Sober October is the one month the rest of the world borrows our lifestyle. Here are 21 gifts for your sober and sober-curious crew, from a Bill W. pillow to giant disco candy corn.
Author: Alysse Bryson
Alysse Bryson
Alysse Bryson is the founder and publisher of The Sober Curator, redefining modern sobriety as aspirational, entertaining, and culturally significant. Sober since 2006, she’s a former media executive turned cultural voice proving the comeback is always better than the origin story.
Golf without the 19th hole. Après-ski without the hangover. Racing at nationals nine days before turning one year sober. Meet Corey Davis of Soba Golf, Ben Coombes of Soberski and electric skateboarder Bianca Criaco, the three sober athletes joining BACKSTAGE live on Oct. 6.
🎧 NEW EPISODE: Gray Area Drinking with the Hosts of Sober & Lit with Ruby Williams and Susan Larkin on RAIN meditation, reclaiming the word sober, mommy wine culture from the inside, the 13-ounce pour, the NA wines they bring to parties, and why the medical community has no grid for the space between fine and full-blown.
ZYN went from Scandinavian import to gas-station icon, but there’s a difference between a nicotine product you keep using and one designed to get you free. We compare Jones and ZYN head to head.
The Sober Mom Collective built Grounded for exactly that mom. It’s a three-month program for women who understand both recovery and motherhood, and it’s built on the belief that nobody should have to figure out either one alone.
FLOW Gummies promise clean energy and focus from Lion’s Mane and botanicals, zero cannabinoids included. I put them through a real workweek of deadlines, podcast recordings, and 3 p.m. fog. Here’s my honest take, including the THC-Free conversation sober readers actually deserve.
Amanda Chen built TOMONOTOMO, an agave spirit made the traditional way. No shortcuts, no extracts. Fire, copper, and patience. Contributor Kim Parsley reviewed the Tobalá in Happy Every Hour back in May and it is delicious. This week, Amanda told us how she got from behind the bar to behind the still.
Laura Clery’s What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Hotter is a funny, vulnerable and occasionally uncomfortable account of divorce, single motherhood, dating and staying sober when life refuses to follow the script.
You’re finally wide awake for your own life. So what do you want to do with all these hours you used to drink through? A cheat sheet for sober nights, from the golden-hour pre-game to the midnight movie, with zero drink pressure and zero FOMO.
Rooms full of people with serious sobriety are chain-vaping in the parking lot, and nobody talks about it. Here’s how to quit nicotine using the recovery muscles you already built, one minute at a time.
We opened this one up to everybody. Members, readers, the sober curious, the person who found us through a Brad Pitt comment section. This is what a Wednesday morning BACKSTAGE looks like, and Suzanne Warye was the perfect guest to show it off. Suzanne is the author of The Sober Shift, host of The Sober Mom Life podcast, and the woman who once spent a full five minutes with me on the podcast talking about ALF. On Sept. 16 she came BACKSTAGE to talk about the paperback relaunch of her book. We got there eventually. First we had to get…
Emily and Lindsay Stetzer built Presently Bracelets so the thing your therapist told you is on your wrist when your brain goes blank. OCD, anxiety, sobriety.
Theo Von never set out to become a recovery podcaster, but some of the most honest conversations about addiction and sobriety keep happening on This Past Weekend. These standout episodes from the past two years deliver vulnerability, unexpected wisdom and plenty of gang-gang energy.
Chelsea Clinton’s health misinformation podcast takes on alcohol myths with Columbia epidemiologist Dr. Katherine Keyes. Spoiler: the red wine study does not survive, and the data on high-achieving women and drinking will stop you mid-scroll.
Camp Sober Fest took adult summer camp and made it sober: high ropes, archery, campfire meetings, and a mandatory-in-spirit talent show. After wrapping its August session at Sequoia Lake, the crew heads to Trinity, Texas for sober spring break, March 17 to 21, 2027. All-inclusive for $525.
