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.

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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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I finally did the thing. After years of dreaming about a Philly bookstore, Nick and I bought a vintage trailer and christened it The Bookcase, a pop up mobile shop we’re rolling around the Catskills this winter. To figure out how any of this actually works, I called my friend Flannery of Bluebird Bookstop, whose own trailer grew into one of my favorite brick and mortar stores. We talk about why a trailer lets you test the market without dying of overhead, the brutal realities of book margins, how I’m curating a tiny but mighty selection, and why the magic is the experience as much as the sale. This episode is my love letter to community, discovery, and saying yes before I feel ready. Part two is coming.

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Find their clothing new arrivals here. (Use our code TRADWIFE20)

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Wharton economist Corinne Low wrote a viral article for The Cut titled “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men.”

Low, the author of the new book Having it All, is here to talk all about it. In this episode, we chat about the real economics of burnout, motherhood, and why gendered division of labor destroys intimacy. Corinne shares how she turned her own research into a blueprint for survival, left a marriage that wasn’t working, and fell in love again—this time, with a woman who gets it.

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Jane Birkin invented effortless cool before Instagram, before influencers, before French-girl chic was even a thing. But behind the Birkin bag and the famous love affairs was a woman battling depression, heartbreak, and the relentless pressure of being an icon.

Journalist Marisa Meltzer joins me to talk about her new book It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, which peels back the myth to reveal the real Birkin: fragile yet magnetic, self-doubting yet endlessly stylish. We explore why her aesthetic still defines generations of women, how her personal struggles shaped her art, why she continues to haunt our cultural imagination and the surprising ways Birkin’s legacy speaks directly to our influencer-saturated world today.

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