From Somewhere with Anna Sale

Thank God for Women Who Care

Anna Sale — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:45:34 GMT

When I was talking to Zoe Azulay as we produced this week’s episode about elder care, Zoe summed it up as profiles of “three women doing their best.”

And in the United States right now, even doing our best doesn’t guarantee we’ll find the right kind of elder care for ourselves or our loved ones without breaking the bank.

Nursing home care in the U.S. can run families $10,000 a month, a cost Medicare won’t pay for.

When one of our guests, Anna de la Cruz, had her parents both develop dementia around the same time, her family split into two paths: a Medicaid ‘spend down’ in the U.S. for her mom, and a move to a memory care facility in Mexico for her dad.

Anna shares her story of her divorced parents both needing memory care at the same time, while she’s raising her kids and also tending to the care of her adult brother with Down Syndrome. I also talk to two women who’ve developed specialties in helping families in crisis find the right kind of elder care.

If any of these challenges sound familiar or like something you could use more community around, subscribe to Anna’s newsletter Gen Xandwich.

We’ll miss you so, Dolly.

So many have said so much as we’ve had to say goodbye. Here are a few of the remembrances I especially enjoyed:

NPR’s Ann Powers: How Dolly Parton wrote the story of a changing America
Tommy Tomlinson: The greatest living American
New York Mag’s Craig Jenkins: Dolly Parton Scrambled Our Brains
Slate’s Carl Wilson: Dolly Parton was no saint—and that’s all the more reason we should always love her.
NYT’s Tressie McMillan Cottom: Loving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard.

I can’t pick a favorite song, so here are some moments I don’t want you to miss. Dolly with Sam Shepherd talking about senseless loss in her beauty shop in Steel Magnolias.

And here she is in 1970, performing with her two sisters, where you hear her singular voice and how she blended it beautifully with others. (She also makes sure to mention her sisters’ names after the host skipped over that detail.)

Speaking of people who see and cheer families that others overlook…

I’m going to be in Laramie, Wyoming, on September 17 to join the 40th Anniversary celebration of Climb Wyoming, an organization that supports, trains, and accompanies single moms as they develop new job skills to get matched with long-term employment opportunities. Back in 2023, I interviewed some of Climb's graduates, along with their leaders, for an episode we called “Productive Discomfort: A Job Training Program for Single Moms that Centers Mental Health.”

I’ve stayed in touch with Climb since, and it’s been so enriching. Every time I interact with someone affiliated with Climb, I feel more hopeful and inspired about the structural transformations that can be possible when we approach them relationally.

Join us if you can be in Laramie on 9/17, or support them from afar if you’re so moved.

How Doing Standup Made Novelist Elizabeth Strout Face Facts

Anna Sale — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:09:03 GMT

I love novelist Elizabeth Strout’s writing — its spareness that is never trying too hard. She tells us, the readers, just what we need to know when. Maybe it’s this patient unfurling that makes me totally fall in love with her characters. The first Strout character I fell for was Olive Kittridge, the namesake of the novel that would win the Pulitzer Prize and become a mini-series starring Frances McDormand.

Each character is so specific. Her latest novel The Things We Never Say, which was long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, tells the story of Artie, a 57-year-old public high school teacher struggling with the state of the world and the rhythms of a lived-in marriage and parenting an adult child. So much so, that he is also struggling with suicidal thoughts. He finds comfort, or at least insight, from the writings of Carl Jung. But, otherwise, he feels very lonely.

In this week’s episode, Elizabeth and I talk about Carl Jung, and what he has to say about loneliness and midlife. We talk about her midlife reset in her early 40s, when the end of her first marriage coincided with publishcation of her first novel. And she describes the horrifying standup class that helped her start writing felt that felt true and less like an impression of somebody else’s.

the routine that I had made up about myself was that I was a white woman from New England, a very uptight white woman from New England, making fun of myself for being an uptight white woman from New England. And honestly, it was not until I did that routine and went through that class that I understood that I was a white woman from New England. That’s the truth.
That’s how New England I was….I’ve been living in New York and there’s so many different cultures and so many different kinds of people. And so I had slowly begun to realize, oh, I am just one other type….And then that is when I understood that I had to go back in my mind to New England. And that the New England, the way the sun fell on the pine needles, you know, the stone walls, everything that I had just absorbed, that’s where I needed to be writing from.

We also talk about Elizabeth’s marriage now to a man whom she met at one of her book events. It reminded me of Isabelle Allende telling me how she connected with her husband after he was captivated by hearing hear on public radio. So here’s the lesson: if you’re a straight man and divorced, widowed, or never married, and you’re a reader of a remarkable unattached straight woman, shoot your shot!

"Too much science class and not enough field trip" in US media

Anna Sale — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:21:03 GMT

I’m not sure how I first heard about Peter Santenello’s work. Likely, someone I know posted one of his videos about Appalachia. My algorithms tend to light up when there’s grabby West Virginia content. And I clicked, interested to see how this latest story about where I grew up was told by an outsider.

If you’re from somewhere where others usually write the script, you know how it goes. There are the quick establishing shots of familiar tropes. In southern WV, it’s coal cars on railroad tracks, homes off the road that have seen better days, empty storefronts. And Peter’s video showed some of this, but a few minutes in, I realized this is different. Peter wasn’t building a familiar argument from a few quick soundbites. He was visiting.

His videos remind me of the kind of human, on-the-ground reporting in American communities that I have always been a fan of. Like, the legendary radio show State of the Re:Union hosted by Al Letson. Or W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America. Or even the book that collected Charles Kuralt’s reporting from the road that sat beside my Grandpa’s recliner.

“The problem in US media right now, there’s too much science class and not enough field trip, right?” Peter told me in this week’s episode. “You need to get out there.”

That’s how I feel when I watch Peter’s video. They grab me into a place I didn’t know I was all that curious about. For example, another episode I loved is about Humboldt County in California, which, yes, gets into weed, but it also tracks the different migrations of people into the area that have made for a wild and specific cultural mix. Plus, it ends in a musical number.

This week, I talk to Peter about his storytelling approach and his winding career path before he found success on YouTube. He didn’t come up through newsrooms or go to film school. He’s run a car detailing business around Tahoe, tried to break into tech startups, and traveled. It wasn’t until he was in his early 40s that he found an audience online, starting with videos he made in Ukraine. He met his wife there, and they moved back to the US during the pandemic, where he decided to bring his travel video approach to his own country.

You can watch all of Peter’s videos on his YouTube channel @PeterSantenello, and his new book is Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home.

Also: for Death, Sex & Money Plus listeners, we have a conversation for young people who are overwhelmed and anxious about managing money. I talk to Beth Kobliner, author of the classic money book for young people, Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties, which just got a new update. Listen to our conversation: When it Comes to Money, Gen Z is More Screwed and More Savvy

Your Responses: Erotic Transference and Weed

We’ve been hearing listener responses and stories about our episode last week on romantic feelings in the therapy office. We shared one listener’s story about a romantic relationship with a therapist that started when she was 19, and how now in her 50s, she views the power imbalance, secrets, and violations of professional ethics.

Afterward, we heard back from one listener who shared about her marriage to her once-therapist, a process that involved professional disclosure and transparency:

I am writing to respond to the episode on erotic transference — I am a psychotherapist myself, and I’m married to someone who was formerly my therapist ….I suppose I’d like to offer an example of a circumstance when a treatment did end in a romantic relationship and it was ultimately positive, because these stories do exist and I think they’re rarely shared, perhaps for good reason.
I was in treatment with this therapist for 5 years, he in his 40s and me in my 30s. In the last year we began discussing my romantic feelings for him. We spent a few months considering the potential transference involved in these feelings. After some time he admitted his own feelings to me and we mutually agreed to end the therapy. We spent a good amount of time processing the ending of the treatment during which time he would not accept payment as it didn’t feel like therapy anymore to either of us.
Over the next few months he shared that he had consulted with several of his professional mentors over the years that we’d been working together to try and make sense of his own feelings for me. They considered all of the possible countertransference involved. I asked to meet with his consultants and see his notes about our work, wanting to understand as much as I possibly could about what was happening on his end. Everything I saw corroborated what he had told me, and confirmed that he had been having these feelings for a long time. He has confessed to me that he often questioned himself and whether he should have terminated the treatment earlier. We met together with his mentors and I asked them if they thought there was something inherently corrupt or exploitative about us being together someday. We received their blessings , which was very important to both of us because we wanted to keep ourselves open to scrutiny. We eventually began dating and moved in together , and got married and pregnant a year later. Having been in several long term relationships myself, I can say it’s the healthiest and most loving relationship I’ve been in by far….
I think what makes our story different is that there were and are no secrets. He called the licensing board himself and informed them of his decision, there was no action taken because I would’ve had to report the relationship. I never felt exploited, manipulated, or taken advantage of. We still talk openly about the complicated nature of our origins, nothing lives in the shadows.
I share this in part to challenge the notion that feelings in the therapeutic context are always transferential in nature. Sometimes they are just romantic and like many other romantic relationships, they begin in complex circumstances.
—Name Withheld

For an upcoming episode, we’ve been collecting your experiences and mixed feelings about legal weed.

We’ve heard from parents, health care professionals, and current users — those who are still quite enthusastic but others who feel a dependency they wish they could shake. Share your stories about cannabis in your life by recording a voice memo and sending it to us at deathsexmoney@slate.com.

My friend Ann

Anna Sale — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:00:03 GMT

Back from a brief newsletter break last week. I was away in the mountains.

If you and your family are comfortable on horses and want to explore the Yellowstone ecosystem away from the crowds, let me recommend our friends at Livingston Outfitting.

I came back into cell service to the news that my dear friend Ann Simpson died early last Friday morning at 94. Long-time listeners may remember her key role in my love life and family, and as you got to know her in that interview, you may have also come to consider her one of your wisest friends. You’re not wrong. That was what happened with just about everyone who had the privilege to cross her path.

Ann Simpson and I together at my surprise 40th birthday party.

She led an incredible life and was at peace that the end had come. The Simpson family put together a beautiful obituary that ran in The Cody Enterprise. This paragraph in particular makes me tear up every time I read it:

…above all, Ann Simpson will be most remembered for her ability to love and listen. In her kitchen, her yard or in her travels, Ann had the super-human power to listen to her friends and family, absorb their triumphs and woes, and give them just the right bits of advice to propel them forward in life. She knew how to live life and enrich others. We will be forever grateful to God for sharing her amazing spirit and soul with us all.

Meanwhile, our team has also put out two episodes in the last two weeks that thrilled me.

In our newest episode, we explore when romantic feelings come up in the therapy office. Why does it happen, and what do you do next?

Listeners shared their stories about erotic transference, because while they are normal, they are taboo, considered embarrassing, and also dangerous. Because if erotic transference is not handled correctly, real harm can happen. Listen here.

I also got to interview Danny McBride, one of my very favorite comedy filmmakers and actors.

He is best known for the characters he plays on screen: men with ridiculous haircuts and puffed-out chests, who throw out f-bombs in their frequent bursts of anger that read as man-child temper tantrums. Eastbound and Down. The Righteous Gemstones. The Foot Fist Way.

He and I talked about his roots growing up in a then-small town in northern Virginia and the rag-tag group of collaborators he’s worked with since college at a public film school in North Carolina. We connected while he sat in his home office in South Carolina, where he lives with his wife and two kids, and he was polite and surprisingly chill. He told me he actually doesn’t have much in common with his obnoxious characters, though he’s clearly delighted by obnoxious behavior.

I also loved listening to the audiobook of his new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. The first two stories in particular, with Danny reading the first and John Goodman reading the second, are very funny and stealthily sensitive about aging for men.

And if hearing about Danny McBride’s writing hobby gets you thinking about what art you could make for fun, you’ll enjoy our latest DSM Plus conversation with a listener about her creative habits: This Listener is an E.R. Doc Who Writes Novels to Unwind. What?!?

A sexy soundtrack for your summer weekend

Anna Sale — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:45:24 GMT

We have a special, sexy episode for you this week.

Sexy, not in the titling way, but in a taking your shoes off at the end of the day… putting them over on your person’s lap and having them gently rub your feet and tell you they adore you.

This episode is about that feeling put to music.

Christopher Johnson, an audiomaker and my friend, first told this story at 99 Percent Invisible, the long-running, legendary podcast about design where he is a supervising producer. He tells us about The Quiet Storm, a radio show that launched a musical genre of feelings-forward ballads about love, sex and longing.

One detail I loved learning: before DJ Melvin Lindsey invented a radio format at the Howard University radio station that changed romantic ballads forever, he was a radio intern who also happened to babysit the station manager's son. You never know where you’ll find the next media star. Here’s Melvin:

And if you want to turn on some Quiet Storm, 99 Percent Invisible made a playlist. Track #1 is Christopher’s favorite. “It came on the other day when I was at a party, and I was in the middle of a conversation, and I made everyone stop talking because this is just more important than anything any of us have to say,” he told me.

Your pet reunion stories

Our The Pet Detective episode unleashed a bunch of your stories of love lost, and then found. Here are a few.

Loved The Pet Detective. Listening had me in tears. We lost our rescue lab, Rosie, in 2023. My husband was out walking her in February, slipped on ice and fell, and she bolted. I was on maternity leave at the time and was utterly distraught. It was frigid out--subzero windchills every night. We did all of the things--social media posts, walks, drive arounds, put out items that smelled like us and smelled like her, explored drone heat detection, and went door to door with posters. The hardest part was the not knowing. My mind ran wild as I was home 24/7 with my infant son about the fate she must have met, particularly in the dead of winter. Low and behold, on the 6th day of her missing, I got a call in the early evening from a local number I didn’t know. A couple several miles away who lived in a densely treed area had gotten a poster from my husband days before and believed Rosie was in their backyard. I’ve never flown out of the house so fast. Sure enough, there was Rosie, trembling in their backyard and looking like she was about to bolt again. It took all my willpower to walk up slowly and calmly. We got her back!!!
…I don’t think I could have listened to the episode had we not found Rosie. Everything was dead on--the scammers who reached out, the return to the wild mindset, and the absolute stunning resilience of our pets.
Thank you for such a rewarding episode to listen to and for highlighting Jim’s work!
-Amy in Clive, Iowa

During the pandemic, while a lot of people turned to cooking and baking sourdough bread, I got into cat rescue work.
…I had my husband build a cat shed on our property..I was so excited when the cat shed was finally done and moved 7 cats in there. I went to sleep that night…and when I woke up I saw from our bedroom window the front door of the shed was open!! …there were 5 cats missing. …
…I don’t have children but I felt like I shored up heroic maternal strength and I kept telling myself: “I HAVE TO FIND THESE CATS. I HAVE TO FIND THEM. I WILL FIND THEM. I’M GOING TO FIND THEM. ALL OF THEM.”
This ordeal involved:
- Consulting with animal trackers, including a woman down in Georgia, who seemed to be an expert in finding lost cats. I was ready and willing to fly her and her assistant up to Connecticut to help me track down these cats.
- Rejoining social media so I could post about these lost cats, and buying online services - both of which resulted in scam attempts and a lot of judgemental mean people accusing me of being irresponsible - similar to the stories I heard on today’s episode
- I learned there’s a free pet online “FBI” service
- Recruiting my fellow cat rescuer network colleagues to drive up from the Bronx to walk the neighborhood. I had just moved from NYC to Connecticut so these cats were from NYC, mostly the Bronx
- Having my husband drive me around to put up posters all around town
- Passing out flyers to my neighbors and having them allow me to check their properties
- Talking to someone who provides drone services for lost pets
- Driving all around CT to follow leads based on Ring or other camera footages
- Staying on high alert for any notifications from any of our multiple Ring cameras
- Setting up wildlife cameras, like the kind hunters use
- Walking our neighborhood streets every night and calling their names while carrying treats and leaving out cat food everywhere
Since then, I had my husband change the door handle on the cat shed, install an inner door so there’s a 2-door system now, put in a little latch on the outside door for good measure, and a Ring camera on the outside of the cat shed also for extra good measure.
It was quite the ordeal and your episode today really resonated with me.
—Tami in Ridgefield, Connecticut

I met my husband in 2017, we were both in mid life but connected on our love of the beach, adventures and our pets. He had a cat named Teetone and a dog named Otis. Teetone came to be with Trevor after being found in an abandoned washing machine inside a dilapidated house Trevor had bought to set up as a rental. No sign of the mother and likely only a couple weeks old, she was in rough shape. Trevor took on the challenge and never looked back.
Trevor drove a Toyota Venza, like soccer mom car, even though he had no kids. The primary purpose of the Venza was to be able to travel comfortably with Otis and Teetone on the many road trips he makes from Florida to Indiana.…It was a typical spring trip and Trevor stopped in Tennessee for a bathroom break and a snack. Teetone got spooked and took off out of the car. Trevor was panicked. He describes jumping into action, calling her, pacing around the gas station, not wanting to confuse her or go too far away from the car. He stayed there for over 15 hours with no luck. He drove on to Indy so he could make signs and returned the next day. No luck.

…For the next five months Trevor returned to the rest stop and called her name, replaced the posters, upped the reward. No luck. Six months later, just before Christmas, he got a call. “We have your cat”. Again, Trevor hit the road and showed up at a house two miles from the gas station. Sure enough, it was Teetone.
—Suzanne

And then this week, I also got this text from my sister, mom to 3 young kids:

Two Men on Their Attunement with Animals

Anna Sale — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:53:41 GMT

Exciting news, everyone. We’ve got a new one from Zoe Azulay, the talented Death, Sex & Money producer who brought you our Snake Guy episode and introduced us to Adonis Williams, the New York City mover with a gift for guiding city residents through life transitions.

And this week, Zoe brings us Jim Tierney, Pet Detective.

Zoe started work on this episode after a scary incident in her neighborhood dog park. One of the other dog owners was hit by a car while walking her dog, and while the dog owner was taken to the hospital and received care, the dog bolted. She was missing; the dog park group chat started worriedly buzzing.

Eventually, the pup was found five miles away, across a bridge in Brooklyn.

Zoe wondered about this dog’s solo adventure in the city, and that led her to the professionals like Jim who help panicked and worried New York City dog owners in similar straits. Jim is trained in pet tracking and takes us along as he tries to find dogs lost in the big, dangerous city.

Some of this episode feels like a mystery thriller, and other parts will make you want to give a big hug to all the people in your life who’ve been healed by an intimate relationship with an animal.

In particular, I loved hearing how Jim described how it felt when — after the Marine Reserves, a divorce, and getting sober — he stumbled into dog-walking for money:

Very, very, like, high vibration. Like, I felt very serene. I felt like I was around no drama. And I really just loved being with the dogs and building relationships with the families and the dogs. And it was very peaceful. I loved being outside. I loved that I was moving…And I think that came from grief. I think because of the sense of grief and loss of even an identity coming out of school. I wasn’t a student anymore. I didn’t have a wife anymore. All my friends were gone that I used to know. I was just kind of alone. And I think that had something to do with opening me up to something.

Out here spilling personal tea this week!

I was very glad to join the latest season of Try Hard, the podcast hosted by Alex Sujong Laughlin from Defector Media. I love this show’s message about trying out loud, and in this episode, Alex and I talked about my matrescence and experiences of early parenthood, and how, for me, it wasn’t until after I became a mother that I realized how much of my professional identity was fueled by earning permission to advance instead of… just trying to do stuff?

We also discuss the newsletter Ordinary Animals by , where I got to answer this very thought-provoking questionnaire about motherhood.

And our episode about Jim Tierney, New York City pet detective, made me appreciate the people in my life who are most attuned to the needs and behavior of animals. Most especially, my husband Arthur. He’s a professor and wildlife ecologist, and before that, he was a boy who noticed, cared for, and learned to train animals.

For this week’s episode for Death, Sex & Money Plus listeners, I asked Arthur to tell me about attuning to the animals around us, the time he had to physically protect his dog on the streets of Manhattan, and his training philosophy for our new puppy, Lewis, and how it connects to parenting our children. “Whatever you’re doing in the formative period is what you’re going to need to live with in all its many forms over the arc of the whole relationship,” he tells me.

If you still want more puppy content after this, enjoy this romp from the other night:

A FUN HANG to start your holiday weekend

Anna Sale — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:08:09 GMT

A summer treat for you: Emmy Winner Jeff Hiller is back on Death, Sex & Money!

Jeff was first on the show back in 2024, when we talked about how he landed a starring role in HBO's Somebody Somewhere—one of my favorite TV shows of the last decade—after putting years and years of effort into New York’s improv scene. We also talked about his growing up in Texas, starting his career in social work, and meeting—and podcasting with—his husband Neil.

Since that episode came out, Jeff won the Emmy for his role of Joel on Somebody Somewhere, and he gave a beautifully moving speech that ricocheted around the internet for days after. We talk about that this week, and about how winning one of Hollywood’s top acting awards does, and does not, change your life. We also talk about money, hairpieces (“I’m juicing,” he says), and how Margaret Atwood’s rooster inspired his own Substack newsletter writing.

This year, he’s shown up on two more buzzy TV shows: Pluribus and Widow’s Bay on Apple TV, and earlier this summer, he was on Broadway as part of the revolving cast of the show Celebrity Autobiography, where celebrities read from other celebrities’ memoirs on stage. Jeff could not have been more prepared for this, because he’s been a long-time student of the form. And he also wrote his own celebrity memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My 20-Year Trail to Overnight Success.

You’ll hear in our conversation that I am a fan of this book, and of this person. Jeff is someone whose creative work I got to know first, and then had the pleasure of having fandom blossom into actual real-life friendship.

I think you’ll enjoy spending time with him as much as I do.

p.s. In your Death, Sex & Money Plus feed this week, I hear a cautionary tale about taking an unauthorized peek into your partner’s AI chat history. Our advice? Don’t do it. Listen here to Reading My Boyfriend’s ChatGPT History Led to Our Breakup.

What'd your teen self get right? And what'd you totally miss?

Anna Sale — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:57:12 GMT

Intuition gets a lot of good press these days. We would all be better served by dropping into the deep currents of knowing, driven more by a sense than by facts or evidence parsed and overworked by our overactive brains. I agree!

And also — there are some instances in life when our intuition totally whiffs it. Sometimes we don’t have the experience or sufficient information to catch all the dynamics around us. This is particularly true in childhood. We may feel something is off, but then make up wildly inaccurate stories as we try to fill in the gaps.

In her art, Anna Konkle has carved out an artistic niche amid these high dramas and hazy truths. She and her friend Maya Erskine created, wrote, and starred in the wonderfully cringy Hulu series PEN15, a middle school comedy inspired by Anna and Maya’s real experiences in early adolescence. Their costars were all actors going through puberty, and even though Anna and Maya were in their 30s when the show was filmed, they played themselves. (Stream it here.)

Anna has a new memoir, called The Sane One, that’s largely told in scenes of dialogue in which she replays conversations between her and her parents to examine their fighting, their divorce, and her being caught in the middle. She also really narrows in on her relationship with her dad—how she used to side with him during arguments but then grew up and started wondering if he was the bad guy, abusive even, a creep who was dangerously dismissive of women’s boundaries. She writes about their five-year estrangement and their reconciliation shortly before his death.

This week on Death, Sex & Money, Anna and I talk about all this and the challenges of unpacking morally ambiguous family memories.

Summer Festival’ing FUN at Old Salt Festival in Montana

Regular readers know I get to spend my summers under the open skies of the Mountain West. I crossed into Montana last weekend for The Old Salt Festival. It’s part music festival, part conference workshop, part camping, part wood-fired cookout, and 100% a celebration of the people coming together to support new sustainable models of land management and food production.

I got to interview Old Salt Co-Op co-founder Cole Mannix on stage and will share that down the line. (In the meantime, please admire his very cool vest in the top-right.) I also got to meet Wendell Berry’s very funny daughter, Mary Berry, director of The Berry Center, and road trip across Montana with my friend Carol Bell, whom you may remember from this episode about her and her son, the late musician Luke Bell. (That’s Carol and me standing in between the ‘D’ and the ‘I’ in the top left.)

All in all, a great way to mark the Summer Solstice.

You can learn more about the Old Salt Co-Op and browse their selections of regenerative meat here.

Interviewing and the Limits of My Self-Awareness

I am a fan of The Small Bow, the podcast and newsletter about recovery in all the different ways we define it, and I got to talk with AJ on the new video podcast version of their show. We talk about all sorts of things, including a scary moment in childbirth for me and the inspirations for Death, Sex & Money that I found in a recovery meeting. Watch here.

'If it's hysterical, it's historical.'

Anna Sale — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:40:07 GMT

One thing about me is I love a short, pithy adage that gets at something clutch in life. Bonus points if it’s a little funny and self -aware. Don’t should all over yourself has been a long-time fav, one I pull out when there’s a need to put down the great clipboard of life and remember that no one actually cares enough to keep score. Another helpful mantra has been I’m having a should-less day, courtesy of Ellen Burstyn from our first conversation in 2014.

I recently learned a new one from my friend Mary, and I keep repeating it like a cheerleader.

If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.

This one comes up when you notice in your body that you’re having an outsize reaction to a slight or moment of confusion. The feelings come in hot, and only after a few deep breaths do you notice the scale of your upset doesn’t match the current facts. Maybe you’re mid-gripe about your co-worker, and then you realize, ‘Oh. This is about feeling excluded in 4th grade.’ Or maybe you’re feeling particularly rebellious in a marital conflict, and your husband helpfully reminds you that no, he is not your father and no one is telling you what to do.

I love hysterical/historical because it doesn't tell you your feelings are wrong. It’s guiding you to the source of why they’re so intense. They help you see that the person who’s making you feel so pissed or mad or indignant is a messenger of sorts, instead of a villain responsible for all of your concentrated upset.

I found myself thinking about this last week when I was in New York City, because my visits there can feel like transporting through the space-time continuum. I was there without my family, a free-wheeling lady with no parenting or puppy duties. I caught up with friends from college and radio lives past, people who know the contours of the histories that can make me hysterical.

Our latest two episodes from Death, Sex & Money also took me back.

I talked to Theo Baker about the culture at Stanford University, where I was an undergrad 25 years ago and was disoriented and turned off by the tech gold rush culture. It’s gotten much, much more extreme in the years since, and it still raises an urgent question for me: how do I prepare for a future shaped by new technologies when I’m not sure whether I accept the underlying values or the culture driving the change?

And this week’s new episode features my conversation with spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt at Tribeca Festival about art, personal creativity, and ambition, and how they can collide with the duties and pleasures of family-building.

They described the trade-offs, collaborations, and need for their own creative space that have been part of their parallel lives as artists. It can be hard to make room for it all, and they made me think about how misalignment around a lot of this is what ultimately ended my first marriage. But that was fifteen years ago now, and as I thought back on that time, I noticed the spikiness of many of those memories has faded.

So, it’s important to note, the inverse of my new favorite adage isn’t always true. It may be historical, but it won’t always stay hysterical.

Spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt on Bad Interviews, Fame and Parenting

Actor Peter Dinklage and playwright Erica Schmidt have been married for two decades, and even though they’ve collaborated on projects, it’s rare for them to do an interview together. That’s why we were so excited when they agreed to join us on stage at the Tribeca Festival to discuss how they balance privacy and family, why they wish interviewers would stop fixating on Game of Thrones, and how they met on a romantic evening when elephants walked through Manhattan.

Something Rotten at Stanford

Theo Baker was seventeen when he enrolled at Stanford and stumbled into one of the biggest stories on campus: academic misconduct allegations against the university’s president. His reporting eventually forced the president out, as he recounts in his new book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.

In our conversation, Theo talked about breaking that story, navigating backlash from classmates and faculty, privately coping with the pressure of it all with dangerous drugs, and questioning where Silicon Valley’s culture of ambition and greed is leading us.

I showed up and very quickly I realized that there was this sort of Stanford inside Stanford. There is this sort of exclusive world that was only afforded to, like, a select few of the people who, you know, if you identify the next trillion dollar founder early, you’ve made your career. If you get in on the ground floor of the next Google or Instagram while the founder is 17 or 18 years old like that, as a VC, as an investor, as someone who’s associated with this system, those are all of your future riches too. And so these adults are constantly hunting for a meal ticket. They’re treating this very inside cohort of kids as a sort of commodity….On the one hand, it is this sort of absurd reality in which the context for your average teenage exploration, you know, is this bizarre, you know, tech excess world. And on the other hand, it’s also this sort of system that lacks real safeguards and really doesn’t call bad behavior when it starts to manifest.

Extra Treat: a guided meditation from Death, Sex & Money

Tara Brach has a new book, The Courageous Heart Workbook, and we at Death, Sex & Money get to share an excerpt with Death, Sex & Money Plus listeners. Hear me lead you through a guided meditation on opening up vulnerable conversations. It’s designed to listen to over and over again, so download it and listen as needed.

A sex party...or cuddle a puppy at home?

Anna Sale — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:39:02 GMT

So, even though I host a show called Death, Sex & Money, we don’t talk about the physical act of sex all that much. Our sex conversations are broadly about relationships, shame, communication, or lack thereof. This week, our show is about sex. A lot of it. The episode starts at a sex party, where my guest Romy Holland had sex with many men, three dozen-plus, including one she first met that night, who became her husband and the father of her child.

Huh, I thought. This is a fellow Berkeley mom with a different sort of meet-cute story.

No matter where you sit on the adventurous spectrum when it comes to your intimate life, I think Romy’s clear, candid way of talking about sex will get you thinking.

The episode, which also gets into postpartum changes in desire, already prompted this note from a listener in the Bay Area:

I had to respond to your recent episode, HOLY SHIT! I was so relieved to hear another human talk about how detached she felt from her partner and sexuality after having a baby. When Romy spoke about being disgusted watching porn again I had to stop prepping my ambulance and take a moment and acknowledge that I am not crazy and that this is a normal response….I used to be a flight attendant/ sex worker and felt sexy and confident and had no problems having sex with random people. I’m now a first responder and a mom and the idea of feeling “sexy” is so foreign to me. The thought of being desired by anyone makes me feel like crawling out of my skin. Sex parties and strip clubs were once a fun idea. I can’t even imagine myself walking into a freaking lingerie store now…

And in the Plus feed for Death, Sex & Money members, I talk with my Slate colleague Luke Winkie about a convention/workshop organized by people in Romy’s Bay Area circles, where hesitant and inexperienced men learn to flirt, and more. Listen here.

Meanwhile…

I’m getting my kicks from this little guy.

My family has a new puppy. Meet Lewis.

No wild parties for me right now as I’m on overnight-pee-break duty.

NEXT WEEK! Join me at Tribeca Festival in NYC!

I am hosting a live Death, Sex & Money taping at the Tribeca Festival. Tickets to see me in conversation with artists and spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt are available here. It really could be quite a night for you. Our show is at 5:30p ET, and tipoff of the Knicks/Spurs NBA finals doesn’t start until we’re finished. You can do both — no need to choose.

Has shame gotten in the way in your friendships?

Anna Sale — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:59:04 GMT

More than the end of the calendar year, May has been the month when I’ve had major turnover in my life. It’s the month when Death, Sex & Money started (12 years young on May 4!). It’s when I packed up and left New York a few years after that. Years before that, my first marriage finally crumbled to pieces in May. Now, May is when my family gets packed up to migrate from Berkeley to Wyoming, where we spend summers for my husband’s work as a wildlife ecologist.

With each of these springtime page turns, my friendships have changed. When the show started, so much was great, but I also lost daily closeness with the reporters I’d worked shoulder to shoulder with in a newsroom. When I moved from New York, my go-to hangout friends became check-in text and audio note friends. When my first marriage ended, my friendships built around that partnership all got upended. When my family picks up and leaves the East Bay, our local friendships here go on temporary hold, and I turn my attention to restoking our friendships in the mountains.

Over the years, with all these transitions, I’ve felt many friendships I cherish grow weaker than I’d like. I learn after the fact about a job loss. A parent’s death. A big move. A medical diagnosis. I’ve seen how friendship is something you do, not something you have. You don’t just get to be a friend; you have to continually befriend.

So I was primed to appreciate my conversation with Andrew McCarthy about his new book, Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. (YES, that Andrew McCarthy. Of Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Mannequin, and Weekend at Bernie's.)

Andrew McCarthy is now 63 years old, an age at which he can see clearly how some early friendships directed the course of his life, and how, in later midlife, they needed attention. In our episode this week, he and I talk about the phase of life when sudden fame made him pull away and suspect the motives of people trying to befriend him. He also had some friendships weaken for reasons many of us experience: he stopped drinking, he got divorced, he raised kids, he got remarried, and he got older.

And one day his teenage son said to him: "You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”

The resulting crisis turned into a road trip, some long-delayed phone calls, and this new book. My favorite passages are about this old friend Seve, who struggles with chronic pain and has receded from a lot of life. He dodges Andrew’s efforts to reconnect, and then, Andrew shows up without an invitation. Repeatedly. Seve doesn’t always welcome the visits, but slowly, their friendship finds a rhythm again, and Andrew describes how they land back in the place where they can lovingly call each other out, in ways only old friends can:

Shame's ugly, it's like seaweed slimed all over you. And so when a friend kind of goes, "Let me take a strand off. It's cool. It's fine. It's just a strand. Let's get rid of that. Jesus Christ, that was all over you," you know? that's what friendship is, I guess.

Come see me under the Bright Lights…or the Big Sky

We’ve got two cool live events coming up next month.

In New York, join us for a live Death, Sex & Money taping at the Tribeca Festival. Tickets to see me in conversation with artists and spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt are available here.

And the next weekend, in Helmsville, Montana, I get to host a conversation in a very different setting at the Old Salt Festival, a really cool gathering that celebrates music, food, agriculture, and land stewardship, from June 19-21. Cole Mannix, big thinker and co-founder of the Old Salt Co-Op in Montana, is my guest. At a time when very rich Americans talk about leaving cities and states because of tax policy, Cole and I are going to talk about the tradeoffs and pressures of building a life and a business that you can’t move because it’s deeply connected to the land. Come out!

Death, SNAKES and Money

Anna Sale — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:53:41 GMT

I’m not a snake person myself, but I’m surrounded by them in my family.

My husband will veer off a hiking path when he sees one slithering out of the corner of his eye. He follows it until he can get set up just so and — snatch! — grab it with his thumb and forefinger right behind its head.

Then he brings it over to the rest of us so the kids can see it, touch it, hold it, passing on his snake fandom to the next generation.

He and my guest, Tim Freide, would be a good tag team on a hike through snake habitat.

I first read about Tim about a year ago in a NYTimes piece with this attention-grabbing headline: “Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times.”

Death, Sex & Money producer Zoe Azulay tracked him down because, well, we had more questions.

I loved our conversation. I learned a lot about snakes and antivenom, and he’s very, very funny. I also appreciated hearing a story about someone starting with a bonkers idea, and then, after years of unpaid, self-taught toil between shift work to pay the bills, his dreams finally came true.

I proved my immunity...it published. I proved I could beat the bites and I don't have to work anymore.

We also got this nice message from a listener, in case you’re not sure you need more snake content in your life.

The snake guy episode was genuinely the funniest thing I’ve heard in so long. Every question just landed an even funnier response. Bravo and thank you.

And if you missed our episode last month about Fishbone with band co-founder and keyboardist Chris Dowd, here’s another nice note we got in our inbox:

I’m a Slate Plus member and I have never interacted with any of the many podcasts I subscribe to but I had to write and thank you for that Fishbone episode. I loved those guys so effing much! Chris is so sweet, smart and eloquent about his path to now. Really great.

Hear the one here!

June 10! Tribeca Festival in NYC!

Join us for a live Death, Sex & Money taping at Tribeca Festival in New York. Tickets to see me in conversation with artists and spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt are available here.

Zen and the art of body maintenance

Anna Sale — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:27:57 GMT

During a drive last weekend, I listened to Ezra Klein talk to Stewart Brand one of the spiritual leaders of the modern tech movement. Their subject? Maintenance.

Now, I generally think of the tech industry as being, if not hostile to the idea of maintenance, at least bored by it. Honoring maintenance, after all, is the opposite of planning for obsolescence. So I leaned as I listened to Ezra talk to Stewart Brand about maintenance, along with right to repair and the spiritual transformation that can come with steadily tending to people and things. I even bought Brand’s book afterward, which has this beautiful cover.

And I think I was particularly primed to appreciate a conversation that respects maintenance, thanks to our episode with Kara Swisher this week. She and I talk about her new series on CNN where she explores, and tries out, some of the buzziest wellness, anti-aging, and longevity trends—particularly those bankrolled and celebrated in Silicon Valley.

As a connected tech journalist, Kara has access to the dinner parties and invite-only conferences to hear about which IV infusions, supplements, and biohacks the tech set is trying next. She’s also not afraid to tell them when they sound like they’ve all gone nuts, which made this conversation extra fun.

On her CNN series, Kara does stunt-y things like a ketamine trip on camera or time in a luxe hyperbaric chamber, but there’s also a strong critique embedded in it. We already know what helps people thrive and live longer, healthier lives, she points out. Access to health care, stable and reliable income, and community, being with each other, not staring alone at our tech tools.

In other words, it takes sufficient resources for ongoing maintenance and care.

Also this week, I had a conversation with a listener named Rhea who reached out to us as we were collecting stories and advice about career pivots. Rhea lost her job in 2024, and her husband has been notified of a coming layoff this summer. We talked about the past work decisions she regrets, and the assumptions about stability that are falling away. Listen to our conversation here: 93 Applications, 14 Interviews, No Job

June 10! Tribeca Festival in NYC!

Tickets to see me in conversation with artists and spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt are available here.

A very personal account of when punk met capitalism

Anna Sale — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:31:19 GMT

A few weeks back, I went to a concert in San Francisco that was the most fun and heart-filling show I’ve been to in a long, long time. Fishbone was in town.

Fishbone showed up on my mixed tape masterpieces I made as a teenager — Housework was one of my favorite bops — but it was a recent social media post from the band that recaptured my attention.

The band was responding to a spontaneous outpouring of internet love that came forth after W. Kamau Bell gave an impromptu testimony about the band’s legacy to LA’s KCRW, in which he declared them “the greatest band to have never made it as big as they should have.” Fishbone wrote, in part:

the truth is, we were together, growing and making your favorite albums and songs…had a lot of opportunity, but didn’t break. This not only was a bummer for us professionally, but personally, it takes its toll. You see your friends blowing up, the bands you took on the road as openers blow up, buy houses, not have to worry about paying rent. …We were never jealous, just envious we didn’t have the same success…
Anyway, the other thing you need to remember is we were kids when we started and we grew up on the road. A real family, brothers, business partners, wives… every cliche you can think of… and a lot happens between 16 and 60… Sharing the same air, space and finances. Splitting a dollar 6 ways at the end of a tour. Not having anything to show for all we did….
So here we are, as good as ever, new album this past year, celebrating our history and new album in the works. We are working to end in a high note, give it all we got, ask you to continue to support by coming out when we play and walk away saying we still kick everyone’s ass.

The team and I read this and thought: that sounds like a Death, Sex & Money episode.

And I was honored to sit down for a long interview with Fishbone co-founder and keyboarder/vocalist/trombone player Chris Dowd to hear more. We talk about the early years of Fishbone, when he jammed with fellow classmates who were bused from South Central to the Valley, and getting signed to Columbia Records right out of high school. Chris also told me about his close friendship with the late musician Jeff Buckley, his trouble with alcoholism after Jeff’s death, and what it was like to leave and rejoin the band he grew up in.

Rick Steves Says Travel is the Antidote to Fear

Anna Sale — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:13:31 GMT

Rick Steves is best known for his dozens of European travel guides and the long-running PBS show called Rick Steves Europe, but more broadly, he’s an evangelist for Americans’ traveling outside the US.

And he does it in the most inviting, down-to-earth way. As Sam Andersen wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile in 2019, “Steves is so completely American that when you stop to really look at his name, you realize it’s just the name Rick followed by the plural of Steve — that he is a one-man crowd of absolutely regular everyday American guys: one Rick, many Steves.”

Underneath that broad appeal is a radical commitment to principle—one that’s driven his activism for marijuana legalization and the end to mass incarceration, and his decision back in 2008, when then-President George W. Bush had already declared Iran to be part of an Axis of Evil, to travel to Iran with a film crew to invite us to “make some friends.”

So after America bombed Iran and started a new war, I wanted to talk to Rick about his life’s mission to make the unfamiliar more familiar.

We talk about his experiences in Iran – a country he first visited as a young man in 1978. And we also talk about how travel has shaped his personal and political opinions, particularly his trip to Central America in the 80s, and how experiencing hunger and hardship on the road has led him to donate millions of dollars to help homeless women and children in the Seattle area, where he was raised and lives when he’s not traveling abroad.

The most frightened people in our society are the people buried deep in the middle of it with no passports, whose worldview is shaped by fear-mongering commercial TV news. The flip side of fear is understanding and we gain understanding when we travel.

You can also watch some of our conversation here.

Speaking of travel….

As you think about your upcoming travel possibilities, savings plans and calendar, here’s a little more inspiration.

You could join us at our Just Announced live show at Tribeca Festival in New York City on June 10. We are thrilled to partner with Tribeca again and I can’t wait to dig into conversation with artists, and spouses, Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt. Tickets go on sale April 28. Here’s their full audio line-up with so many good shows!

And if communing with nature is something you’re craving, here are some select photos from my family’s recent trip to Costa Rica, which Rick Steves and I also discuss.

Glorious!

As the wife of a wildlife ecologist, it was also fascinating to learn about the combination of forces and policy choices that created Costa Rica’s ecotourism industry, from scentific research investment and government policy to large-scale private land conservation and small-scale entrepreneurism.

