The Feminist Present

Join Adrian and friend of the pod Michael Hobbes in part one of Moral Panic Mythbusting. Michael Hobbes is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase . He previously was a reporter at The Huffington Post and co-host of the podcast You're Wrong About.

Vauhini Vara joins TFP to discuss her debut novel The Immortal King Rao. Vauhini was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. She reported at The Wall Street Journal for nine years, with writing also appearing in The New York Times Magazine , The Atlantic , Harper’s , Wired, The New Republic , Businessweek, Fortu...

Angela Garbes is the author of Like a Mother, an NPR Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, New York, Bon Appétit, and featured on NPR's Fresh Air . On this week's episode, she and Laura laugh and cry as they discuss her new book Essential Labor, which explores care work and mothering as social cha...

Nell McShane Wulfhart is a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section and wrote the column “Carry On” from 2016-2019. She has written for Travel + Leisure , Bon Appétit , Condé Nast Traveler , The Wall Street Journal Magazine , and T Magazine. She is the author of the Audible Original Off Menu . She joins Laura to discuss her new book "The Great Stewardess Rebellion" and the untold...

Ry Russo-Young is an award-winning film director whose work includes the movies Before I Fall and The Sun is Also a Star. Ry joins us this week as we discuss her newest work, the three-part HBO docuseries Nuclear Family, which investigates the prolonged impact on Ry’s family of the four-year legal battle between her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights. We talk abo...

Melissa Febos is the critically acclaimed author of Whipsmart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood. She joins Laura and Adrian for a candid and captivating conversation on her newest book Body Work (out 3/16). They explore the craft and complexity of writing truthfully about our lives and loved ones.

Taylor Harris is the author of the affecting memoir This Boy We Made, which details her family’s journey through the American medical system in search of a diagnosis and treatment for her son Tophs. In this discussion, we explore the function of faith, anxiety, parenthood, medical mysteries, and institutional racism. Harris’s essays have appeared in TIME, Catapult, The Washington Post, and many ot...

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of the award-winning book The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir. Alex joins TFP this week to discuss the historically controversial lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness: is it really a lesbian novel, or perhaps more of a trans novel? Have we moved beyond the tragic queer love story? And how has our interpretation of this classic text changed in the last 100...

Friend of the podcast Moira Donegan is an opinion columnist for Guardian US who longtime TFP fans will remember from our first season. Moira makes a glorious return to discuss her recent deep dive into Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Jeanette Winterson CBE is the author of 27 influential feminist texts, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Sexing The Cherry, Gut Symmetries, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? , and most recently, 12 BYTES: Where We Might Go Next. In a special event partnering with the independent bookstores Politics & Prose and Books & Books, Jeanette joined Laura and Adrian to talk about how 12 BYTES en...

Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed are the hosts of the podcast YOU ARE GOOD (formerly WHY ARE DADS), the film podcast unafraid of feelings. With Laura and Adrian, they dive into the odd complexity of REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, the 1990 film adapted from law professor Alan Dershowitz’s 1985 book.

Meera Menon is the director of two feature films: EQUITY (2016), starring Anna Gunn as a high-powered Wall Street broker, and FARAH GOES BANG (2013), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue (and which Meera co-wrote with one of your loyal hosts). She’s also a sought-after director in episodic television, with directing credits on...

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America 2017), The Ferrante Letters (2019), and The Personality Brokers (2018). She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (2021). Merve chatted with Adrian and La...

The wildly talented Terry Castle, Walter A. Hass Professor in the Humanities, has taught literature at Stanford for almost 40 years. She was once described by Susan Sontag as “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today”, and detailed her friendship with Sontag in the classic essay “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Her many books include The Literature of Lesbianism: A Histori...

Annalee Newitz is pretty much nerd royalty. They are the author of the novels The Future of Another Timeline and Autonomous , which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, their work appears regularly in the New York Times and New Scientist , as well as in The Washington Post, Slate , Popular Science, Ars Technica , The New Yorker , and The Atlantic . They co-host the Hugo Award-wi...

Inkoo Kang, recently announced as the Washington Post’s newest TV critic, was also named the best critic of 2021 by the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards for her work at The Hollywood Reporter . Inkoo co-hosts the All About Almodovar podcast, and has previously written about film, TV, and culture for Slate, MTV News, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, and many other places. Laura and Adria...

Susan Stryker is an author, professor, filmmaker, and heroine of the trans and queer rights movement. Her extensive bibliography includes two editions of The Transgender Studies Reader and Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area ; her documentary films include Christine in the Cutting Room , an experimental short film about Christine Jorgensen, and most recently, T...

Laura and Adrian joyfully reunite in part 2 of this guestless double-wide kickoff to The Feminist Present’s third season. And we have a new, cinematic theme! In addition to the book nerd chatter you’ve come to count on from us in the present, for this season we’re also reflecting on the past: we’ve invited a bunch of brilliant feminists to talk about ‘90s-’00s “chick flicks” with us, allowing them...

Laura and Adrian joyfully reunite in this guestless double-wide kickoff to The Feminist Present’s third season. And we have a new, cinematic theme! In addition to the book nerd chatter you’ve come to count on from us in the present, for this season we’re also reflecting on the past: we’ve invited a bunch of brilliant feminists to talk about ‘90s-’00s “chick flicks” with us, allowing them to define...

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild , the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough , and the novel Torch . She’s also Laura’s favorite living author. Laura barely kept her shit together talking with Cheryl about unconditional positive regard as a feminist value, the writer as teacher, and how breadwinners can’t afford to have write...

Lyz Lenz is the author of two books, the latter of which, Belabored: A Vindication on the Rights of Pregnant Women , was released while she was fleeing an Iowa derecho mid-pandemic with her two young children. She was, until very recently, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette; her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in her popu...

Sister Roma, the “most photographed nun in the world,” has been an influential member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence since 1987. The Sisters are an Order of queer and trans nuns that debuted in San Francisco on Easter Sunday 1979; originally formed to draw money and attention to the AIDS crisis, the Sisters have spent over four decades in radically compassionate service to, in their words,...

Nick Mitchell is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received, and returned , UCSC’s Chancellor’s Award for Diversity in early 2020, and has been a vocal proponent of the Cops Off Campus movement throughout and beyond the University of California system. Adrian and Laura talked to Nick about his essay “ Summer...

Farai Chideya has covered every American presidential election since 1996. She’s the author of six books, as well as a journalist and commentator whose work has been featured on NPR, CNN, ABC News, Newsweek, FiveThirtyEight, Oxygen, and many other outlets. After the 2016 election, she became a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blending quantitative and qu...

Imran Siddiquee is a filmmaker, writer and activist, whose articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Bitch and Salon. They are also an active filmmaker and organize the BlackStar Film Festival. Laura and Adrian talk with Imran about masculinity, pop culture , and race, about being from a place called Springfield and about the complexities of white feminism .