tautological relations are certain equations in the chow ring of the moduli space of curves. i will discuss a family of such relations, first conjectured by a. pixton, that arises by studying moduli spaces of ramified covers of the projective line. these relations can be used to recover a number of well-known facts about the moduli space of curves, as well as to generate very special equations known as topological recursion relations. this is joint work with various subsets of s. grushevsky, f. janda, x. wang, and d. zakharov.