Today’s episode is a grab bag — a hodgepodge of the stories people have been asking me about in my DMs for the past week.

First up: the Ballerina Farm raw milk scandal. We break down the failed raw milk tests, the health concerns, and why the internet reacted with such gleeful ferocity. This isn’t really about unpasteurized dairy with cow poop bacteria in it. It’s about influencer perfection and the collective desire to take it down a notch.

Then we get into “Hating on the Katies” — the online backlash against lifestyle influencers and everyday women who are only now speaking up politically and why progressive s might be getting this one very wrong.

And finally: the rise of the Intellectual It Girl. From celebrity book clubs to “becoming disgustingly educated,” we unpack why smart is suddenly chic again and why I hope it destroys the soft girls, stay-at-home girlfriends trends.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moms drive the majority of household purchasing decisions. Recommendations from mom influencers outperform traditional ads. They even convert better than celebrity endorsements. And yet, they’re still treated like they should be grateful for a free product and an affiliate link.

This week we talk with Chelsea Clark, founder and CEO of Momfluence, an influencer marketing agency built specifically around mom creators, about how the mom-influencer economy really works and why it continues to undervalue women’s labor even as it explodes.

We get into why moms chronically undercharge, how the lack of transparency mirrors other female-dominated industries, and the uniquely brutal experience of having your work publicly judged every day while also parenting.

Learn more about Momfluence here.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every January, parents are asked to plan the entire summer for their kids months in advance, spend a lot of money, juggle waitlists, and pretend this isn't a hellscape of doom. In this episode, we chat with journalist Katherine Goldstein about the overwhelming amount of summer planning we all seem to be doing and why so much of it falls on moms.

There are a ton of reasons for this that are uniquely American. We have long summers, very little paid time off, a culture that expects constant supervision, and a childcare system that’s mostly private and wildly expensive. Put all of that together and summer often ends up being more logistical nightmare than break.

Katherine also pushes back on the idea that kids need nonstop structured programming to have a “good” summer. She talks about why the pressure to optimize every week is exhausting, and about what happened when her family opted out of the camp scramble and tried something totally different.

Follow the Double Shift substack here.

Get 20% off Katharine's Summer Budget Travel Guide here with the code UNDER20.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve had kids, you’ve probably wondered at some point if you’re a bad mother. I would say this is true for 99.9 percent of us. And the other 0.1 percent is Ruby Franke.

On today’s episode of Under the Influence, we're joined by Cut culture writer EJ Dickson to talk about her smart, sharp and wildly satisfying new book One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate. “Bad mom” is one of our culture’s favorite labels, and EJ pulls back the curtain on where it came from, how it evolved, and who it’s actually attacking.

We talk about why the moral panic tends to land on women (and especially women of color), and how the modern parenting advice industry and influencer economy keep moms perpetually off-kilter. We also get into Mommie Dearest and maternal mental illness, the pressure to perform “good motherhood,” and why even the most self-aware among us still find ourselves blurting out, “I don’t usually give them this much screen time.”

This one is a lucky, a permission slip to stop chasing impossible standards and let ourselves just be moms.

Order One Bad Mother here

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one is going to check in with you to make sure you're enjoying your life.

What if fun—not self-care, not optimization, not doing more—is the thing missing from modern motherhood?

This week on Under the Influence, we’re talking about why moms feel guilty for wanting joy, adventure, and pleasure that doesn’t serve anyone else. Our guest is Kelly Conroy, the creator of Your Mom Races Rally (YOMO), who went from feeling invisible and depleted in early motherhood to learning how to race rally cars—yes, actual rally cars—on dirt tracks at high speed.

This episode is about the lies we’re told about motherhood: that it should fulfill every need, that good moms are selfless, and that fun has to be earned, justified, or monetized to be allowed. We talk about why women feel pressure to prove the “ROI” of their hobbies, why dads are never asked to account for their leisure time, and how reclaiming adventure can radically change how we parent, partner, and exist in our bodies.

Kelly shares how racing became a form of deep presence, confidence-building, and community—and why modeling joy, risk, and selfhood for our kids might be one of the most important things we do as parents.

