This past weekend I drove home for the last time to pick up some rather large furniture for my new house (updates on that to
come).  I finished listening to Serial on my last trip home, so I had to find something new for this round. With the help of some quality Buzzfeed articles I found a podcast series called “Call Your Girlfriend.” In effort to not get too bored of one thing, I separated episodes of Call Your Girlfriend by listening to 3 different interviews by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on one of my
favorite new books “Americanah”, as well a inspirational Ted Talk from a principal in a tough low income school district, and lastly a NPR interview of Buzz Bissinger, the author of the original Friday Night Lights book.

I have to be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect with Call Your Girlfriend as it is dubbed the “podcast for long distance best friends.” I was pleasantly surprised with what I got though! The two host are best friends who travel a lot and live far away from each other. Ann Friedman a successful freelance journalist, and Aminatou Sow who founded a tech company called Tech LadyMafia, use some technology that I have not been able to quite understand yet, that allows them to record together even when they are on different continents. Anyways, together they discuss current events, popular articles floating around the web, their own lives, and there is usually a update about the most recent studies regarding menstruation (lols). In the past three days of ease
dropping on their conversations I have learned some new lingo, including:

         IRL:  in real life, usually referring to a friend you have met in person

         URL:  referring to a friend you have online

         Shine Theory: a phenomenal concept directed that encourages women to not look at other women as competition, but as a resource to “shine”/be great together. The quote from Ann Friedman’s  article in The Cut, explains it perfectly: “if Kelly Rowland can come around to the idea that she shines more (not less) because of her proximity to Beyonce, there’s hope for the rest of us.”

Read more of Ann’s published articles here and learn more about Aminatou and her company here!

Have you listened to any of these podcasts before? What do you think of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend?