Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Anya Kamenetz, a journalist and author known for her insights on culture and family, dives deep into the complexities of adult friendships. She explores how connections evolve in midlife, dispelling the loneliness narrative while emphasizing the importance of vulnerability and community. Anya shares practical tips like scheduling check-ins to maintain friendships, managing conflicts as part of real community dynamics, and creating intentional networks. With a focus on choosing friends wisely and honoring seasonal shifts in relationships, she offers a refreshing take on nurturing deeper bonds.

Traveling with kids is not a vacation. It’s work. It’s labor. It’s also one of my absolute favorite things to do. In this episode I talk about how we actually make it happen as a family, from taking my “lumpy babies” to Sicily to hauling three kids through London while one of them pukes all over an Uber and then immediately asks for sushi. I’m joined by my family travel guru, writer and travel journalist Regan Stephens, founder of the travel guides Saltete and mom of three girls who spends a month every summer exploring the world with them. We dig into the real mechanics of traveling with kids: choosing one anchor activity a day instead of trying to see everything, letting each kid pick something so they feel invested, and embracing grocery stores, metros, and playgrounds as essential cultural experiences. Subscribe to Regan's newsletter here. Browse the Saltete guides here. Get your free Saltete guides at these links: Where to Eat + Drink in Philadelphia  A Guide to Visiting Philadelphia with Kids Jo Piazza’s Ultimate Guide to Traveling in Sicily Jo Piazza’s Family Guide to the Catskills Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm dropping an interview that I did with the Love-ly⁠ podcast into our feed. This week on Love-ly, Mehak sits down with bestselling author, journalist, and podcaster Jo Piazza, widely considered one of America’s sharpest observers of women, motherhood, and the influencer economy. Together, they unpack the increasingly visible and controversial world of “trad wives”—women who embrace and promote full-time homemaking on social media. Mehak and Jo explore why the aesthetic is so magnetic, what’s intentionally left out of the picture-perfect narrative, and how domesticity is often repackaged as empowerment. Along the way, Mehak and Jo discuss a viral TikTok from @cortneygetsfit, a stay-at-home mom navigating life post-divorce after years of financial dependence on her husband. Piazza opens up about the realities of feminist choice, financial independence, and how her own views on marriage and partnership have shifted over time. Pulling from her years of reporting and her latest book, Everyone Is Lying to You, the conversation gets into shifting gender roles, the pressure cooker of modern womanhood, and the glossy myths social media keeps feeding us. You can listen to more episode of Love-ly here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The trad wife trend has finally hit its ceiling. After years of algorithm-friendly homemaking, the movement is showing the cracks in its seams. The performance is shifting. The ambition underneath is no longer hiding and that reveal says everything about where the culture is headed next. Brands like Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith are now openly embracing the CEO role instead of pretending domestic perfection happens without childcare, staff, or structure and that transparency matters. But what happens when the influencers who sold “traditional femininity” as a lifestyle pivot to empire-building in plain sight? Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Holiday joy is supposed to feel cozy and magical. Instead, a lot of women spend December simmering with quiet (or not so quiet) rage. Let's dig into why the holidays can feel especially brutal for women in midlife, and what our hormones, our brains, and the unpaid mental load of the season have to do with it. Her guest is Dr. Kim Einhorn, an OB GYN and founder of the MP Collective, a personalized menopause and perimenopause practice. Kim explains how hormone fluctuations in perimenopause can hijack your mood, why you suddenly cannot stand the way your partner does just about anything, and how sleep, stress, and resentment collide to tank both your patience and your libido. Kim gets into practical ways to lower the mental load, use the power of no, rethink self care, and protect your joy this season, without burning your life down or making one more cheese plate for people you do not like. Learn more about Kim and the MP Collective here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In light of the news about Australia's social media ban for teenagers we are resurfacing an episode with a young creator. This is a deep dive into the world of a 16-year-old TikTok star who wants to change the industry as we know it and ensure that the next 20 billionaires are females under 25. Sloane Price is wildly ambitious in ways I couldn't have imagined possible when I was a teenager. And today we're talking about her business plans, the ways that brands and agencies take advantage of teen girl influencers (plus how she wants to fix it) and why the teenage influencers today are the future of celebrity marketing. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Australia just became the first country in the world to ban social media for anyone under sixteen. It’s a sweeping, messy and imperfect law. But it's also one of the first real attempts to hold tech companies accountable for the impact their platforms have on kids. We dig into what the ban actually does, why it matters even with all its flaws, and what the early backlash from teenagers and tech companies reveals. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quite Literally Books is doing something rare in publishing. They are bringing back books by American women who were once widely read, widely praised, and then quietly erased from the literary conversation. These writers were bestsellers a hundred years ago. They were reviewed by the major outlets. They shaped cultural debates. And then, because the canon was built and maintained mostly by men, their work disappeared from classrooms, bookstores, and the public memory. Republishing these books is not just a literary project. It is a way of restoring voices that should never have been silenced in the first place. In this episode, I talk with the two women behind Quite Literally Books. They explain how they track down these lost authors, what it feels like to hold a great book that history forgot, and why stories about motherhood, marriage, mental health, labor, and identity from the early twentieth century still feel shockingly current. Check out ⁠Quite Literally Books⁠. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we’re bringing back one of my favorite episodes because it has only become more relevant. On the surface, it is a story about “bad nanny” posts in mom groups. Underneath, it is a story about money, power, and the invisible labor that holds up our entire childcare system. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What happens when a thriller writer discovers her novels have been quietly fed into AI without her consent and decides to fight back. In this episode, Jo digs in with Andrea Bartz, author of The Last Ferry Out and Reese pick We Were Never Here, to unpack how pirated books ended up inside massive AI training datasets, what it was like to be deposed and to face down an AI giant, and how that fight led to a proposed 1.5 billion dollar copyright settlement that lawyers are calling the largest in history. They trace every step of the case, explain how authors can check whether their own books are eligible for payouts, and ask what this moment might mean for the future balance of power between artists and AI. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for videos of all episodes here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices