Kelly Corrigan Wonders

Quick afternoon nap? Gummies before bed? Hitting snooze? Here’s a thorough look at how to get our sleep right with one of the world’s most informed sleep experts: Dr. Matthew Walker. Why? Sleep is our super power. Put less positively, poor sleep maps terribly closely to poor mental health. Joining me for the conversation are previous guests and friends of the show cognitive scientist and podcaster Maya Shankar, and comedian/producer W Kamau Bell. You can receive our weekly takeaways here. You can watch this conversation anytime at www.pbs.org/kelly or stream on the PBS app. Many thanks to COOP for making the best pillows and sheets to help us get a really solid night’s sleep and for sponsoring this episode. Get 20% off with the code KELLY20.

Today is the last of our special 5-part series about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Christy and I recently spent an unforgettable Saturday afternoon talking to the singular force of nature that is Spike Lee about his mother, Jackie, who died when Spike was a sophomore at Morehouse College. Spike has 134 directing credits over four+ decades, in each case imploring us to Wake Up. Here’s a chance to understand something about the development of this legendary voice. Please share. This series hopes to raise $100,000 to support safe and respectful pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 and led every day since by Christy Turlington Burns. Please join us with a donation here. Maternal health is a human right. Love it? Don’t like it? Have an idea? We love to hear from listeners. Write us anytime — hello@kellycorrigan.com - or sign up for our weekly list of takeaways here.

Today is #4 in a special 5-part series about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Today we talk to the iconic Cindy Crawford, an old friend of Christy’s (you may have seen them together in the Apple TV docu-series The Super Models). Cindy is a Midwestern girl, a high school valedictorian who started at Northwestern on an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering before her career took her around the world. She is also the daughter of Jenny, a young bride who had four children and lost one to childhood leukemia. This is a candid and loving conversation about the realities of family life. Please share. This series hopes to raise $100,000 to support safe and respectful pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 and led every day since by Christy Turlington Burns. Please join us with a donation here. We know that maternal health is a human right; let’s help make it ubiquitous. Love it? Don’t like it? Have an idea? We love to hear from listeners. Write us anytime — hello@kellycorrigan.com - or sign up for our weekly list of takeaways here.

Today is #3 in a special 5-part series about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Bono lost his mother Iris when he was 14 years old. She had an aneurysm at her father’s funeral and as he says, he’s been singing to her ever since. This is a very special conversation, possibly my favorite interview of all time, made more lovely and intimate by the friendship between Bono and Christy going back many years now. This series hopes to raise $100,000 to support safe and respectful pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 and led every day since by Christy Turlington Burns. Please join us with a donation here. Maternal health is a human right and as Bono says, raising kids takes a village and a mother is a village. Got feedback? Have an idea? We love to hear form listeners. Write us anytime — hello@kellycorrigan.com - or sign up for our weekly list of takeaways here.

Today is #2 in a special 5-part series about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Amy Schumer is as sharp a writer as she is a performer. I love her always-on-point work in Life & Beth, Trainwreck and all 44 episodes of Inside Amy Schumer. She’s honest in way I wish more people were and you’ll hear that in this candid conversation about her mother, Sandra. This series hopes to raise $100,000 to support maternal health in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 and led every day since by Christy Turlington Burns. Please join us with a donation here. Love it? Hate it? Have an idea? We love to hear form listeners. Write us anytime — hello@kellycorrigan.com - or sign up for our weekly list of takeaways here.

Today begins a 5-part series of conversations about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Jen G, as we call her in my house, is as special and wonderful as you think she is. She is such a ready learner that she carries around a pen and notebook everywhere she goes. She cares about all the right things and not one bit of the nonsense. She is still, in many essential ways, one of the “Garner girls” from West Virginia. Today’s conversation, co-hosted by Christy Turlington Burns, celebrates Jen’s mom, Pat (and a little bit, Jen’s dad, Billy Jack Garner, who died only 10 days before we recorded). I have loved knowing Jen since we met at The Nantucket Project many years ago and am grateful she could be with us for this series. This series hopes to raise $100,000 to support maternal health in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 and led every day since by Christy Turlington Burns. Please join us with a donation here. Love it? Don’t like it? Have an idea? We love to hear from listeners. Write us anytime — hello@kellycorrigan.com - or sign up for our weekly list of takeaways here.

You cannot talk about well-being without talking about our connections. As my guest, the divine Esther Perel, makes gin clear, the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. Esther, a Belgian psychotherapist and bestselling author of State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity, has spent as much time investigating and evaluating relationships as anyone on earth. Joining us for this essential discussion about how to interact better in this modern world we’ve made are two former guests and friends of the show, journalist Katie Couric and artist Timothy Goodman. You can receive our weekly takeaways here. You can watch my conversation with Esther, Katie and Tim at www.pbs.org/kelly or stream on the PBS app.

At this time of year, we are knee-deep in sports: college lacrosse, the NBA play-offs and all the golf majors. Where there are sports, there are adjectives describing the athletes and where there are sports championships, those adjectives are garish and piled-high. Kelly wonders if maybe it’s time to use those dazzling descriptors to honor not the elite athletes out there but the army of regular, everyday, hard-working moms. (Previously aired)

I am damn near hopeless with routers and a printer on the skids can take me around the bend. But, inspired by my mother and my husband and a friend, I remembered that hopeless is almost always an overstatement. (Previously aired)

Doctors Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman are probably the world’s reigning experts on relationships. They are well into their 5th decade of research that reveals why we treat each other as we do and how a few small but essential adjustments to our everyday patterns could change our relationships for the better. Everything we talked about is applicable across the board - from couples to parents and children and all the people we work with. We predict this will be our most shared episode of 2024. Enjoy. (Previously aired) Check out the Gottman's’ new book: Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection Special thanks to the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations for their generous support of this series. To receive a short set of our weekly takeaways in your email, sign up here.

Cathy Coleman wrote this eulogy for her mother Shirley. For Mother’s Day the year Cathy was 57, she made a list of 57 things about her mom that she was grateful for and references those things in this beautiful tribute.

After much back and forth with you all on Facebook, I came up with my most important go-to items — the things that get me through the day — and, more importantly, the ideas that ground me on the epic journey of motherhood. (Previously aired)

Dr. Leanne Williams is determined to spare people the suffering she’s endured. Her partner of many years died by suicide after fighting a depression that resisted all treatment. She has devoted her life as a scientist at Stanford to applying the principles and tactics of precision medicine to depression, which she has categorized into sub-types (much as was done with cancer decades ago). Joining me in this conversation are Dr BJ Miller, a friend and previous guest who works as a palliative care doc and lost his sister to suicide, as well as Emmy-winning comedian W. Kamau Bell, also a friend and previous guest, who brings his usual good will and insight to the conversation. This episode contains a detailed discussion of suicide. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please dial 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Thanks to PBS for supporting this series. You can watch any of these episodes any time at PBS.org/kelly. Feedback welcome at hello@kellycorrigan.com.

Nancy Brown, a military spouse of 19 years, wrote this loving tribute for her two best deployment buddies. It honors the way the three friends formed one great big family while living through several deployments in Eastern North Carolina. Three women, no husbands and nine children all dressed in each other's hand-me-downs. On paper, they were more different than alike but maybe that's a more accurate description of a family after all. (Previously aired)

I’ve done it again. I accidentally saw the world through my own lens and forgot all the other ways life unfolds for the people who listen to this show. Thanks to a listener named Micah Boyett who sent a lovely piece of unmistakable feedback — coated in genuine kindness — I learned the lesson again. We really respect our listeners and find your emails invaluable as we steer this ship we’ve built. Write any time. hello@kellycorrigan.com. We read every one. Micah’s book is: Blessed Are the Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole

How much can we blame DNA for our depression and anxiety? Is something about our mental health pre-written into our genetic code? How much trauma carries over from one generation to the next? How should we think about epi-genetics? These were 4 of the 20 questions I brought to Dr. Francis Collins, the guy who let the team that mapped the human genome. There’s two things I want to say about this episode: I learned so much just studying for the interview and every minute I spent with Francis Collins was a total joy. He is a very special person — direct, deeply informed (maybe moreso on this topic than anyone else on Earth) and delightful. I am so excited to put his guy in your ear — a happy, loving man filled with purpose and eager to share what he knows (and doesn’t) for the greater good. And he laughs easily and a lot. So, I was getting hits of my dad the whole time. A heavenly experience that comes through in every minute of the conversation. Enjoy. Thanks to PBS stations across the country for supporting Tell Me More. You can watch an edited video version of this conversation anytime at PBS.org/kelly.

Writer Courtney Martin wrote this loving, humorous tribute to her mother for her 75th birthday. Along with detailing some of her mom’s quirks that used to drive her crazy (but which at age 43 she now appreciates), Courtney also lovingly describes her many incredible qualities. (Previously aired)

When my girls were young, I must have told them a hundred times: you get what you give. I believe it like I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Chris Anderson, the genius do-gooder behind TED, believes it too. And with good reason. He’s seen generous giving pay off in big ways — giving his brand to TEDx conferences around the world, giving away TED speeches to anyone who wanted them online, giving attention, support and contributions to the most focused, devoted, strategic efforts on the planet. This is an episode for anyone looking for inspiration. Chris’ new book is Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading

Here’s why I had to sit with Dr. Dima Amso, who teaches and runs a lab that studies developmental cognition at Columbia: in a sea of hyperbole, she offers the voice of sanity and moderation, clarifying basic ideas like “good enough parenting.” For anyone who wonders how well-being is affected by our earliest childhood environments and relationships, this is the conversation for you. Please share widely with everyone who is feeling trapped by their personal history, as imperfect parents or as grown children of imperfect parents. Thanks to PBS stations across the country for supporting Tell Me More. You can watch an edited video version of this conversation anytime at PBS.org/kelly.

Michelle Hurst celebrates her husband and their marriage on the occasion of their 20th Anniversary. From 23 year-old newlyweds finding their way in the world to 43 year-old’s who have shared a puppy, kids, a mortgage and decades of meaningful memories - they have navigated it all together. (Previously aired)