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Warning: This post and episode contain spoilers for the “Love Is Blind” season 7 finale!

The first 15 minutes of the “Love Is Blind” season 7 finale was riveting and wrenching. The following hour was largely boring, with sides of sweetness and dramatic irony. This is one of those finales that should have jumped straight into a reunion. (Not that we think…

The psychologist John Gottman has posited that there are four horsemen that portended doom in a relationship: contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling. If this theory didn’t already exist, it could have been developed simply by watching this season of “Love Is Blind,” in which contempt and criticism have infected several of the relationships root and branch.

At this point, it feels like it happens every season. You think you know who the villains are… and then more episodes come out and the TikToks start rolling in. Move on over, Leo. Stephen and Tyler (sob!) are ready to take your place.

In this week’s batch of “Love Is Blind” episodes, our couples finish out their time in Cabo…

Our nation’s preeminent insta-marriage reality show has taken its talents to the capital for season seven! It’s “Love Is Blind,” DC edition, and this mammoth first drop (six episodes, some close to 75 minutes long) showcases that special DMV flavor. Cast members work at think tanks and ponder whether they would have spoken to each other if they’d met “on the Hill.” In this episode, we recap drop one -- episodes 1-6!

There are a lot of things to love about the new Netflix show “Nobody Wants This,” Netflix's new rom-com TV show starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell. Unfortunately, its depiction of Jewish women isn’t one of them. In this episode, we get into the joys and failures of “Nobody Wants This,” our eternal crushes on Adam Brody, the show’s shared cultural DNA with “Keeping The Faith,” and more. Hope you enjoy! Xo

After four years and four seasons of television, Emily Cooper has finally been in Paris for an entire year. That’s right: despite seasonal hopscotch, some misleading pregnancy timelines, and a general sense among the show’s audience, characters, and seemingly even writers that our plucky young marketing phenom has been in Paris forever, t’s really only been about 12 months in “Emily in Paris” time.

The minute the beat drops on Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” during the opening scenes for Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” you know you’re gonna be in for a god damn ride. The camera is trained on social media star Taylor Frankie Paul, a mother of two in her late 20s who is all hair extensions and highlights. She’s also the closest thing this series has to a protagonist. A producer asks a question to set the scene: “So tell us how a couple of Mormon moms, getting together, making TikToks, suddenly turns into this crazy swinging sex scandal?”

The show is ultimately more about Whitney Leavitt leaving the group chat than about a Mormon sex scandal... and yet we are HOOKED. In this episode, we discuss Paul’s tricky role as the show’s emotional center, saints and sinners, Whitney’s villain edit vs. the real villain (Zac), Demi’s feminist soapbox, Jessi’s company branding, and whether MomTok “can even survive this.” Hope you enjoy! Xo

Last season of “Selling Sunset” saw Chrishell Stause victorious, the undisputed queen of the Oppenheim Group and, more importantly, of the reality show about it. In season 8, her power can go unstated, but it’s felt; she and her clique run the school (complimentary). But as their stars are rising, and other agents jockey for similar clout, the narratives on the show seem to be driven less and less by real estate affairs and more and more by reality TV production affairs: Who set up what on-camera conversation, and for what purpose? Who said what about whom during an Instagram Live or in a social media conversation about the show? If a show depicts the personal lives of its stars — their marriages, family lives, romances — is everything pertaining to their personal lives fair game, or are some things too sacred or too sensitive to be used as TV fodder?

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the “Love Is Blind UK” reunion.

The “Love Is Blind UK” reunion show dropped Monday, and we were ready. While we were eager for updates on all of our troubled but mostly lovable duos, there was one from whom we expected to hear nothing noteworthy: Sabrina and Steven Smith, the standard-issue golden…

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the final drop of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes.

In this episode, we discuss the stag and hen dos, the most beautiful wedding venue we’ve ever seen on a “Love Is Blind” show, and, of course, who got married and who got jilted at the altar.

Spoiler Alert: This podcast and post contain spoilers for the second batch of “Love Is Blind UK” episodes, 5-9.

The certified hotties of the inaugural season of “Love Is Blind UK” are officially out of the honeymoon phase. Literally. Our six (!!!) couples leave Corfu and head back to London in this batch of episodes, where they move into some immaculately-designed riverfront apartments (seriously, we would like to move in!), meet each other’s family and friends, and begin to discover the cracks in their romantic relationships.

In this episode, we talk through the highlights of these FIVE episodes, call out our stand-out friends and enemies, and Claire gives her predictions for who will get married and who will split. Hope you enjoy! Xo

They’ve got the pods. They’ve got the golden goblets. They’ve got a Nick-and-Vanessa-Lachey-esque married couple with English accents (Emma and Matt Willis, to be specific). And they’ve got a host of singles from across the U.K., mostly in their late twenties to thirties, who are ready to bare their hearts through a luminous opaque glass wall in hopes of finding a spouse. “Love Is Blind UK” is here, and it’s got all the romance and drama we expect from the series with an extra dash of winning British slang and cultural references.

It feels like we’ve been preparing for this one for years. We’ve talked about nap dresses and mom bodies. We’ve talked about the fear of losing your selfhood in motherhood. We’ve talked about egg-freezing and IVF. We’ve talked about the way that parenthood and non-parenthood are treated on both the left and the right. And now it’s time for all of these threads to merge together into a mega-discourse, thanks to Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance.

A preternaturally beautiful, homesteading momfluencer and an alt-right weirdo with the face of a socially-awkward 14-year-old (and an unsettling obsession with punishing childfree women) may seem like odd cultural bedfellows. But, as Claire put it, if Ballerina Farm is the trad honey trap who makes the pro-natalist lifestyle look romantic and joyful, JD Vance is the trad boot heel of the state who aspires to grind down upon all the childfree women in America until they’re barefoot and pregnant in their egg aprons.

Note: We recorded this episode last Wednesday, so some of the post-show updates we discuss may have evolved!

“Love Island USA” did its big one this season. (Like so much of “Love Island” lingo… if you know you know. Soul Ties is craaaaaazy!)

Emma was curious what was behind the show becoming such a mainstream phenomenon now, six seasons in. So she recruited “Love Island” aficianado and the author of the superb Nightcap newsletter, Laura Bassett, to school her on the show’s history, and analyze Leah and Rob’s star power, Serena and Kordell’s rom-com arc, and what made season 6 so special. Hope you enjoy!

“The Bear,” everyone’s favorite drama-with-just-enough-jokes-to-get-awards-nominations-as-a-comedy, which follows a tortured-genius chef who heads back to Chicago to take over his brother’s Italian beef sandwich shop, has released its third season. In this podcast, we discuss what happened (and didn’t) this season, the critical backlash, our own initial reactions to season 3, how the repetitiveness and stagnation of the season might serve a purpose in its artistic project, and where “The Bear” could go from here. And despite how this may sound, we had a lot of fun with this one! We hope you enjoy. xo

Emma and Adam are engaged! Claire interviews Emma all about the proposal, and then they both discuss the feelings on surprise proposals, traditional wedding traditions and how their feelings about marriage interact with their feminist values. (Bonus: Claire talks about her proposal story!)

Watching Netflix’s new Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders docuseries, “America’s Sweethearts,” is like diving under the water to check out what a swan’s feet are doing as she glides elegantly across a glassy pond. The frantic but hidden exertion underneath, all in service of creating an apparently effortless movement forward, becomes suddenly, jarringly visible once you peer under the surface of the water. That’s the ultimate challenge of meeting the traditional high-feminine ideal: The work, no matter how demanding, must expand to include the work of making itself invisible. A Dallas Cowboys cheerleader is an elite athlete, a brand ambassador, a pageant-ready beauty, a sex symbol and an ever-ready helping hand. She works tirelessly and accepts the meager pay as an honor. She also makes it all look easy. It’s part of the job.

In this episode, we dug into the labor exploitation of it all, focusing on the devaluation of women’s work and the expectation that women will demonstrate their virtue through a willingness to donate time and effort. We also discuss the rigid beauty standards and casual objectification faced by the cheerleaders, and the upholding of a very specific feminine ideal through this brand. Hope you enjoy! xo

Reading the comments on The Cut’s Instagram page is not for the faint of heart. Things tend to get weird and heated and even more weird, but sometimes they also get interesting, like they did after writer Shannon Keating wrote an essay about her confused ambivalence about having children.

The piece ran with the e…

Dearest gentle readers, the end of Polin season is upon us at last, bringing with it relief from weepy eyes and gasping breaths. Colin and Penelope’s love story climaxes in several senses during these final four episodes: with a declaration of love, with a long-awaited sex scene featuring a mirror, with his discovery of Penelope’s nom de plume, and with his eventual acceptance of her full self. Oh, and they get married. (Details, details.)

But alongside the story of their friendship and love growing deeper and more complete, this season is telling another story: the story of how an intrepid gossip girlboss gaslights and gatekeeps her way to the top.

Bravo shows tend to be their most interesting and most depressing when we’re watching something dissolve, whether that’s a longterm relationship or the remaining space between reality TV cast members and their audience.

“The Valley,” “Summer House” and “Vanderpump Rules” all ended their seasons with something fundamental shatt…

The great rom-com stars make it look easy. Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore: When they fall in love on-screen, their charm pulls us in and the transparency of their emotions enables us to feel every moment of yearning and every thrill just as their characters do. But a rom-com lead can also, we recently discovered, turn in such a limp performance that it makes the sheer difficulty of being a rom-com lead obvious. Sydney Sweeney is a good actress, and she was surely trying to put in a rousing performance as the female lead ofthe recent film “Anyone But You.” It just doesn’t work.

Dearest gentle reader…

In the words of our dear gossip-monger Lady Whistledown, “Diamonds are not the only gems that sparkle.” On this season of “Bridgerton,” we are given an emerald, in the form of a no-longer-citrus-clad Penelope Featherington. The former wallflower is in full bloom, catching the eyes of both naturalist Lo…

“Selling the O.C.” has always distinguished itself from its older, cooler sister “Selling Sunset” by being slightly worse in almost every respect: the fashion, the characters, the politics, the drama. In season 3, that continues. The “Love Island”-inspired, Shein-designed outfits, the flatly unpleasant people, the thinly veiled bigotries, and the warmed-over storylines make for an uninspiring season. Still worse, the biggest central stories now seem irrelevant, given how many key characters have left the show since this season filmed.

But “Selling the O.C.” does offer one thing “Selling Sunset” does not: sheer villain volume. Everyone who has briefly won our sympathy on this show immediately loses it (except perhaps Brandi, who has effectively sidelined herself from the drama this go-around). The most likable characters onscreen often turn out to have the most heinous politics, and even the more sympathetic figures often have pretty unpleasant vibes themselves. There’s not a Chrishell in this bunch, folks. It’s mean girls and a*****e bros all the way down.

In this episode, we discuss the alarmingly flammable-looking fashion; the abysmal race, class and gender politics; the Alex Hall-Tyler Stanaland will-they-won’t-they flirtation that just won’t end; and the gay panic that appears to have blown up the cast. We hope you enjoy!

Are we in the golden age of friend-group Bravo shows? After doing a major binge of established shows “Summer House,” “Vanderpump Rules,” and new addition “The Valley,” we think that answer is a resounding yes. So naturally, we had to get Gibson Johns of Gibsonoma back on the Rich Text pod to do a little state of the Bravo union.

All three of the aforementioned shows track th…

Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album. And after almost a week of listening and relistening to the album, following the critical reactions to it, and stewing in the public debates raging about it, we decided we were ready to wade in.

We are joined by culture critic B.D. McClay of Notebook for this conversation!

Further Reading + Listening:

“Taylor Swift Still Isn’t Your Friend,” B.D. McClay’s 2023 Slate essay about the controversy surrounding Taylor’s relationship with Matty Healy

“Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome with B.D. McClay,” Know Your Enemy pod

"Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood," Ann Powers, NPR

“Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet,” Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

“Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend,” Constance Grady, Vox

“The Real Reason Taylor Swift Dresses Like That,” Cathy Horyn, NYMag

It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.*

David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. …

Last week, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an all-time banger of a hate read — which is saying something, considering the run they’ve been on recently (from the “$50k in a shoebox” piece to the “tried to leave my husband and then realized I was just having a breakdown” piece). Grazie Sophia Christie’s floridly written and smugly framed essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” argues, with all the wisdom and certainty earned through 27 years on earth and 4 years of marriage, that leveraging youth and beauty to marry an older man is a cheat code for women, who are otherwise condemned to years of miserable labor alongside insufficient same-age partners.

One of the first things you notice about “Irish Wish,” the latest output of Lindsay Lohan’s deal with Netflix, is just how… saturated the colors are. The pink accents in her plaid knee-length dress look a little too pink. The green grass of the Irish countryside is a little too green. The blue of the water is a little too blue. Are we in Ireland at all, you start to wonder? Is that real clothing? Are those real human beings? Is this all a simulation? And why in god’s name is Ayesha Curry there?

We needed reinforcements to properly unpack why this movie shook us to our cores and also made us laugh so very much. Luckily, Nora McInerny was game to talk it all through.

Nearly three months after the last official appearance of Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and following approximately 17 waves of fevered speculation about the cause of her unusually long absence from the public eye, we decided it was time to dedicate an episode to KateGate. Sara Petersen of In Pursuit of Clean Countertops joined us to recap the timeline of events since this PR mess first began brewing, to discuss a few of the major theories behind her absence, and — most importantly — to unpack the seductiveness of this particular path down the rabbit hole.

It only took six seasons of “Love Is Blind” for Netflix and Kinetic to get Nick and Vanessa Lachey some real media training. At long last, our fair hosts seem to have discovered the power of a follow-up question! (They did seem to basically forget to ask about the majority of Jimmy and Chelsea’s relationship, but… baby steps.)

This year’s reunion had som…

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some spoilers for the finale of season 6 of “Love Is Blind.”

The Charlotte-based “Love Is Blind” season that started out so promisingly is looking pretty diminished by the finale — at least when you’re counting couples. Season 6 ended up being as short on weddings as season 5, and similarly gave us…

Just when we thought things had reached peak insanity on season 6 of “Love Is Blind,” receipts pointing to some questionable off-screen behavior of cast members started popping up all over TikTok.

Full disclosure! We taped our recap of episodes 10 and 11 last week, but then the gossip started pouring out: about Jeramey’s pre…

On this week’s pod, we recap episodes 7-9 of “Love Is Blind” season 6, which has begun to take some unexpected twists after a strong opening. Though the first drop of “Love Is Blind” episodes ended in a grim place, with at least two of the five engaged pairs collapsing into conflict within hours of attending their first social fun…

Season 6 of Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” dropped its first six episodes on Valentine’s Day, and (obviously) we binged them all. The verdict? So far, so good.

After an absolutely disastrous season 5, which left multiple lawsuits in its wake, and two couples fully erased from the season, we were wary heading into season 6. But six…

this week on the pod, we discuss the first six episodes of season two of “The Traitors.” Hosted by Alan Cumming and his Scottish sparklecore wardrobe — a seemingly endless array of kilts in bold colors, structural sleeves, and rhinestone-studded ensembles — “The Traitors” takes 22 reality show contestants, athletes, and a former member of the English Parliament, and throws them into a gussied-up game of Mafia.

“What is the penis to me? What is its nature?” Jacqueline Novak asks early in her show, “Get On Your Knees.” After some consideration she concludes that the penis is tender, responsive, and has “the soul of an artist.”

Like the organ it explores, “Get On Your Knees” has a tenderness at its center, wrapped in a package of genital humor.

Just when you thought “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” would never be able to top the moment when federal agents tried to arrest Jen Shah during filming, the season 4 finale raised the bar to the heavens, delivering a finale as shocking and suspenseful as a scripted thriller.

Content warning: We will be discussing infertility and IVF during this episode. If those topics are sensitive for you right now, we totally understand. Feel free to skip this week’s episode. Take care of yourselves, first and foremost.

When Sami Jacobson decided to start trying to have a baby, she was 33, and, anxieties assuaged by a doctor friend, she figured, “it’ll just happen.” But then… it didn’t.

Now, at 37, she and her husband are in the middle of one of the least-discussed fertility interventions — something that New York Magazine termed “the last fertility taboo” back in April: egg donor-assisted IVF.

This week, we finally got around to discussing the movie everyone has been talking about: “May December,” a film “loosely inspired” by the Mary Kay Letourneau-Vili case. Directed by Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, it stars Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress researching her role playing Gracie A…

FBoy? F, Hi. Again!

After being unceremoniously axed by MAX in 2022, our favorite, innovative reality dating show has made a moderately triumphant comeback. “FBoy Island,” a show from the creative brain of former “Bachelor” EP Elan Gale, just wrapped up its third season on The CW, and boy do we have thoughts.

First, there’s t…

The holidays are here at last, and one thing Netflix guarantees us during this magical time is a Christmas-themed chick flick starring one to three early aughts icons. The plot? Thin as a single snowflake. The message? Don’t stop believin’ (in Santa).

