COVID Exhaustion
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate senior editor and science writer Shannon Palus is joined by staff writer Rebecca Onion to talk parenting and family life during the Delta wave. They start by talking about how they get through the days when all the news feels apocalyptic and Rebecca’s fears for her unvaccinated child. Then they get real about their varying levels of optimism and tolerance for those who refuse to get vaccinated.
Recommendations:
Rebecca: The Paramount+ show Evil.
Shannon: The young adult novel They’ll Never Catch Us, by Jessica Goodman.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:05.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:06.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:07.8 | This is the waves. |
| 0:08.4 | This is the waves. |
| 0:09.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:10.3 | This is the waves. |
| 0:16.2 | Welcome to the waves. |
| 0:18.0 | Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and the latest wave of coronavirus. |
| 0:23.5 | We're all doing this anxious fretting all over again. |
| 0:28.4 | Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off of our minds. |
| 0:32.7 | And today you've got me, Shannon Paulus, a senior editor at Sleet, focusing on health and science. |
| 0:38.8 | And me, Rebecca Onion, a staff writer at Slate. Today, we're going to be talking about the |
| 0:44.0 | Delta Surge and how it's put us all back in a position of having to navigate very difficult |
| 0:49.1 | family decision-making situations. For a while, the mental load of the pandemic seemed to be gone. Now it's back. |
| 0:56.8 | How are people dealing with the narrative switch back to, quote unquote, starting to worry again? |
| 1:01.8 | How is that flip getting reflected in relationships? And how is this period of negotiation different |
| 1:07.2 | from 2020? Rebecca, why were you interested in talking about this? Who isn't thinking about |
| 1:13.7 | this right now? I'm not sure. I just kind of personally overwhelmed by this switch, as I think a lot of |
| 1:20.4 | people have been. I have a child who's four and a half, who's been out of preschool for 17 months. |
| 1:26.7 | We're lucky enough to be able to have a place to send her back to, which is not a half, who's been out of preschool for 17 months. We're lucky enough to be able to have a |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.