Writer, host and educator Ashley C. Ford has written or guest-edited for publications including The Guardian, ELLE Magazine, BuzzFeed, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, The New York Times, taught creative nonfiction writing at The New School and Catapult.Co, hosted podcasts for HBO, Audible and Mastercard, and had her work listed among Longform & Longread's Best of 2017. Her memoir Somebody’s Daughter was published in early June and became an instant New York Times bestseller. A powerful acco...
Aug 25, 2021•59 min•Season 3Ep. 9
On today’s episode I’m talking to the journalist and podcaster Anna Sale, who’s the creator of Death, Sex & Money – WNYC’s hugely popular podcast about the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation. In June, Anna published a book, Let’s Talk About Hard Things, in which she considers her own history of facing (and sometimes avoiding) difficult subjects; subjects such as race and wealth, inequality, grief, love, death, power – basically all the things that s...
Aug 18, 2021•55 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Youtuber and content creator Lucy Moon has been creating content online – and being paid for it – since long before many of us had even heard of the word ‘influencer’, and so this episode is a real insider’s account of an industry and lifestyle that commands a great deal of cultural fascination, and is also largely dominated by women. We covered alot on this episode – what it’s like participating in ‘the economy of the self’, and the pressure that comes with having your professional and financia...
Aug 11, 2021•57 min•Season 3Ep. 7
In 2019, the writer Clare Seal started an Instagram account @myfrugalyear in order to anonymously document her journey out of £27,000 worth of debt. Her story immediately struck a chord, and @myfrugalyear now has 78,000 followers who’ve followed Clare’s journey – that of a working mother of two on an average salary trying her best to take control of her financial situation. Last year Clare published Real Life Money: An Honest Guide To Taking Control Of Your Finances, which is very much a realist...
Aug 04, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Yomi Adegoke is a multi award-winning journalist and author who writes about race, feminism, class, politics and how those things intersect. Besides having columns in both Vogue and the Guardian, Yomi is also the co-author of Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, an inspirational guide to life for Black British women, as well as series of follow-up titles including Slay In Your Lane: The Journal, and most recently Loud Black Girls, an anthology of Black British writing featuring essays from t...
Jul 28, 2021•58 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Journalist Vicky Spratt is the i Paper’s housing correspondent as well as an editor at Refinery29 UK, and has been reporting on the UK’s housing crisis for a number of years. In 2016 she created a successful campaign, Make Renting Fair, designed to highlight the plight of ‘Generation Rent’, and which resulted in the government announcing a ban on letting agency fees for tenants. Her forthcoming book Tenants will be published next year, and is set to be the most comprehensive look at the human im...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 5
Mona Chalabi is a data journalist, producer and presenter whose work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Yorker to the Guardian, and who’s also written for radio and TV networks including NPR, Gimlet, Netflix, and the BBC, as well as being one half of the team that created an Emmy-nominated video series called Vagina Dispatches. Plus she’s an illustrator, with much of her artwork focusing on bringing data to life by visualizing important information around various political and soc...
Jul 14, 2021•56 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Journalist, essayist, and media entrepreneur is co-host of the long-running and phenomenally popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, and has written for publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, the LA Times, The Gentlewoman, and The Guardian. She also has a newsletter called The Ann Friedman Weekly, which is a curation of great writing and interesting gems from far-flung corners of the Internet. Most recently Ann and her podcast co-host Aminatou Sow co-wrote Big Friendship: Ho...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 2
Delighted to share an extract from my forthcoming memoir We Need To Talk About Money, all about my childhood and teenage years, going to a private school, and the early money lessons I learned during that period of my life. We Need To Talk About Money is published by 4th Estate on 8th July and available to pre-order now in hardback, eBook and audio, with signed copies available from Waterstones.com. Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/we-need-to-talk-about-money/otegha-uwagba/978000848...
Jun 30, 2021•36 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Paris Lees is a prominent journalist and British Vogue columnist whose incredible memoir and debut book What It Feels Like For A Girl is published this week. Born and raised in Hucknall, near Nottingham, Paris has written for publications including the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph and VICE, and presented programmes for BBC Radio 1 and Channel 4, as well as having been a vocal campaigner for the transgender community. What It Feels Like For A Girl is a boldly-written account of an ext...
May 26, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Pandora Sykes is a journalist, podcaster and author of the Sunday Times bestselling collection of essays How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right?, which attempts to dissect and give some shape to the infinite choices that modern life presents us with. Previously an editor at the Sunday Times Style (you may remember her days as the magazine’s Wardrobe Mistress), Pandora is also the former co-host of the wildly successful podcast The High Low Show, which during its 4-year duration grew to become one o...
May 05, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Amy Fraser is the founder of OKREAL, a self-development platform for women that’s focused on providing the community and resources that women need to build the lives they want - both in the office and outside of it - offering everything from panel discussions and workshops, to digital content and group mentoring sessions. In this episode we discuss the importance of building a career around your life (as opposed to the other way round), how to use career uncertainty to your advantage, the secret...
Apr 28, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker online, where she writes about Silicon Valley, start-up culture, and technology, and the author of tech memoir Uncanny Valley, which tells the story of Anna’s time working in Silicon Valley during her mid to late twenties. Despite its tech world setting, Uncanny Valley is very much an everywoman story that will be familiar to any woman who’s ever worked in a sexist environment, and it touches on everything from gendered discrimination and em...
Apr 21, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Academic, activist, broadcaster and SOAS university teaching fellow Emma Dabiri joins me to discuss her latest book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition. Written in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder last year and the subsequent conversations on racism and anti-racism that followed it, What White People Can Do Next is a simultaneously radical and practical essay aimed at changing the way we talk about racial injustice, and featuring some incredibly nuanced and thoroughly...
Apr 14, 2021•39 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Journalist Sirin Kale is a features writer for the Guardian, Observer, British Vogue, Wired UK, VICE, GQ, and many other publications, and was previously an editor at VICE UK, where she launched their award-winning anti-stalking campaign Unfollow Me. Sirin authors the Guardian's flagship longform series on Covid-19 deaths, Lost to the Virus, which tells the stories of the individuals who died of Covid-19 in the UK, and the structural and systemic factors that contributed to their deaths. In this...
Apr 07, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Journalist Sarah Jaffe’s work focuses on the politics of power, especially within the workplace, and her writing has appeared everywhere from the New York Times and the Atlantic to the Guardian and many, many more. Most recently she’s written a deeply compelling new book called Work Won’t Love You Back, which seeks to examine what Sarah calls the ‘labour-of-love myth’ – the idea that certain work isn’t really work, and should be done out of love or vocational passion, and how that myth is then u...
Mar 31, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Journalist, public speaker, creative consultant, talk show host, fashion icon – there is nothing Marjon Carlos can’t – or does not – do. As a journalist, Marjon’s works sits squarely at the intersection of style and culture, and covers a range of really fascinating topics and personalities, from Cardi B to intersectional feminism. She was previously a Senior Fashion Writer at Vogue, and is now the Editorial Director at lingerie brand CUUP, and her work has appeared in Vogue, Elle, Refinery29, Va...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 2
A wide-ranging conversation with Penny Martin, editor-in-chief of iconic women’s magazine The Gentlewoman. Widely recognised as the definitive style title for discerning women, as The Gentlewoman’s founding editor, Penny is responsible for the exacting editorial standards and refined taste that have made it so influential. Before being tapped by the publishers of Fantastic Man to head up the magazine back in 2010, Penny was previously a curator at the National Museum of Photography, Film & T...
Mar 17, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 1
A special bonus episode produced in collaboration with the Standard Hotel as part of their new audio programming platform, Sometimes Radio , and recorded in the Library Lounge of the Standard Hotel’s London outpost. This episode is a live recording from the Feminist State of the Union I hosted on International Women’s Day, a conversational salon about contemporary feminism featuring contributions from award-winning author Reni Eddo-Lodge, broadcaster Zezi Ifore, and Dazed Digital’s Head of Fashi...
Apr 16, 2020•53 min•Season 2Ep. 7
As the youngest ever person to be appointed editor-in-chief of a Condé Nast title – and only the second ever African American person to hold that position – former Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Elaine Welteroth was the driving force behind the magazine’s pivot to a more political, more socially conscious editorial stance that earned it an army of new readers and admirers. An award-winning writer and New York Times bestselling author (on account of her memoir More Than Enough ), Elaine has charted a...
Oct 29, 2019•56 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Seasoned fashion and beauty editor Funmi Fetto is something of an anomaly within the magazine world – a black journalist who’s risen to the heady heights of executive editor and beauty director of Glamour magazine, by way of a stint as beauty editor at British Vogue, and an on-going column for the Observer. She’s recently published Palette , a carefully curated beauty guide aimed specifically at women of colour that British Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful has described as “ground-breakin...
Oct 23, 2019•55 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Consider this episode a masterclass in brand storytelling, courtesy of Kate Hamilton and Emily Ames, co-founders of content and communications agency Sonder & Tell, which specialises in helping brands craft their messaging and figure out how best to communicate with their customers. Since setting up Sonder & Tell two years ago, the pair have worked with clients that range from food startups to sexual health apps, and earlier this year they teamed up with fashion brand Jigsaw to publish a...
Oct 15, 2019•38 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Food writer and chef Alison Roman look set to be the millennial inheritor to Nigella’s domestic goddess crown – funny, sharp, and (cliché though it might sound) effortlessly cool, it’s no wonder she’s developed a cult following in the US (and racked up over 200,000 followers on Instagram). A columnist for the New York Times and contributor to food magazine Bon Appetit, Alison’s also the author of two cookbooks – Dining In, a best-selling collection of recipes published in 2017, and the forthcomi...
Oct 08, 2019•42 min•Season 2Ep. 3
You’ll likely already be familiar with beauty and tech entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid, who made her name within the beauty industry through WAH, the nail salon and beauty brand that kicked off the nail art trend globally, and went on to shape beauty and girl culture around the world. A serial entrepreneur, Sharmadean has now turned her hand to the tech world with Beautystack , and on this episode she shares what she’s learned about building culturally influential brands and businesses over the yea...
Oct 01, 2019•50 min•Season 2Ep. 2
“Selfhood is the economic engine of the Internet” – so says Jia Tolentino, staff writer at the New Yorker, and author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, a razor-sharp collection of essays examining contemporary American culture that touches on everything from the commodification of feminism and the “nightmare” of personal branding, to the similarities between religion and MDMA, and our cultural obsession with ‘the scam’. Find out how the author of one of the most talked about books o...
Sep 23, 2019•51 min•Season 2Ep. 1
This month’s guest is Liv Little, founder of gal-dem , a media platform run by women and non-binary people of colour. Tune in to hear us discuss the business side of building a viable digital media platform, from the ins and outs of raising money from investors to the key to successful brand partnerships. Plus – the microaggressions that prompted Liv to start gal-dem in the first place, how we REALLY feel about Diversity Panels, and a letter from a listener debating whether or not to pursue a ca...
Apr 29, 2019•55 min•Season 1Ep. 19
“Everyone experiences failure, but not everyone is honest about it, so it can sometimes seem as if everyone else has perfect lives - and that adds to your sense of personal failure". Elizabeth Day is an award-winning journalist, acclaimed author, creator of the hugely popular How To Fail podcast - and now author of a forthcoming book of the same name - and on this month's episode we cover everything from feeling like an outsider at work and surviving male-dominated newsrooms, to the major career...
Apr 03, 2019•56 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Best-selling author, award-winning journalist and chart-topping podcaster Dolly Alderton joins us in the studio to chat about the whirlwind year she's had since her debut book came out, her thoughts on turning 30, the pressure (and joys!) of promoting and selling books, and how she finds the time to write. We also had an in-depth chat about privilege and private education (in light of a much-debated column Dolly recently wrote for The Sunday Times Style), the role that money has played in her ca...
Mar 06, 2019•50 min•Season 1Ep. 17
“Likeability is still a huge issue for women in the workforce – they can’t just be good at what they do, they have to be likeable in the process”. Sobering words from journalist Gemma Hartley, whose new book Fed Up explores the burden of invisible labour and why it tends to fall more heavily on women both at home and in the workplace - as well as offering up practical solutions on how to better navigate it. Plus some advice for a listener who’s concerned about the lack of diversity in their offi...
Feb 08, 2019•49 min•Season 1Ep. 16
This month's guest is Abigail Bergstrom, Head of Publishing at digital talent agency Gleam. If you dream of being a published author some day, Abigail's got plenty of advice on how to make that happen, from approaching literary agents, to the pros and cons of self-publishing. Plus – an Ask Otegha segment on coping with a misogynistic work environments. Gleam Titles: www.gleamtitles.com Find Abigail Bergstrom on Instagram (@abigailbergstrom) and Twitter (@AbigailBergstrm) For more career-related ...
Dec 18, 2018•48 min•Season 1Ep. 15
