Christina Cauterucci

Christina Cauterucci is a writer for Slate and host of The Waves and Outward. Follow her on Twitter here.

What was your relationship with podcasts before you started hosting The Waves and Outward?
I’d listened to some narrative podcasts, starting with Serial, like millions of other people. But I only started listening to chat shows once I started at Slate in 2015. Listening to The Waves and the Culture Gabfest helped me feel like I knew my new co-workers long before I actually did.

How has Outward changed since it began?
For the first year of the show, we organized each episode around a specific theme. So, for example, in our episode on spirituality, we talked about astrology and the Enneagram, interviewed a gay Mormon who’d struggled with her relationship to her church, and discussed a video series that imagines a world in which AIDS never existed. 

Now, we try to peg our shows a little more to the news cycle—loosely, though, since it’s a monthly show. It helps us feel tied to the moment and part of ongoing conversations about queer culture. Our episodes are also a bit shorter now, because we heard from our data people that listeners aren’t into 70-minute podcasts. Now you can consume us in bite-sized (45-minute) pieces.

The other big change we made around our one-year anniversary was one of our hosts. Our founding member Brandon Tensley left us for CNN, so he’s dead to us now (just kidding, we still drink together), and we’ve replaced him with a brilliant new co-host, Rumaan Alam. Rumaan is a gem—he immediately clicked with us, and it’s been cool to have a non-millennial and gay dad perspective on the show.

Why does Outward come out only once a month? I wish it came out more, but maybe one of the reasons I treasure the episodes so much is because they don't show up frequently enough in my feed!
Please, tell our editors and advertisers! No, actually, though we’d love to make more Outward, the thing that’s holding us back is the other work my co-host Bryan Lowder and I do at Slate, which we wouldn’t want to give up. Bryan edits a lot of stuff here—including our queer vertical, which is also called Outward—and I write things for the site and host another biweekly Slate podcast. But I also think we get more joy out of it because it’s a rare-ish treat, like boardwalk fries or the women’s World Cup.

How did you end up hosting The Waves?
I was hired at Slate as a writer on the women and gender beat, so I occasionally guest-hosted The Waves when one of the three co-hosts was away. A couple of years later, Slate took the show weekly, partly because there was appetite for a weekly show and partly to get a more diverse roster of voices on board. So I helmed the new week with a rotating cast of co-hosts for a while before landing on our current lineup. Then, when two of the other week’s co-hosts left, we took June Thomas in from that week, so now we’re a cast of four and back to biweekly. We all have very different personalities and takes on issues, even when we agree, which makes every episode kind of zingy.

What has surprised you about being a podcast host?
On a chat show, for me, there is very little correlation between the amount of preparation I do and how well the show turns out. Most of the magic is in the interaction, so even if I come having read every possible article on whatever topic we’re discussing or having scripted the most perfect bit of analysis on the political dust-up of the week, it doesn’t necessarily make the show sing. The best moments are when someone says something surprising and we can dig into it on the spot. I used to over-prepare because it helped me deal with my nerves as a new host, but now I read and write just enough to have a few ideas to bring to a conversation with a group of friends.

Women get criticized for the voices all the time. What is your relationship with yours?
I’ve gotten plenty of rude emails about my voice and speech patterns. But by the time I started podcasting, many women in audio had already bravely and generously spoken out about the harassment and insults they’d received. So when the same thing happened to me, I was able to recognize it as part of a pattern that had everything to do with the way people refuse to hear women as voices of authority and nothing to do with me.

Like a lot of people, I’m my own worst critic, and it wasn’t until I heard myself on podcasts that I realized I sometimes say certain letters or words in strange ways. Over time, I’ve come to love and accept that as one of those human-diversity-patchwork-of-life things. I’m still scared to listen to recordings of myself, but every time I do, I’m like, “hey, I do not sound bad!” I owe each of our producers a vacation home for making that happen.

If you were going to start a new show and it could be about anything, you didn't have to worry about it succeeding or the logistics or any of that...what would it be?
When we were brainstorming a queer podcast for Slate, I jokingly pitched a show called “Lesbians I Love,” where I’d just interview a bunch of celesbians I love. So I’d have Ashlyn Harris, Samira Wiley, Kristen Stewart, or whoever in the studio, and just kind of drool over them on the mic and ask them about their lives. It’s a completely inappropriate and terrible idea, and I’m not actually sure all those people identify as lesbians, but if journalistic ethics and common decency were no object, I’d make the hell out of that podcast. Actually, I think Alice on The L Word: Generation Q kind of stole that idea when she had Megan Rapinoe on her talk show, so it’s old news anyway.

More seriously, I’d love to do a narrative show about people learning new skills after age 80. I used to do a series at Slate called Interview With An Old Person, where I’d… interview old people, and it turns out literally every old person is a joy to talk to. The podcast would be a mix of that type of interview and the story of the old people learning and trying and failing and succeeding at new hobbies. Ideally they’d be hobbies with good audio potential, like tap dancing or vlogging.

What's something that listeners of The Waves and Outward, the people who know you pretty well, would be surprised to know about you?
That’s an interesting question! I’m never sure how much of my personal life I want to put on the show or how accurately my personality comes across. So I guess I’d ask you, what kind of person do listeners think I am??!

I think most people who know me would be surprised to learn that I once worked on a Republican political campaign. It was the summer after my first year of college, I was back home in New Hampshire, and I took a job with a political consulting firm. They put me on the reelection campaign of the Republican mayor of Manchester. I opposed pretty much everything he stood for, but the job paid well and I didn’t have the guts to quit. Luckily, they made extremely poor use of my time: I was tasked with phone banking and door knocking during business hours, when no one was home or answering their phones. I’d also take a book to the riverside park for three-hour lunch breaks, Gchat with friends who had similarly shitty jobs, and indulge in lengthy internet rabbit holes. (I remember spending one full day educating myself about the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.) Despite my best efforts, the mayor won reelection and eventually ended up in Congress. I interned for his opponent’s campaign and considered it my penance.

What's the most challenging thing about making Outward?
Keeping the show under 45 minutes isn’t easy, because we could always chat for hours with each other and the people we invite on the show—and, often, we do. I am endlessly fascinated and energized by the topics we choose, and our recording sessions are the most fun hours of my work month. I never want our conversations to end. I always want to tack on another chat segment or interview. Our producer, Daniel Schroeder, gets the hard job of chopping each session down to the best stuff.

What is the most rewarding thing about making Outward?
I love it when friends or friends-of-friends I respect tell me they laughed out loud on a crowded train while listening to the show, or that a conversation we had gave them something new to think about. Even better is when a brand-new listener sends us an email to tell us they discovered the show and immediately went through the entire back catalog to listen to every episode. Strengthening queer pride, building queer community, and enriching the landscape of queer culture and cultural criticism is so important to me, especially as LGBTQ publications and brick-and-mortar spaces shutter. I derive so much joy from the thought that our podcast might make some people we’ve never met even more excited to be queer and seek out queer culture. 

The Waves isn't a comedy show, but you so often say things that make me lol. Do you think being funny helps you be a good podcaster? Is your humor appreciated? Are you the funniest one in your friend groups? When did you first discover that you were funny?
Omg STOP IT. (Thank you.) Sometimes, on a podcast about feminism and gender, there are a lot of sad and enraging news items to discuss! A show without fizz and fun would get despondent and flat really fast. So we work hard to keep a good balance of light and heavy on each show, both for the sake of our listeners and to satisfy our own interests. I also try to get a laugh out of my co-hosts whenever I can because it tends to relax everyone (including me) and encourage spontaneity, which always makes the show better. I want our listeners to feel like they’re part of a dinner-party conversation, not a conference panel.

What are your fans like? Are most of them are people from the LGBTQ community?
I have no idea! We have no comprehensive demographic data about our listeners, at least that I know of. The only listeners I’m aware of are the ones who tweet about the show, email us, or come to our live events, and they seem to be a pretty diverse bunch. A fair number of straight listeners have written in to Outward, as well as several people who newly identify as LGBTQ and are just starting to explore queer culture. A ton of men have sent The Waves feedback on our show. Maybe we have a lot of listeners who are men, or maybe they’re just a disproportionately vocal demographic. I have a few theories! 

When we dreamed up Outward, it was equally important to us to make a show that didn’t feel boring, predictable, or dumbed down to LGBTQ listeners (“this isn’t Queer 101,” we wrote in our plan) and that straight listeners could enjoy, too, with the feeling of eavesdropping on a really interesting conversation taking place within a community they’re not a part of. I hope we hit both marks.

Thanks, Christina!