In her book Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, journalist Kathleen Hale looks at this true crime story through a new lens: that the girls who stabbed Payton were dealing with severe mental illness that the justice system in Wisconsin ignored.

Nora and Kathleen discuss the legal realities of this case, how the media portrayed the story and how we can all think about true crime consumption differently.

‘Tis the season for a holiday read, and Becca Freeman has written the coziest novel that ticks all the boxes: friendship, romance, and just a sprinkle of grief and trauma. Nora and Becca share all about their past holidays, favorite Christmas movies, and more.

Wanna read the book? When you purchase from Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

Happyish Holidays and welcome to our first ever TRC gift guide! Nora and Kara (and our awesome TRC community) have compiled book recs for everyone on your gift list — from the youngest of picture book readers to the father in law who you can only talk to about the weather.

A conversation with author Emma Straub about her book This Time Tomorrow.

Nora and fellow Britney superfan Kara Nesvig do a deep dive on The Woman in Me by Britney Spears.

Join Nora for her first monthly book check-in to see what she loved, what she’s currently reading, and what’s next on her list.

Wanna read the books? When you purchase from Bookshop.org, you help support our show!

When Harrison Scott Key discovered his wife was cheating on him, he wasn’t about to break his wedding vows. He was going to save his marriage, and that quest involved taking a good hard look at how he’d failed his wife too. The result? A happily ever after — well, sort of — and the memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.

Harrison joins Nora to talk about the extremely wild ride called marriage and why he decided to let his wife write the (second to) last chapter in their not-quite divorce story.

Nora sits down with author, podcaster, pop culture critic and friend, Kate Kennedy of Be There in Five, to talk about the politics of being a parent online, why we’re so quick to dismiss the work of influencers and why you don’t need to buy a baby wipe warmer, no matter what the internet tells you.

What does it really mean to be a good person? Have you ever wondered why you consider one public figure to be “good” and another “bad”? Where those frameworks for so-called goodness came from?

Turns out they date all the way back to the fourth century, as journalist Elise Loehnen found out while researching her new book “On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good.”

Contrary to popular belief, the seven deadly sins — lust, greed, envy, sloth and the rest of the crew — weren’t actually a Biblical decree from on high. Regardless of their proximity to God, the expectations set by the infamous sins have been holding women back ever since. So where do we draw the line between “good” and “good enough?” Elise and Nora discuss the origin of sins, why women bear the brunt of these expectations and how to reframe your view of “goodness.”

Journalist and writer Rainesford Stauffer has a complicated relationship with ambition, and it started when she was just a kid. She published a book, wrote for top publications and never stopped reaching for the next golden ring — until she was forced to.

Stauffer spent months interviewing teachers, parents, psychologists and organizers about how they define and practice ambition, all while trying to reconcile its impact on her own life. Her new book, “All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and All the Ways We Strive,” is about the societal expectations that keep us striving for more and the tenuous balance between achieving your goals and burning out entirely.

When Nora lost her dad, her second pregnancy, and her husband in the fall of 2015, people gifted her a lot of books. Why? Because people want to say and do the right thing when times are hard … want to make everything better as fast as possible. Many of those books ended up in the donation pile immediately, but one of the books Nora actually read was by Anne Lamott.

Since then, she’s read all of Anne’s books — including her latest, Dusk Night Dawn. So it only made sense to kick off this new show with Nora’s conversation with Anne.

John Green is one of Nora’s favorite observers of humanity, in part because of how gentle he is with even the most maddening parts of human existence: illness (both mental and physical), human foibles and failures. And maybe most impressively, he’s a creator who has existed on the Internet without letting it completely destroy him and his opinions of humanity.

In today’s episode, Nora talks with John about his book The Anthropocene Reviewed.

Grieving is a lonely experience, and many of us who have been through it wish there was a handbook to lead us through the experience. When comedy writer Jason Roeder lost his mom, he decided to write the guidebook that he wanted to read.

This episode is a chat with Jason about his book Griefstrike!, a humorous guide to grief. And when we say humorous, we mean it: Nora read it on an airplane and was certain she was going to be escorted off the flight by an air marshal because she was laughing so hard.

When sickness has become the center of your life, when the goal posts move from “get better” to “live,” you do not simply wake up better and get on with it.

In today’s episode, Nora talks with Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms. Suleika was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia when she was 22. A major spoiler for her book (and for this episode) is that Suleika lives. She survives cancer, the stated goal for every patient, but… then what?

Our brains and our minds fragile, and they’re housed in our fragile little human bodies that just break unexpectedly. 

That’s where Drew Magary found himself: the owner of a broken skull and a badly damaged brain. But you’d really never know it — because on the outside, he looked mostly fine!

In this episode, Nora talks with Drew about his memoir, The Night The Lights Went Out, and the insidiousness that is recovering from a traumatic brain injury.

Part of what’s terrible sometimes is how easy it is for people to hate each other. And how hard it is for people to TALK to each other in meaningful ways when we disagree. And while it’s certainly not a phenomenon that’s brand NEW, the Internet has certainly made it easier for us to voice our dislike for people in ways that are… not always helpful or productive?

Dylan Marron is the author of the book Conversations With People Who Hate Me, and in today’s episode, Nora talks with him about about why we are how we are, and how we could change.

There are people in the world who were once kids who grew up without the kind of parents you see on ‘90s sitcoms, kids whose parents abdicated all responsibility, who walked off the job, who just didn’t do the one thing they were supposed to have done.

Danielle Henderson was one of those kids. She’s a grown-up now, and author of The Ugly Cry, a book that traces Danielle’s childhood as a Black girl in a very white town in upstate New York with a mother who was struggling with her own life’s disappointments. She and Nora talk about using humor to address trauma and the importance of foundational relationships.

Self-help books sell mostly because they are selling you a way to solve a problem, and the problem is you. It’s never something that’s out of your control, or bigger than you, it’s just… you. But today’s book, even if it’s shelved in the self-help section, is different.

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis is the most compassionate, most practical, most understanding book about how to do the kind of tasks that can confound and, like it says, drown you. In this episode, Nora talks with KC about the problems that arise when having a clean home becomes a moral issue.

For the past few years, the U.S. has been in the midst of a racial reckoning, and though today’s book is a piece of fiction it is, like all fiction, a reflection of the real world that we live in. 

In We Are Not Like Them, a white woman (Jen) and a Black woman (Riley) are lifelong friends, nearly as close as sisters … until Jen’s policeman husband is involved in the shooting of a Black man, and journalist Riley begins covering the story.

In this episode, Nora talks with one of the book’s authors, Christine Pride, about writing a book about interracial friendship.