Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong

When Dr. Christopher Choukalas first held his newborn twins, the joy he expected simply wasn’t there. He spent his early fatherhood days obsessively controlling nap schedules, struggling with panic attacks, and even darkly imagining ways he might escape his new life. Despite being a successful physician, he couldn't even begin to diagnose what he was going through.  Christopher's experience sheds...

Most people don't think much about human biology after high school. Which is a real problem! Because most people also assume that biological sex is obvious, simple, and binary: people are either male or female. However, the closer biologists look, the more that simple perspective falls apart.  In The Binary Delusion, biologist Ari Berkowitz reveals how chromosomes, hormones, genitals, brains, and...

Death is inevitable, but most of us spend our lives keeping it at a distance. After Amelia Chiarenza lost her mother, father, and best friend within 16 months, she decided to move closer to it instead. In this mini episode, the creator of the Cultivate Being podcast explores what grief can reveal about our relationships, how unexpected people can help us reconnect with those we've lost, and why ge...

What if some of the ideas normalized in the practice of psychology are actually causing harm? Psychologist Jonathan Mathias Lassiter joins Blair to uncover the white/Eurocentric assumptions embedded in the field of psychology. They talk about racism in the therapy room, the bizarre “diversity project” Lassiter had to complete as a doctoral student, unlearning queerphobia, finding the right therapi...

Teresa Wong loved her newborn daughter. At the same time, she wondered if she hated her. After giving birth to Scarlet, Teresa found herself consumed by exhaustion, shame, isolation, and self-loathing. In her graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, she turns that experience into an intimate letter to the daughter she struggled to connect with.   Full transcript is avai...

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, another hashtag reckoning emerged: #ChurchToo. Religious women are coming forward with stories of being harmed by the tenets of Christian purity culture, which often foster sexual shame and disconnection from one's body, which contribute to environments where abuse is normalized or concealed, and which continue shaping people long after they leave evangelicalism...

After experiencing a devastating miscarriage, writer Ayana Lage was thrilled to welcome a new child. She wasn't so thrilled with the accompanying  sleeplessness, mania, and hallucinations, which included the delusion that God was speaking directly to her. Ayana was experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare but potentially life-threatening maternal mental health emergency. In this deeply personal c...

Donald Trump launched his political career by spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He launched his second term as president trying to overturn the plain and long-held intent of the 14th Amendment. In both cases, birth certificates played a crucial role. Historian Susan J. Pearson returns to unpack the Supreme Court's recent birthright citizenship decision, the pro...

History is often told through revolutions, presidents, and wars. Historian Ada Ferrer tells it through the experience of her own family. When Ferrer was just 11 months old, her mother fled Cuba with her in her arms, leaving behind a 9-year-old son she hoped to reunite with soon. Decades later, after her parents' deaths, Ferrer uncovered boxes of letters, keepsakes, and forgotten records that revea...

If you have one, your American birth certificate may be the most powerful piece of paper you own. It can open doors to citizenship, school, employment, and legal recognition. Which means it can also been used to enforce segregation, restrict marriage, erase Native identities, police gender, and m re. Historian Susan J. Pearson uncovers the surprising history of the birth certificate and reveals ho...

In 1959, a young University of Florida student was pulled out of his final exam by police and taken to a motel room for interrogation. His suspected crime: being gay. Journalist Robert Fieseler uncovers the hidden history of Florida's Johns Committee, a state-backed investigation that targeted Black activists, supposed communists, and LGBTQ people. Drawing from previously confidential records, Fie...

The rainbow flag signals unity. Reality under the banner is messier. Professor Kaila Story has spent her life navigating spaces where parts of her identity are welcomed while other parts are pushed aside. As a Black lesbian, she has encountered racism within queer communities, queerphobia within Black communities, and exclusion even among people who claim to be fighting for liberation. Drawing fro...