A worker who left publishing for OnlyFans

Anna Sale — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:08:00 GMT

One night in September 2024, I stayed up way beyond my intended bedtime to finish a novel. I had started it on the plane, on the way home to West Virginia for my high school reunion, and couldn’t put it down. It was Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe.

That novel is now a show on Apple TV starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and our friend at Death, Sex & Money, Nick Offerman, who plays Margo’s dad, a former pro wrestler in recovery from opioid addiction. The story follows Margo, a young community college student, who starts a flirtation and then an affair with a professor who ends up getting her pregnant. Margo decides to have the baby, promptly loses her waitressing job, and then joins OnlyFans to make money. Then, like a lot of digital entrepreneurs find, simply hanging a shingle on the internet doesn’t guarantee an audience, even when your internet business includes nakedness. We follow as Margo takes on algorithms and discoverability gaps, and somehow, Rufi’s writing turns a plot about digital strategy into a real page-turner!

This week on the show, I talk with Rufi Thorpe about writing this book while living in a 3-car garage and supervising Zoom school for her young kids, and about how single motherhood and loving people in addiction recovery have both shaped her life.

And the plot details about the mechanics of OnlyFans? For that, Rufi had to become an OnlyFans consumer herself and figure out how to convince some of its high-earning stars to tell her how they did it.

RUFI: What I really wanted was to get an OnlyFans model to read the whole book. And, their idea of how much I should pay them to do that was like $500 a page, you know?
ANNA: Oh, wow.
RUFI: And type it into the chat.
ANNA: Oh, that’s so interesting. You have to do it In my world, on my terms.
RUFI: Which I mean, makes a great deal of sense. But so eventually I found someone who had left publishing to pursue an OnlyFans. So she just understood the situation that I was in better and was willing to read the whole thing. And her commentary was invaluable. And I’m, I’m so glad that she read it. And there were lots of things that occurred to her that just hadn’t occurred to me.

And for Slate Plus listeners, we put out an extra (and useful!) conversation about gym memberships—and the obstacles in your way to stop paying for them when you’re not using them. Slate contributor David Mack shares his reporting on the fitness industry and the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to make opting out easier. Listen here.

Joys and Sorrows

Growing up in a UU church, we had a weekly ritual during Sunday service: inviting members of the congregation to light a candle and share a joy or sorrow.

I’ve been thinking about that this week because I did some serious pinging between the two. It started at the end of last weekend, when we had to say goodbye to one of our family dogs, Lupine. She was just 5 and took a turn quickly after a cancer diagnosis, while I was still very much in denial that she was sick.

When her time came, it was blessedly clear and shockingly swift.

Alongside our sadness, and probably because of it, I had an unusually bright set of extracurricular activities that have left me feeling extra appreciative of friendship and beauty. I got tickets for my husband to finally see Springsteen and the E Street Band live. Their showmanship and clear affection for each other have had me smiling since. (And the bridge of the song “Wrecking Ball” has been a bit of an interior mantra: “Hard times come…hard times go…Hard times come…Hard times go…”)

I also got to see former Poet Laureate Ada Limón talk in San Francisco about her new book, nature, and returning home to California with two supercool gal pals, and on another night, had a casual and fun taco night with another family.

And roses are in bloom in Berkeley! Here’s a picture my 7 year-old snapped of one from our yard.

Lots of new listening to lap up!

Anna Sale — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:42:06 GMT

I’m Anna Sale, interviewer and host of Slate’s show Death, Sex & Money. Thanks for reading this, a weekly update on what we’re making and recommendations for others’ work that gave me pause or inspiration. I also like to know what you’re thinking, so don’t hesitate to reply.

Well hello! I took a few weeks off from this newsletter while I had some luscious time away with my family — and a calf looking for milk in my earlobe.

That means, lucky you, there is a treasure trove of DSM episodes that have come out since I sent my last note.

First, we shared part 2 of our series about AI and your emotional lives. This episode has really stuck with me, in particular my conversation with psychologist Dr. Zak Stein, director of the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition, about his theory of chatbots and “attachment hacking.”

We followed up with a raucous conversation about career changes, featuring your advice questions that we put to a panel of people who’ve made their own big moves: Sophia Chang, a former hip-hop talent agent who started a mentorship nonprofit. launched his own PR firm and then branched out to cover the tech industry in his newsletter and podcast. Luke Peterson is a Minnesota farmer who pivoted to agriculture from a secure state agency job, even though he didn’t own any equipment or land. (I first met Luke at the Farm Aid 40th Anniversary concert last fall, so we have Willie Nelson to thank for introducing us, which is always a good way to start a relationship.)

The listener questions were heartfelt and urgent, and I loved the mix of experiences Sophia, Luke, and Ed shared. It’s a great listen.

I also had a wonderful conversation in our Slate Plus feed that week with Chris Saenger, a USAID worker for almost two decades and host of the podcast It Was Never a Job, Listen to How to Cope When You Lose a Job You Love.

Then, our episode last week is one we’ve had in the works for months. It started with a listener email about the overwhelming mix of emotions that have come with receiving a major windfall from an abuse settlement. A listener we called Natalie was among the abuse victims of a gynecologist at USC, and she talks about the strange math of converting a bad experience into a dollar amount, and why she’s barely spent any of it.

Finally, this week, we reshared one of my favorite episodes about starting a family. Writer Doree Shafrir describes her long, circuitous, and expensive experience with IVF, and in your Slate Plus feed, shared listener stories of fertility challenges: Why No Two Infertility Stories Are the Same.

Your Career Change Responses in the DSM inbox

Our career advice episode prompted many of you to write in with your own experiences, particularly for a listener we called Fern, who is considering a career in teaching but is fearful of burnout. There were no educators on our panel of experts, and some of you thought it showed when we focused on credential- or degree-earning approaches Fern could consider.

I HAD to email because TERRIBLE advice was given to Fern in the podcast episode “A career change? In this economy?” I am parked in front of the school sending this email immediately after listening because the advice was so bad….There are so many ways to work at a school without an education degree to see if it’s a good fit for you before you spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life getting a teaching degree. I would encourage Fern to work as a paraprofessional or a substitute teacher, or in the office, or in an after school program, or in the lunchroom, or any of the other teaching adjacent jobs for at least a full year before they go back to school to become a teacher. Please send this advice along to Fern before they make any rash decisions and land themself in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

We also heard back from a listener who’d sent in an advice question, a graphic designer who has been feeling quite defeated and disillusioned by AI's expansion into his field:

Thank you for this episode. Having Ed Zitron yell at me was the biggest gift, it was so wild how much he picked up from my message that I wasn’t aware of (the mourning, the burnout, the exhaustion) and I like his reframing of community.
Of all advice episodes this had an excellent panel and such diverse answers that tackle the inherit issues people have with networking. With nuance you’ve covered how networking is a muscle you need to train versus people saying it like “fold in the cheese.” (I’m on a Schitt’s Creek Binge)
An update, I quit my job due to toxic management and have the breathing room and a small financial cushion to heal. This episode was perfectly timed with me starting the work of introspection so I don’t find myself in the same slump and can build a new foundation as the architect of the future that I can own.

The kinds of secrets you're telling AI chatbots

Anna Sale — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:17:37 GMT

For the last several months, you’ve been sharing your stories with us about how conversations with AI chatbots have affected your emotional lives.

In this week's episode, you hear from people for whom the tech helped during crises and transitions. Their experiences have been varied:

I didn’t set out to make an AI companion. But It’s, it’s unbelievable. It’s truly magical….

There was four weeks from the first interaction with the, to when she filed for divorce, and over those four weeks, I saw her personality change completely into someone that I no longer recognize….

It’s where I went to voice, how nobody understood what I was going through, I didn’t wanna go to my friends and family all of the time with all of these horrible, dark thoughts I could just go here and in a way like chat was there. Not only did it help me understand what it was I was actually going through, but it also helped me understand what it was I was actually going through….

You’ll hear from a parent getting tips on how to raise a teenager, an American abroad who turned to ChatGPT for grief counseling, a therapist who says Claude is better than a lot of her peers, and a husband who says AI broke up their marriage.

Listen to this week’s episode, and look out for more next week here, when we dig more into the disruptions already happening in some of your closest relationships because of chatbots, and how all of us may be at risk of “attachment hacking” from well-designed tech.

AND THERE’S MORE! Death, Sex & Money listeners sent so many long, thoughtful, and exceedingly ambivalent voice memos about their relationships with chatbots that we also made an AI confessional booth of sorts, where you hear how AI has been helpful and also the private things some of you have disclosed—and then regretted. That’s in the Slate Plus feed this week. We called that episode, “AI Confessions: I Feel Like a Hypocrite, But I Keep Going Back.” Not a Slate Plus member yet? Sign up at slate.com/dsmplus.

Putting my politics reporter hat back on

Anna Sale — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:43:50 GMT

My style of journalism – interviews focused on concrete details of people’s lives – has its roots in the election reporting I did in newsrooms from 2005 to 2013. Covering elections meant keeping up with polls, getting fed innuendo and dirt from dueling campaign staffers, calling up political science professors to get just the right “expert quote” to articulate the stakes of the race, but my favorite part was away from all that. I liked popping into barbershops and diners (yes, I liked doing that, even though it’s a cliché), but I’d also stop at public basketball courts, shopping centers, and office parks, and convince people to give me a few moments of their time to talk.

The point was to hear from voters who weren’t showing up to rallies or watching cable news every night to hear how they thought things were going in their lives and to get a sense of which messages were trickling down about which candidates would do the most to help them.

Over time, I found I liked talking to people about their lives so much that I pitched a show about it – which became Death, Sex & Money – but I keep an eye on political news, particularly candidate profiles. I want to know who these people are who are making the case for voters’ support, what happened in their lives to shape their values, and which people's interests they know most intimately.

So - I’ve been following the Maine U.S. Senate race. Sen. Susan Collins is up for reelection to keep her Republican seat, and there’s a contested Democratic primary to take her on. The sitting governor, Janet Mills, is one candidate. The other is Graham Platner, a 41-year-old combat veteran from a small rural town who, until July, had never considered running for office. And he’s leading in primary polls.

Last week, on February 23, while Planter was traveling through the San Francisco Bay Area to raise money, I got to sit down and interview him.

He’s running as an economic populist, and as a veteran with PTSD who spent his post-combat years disillusioned with the American government and working through career false starts. Part of that time, he lived in Washington, DC, and bartended at a Capitol Hill bar called The Tune Inn:

Anna Sale: What did you learn about how our government works by being across the bar from those people?
Graham Platner: It was, it was very illuminating. I mean, because you, you really, I began to realize that the apparatus that had like sent me off to fight in these wars, uh, there were some people in it who literally didn’t care…It was all like a political choice or it was better for someone’s career or it was better for like, for some lobbying outfit that came and approached them. I mean, and also there was this realization that none of the people I met, some of them were like the smartest people I met. Some of them were the dumbest people I’d ever met.
But that’s the same as anywhere. And it was this realization that politics, it’s not actually for special people. It really is for anybody, like anybody could do this stuff. And we’ve just been sort of sold the story that it’s a special kind of person or special kinds of people.
And I began, I mean, at, at the time that manifested itself with me getting real cynical. Because like, oh really? Like my friends are dead.
Anna Sale: Would you engage like Hill staffers while you’re serving him beers?
Graham Platner: Not in this kind of conversation. Yeah. But, uh, but I definitely had moments of like, holy shit.
Like, like I thought these wars that I’m already like reeling with, trying to figure out what the purpose was, what my role in them was, all of that. And then kind of come to the conclusion like, wait, you are the people that sent us off to do this Uhhuh, it’s you guys. You guys don’t even know what the fuck’s going on….Like, I met people who were like, like talking about doing foreign policy work, who’ve never read any of the books on, like the regions that they’re talking about. I’m like, uh, this is, and that was about the time….I didn’t know what, I still thought I was gonna maybe work for the government or go back to like carrying guns somehow
And it was around. I was like, I don’t wanna be part of any of this.

You can watch our full interview too, if that’s of interest.

Not Wanting Kids Cost Me My Marriage

Anna Sale — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:22:03 GMT

Whether to have children. It’s a deeply personal decision — one that our closest family members and the general public seem to have lots of opinions on how we make it.

In our episode this week, we share a story about how one couple thought about it and what happened when they reached an impasse.

Audio producer Helena de Groot takes us inside her marriage: their intense, fast love story, their sweet domestic life together, and how it papered over the fundamental difference about kids.

Until an unplanned pregnancy.

And then, an abortion.

And a divorce after 8 years of marriage.

Helena tells me that she did not want kids, really ever, but this was still not a one-time decision. It was one she had to keep revisiting, not just to explain to others, but also to herself.

After you listen to our conversation, do check out the whole CBC series Helena made called Creation Myth. She describes the mix of feelings after divorce, a few efforts to get her tubes tied, and falling in love again. And she shares more about her mental health history — and the mental health history of women in her family — that were a fundamental aspect of her decision to forgo motherhood.

This episode has prompted a lot of responses from you in our inbox at deathsexmoney@slate.com, like from this listener:

Your latest episode with Helena de Groote took my breath away.
I have a 3 year old and have been thinking very intensely about whether to have another. I look around and envy those who seem so sure of what they want (people who don’t want kids at all, people who know they want multiple kids, etc.).
Hearing Helena say that we don’t acknowledge doubt enough really unlocked something for me. Just because you could have some doubt about a decision your whole life, it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. What a freeing thought.
Thank you for this gift.
I’ll be sending this episode and screenshot to my group texts!

We landed a HUGE interview this week!

(Yes, while my children were at school and I was working remotely at home, I celebrated our team’s honor by doing a little role-playing with hats.)

Death, Sex & Money’s Cameron Drews accepted our honor from the awards ceremony stage and did a beautiful job capturing the spirit of our show…without even going over the 30-second speech time limit. Watch it here.

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We’ll miss you so, Dolly.

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NEXT WEEK! Join me at Tribeca Festival in NYC!

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We landed a HUGE interview this week!

June 10! Tribeca Festival in NYC!

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