The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Have you noticed the bad vibes around dating lately? Whether you’re swiping on apps or scrolling through social media, it’s easy to feel like the romantic landscape has become a battleground — at least, for the heterosexual among us. This pervasive feeling of hopelessness and negativity — often called "hetero-pessimism" — is everywhere. But is this cynicism the actual picture, or is it just another digital trap?

In this episode of The Gray Area, host Jonquilyn Hill is joined by Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor at Playboy. Together, they dissect why we’ve become so hostile towards straight dating, the disconnect between our online expectations and real-world reality, and why Magdalene is making a radical case for "hetero optimism."

Host: Jonquilyn Hill, host of Explain It To Me

Guest: Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor for Playboy

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.

And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.

Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is it ever okay to put a price on a kidney? Why is it illegal to sell an organ, but perfectly legal to sell blood plasma? This episode explores the world of "repugnant transactions" — the markets we find morally offensive — and asks why we ban certain markets as "gross" or "unethical" while ignoring others that might cause more harm.

In this episode of The Gray Area, host Bryan Walsh sits down with Nobel laureate Alvin Roth, who wrote the recent book Moral Economics, to discuss how markets are the key to understanding our most deeply held social values. They break down why society chooses to ban certain transactions, how those choices affect real lives, and whether we can use "market design" to save people without violating our ethical standards.

Host: Bryan Walsh, Vox Editorial Director

Guest: Alvin Roth, Professor of Economics at Stanford University and author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.

And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. New episodes drop every Monday and Friday.

Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true or not — are what we end up calling our life, and sometimes, our collective history.

Today’s episode is a rerun of an interview that originally published last year with Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. The two discuss the strange alchemy of remembering and how the stories our minds create end up creating us.

Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)

Guest: Charan Ranganath, neuroscientist and author of Why We Remember

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.

And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.

Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sigmund Freud is probably the most famous psychoanalyst. Yet many of his theories have been critiqued or discredited. So is there anything we can still learn from the father of psychoanalysis?

In today’s episode Sean speaks with professor Mark Solms, author of The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. Mark argues that while Freud may have been wrong about many things, he was right about one important thing: the human mind cannot be fully understood on purely biological terms. He believes that modern psychiatry has become focused on treating mental suffering like a chemical problem, instead of focusing on emotional and psychological aspects.

Sean and Mark discuss the conscious versus the unconscious mind, whether psychoanalysis is the best therapy, and why Freud is still relevant today.

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.

And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.

Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The internet is rife with chatter about “heteropessimism,” the feeling that gender relations are broken and heterosexual relationships are doomed. But is this just cynical discourse, like a coping mechanism for bad dates? Or is this a symptom of a much deeper, systemic breakdown?

In this episode of The Gray Area, guest host Jonquilyn Hill is joined by Sarah Jones, senior writer for The Intelligencer. Together, they peel back the performative irony to look at the harsh realities of dating in a post-Dobbs, politically volatile United States.

From the economic structures that make leaving bad relationships feel impossible, to the "manosphere" versus the "pink pill," Sarah and Jonquilyn discuss why we are struggling to connect — and why "hopeful pessimism" might be the most responsible way to build a future.

Host: Jonquilyn Hill, host of Explain It To Me

Guest: Sarah Jones, senior writer, IntelligencerWe would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749.

Your comments and questions help us make a better show.

And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.

Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices