The Soloists

Lindsey Stirling is famous for doing something no one has seen before — blending classical violin with high-octane choreography, viral-era savvy, and a fiercely original sense of style. She’s not just a performer, but a disciplined creative and strategic thinker who built a global career on her own terms.

In this episode of The Soloists, Lindsey talks candidly about painful parts of her life that her public success hasn’t managed to...

Over the next couple of months, Mallory and Diana will be hosting conversations to explore shifting norms around dating and marriage in LDS culture, and this is a first dip into the question.

This conversation is a bit bigger picture and less LDS-specific, though we start by talking about a change in the Church’s summer youth program, For the Strength of Youth (formerly called Especially For Youth) that brings it close to home: the...

No friendship is free from unfunny jokes and no romance is spared from chewing noises. Buddhist Jonathan Makransky joins Mallory and Diana to discuss why irritation arises in intimate relationships and what to do about it. We cover insights from Seinfeld, What about Bob, angsty Reddit confessions, and a book Jonathan recommended: Awakening Dignity, by Phakchok Rinpoche. You’ll also hear a theory for why the “ick” has come to rule ...

What do I really want? It’s a question that sounds simple—until you try to answer it with your whole life. Diana and Mallory spoke with writer Michaelann Gardner, author of the new book Sovereign, about the quiet, sometimes heartbreaking work of discerning our most sacred desires and being true to them. Once we can fully see what we want, it gets easier to build a life of alignment. And if life won’t allow that to happen, we are be...

What do you do when the life you imagined—the one your faith or culture led you to believe was inevitable, even promised—no longer feels possible? In this conversation, Diana and Mallory sit down with two beloved guests and friends, Stacey Harkey and Ben Schilaty, for a candid, thoughtful dialogue about faith, identity, purpose, and the courage it takes to walk a different path.

Stacey and Ben both come from Latter-day Saint backgr...

What does it mean to receive beauty for ashes? The phrase comes from Isaiah 61:3, where God promises to bring joy where there was mourning, praise where there was despair, and new life from devastation. In this conversation, we spoke with chaplain and writer Jenna Carson about her journey through two divorces and the hard-won path to healing and renewal. For Jenna, the process wasn’t just about working harder or pushing through pai...

“Why is boredom painful? Shouldn’t it just be boring?” Adam S. Miller asks in his book The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom & Addiction in an age of Distraction. In this conversation, Mallory and Diana spoke with Adam about boredom has to teach us, including in our relationships with other people. How does boredom impact the way we read and respond to others? How does our dread of being bored with someone shape our...

Like an itch that won’t be scratched, many of us walk around fearing that love is scarce in our lives, that there’s not enough of it to go around. For that itch, the Wayfare essay ”Overflowing with Family” by Dr. Amy Harris offers triumphant relief. Amy is a genealogist and professor of family history at Brigham Young University. In this conversation, we spoke with Amy about her essay and about the family relationships—living and d...

Provo, Utah is widely known for its hyper-earnest dating culture. What happens when you bring that to reality TV? We talk to a 2nd season winner of Provo's Most Eligible, Scott Anderson, about his experience on the show and the questions he’s haunted by years down the road. What motivates people to go on reality shows? What is it like trying to grow close to someone on camera? Towards the end, we discuss how men and women tend to ...

Today, we’re sharing a conversation that we recorded with Dan Wotherspoon for his podcast, Latter-day Faith. Dan is a very talented interviewer and drew out perhaps the tenderest conversation we've had yet. He asked how our faith has transformed as romantic disappointments and the slow slipping away of time have made our lives look different than what we expected. We talk about courage — facing our own lives without flinching. We t...

This isn’t just an episode on dating, though we spend substantial time there. What we’re really straining at is a glimpse of love — a word that can feel as flaccid and overused as a discarded tissue — as a particular, substantive force that we can cultivate in our relationships. Borrowing from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, our guests Venerable Tien Nguyen and Jonathan Makransky translate Bud...

We’ve been looking forward to a conversation on “chosen families” for a long time. The concept is especially meaningful to those whose relational support doesn’t take the shape of a traditional family, but who experience deep intimacy, growth, and loyalty within other “relation-shapes.” Historically, this has included LGBTQ individuals as well as the unmarried. As one listener recently said to us, “singleness allows opportunities t...

Subscribe to our new Substack!It’s just us this week—Mallory and Diana—for an introspective end-of-year conversation. We ask ourselves Where did the Soloists come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? and how we’ve changed since coming together to work on this project. We also share love from listeners: emails, DMs, and reviews that crack open what it means to live courageously with major parts of our lives unsettled.

If you’ve...

This week, we’re joined by Candice Gutierrez, Dusty Hulet, and Cheryl Johnson to talk about The Art of Gathering, and how to plan parties that can genuinely change people’s lives. Candice says parties are about interpersonal alchemy; people come in feeling one way and leave feeling another way, and the way you design the event shapes this transformation. Cheryl believes gatherings can be a lifeline for those who live alone or with...

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This week we teamed up with our beloved friend Rebbie Brassfield who runs the up-and-coming Mormons in Media Instagram (now a podcast!). As we enter another kind of "mormon moment" as the world fixates on Latter-day Saint lifestyle influencers, Rebbie leads the public in watching closely all the references to Mormonism in media, tracking where representation is going, and making a case for more diverse media...

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This week, we sat down to talk with our friend and writer Kristine Haglund about the envying lives we don't have, and particularly people whose family situations look simpler or more functional than our own.

Kristine has had a longstanding, studied fascination with Mormon mommy bloggers, the forerunners to today's Mormon lifestyle influencers--sometimes called "trad wives"--that have by n...

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"Dating is the only thing... that gets harder with practice." This is how Faith Hill, writer for The Atlantic, summarized modern romantic pursuits in the August 2024 article, "Should I Quit Dating?" This week, Mallory and Diana chat with their friend Haymitch St. Stephen about this article and another one from The Cut, entitled, "How Much Work Should Dating Be?" Listen in to hear how we a...

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We told you we wanted to talk about sex on this podcast, and this is where we wanted to start -- with a talk about not having sex. 

We had a conversation with with Fr. Patrick Briscoe, a Catholic Dominican Friar, and Sara Perla, a single Catholic woman, about the purpose of celibacy for Catholics and how they support a large group of adults committed to it. Catholics take as doctrine Jesus’ statement that “a...

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In this episode we brought on political scientist and philosopher Ryan Davis to talk about his muse and favorite teaching resource: the one and only Taylor Swift. Ryan believes that Taylor's discography, more than  a catalog account of her romantic failures, is an evolving exploration about what it means to be good. Though she may have hoped her life would follow the trajectory of the song "love story",...