Over the four months that Claire was on maternity leave, a whole lot happened, both in our lives, and in the greater cultural sphere. So we figured it would be a good opportunity to catch up,

An entire, absolutely deranged season of “Love Is Blind” aired! Charity Lawson found love with Dotun Olubeko on “The Bacheloret…

This week on the pod — Claire’s first official week back from maternity leave! — we dig into the latest season of the Netflix show about the Oppenheim Group, a luxury L.A. real estate brokerage where maternity leave is grounds for removal.

Back in the fantasia of Calacatta marble countertops and glass pocket doors that is the Los Angeles …

There is a particular pleasure in listening to other people give relationship advice. In this episode, we give it a go ourselves.

As a girl in the late ‘90s and early aughts, few figures loomed larger than Britney Spears.

She was IT. Her blonde waves, her sugary sweet voice, her sexy-but-virginal winking public image, she represented an ideal I knew I was supposed to strive for and also knew I’d fail to achieve. I choreographed dances …

Houston, we had a problem. We continued to have problems. The problems spun out far beyond our TVs — like this lawsuit — and now the problems have ended. That’s right, baby, “Love Is Blind” season 5 has come to a whimpering end.

We got two weddings, one double “I Do,” and a shockingly calm and mature reunion episode. (Raise your virtual hand if you were …

Season of 5 of “Love Is Blind” continues to be an absolute mess, top to bottom.

Episode 8 was full of hard-to-litigate conflicts (Johnie and Izzy, Uche and Lydia, Johnie and Stacy, Uche and Miriam…), and then episode 9 was like emotional whiplash as we prepare for the two — only two! — weddings we will see in the finale.

This season of “Love Is Blind” is less about rooting for any of the couples, and more about watching with fascination as relationships fall apart and — maybe — come back together. And this week, the couple that did NOT defy the odds, is horny-for-Americana J.P. and sweet kindergarten teacher Taylor.

After forcing his partner…

My main reaction to the first four episodes of “Love Is Blind” season 5? OY.

There are certain conventions of “Love Is Blind,” as there are with every dating show, that we’ve grown to understand and, in a sense, feel comforted by. There will be a Golden Couple who emerges as a sure thing from episode one. There will be at le…

In my humble opinion, few things feel as good as a promising, burgeoning friendship.

As inept as I’ve historically been at finding great men to date, I excel at making new friends. We all have our strengths, and that’s one of mine. Friendships have been the building blocks of my adulthood. I reached 36 as an unmarried…

Editor’s Note: The audio quality on this episode is worse than normal because we had to use our backup Zoom recording. Apologies for this! Emma is running an operation of one while Claire is on leave.

Is “Love Is Blind” season 4 the most functional cast in LIB history? After watching the three-part “After The Altar” special w…

While I was watching episode 8 of “And Just Like That’s” second season, I texted Claire an important question: Do I have Stockholm Syndrome, or has this show become significantly more watchable?

After a much-needed nearly two-hour breakdown of the back half of the SATC spinoff’s sophomore season with Claire herself (!!!), my conclusion is that the answer…

I have a love-hate relationship with “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Jenny Han’s 2009-2011 trilogy turned Prime Video hit show. There were so many things I adored about the first season: the idyllic setting of (fake) Cousins Beach, the adult friendship between Belly’s mother, Laurel, and her college bestie Susannah Fisher, the Taylor Swift-heavy soundtrac…

“Red, White & Royal Blue” is the streaming summer rom-com I’ve been craving. A sexy prince! A sexy First Son! Sexy chemistry! It’s all very sexy and very hopeful and very full of the kind of political wish fulfillment that feels oh so good as we stare ahead at our next presidential election cycle. I wouldn’t call this mo…

I may not have been an OG fan of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” but I was a dedicated one. I watched Countess Luann incessantly discuss her cabaret show, I knew all about the fish room and the lower level, and I couldn’t wait to watch the boat ride from hell.

And yet, in 2021, deep in pandemic-land, I found myself dre…

The first thing I noticed when I stepped into a Brooklyn movie theater at 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, the day before “Barbie” opened nationwide, was the palpable buzz of anticipation.

Before the Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” even began, you could sense the hunger of the audience; the sense that we had been waiting for something just like…

We’re back to recap the second batch of episodes of “And Just Like That,” a show that we love to watch and also love to obsessively critique. And boy did a lot happen in episodes 3-6.

We got breakups, breakdowns, a Gloria Steinem cameo, an odd amount of petty crime, a particularly creepy scenario which involved a MILF list and grown-ass…

“The Bear” season 2 deserved better than what it got. After a highly acclaimed and buzzy first season (which just snagged 13 Emmy nominations), the FX culinary comedy/drama released its whole second season on Hulu in one drop. Instead of savoring one new episode a week — and having a whole day or more of discourse about standout episodes, li…

This is part two of our two-part Q&A about motherhood and non-motherhood. You can listen to part one here.

CW: In this podcast, we discuss pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with those topics. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that questions around pregnancy and “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

So much about diving headfirst into Big Adult Life Decisions is about embracing the unknown. And few things require more leaping into the unknown than becoming a parent — the first time or the third time or not at all.

The unanswerable questions are literally endless: How will your body react to pregnancy, should you want to and be able to (both big ifs) become pregnant in the first place? What will labor be like? Will your child be healthy? How will your body recover from childbirth? Will you still feel like yourself, and if not, for how long? What will your ambition look like? How will your friendships change, whether or not you have kids? How will you balance work and parenting? If you never have children, what will your older years look like? If you want children and are single, how should you preserve your fertility? If you aren’t sure if you want to have kids, how do you broach those conversations while dating? What will the world look like in 50 years if you choose to bring new humans into it?

In this episode, we dive into more of the thoughtful, thought-provoking, difficult-to-answer questions we got from you, our community. We discuss things like financial readiness, maintaining friendships across parent/non-parent lines, and how to maintain your sense of self if you decide to have children. We also try our hand at giving some advice: on egg freezing, on dating while grappling with whether you want kids, and on feeling like being a “baby maker” is somehow “unfeminist.” Like in our first installment, we come to few hard and fast conclusions, but like so many things, the beauty is in the discussion.

Hope you enjoy this candid conversation! Xo

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CW: In this podcast, we discuss pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with those topics. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that questions around pregnancy and “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

A couple of months ago, we asked our wonderful listeners for questions and suggested topics for a discussion on motherhood/non-motherhood — and received a deluge of outstanding submissions. This week, we finally got around to answering some of them! In this episode, we focused on questions about deciding whether, when, and how to prepare for having kids; choosing not to be a parent; the experience of pregnancy and childbirth; and the logistics of having kids while working and living in the city.

Many of these questions are profoundly personal, and really have no “right” or universal answer. We tried to balance speaking honestly about our own experiences and feelings with trying to circle some broader takeaways, despite the fact that everyone’s experiences and feelings on these topics are unique and can’t be distilled into simple rules. Doing these episodes on the motherhood question have been nothing if not a challenge to examine where our own emotions and beliefs about having kids took root — the values we grew up with, the examples we were shown, our own personality quirks, the lucky and unlucky breaks we’ve gotten along the way — and to reflect on how we really decide what to do with our lives.

We hope you enjoy, and stay tuned — we’ll have more coming soon, with questions about money, working motherhood, how having/not having kids can affect friendships and your relationship with yourself, and advice!

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack!

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And just like that… we’re back in the saddle with Carrie & Co.

Carrie is experiencing the instability of the podcasting industry, Miranda is in Los Angeles with Che (yes, Che Diaz is still around), Charlotte is grappling with her role as a mom now that her children are bonafide emo teens, and Samantha is still absent (but going to make …

After Emma’s meticulous crash course in “Vanderpump Rules” and, more specifically, the Scandoval, we were both feeling prepped and ready as hell to watch a finale and three entire reunion episodes about the wild on- and off-screen events of the past season. The finale kicks off with Ariana and Sandoval’s raw on-camera confrontation about hi…

We are GOING ON (mini) TOUR! If you live in the Philly, Boston or New York City areas, come hang out with us and see Love To See It LIVE! We’ll be recapping an iconic — and hilarious — vintage episode of “The Bachelorette” with some very special guests: “Normal Gossip” host Kelsey McKinney, BIP alum Jill Chin and comedian Arden Myrin. Get…

We are GOING ON (mini) TOUR! If you live in the Philly, Boston or New York City areas, come hang out with us and see Love To See It LIVE! We’ll be recapping an iconic — and hilarious — vintage episode of “The Bachelorette” with some very special guests: “Normal Gossip” host Kelsey McKinney, BIP alum Jill Chin and comedian Arden Myrin. Get your tickets here.

Content Warning: In today’s podcast, we will be discussing pregnancy and having children, and our own personal experiences with deciding whether to grow our families. We know these are difficult topics for many people. If you’re struggling with infertility, or have suffered miscarriage, or have lost children, we know that the question of “choosing” to have children can be particularly painful. If this is the case for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

It’s been nearly two years since we’ve had a conversation about motherhood on this podcast. Now felt like a good time to bring this loose series back. Claire is pregnant with her second child. Emma is watching so many people around her experience the joys and pains of parenthood for the first time, and is still confused about how she feels about having those experiences herself.

So consider this episode a casual check-in, one in which we try to be honest and raw about a topic that is so thorny for so many people. This conversation is far from the totality of our thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes, but it is a start.

We are working our way through all of the excellent questions and topics that listeners suggested when we said we were thinking of doing more motherhood/non-motherhood episodes. We plan to dig deeper into topics like the money question in future episodes. And we also are hoping to have guests — friends and experts who have lived experiences that we don’t.

Hope you enjoy. Xo

Check out our previous conversations on motherhood & non-motherhood below:

Bridging The Motherhood Divide (Ep. 1)

Mom Fashion & The Nap Dress (Ep. 2)

The Egg Freezing Boom (Ep. 3)

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack!

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The big headline about season 6 of “Selling Sunset,” the real estate docusoap set amidst multi-million-dollar mansions in Los Angeles, was the departure of the long-time series villain, Christine Quinn. After five seasons of antagonizing doe-eyed heroine Chrishell Stause and systematically burning bridges with the rest of the Oppenheim Gr…

Note: Because of all of the clips and photos, if you’re receiving this in your inbox, you will have to click “view entire message” at the bottom of the email to see the full post!

For “Vanderpump Rules” fans, “Scandoval” was the culmination of a years-long commitment to the dramatic ups and downs of a group of Los Angeles strivers. For everyone else, it…

Twenty years ago, Hilary Duff cemented her status as a Disney Channel icon by starring in the first-ever Disney series movie spin-off released in theaters: “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” As in the show, Duff played the perpetually lip-glossed, glossy-haired middle-school outcast, Lizzie McGuire, who manages to get bullied by being nicer and conventionally hotter than anyone you went to junior high with. The concept of the movie: Lizzie heads to Rome for a post-graduation class trip, only to catch the eye of an Italian teen heartthrob named Paolo and get swept into impersonating his ex-partner, Isabella, at a music video awards show. It’s millennial tween girl wish-fulfillment to the max, from Lizzie’s effortlessly stick-straight blonde hair and pinstriped flared low-rise jeans to her sudden ascension into pop stardom. And it should not be surprising that, as adult viewers, we found this classic tween flick to be rife with plot holes, bad accent work, and glib references to no-carb diets. How did we ever make it through middle school in the early aughts? This movie only offers more questions.

If you haven’t been listening to our “Bachelor” off-season pods on “Love to See It,” we’ve been rewatching teen romances that shaped our own youthful beliefs about love, ambition, feminism and finding ourselves: “Love and Basketball,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Easy A,” and many more to come. And honestly? Most of them actually do hold up.

Joining us for this rewatch was the wonderful Laura Hankin, our old friend and author of “The Daydreams” (out tomorrow!), a novel about four friends who starred on a Disney-esque teen show in the early aughts — and whose lives spun off in wildly different directions after a live episode went catastrophically awry and brought down the entire series. Now adults, the four cast members are brought back together for a reunion show, where old wounds are reopened, old secrets come to light, and old hopes are rekindled. It’s truly the satisfying version of rewatching “Lizzie McGuire” as a grown-up, with all the heady 2000s nostalgia plus the added depth of adult perspective.

So please, check out Laura’s delightful book, dig into our teen rom-com rewatch miniseries over at LTSI, and enjoy this tween rom-com rewatch — as a special treat, we’ve made it free!

And stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot of great pods coming this month for paid subscribers, including a pre-VPR finale Scandoval explainer, a “Selling Sunset” season 6 recap, and a “Yellowjackets” season 2 discussion!

Spoiler warning: The “Love Is Blind” season 4 reunion will be discussed in this post and in great detail in the podcast! You’ve been warned!

Also, we attempted to be as up to date as possible on all of the tea trickling out post-reunion, but of course we had to take time to edit this episode, and in the intervening hours, Ja…

Spoiler warning: The “Love Is Blind” season 4 finale will be discussed in this post and in great detail in the podcast. There will be spoilers! Be prepared!

When Alanis memorably sang, “It’s like raaayyy-ee-aaainnnn on your wedding day,” she was trying to illustrate the concept of irony. She was mistaken, of course. Rain on y…

It’s a big week for “Love Is Blind.” At this point in the season, things always start to either really come together or totally fall apart. And in episodes 9-11 of season 4, we got both.

On one end of the should-they-get-married spectrum is Brett and Tiffany, who continue to be THE Golden Couple of the season. It’s hard to sa…

The pods and sunny Mexico are in the rearview mirror, so it’s time for our four surviving couples to move into Seattle townhouses and start hashing out chore wheels. This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s the first opportunity the couples have to see if they can stand each other not just through a wall or at a lavish resort, but while managing th…

NOTE: When we started recapping this week, we thought it was a 4-episode drop, and then we realized it was actually a 5-episode drop! So we recap all 5 episodes in this podcast, but we recapped the last episode in a separate taping. (Also, be warned: This made the recap pod way longer than anticipated.) Thanks for bearing wi…

In the final moments of “Sex/Life” season one, desperate Connecticut housewife and former New York sex-haver Billie (Sarah Shahi) is finally ready to act on years of yearning and months of journaling about the one that got away. She’s been trying to make things work with her handsome, loving, and loaded husband Cooper, and to put …

Warning: This podcast contains many, many spoilers for “You” season 4, part 2. It also contains discussion of events in the show that pertain to suicide.

ANOTHER WARNING: DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED “YOU” SEASON 4.

Ahhh, Paris. The City of Lights, the City of Love, the City of American Women Starved For Romance. In the American cultural imagination, the French capital has long been idealized as the most romantic, chic, charming destination in the world — the perfect place, as “The Bachelor” might put it, to fall in love.

On the…

“Your Place Or Mine” has all the markers of a great romantic comedy: The friends to lovers trope! A script from “27 Dresses” screenwriter / “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna! Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, both of whom have aged like fine wine! A wild cast of supporting characters played by legends …

Last season of the Netflix thriller “You” ended in an almost absurdly climactic way: Joe Goldberg, the main character and arch-villain of the series, killed his murderous wife Love Quinn, burned down their house, faked his own death, and left his baby son with a couple who would make better guardians. He then took off to Paris to find his new love object, Marienne, who had fled there with her daughter to escape him.

Season 4 finds us in an unexpected place: London. Joe has found his way to a new city, a new identity (Jonathan Moore), a new gig (American literature professor), and a new role in the drama. Joe, for three seasons, has been a serial killer and an irredeemable stalker; however much he may live in denial of his own nature, he has never strayed far from the role of Big Bad. But almost as soon as his story in London commences, Joe wakes up one morning to find that his colleague, Malcolm, has been knifed to death and left on his kitchen counter. In a panic, he disposes of the body — only to learn, from encrypted disappearing texts from an anonymous figure, that he did not kill Malcolm in a blackout fugue. He is being framed. Joe the villain has become Joe the victim, and, very quickly, Joe the detective, as he frantically tries to uncover the real killer.

With five episodes left to go, there are many possible ways this season could ultimately go. But we couldn’t resist hopping on the mic to dissect the first half of season one. We discuss its class satire and its meta-commentary on eat-the-rich entertainment, the murder-mystery conceit, and Joe as possible victim. Hope you enjoy! xo

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Part 2 of this series will be released for paid subscribers on Monday. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

We asked you, our beloved audience, for questions a few days ago thinking that *maybe* we’d get enough to cobble together one podcast episode. But, as always, our community went above and beyond.

We got so many thoughtful, interesting, probing questions that we decided to break this Q&A into two episodes: One public episode (this one!!) released today, on work and career, podcasting, our favorite books, The Bachelor and other culture. The second part will go out on Monday for paying subscribers only, and will get a bit more personal, as we dig into questions about love and marriage, parenting, 30-something style, and friendship.

Thank you for your questions, and we hope you enjoy!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors! Coming soon: A subscribers-only episode about Netflix’s batshit new reality dating show “The Ultimatum.”

In the final episodes of the NBC sitcom “The Good Place,” our intrepid ensemble of Bad Place fugitives finally arrive at the real Good Place: an eternity of ease and joy. Almost immediately, they notice that all is not quite right. The denizens of the Good Place, finally delivered unto their eternal reward, are very f*****g not okay. They’re happiness-poisoned, so surfeited with fun and relaxation that they’re drowning in their own boredom. They’ve developed anhedonic armor against the relentless pleasure of heaven. The gang of newcomers looks around, shocked and horrified. All this time they’d been hearing about how rapturously wonderful the Good Place was… and this was the reality?

Heather Havrilesky’s new book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage,” gives us a similar surprise reveal for a more earthly dream: wedded bliss. That moment of shocking reveal is what made the pages of the New York Times, in an excerpt that catalyzed a massive Twitter storm. “Until Bill has enough coffee,” she writes, “[h]e is exactly the same as a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, almost sentient but not quite.” She also writes of his throat-clearing, his sneezes, his monologues on educational sciences. Marriage, she seems to conclude, “requires turning down the volume on your spouse.” Also, she writes, “he’s still my favorite person.”

Yes, this is what marriage to your favorite person might actually look like — not a rosy fantasia of passionate kisses and ardent speeches and your partner somehow doing and saying everything you’d like at exactly the right moment. It might be sort of a mess, and full of frustrations and disappointments. It might also still be really wonderful, and part of the wonder of it might come through the mess and the frustrations and disappointments. A marriage is a shared project, a puzzle; figuring out, together, how to survive the boring sameness and the human failings can be the most intimate and fulfilling part.

That’s what Havrilesky wanted to write about: not a perfect marriage, and not a broken one, but the gripping drama that takes place in a strong, happy marriage. The kinds of conflicts that are often breezily referred to as “ups and downs,” or with the vague admonition that “marriage takes work.”

We both loved Havrilesky’s book (we’re long-time fans of her advice column, Ask Polly) and were baffled by the backlash to “Foreverland,” so we were thrilled she agreed to join us for a conversation about her book, marriage and long-term partnership, aging and hanging on to your identity as a woman in this society, and why people had such a strong reaction to her book.

This week’s episode is free. For more Rich Text episodes, including podcasts on Love Is Blind, The Gilded Age, and Bridgerton, become a paid subscriber!

We’ve been reading…

Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour,” a dreamy origin myth and love story.

Also, Lydia Kiesling’s crackerjack essay on Horatio Alger, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and the weird mix of American ambition and erotic predation that undergirds our culture’s most successful and enduring rags-to-riches fantasies. The disturbing truth she reveals about Alger truly shocked me, though, as she points out, it’s not a secret so much as rarely discussed, and her analysis of his life and work illuminates elements of the billionaire romantic fantasy that have never quite clicked into place for me before. -Claire

Blair McLendon’s New York Times magazine piece on America’s Black billionaires. -Emma

We’ve been watching…

“Minx,” the HBO Max show about a prim feminist (a Vassar grad and tennis club member) who joins forces with a porn mag publisher (played by a swaggering Jake Johnson) after no one else takes an interest in her consciousness-raising magazine, The Matriarchy Awakens. The twist he adds: nude male centerfolds. It’s not groundbreaking — it’s pretty classic uptight-lady-meets-charming-dirtbag material — but it’s well-executed and fun, and the 1970s hair doesn’t hurt. -Claire

All the screeners of “The Ultimatum.” Netflix’s newest reality romance show is a complete mess, but I cannot look away!!!! -Emma

We’ve been listening to…

The bonus episodes of “Biohacked: Family Secrets” on Apple Podcasts, each of which follow someone whose life and identity was upended by a home DNA test. The stories are utterly gripping. -Emma

This week’s bonus episode of Love to See It! I couldn’t make the taping because I was sick, so for this episode, I get to be a fan. Emma went to see The Bachelor Live in New York last weekend, and she recaps the whole bizarre evening with our friend Liviya Kraemer and our old producer Harry Huggins. -Claire

We’ve been buying…

A chelating shampoo, because apparently Jersey City has ridiculously hard water. (Our faucets have the white mineral stains to prove it.) Hard water can build up in your hair and make it dry and brittle — but chelating shampoo is also super drying?? Seems like a conspiracy. Why is it so hard to have hair? Should I just try to install a showerhead filter? My level of handiness is “Ikea dresser assembly.” -Claire

I took advantage of Sephora’s spring sale to get some of my favorites lightly discounted. After months of searching and revamping my makeup routine, I’ve finally landed on a concealer: ILIA True Skin Serum Concealer with Vitamin C. I grabbed two of those — I have been wearing some light concealer under my eyes and on any blemishes on days when I want to look fresh but don’t want to do a full face of makeup. I also grabbed Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Setting Spray, a tube of Benefit 24-Hour Lamination Effect Brow Gel, and a Beauty Blender sponge, because mine has gotten pretty gross. -Emma

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This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

We soft launched Rich Text one year ago. It was supposed to be a hobby, an experiment, an attempt to rediscover joy in writing after a demoralizing year of Covid scares, lockdowns, and (for Claire) new motherhood. Instead, in the 12 months since our inaugural newsletter — thanks to an unexpected layoff — it became one of our primary projects and sources of income.

We rapidly ramped up our newsletter capacity, and, in an attempt to keep up with our Bachelor coverage as Matt James’s season wound to a chaotic close, we began publishing our recap podcasts here as well. Our Bachelor podcast, Here to Make Friends, eventually found a new home with Stitcher as Love to See It with Emma and Claire, but we immediately realized that we had an opportunity with Rich Text to podcast about everything else: scripted TV, books, weird Twitter storms like Bad Art Friend and broader cultural topics like motherhood. We kept writing essays, if less frequently than we should have. In the year since we launched this newsletter, it’s grown from a tiny side gig to the center of our work life.

And that, to be honest, is about all of you. We were, and are, profoundly grateful for everyone who subscribed to the newsletter in the wake of our involuntary departure from HuffPost, and we are grateful for everyone who subscribes now. We appreciate everyone who reads and/or listens to Rich Text, everyone who shares it, and everyone who lets it pile up in their inbox because it really can be pretty hard to keep up with all your subscriptions (Claire says, eyeing her stack of unopened NYRBs in the corner). And, of course, we appreciate those readers and listeners who pay for premium subscriptions. Everyone who pays to subscribe to Rich Text makes it possible for us to keep doing what we love, which is writing and talking about culture.

Starting a newsletter was a sort of optimistic, clean-slate New Year’s gesture in 2021, when we wanted it to signify our renewed commitment to blogging it out and keeping our synapses firing. Now it’s another new year, and another moment to take stock. Much like 2020, 2021 didn’t go much like we expected (globally, politically, professionally, or personally). Professionally, it’s been a terrifying and yet exhilarating new world for us. In this week’s pod, we talk about how this year of Rich Text went, what we’re proud of, and what we want to work on in 2022.

This week, in lieu of recommendations, we’re digging into the Rich Text archives. Here are our favorite podcast episodes and essays of 2021.

Claire

Emma

Podcast Episodes

Please let us know in the comments what you’d love to see more of in 2022! And again, thank you for being here. Happy New Year!

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On Rich Text Book Club this week, we’re talking about “Carefree Black Girls,” a new book from culture critic Zeba Blay, who also happens to be (full disclosure) our friend and old HuffPost colleague!

In 2013, Zeba tweeted a post with the hashtag #carefreeblackgirl. She was an early popularizer of the term, which reached toward a conception of Black girlhood that could be joyful, relaxed, at ease in the world — carefree in a way that white girls were often shown as being. Almost a decade later, her hashtag has evolved into the title of a book of essays about Black women in pop culture and her own experiences as a Black woman and critic. In “Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture,” Zeba blends the personal and the critical in order to explore how Black women have created our culture, how they’ve been depicted in it and treated by it, and how these narratives affect how Black women and girls experience the world.

As the subtitle suggests, it’s a celebration of women like Josephine Baker, Mel B, Serena Williams, Countess Vaughn, Viola Davis, and Cardi B — but it’s also a searching, tender excavation of the humanity of these women. Zeba examines how societal demands of and cultural tropes about Black women limit them, demand that they appear smaller or flatter or less complex than they truly are; she also, through her own experiences and those of the women she writes about, does an accounting of the suffering this causes.

It’s a beautiful and illuminating book, and we were so thrilled to talk to Zeba about it. This was also a mini-reunion, since we all worked together at HuffPost Culture for years — and getting to talk pop culture on Zoom again was, simply put, a huge treat.

You can buy “Carefree Black Girls” here, or wherever you get your books!

We’ve been watching…

The new “Great British Baking Show” season. It’s not quite like it used to be — I preferred it when the showstopper for Cake Week involved making a nice Victoria sandwich rather than an anti-gravity illusion cake (what is this, “Nailed It”?) — but I’ll accept it. -Claire

I’m still making my way through “Squid Game,” because I am a MASSIVE baby when it comes to violence. But I still am loving it. -Emma

We’ve been reading…

“Carefree Black Girls,” “Crossroads,” and this horrifying deep dive on a series of brutal murders at Woodson Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn. -Claire

“Carefree Black Girls,” of course, and our bud Jess Goodman’s great Bustle piece on the perils of being a Very Online author. -Emma

We’ve been listening to…

Michael Hobbes’s goodbye episode of “You’re Wrong About,” which broke my heart (all-time fave pod, changing forever!) but also inspired many thoughts about how we decide where to expend our creative energy and how to keep the joy alive in projects that were once passion projects and became, well, work. -Claire

In the spirit of keeping this Michael Hobbes-themed, I really loved the deep dive his other podcast, “Maintenance Phase,” did on Rachel Hollis. As someone who was only peripherally aware of Hollis before her TikTok/IG scandal, I really loved having Hobbes and his co-host Aubrey Gordon walk me through it all. -Emma

We’ve been buying…

We’ve both been saving up for next week’s Hill House Holiday drop. Yes, we’re extremely predictable.

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

In Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s new novel, We Are Not Like Them (out tomorrow at your finest book purveyors), lifelong friends Riley and Jen find their bond being tested in the most profound way possible. Riley, a Black TV news reporter recently returned to her hometown of Philadelphia, is assigned to cover a shocking police shooting of an unarmed teenage boy, Justin. Her childhood bestie Jen, a white woman who is late in her longed-for pregnancy, is also caught up in the case — because her husband, Kevin, was one of the two cops who shot the boy.

As Riley is drawn into covering the case, wrecked emotionally by yet another episode of anti-Black police brutality and developing a personal relationship with Justin’s grieving mother and uncle, she also must contend with Jen’s resentment that her best friend isn’t supportive of her husband, as he faces an investigation and public wrath. Both Riley and Jen ultimately have to face the reality of how race plays a role in both their lives, and in their friendship, after years of avoiding tough conversations about racism.

Pride and Piazza drew on their own perspectives as a Black woman and a white woman, as well as their own friendship, to tell Riley and Jen’s story in We Are Not Like Them. In our conversation, the four of us discussed the agony and ecstasy of creative partnership, the importance of Google Docs, how to build three-dimensional characters, storytelling for a cause, and all the tripwires that make interracial conversations about race so difficult (especially if you’re talking to your white friends!).

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This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

When the pandemic began, there was talk of a baby boom. More than a year later, that never materialized. But know what did? An egg-freezing boom.

Turns out that lots of women, predominantly in their 30s, decided there was no time like the Covid present to explore their options for fertility preservation. (If you peruse Instagram, you’ll even find a number of “Bachelor” ladies who publicly documented their egg-freezing journeys.) It was a perfect storm for women of a certain socioeconomic class: time to reflect on their desires and life choices while not going to the office, paired with the pre-existing trends of delayed parenthood and more employers offering coverage as part of their benefits packages.

Our dear friend — and OG Here To Make Friends producer — Katelyn was one of the many women who chose to undergo egg freezing in the last year and a half. She joined us to discuss fertility preservation, the terror of regret, and the general mindfuck that is being a 30-something woman during Covid.

More resources on egg freezing:

“How Egg Freezing Went Mainstream,” NYTimes

“Everything You’ve Ever Wondered About Egg Freezing, Answered,” Elle

We’ve been reading…

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton, about a 30-something writer in London who gets on dating apps for the first time after ending a long relationship, meets a guy she really likes, and then gets ghosted. It’s wry and well-observed and it broke me wide open. -Emma

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan, a sly and sardonic novel about two thirty-something servers, Alicia and Remy, whose romantic relationship is sustained by their joint obsession with Remy’s ex-coworker Jen, a microinfluencer he has long fostered a crush on. After the pair runs into Jen in real life and strikes up a new friendship, things rapidly get weirder and darker, even downright supernatural. Instagram addiction, the service economy, woo-woo self-help and the alienation of (what else) life under late-stage capitalism all take on an eerie sheen in this book, which is equally funny, disturbing, and uncomfortably revealing of the world we live in. -Claire

We’ve been listening to…

“A Little Bit Culty,” a podcast by former NXIVM members Sarah Edmonson and Anthony “Nippy” Ames. I would especially recommend their bonus interview with India Oxenberg. -Emma

The recent "Decoder Ring” episode on selling out, which actually offers a new insight on a topic I thought I’d already considered exhaustively: Jonathan Franzen’s selection for Oprah’s Book Club for The Corrections, and his public comments expressing that he didn’t want the Oprah’s Book Club sticker on his book because it would scare away his coveted male readers and diminish his artistic cred. Willa Paskin is a razor-sharp critic and, as always, I learned a lot from her analysis and research. -Claire

We’ve been watching…

Ok so this might be embarrassing but I am low-key obsessed with TLC’s “Welcome To Plathville,” and season 3 just premiered. -Emma

I just finished AMC’s “Kevin Can F*ck Himself,” a high-concept drama built around a traditional multi-camera sitcom featuring a schlubby, prank-pulling, Pats-obsessed, cable-repairing dude named Kevin and his hot, long-suffering wife Allison. When Kevin is offscreen, Allison, played by Annie Murphy (“Schitt’s Creek”), lives in a gritty drama about marital dissatisfaction. Fed up with his endless capers, his narcissism, and his inability to leave space for her to be anything but a tireless servant and comedic foil, Allison decides to kill him. The premise is a neat bit of commentary, if a bit heavy-handed (as is the execution). -Claire

We’ve been buying…

Supergoop! Unseen Sunscreen in SPF 40 so that I can carry it around in my tote and hopefully actually be reminded to put it on every day multiple times a day. -Emma

The Ordinary retinol serum, in hopes that I’ll soon have successfully weaned my son and be allowed to contaminate my breast milk with aggressive skincare products again. Optimism! -Claire

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription 

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Welcome to our third Rich Text book club! We have officially reached trend status, y’all.

For this episode, we were joined by our friend Jessica Goodman, the author of “They Wish They Were Us,” who has a twisty, page-turning new novel out this week called “They’ll Never Catch Us.” Like her fantastic first book, it’s a Y.A. thriller about murder, gossip, the terror-scape that is the high school lunchroom, and competitive young women with ambitions too big for the boxes they’re expected to fit into.

The book’s primary narrators are Stella and Ella Steckler, two sisters who are competing for the top spot on their competitive cross-country team at a high school in the Catskills — as well as athletic scholarships that could be their ticket out of town. Stella’s college hopes have already been shaken by a murky scandal from the previous season, and she’s more determined than ever to catch the eye of recruiters. When Mila Keene, a star runner from Connecticut, moves to town and begins to compete with them for dominance on the team, the girls are rattled but also drawn to Mila’s warm personality and competitive spark. Then Mila goes missing, and suspicion quickly turns to the two sisters who had most to gain from her absence in competitions. Did one of the Steckler sisters take out their competition? And if not, what happened?

In this chat, we talked about the intense pressure placed on elite female athletes, who are asked to be explosively competitive on the field while always maintaining a polite, ladylike facade; the complexity of the bond between sisters; the gentrification of the Catskills; and so much more.

You can buy the book here!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription 

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

We’ll admit it: we weren’t exactly champing at the bit to watch “Sex/Life,” the new lightly pornographic Netflix drama. The trailer, and first twenty minutes, suggested that the show would be both heavy-handed (a butterfly in a jar to symbolize a hot mom being smothered by the confines of domesticity? groundbreaking) and bizarrely menacing in tone. If we’re going to watch a campy, graphically sexual romance, we prefer a bit more spark and frothy fun and a bit less foreboding voiceover.

But then, well, everyone started watching it. A lingering moment of male full-frontal fueled a think-piece cycle. Reviews were, uh, less than kind. Against our own initial instincts, we grew intrigued. And so, at last, we binged.

“Sex/Life” tells the story of Billie, a ragingly hot and miserable Greenwich stay-at-home mom. She has a preschooler and a newborn, a sculpted Greek god of a husband who is also a successful hedge funder and living saint, a long-abandoned career as a psychologist and PhD candidate, and a throbbing need for sexual adventure and fulfillment that has begun to explode messily all over her life.

In a melodramatic voiceover, taken from the pages of her Word doc journal, Billie recalls the explosive sex she used to have with her bad-boy ex, Brad, who broke her heart, and yearns for a rekindling of that part of herself. And then, oops, her husband reads the diary — AND she runs into Brad, who she learns has been hooking up with her best friend, Sasha, but still has feelings for her. Who will she choose? What will her husband do? The drama unfolds from here, but all the plot is crammed into a handful of minutes in between endless explicit sex scenes, which manage to feel more grim than sensual.

In this discussion, we cover the first four episodes of “Sex/Life”: getting to know the paper-flat characters, unpacking the themes, and breaking down the credulity-stretching plot turns. We hope you enjoy!

We’ve been reading…

Filthy Animals, the new short story collection by Brandon Taylor, author of the recent novel Real Life, which I absolutely adored. There’s a thread of linked stories, about an unusual relationship that forms between three young people at a university — two dance students, who are dating, and a man who becomes entangled in a sexual game between them — that serves as a spine for the collection, but the stories also dip into the lives of a desperate nanny, a tenuously closeted woman in her first lesbian relationship, and more. The whole collection is acutely observed and emotionally nuanced, a true pleasure to read. -Claire

We’ve been watching…

“My Unorthodox Life,” a reality show on Netflix about Julia Haart — current CEO of Elite World Group, and former member of an Ultra-Orthodox community in Monsey — and her four children. It’s a fascinating look at religious fundamentalism and the path one family took in walking away from it. -Emma

The second season of “I Think You Should Leave”! I almost cried with joy when I saw a new season of Tim Robinson’s relentlessly uncomfortable, painfully funny sketch comedy show in my Netflix carousel. The new season is rife with absurd bits that spoof office politics, social niceties, and the death throes of capitalism. (If you’ve never watched the show, start with this season 1 sketch and then watch all two seasons.) -Claire

We’ve been listening to…

“Drama Queens,” the podcast where former “One Tree Hill” stars Bethany Joy Lenz, Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton recap the series, episode by episode. The first episode gave me all the nostalgic feels about my days of WB-watching. -Emma

We’ve been buying…

Heeled sandals from Zara. I decided I needed to mix up my shoe collection and wanted some fun heels that also weren’t super high and weren’t super expensive. I landed on these fun pearl-trimmed ones! -Emma

I’m on a personal spending fast after months of trying to figure out what my summer style would be, in a postpartum world — I’ve figured it out, it’s floaty dresses and high-waisted shorts with tank tops, next question — but my neighborhood park has a composting drop-off site, so I got a compost pail for our kitchen counter! It’s part of my long-term plan to suck less at making sure everything in our home is recycled and disposed of in the most sustainable possible way. Recently I’ve also been trying out Bee’s Wrap and Stasher bags to cut down on our plastic use, and reusable paper towels. -Claire

Happy Friday! Last week we dug into the divide that seems to spring up between women with and without kids, especially in our own millennial milieu. We loved opening up to each other and all of you about the resentments and pressures and societal structures that conspire to sort moms from non-moms, and how we try to foster friendship and community across those lines in our own lives.

We got so many wonderful messages about this episode, and we want to build off of it and address many of the important topics you brought up — women who have always known they want to be childfree, women who are unpartnered, women who are also taking care of elderly parents, and so much more — in future episodes. (Some will be public, and some will be subscriber-only.)

But we have a much more frivolous topic today, because this was actually going to be the second half of last week’s episode, and we didn’t want our notes to languish forever. So our topic today: the nap dress and cottagecore for moms and non-moms!

We both read Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study essay “Unpacking the Nap Dress,” which traces the historical precedents for romanticized, pastoral styles like the current crop of gauzy, ruffly nap dresses and the corresponding trend of mommy-and-me dressing, and draws out the ways in which these styles have been harbingers of backlash against change and attempts to reassert conservative values around women’s roles and the domestic sphere. She zeroes in on the ways that these dresses appeal to millennial moms, in particular, and work to signal class, politics, and race.

As big fans of the nap dress, we were intrigued, and it inspired a long and enthusiastic chat about dressing our changing bodies, reimagining a world without the capitalist rat race, and finding common ground through fashion. Hope you enjoy!

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Last year, it seemed like everyone was predicting a pandemic baby boom; this year, it turned out to be a baby bust (maybe because, thanks to reliable and accessible birth control, it takes more to get even straight people pregnant than forcing them into lockdown with their partners for months on end).

Cue the media freakout. “Experts sound the alarm on declining birth rates among younger generations: ‘It's a crisis’,” blared a CBS headline. Time went with “Why the COVID-19 Baby Bust Is Bad for America.” Arguments swirled about the need for stronger benefits to encourage young people to start producing kids in order to replace the population, or, conversely, the oppressive nature of pro-natalist policies. Should everyone be pushed to have lots of kids? Should everyone, rather, be discouraged from it?

As a mom and a non-mom belonging to the fail-generation in question — those hapless millennials — we were both vaguely aghast by this discourse, which seemed to betray parents and non-parents alike. In our free time, we talk a lot about motherhood and the ways in which it’s both fetishized as a concept by our society (especially for white women) while actual mothers are left without the resources or support they need.

We talk about the ways in which a lower birth rate can be reflective of hard-won and valuable new freedoms for women, but also of a failure by our country to provide economic and healthcare benefits that would make having kids feasible for more people. We talk about how non-mothers are made to feel as if they’re simply mothers-in-waiting, or as if they’ve failed to achieve the pinnacle of female value and experience; we also talk about how once women become mothers, their material needs are ignored and their individual identities are viewed as disposable.

We also talk about how fraught it can be for women to talk with each other about the big question of motherhood from different experiences. Moms and non-moms are often set in opposition, resentful of the freedoms or plaudits offered to women who made the other choice, rather than being encouraged to connect across different experiences and find shared purpose in improving the lives of women who have kids — and their children — and the lives of women who don’t.

So we decided to have a talk about it! We unpack some of the discourse around the baby bust news cycle, look back at the Elizabeth Bruenig essay on early motherhood that fueled days of controversy back in May, and try to sort through our feelings about parenting, or not parenting, in a society that is hostile to parents and yet, at the same time, hostile to childfree people.

We hope you enjoy! (And let us know if there are other topics like this one that you’d like to see us discuss!)

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Welcome to another book club episode of Rich Text. Our second! Three times will make it official, right? Our book today is God Spare the Girls, a powerful exploration of American evangelical girlhood and coming of age, by Kelsey McKinney. (If you missed our first book club episode with Laura Hankin, you can listen to it here.)

McKinney is a features writer and cofounder of Defector Media, as well as the author of God Spare the Girls, which will be out on June 22. Her novel tells the story of two young women, the daughters of a wealthy megachurch preacher, who begin to question their lives and their faith in the wake of a scandalous revelation about their father. You can pre-order the book here!

On this episode of Rich Text, we chat with Kelsey about the appeal of celebrity pastors, what it’s like to grow up in a community whose tenets you come to question, and the way the capitalism intersects with American evangelicalism (and other organized religion) in icky ways.

We also get into one of our favorite topics: the way that evangelical Christianity has become inextricably linked to “The Bachelor.” Come for the book talk, stay for the in-depth conversation about Ben Higgins’ Bible verse tat.

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Be warned: This chat contains ALL THE SPOILERS.

Who murdered the durder? We finally found out on Sunday night, after a spasm of national curiosity so intense that it overloaded HBO Max and left “Mare of Easttown” fans hanging.

The show ultimately revealed itself to be as much of a family drama as a whodunnit, following the titular detective Mare (Kate Winslet) as she attempted to finally grieve for her late son, solve the disappearances of two young women and the murder of another in her small community, and hold her own crumbling family together. In the finale, the central mystery of the show — who murdered young mom Erin McMenamin? — is dramatically solved, and the relationships between Mare and her loved ones are further tested.

Special guest Esmé Wang joined us to discuss whether “Mare” is actually a good show, the Delco accent PR blitz, how the show explores motherhood and friendship, and the thorny question of how to make murder mysteries without making copaganda.

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter by Claire Fallon and Emma Gray. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political in both written and audio formats. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

It’s been a minute since we’ve podcasted, so this week we’re trying something a little bit different. There’s so much in pop culture world we want to talk about and dissect — sometimes in obsessive detail. And we’ve absolutely loved getting to expand beyond “The Bachelor” here on the newsletter.

That’s something we will continue to do on “Rich Text,” in both audio and written formats. Some episodes, like this one, will be public. Others will continue to live behind a paywall, for subscribers only.

Today’s episode is all about The Kids (sort of). First, we talk about Pilot Pete and Kelley Flanagan, who can’t stop giving long-winded, extremely vague podcast interviews (well Pete’s was really just a monologue on his own podcast) about the messy end of their relationship.

Then we really get into The Teens with a discussion of Freeform’s soapy, ‘90s-set, teen thriller, “Cruel Summer.” Beyond just being a fun watch, the show is really a meditation on the power and danger of being a teenage girl, dressed up as a fast-paced, nostalgic mystery.

Finally, we dive into Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, “Sour.” Is it creepy that adults — like us! — have been listening to it on repeat? What does it say about our culture that even we adults form obsessions over the things teenagers produce? Should we all just stop worrying and give into the ecstasy of playing “traitor” and “good 4 u” at high volume while dancing around our living rooms and/or driving down the highway?

Happy weekend, and please enjoy our (slightly long, extremely fun) conversation about Kids These Days!

*Apologies for the occasional interruptions in this episode. We were contending with door knocking, phone calls and very loud package deliveries.*

Imagine, if you will, a very safe and special place for women. It’s candy-hued and tastefully lit; it’s a space of female community and mutual empowerment. Most of all, it’s secret, exclusive, guarded. If a cis man ever tries to enter, he will be met with force. It’s The Wing meets Skull and Bones, and behind the gates, New York’s most elite women are plotting change.

This is Nevertheless, a clandestine social club at the heart of Laura Hankin’s witty, suspenseful satire A Special Place for Women. The novel follows an out-of-work, lonely journalist named Jillian Beckley who pitches a moonshot story to her old editor and crush: An exposé of what really goes on inside the long-rumored, never-confirmed-to-exist club. She believes that the powerful women of Nevertheless were behind the election of the city’s first woman mayor, and that they engineered her downfall after she tried to pass a wealth tax. She infiltrates the club — with some help from her childhood friend, Raf, a celebrity chef who agrees to pretend to be her boyfriend — and quickly discovers there is a lot going on. But what exactly? Is it just kitschy cute you-go-girl feminism, salary negotiation workshops, and virtue signaling? Or is there something darker… even something genuinely spooky?

We chatted with Laura — who is, full disclosure, a longtime close friend — about her new book, safe spaces for women, girlbosses, Rachel Hollis, capitalism, female friendship, and so much more.

Here’s a brief excerpt of our conversation:

Claire: There's so much to discuss in this book: corporate feminism and girlbosses, pastel furniture and cute neon signs that say, like, f**k the patriarchy, Tarot decks on sale at Urban Outfitters, and, of course, being special women, which we all are. Laura, thank you so much for joining us.

Laura: Thank you so much for having me. We've had so many conversations over the years, but never one recorded before.

Emma: The pressure is on! To kick us off, where did the idea for this book come from?

Laura: So the funny thing that I don't think you knew until today, Emma, is that you played a role. About four years ago, you invited me to come and meet you for a coffee at this exclusive women-only space, The Wing. I remember being so excited to meet you there. I had never been before, but I had obviously seen the gorgeous Instagram. And I was like, “Oh my god, it's gonna be this incredible utopia for women. I'm gonna feel so welcomed. Maybe I'll try to join.” And I was at this place in my life where I didn't feel particularly impressive — [My first book], Happy And You Know It, had not been published yet. I was running around to a bunch of day jobs. And I remember going and meeting you and you were so wonderful. But I just felt so out of place and so self-conscious. I was like, “What am I doing here? My dress is so wrinkly. I'm too short.” It just made me wonder, what would happen if a woman who really did not picture herself being part of an exclusive club had to infiltrate it for her career?

Claire: I was really intrigued by the idea of setting a really dark thriller/satire/mystery in these really glossy, cozy spaces that are supposed to be safe spaces for women who are threatened by male violence at every turn. I'm curious for you, what appealed to you about this juxtaposition of genre and setting?

Laura: I think I was always like, “Oh, if I could just get into those beautiful spaces, and be surrounded by other women, and suddenly, I just had my allies in the fight and we could rest together, then everything would be great.” And that is obviously not the case. And so I wanted to dig underneath these shiny surfaces. Because I feel like sometimes the shiny surfaces can hide the deepest secrets. And also, I'm really drawn to shiny surfaces, and I want to be a part of them.

Emma: In the book, you get at the inherent tension between advocating for gender equality and the exclusivity of an elite club — even if it is focused on women. It erases so many other ways that oppression plays out in our culture [other than gender], and also turns this social justice mission into a capitalist product. It's something that I think was you dealt with really compassionately, which, as someone who was a member of The Wing, and loved it, but also felt really conflicted about it the whole time, I really appreciated.

Claire: It's so seductive to believe that you could belong to this beautiful place full of impressive people. And I feel like your book really gets at this. [Places like] The Wing, and more importantly, Nevertheless [the fictional women’s club in the book], they're trying to embody an ideal of acceptance. That is what social justice is built on. It's not exclusivity, it's everyone gets the same, everyone gets their needs met equally. But what we really want in our communities is to be special. There's no community, the way that humans build community, without some people not being in it. And that is fundamentally inextricable from the appeal of a social club. So how do you find community without betraying the ideal of “everyone is equal, everyone is accepted”? It’s very difficult for the women of Nevertheless to resolve that. Do you feel like you're still struggling with resolving that?

Laura: A little bit? It's really nice to be able to have a “common enemy.” That might be the wrong [term], but to be able to be like, “well, the men can't come.” And I think a lot of the women in the club in the book will say the right things. Like, “we have to remember these other women, too, we have to support them, the ones who are not as fortunate as us.” But it takes hard work to actually reach out and include those other people. And also, then it would make going to the club not feel quite as exciting and fun, right? Having something be secret or exclusive makes it automatically feel so much more important than it actually is.

Emma: I think so many of us don't want to admit the appeal of that, because it feels kind of gross to be like, “I like being special. I like being included in the thing that not everyone is [included in].” And so if you can dress that up in a mission, then you don't have to feel bad.

Claire: There's this incredible balancing act that these companies are trying to do, which is marketing both acceptance and exclusivity, and trying to capitalize on both of those desires. Because what we all want is to be accepted and for other people not to be. And so if you can sell both sides of that, that's very effective.

Emma: Laura, you do a really good job of interrogating those impulses, and universalizing the experience [of wanting to be chosen] and then picking it apart, but doing it from a really compassionate place, which makes A Special Place For Women such a fantastic read.

Laura: Ultimately, I always really love my characters. And so I always do want them to succeed and try to be better. So I think I was coming at the writing of the book from that place. It's like, okay, they might fail, they might do some bad things. But is there hope for redemption for us all? Can we find a way to both belong and not keep people out unnecessarily?

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to the full Rich Text audio chat in this newsletter, or wherever you get your podcasts!

You can buy “A Special Place For Women,” which comes out May 11th, here, check out her virtual book launch here, and follow Laura on Instagram and Twitter!

On Wednesday morning, Colton Underwood sat down with Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts to make a big announcement: He is gay.

“I’ve ran from myself for a long time. I’ve hated myself for a long time. I’m gay and I came to terms with that earlier this year," he told Roberts.

The interview packed a lot into less than 15 minutes. Underwood discussed the ways in which growing up in the Catholic Church and in the uber-macho world of professional football impacted his desire to avoid reckoning with his sexual identity. He talked about the mental health issues this repression wrought, culminating in a morning last year on which he “didn’t have the intentions of waking up.” He spoke about the heterosexual cachet of “The Bachelor” franchise, so powerful that when he was named the titular lead, he remembers “praying to God the morning I found out I was the Bachelor and thanking him for making me straight.”

He also addressed ex-girlfriend Cassie Randolph, although Roberts did not press him much on the temporary restraining order Randolph was granted against Underwood in September 2020.

“I would like to say sorry for how things ended. I messed up. I made a lot of bad choices,” said Underwood. “I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. I’m sorry for any pain and emotional stress I caused. I wish it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. I wish I would have been courageous enough to fix myself before I broke anybody else.” 

We felt like Colton’s interview — and all of the discourse around it — deserved more than a bonus chat. (There are layers! So many complex layers!)

So we talked about it with the wonderful Daryn Carp, host of PeopleTV’s Reality Check, and podcasts “Scissoring Isn’t A Thing” and “Shaken And Disturbed.” In our hour-long conversation, the three of us all sorted through our reactions to the news, the broader implications of Colton’s coming out, how to ensure Cassie’s pain is accounted for in this moment, and the reports that he will be starring in a Netflix series currently being filmed.

We also didn’t want this one to be behind any paywalls, so we are making this post and the episode public. (You can copy the RSS feed from this newsletter into your podcast app of choice, or you can search Rich Text directly on Spotify.)

Happy listening, friends 🌹

Special thanks to Sara Patterson for producing and editing this Rich Text audio chat. If you need an amazing audio producer, hire her!

This week on Rich Text we dive into the finale of Matt James season of “The Bachelor.” As you can imagine, we had *a lot* of thoughts on the bleak conclusion of a season that was meant to signal historic change for the franchise.

After you listen, check out our essay about the finale and After The Final Rose special on Cosmopolitan.com!

Want more Rich Text? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this now-curricular writing project, and receive subscriber-only posts and audio.