The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Mom and Dider Fighting, Slate's parenting podcast for Thursday, June 23rd, The Tale of Two Cities Edition.

I'm Alison Benedict, an editor at Slate and the mom of Harry 7, Sam 5, and Wally 3.

Dan is actually out this week, so filling in for him is my buddy and also an editor at Slate

and the author of Break in Case of Emergency, a new and terrific novel that everyone should buy out

July 12th, Jessica Winter.

Hello, I'm Jessica, and I'm the mom of Devin, who is 19 months old.

On today's show, we will interview New York Times Magazine writer Nicole Hannah-Jones about her latest piece, choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city and about school segregation more broadly.

Then Jessica will tell us about the parenting

challenges she is facing as the mother of a newly minted, difficult toddler.

And we will discuss.

Also parenting triumphs and fails, a listener call about political differences between a father

and son and recommendations.

And for our Slate Plus segment, Slate designer Derek Johnson, who came on the show for our Sleep Plus segment maybe two months ago. Anyway, he's coming back to tell us all about how he and his wife's planned hypnobirth worked out. I have no announcements this week other than to say like our Facebook page, Facebook.com slash mom and dad are fighting. So let's move on to triumphs and fails. Jessica. I feel sheepish calling this a triumph. It's more like a nice thing that happened. But every time I've ever been on the show, I've had a fail. So I decided to have a triumph. We have recently fallen into a rhythm with Devin where every four to six weeks she has a sleepover or a long weekend with her aunt who lives about 90 minutes away by train. And it's so great. My sister doesn't have kids, but she's really embraced the auntie role. And my parents often come in to help, and Devin seems to have a really wonderful

time. My sister is also a trained chef, so I know the kid eats exponentially better there than she

does at home. And ostensibly, I'm supposed to be using all that extra free time to work on my

second book. And I usually achieve this, but this past Saturday, when Devin was with her auntie,

instead of writing, I binged the seven-hour long OJ documentary, which I suppose was a different kind of achievement. So this is great. It's been a great development for Devin to spend more time with her extended family. It's great to have the support, and I feel very fortunate.

As you know, I definitely consider that a triumph and also makes me insanely jealous.

But I'm very happy for you.

Thank you.

It's sort of a similar feeling that I have when Dan usually talks about his triumph.

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