Holly Brown loves TV sitcoms. Growing up, her own family looked like the prototype for must-see TV: a charismatic dad who worked on a top sitcom in Hollywood, siblings and a mother filling the other familiar family roles. Until it all started to fall apart. As though the writers were playing some kind of sadistic joke. And as her father was dying of cancer, he revealed a secret no one had told her...

Kevin James Thornton built a massive audience singing absurd stories from his evangelical past in an auto-tune style on TikTok. But underneath the humor were years of loneliness, secrecy, religious fear, and the slow unraveling of a series of lives he thought he was supposed to live.  Kevin talks about growing up in a "super fundamentalist" church in Indiana, youth-group purity culture, heartbreak...

Why do racist comments from loved ones cut more deeply than overt racism from strangers? What makes it so difficult to name harm when it comes from someone who cares about you? And how do you respond when good intentions don’t match real impact? Samira Mehta says growing up in a mixed-race family showed her how love and harm can coexist in complicated, often invisible ways. Through personal storie...

We talk a lot about women’s reproductive health. We rarely talk about men’s. But that gap isn’t just cultural—it’s built into science itself. In this episode, Yale sociologist Rene Almeling explains how modern medicine ended up with an entire field devoted to women’s reproductive systems—and no real equivalent for men. From a failed 19th-century push for “andrology” to today’s emerging research on...

She thought there would always be more time to explore—until a routine hike nearly killed her. In this mini episode, Bailey Buckles recounts how a sudden, life-threatening infection drove home the fact that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. It was an especially powerful moment, because as a transgender woman of color in America, she hadn't always wanted to stay alive.  From climbing mountains to showing...

If you lost touch with reality, how would you even tell the difference? That's the question Sarah Labrie had to confront after her mother was found on the side of a Houston freeway in the midst of a schizophrenic break. And she also wondered, "Am I next?" In this candid conversation, Sarah discusses growing up between extremes of adoration and abuse, witnessing a parent’s mental illness, strugglin...

Dogs didn’t just become our companions. They helped make us human. They've been by our side for tens of thousands of years, helping us herd and hunt, migrate, heal, grieve, fight war, imagine the afterlife, and more.  Religion and environmental studies scholar Laura Hobgood joins us to explore the long, complicated co-evolution of humans and dogs—how humans have loved, used, protected, and sometim...

Some songs take decades to reveal what they’re really about. Back in the 90s when 20-year-old Steven Page wrote “What a Good Boy,” he understood it as a plea to ease up on restrictive gender expectations that harmed boys and girls. But as he performed it over the years, he realized it was about much more than that. The stirring anthem has become a greater exploration of gender identity and sexuali...

When George M. Johnson was a kid growing up in New Jersey, they loved Black History Month. They were thrilled to learn about the people who shaped American history for the better. But as they got older, they started noticing things were missing—hidden stories that might have meant the most to a queer kid like they were. George was especially drawn to one of the most dazzling moments in Black histo...

Is it possible to raise kind, feminist boys in our era of manosphere misogyny? Sonora Jha, an Indian-American immigrant and single mother, says yes. But it takes a lot more than good intentions.  She reflects on raising her son across cultures, teaching empathy through film, talking frankly about sex, consent, and body image, and modeling apology without demanding forgiveness. She pushes back on t...

Adoption is often framed as a loving and selfless decision made by women who want to give their babies a better life—but many relinquishing mothers say it doesn’t actually feel like a real choice at all. Private domestic adoption in the U.S. operates under conditions of high demand, limited supply, and deep economic inequality. Researchers say women rarely choose adoption over abortion or parentin...

We’re a little over halfway through January and it's already been A LOT. The Trump administration kidnapped the de facto Venezuelan president. The chairman of the Federal Reserve announced he’s being targeted for prosecution because the president wants to control monetary policy. A queer mother in Minneapolis was shot in the head in broad daylight by ICE, who is occupying the city, and the governm...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to outlaw abortion, has had devastating consequences for women across the country—especially because the American health care system was already making pregnancy more dangerous and more unequal in blue states and red states alike. In her new book Unbearable , journalist Irin Carmon tells the stories of five women whose experiences uncover the re...