The Unspeakable Podcast: Recent Episodes
Meghan Daum
Remember “good conversation?” Remember what it was like to speak freely, to talk about complicated and sometimes controversial subjects with people who wouldn’t twist your words or insist that certain topics are off-limits? Remember when healthy disagreement was considered not threatening or unsafe but actually healthy?
Author, essayist and journalist Meghan Daum has spent decades giving voice—and bringing nuance, humor and surprising perspectives—to things that lots of people are thinking but are afraid to say out loud. Now, she brings her observations to the realm of conversation. In candid, free-ranging interviews, Meghan talks with artists, entertainers, journalists, scientists, scholars, and anyone else who’s willing to do the “unspeakable” and question prevailing cultural and moral assumptions.
Meghan's guest this week is Evan Barker, a former progressive operative, fundraising strategist, and author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Meghan was eager to sit down with Evan after following her journey from a working-class Midwestern Obama campaign volunteer to a high-powered consultant who ultimately grew disillusioned with the modern Democratic machine. Together, they pull back the curtain on what actually goes on inside campaign "call time," how wealthy donor advisors hijacked progressive priorities, and why the party's relentless focus on identity politics alienated the very working-class voters it claims to represent.
In this conversation, they dive into:
- The Brutal Reality of Political "Call Time": What it's like to sit beside candidates for eight hours a day begging billionaires for cash, using psychological tricks, and maneuvering past corporate gatekeepers.
- How Identity Politics Captured the Donor Base: How wealthy donors, young staffers, and ideological consultants created race-based funding mandates and cultural litmus tests that backfired across the country.
- Behind the Scenes at the DNC Spectacle: Evan's bizarre encounters chaperoning TikTok influencers, dodging Chicago vasectomy vans, and realizing the party's messaging was completely detached from everyday economic strain.
- Marrying MAGA Populism with Bernie Sanders Economics: Why a working-class party offering real health reform alongside common-sense border control could dominate American politics—if the two-party monopoly ever allows it.
Grab Evan's book Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative and check out her work: 👉 https://www.evanbarker.net
🎙️ About Our Guest Evan Barker is an author, political strategist, and former Democratic campaign operative. Raised in a union family in the Midwest with a rare genetic lung condition, she got her start in politics volunteering for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign before rising through the ranks to direct high-dollar fundraising for progressive candidates across the country. A first-generation college graduate, she served as a director at the campaign consulting firm Left Rising, raising millions of dollars before publicly breaking with the progressive movement. She is the author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.
🏡 Housekeeping & Links * Connect with Evan Barker: Grab a copy of her book Nothing Left and check out her latest writing. 👉 https://www.evanbarker.net * Join The Club: Become a paid subscriber to The Unspeakeasy on Substack to unlock monthly hangouts for Founding Members. * 👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com * Unspeakeasy Retreats: Off-the-record, curated conversations in beautiful settings. Registration for this fall's Small Gathering for Big Ideas in New York's Hudson Valley is now open. * 👉 https://tinyurl.com/573a9vnu * Meghan's Writing Workshops: Featuring a coed summer Zoom course and a 3-night women's writing retreat in upstate NY this fall. Is one right for you? * 👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com * The Audiobook: Meghan's most recent book, The Catastrophe Hour, is out now. It's narrated by Meghan herself, in case you still haven't heard enough of her voice. * 👉 https://tinyurl.com/ystzc5yz
After a decade of ideological conformity, is American theater ready to laugh at itself again?
This week Meghan is joined by Broadway star, comedian, and producer PJ Adzima, founder of Stage Time NYC and producer of Slam Frank—a mind-melting new musical that reimagines The Diary of Anne Frank through "an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, Afro-Latin hip-hop lens." (You read that right.)
Slam Frank was conceived by composer and lyricist Andrew Fox, who was stunned and inspired by a Twitter thread in which someone asked, "Did Anne Frank ever examine her white privilege?" (You also read that right.) A play within a play about a progressive theater company twisting itself into knots trying to stay on the right side of history, the show has provoked both walkouts and rave reviews—including in The New York Times. (Again, you read that right.)
PJ and Meghan discuss the transformation of the theater world over the past decade, the legacy of The Book of Mormon (in which he starred for many years), the "Dear White American Theater" manifesto, and why he believes great art cannot be created by checking ideological boxes. They also talk about what happens when artists prioritize pleasing everyone over having a point of view—and why live performance still matters in an era dominated by algorithms and social media.
PJ was recently added as a guest at The Unspeakeasy's Small Gathering for Big Ideas retreat, Oct 19-21 in Kingston, NY. He joins fellow speakers John McWhorter and Lisa Marchiano. Spaces are filling fast. Info here.
Slam Frank opens off-Broadway at New York's Orpheum Theater in September.
Guest Bio:
PJ Adzima starred on Broadway in The Book of Mormon and is the founder of Stage Time, an underground-style variety theater company and artist collective in New York City. He is also producer of Slam Frank. 🏡 Housekeeping & Links * Join The Club: Become a paid subscriber to The Unspeakeasy on Substack to unlock monthly hangouts for Founding Members. * 👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ * Unspeakeasy Retreats: Off-the-record, curated conversations in beautiful settings. Registration for this fall's Small Gathering for Big Ideas in New York's Hudson Valley is now open. * 👉 https://tinyurl.com/573a9vnu * Meghan's Writing Workshops: Featuring a coed summer Zoom course and a 3-night women's writing retreat in upstate NY this fall. Is one right for you? * 👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com * The Audiobook: Meghan's most recent book, The Catastrophe Hour, is out now. It's narrated by Meghan herself, in case you still haven't heard enough of her voice. * 👉 https://tinyurl.com/ystzc5yz
This (almost) Fourth of July conversation originally appeared on Jenny Holland's channel, Saving Culture From Itself, but it's really a "collab," as they say in the pod-biz. Meghan has talked with Jenny before on YouTube livestreams, but this is the first time they've done an official podcast together.
This conversation kept circling back to the kinds of tripwires and trigger points that cause people to tune out ideas before they even hear them—for instance my advocacy for Spencer Pratt in the L.A. mayoral race a few months ago and Jenny's support of . . . Brexit. (She lives in Belfast in Northern Ireland.) We also talked about how Meghan began her career at the tail end of the golden age of magazine journalism, and what it was like watching that world start to shift around 2012-13.
Finally, in the spirit of the season, they talked about American exceptionalism, generosity of spirit, and Jenny's husband's 1987 trip to the US as part of the "Children of the Troubles" program — the trip that made him fall in love with this country.
Catch more of Jenny's cultural critiques directly on her YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@SavingCultureFromItself
🎙️ About Our Guest Jenny Holland is an Irish-American, Gen X writer, critic, and former speechwriter who currently writes and hosts Saving Culture (from itself) on Substack and YouTube. A true media journeyman, her first gig in the news business was working as an assistant at The New York Times in the final years before the digital revolution—an experience she likens to being among the last people to board the lifeboats on the Titanic. Now living in Northern Ireland, she is a frequent contributor to Spiked and writes widely about culture, journalism, and the strange ideological shifts of the modern Western world.
🏡 Housekeeping & Links * Join The Club: Become a paid subscriber to The Unspeakeasy on Substack to unlock monthly hangouts for Founding Members and gain access to exclusive live stream recordings.
👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ * Unspeakeasy Retreats: Off-the-record, curated conversations in beautiful settings. Registration for this fall's Small Gathering for Big Ideas in New York's Hudson Valley is now open.
👉 https://tinyurl.com/573a9vnu * Meghan's Writing Workshops: Featuring a coed summer Zoom course and a 3-night women's writing retreat in upstate NY this fall. Is one right for you?
👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com * The Audiobook: Meghan's most recent book, The Catastrophe Hour, is out now. It's narrated by Meghan herself, in case you still haven't heard enough of her voice.
👉 https://tinyurl.com/ystzc5yz
Meghan's guest this week is Lisa Marchiano—Jungian analyst, author, and co-host of the popular podcast This Jungian Life.
She's long been intrigued by Carl Jung's ideas but also found them somewhat elusive. So she asked Lisa to help me understand why Jung resonates so deeply with so many people and why his work feels especially relevant today.
They discuss archetypes, the shadow, synchronicity, Jung's break with Freud, and how Jungian psychology can help us make sense of political polarization, ideology, loneliness, and our search for meaning in an increasingly fractured culture.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you can continue it in person! Lisa will join us this October at The Unspeakeasy's second annual Small Gathering for Big Ideas in Kingston, New York (October 19–21), alongside John McWhorter. Learn more at theunspeakeasy.com/retreats.
Guest Bio:
Lisa Marchiano is an award-winning author, certified Jungian analyst, and co-host of the popular depth psychology podcast This Jungian Life, which has garnered more than 10 million downloads. The author of several acclaimed books that draw on the healing wisdom of fairy tales, Lisa holds degrees from Brown University, Columbia University, and New York University, trained at the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and lectures and leads workshops internationally on Jungian psychology and personal growth.
Mark Oppenheimer spent decades thinking about Judy Blume before finally writing her biography — and the result is a book that is a serious inquiry into Blume's books, her personal story, and social and cultural dynamics of the 80-plus years in which she has lived. In this conversation, we talk about what it meant to be a boy who loved Judy Blume, why realist fiction for young people has largely given way to fantasy, and how Blume's work stirred up controversy even though she never courted it herself.
Paying subscribers to The Unspeakeasy on Subtack can hear an extra long version of this conversation. Go to https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/subscribe to join or upgrade your subscription.
Guest bio:
Mark Oppenheimer is a journalist, academic, and the author of several books including Squirrel Hill, about the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. His new biography, Judy Blume: A Life, is out now.
Adam Miller is one of more than a dozen candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles, but unlike some of his rivals, he comes from the worlds of tech and nonprofit management rather than politics. Miller founded the e-learning company Cornerstone and the homelessness prevention nonprofit Better Angels, and says he entered the race because he believes the city's failures — especially around homelessness — are fundamentally operational.
In this conversation, Miller explains why encampments persist outside housing facilities, why affordable housing costs have spiraled, why shelters can sit half-empty, and why the city still lacks basic real-time data on homelessness. He also addresses the strange dynamics of a campaign unfolding in an attention economy where reality star Spencer Pratt has emerged as a serious contender. Miller argues that while he and Pratt often identify the same problems, he has the management experience to actually implement solutions.
Guest Bio:
Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and chief executive of the nonprofit Better Angels, is running for mayor of Los Angeles.
Writer and cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy joins Meghan to discuss her new book, The Last Straight Woman, an exploration of how heterosexual women became suspect — if not pitifully uncool — in progressive culture. They talk about everything from Tumblr-era feminism and the post-#MeToo recalibration of gender politics to the television series Sex and the City and Girls, "photogenic feminism," bachelorette parties at gay bars, late-in-life lesbians, hookup culture, and why admitting you're a "boring straight woman" may now qualify as a radical act. We also revisit the "lesbian chic" era of the 1990s (my personal heyday), the discourse around the viral New Yorker short story Cat Person, the appeal (and limits) of sexual fluidity narratives, and the cultural overlap between straight female culture and gay male sensibilities. Bonus: They switched gears in the last 15 minutes and did a Deep Dive™ into the subject of buying secondhand clothing from online marketplaces such as Poshmark. This portion is available to paying subscribers. To upgrade your subscription, go to https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/subscribe. Guest Bio: Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto-based cultural critic and the author. She is co-host, with Kat Rosenfield, of the Feminine Chaos podcast, Opinion Editor at The Canadian Jewish News, and host of the Canadian Jewish News podcast, The Jewish Angle. She contributes regularly to The Globe and Mail and is the author of The Perils of "Privilege" (St. Martins, 2017). She also runs a Substack called Close-Reading the Reruns with Phoebe Maltz Bovy.
Meghan's guest is Spencer Pratt, candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Yes, that Spencer Pratt — the producer-crafted villain from The Hills who later blew a fortune on moldavite crystals and Birkin bags before settling into a quieter life raising a family in Pacific Palisades. That house burned down in the Palisades Fire in January 2025, and what followed was a political awakening that has put him in second place in the June 2 primary.
Meghan sat down with him at his burned lot to talk about the fires, the homelessness crisis, the billions in homeless services funding that a federal audit couldn't account for, animal abuse on Skid Row, and why he thinks an outsider with no political debts is the only person who can fix a city that's been broken for decades.
This version includes a short introduction. For the full ten-minute introduction with additional context, find the Substack version at theunspeakablepodcast.com.
Meghan's guest this week is British journalist and author Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy. Brendan talks about what he sees as a growing "vibe shift" away from elite consensus and toward something like common sense—though not without its own distortions. He and Meghan discuss the UK's role in pushing back on gender ideology (aka "TERF Island"), the uneasy state of free speech on both sides of the Atlantic, and why ordinary people seemed to tolerate cultural excesses until they suddenly didn't. They also touch on the rise of unserious, meme-driven politics, the infantilization of public discourse (with Greta Thunberg as an emblematic if also profoundly dysfunctional figure), and the strange convergence of hectoring moralism on one side and gleeful nihilism on the other. Finally, Brendan reflects on his own journey from revolutionary communist to free speech absolutist, and why he thinks we may be inching slowly back toward a politics grounded less in identity and more in reality. Guest Bio; Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer at Spiked and host of The Brendan O'Neill Show. He's also the author of several books, including Anti-Woke, A Duty to Offend, A Heretic's Manifesto, and most recently, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy.