That book in your head isn’t writing itself. Tawny Lara’s fall writing room runs Tuesdays and Thursdays, September 22 through November 19, with guided prompts, focused writing time, and a community of writers who get it.
Simon Dyson threw Ironman medals in a shoebox, drank to fix what could not be fixed, and got sober after a stranger prayed for him at Notre Dame. Then he rode 852 kilometers across the Karoo and came home with a farm to build for his son Billy.
Al Tapper never drank. His college roommate never stopped. Sixty years after Walt Disney fired that roommate from a Disneyland ice cream parlor, the story is a song in Tapper’s new Off-Broadway musical memoir, and Sober Curator readers get 20% off tickets.
Panel scores, fulls and halves only: “Running Point” S2 got a 3.5, “Your Friends & Neighbors” S2 got a 4.5, “Imperfect Women” got a 3.5. Senior Contributor Lane Kennedy tried to file a 4.75 and is now on strike. Which one did we get wrong? Give us your Sobees score and one sentence of evidence.
D’Aydrian Harding is bringing his Stay Sober apparel to Spencer’s, giving sober streetwear a highly visible home in mainstream retail. Shop the colorful hoodie, T-shirt and lounge pants designed to make sobriety look bold, confident and anything but boring.
Aerosmith accidentally invented recovery coaching in the 1980s. Forty years later, coach Stephanie Hazard wrote the first mainstream book about it. Our #QUITLIT review of Making Sobriety Stick, including the Sobees score and the one chapter written for readers with decades of sobriety.
Dopey Nation is turning recovery into a game show. On October 3, DopeyCon takes over NYC’s SVA Theatre with Katz’s pastrami, a stacked sober celebrity lineup including Hank Azaria and Carl Radke, and a shot at being pulled into the show yourself. Costumes strongly encouraged.
Alysse Bryson and Tamar Routly take on the hazards of podcasting sober. No blackout excuse. “Radical honesty” was never supposed to mean unfiltered.
Bianca signed up for Australia’s national electric skateboard championship without knowing what it was, trained for two months on a board limited to 42 km/h, and came last. Nine days later she hit one year sober. She is calling it a comeback story. She is right.
Ronnie Marmo has never had a legal drink. On September 3 he turns 36 years sober, and that same night Bill W. and Dr. Bob opens in Skokie with Ronnie playing Bill. He carried the script around for a decade before he dared to stage it. We talked treasurer resentments, sitting at Bill Wilson’s desk, and why I was wrong about Jamie Lee Curtis.
Rich Roll has spent 1,000+ episodes proving recovery conversations don’t have to be preachy. We pulled the 18 best addiction and recovery episodes from the last two years, from Spider-Man’s sobriety to Episode 1,000. Bookmark accordingly.
Eliza runs the National Recovery Friendly Workplace Institute, which certifies employers as recovery friendly. If you have heard the federal term “recovery-ready workplace,” that’s the same idea with government wording on it. The two are used interchangeably. Here’s how it got here, and I love this origin story. New Hampshire has been one of the hardest-hit states in the country for fatal overdoses. Governor Chris Sununu had run a ski resort before he ran the state, and he’d seen firsthand what the gap looked like from an employer’s side. Resources cluster in cities. Workplaces don’t. There’s a workplace in every…
Sober travel has always had a discovery problem: the trips exist, but finding them means group chats and lucky screenshots. Backstage member Isabel van Zuilen just launched Dry Tripping Travel, a marketplace that puts alcohol-free retreats and group trips in one searchable place.
We put the Davincified Seattle Mini Paint by Numbers Set to the test at a sober paint and sip night on a backyard patio in the PNW. Six mini canvases, 24 paints, brushes, zero hangovers. Here’s what we loved, what it costs, and the one sticker snafu you’ll want to avoid.
Three memoirs came out this year from three people who could not be more different, and every one of them was writing about the same thing. We pulled the Sober Curator readers into a room and made them score it.