, and how social media keeps us dysregulated for profit. We talk about what it looks like to stop performing motherhood and start living it, why burnout is really a form of self-abandonment, and how to find authenticity in a system designed to make women disappear.

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The publishing world can feel like an exclusive club: one where the rules are unwritten and the gatekeepers speak a different language. In this episode, we talk to novelist Kristin Vuković to break down what really happens behind the scenes of selling a book. From finding and querying a literary agent to surviving rejection, negotiating deals, and choosing the right publisher, we pull back the curtain on all the things.

We also chat about the upcoming Adriatic Writers Conference in Croatia that I am co-organizing which is changing the game for authors by teaching both the craft and the commerce of writing. If you’ve ever dreamed about getting your book into the world, this is your roadmap to how it actually happens.

Apply for a spot at the Adriatic Writer's Conference in Spring 2026 here.

Find more of Kristin's work here.

Find Lidija's tips for what to ask an agent here.

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Our friends at Tink Media and the Resonate Podcast Festival have launched something called Pitch Party—a brilliant idea that gives independent audio creators a place to share their podcast pilots with real listeners.

This week’s pilot, Heart Trouble, is a haunting and beautiful piece of storytelling. It begins when country radio DJ Sid Wood dies suddenly in 1987. Decades later, his daughter finds a box of old cassette tapes and hears her father’s voice for the first time. That discovery sends her on a cross-country journey through the Midwest and the American South—from honky-tonk bars to the Grand Ole Opry—to uncover who her father was, and what his life (and his music) meant.

Listen to more of Pitch Party here.

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We spend nearly two months a year on social media. Two months!!!!
That’s how much time the average person gives to an algorithm built to hijack their attention, flood their brain with dopamine, and quietly rewire how they connect, focus, and feel joy.

In this episode, clinical psychologist and addiction medicine expert Dr. Thekla Ross breaks down the science of how our phones became “sophisticated attention traps”—and what that’s doing to our relationships, our sex lives, and our ability to feel joy. Jo and Nick join her for a brutally honest conversation about how to break the habit, rebuild intimacy, and reclaim the parts of life that can’t be lived through a screen.

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We talk a lot on this show about women doing too much. About the impossible math of modern life—motherhood, work, ambition, marriage, self-care, friendship—and then one day, another full-time job sneaks in: caregiving for your parents.

That’s where I am right now. Squarely in the sandwich generation. Raising three small kids and moving my own mom from the suburbs into the city.

This week, I’m joining the brilliant reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis on her new show So Your Parents Are Old for a crossover episode about what happens when the people who raised you suddenly need you to raise them. We get honest about the third shift—the invisible labor of caring for everyone at once—about guilt, burnout, and what it means to have zero minutes left to spare.

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Taylor Swift isn’t a tradwife. She’s the opposite. She’s a woman who waited, who dated the douchebags, found herself, built an empire, and then finally chose a partner who celebrates her, supports her, and will never be her glass ceiling. That’s the story we should be talking about, the one that actually matters for young women. If you are a person who wants a partner, it is wonderful to wait for the right person and to find a good man.

My best girlfriend Jackie Cascarano of Juno Women's Collective and I dig into why Taylor and Travis’s relationship is such a powerful example for young women, and why it’s time to stop calling every woman who wants marriage and kids a tradwife, as if wanting those things somehow cancels out your feminism.

We also get into the fragile male ego, the madness of Bama Rush, and the weird ways social media keeps shaping what it means to be a woman right now.

Read the WSJ story about Bama Rush here.

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Every family runs on a kind of mythology — the stories we tell about who we are, where we come from, and what we’ve survived. For Gabrielle Hamilton, those stories fueled both her cooking and her writing.

The James Beard Award–winning chef behind Prune and the author of Blood, Bones & Butter has spent her life turning memory into art. In her new book, Next of Kin, she returns to the chaos and brilliance of her childhood — the beauty and the violence, the humor and the heartbreak — to see what still holds true after all these years.

This episode is about how family becomes material, how humor masks survival, and how writing it all down can both preserve and transform the people we come from.

Next of Kin is out now. Grab your copy here.

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