In part three of their Death and Spectacle series, Carrie and Ellie explore the inequity of American commemoration and how it deprives the marginalized, even in death. They discuss the corrupt dealings behind public works projects such as Lake Eufaula, which led to the forcible removal of native peoples and the flooding of their history. In the context of the discovery of countless children’s remains near residential schools and an official record of 9/11 fatalities that excludes the undocumented, the sisters ask – how do we choose what and who to memorialize? What makes some ground holy and others deserving of desecration or erasure? Who has the right to rest in peace? Texts discussed include: Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Jefferson Cowie’s “Freedom’s Dominion,” The 1965 James Baldwin - William F. Buckley Debate, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “The Undocumented Americans,” Jason de Leon’s “The Land of Open Graves”, Alicia Elliott’s short story “Unearth,” and Annette Gordon Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello” and Walter Johnson’s “The Strange Story of Alexina Morrison: Race, Sex, and Resistance in Antebellum Louisiana.”

CW: Sensitive content regarding 9/11, terrorism, genocide, racial violence, spectacular death, dark tourism. The sisters return from winter hiatus with an episode about atrocity, human suffering, spectacular death and how we choose to memorialize and regard the pain of others. Focusing primarily on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, they ask — can we look back on catastrophe without becoming voyeuristic consumers? Can we honor victims without turning them into commodities? Can morbid curiosity and empathy coexist? When will tourists visit places like Ground Zero or Auschwitz in the way they visit Pompeii? Using Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) as a critical framework, they dissect the role of images in memory making and the tension between private memory and public instruction. Other topics include images of torture at Abu Ghraib, Lynndie England as a specter for white women in lynching photography, Kerry James Marshall’s "Heirlooms and Accessories," and willed white innocence. Readings include works by Jacqueline Goldsby, Eduardo Cadava, Philip R. Stone & Alex Grebenar, Marita Sturken, Jennifer Senior, Mary Marshall Clark, and as always, our ultimate, Susan Sontag. Cover is Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier" (1936)

In the third and final episode in their Taylor Swift retrospective, Ellie and Carrie examine the seven songs that comprise the 3am Version of the Midnights album. They discuss the artistic differences between songs produced by Swift collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner and the merits of pop versus more naturalistic music. They pull excerpts from Taylor’s highly personal, thoughtfully constructed NYU address and consider the role Taylor continues to play in their sisterhood and young/not so young adulthood. This episode features voice notes from two loyal listeners and the discussion their reflections inspired. Topics explored include Taylor’s anglophilia, miscarriage as metaphor (TW), the role of fate versus free will, the intractability of emotional trauma, and a brief meditation on the 2020 film Promising Young Woman (spoiler alert!).

After a monthlong reprieve, Ellie and Carrie return to discuss their all time favorite artist, Taylor Swift, and her lasting hold over American music and popular culture. The sisters discuss their relationship with Taylor over the past twelve years, from the release of her eponymous album in 2006 to her latest studio album Midnights, which, in the month since it was dropped, has shattered records and quite literally, broken the internet. Or Ticketmaster, at least. They chart a musical history that mirrors that of Taylor — from childhood and adolescence to young and not so young adulthood. The multifaceted Taylor is examined through a variety of lenses — musical wunderkind, pop star, celebrity, icon, deity, activist, storyteller, trickster, arbiter of angst, wizard of words, and mistress of reinvention. Taken as a whole, Taylor’s discography is the ultimate bildungsroman of an artist who shirked the cloak of likability to become her own flawed and messy person. Topics discussed include Horse Girls, media witch hunts, the toxic aughts, #KanyeGate, and the cathartic power of the inimitable T.Swift bridge. Articles are: “You Belong With Me: How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire” by Lizzie Widdicombe (2011), “Taylor Swift Is Confusing” by Curtis Sittenfeld (2015), Pitchfork’s “Midnights Review” (2022), “In Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’, The Easter Eggs Aren’t the Point” By Lauren Michele Jackson (2022).

In this special spooky episode, Ellie and Carrie discuss the cultural logic of hauntings in both American history and their own lives. They grapple with childhood notions of their late father's ghost, something Carrie feared and Ellie denied. Understanding hauntings as living loss, they bring in the work of historian Tiya Miles, whose book Tales from the Haunted South offers ghost stories as potentially radical works of historiography that often deal with narratives left out of the official record. But such narratives are also taken less seriously because they are ghost stories. For Miles, the Native American ghost and the enslaved ghost play twin roles interrogating trauma in the American gothic. Ellie offers a brief history and social explanation of the Salem witch trials, undergirded by patriarchal prescriptions and the anxieties of Puritan predestination. Meanwhile, how have misogynistic conceptions of women as vessels prone to hysteria colored female possession narratives from Dido to Bertha Mason to Regan MacNeil (a.k.a. the Exorcist girl, who's chained to a bed while the Devil makes her say "Fuck me! Fuck me!")? During the Victorian era, women spiritualists used such stereotypes to their advantage, finding their own voices while speaking for the undead. Other topics include the role of inherited trauma in the most powerful horror stories (see the Graham family in Ari Aster's Hereditary), queerness and ghosts (see Dani in The Haunting of Bly Manner), and the relationship between 19th-century spiritualism and technology, especially when it came to the new medium of photography. In addition to Miles, books referenced are Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, Renée L. Bergland’s The National Uncanny, Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, and, of course, Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Articles are “Most witches are women, because witch hunts were all about persecuting the powerless” by Bridget Marshall for The Conversation (2019), “Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead” by Casey Cep for the New Yorker (2021), and “What Ghost Stories Taught Me About My Queer Self” by Nell Stevens for the New Yorker (2022).

Last month, a faculty member at Trinity School NYC (Ellie and Carrie's alma mater) left the school after being secretly filmed by Project Veritas during what she thought was a date. In the widely disseminated video that was catnip for CRT-fearing conservatives, she reveals that she takes her full self—including her leftist political agenda—to her job, where she says “white boys … a huge contingent of them,” are “just horrible.” The latest pendulum swing back toward tradition in private schools (see Ginia Bellafante last month in the NYTimes), the headmaster's email announcing her departure claimed it was the school’s responsibility to “nurture children as they become responsible citizens" by rejecting “discrimination of any kind” and espousing the importance of “a diverse, inclusive community.” In this episode, Ellie and Carrie speak with friend and fellow Trinity alumna Sara Frost (@spooningwithsara), unequivocally That Girl—albeit with a heart of gold—in high school. The faculty member's political statements did not surprise (or particularly disturb) us alumnae, who recall parents labeling the history department “socialist summer camp" (we read Howard Zinn) when we were students. As for her thoughts on wealthy white boys—well, we lived them. When we were there, Trinity, despite its academic leftism, fostered neither a nurturing nor progressive student culture. Looking to Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right to Sex,” Ellie, Carrie, and Sara discuss the politics of sexual surveillance in “the swamp”—the student lounge to which white male students (largely those not on financial aid) felt entitled. In retrospect, they realize that many girls who spent free periods in the swamp were welcome there partly due to their "fuckability." But fuckability, Srinivasan reminds us, “is not some good that should be distributed more fairly. It isn’t a good at all.” Citing sociologist Katherine Cross, she implores us to ask ourselves what certain women get from topping white men’s hierarchies of desirability. In other words, what are the wages of being in someone else’s pecking order? Meanwhile, what happens when one is implicitly (or in Ellie’s case, explicitly) unwelcome in the swamp? And why are girls wronged by boys often ostracized when those boys are punished? Other topics discussed include Trinity’s insularity, owed in part to its prison-inspired architecture, and its inability to handle students who learned differently or were unwilling to make themselves sick in pursuit of perfection. "Labore et virtute" is fine to a point—but what ever happened to curā?

For the second-to-last episode in our private school series, our guest Kayla narrates her journey from a New Jersey public school to the total environment of Phillips Academy — Andover. Growing up middle class in the suburbs, Kayla’s entry into Prep for Prep’s “Prep 9” program meant a 90-minute commute to the big city and a newfound sense of class consciousness. Getting to know her Prep peers, largely from low-income backgrounds, was a lesson in economic inequality. When she got to Andover, however, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, making Kayla keenly aware of the privilege she lacked. Black and openly queer by 14, she realizes in retrospect that the institution was not one made for people like her. But boarding school, despite its normalization of whiteness and extreme wealth, was an overwhelmingly positive part of Kayla’s development. Still, Kayla finds that the Prep 9 model is not a scalable one promising meaningful change for the American education crisis. Other topics include the racial politics of dating in boarding school, the contention over romantic room visitations, and the preppy classics (Vineyard Vines) vs. the American classics (Hollister).

This episode in our NYC private school series features a very special guest, Krittika, who was Carrie's classmate at Spence. Her pragmatic parents, who met at university in India and raised Krittika and her brother Josh in Queens, always knew they'd have to do the most to circumvent the failings of the New York City public school system when it came to their own kids' education. They found Prep for Prep, a program founded by educator Gary Simons in 1978 to identify New York City’s most promising students of color and prepare them for success at selective independent schools. Krittika says Prep parents like hers were highly devoted, and recalls Dr. Cornel West's sentiment "I am who I am because somebody loved me." She takes us through the grueling Prep for Prep process, which was 14 months long and meant extra schooling on Wednesday nights, all day Saturday, and five days a week in the summer. With students getting "dropped" each week, Krittika and her peers took college-level courses and read The Iliad, sometimes pulling all-nighters at age 11 (something she's never had to do since). Krittika was overjoyed to finally end up at Spence, where her classes were stimulating, the rooms were beautiful, the food (muenster bagels!) was delicious, and her peers also watched Glee. While she was keenly aware that Spence was a testament to extreme wealth inequality, she learned to accept the trade-off: that though the school was not made for her, it would be the means for an excellent education and the bridge to a college where she could thrive. Works cited include Caitlin Flanagan's 2021 piece on private schools for The Atlantic and Vinson Cunningham's 2020 Prep for Prep profile for the New Yorker.

In the third episode of our NYC private school series, Ellie and Carrie speak with Alyssa, a Black Spence alumna whose experience of growing up in uneasy proximity to whiteness was lonely and damaging. Alyssa, whose family represented what Caitlin Flanagan describes as "the bread and butter of these schools... the two-career couple who care greatly about their children’s education and can afford it, but not easily," struggled to fit in with her wealthier white peers. A light-skinned Black woman with roots in what W. E. B. Du Bois deemed the "Talented Tenth," Alyssa's mother taught her to reject her blackness in the name of respectability. The disassociation brought on by the pressures of assimilation made Alyssa an anxious and compulsively polite child who could not freely be herself. One of the two Black students in her grade for her first eight years at Spence, Alyssa became a self-described "poser" whose desperation to be seen as white only led to isolation. She unpacks the traumas of self-surveillance and external adultification as a Black girl taught not to love herself. Reckoning years later with images of jubilant enslaved people in the Spence dance studio's wallpaper, Alyssa gathers the fragments of a fractured identity.

In the second episode of their New York City private school series, Ellie and Carrie move on from the dreamland of Spence lower school to the hell scape of middle school materialism and accelerated adolescence. We start with the joys and horrors of Knicker Bocker, where we, white-gloved, danced with tiny boys who, to us, were gods. Where are Pierre (FKA Peter of New Jersey) and "the lovely Ms. Yvonne" now? With our first-ever guest Jess, we hear about her transition from a city public school to a private school in the Bronx that ushered in a brief obsession with Uggs. Plus, musings on the "fast girls" from a certain all-girls' school who still occupy an indelible place in the imagination (for a certain subsect of Manhattan girls who were 12-14 around 2009). What did Blair Waldorf, seen in birds-eye view from the Spence staircase, do to our lexicons and capacity for kindness? Hervé Leger at Temple Emanu-El? Ninth graders at Riff Raff (rip)? Sure, why not! But ages 12 and up at Spence were not all bad, it turns out. The saving grace was namely the dance program's welcome overhaul under the fearless direction of Mr. Redacted and his leather bracelets. The image of sixth graders throbbing in a pile to the beat of Ramalama (Bang Bang) on the Symphony Space stage will stand the test of time. We speak to former Spence dancer and our dear friend Elizabeth, who says the beloved Mr. Redacted brought joy and laughter to her adolescence while normalizing queerness within the school for the first time.

In part one of what will be sizable series, Ellie and Carrie introduce the obscene world of Manhattan private schools, using Caitlin Flanagan's 2021 Atlantic article to guide their discussion. Recalling their educational experience, namely at Spence in this episode, is not so simple: these institutions made them who they are by cultivating their creativity, instilling in them a curiosity for the world around them, and igniting in them a love of learning (hey, Carrie still remembers her declensions). On the other hand, the very existence of these elite institutions runs counter to the sisters' vision of a just society in which education--excellent education--is a right, not a privilege. But to quote Flanagan, "the god of private schools is money." Other topics include the cutthroat game of preschool admissions, Ellie's chronic masturbation as a child, and--at the end of the episode--a dip (or perhaps a cha cha?) into Knicker Bocker. More to come on that front in next Friday's episode. You know you love me. XOXO. talk about their idyllic memory

In another quasi-episode (sorry, we are preparing for a 23-person family reunion at Mom's house), Carrie reads a piece she wrote called "Boneless Girl," named for a disturbing miniclip.com game she played as a child in the aughts. Exploring the scourge of 2000s "bubblegum misogyny" (see Constance Grady in Vox, 2021) and its effect on the minds of young girls like the writer herself, the essay reflects on how the public's dissociative seeing of celebutantes like Paris, Nicole, Mischa, and Mary Kate foreshadowed our own unmooring of our images from ourselves. Following the reading, Ellie and Carrie discuss how their prelapsarian Internet experience (think computer rooms and Ebaum's World) devolved into something much darker and panoptically consuming. Is our fall from grace, triggered by Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a fortunate one? What would John Milton have to say?

In the final installment of Ellie and Carrie's "doll play" trilogy, the sisters discuss the American Girl doll line, from its Pleasant Company origins in the pages of mail-order catalogues to its transformation, with the help of Mattel, into a consumerist behemoth of popcorn machines, solipsistic look-like-me dolls and other forms of late-capitalist foolishness. They focus on "Selling Multicultural Girlhood: The American Girl Doll, 1986 to Present," the final chapter of Molly Rosner's 2021 book Playing With History: American Identities and Children's Consumer Culture. As "didactic amusements", how do the American Girls' narratives distort and flatten the nuances of American history? How do they contribute and enrich American historiography, especially for young girls? Other works cited include Molly Brookfield's on American Girl Doll play and nostalgia, John Berger's Ways of Seeing (as always), Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

Using Lisa Guerrero's 2009 article “Can the Subaltern Shop? The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls” as a framework, Carrie and Ellie discuss MGA Entertainment's introduction of the Bratz line in 2001 and the alternative vision of femininity and style it offered young girls in the new millennium. Guerrero explores four spaces of critical inquiry: the Bratz' paradoxical investment in racial identities, gender and sexuality politics, the influence of consumerism/commodity culture, and the "street cred" culture that provided white suburban girls a "tourist opportunity of the urban imaginary space." The sisters also contextualize the Bratz line within the y2k emphasis on multiculturalism and the specious understanding of America as a "post-racial society" in the late 20th century. Other topics include the McBling aesthetic, the "browning of America," and (as always) neoliberal postfeminism. Works cited include Danzy Senna's 1998 piece "Mulatto Millennium," Michele Elam's 2011 work The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, Molly Rosner's Playing with History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture (2021), Walter Johnson's 1996 article “The Strange Story of Alexina Morrison: Race, Sex, and Resistance in Antebellum Louisiana” as well as his 1999 book Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, and (just barely!) Jill Lepore's 2018 piece in the New Yorker, "Valley of the Dolls: Barbie, Bratz, and the end of originality." Passing narrative films Carrie mentioned were Showboat (1936, 1951), Pinky (1949), and Imitation of Life (1934, 1959).

Ellie and Carrie recall their time spent world building with Barbie, Ken, Midge, Skipper, Christie, et al. Using Molly Rosner’s “Playing With History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture” (Rutgers University Press, 2021) as a framework, they introduce Barbie dolls as "didactic amusements” instructing girls on what it means to be feminine and introducing them to their identities as American consumers. What do cultural artifacts like Barbie tell us about the world in which they were produced? Ellie links the world's introduction to Barbie in 1959 with Nixon and Khrushchev famous Kitchen Debate that same year in Moscow. Was Barbie a capitalist soldier in the cold war against communism? Carrie brings up the work of Harvard professor Sarah Lewis, who has posited that images create culture as much as culture creates images. Other topics include Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll studies in the 1940s as well as doll play's influence on pornography predilections.

In this quasi-episode, which takes a break from the show's usual history and theory, the sisters recall Ellie's wedding to Mark last summer, with Carrie reading her maid of honor speech once again. Ellie reacts and answers some questions about marriage.