This conversation is about identity, autonomy, and why choosing fun isn’t frivolous—it’s revolutionary.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are only a few topics women in their forties can’t stop talking about right now: perimenopause, hormone replacement therapy, and GLP medications. In this episode, we sit down with physician Dr. Mary Brandon for a no-bullshit conversation about what’s actually happening in our bodies—and why so many of us feel like we’re losing our minds.

We break down how GLP medications really work (and why many women feel better on them beyond weight loss), the role inflammation plays in joint pain, sleep, mood, and energy, and what the next generation of these drugs could look like. We also get into hormone replacement therapy—what it actually does, why testosterone is so often ignored in women’s care, and how decades of fear, shame, and misinformation have made this phase of life harder than it ever needed to be.

Follow Dr. Brandon's practice here.

Follow Dr. Brandon here.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Three things are happening in the group chat right now: perimenopause, ICE, and Heated Rivalry. That’s it. That’s the list. And yes, I am late to this particular party because this is a show I have to watch alone, in the daylight, with no children within a one mile radius.

So let’s talk about why this Canadian, low-budget, nipples-everywhere hockey romance has basically taken over the brains of American women in this exact moment. I brought in the only person I wanted to unpack it with: Sarah Wendell, co-founder of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, who has been taking romance seriously since before the rest of the world decided it was cool.

We get into what makes the show feel so different from American TV, why it probably couldn’t have been made here, and how it became a global obsession without a celebrity tentpole (hahaha tentpole). We talk about what it means to watch two men do their own emotional heavy lifting for once, with no woman managing the feelings, and why that turns women on.

This episode is funny, smart, extremely not safe for kids, and designed for anyone who has ever loved “delicious trash” and also wanted to talk about it like it's Proust.

Read EVERYTHING Smart Bitches, Trashy Books here.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’m really excited to introduce you to a new show today.

It’s a smart podcast about trashy books: Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, created by my good friend Sarah Wendell. Sarah has been talking about romance novels in a smart, generous, deeply thoughtful way since long before the current romance renaissance. She’s brilliant, she’s an absolute delight, and she has produced more than 700 episodes of this podcast.

Typically, Sarah talks with authors, readers, reviewers, and bloggers about romance novels, which happen to be one of the most popular genres in fiction worldwide. But today’s episode is a little different.

Her guest is our mutual friend Amanda Matta, best known online as a royal-watcher and pop culture historian, and the host of The Art of History podcast. In this episode, Amanda brings her Art of History treatment to classic old-school romance novel covers. Yes, there is Fabio. And yes, it’s as fun as it sounds.

Listen to more Smart Podcast, Trashy Books⁠.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Taylor Wolfe, better known as The Daily Tay, has built a massive following online by helping us laugh about the hardest parts of motherhood.

In this episode, we talk about Taylor’s new book Just a Busy Season, a brutally funny and deeply honest look at postpartum life, breastfeeding shame, marriage after kids, and how the so-called “busy season” never truly ends. We dig into how she went from a 2009 blogger to running a full-blown media business, why the word “influencer” still feels condescending, and what it’s like when satire goes viral and strangers decide they know who you are and decide to crap all over your life in the comments section.

We also get into mom shaming, why one cruel comment can outweigh a hundred kind ones and how women end up policing each other online.

Order Just a Busy Season here.

Follow Taylor on Instagram here.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are so many “most anticipated” lists about what to read this year. We have one book at the very top of ours: The Fountain by Casey Scieszka.

Casey is one of our closest friends, and this is the novel we’ve been quietly recommending for years before anyone could actually get their hands on it. The Fountain, out in March, is set in the Catskills and follows Vera, a woman who looks like she’s in her mid-twenties but has been alive for more than two hundred years. She comes back to her hometown to figure out what happened to her and whether she can finally stop living forever. It’s a page-turner, but it also asks bigger questions about aging, power, womanhood, and building a life with purpose and love.

We also talk about friendship and books as a form of survival, the high-stakes insanity of swapping early drafts with someone you’re just getting to know, and what it looks like to build a creative life while parenting, running a business, and juggling more jobs than anyone should have at once. Plus, we get into writing process, imposter syndrome, and what actually makes someone a writer.

If you’re choosing a March book club pick right now, this is one to put at the top of your list.

ORDER The Fountain here.

Request that Casey Zoom into your book club here.

Join our newsletter community here.

ORDER The Parisian Heist here.

Visit our lovely sponsors here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices