At last we’ve arrived at the final weeks of summer, a liminal time during which that once-sweet freedom may start to taste a bit bitter—and structure and consistency may start to feel like sweet relief.
Perhaps like me, you are feeling a bit mentally and physically worn by these months of freedom. Perhaps what you need is a nice walk and something to get your brain moving again, something like a good care podcast.
Here are four I highly recommend:
I’m lucky enough to call Michael Feigelson, the host of this podcast, a friend and colleague. Feigelson is the executive director of the Van Leer Foundation which finds truly innovative ways to support young children, caregivers and communities worldwide. (I was the 2025 guest editor of their annual journal, Early Childhood Matters.)
Feigelson is the perfect host for this deep dive into the science of how parenting transforms the human mind. He is curious, vulnerable, and has a real knack for breaking down the work of brilliant scientists into digestible ideas that tired parents and caregivers can wrap their minds around. I should note that while my new parent days are long behind, I still find this all so fascinating and relatable. My big bang as a parent may have happened on November 1, 2012, when my eldest was born. But since then it has been an ongoing cycle of becomings, and the science on new parenting still feels deeply relevant.
If you read me often, you know my greatest dream is for us to have more conversations about care that move beyond the fairy tale vs. nightmare binary. I want spaces where people can show up with all their oozing, messy, fullness, where they can speak vulnerably about their love for the recipients of their care and their pride in caring for them, and the challenges of caring for them. Spaces where we can share solutions and big ideas, but also make space for the unknowable wilderness at the center of it all. This podcast is one of those spaces! Geriatrician Dr. Anita Chandra and parenting journalist Zara Hanawalt are wise, honest, and funny, and therefore wonderful guides to the world of sandwich caregiving.
Humans have been giving and receiving care forever. But thinking deeply about care is a fairly new thing. (Could this have something to do with the gender of the official “deep thinkers” for most of time? I suspect it does…) In this podcast, Martin Robb speaks with some of the smartest care nerds around, asking big philosophical and political questions, always with a wide-open mind. Robb is a professor of care ethics and culture at The Open University in the UK, and his energy is pretty much the polar opposite of a blustery male podcaster convinced he has figured out life. (One of the best parts of the care ethics community is that most of them practice what they preach!)
This podcast is for those of us who find ourselves missing our higher education days, when we used to sit around talking through big ideas and the meaning of life at a super macro level. Host Andrea Hiott, philosopher and cognitive scientist, brings the most interesting people onto her podcast, many you likely have never heard of, to dive into the kind of questions that will never fully be answered—only navigated. Her explorations with these philosophers, scientists, journalists and others involve moving through the kind of substantial ideas that would never ever fit neatly into an Instagram carousel. Hiott is in search of, in her own words, the kind of knowing that happens from the heart. This is not a sentimental mission in a treacly sense, but rather a long overdue acknowledgement that relationships, sentiments and bodily sensations very much matter in coloring our experience of the world.
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