Rebecca Traister
speaker
165 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 Mar
Rebecca Traister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes, there's all kinds of candy around.
You know what?
People are curious about the world.
We send them scary messages about it all the time, right?
We tell them they live in unprecedented times.
That's terrifying for young people to hear.
They actually sort of have hunger and, you know, there are lots of different ways you can be satisfied, but with actually getting fuller, richer, more complex, sometimes funnier, sometimes angrier stories.
So I actually, I give young people a lot of credit for having varied appetites.
I'm working on it.
Well, I made some conscious plans in advance, which was to be with friends. We had house guests for the weekend and, I had dinner with friends last night. I texted with some people, including you, Brittany, a little bit. you know, couple groups that are text threads that are important to me and just the voices that, you know, the people I trust the most. And there are tons of them.
I mean, that's one of the ways I experience all of this right now is remembering that the world is full. It's not some retreat, small club thing where just there are a few people whispering, like the world is full of people who are, um, in conversation about what to do and how to act.
So I will say there were things about yesterday specifically, like I didn't expect to wake up to Cecile Richards dying on that. But, you know, like there were some things that were like, wow, you gird and then there's like a kick first thing in the morning that's not one that you saw coming that sort of throws you off.
And then I didn't watch the inauguration and I didn't, you know, I read at the end of the day as I was going to bed, I read some stories about what had happened. But that was my experience of yesterday. And I want to hear what Brittany's is.
But very quickly, I just want to say like the number of things rolling around in my head that don't have easy answers right now that are full of contradiction is huge. And I'd love to sort of talk through some of them here.
So the things that I'm like, that are all knotted in my head right now are around questions of strength and weakness, long-term hope and short-term terror. Hmm. the connections around masculinity and ideas of masculinity that were being sold. the ideas of top-down power versus bottom-up power, which I think are really crucial that we empower.
I'm just like listing the things that in my head are like the happening. And I think all these things apply to what I'm sorting.
Oh, and these questions of something Brittany and I were talking about just before we started recording is I said, I have this weird feeling that we just have to sit through this, which doesn't mean passivity and it doesn't mean not having thoughts or conversations like these and a million others and doing the work and writing and all that stuff. But there's this weird feeling of like,
this is like a display happening or like a temper tantrum, like a toddler, you know, like there's no... There's no succeeding in calming it right now, so you just have to sit through it, and you can choose how closely to pay attention to it or not, but it's gonna go on and there's nothing you can do. That tantrum-y thing.
All these things, they're just knots in my brain that I'm picking apart and trying to get into some kind of shape that makes sense, and sometimes it's in my writing. My bosses at New York Magazine gave me an assignment beginning of the year to go down and cover the Hegsath confirmation, which I think was pretty brutal for me emotionally. I had a weird experience of going down.
Brittany, you talked about crying. And as a white woman, I have a different relationship to tears. Mine can be used to draw a lot of response. But I will tell you that in a professional context, they're pretty embarrassing. A weird thing happened the first week I went down to sort of talk to senators about how they were going to game out this Hegsath confirmation. I mean,
Showing 81–100 of 165 · page 5 of 9
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