Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong

Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. Angela says transracial adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion about their heritage.    ABOUT THE GUEST Angela Tucker is author of “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption . Her family story...

When Jessi Hempel came out of the closet she had no idea her whole church-going family had been hiding in there with her. And things got complicated fast when the closet door kept swinging open.   SHOW NOTES Jessi Hempel, " My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family ," TIME (Sept. 12, 2016).   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jessi Hempel is author of The Family Outing: A Memoir . She is also...

One hundred years ago, a bright new age for children was dawning in America. Child labor laws were being passed, public education was spreading, and more. But Adam Benforado says America stopped short in its revolution of children's rights. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty. We deny young people any political power, while we fail to act on the issues that matter mos...

Your family is...loving? Your family is...hurtful? Your family is...all this and more? If you feel overwhelmed when you think about your family, this episode will help you understand your anxiety and give you evidence-based tools to repair it.  Dr. Mariel Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says our physical and mental health challenges can be rooted in family trauma passed dow...

Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet.  Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drov...

Welcome to Relationscapes! The way society thinks about family, love, and identity seems to be evolving faster than ever. In our hyperconnected world, these changes feel more urgent, and as we're seeing every day in the news, it's sparking backlash. So what can we do?  I didn't have to worry much about that before as a white straight cisgender guy. But I realized that the less I knew about people...