Spilling Chai

Five of the 10 most common medical interventions performed in the US are related to childbirth, and cesarean sections are the most widely performed surgery in the US. The cesarean section delivery rate has increased 500 (!!!) percent since 1970, and today more women die from pregnancy-related complications in America than any other rich country in the world. So what is driving America's insanely h...

What does justice look like for women of color in America? That is the key question for our episode this week as host, Anushay Hossain, speaks with CNN’s chief legal analyst and author, Laura Coates about her new book, and pursuing birth and racial justice as a Black woman in the world’s richest democracy.

Did you know that more women die giving birth in America than in any other rich country? The number of women who die giving birth in America each year has nearly doubled in the last two decades, making the United States the only developed country with a consistently rising maternal mortality rate. How can we make giving birth in America safer? That's a question at the heart of the premiere ep...

Hello my fabulous, dear Spilling Chai listeners! How is everyone? Welcome to the final episode of Season 3, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. When I was thinking about who we should have as the last guest for our season finale, only one person came to my mind: Bilal Qureshi, who was not only our very first guest on the first episode of the first season of Spilling...

Hello my Spilling Chai listeners! How is everyone? Welcome to episode 11 of season 3 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain! Right before I graduated from college at UVA in 2002, a favorite professor of mine told me something I think of often: “In the real world, you’ll be shocked at how uninformed people really are.” I’ve been thinking about Professor Rober...

Hello my fabulous chai drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 10 of season three of the show coming to you as always from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. When we think of stand-up comedians, we don’t really think about mindful masculinity and raising strong daughters. The #MeToo movement wreaked havoc on the stand-up comedy world but honestly, the deep-rooted misogyny was alread...

Hello my fabulous chai drinkers! How is everyone doing? Welcome to episode 9 of season three of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. When you hear the words “Iran nuclear deal” what are the images that come up in your mind? I think of men-- mainly American and Iranian diplomats sitting across one another in the conference room of some major hotel in Vienna,...

Hello my fabulous chai drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 8 of season 3 of the show coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain! One of my favorite things about living in DC as a University of Virginia (UVA) alum is having so many friends you went to college with so close by. And when you find yourselves working on the same core goals professionally, well that makes li...

Hello my fabulous chai drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode seven of season three of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain! We hear so much talk about diversity in the media but every now and then there is a journalist who becomes iconic just by doing their job. And when that person is a person of color? Well, that’s even better.

Hello my chai drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 6 of season 3 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain! When you think about American mainstream media, the image that naturally comes to mind is that of a white, middle-aged man or woman, and with good reason. Whiteness has been synonymous with journalism and media in the U.S. since forever. From Walter...

Hello my fabulous chai drinkers! How is everybody doing? Welcome to season 3, episode 5 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. It’s such a weird time to be alive and the duality is even more jarring if you’re South Asian-American: You watch the Indian subcontinent gasping for air while simultaneously watching America reopen. Lucky for us, our guest today is...

Hello My Dear Chai Drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 4 of season 3 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. When we think of spies, we think of iconic, leading Hollywood men (read: white men) like Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, or Daniel Craig. But in real life, patriotic immigrants, men of color also go undercover, risking their lives for love of coun...

Hello my lovely chai drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 3 of season 3 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC where the cherry blossoms and azaleas are just bursting all over the city. As COVID continues to ravage America and the world, domestic violence is also surging. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, when the pandemic began, incidents of domestic violence i...

Hello My Amazing Chai Drinkers! How are you? Welcome to episode 2 of season 3 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. If you follow me on Instagram, my favorite social media platform, you may have figured out that I am a big lover of all things food. I am not only an excellent eater and dessert connoisseur, if I do say so myself, but I am also a closet cook....

Hello Spilling Chai Listeners! How are you? It’s been three very long months. I’ve missed you but am so excited to be back on the mic with season 3 of the show coming to you LIVE from Washington, DC. You would think with the U.S. battling so many different kinds of pandemics-- from race to poverty to COVID-- that America’s love affair with guns would be cooling off. However, the numbers paint a ve...

Hello My Dear Listeners! How are you? Welcome to Episode 12, the season finale of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. For so long, journalism in America has been defined and run by white men-- and some white women. But where do the rest of us fit in and what happens to our stories? No one is poised to better answer this question than our guest today who is...

Hello Spilling Chai listeners! How is everyone? Welcome to Episode 11 of Season 2 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain! When we first launched this podcast and we were setting up our social media accounts, on Instagram I kept finding myself reposting these incredibly colorful, vibrant, and super-feminist images with this very cool South Asian vibe. The acc...

Hello Everyone! How are you? Welcome to episode 10 of season 2 of the show coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. One of the things I love about having this podcast is getting to invite people whose work I’ve admired and fan-girled from a far to be a guest on Spilling Chai. So, of course, I would take this opportunity to reach out to a woman who proudly calls herself an...

Hello fabulous listeners of Spilling Chai! Welcome to Episode 9 of season two of the show. You guys have such great taste in podcasts and I am so happy to have you with us! It is no secret that publishing in America, much like Hollywood, is not the most diverse business. In fact, a 2016 Diversity Baseline Survey examining race and gender in book publishing found that 79% of the industry is made up...

Hello Fabulous Spilling Chai listeners! How are you? Welcome to Season 2, Episode 8 of the show coming to you from Washington, DC. I am your host, Anushay Hossain. While many of you who follow my work may know that I am a massive feminist, how many of you know that I am actually a raging feminist? Feminism for me is more than just believing in women’s equal rights as human beings. I also rely on i...

Hello My Spilling Chai, listeners! How are you? Welcome to Episode 7 of Season 2 of the show. Is there a group of women more stereotyped or more misunderstood than Muslim women? From being collectively labelled as subjugated, oppressed, uneducated, helpless victims, despite the fact that Islam spreads from America to the Middle East to South Asia to Indonesia, when it comes to Muslim women we are...

Hello my Spilling Chai listeners! How is everyone doing? Welcome to Episode 5 of Season 2 of the show, coming to you from Washington, DC. The word “immigration” brings up so many different kinds of emotions and images for people. In Trump’s America, for me the word brings to mind families being tear-gassed and separated at the border; children in cages sleeping under aluminum blankets. Under Donal...

Hello Spilling Chai, Listeners! Welcome to Episode 5 of Season 2 coming to you from Washington, DC. Being a writer during a pandemic has made me think a lot about not just our stories but who gets to tell them. Being a brown person in America, an immigrant, a person of color, means that narratives are often framed for you by well, your brownness. But the work of our guest today has been instrument...

Hi Spilling Chai Listeners! How are you? Welcome to Episode 4 of Season 2 of “Spilling Chai” coming to you from Washington, DC. I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. I’ve been a feminist for such a large part of my life and one of the things that makes me the happiest is when men not only support women’s rights but openly call themselves feminists. One of the most frustrating things I have dealt with in...

Hello Everyone! How are you? Welcome to Episode 3 of Season 2 of Spilling Chai! I’m your host, Anushay Hossain. To say that things are hard right now might just be the greatest understatement of all time. While living in a pandemic intensifies the struggle for all of us in different ways, the gendered impacts of COVID-19 means pivoting around the pandemic has been uniquely difficult for women. Now...