Hadley Freeman is a U.K.-based journalist, Sunday Times columnist, and the author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia. She joins the podcast this week to discuss what she calls the "thinness arms race" in the era of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. She and Meghan talk about why extreme thinness is once again being rewarded—if not demanded—of female celebrities, how the current aesthetic differs from 90s heroin chic, and why the language of body positivity is often used to shut down obvious observations. They also talk about the physical and psychological realities of severe undernourishment, the role of status and self-denial in shaping beauty standards, and the broader "cartoonification" of the human body in a culture increasingly mediated by filters, pornography, and screens.
Before the episode begins, Meghan has a quick but important message about her April Fool's Day episode with "guest" Amanda Gertz-Hurdy.
Guest Bio:
Hadley Freeman is a staff writer at The Sunday Times. Her latest book, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, was published in 2023.
This week's guest is Estela Lopez, Executive Director of the LA Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which encompasses Los Angeles's Skid Row. With 25 years on the job and a lifetime in the neighborhood, Estela is one of the most clear-eyed, unsparing voices when it comes to what homelessness actually looks like at the ground level. In this conversation, she and Meghan talk about how a thriving industrial district became the nation's most concentrated homeless encampment, why Estela sees this less as a homelessness crisis than a lawlessness crisis, and how the open-air drug economy makes every other intervention nearly impossible. They also talk about the limits—and often the folly—of harm reduction policy, how COVID chaos led to the collapse of enforcement, and what the "housing first" approach gets wrong.
This week, Meghan sits down for an efficient but information-packed conversation with mindset coach Amanda Gertz-Hurdy, author of The Curiosity Workbook. They discuss how Amanda pivoted from a corporate career to a more creative path before building a thriving practice in the mindfulness and curiosity space—and why she believes radical self-acceptance can only come when you're ready to ask the radical questions. This episode is sponsored by Fecalicity. Visit myfecalmatters.biz to start your new gut health journey today. Guest bio: Amanda Gertz-Hurdy is a certified journaling coach, a top-rated curiosity practitioner, a mom to twins, and the author of The Curiosity Workbook: How to Stand in Your Truth, Sit in Your Intention, and Kick Ass by Cultivating Curiosity.
Bestselling novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to dicuss what might be her most controversial book yet. A Better Life takes on immigration through the story of a progressive Brooklyn woman who opens her home to a migrant. In this interview, she and Meghan discuss the book's themes and central characters, including the deliciously complicated Nico, a basement-dwelling fan of manospheric podcasts, and the role of the family's sprawling, Queen Anne-style house, which is almost a character in itself. They also talk about demography, population decline, and the cultural shift from seeing children as the default to seeing them as an elective. Lionel was a contributor to Meghan's 2015 book Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On the Decision Not To Have Kids, and they revisit their respective choices in that regard, what people really mean when they talk about happiness and fulfillment, and why sacrifice may be more central to a meaningful life than our culture likes to admit. Guest Bio: A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in Britain's The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications. She has written 16 novels, including Mania, Should We Stay or Should We Go, The Mandibles, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, and her work has been translated into 35 languages. Her latest novel is A Better Life.
This week Meghan is joined by actor, humorist, and six-time author Annabelle Gurwitch, who returns to the podcast to discuss her new memoir, The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker.
Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer during COVID, entirely out of the blue, after what she assumed was a meaningless cough. Five years later, she remains an outlier on a targeted therapy that has kept her stable. In this conversation, Annabelle talks about how she has resisted the sentimental clichés surrounding illness, why she rejects the idea that cancer is a "battle," and how humor, contrarianism, and facing "the shipwreck of the soul" have shaped the way she lives now.
Guest Bio:
Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and New York Times bestselling author of six books and two-time finalist for the Thurber Prize.
Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Hadassah Magazine, among other publications. Her six books include the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort.
Annabelle co-hosted the fan favorite Dinner & a Movie on TBS, was a regular commentator for NPR. She is serving in leadership as a patient advocate with the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).
Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we're often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life. Sam explains how today's meth is fundamentally different from the "tweaker" era of the 1990s and early 2000s: cheaper, purer, more abundant, and more destabilizing. Known as P2P meth, this new form was perfectly suited to mass industrial production and reshaped street homelessness across the country, including places that historically had little visible homelessness at all. They also talk about the limitations of a single-cause narrative ("it's all housing costs"), the realities of Housing First, and why many recovery stories begin not with compassion-as-policy, but with the unpopular intervention that removes access to drugs: arrest and incarceration. And then for something completely different . . . Sam talks about his delightfully unexpected new book, The Perfect Tuba, and why band, discipline, and collective effort may offer a strange but persuasive antidote to a culture increasingly engineered for addiction. Guest Bio: Sam Quinones is an investigative journalist and bestselling author whose work focuses on addiction, drug trafficking, and social breakdown in the United States. He is the author of Dreamland, which examined the origins of the opioid epidemic, and The Least of Us, about fentanyl, methamphetamine, and the transformation of American street life. His latest book, The Perfect Tuba, explores community, discipline, and fulfillment through the unlikely world of band and brass instruments. He writes the Dreamland newsletter on Substack and hosts a podcast on addiction, recovery, and public policy.
Time for another reunion! Sarah Haider, Meghan's co-host on the late, great A Special Place In Hell, has a lot to say about the Epstein files, so she visited the podcast to unload. After opening the episode with an homage to the classic intro from our former podcast, the ladies talk about how everyone's a pedophile now, why Ghislaine Maxwell was drawn to such bad boyfriends, and why Epstein's favorite muffins (yes, literal muffins) were so delicious they inspired poetry. Because it's Sarah, they also discuss the latest in Fertility Crisis Discourse, including new nostalgia about teenage motherhood and Sarah's idea of a GI Bill for mothers. Finally, they reveal the only conditions under which we would revive A Special Place In Hell. The answer may (not) surprise you.
A special solo episode! Now out from behind the paywall. As a recent bonus episode for subscribers, Meghan recorded some thoughts about a media dustup that was making her head explode. In the wake of the latest Epstein document dump, a smaller, unrelated story emerged a few weeks ago that carried some of the same themes. It involved New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's decision not to air an interview he recorded with journalist Seth Harp for his podcast Interesting Times. After Harp accused Douthat of spiking the episode out of cowardice, a chorus of online commenters demanded the tape be released anyway—raw, unedited, or handed over to the guest—so "the people" could decide. What interested Meghan wasn't who won a debate no one heard, but the apparently widespread belief that audiences are entitled to everything that gets recorded, regardless of editorial judgment. To her, this seems bonkers, but a surprising number of people seem not to realize that interviews get scrapped all the time. She's done it herself, and she explains some of the circumstances that led to it. This episode also contains a painful personal story about Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Get out your hankies.
Is it really true that no one—or at least no one under 30—is having sex anymore? In this episode, Meghan talks with neuroscientist, author, and former sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh about her new book Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, a data-packed look at why millennials and Gen Z are having less sex than any cohort on record despite living in the most sexually permissive culture in history. From declining testosterone and endocrine disruptors to porn, dating apps, kink culture, sex dolls, and the rise of AI boyfriends and girlfriends (she tried a few), Debra argues that technology has become the new contraception—reshaping not just sexual behavior but intimacy itself. They also discuss hypergamy, hookup culture backlash, "sex positivity" overreach, and whether the future holds a rebellion back toward real-life connection and analog pastimes. Guest Bio Dr. Debra Soh is a neuroscientist who specializes in human sexuality and biological explanations for behavior. Her previous book, The End of Gender, was published in 2020.
In this episode, Meghan talks with science writer and professional skeptic Michael Shermer about his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, and about why agreeing on basic facts has become so difficult, even when everyone is looking at the same video. They discuss Minneapolis, ICE raids, viral "exposé" culture, the transgender movement, the lab leak theory, the Jeffrey Epstein case, the way activism distorts institutions that are supposed to care about evidence, and why humans are much better at defending beliefs than revising them. Note that this episode was recorded on January 20, four days before the killing of Alex Pretti during ICE protests in Minneapolis. We discuss the killing of Renee Good. Guest Bio Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. For 30 years he taught college and university courses in critical thinking, and for 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, Giving the Devil His Due, and Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters. Follow him on X @michaelshermer.
Jacob Savage, author of the ultra-viral Compact essay "The Lost Generation," was digital media's man of the month in December. Meghan interviewed him on December 26 for a special episode for paying subscribers, and here it is now from behind the paywall. Jacob's argument in a nutshell, is this: Starting around 2014, the push to diversify hiring in elite institutions, particularly academia, journalism/book publishing and entertainment, hit millennial white men hardest. Despite talent, hardwork, and even privileged connections, many were denied professional opportunities solely because of identity. Many were left stuck, sidelined, or quietly drifting. Jacob describes his path after graduating from Princeton in 2006 and sampling a few different fields before trying to become a television writer in Hollywood. Spoiler: it didn't work out well. Was his mistake his insistence that, as he writes, "the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so"? Or were the systemic forces that conspired against him part of a larger movement that will have negative downstream consequences for generations to come? Guest Bio: Jacob Savage writes from Los Angeles.
We're back from the holiday break! (Sort of.) This interview with the inimitable Mike Pesca was recorded on Boxing Day and released right away to paying subscribers. Now it's available to everyone. Host of The Gist and author of the newsletters Pesca Profundities and The Gist List, Mike has turned the humble "bonus segment" into a multi-level rmarketing scheme multi-tiered pricing philosophy. How does he do it? We'll find out! We also talk about the hardest part of the creator economy (discovery), the incentives that reward martyrdom and outrage, and, most of all, Mike's December 26 Substack post No One's Nice To Bari Weiss. The CBS News editor-in-chief has been all over the headlines this past week after spiking delaying a 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, the notorious El Salvador terrorist prison, that was on the cusp of airing. Is it because the segment needed to "move beyond the forty-yard lines?" Or is something else going on? Also: a discussion on a mega-viral Compact article about systemic discrimination against white millennial men, a cry against Hamilton erasure, and why my lack of grip strength is more than made up for by my alarmingly hyperextensive fingers.
This week, I talk with author Lili Anolik about her book on two writers whose lives overlapped in ways that were both unlikely and (in retrospect) inevitable. One is Eve Babitz, the exuberant chronicler of 1970s Hollywood. The other is Joan Didion, whose notoriously "cool," exacting style defined a particular vision of Los Angeles and helped make her one of the most influential writers of the last century.
The two writers are often framed as opposites, but in Didion & Babitz, Lili explores how they shared similar burdens of the times–burdens around creativity, ambition, and modern womanhood. If you enjoy literary gossip, this interview is for you. Our conversation includes some surprising and, at times, uncomfortable details about Didion's marriage, her relationship with her daughter, and her lingering feelings from an early romance with Noel Parmentel, a roguish figure who helped her start her career and introduced her to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. If you're among the devoted Didion faithful, you may hear things you didn't expect. If you're new to Eve Babitz, consider this your introduction to one of the great hidden figures of American literary life.
Guest Bio:
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her work has also appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and The Paris Review, among other publications. She is the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College. Her latest book is Didion & Babitz, published by Scribner.
Writer and editor Thomas Beller joins me to discuss his new essay collection Degas at the Gas Station. The essays trace his experience of fatherhood through the landscapes of his own childhood, including the early death of his psychoanalyst father and Tom's later return—wife and children in tow—to the very Manhattan apartment where he was raised.
We talk about some of the fundamental conflicts of personal writing, including the ethics of writing about your children and even your ambivalence about parenthood. We also discuss why some writers feel trapped inside the genres that come most naturally to them, how the literary sensibility of The New Yorker shaped the styles of generations of writers, and how Tom is feeling about New York City these days. The episode was recorded on the morning of November 4, Election Day, and Tom talks about why he's voting for Zohran Mamdani—and why he thinks some of my early writing relates directly to Mamdani's platform.
Guest Bio:
Thomas Beller is a long time contributor to the New Yorker and the author of several books including Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball, also published by Duke University Press; J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist; and The Sleep-Over Artist. A 2024-25 Guggenheim fellow, he is a founding editor of Open City Magazine and Books and Mrbellersneighborhood.com, and Professor and Director of creative writing at Tulane University.
Thanksgiving has come early! A year after bidding farewell to our much-loved/occasionally-despised podcast A Special Place In Hell, Sarah Haider joins me for a catch-up. A lot has happened in the last few weeks, not to mention the last year. We discuss the killing of Charlie Kirk, the wave of anti-Indian hate on X, the phenomenon of South Asian troll farming, the uses and abuses of AI, and, of course, the discourse around "the great feminization," which was the entire premise of A Special Place In Hell. (Did someone steal our idea?) We also discuss Sarah's new baby and whether her pregnancy was worse than my house burning down.
This version of our conversation is free to all. To hear a longer version, become a paying subscriber at Substack at https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ or join The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnspeakeasyPodcast
Why is it so difficult to find meaningful help for the severely mentally ill, including those exhibiting patterns of violence? And why has this question become politicized?
Policy expert and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel is not typically a fan of Donald Trump, but she agrees with the president's recent executive order on mental health policy. That order called for "shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment to restore public order." This issue, she says, should not be about politics but about getting both parties to grapple with the full dimensions of serious mental illness as it relates to public health. In this episode, we talk about what drew Sally to this field, why "harm reduction" can be a flimsy approach, and why we so desperately need more beds in psychiatric units. We also discuss last summer's horrific case in Charlotte, N.C., where a young woman was stabbed to death by a man whose mother had tried to have him committed for psychosis. Guest Bio: Sally Satel, M.D., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, examines mental health policy as well as political trends in medicine. Become a paying subscriber to The Unspeakeasy and get lots of perks, including access to monthly hangouts for Founding Members. https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ I'm teaching a Zoom writing workshop in Memoir and Personal Essay, Jan 6 through Feb 24, 2026. Apply by Dec 5. https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/next-writing-course-starts-jan-6 The Unspeakeasy 2026 retreat schedule has been announced! https://theunspeakeasy.com/retreats Order my book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-catastrophe-hour.
This week, Ben Appel joins me to talk about his new book, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, a memoir about leaving one kind of cult only to stumble into another. Raised in a rigid Christian community, Ben found refuge in the gay rights movement and, later, the Ivy League—until "allyship" started to look less like solidarity and more like a loyalty oath.
We discuss • Why he chose the deliberately provocative title Cis, White, Gay — and what reactions revealed about current identity politics. • How queer "community" has become increasingly moralized, hierarchical, and policed — and what gets lost when dissent is framed as betrayal. • The difference between taste and taboo — and how aesthetic preferences are now treated as political statements. • Why "representation" has replaced excellence as the highest cultural virtue. • How literary gatekeeping operates today — from publishers and prize committees to informal online watchdogs. • The loneliness of ideological nonconformity in queer and creative circles. • The professional and social costs of questioning orthodoxy — including lost friendships, lost opportunities, and subtle blacklisting. Guest Bio: Ben Appel is a writer and commentator whose memoir, Cis White Gay, traces his path from a strict Christian sect to progressive activism—and his break with movement orthodoxy; he's written for outlets like Newsweek, UnHerd, and more, and publishes on Substack. Become a paying subscriber to The Unspeakeasy and get lots of perks, including access to monthly hangouts for Founding Members. https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/ I'm teaching a Zoom writing workshop in Memoir and Personal Essay, Jan 6 through Feb 24, 2026. Apply by Dec 5. https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/next-writing-course-starts-jan-6 The Unspeakeasy 2026 retreat schedule has been announced! https://theunspeakeasy.com/retreats Order my book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-catastrophe-hour.
My guest is Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. We talk about what it really means to care for patients when cure is no longer the goal, why our medical system resists honest conversations about death, and how clarity and compassion can coexist at the end of life. Topics we cover: • What palliative care really provides (beyond hospice) • Why "more treatment" ≠ "more life" • Prognosis, probabilities, and telling the truth kindly • How families can ask the right questions • Documentation that matters (and what to avoid) • The moral distress of clinicians • Cultural/faith factors that shape decisions • Dignity, autonomy, and realistic hope Guest Bio: Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where she is the Director of the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other publications. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness.
Less than 24 hours after her Compact essay, "The Great Feminization," set off a thousand group texts, writer Helen Andrews joined to talk about what she means by "feminization," why the 2020 moral fervor looked the way it did, and how workplace culture shifts when women become the numerical majority. We also compare "agreeableness" with the kind of conflict that actually moves ideas forward (and where each belongs). In this episode we discuss:
- How Helen defines "the great feminization" and why she thinks it explains contemporary "wokeness"
- What changes when institutions tip female—journalism, academia, law, nonprofits
- HR-ification, hostile-environment law, and why managers vs. judges should handle culture
- Agreeableness as a social virtue—and a professional liability in truth-seeking fields
- Innovation, risk tolerance, and the gendered vibes around tech, nuclear power, and exploration
- Whether "women in STEM" initiatives help, hurt, or just rebrand office politics
About the guest: Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her new Compact essay is "The Great Feminization."
This week I interview journalist and author Olga Khazan about her new book on personality change, Me, But Better. We talk about the Big Five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and how they play out in ordinary life rather than in personality quizzes. Olga explains what research actually shows about how much you can change, how anxiety and depression tie into neuroticism, and why introversion can quietly turn into isolation. We also discuss everyone's favorite personality expert, Carl Jung, the politics of "openness," what's happened to our social lives since the pandemic, and how the culture of "self-care" has blurred into hiding from the world. Other threads include: • The science behind gradual, behavioral change instead of "life hacks" • How "fake it till you make it" can work without faking yourself entirely • Gender differences in agreeableness and the social cost of being direct • Why liberals often score higher on neuroticism—and what that might really mean • The relationship between personality, motherhood, and the urge to optimize everything Guest Bio: Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird. She is a two-time recipient of journalism fellowships from the International Reporting Project and the winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing.
Novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner returns to discuss his exceptionally timely new novel Amputation—a strange, exuberant, and ultra meta work set against a topic I've talked about a lot this year, the January LA wildfires. Bruce, an L.A. native and prominent literary figure in the city, explains how the book came together in less than two months, why he resists "political novels" even when writing inside a political moment, and how language (not legacy) keeps him making art. We also talk about real-life figures who appear as characters (Stephen Colbert, Mayor Karen Bass, Debra Winger, and a Timothée Chalamet student double, among others), the surrealism of driving through miles of leveled neighborhoods, and the deranged comic-tragic chorus of the Nextdoor app. Bruce also reflects on being an L.A. "outsider who outsided his way inside," why the book is opera, not noir, and what it means to keep walking the "narrow, burning road to the palace." Guest Bio: Bruce Wagner is the author of fifteen novels, including the "cell phone" trilogy, The Marvel Universe, The Met Gala and Tales of Saints and Seekers, Roar: American Master, and now Amputation. A longtime Hollywood insider/outsider, he has written for film and television and is currently published by Arcade.
Katie Herzog, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast (BarPod), is best known as an anthropologist of, as she puts it, “internet bullshit.” But she’s swerved far out of her lane for her latest project. In her brand new book, Drink Your Way Sober, Katie combines personal history with deep reporting to chronicle a lifetime of drinking and explain how a little-known drug called naltrexone, combined with an approach called The Sinclair Method, finally allowed her to quit for good.
They also get into why young people are drinking less, what the “California sober” trend actually means, and how Katie’s own story fits into the larger debate about moderation versus abstinence. Plus: real estate, dogs, and how we’re feeling about the state of independent journalism and their own longterm survival. Guest Bio: Katie Herzog is a journalist living in the Pacific Northwest. She is the host of the podcast Blocked and Reported.
Photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn has spent years documenting protests, rallies, and moments of public unrest that often look very different on the ground than they do on the evening news. In this conversation, he talks with Meghan about what really happens when a “mostly peaceful protest” turns chaotic, how viral clips can erase context, and why the incentives of freelance journalism can skew coverage. They also discuss what it takes to build trust with sources across ideological divides, the ethics of filming in volatile environments, and how ordinary viewers can tell when the narrative doesn’t match reality.
Topics include: • The gap between local experience and national headlines • “Mostly peaceful” framing vs. street-level truth • Freelance journalism, safety, and incentives • Crossing lines without becoming the story • Why viral video is a poor substitute for context • What citizens should know about media literacy About the guest Jeremy Lee Quinn is a photojournalist and reporter who has covered protests and political unrest since 2020. His forthcoming book is Culture of Confusion. He posts most actively as @JeremyReporter (Instagram, Facebook) and also writes on Substack and X/Twitter.
After years of institutional groupthink and policy whiplash, what have we actually learned—and what are we still not allowed to ask? Lisa Selin Davis returns to discuss the evidence (and non-evidence) around youth gender medicine, talk about the ongoing taboo and confusion around AGP (autogynephilia), and consider how to hold two truths at once: some people report thriving post-transition while others were clearly harmed.
In this episode, we discuss / talk about:
- How “don’t question it” became a default and why that stalled real inquiry
- What the evidence actually says (and doesn’t) about pediatric interventions
- Thriving vs. harm: talking about real outcomes without slogans
- Gender clinics closing under political pressure—who might be quietly relieved, and why
- AGP: why it’s still taboo and how that affects research and discourse
- The NFL cheerleader controversy and what it revealed about intellectual consistency
- “Stopping” vs. “ending”: Lisa’s framework for irreversible choices and life after medicalization
About the guest Lisa Selin Davis is the author of two novels and two nonfiction books, with a forthcoming book on the culture of trans kids and gender identity. She writes the Substack BROADview.
Dr. Andrew Hartz is a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, an organization dedicated to overcoming sociopolitical bias in the mental health field. He was last here in 2023 and returns now to talk about what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the mental-health landscape since then. We discuss the rise of “everyday dissociation,” how screens and Zoom relationships dull presence and feeling, and why talk therapy can miss the mark when the problem is disconnection from the body. Andrew also explains how anxiety became a form of social currency (from dating to testing accommodations), the overuse of diagnostic labels online, and why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a saner path than endless self-rumination. Guest Bio: Andrew Hartz is the Founder, President, and Executive Director of the Open Therapy Institute. He's also a practicing clinical psychologist and was formerly a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University, where he also completed his Ph.D. He's been featured in the New York Times, on The Dr. Drew Podcast, on Dr. Phil Primetime, and in The Free Press and has written about political issues and mental health for outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Discourse, Heterodox Academy, the New York Post, and Quillette.
Novelist, essayist, and publishing coach Leigh Stein returns to the show to discuss her new gothic-inspired novel, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. Set in a Los Angeles “hype house,” the book follows a 39-year-old woman managing a mansion full of TikTok influencers—and confronting the realities of aging out of digital media. Leigh talks about the inspirations behind the novel, from a Frank Lloyd Wright house to parasocial relationships to the controversies around Joan Didion’s private papers. We also explore bigger questions: the future of Substack, fandom as a cultural force, the blurred line between art and content, and how young writers can navigate the creator economy. Along the way we get into Coldplay-Gate, public shaming as a modern scarlet letter, and what it really means to make a living while making art. About the Guest: Leigh Stein is the author of six books, including the satirical novel Self Care and her latest gothic novel, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker online, Airmail, Allure, ELLE, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate.
This week, I welcome back Rob Henderson, the social psychologist, author, and commentator who coined the concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the upper class while inflicting real costs on lower-income communities. Rob was last here in early 2024 discussing his memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, which chronicles his journey through California’s foster system to the Air Force, and onward to Yale and Cambridge. In this conversation, we explore what he’s been thinking about since the book’s release—particularly the so-called “mating crisis,” why many young people delay or avoid partnerships and family, and what that means for the future. We also dissect the emergence of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral hopeful who, according to Rob (and I would concur), embodies luxury beliefs in action. Finally, Rob answers questions from Substack readers.
Rob will be a speaker at our Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas weekend, October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
GUEST BIO
Rob Henderson is the author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. He grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and in the rural town of Red Bluff, California. After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force at the age of seventeen, he subsequently attended Yale on the GI Bill and was then awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in psychology in 2022. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and his Substack newsletter is sent each week to more than 70 thousand subscribers.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
This is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers.
Author, New York Times columnist, and superstar linguist John McWhorter returns to the pod to catch us up on what’s been on his mind now that the Woke Emergency is over . . . or is it over? We talk about how figures like Robin D’Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi have receded from the spotlight and then move on to more pressing questions topics, such as whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s “I vs me” confusion is disqualifying (I say yes), whether a smart person would say “stupider” or “more stupid,” when it became acceptable to say “anyways,” and why kids today have substituted “based off” for “based on.” We also discuss John’s long-running conversations with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show and how their divergent views on the Trump phenomenon have changed (and also not changed) the dynamics of their discussions. (Listen to my 2024 interview with Glenn Loury here.) John reflects on Glenn’s 2024 memoir and explains why he would be reluctant to expand the personal writing in his columns into an entire book. Finally, we talk about the definition of a public intellectual and why so many people with microphones count themselves as such. Would a legendary public intellectual like Susan Sontag have adapted to the YouTube era? What John has to say might surprise you. John McWhorter is one of several speakers featured at the Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas rereat in New York City October 11-12, 2025. Find out more at https://theunspeakeasy.com/nyc. GUEST BIO John McWhorter writes a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and the author or more than 20 books, most recently Pronoun Trouble, Nine Nasty Words, and Woke Racism. HOUSEKEEPING Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here. Join the listener and reader community by subscribing to my Substack at theunspeakablepodcast.com. Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
This week I’m joined by Alana Newhouse, journalist, cultural critic, and founder/editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine. Since launching Tablet in 2009, Alana has carved out a space for nuanced and surprising reporting on Jewish identity and the larger cultural questions shaping those issues, as well as the broader issues of our time.
We discuss her 2021 essay, Everything Is Broken, in which she diagnoses systemic failures in medicine, media, education, and culture. Alana traces these breakdowns to a pervasive cultural force she calls flatness — the drive toward frictionless interaction, simplified narratives, and ideological conformity.
Drawing from her own story of navigating a medical crisis with her own child, Alana exposes how even privileged, insured families can be failed by institutions. She also offers a blueprint for repair: embracing complexity, friction, unpredictability, and deep creative engagement.
Alana will be a guest speaker at our Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas weekend, October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
Are you a fan of what Alana has done at Tablet? Show your love (and get a big discount) by using promo code ALANA1800 at checkout.
GUEST BIO
Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom. More info here.
🗽 Live event in NYC on Sept 3! Come see me discuss The Catastrophe Hour with bestselling novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (catch my recent interview with Lionel here). The Village Underground, 6 pm. Tickets and info here.
This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In that book, How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey wrote not just about anorexia itself but the culture surrounding it, notably the “peak sad girl” era of the late 1990s through early 2000s. The therapeutic approach that accompanied it, she argues, took universal human questions that have been asked for millennia and repackaged them as personal neuroses to be indulged and then solved — or, more often, deemed unsolvable. Her conversion to Judaism and participation in an Orthodox community helped reframe her entire way of thinking and changed her life for the better.
GUEST BIO
Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, which came out in April from Viking. Her work has appeared online or in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, and the New Yorker, among other outlets.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
September 3 in NYC at 6 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Lionel live at The Village Underground. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.
Bestselling novelist and beloved (and occasionally be-hated) columnist Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to talk about several topics, including her most recent novel, Mania. In that novel, she imagines a society under the grip of “mental parity,” a concept arguing that all individuals possess equal intelligence and no one should be given greater credence or responsibility because of the perception that they are smarter. We also discuss our own intelligence (are we really all that smart?) and wonder what makes us so resistant to groupthink in politics and daily life, especially around movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gender ideology.
In search of a lighter topic, we finally move on to . . . immigration. (Oops.) As a Los Angeles resident, I’ve been alarmed by the ICE raids in my community, and I’m quite upset about the Trump administration’s policies. As a longtime expatriate in the U.K. and as the author of a forthcoming novel about immigration (A Better Life, coming in February 2026), Lionel sees things a little differently.
GUEST BIO
A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in Britain’s The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. Her first nonfiction book, ABOMINATIONS: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-destruction, was published in 2022. It joins a story collection and fifteen novels, including Mania, Should We Stay or Should We Go, The Mandibles, and We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton). Her work has been translated into 35 languages. Her latest novel A Better Life, focused on immigration, will be out in early 2026.
UPCOMING EVENT:
Once again, if you enjoyed this interview, join me in NYC on September 3 at The Village Underground for a conversation with Lionel about The Catastrophe Hour as well as her work. Topics will include (but are not limited to) death, sex, real estate, dogs, beauty, grief, aging, cancelation, incels, femcels, self-destruction, natural disasters, pronatalism, anti-natalism, human intelligence, and cultural stupidity.
Doors open at 5:15, show starts at 6pm. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In that book, How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey wrote not just about anorexia itself but the culture surrounding it, notably the “peak sad girl” era of the late 1990s through early 2000s. The therapeutic approach that accompanied it, she argues, took universal human questions that have been asked for millennia and repackaged them as personal neuroses to be indulged and then solved — or, more often, deemed unsolvable. Her conversion to Judaism and participation in an Orthodox community helped reframe her entire way of thinking and changed her life for the better.
GUEST BIO
Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, which came out in April from Viking. Her work has appeared online or in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, and the New Yorker, among other outlets.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 23, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fifth essay of the collection, Playlist of Tears.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET. The book club is for yearly paid Substack subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription at www.theunspeakablepodcast.com.
About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
This episode starts with a Very Special introduction in which I explain what’s been going on with the podcast over the last six months (lots of different offerings, which possibly caused some confusion) and talk about the ongoing challenges of the subscriber model. (Short version, please stick around!)
I then have the great pleasure of interviewing evolutionary biologist Dr. Carole Hooven, who’s been a speaker at several Unspeakeasy events but never actually a guest on the podcast. As we approach the four-year anniversary of the publication of her book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole recounts how a media appearance defending “male” and “female” as meaningful scientific categories led to unexpected controversy and her eventual departure from Harvard, where she’d taught for many years. She talks about how ideological influence has made even basic scientific facts about sex contentious and cites the importance of precise use of language, especially on topics like sex differences and women’s rights, which she feels have been muddied by cultural and political agendas.
Most fascinatingly (to me, anyway), Carole argues that a predominantly female, progressive teaching culture favors girls’ learning styles—while boys, wired differently by biology, are stigmatized and alienated. Meanwhile, it’s become culturally verboten to even acknowledge men’s intense sexual drives and emotional vulnerability, and she calls for a return to rites of passage that acknowledge male biology without shame.
Finally, we talk about a recent controversy surrounding her husband, MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne (who was a guest on the podcast back in March 2024), after he was invited to contribute to a U.S. Health and Human Services report on sex and gender. Although the team was politically diverse, Alex’s name was leaked via PDF metadata, and he faced fierce criticism from activist students and colleagues. He responded with a Washington Post op-ed explaining his position.
GUEST BIO
Dr. Carole Hooven is a human evolutionary biologist, the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
Housekeeping 📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. We’ll be in Texas, New York, Los Angeles, and more.
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fifth essay of the collection, Playlist of Tears.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET. The book club is for yearly paid Substack subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription at www.theunspeakablepodcast.com.
About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
In this episode, I speak with filmmaker Rachel Mason about her documentary Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna, which explores the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. On October 21, 20221, Alec Badwin, who starred in the film, pulled the trigger on a gun he thought was not loaded, killing Halyna and injuring director Joel Souza. Through the lens of grief, media spectacle, and justice. Rachel, a close friend of Halyna’s, offers an intimate perspective on the aftermath of the incident and how it was experienced by those who knew Halyna beyond the headlines.
We also talk about Rachel’s recent docuseries, An Update on Our Family, which investigates the world of family vlogging on YouTube—particularly the story of Myka and James Stauffer, whose decision to rehome their adopted son sparked public outrage and raised ethical questions about online parenting content. Toward the end of our conversation, Rachel talks about her next project, a collaborative effort to unravel a legendary unsolved murder case in Los Angeles. It's a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation that touches on art, ethics, personal loss, and the complexities of telling true stories in a digital age. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
GUEST BIO
Rachel Mason is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker. She received an Emmy Nomination for her Netflix Original Documentary Circus of Books, based on her biographical telling of growing up the child of owners of an adult bookstore that was a fixture of the gay community during the height of the AIDS era. In 2025 a series Mason directed called “An Update on Our Family” was released on HBO MAX and has been cited in legal arguments proposing legislation changes regarding children on the internet. Following that, Hulu released the authorized documentary about her friend Halyna Hutchins death on the Alec Baldwin film Rust. She is currently completing a documentary about the murder of a young gay man in 1990 named Billy London, which was until 2022 a cold case. The film is being made independently and has been a volunteer effort from the community, who helped to solve the crime.
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna- Hulu
An Update on Our Family- HBO Max
Circus of Books- Netflix
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 9, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fifth essay of the collection, Playlist of Tears.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET. The book club is for yearly paid Substack subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription at www.theunspeakablepodcast.com.
About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 2, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fourth essay of the collection, Species Of Grief.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET, beginning June 11. The book club is for yearly paid subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription.
Species Of Grief was written in May of 2019 and appeared as one of my columns in Medium’s GEN Magazine.
Want to hear the whole recording? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, June 25, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the third essay of the collection, Basically Dead.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET. The book club is for yearly paid Substack subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription at www.theunspeakablepodcast.com.
How to Join The Book Club
Yearly subscribers will receive a reminder email on Tuesdays. If you are only a monthly subscriber, you will not receive the email. To update your subscription:
- Navigate to your profile image in the top right corner and click.
- Go to “Manage Subscription”
- Next to your subscription type, select “Change.”
- Select yearly and confirm.
About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
In his new memoir, An Exercise In Uncertainty, journalist and editor Jonathan Gluck chronicles more than 20 years of living with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. He joined me to talk about how he’s coped with illness, why he chose this moment to write about it, and, most importantly, how he’s learned to deal with a condition all of us face to one degree or another: uncertainty.
Jon explains the concept of “predemption”—a mindset that’s helped him find something positive, even in the toughest moments—and describes the invisible aspects of cancer, how it affected family dynamics, and the honest conversations he’s had with his kids about his condition. He reflects on the strain illness can have on relationships, especially marriage, and how fly fishing became a crucial form of therapy and connection.
GUEST BIO
Jonathan Gluck is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was deputy editor of New York magazine for ten years, after which he worked as managing editor of Vogue. His work has been recognized with multiple National Magazine Awards.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes :
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, June 18, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the second essay of the collection, Same Life, Higher Rent.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET, beginning June 11. The book club is for yearly paid subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription.
To learn more about the book club and join, visit https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/the-catastrophe-hour-book-club Same Life, Higher Rent was written in 2017, shortly after I returned to New York after nearly two decades away. At the time, I was 47 and, strangely, my life was a lot like it had been at 27, though of course I was older and the rent was higher. The essay also explores, among other things, the concept of the “situational setpoint,” which is the state of life I seem to find myself in no matter how long I spend trying to live a different kind of life. About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
This week I’m joined by Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of beloved author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser’s latest book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust In The Time Of Serial Killers, is a notable departure from the world of sunbonnets and covered wagons. This time, she explores the proliferation of serial killers—figures like the Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway, I-5 killer Randall Woodfield, and, of course, Ted Bundy—who haunted the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s to 1990s.
Why were there so many serial killers during this time and in this region? Fraser points to the “lead-crime hypothesis,” which suggests that a spike in violent crime during this era can be traced back to widespread childhood lead exposure from gasoline, paint, and industrial sources. In the book, Fraser expands on this theory, connecting the ecological and societal dots between environmental toxins and waves of violent crime. She also draws on her own experience growing up in the Seattle area, giving personal context to a much larger story.
GUEST BIO
Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
Housekeeping 📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. We’ll be in Texas, New York, Los Angeles, and more.
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
The Catastrophe Hour Book Club begins June 11 with a discussion of the first essay in the book, The Broken-In World, an examination of divorce, loss, and finding unexpected peace and camaraderie in a world that “can no longer support pretense.” The book club runs for 14 consecutive Wednesdays from 3-4 p.m. ET. We will discuss one essay per week To learn more about the book club and join, visit https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/the-catastrophe-hour-book-club About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day.” — Washington Examiner From the acclaimed author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays. Written between 2017 and 2024, these essays are classic Meghan Daum, showcasing her wit, her intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Arranged in the order that they were written, the essays touch on themes of aging, solitude, creative life, money, the changing media landscape, death, and the meaning of home. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
Alma Deutscher, often described as a modern-day Mozart, was a prodigy whose early accomplishments include composing a piano sonata at age six, a short opera at seven, a violin concerto at nine, and her first full-length opera at ten. At twelve, she was profiled on 60 Minutes, and in 2021 began conducting studies in Vienna with Johannes Wildner.
Now 20, Alma has just written her first ballet score—a collaboration with Lincoln Jones, founder and director of American Contemporary Ballet (ACB) in Los Angeles.
Lincoln joined me on the podcast just over two years ago, offering unique insights into the complexities of running a dance company and the profound art of dance itself.
In this episode, Lincoln and Alma discuss their new ballet, The Euterpides, inspired by Euterpe, the ancient Greek Muse of Music. This piece follows the Muse’s goddess daughters as they descend to dance with a mortal, exploring the age-old connection between inspiration and craft.
We recorded this conversation on Memorial Day to get it out ahead of the ballet’s world premiere, which runs June 5–28 in Los Angeles. If you’re local (or can make the trip!), you’ll also hear about an audience support campaign, offering a rare chance for the public to get involved in bringing this ballet to life.
GUEST BIO
Alma Deutscher has composed a number of acclaimed orchestral works, including a full-length opera, by the age of 10. Her music has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Vienna State Opera. She’s earned the admiration of classical music luminaries like Zubin Mehta, who called her “one of the greatest musical talents of today.”
Lincoln Jones is the founder, director, and principal choreographer of the American Contemporary Ballet in Los Angeles. Their collaboration, The Euterpides, premieres on June 5.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes :
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
This week, I share an essay from The Catastrophe Hour. There’s no audiobook available (yet), so I offer this reading of the final essay in the collection, The End Of The Personal. It’s a meditation on first-person writing in a world that seems to have overdosed on oversharing.
The era of the personal is over. The writer sees this now. One day, she just gets it. Everything is personal so nothing is personal. The erosion has been a long time coming. First, the personal became political. Then it became porn. Now it has become dust.
The Catastrophe Hour book club begins on June 11 and runs every Wednesday from 3:00-4:00 p.m. ET for 14 consecutive weeks. We will read one essay each week, starting from the beginning of the book. Audio excerpts of each essay will be released every week as special podcast episodes. (They’ll be excerpts, so you’ll still want to get the book.)
To join the book club, become a paying subscriber to the Substack at the annual level. More info here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube!
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays 3-4pm ET. We will meet on Zoom. I’ll make a post about it very soon with more info.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream happens every Thursday at 3pm ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.
✌️Upgrade your subscription if you want to hear the full conversation: http://bit.ly/3OJJRO9
🔔 Did you like this episode? Don’t forget to like, subscribe and leave a comment down below.
[DESCRIPTION]
You can upgrade your subscription here: http://bit.ly/3OJJRO9
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GUEST BIO
Peter Moskos teaches in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Moskos, a Princeton and Harvard-trained sociologist, is a former Baltimore City Police Officer and is the director of John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program.
Also, check out Peter’s previous Unspeakable interviews:
Can We Get Smarter About Policing? A conversation with Professor of Police Science (and former Baltimore cop) Peter Moskos: https://bit.ly/3H0209F
How Are We Feeling About Policing These Days? https://bit.ly/4ms8rCP
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HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: https://bit.ly/3H028pF
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/43yJAWf
In this much-anticipated interview (at least by me), humorist and journalist Henry Alford joins me to discuss his recent bestselling book I Dream Of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots. In a Joni nerd-off that may be unrivaled in podcast history, Henry and I talk about his research and reporting for this book, what he learned about Mitchell’s contradictions and complexities, why he thinks she might be on the autism spectrum, and, above all, why Mitchell’s music holds such a profound place in so many people’s emotional and even intellectual lives.
GUEST BIO
Henry Alford is a humorist and journalist who has contributed to the New Yorker since 1998. He is the author of seven books, including Big Kiss, which won a Thurber Prize, and the recent I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots, a national bestseller.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
New feature! The Unspeakeasy Live is a twice-weekly livestream featuring casual, spontaneous conversations with guests, friends, and sometimes just myself. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 pm ET. Recordings of livestreams are posted the next day (or soon thereafter) for paying subscribers.
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
May 17 I’ll be in Denver at The Process discussing my new book, The Catastrophe Hour. 7pm. Info here.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent solo episodes :
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. Find out where we’ll be!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Make a donation of any amount to help me recover from the fire by using the tip jar.
Writer and podcaster Louise Perry returns to the pod to discuss her new book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, in which shetakes ideas from her 2022 book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution and adapts them for teenagers and young adults. In this conversation, we pick up from where we left off in our 2022 interview,catching up on the evolving discourse around the winners and losers of the sexual revolution and trying to parse what’s going with the “online right” and its Little House On The Prairie fantasies and overall fixation on homestead life. (News alert: People on the American frontier did suffer from depression. There was even a name for it: Prairie Madness.) We also talk about the 4B movement (what does “B” stand for anyway?), conservative matchmaking initiatives (has Louise crowdsourced her own yenta business?), and the need for a more interventionist approach to relationships and family life.
Guest bio: Louise Perry is a writer and activist based in London. This year, she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
Journalist and political commentator Emily Jashisnky, host of Undercurrents and co-host of Counterpoints, is a 31-year-old Evangelical Christian from Wisconsin. She’s also (for my money) one of the sanest, smartest, and most principled voices in the information landscape these days. In this conversation, we talk about Emily’s philosophical and political roots, her college years during the height of the woke era, and her thoughts about the state of the Republican party (she considers herself a conservative but not a Republican), the perils and promise of the Trump agenda, and what’s driving Elon Musk—not to mention keeping him awake. Emily Jashinsky is an American journalist based in Washington, D.C. She is the D.C. Correspondent at UnHerd and co-host of the show "Counter Points" with Ryan Grim on the Breaking Points channel, a Top 10 Politics podcast. Housekeeping Listen to my recent audio essays about the Los Angeles wildfires and (moving right along) the state of public discourse in the new Trump era. Read my recent essay in The New York Times about accepting help. Pre-order my new book The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays (which is unrelated to the current catastrophe). Either from you-know-where or (even better) directly from the publisher, Notting Hill Editions. Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube. The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. We’ll be in Texas, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
For the last several years, we yelled about the left eating itself. Is the right now feasting on the same poisonous meal? This week Meghan is joined by Free Press reporter River Page, whose February 19 article The Online Right Is Building A Monster, articulated a phenomenon she’d long observed but could never quite parse; the phenomenon of right-wing trolls making antisemitic and misogynist memes as well as other forms of rage bait in order to own the libs. River explains the origins and effects of this rising movement, dispelling Meghan's preconceptions that most of these trolls are bots or teenagers (alas, many are grown men). Speaking of grown men, the conversation wanders into an exploration of why young males are so obsessed with their bodies and physical appearance. Should we blame Instagram and TikTok? Maybe. But River thinks there’s a connection between income inequality and male vanity. When you believe you’ll never be able to afford a house or a middle-class family life, controlling your own body may be the only control you have.
Guest Bio: River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Previously, he worked as a staff writer at Pirate Wires, covering technology, politics, and culture. His work has also appeared in Compact, American Affairs, and the Washington Examiner, among other publications.
You can upgrade your subscription here: http://bit.ly/3OJJRO9
HOUSEKEEPING Unspeakeasy Retreats: https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v Pre-order Meghan's new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays. Coming April 15, 2025. https://tinyurl.com/2t4rb76r
Recorded February 13, 2025
On my birthday, with my laryngitis almost gone, I share some audio reflections about my recent New York Times opinion essay about losing my home in the fire, my current housing situation, and my former housing blunders. Most importantly, I offer a sneak preview of my ironically-titled forthcoming book, The Catastrophe Hour.
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Earlier fire dispatches.
January 9: The First 24 Hours — https://bit.ly/3CgZTMV
January 16: The Immaterial World — https://bit.ly/40QLfVO
January 27: Housing Wars — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eVZpYBpd2g&t=2s
How to help? Become a paying subscriber to this podcast on Substack or leave a donation of any amount in the tip jar. Your support is deeply appreciated: https://bit.ly/42wIZnW
HOUSEKEEPING Unspeakeasy Retreats: https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v Pre-order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays. Coming April 15, 2025. https://tinyurl.com/2t4rb76r
February 10, 2025 edition
Recorded December 16, 2024
Chloé Valdary was last on the podcast in May 2021, talking about Theory of Enchantment, an enterprise devoted to more nuanced and art-focussed approaches to DEI. She’s back to discuss what she’s been up to since then. A lot!
In this conversation, recorded in December, Chloé talks about her journey from prolific tweeting to long-form writing and the impact of social media on mental health and creativity. She talks about psychosomatic work, the influence of Elon Musk on Twitter, and the cultural response to Luigi Mangione's killing of a health insurance executive. In her view, Luigi fandom connects to themes of Puritan heritage, as she discusses in her (then) recent piece Luigi Mangione and the Puritans.
GUEST BIO
Chloé Valdary, educator, artist, and founder of the Theory of Enchantment, is on a mission to address the shortcomings of DEI by teaching love and harmony. Chloé received her bachelor’s in international studies with a concentration in conflict and diplomacy from the University of New Orleans. She has been published in the WSJ, the New York Times and the Atlantic Magazine, and she spends her days helping schools and businesses build trust in their organizations. In her spare time, she enjoys bird watching, reading, and DJing.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📰 Read my recent essay in The New York Times about accepting help in the wake of the L.A. wildfires.
📖 Pre-order my new book The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays (which is unrelated to the current catastrophe).
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. We’ll be in Texas, New York, Los Angeles, and more.
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
It’s been three weeks since my house burned to the ground in the Los Angeles wildfires. Here are some thoughts on rent gouging, couch surfing, and the lifestyles of the rich and unhoused.
A note on this photo. I took it from Farnsworth Park in Altadena on New Year’s Day, one week before the fire. That thing in the sky is the Goodyear Blimp hovering over Rose Bowl Stadium during the game.
Earlier dispatches.
January 9: The First 24 Hours
January 16: The Immaterial World
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The podcast resumes its regular schedule very soon! Thanks for your patience. Housekeeping Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube. Learn about The Unspeakeasy, a community for freethinking women. Pre-order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays. Coming April 15, 2025.
In the hours of January 8, my house burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA. Here are some thoughts I recorded on January 15.
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I’ve lost my home. I am safe. HOUSEKEEPING Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube! Unspeakeasy 2025 retreats. We’re going to Texas, Los Angeles, upstate NY and beyond. See where we'll be! Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
This week, Meghan is joined by filmmaker, YouTuber, and “experience design architect” Topaz Adizes. He is the founder of The Skin Deep, an experience design created to foster connection in human relationships, often through innovative products and curated live events. In this conversation, Topaz discusses the evolution of relationships in the digital age, the importance of asking the right questions, and how he built a sustainable business model around his project, The And, a video series in which two people sit face to face and engage with a series of simple yet surprising questions. He also explains the concept of experience design and how it shapes human interactions in a technology-driven world. Finally, he and Meghan talk about building a business, the meaning of “intimacy,” the changing rules of the dating market, and why he’s (theoretically) willing to accept that his grandchildren might never meet their spouses in real life. GUEST BIO Topaz Adizes is an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and the founder and executive director of the experience design studio The Skin Deep, which has a popular YouTube channel. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children. HOUSEKEEPING
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As you make your new year’s resolutions or plan for Dry January, returning guest Ruby Warrington has another idea for better living in 2025: go on a “content diet.” In this conversation, Ruby describes the overwhelming nature of content consumption and its impact on mental health and wellbeing. She draws parallels between the “sober curious” movement, which she spearheaded, and the need for conscious content consumption, emphasizing the importance of awareness in our media engagement. We also talk about the pressures of content creation, the role of intimacy in communication, the rise of AI-generated content in the digital landscape, and the important of reading novels and listening to music.
GUEST BIO
Ruby Warrington is the author of Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood and is the creator of the term “sober curious." Author of the 2018 book Sober Curious and million-download podcast of the same title, her work has spearheaded a global movement to reevaluate our relationship to alcohol. Other works include Material Girl, Mystical World (2017), The Numinous Astro Deck (2019), and The Sober Curious Reset (2020). With 20+ years’ experience as a lifestyle journalist and editor, Ruby is also the founder of the self-publishing incubator Numinous Books.
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Do journalists ever regret the way they cover events? This week, veteran YouTube journalist and political commentator Ana Kasparian discusses her journey from the progressive left to finding herself politically unaligned, the regrets she still harbors, and the complexities of navigating controversial issues with nuance. She also discusses her thoughts on the election and on Biden's mental decline, the appeal of Trump, and how cultural shifts within the Democratic party affected the election.
Meghan and Ana also discuss motherhood (or in their cases, non-motherhood) and new discourse surrounding the trad movement, pro-natalism and the dark side of the pressure campaign to get people to have more children.
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Ana Kasparian is a political journalist and media personality with nearly two decades of experience in news and analysis. Beginning her career as an assistant producer at CBS Radio in Los Angeles, she later became Executive Producer and co-host of The Young Turks. She now writes a Substack newsletter chronicling her political realignment journey and exploring key political and cultural issues.
Follow her on Substack here.
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What purpose does “wokeness” really serve? Is it a way of thinking that helps lift up marginalized groups? Or is it a convenient way for elites to pay lip service to social justice while maintaining the status quo that benefits them? This week, I’m joined by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions Of A New Elite. In addition to distilling his ideas about wokeness as “cover for elites,” we talk about Musa’s love for French theorists, the value of his community college education, and the culture shock he experienced when arriving at Columbia University. We also explore whether women are overrepresented in elite workplaces and how this might affect perceptions of gender inequality and male dominance.
GUEST BIO
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the “social life” of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.
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Until 2018, sports betting was almost a sport unto itself. To place a bet, you had to call your bookie, go to the race track, or make a trip to Las Vegas. But in 2018, the Supreme Court put an end to a longtime federal ban on sports betting, and it is now legal in most states and accessible on smartphones.
For years, we’ve been hearing alarm bells about the addictive qualities of online pornography, which many experts believe has dulled the senses and hindered the relationship prospects of generations of young men. But according to Alex Grodd, founder of The Disagreement, a media and education company that puts out a podcast of the same name, sports betting in its current incarnation poses an even greater threat. In this conversation, Alex describes how compulsive betting and predatory marketing is leading to financial ruin for countless users, many of whom he spoke with for a recent episode of The Disagreement. He also talks about how this connects with the “masculinity crisis” as well as the overall drop in attention span for just about everyone.
Listen to The Disagreement here.
GUEST BIO
Alex Grodd is the founder and CEO of The Disagreement and hosts its podcast. Prior to starting The Disagreement, Alex founded and ran BetterLesson, an edtech company that provides professional development tools to teachers. Alex forged his love for disagreement by facilitating debates among students during his days as a middle school teacher at public schools in Atlanta and Boston.
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Journalist Ben Ryan returns to the podcast to reflect on the role of the trans debate in the recent election as well as discuss the impact of the Cass Review on pediatric gender medicine and on journalists covering the issue. He also talks about various aspects of gender transition treatments, explains what is known about rates of surgeries among minors and to what extent medical care for trans adults could be affected by Trump administration policies. Finally, he and Meghan discuss the TERF Wars, aka infighting within the “gender critical community.” Is using preferred pronouns a harmless courtesy? Or does it imply acquiescence to the slippery slope of reality denial?
Ben’s May 2024 interview can be found here.
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Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist who focuses on health care and science. He contributes to several major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and NBC News. He has a particular interest in public health, medicine, and psychology, and has spent years reporting on HIV.
His work has received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, including the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award. Benjamin is a cancer survivor and enjoys reading, theatre, movies, biking, cooking, and photography in his spare time.
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Playwright and performer Sandra Tsing Loh returns to the podcast (after four years!) to discuss her surprise hit play Madwomen of the West, which featured a superstar cast including Caroline Aaron, Marilu Henner, Melanie Mayron, and JoBeth Williams. After the Los Angeles theater establishment deemed the show too woman-centric, Sandra mounted an independent production, which she eventually took to New York and London. She now has a new one-woman show — a 70-minute "You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again”-style rant — about the “journey” of that production called I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It will be performed for just two nights at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. November 16 and November 23. Info and tickets here.
GUEST BIO
Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of several books, including "The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones," which was selected as one of the New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books. Her previous book, "Mother on Fire," was inspired by her hit solo show about Los Angeles public education.
Her off-Broadway solo shows include "Aliens in America" and "Bad Sex With Bud Kemp." Her comic memoirs include The New York Times New and Noteworthy "Madwoman and the Roomba"; The New York Times 100 Notable Books "Madwoman in the Volvo"; "Mother on Fire"; "A Year in Van Nuys"; and "Depth Takes a Holiday." The Los Angeles Times named her 1998 novel "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now" a 100 Best Fiction Book. An Atlantic contributing editor, Loh has been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, PRI's Marketplace and This American Life. She currently hosts the LAist/NPR daily radio science minute “The Loh Down on Science.”
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For this first post-election episode, Meghan welcomes back author Lionel Shriver, who is arguably America’s (and the U.K.’s) most controversial woman of letters. They talk about the over/under on the end of democracy, whether J.D. Vance is following a Trump-mandated script, how trans issues replaced abortion rights as a priority for many female voters, and whether Kamala Harris is secretly relieved that she doesn’t have to be President of the United States. They also discuss why writers must oppose Israel to remain in good standing in the literary world and how they feel about the current pronatalism movement with respect to their own reproductive choices.
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GUEST BIO
Lionel Shriver is a columnist for The Spectator and the author, most recently, of Mania, a novel. Her fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much For That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. A longtime American expat in the U.K, she now lives in Portugal.
Hundreds Of Authors Pledge To Boycott Israeli Institutions: https://bit.ly/40EBf2r
Lionel Shriver contributed an essay to Meghan’s 2015 anthology “Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids”: https://amzn.to/40MHC3F
Lionel’s previous interviews on The Unspeakable: https://bit.ly/3O66FHu and https://bit.ly/3YOgNcC
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In this premium episode, writer, editor, and friend of the pod Leigh Stein returns to talk about the state of book publishing, including the importance of promotion via digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Leigh may be the Jane Goodall of BookTok. She has spent countless hours in the wild, studying the platform’s users and creators for insights into its addictive magic. As a book coach who helps authors sell their manuscripts to publishers and then (hopefully) sell lots of copies, she understands the changing landscape of publishing and sees endless potential and opportunity. Where many authors and editors feel only fear and dread, Leigh feels joy. Recently, she helped literary agent turned novelist Betsy Lerner become an unlikely TikTok star.
Want in on more of Leigh’s secrets? On November 14, The Unspeakeasy is offering a one-time webinar with Leigh called How To Get A Book Deal The Easy Way. It’s open to everyone (not just ladies) and may change your life. And it’s only $150! Visit the course page in The Unspeakeasy for more details and to sign up.
GUEST BIO
Leigh Stein is a writer exploring the impact of the internet on our identities, relationships, and politics. She has written five books, including the satirical novel Self Care (Penguin, 2020) and the poetry collection What to Miss When (Soft Skull Press, 2021). Her non-fiction work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Allure, ELLE, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate.
Leigh founded Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist literary nonprofit organization that supported women and gender variant writers. BinderCon events in NYC and LA welcomed nearly 2,000 writers to hear speakers such as Lisa Kudrow, Anna Quindlen, Claudia Rankine, Jill Abramson, Elif Batuman, Effie Brown, Leslie Jamison, Suki Kim, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Leigh also moderated a Facebook community of 40,000 writers. She is no longer on Facebook.
Leigh’s website.
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This week, journalist and legendary feminist activist Julie Bindel talks about her new podcast series, Julie in Genderland, which explores the complexities surrounding gender identity, particularly from the perspective of parents of children who’ve become caught up in gender ideology. Julie discusses the role of social services and educators in shaping children's understanding of gender, the intersection of class and gender issues, and the parallels with social justice movements around the sex trade and surrogacy. She also reflects on her reporting of grooming gangs in the UK, linking it to broader issues of misogyny and systemic failures in protecting vulnerable girls.
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Julie Bindel is a British journalist, broadcaster, author and a feminist campaigner against male violence towards women and girls. Her latest book, Lesbians: Where Are We Now? will be published by Swift Press in Spring 2025 and her new podcast, Julie In Genderland, premiered in September 2024.
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Listen to Julie in Genderland.
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Stephanie Lepp is a video artist and producer whose work focuses on bringing together different viewpoints to arrive at a perspective that goes beyond “common ground” and emerges as a true integration, or synthesis. She was on the podcast in July 2022 to talk about a project called Deep Reckonings. In it, she considered the cases of public figures who’d responded to personal controversy in less-than-ideal ways and reimagined responses that would have conveyed genuine learning.
Now she’s back with a new video series, Faces of X, which illustrates an argument using a single performer to act out the three parts of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis schematic. Those performers include Buck Angel, Liv Boeree, Magatte Wade, and herself.
In this conversation, I talk with Stephanie about why it’s so hard to check your confirmation bias (even — and maybe even especially — when you pride yourself on being able to do so), the difference between synthesis and “both sidesism,” and why she’s optimistic about the future of public discourse about complicated issues.
GUEST BIO
Stephanie Lepp is the founder of Synthesis Media, a production studio devoted to integrating perspectives into a bigger picture. In 2022, she debuted Reckonings, a narrative podcast that explores how we change our hearts and minds, and Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly-marked deepfake videos that imagine morally courageous versions of our public figures. Her new project is Faces of X.
Watch Deep Reckonings.
Watch Faces of X.
Listen to Stephanie Lepp’s previous interview on The Unspeakable.
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To doomers and nihilists, the whole world is a joke — and it’s not even funny. Writer Neal Pollack may be a natural skeptic, but he thinks that’s nonsense and he returns to the podcast to talk about better living through laughter (and not in a “live, love, laugh” kind of way). He discusses his various careers — professional writer, professional poker player, three-time Jeopardy champion — his thoughts on COVID-19 lockdowns, the culture of Austin, and his recent battle with sofa dermatitis.
Most importantly, he talks about his upcoming course for The Unspeakeasy School of Thought, Writing Humor in Humorless Times. Unlike most writing workshops, which limit students to the arduous activity of writing, Neal will also be available to teach students how to be funny on Twitter/X, TikTok, at dinner parties, or even while muttering to themselves while walking down the street.
GUEST BIO
Neal Pollack is the author of 12 semi-bestselling works of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoirs Alternadad, Stretch, and Pothead, the novels Jewball, Keep Mars Weird, Edge of Safety, and Never Mind the Pollacks, and the cult short-fiction classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. His “Greatest Living American Writer” satire pieces have appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, The Federalist, The Spectator, and the Jewish Daily Forward/. He is a three-time Jeopardy! champion, a certified yoga instructor, a semi-professional poker player, a Generation X legend, and the editor-in-chief of Book and Film Globe.
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If you have a pet, you’ve probably wondered lately what in the world has happened to veterinary medicine. Why is it so expensive? Why is it so hard to get an appointment? And why, despite all of that, do domestic animals seem to have more health problems than ever?
In this conversation, financial reporter Helaine Olen, a longtime dog owner and author of the April 2024 Atlantic article Why Your Vet Bill Is So High, explains how a combination of advancing technologies, private equity, and let's face it, people being really, really attached to their pets have made it costlier and more complicated than ever to own a pet.
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Helaine Olen is Managing Editor at the American Economic Liberties Project and a contributing columnist for MSNBC.com. She is the author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry and a co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated. A former columnist for The Washington Post opinion page and Slate, her work has also appeared in numerous other publications, including The Atlantic, where Why is Your Vet Bill So High appeared.
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This interview with Kat Timpf is free to all subscribers. To hear bonus conversations and get early access to other episodes, become a paying subscriber here.
Meghan interviews Kat Timpf, Fox News analyst and co-host of Gutfeld, about her new book "I Used to Like You Until... (How Binary Thinking Divides Us)." They discuss Kat’s education and early political evolution, her frustrations with ideological tribalism, and her thoughts about red-pilled manosphere discourse regarding dating, mating, and female fertility.
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Kat Timpf is a writer, comedian, and television personality. She’s currently the co-host of “Gutfeld!” on Fox News weeknights at 10 p.m. and a Fox News analyst. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestsellers "You Can’t Joke About That: Why Everything is Funny, Nothing is Sacred, and We’re All in This Together," and "I Used To Like You Until... (How Binary Thinking Divides Us).”
Follow Kat Timpf on Twitter and Instagram.
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Over the last decade, Planned Parenthood has become one of the country’s leading providers of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In August, journalist Jennifer Block published an article in The Free Press entitled “How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?” The article follows the story of a teenager who visited her local Planned Parenthood and was fast-tracked into medical transition and then surgery that she almost immediately regretted. In this conversation, Jennifer talks about how this happened, why the public has been slow to realize it, and how to find an intellectual consistency between supporting abortion rights and opposing medicalized gender transition for young people.
GUEST BIO
Jennifer Block is an independent journalist who writes frequently about health, gender, and contested areas of medicine. Her articles and commentary have appeared in The Boston Globe, Romper, The BMJ, The Cut, The New York Times, The Baffler, and many other outlets. Her 2007 book Pushed, led a wave of attention to the national crisis in maternity care and is a foundational text in university curricula and birth worker training. She’s also the author the 2019 book Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.
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Meghan interviews housing market analyst Melody Wright about why purchasing a home has reached historic levels of unaffordability. A rising star on YouTube, Melody was on the front lines of the mortgage implosion during the Great Financial Crisis and has devoted the last few years to scratching beneath the surface of the affordability crisis in housing. Though low inventory remains a problem in many regions, you might be surprised to learn that in many parts of the country, new construction has saturated the marketplace and countless homes are sitting empty. Melody talks about how this happened, why the media doesn’t report more on it, and where she sees similarities to the run-up to the housing market crash in 2008. Plus, fun fact: did you know that the word mortgage is derived from the very old French legal term “death pledge?”
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Writer, performer, and Gen-X legend Moon Unit Zappa joins Meghan for a conversation about her new memoir Earth To Moon. She talks about being the eldest child of iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa, growing up in the chaos of the 1970s and 80s rock-and-roll scene, the cultural phenomenon of the hit single Valley Girl, fissures within the Zappa family, and forging a life and career in the today’s creative economy.
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Moon Unit Zappa was born in 1967 to legendary musician Frank Vincent Zappa and his second wife, Gail Zappa. At the age of 14, she appeared in Frank Zappa’s career-defining song, “Valley Girl,” which later helped jump-start Moon’s career. Since then, Moon has firmly established herself as a writer, actress, comedian, artist, podcaster, and tea merchant.
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This is a PREVIEW of a PREMIUM episode for paying subscribers, Meghan welcomes back writer and physician Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care specialist who writes with exquisite care and candor about end-of-life issues. Sunita was on the podcast a little over a year ago talking about the hidden harms of CPR, which she wrote about for The New Yorker. She’s back to discuss two articles she published this summer. One in The Atlantic about how doctors deal with terminal illness in younger patients and another in The Wall Street Journal about dying at home. We’ve been taught to assume that a good death means dying at home, or at least not in a hospital, but Sunita points out that this can be better in theory than in practice. This is another extraordinary conversation with one of listeners’ favorite guests.
GUEST BIO
Dr. Sunita Puri is a palliative care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a literary memoir recounting her journey to the practice of palliative care and what it means to help people find dignity, purpose, and comfort when facing serious illnesses and the end of life. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles times, Tricycle, The Wall Street Journal and Slate. This fall, she is joining the UC Irvine Medical Center faculty as the director of the inpatient palliative care service and associate professor of medicine. She was recently awarded a one-month Bogliasco fellowship for exceptional artists and has received writing residencies from Yaddo and MacDowell, among other places.
The Atlantic, The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennial Deaths
The Wall Street Journal, Most People Are Dying At Home. Is That A Good Thing?
Sunita’s previous interview on The Unspeakable.
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The Unspeakable is moving to video! Here’s the scoop, in case you missed it.
The Unspeakable’s debut video guest is one of Meghan’s favorite people to talk with about our confounding political times: journalist and podcaster Tara Henley. Since visiting the pod back in early 2023, Tara’s podcast and Substack newsletter Lean Out has become a major force in the heterodox space. She is one of the finest interviewers and sharpest thinkers working today.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Meghan and Tara talk about how to avoid the phenomenon of audience capture, how to think about J.D. Vance, how to find the joy (or at least the fun memes) in Kamala Harris, and what’s behind the mating crisis, the masculinity crisis, the economic crisis, and any number of other crises (not necessarily in that order).
This conversation was recorded on August 15, 2024. The video will appear on The Unspeakable’s YouTube channel soon.
Tara will be a guest speaker at the October 21-24 Unspeakeasy retreat in Woodstock, NY. There still may be spots left. Find out more here.
Follow Tara on Substack.
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Tara Henley is a Canadian journalist and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Her 22-year career spans TV, radio, online media, magazines, and newspapers. She has worked as a producer on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight and on current affairs morning and afternoon shows at CBC Radio, in both Vancouver and Toronto. Henley's CBC radio documentary "39" was a finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards. A former books columnist for The Toronto Star, and for Metro Morning, Toronto's top morning radio show, Henley is a contributor to the books section of The Globe and Mail. Her writing has appeared in outlets across Canada and around the world, and she now publishes a popular current affairs Substack newsletter, Lean Out. Her weekly interview podcast of the same name has listeners in more than 150 countries and 5,000 cities worldwide.
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This week, something a little different: Meghan is the interview subject! In a special end-of-summer episode, The Unspeakable pairs up with Michael Callahan and his podcast Where We Go Next. In a conversation that Michael posted earlier this month, he and Meghan talk about how to avoid audience capture in the “heterodox space,” how the term “community” got tacked onto nearly everything, and how the concept of the “literary citizen” replaced the role of the working writer or even public intellectual. They vent their shared frustration with the marketing demands of algorithms, particularly the YouTube algorithm and its clickbait thumbnail images, and wonder whether Meghan’s Reddit haters are correct that she’s really just a conservative cosplaying as an old-school liberal. Finally, Meghan discusses the origins and current iteration of The Unspeakeasy and Michael reminds her that in her first visit to his podcast, back in July 2021, she declared that she would never launch a freethought community — oops!
Relevant Links Original Where We Go Next episode
I Wasn’t Canceled. I Was Problematized.
Who Killed Creative Writing?
Was Alice Munro An Art Monster?
About Michael Callahan Michael Callahan is an award-winning commercial director and the host of Where We Go Next, where he has deep-dive conversations with accomplished people doing fascinating things. He enjoys vacationing in the Pacific Northwest, hanging out with his awesome wife, and taking far too many photos of their 3 dogs.
Instagram: @wwgnpodcast
Follow WWGN on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts or Audible.
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In the latest installment of Casual August, writer and educator Larissa Phillips joins the pod to respond to the August 2 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis, who theorized that childless cat ladies were secretly happier than moms, especially moms raising young children while caring for aging parents. Larissa related to much of what Vanessa said, but she had several things to add, including her later-in-life recognition that early motherhood makes more sense than later-in-life motherhood — and, what’s more, single motherhood might not be as cool and easy as 1980s media made it out to be.
A GenXer who grew up steeped in second-wave feminism, Larissa now advises her 20-something daughter to marry and start a family early, which is pretty much the opposite of what her own mom advised. In this conversation, Larissa (who was a guest on A Special Place In Hell back in March) explores how her thinking evolved, why her friends were shocked when she got pregnant at 29 (practically a teen mom!), how divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s made an entire generation wary of the nuclear family, and why she invokes Jordan Peterson when she explains to her daughter that being “high value” has a lot to do with being young. She and Meghan also wrestle with whether the hyper-professional, hyper-independent feminist ethos internalized by Gen Xers and millennials will end up being something of a blip in time in the history of civilization.
Larissa also talks about joining The Unspeakeasy at its upcoming retreat in Woodstock, NY this October.
GUEST BIO
Larissa Phillips is the founder and director of the Volunteer Literacy Project, a NPO that teaches reading to adults using a phonics-based curriculum. She also runs an educational program on her family farm in Upstate New York. She can be found on X (@larissaphillip) and Instagram (@honeyhollowfarmstay) and Substack, where she writes about farming, animals, and life as a lapsed Progressive living in Trumpland.
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“While some might argue that collaboration with fascists, TERFs, and racist edgelords does not constitute endorsement of violent and anti-liberation views, we disagree. There can be no innocent collaboration with such people.”
That was the official statement from Hiding Press, the small, independent poetry press that was set to publish writer Emmalea Russo’s fourth book of poetry. But when word got out that she had been “collaborating” with the wrong people, they canceled the book. By collaborations, they meant writing for certain journals and appearing as a guest on certain podcasts. By alt-right or fascist-adjacent they were talking about magazines like Compact, a publication that, according to its mission statement, “seeks a new political center devoted to the common good.”
In this conversation, Emmalea talks about the “chain of contamination” that causes panic and public disassociation with anyone even remotely associated with someone designated as “bad.” She also discusses her forthcoming novel, Vivienne, which is about a septuagenarian artist who’s canceled online over rumor and innuendo.
GUEST BIO
Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first novel, Vivienne, is forthcoming in September.
Read her piece in Compact Magazine, Purity Policing Is Poison To Poetry.
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Meghan, a childless dog lady, had a whole other episode cued up for this week when her friend Vanessa Grigoriadis called her with a surprising observation. According to Vanessa, moms today are so stressed out (even miserable) that childless women are getting the last laugh. This is especially true for women in midlife who started families in their late 30s to early 40s and are now saddled with elder care for aging parents while also having school-aged children. Does she have a point?
In this conversation, Meghan gloats over her utterly carefree lifestyle while Vanessa lays out what the public discourse around J.D. Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment is getting wrong. An award winning magazine journalist who has done deeply reported features on subjects like the NXIVM cult and whose countless celebrity profiles have included Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift, Vanessa also talks about charting a new professional path (podcasts, naturally) in an economy that’s quickly becoming oversaturated.
GUEST BIO
Vanessa Grigoriadis is a veteran longform journalist and a co-founder of Campside Media. She is the co-creator of the Chameleon and Fallen Angel podcasts, and hosted New York Magazine’s Tabloid series on Ivanka Trump. She is a National Magazine Award winner, and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Her book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, was published in 2017.
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This is a premium episode with Jamie Reed.This episode is available to paid listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
Jamie will be in The Unspeakeasy as part of our Unspeakers Series on Aug. 7, 2024. Apply to join The Unspeakeasy now if you want the chance to meet her in a private, off-the-record hangout.
“What is happening to scores of children . . . is morally and medically appalling.” Those were the words of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a gender clinic in a major American children’s hospital, when she burst on the scene via a Free Press article in February 2023. Since then, she has become known as the most prominent whistleblower in the effort to put the brakes on medicalized gender transition for kids.
In this conversation, Jamie talks about what the last year and a half has been like for her, what the public still needs to understand about this issue, and why doctors and other medical providers are continuing to misrepresent their treatment protocols. She discusses how institutions serving the most vulnerable kids, including foster care systems (where large numbers of kids now identify as trans), have adopted affirmative care models and explains what it’s like to
Testify before state legislatures about restricting access to non-evidence-based gender-affirming care. As a self-described “queer woman who’s married to a transgender person and is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” it’s the last thing she ever thought she’d be doing. Now it’s her life’s work.
GUEST BIO
Jamie Reed is one of the first public whistleblowers from a pediatric gender clinic in the United States and is now the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the LGBT Courage Coalition, an American-based non-profit of LGBT adults seeking to reform youth gender medicine. She has spoken at numerous conferences including Genspect: The Bigger Picture in Colorado, at the International Perspectives on Evidence- Based Treatment for Gender-Dysphoric Youth in New York, and Psychotherapeutic Process with Young People Experiencing Gender Dysphoria in Tampere, Finland.
Jamie is a gay woman and foster and adoptive parent of five boys. She holds a Master of Science in Clinical Research from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology.
Read the original story in The Free Press here.
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Between 2013 and 2020, hundreds of people who worked in the entertainment industry—from actors and writers to photographers, makeup artists, and security personnel—were targeted by brilliant and bizarre scammer who came to be known as the Con Queen of Hollywood. The Con Queen impersonated famous female studio executives and convinced many of her marks to spend huge sums of money—often on trips to Indonesia—under the pretext of doing research for film projects that would be their big break.
Journalist Scott Johnson covered the case for The Hollywood Reporter, eventually reporting that the Con Queen was actually a man named Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, a genius impersonator who was also trying to make it as an Instagram food influencer. Scott’s book about the case, The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius, was published last year and a three-part documentary series based on his book premiered on Apple TV this past May. Scott joined me for a conversation about his years reporting the case and how he finally tracked Hargobind down in England in the early months of the Covid pandemic. He also talks about how reporting from wars and being the son of a CIA officer informed his reporting.
GUEST BIO
Scott C. Johnson is the author of two highly acclaimed books. The Wolf and the Watchman (W.W. Norton, 2013) was long-listed for the National Book Award, the PEN USA award and was named a Washington Post Notable Book. His second book, The Hollywood Con Queen (Harper, 2023) was given a starred review by Publisher’s Weekly and selected as an Amazon editor’s pick. Scott was a consulting producer of Hollywood Con Queen, a 3-part documentary series to air on Apple TV+ in the spring of 2024. He now lives in France with his wife and two children.
Buy the book
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We hear all the time that children are resilient — and should be even more so! But do divorcing parents overestimate their kids’ resilience to justify their actions? Should “staying together for the children” come back into style? Returning guest Bridget Phetasy talks about her recent article for The Spectator about an aspect of divorce that rarely gets discussed: the ripple effects over decades as adult children and grandchildren are spread thin among multiple families and step-families. Bridget’s parents, who had five children under 12 when they divorced, followed the logic that parental happiness is better for children than “staying together for the kids.” But is that really true? Bridget’s essay kicked off a huge conversation online and touched a lot of nerves (and ruffled a lot of feathers) and she and Meghan continue that conversation here.
They also talk about their shared desire to quit the content creator hustle and move to the woods. Also, Bridget apologizes to Meghan for a microaggression that’s been haunting her, even though Meghan has no memory of it.
GUEST BIO
Bridget Phetasy is a Spectator columnist and contributing editor. She is also the host of the Weekly Dumpster Fire on YouTube and the Walk-Ins Welcome podcast. Follow her on Twitter, Rumble and YouTube, or join her community at phetasy.com.
You can read her article for The Spectator here: https://bit.ly/465I5yv
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Jennifer Sey has been an elite gymnast, a high level marketing executive at Levi’s, and an outspoken critic of protracted school closures during the Covid pandemic. That last role led her to become a prominent figure in the new free speech movement, and she fulfilled that role by writing a book and starting a Substack about her conscription into the culture wars. But her real skills are as a business person, so she decided to apply those skills and start a retail brand. XX-XY Athletics, which launched in late March, is an apparel line that sells athletic clothing for men and women but is branded around the idea of standing up for women’s sports
Given the fraught politics around this issue, XX-XY may be the first “gender critical” retail business. But does it make sense to build a brand around a culture war issue? In this wide-ranging conversation, Jennifer talks about the legacy of corporate virtue signaling, the inner turmoil of wealthy executives who want to look like progressives, her attempts to get another job after being designated as problematic, and the day to day tasks of building a business. She also explains how HR departments gained massive power in corporations and why executives are so afraid of their young staffers.
GUEST BIO
Jennifer Sey is a corporate marketing executive turned author, activist, documentary filmmaker (we didn’t even talk about that) and now the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.
You can find her on her Substack here.
Check out XX-XY here.
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Are you relieved that Gay Pride month is over? Monica Harris, an author, attorney, activist, and the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) fought for LGBT civil rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, she finds herself dismayed by the current state of that movement.
In this conversation, Monica talks about how we went from Ellen DeGeneres to drag queen story hours, why gay rights organizations turned their attention to trans issues, and why she believes homophobia lies at the root of much of gender medicine. She also talks about the economic forces driving ordinary people to the ideological fringes, particularly young men who find themselves without job or relationship prospects.
GUEST BIO
Monica Harris is the executive director of FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She spent over a decade as a business and legal affairs executive at Walt Disney Television, NBCUniversal Media, and Viacom Media Networks. In 2011, she abandoned corporate life and moved with her family to Montana, where she serves entertainment clients remotely through her firm, Big Sky. Monica is a TEDx speaker, author, and blogger who advocates for balanced, common-sense solutions to systemic problems based on our shared values and goals. Her book, The Illusion of Division, is available on Amazon.
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Writer and podcaster Sarah Hepola returns to The Unspeakable to talk about love, sex, #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein’s overturned rape conviction, her new job at The Dallas Morning News, her book in progress, and why she thinks local reporting will lead the way out of the media abyss.
GUEST BIO
Sarah Hepola is a features staff writer at the Dallas Morning News, the cohost with Nancy Rommelmann of the Smoke ‘Em If You Got Em podcast and author of the 2015 best-selling memoir Blackout. She was also the host and creator of the Texas Monthly podcast "America's Girls," about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Read her work at the Dallas Morning News here.
Listen to her podcast about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, “America’s Girls,” here.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Andrew Boryga.
The first portion of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
Who says you can’t write a novel skewing social justice excesses? Andrew Boryga has done just that — to critical acclaim. His debut novel VICTIM tells the story of Javier Perez, an academically gifted kid from The Bronx who lands at an elite college and soon discovers the advantages of playing up his disadvantages.
In this conversation, Andrew talks about the decade-long process of writing the book, his similarities to Javier, and how he feels about contemporary fiction and the literary world these days. He also discusses what it was like to shop the book to publishers and explores the question of whether a white author could get away with this kind of satire.
GUEST BIO
Andrew Boryga is a writer and editor who grew up in Bronx, NY and currently likes in Miami with his wife and two children. His debut novel VICTIM, was published in March by Doubleday.
Buy VICTIM here.
Follow his Substack here.
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Is college pointless? Is an “elite education” more about networking than learning? Returning guest William Deresiewicz has been pondering these questions for more than a decade. They were the subject of his bestselling 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. That book has just been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition and in this episode, William talks with Meghan about what’s changed (i.e. what’s gotten worse) and what, if anything, can be done to make things better. They also discuss whether we need affirmative action for men, whether it’s better to get a job waiting tables than go to college right after high school, and whether childless people have any standing to talk—or even care—about this stuff in the first place.
GUEST BIO
William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which will be published in a 10th-anniversary edition in May 2024. His latest book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.
Find his other conversations with Meghan here, here, and here.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Nellie Bowles.
The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
You may know Nellie Bowles from TGIF, her popular news roundup in The Free Press. Before that, she reported on Silicon Valley for The New York Times.
Now she’s out with her first book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History. Filled with keenly observed details about the cultural and political battles of the last couple of years, it’s also an honest appraisal of her own political evolution. A self-described “lesbian from San Francisco lesbian who held all the values associated with that,” Nellie is now among those considered non-grata by progressives—her marriage to Bari Weiss would attest to that—and in this conversation, she talks about coming to terms with that as well as her reporting on everything from Antifa militants to the incel movement. She also talks about her own past life as a member of the progressive purity police.
GUEST BIO
Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife to build The Free Press, a new media company.
Get a copy of her book here.
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This week’s guest is economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury. Glenn is almost certainly no stranger to Unspeakable listeners, many of whom know him from his long-running podcast The Glenn Show.
In addition to opining there about political and social issues, Glenn is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005.
He grew up on the south side of Chicago and eventually became the first black professor of economics at Harvard and a prominent conservative thinker and policy expert. The Glenn Show debuted in 2012, and Glenn’s conversations about race with linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter were foundational to the emergence of the independent media sphere sometimes called the “heterodoxy” (at least they were Meghan’s gateway drug).
Glenn has published numerous books, but his latest, a memoir, is a major departure. Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is not just an account of his professional trajectory but also an unflinching interrogation of his personal choices.
This interview is stunningly candid and also utterly delightful. Meghan is grateful to Glenn for his honesty, deep insight, and great humor.
GUEST BIO
Glenn Loury is a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University. His new book Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is out May 14. You can find him on Substack here.
Pre-order or purchase Glenn’s book here.
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This episode is with one of our guest speakers at The Unspeakeasy retreat in Chicago. If you’re interested in going, learn more here.
This week Meghan welcomes returning guest Erec Smith. He is an academic whose area of scholarship is Rhetoric, but he also writes and speaks frequently about the state of race politics in America, particularly the perils (and uses) of DEI. In this conversation, they talk about the concept of prescriptive racism, which Erec wrote about in a recent Boston Globe column, and ask whether the emergence of the concept of microaggressions has resulted mainly in people steering clear of one another.
They also discuss what’s happened on college campuses since Erec was on the podcast a year ago, including the ouster of college presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and U Penn’s Liz Magill over free speech policies. He also discusses what he was like as a college student carrying around a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and how he would have felt if he’d been told that he was living under the thumb of white supremacy.
Erec will be a guest speaker at the first-ever Unspeakeasy coed retreat in Chicago on June 4-5. We’ll also be joined by recent Unspeakable guests Nadine Strossen and Lisa Selin Davis. To find out about that go to theunspeakeasy.com.)
Make sure you listen all the way to the end, so you can hear an excerpt from Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist from the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q. (Probably not coming to a high school theater near you.)
GUEST BIO
Erec Smith is a professor of rhetoric at York College of PA, a research scholar at the Cato Insitute, and a co-founder and an editor at Free Black Thought.
Read Erec’s recent Boston Globe column on prescriptive racism.
Listen to the last time he was on the podcast.
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This interview with Benjamin Ryan is a BONUS episode for paying subscribers only.
The first few minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
On April 10th, a big story broke in the gender world: The long-awaited report commissioned by the UK's National Health Service, known as the Cass Review, was released. As soon as the report hit the news cycle, gender-critical activists celebrated it as the final nail in the coffin of harmful practices, while trans-rights activists accused it of faulty methodology.
So who was right? This week, I spoke with Benjamin Ryan, a health and science reporter, to help unpack the Cass Review's data. Ben has spent years covering the intersection of health and public policy. He has a remarkably clear head and is a disciplined thinker about the youth gender medicine debate, so he is a great person to explain what is and is not in the Cass Review.
GUEST BIO
Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist who focuses on health care and science. He contributes to several major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and NBC News. He has a particular interest in public health, medicine, and psychology, and has spent years reporting on HIV.
His work has received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, including the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award. Benjamin is a cancer survivor and enjoys reading, theatre, movies, biking, cooking, and photography in his spare time.
Follow him on Twitter here.
Follow his Substack here.
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This week, Meghan talks with legal scholar, former law professor, and legendary free speech advocate Nadine Strossen.
Nadine was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and she’s the author of many books, including Defending Pornography, which has just been reissued nearly 30 years after its original publication. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nadine talks about pornography, campus speech codes, generational divides when it comes to ideas about words causing harm, and changes in institutions like the ACLU.
This week, almost the entire conversation is available to everyone, but paying Substack subscribers get a fascinating and very funny tangent at the end about a subject (mostly) unrelated to free speech: the subject of choosing not to have children. Nadine always knew she never wanted kids and she talks candidly about what was behind that impulse and how she feels about it now that she’s in her 70s.
GUEST BIO
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen also serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that promote free speech and academic freedom.
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This week, author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis returns for her third visit to The Unspeakable. Lisa is best known to listeners for her thorough and rigorous reporting on the new gender movement and her probing insights into how ideas around gender nonconformity have shifted over time.
But she has a new book out about something completely (or at least mostly) different: the concept of the housewife. In Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead, Lisa traces the social history of the housewife, examines the evolutionary and economic roots of housewifery, and wrestles with why the iconic 50s housewife has such a strong hold on the public consciousness despite not lasting all that long. In this conversation, she discusses what she learned in the course of her reporting, shares her own conflicting feelings about being a wife and mother, and talks about the rise of the “trad wife influencer.” Can Instagramming everything from your home birth to your home school be interpreted through a feminist lens? Lisa says yes!
In the second part of the conversation, for paying subscribers, Lisa returns to form and talks about gender, which is the subject of her next book.
GUEST BIO
Lisa Selin Davis’s new book is Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead. She is also the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History & Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
Follow her writing on her Substack, Broadview.
You can pick up a copy of Housewife here.
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This week, I’m talking with author Sloane Crosley. Best known for her humorous and existentially probing essays, Sloane’s latest book is a departure of sorts. Grief Is For People, a memoir, covers the year in her life following the death of Russell Perreault, a veteran of book publishing who’d been her boss before becoming her closest friend. A month before Russell’s death, Sloane’s apartment was burglarized by a jewel thief, turning her into an amateur detective as she attempted to retrieve family heirlooms while reckoning with loss across several dimensions.
Sloane worked as a book publicist for many years before being an author herself, and in this conversation, she talks about how office culture has changed over the last decade, especially in the wake of #MeToo, and what it was like to work with famous authors like Joan Didion and Sandra Cisneros in the final glory days of publishing. Meghan and Sloane also explore the phenomenon of collective grief over animals that become symbols of something much larger: for instance, the response to the death a few months ago of Flaco, the Eurasian owl that got out of a zoo enclosure and flew around upper Manhattan for more than a year, captivating not just the New Yorkers who saw him in real life but people all over the world following his whereabouts on social media.
GUEST BIO
Sloane Crosley is the author of two novels and three essay collections, including the bestsellers I Was Told They’re Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number? Her new book is the memoir Grief Is For People. She lives in New York City.
You can buy her new book here.
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This week, Meghan welcomes Arielle Isaac Norman, an Austin-based comedian who has opened for Louie C.K., Bobcat Goldthwait, Tim Dillon, Joe DeRosa, Eddie Pepitone and Maria Bamford, among others. Arielle, who describes herself as a “politically non-binary lesbian,” has a new YouTube special, Ellen DeGenderless, in which she discusses gender identity, sexuality, pronouns, social issues, and pop culture. This conversation covers all of those topics and more — including Arielle’s friendship with Louis CK and her thoughts about his sexual behaviors and resulting cancelation.
GUEST BIO
Arielle Isaac Norman is an Austin-based comedian. Her new special, Ellen Degenderless, is now streaming on YouTube. Find her on Instagram at @ellendegenderless and on YouTube or Spotify at Politically Non-binary.
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This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research, overzealous prescribing of medications, and, above all, a cultural obsession with trauma and emotional injury are causing unnecessary misery.
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Abigail Shrier’s new book is the best-selling Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times of London and has been translated into ten languages.
She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
You can pick up a copy of Bad Therapy here.
Read Abigail’s Substack here.
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If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there’s a good chance you were assigned Sherman’s classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school. The book is semi-autobiographical. Sherman grew up on that reservation in the 1970s and 80s and is a member of the Spokane Tribe. He is also arguably — or perhaps inarguably — the most significant native American writer of the last 30 years. Not only did The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian win the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other prizes, but his 2009 book War Dances won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner award for fiction, and his 1993 story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was adapted into the popular and highly acclaimed film Smoke Signals.
Best of all (for me, anyway), Sherman is teaching a class for the brand-new Unspeakeasy School Of Thought. It’s in a brand new genre: Writing Your Cancelation Story.
In this conversation, Sherman talks about his career, his 2018 “cancelation event” (or at least its aftermath) and offers his thoughts on the state of writing and publishing, not least of all the recent incident wherein editors at the journal Guernica retracted an essay when the Twitter mob and its own staffers deemed it harmful, even “genocidal.”
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Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and filmmaker. He’s published two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was listed by the American Library Association as the Most Banned and Challenged Book from 2010 to 2019. He’s won the PEN-Faulkner and PEN-Malamud awards, and he wrote and co-produced the award-winning film Smoke Signals, which was based on his short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
Visit Sherman’s Substack.
Check out his upcoming course here.
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On podcasts devoted to free speech and so-called heterodox discourse, the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind is probably mentioned more frequently than any other. Written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar and Greg Lukianoff, who now heads the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it is effectively the bible of the Heterodox crowd. And now it’s a movie. My guests are husband and wife filmmaking team Ted Balaker, who directed the film, and Courtney Moorehead Balaker, who produced it.
In this conversation, they discuss how they took a book about ideas and turned it into an engaging, poignant, and often very funny movie about mental health and how it intersects with higher education and campus life. They relay the stories of many of the young people featured in the movie and talk about the process of finding them. They also discuss how the movie ended up on Substack, where it’s making history as the first film to stream on that platform.
You can watch the film here.
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Ted Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, former think tank scholar and network news producer. He co-founded Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining, and Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Ted produced the feature film Little Pink House and is the director of The Coddling of the American Mind, based on The New York Times bestselling book by Greg Lukionoff and Jonathan Haidt and the very first feature documentary presented by Substack.
Courtney Moorehead Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, adjunct professor of acting, and co-founder of Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining. She also co-founded Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Courtney wrote and directed Little Pink House, which stars Catherine Keener as Susette Kelo, the blue-collar woman whose fight against eminent domain abuse went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Alex Byrne.
The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
Philosopher Alex Byrne spent most of his career innocently studying subjects like epistemology and metaphysics. But a few years ago, he became interested in — wait for it — gender, and he became a “dissident” scholar just for exploring foundational questions. His book Trouble with Gender, covers a lot of ground. But above all, it wrestles with the linguistic confusion of gender. What does the word even mean? What did the philosopher Judith Butler (whose 1990 book Gender Trouble kicked off decades of debate and cognitive distortions) mean when she said sex was different from gender? What about social scientists like Anne Fausto-Sterling, who came up with the idea that there are five sexes? In this interview, Alex discusses all of that and more, including how the UK acquired the nickname "TERF Island,” whether “auto-androphilia” is a real thing, why autogynephilia isn’t technically a fetish, and why Oxford University Press changed its mind about publishing the book. (Their loss!)
GUEST BIO
Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at MIT and the author of Trouble With Gender which you can order here.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Katherine Dee.
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Katherine Dee is a writer, cultural commentator, and a phenomenally astute observer of online culture. If you want to understand the rise of the “tradcels,” the “girl boss” trope (and subsequent backlash), and how identity concepts like “otherkin” become connected to social justice politics, Katherine is the one to explain it.
In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about how ideas on places like Tumblr found their way into our political discourse, academia, and even the retail space and they had a profound impact on young people’s psychological development, especially when it comes to dating and relationships.
Katherine herself was so indoctrinated by online manosphere content and it’s the scarcity complex it engendered that she ended up marrying someone she met online after knowing him in person for three days. She also discusses why Taylor Swift is just the latest example of a powerful woman reframed as a sad cat lady, why the beauty standards of the 1990s were so destructive, and why New York City arts and media circles are incubators are terrible places to meet heterosexual men. (But very good places to be one.)
GUEST BIO
Katherine Dee is an internet culture blogger. Everything else is secondary. You can find her at default.blog.
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📖 🌵Come see Meghan in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about her book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Rob Henderson.
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If you listen to this podcast and others like it, you may have heard of the concept of luxury beliefs. It was coined by this week’s guest Rob Henderson. Rob holds a PhD in psychology, has written for lots of media outlets, and writes a popular Sustack newsletter about social issues and how they relate to class dynamics, economic forces, and personal psychology. He also has a brand new book, Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class.
Born to a drug addicted mother, Rob spent his early life in the foster care system in California, living in seven different homes before finding a permanent placement. However, his adoptive family was chaotic, and Rob navigated a labyrinth of dysfunction before joining the military and eventually finding his way to the Ivy League. It was there that he noticed that many of his classmates seemed to hold certain ideas about the world at large, often in the name of tolerance, even though they held themselves to a much higher standard. From that emerged the concept of luxury beliefs which he discusses in depth in his memoir.
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Rob Henderson is a Yale and Cambridge University graduate who writes extensively on human nature, psychology, social class, TV shows, movies, political and social divisions, and more on Substack. The term "luxury beliefs" was coined by him, inspired by his experiences at Yale. His book, "Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class," will be published in February 2024 through Simon & Schuster.
Follow him on Substack.
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Get his book, “Troubled” here.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Lori Gottlieb.
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Psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb visited The Unspeakable in 2021 to talk about her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. She returns for a Valentine’s Day episode about finding love, staying in love, and what to make of all the social scientists constantly going on about how marriage and family are essential for mental, physical and even economic well-being. To that, Lori says, “well, obviously!” But she also asks “how are you supposed to find someone when our social systems are so dysfunctional?”
Her own story involves becoming a mother on her own in her 30s (her son Zach is a budding Gen Z thought leader in his own right) and trying to balance her own dating life with childrearing and a busy career. In this conversation, she talks about how she tries to help clients who are struggling to find love, how honest talk about female fertility became taboo sometime in the 2000s, why dating apps are making things so much worse, and why age gaps in romantic relationships seem more prevalent than ever. She also explains why, for older daters, widowed people can make the best partners and, finally, why more singles should seriously consider hiring a matchmaker.
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Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and the New York Times best-selling author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” and “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.” She is also a TED Speaker, the co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists" podcast, and the “Dear Therapist” columnist for The Atlantic.
Listen to the last time she was on the podcast.
Check out her website.
Follow her on Twitter here.
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📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with John Vervaeke and Shawn Coyne.
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Meghan has been threatening to do an episode on artificial intelligence, and finally she makes good. This week, she welcomes two guests: the philosopher, neuroscientist, and popular YouTuber John Vervaeke and the editor and publishing entrepreneur Shawn Coyne. They have collaborated on Mentoring The Machines, a series of short books–technically, it’s one book in four parts–about artificial intelligence. Their aim is to offer a clear understanding of the implications of AI and to invite readers to think about their own participation in its development and how their own choices can move that development in a positive or negative direction. In this conversation, they explain what drew them to this subject, how they came to work together, and how worried we should be about computers destroying civilization.
GUEST BIOS
John Vervaeke is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” “After Socrates” and the host of “Voices with Vervaeke.”
Sean Coyne is a writer, editor, and the founder of Story Grid.
Learn about Mentoring The Machines.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Kathrine Brodsky.
The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.
Cultural critic Katherine Brodsky is an example of what Meghan likes to call “Heterodoxy 2.0.” She’s committed to fighting censorship and groupthink but is also mindful of not becoming an ideologue herself. Born in the Soviet Union, she emigrated with her family to Israel and then Canada and is acutely sensitive to signs of creeping authoritarianism. She now lives in Vancouver and writes about a variety of topics, including the arts, technology, and the recently emerging debates about free speech and censorship.
In her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage—Lessons for the Silenced Majority, Katherine recounts her own cancelation event but, more importantly, interviews a range of people—including Katie Herzog, Winston Marshall, Stephen Elliot, and Peter Boghossian, to name a few—who have fallen prey to the online mob. In this conversation, we talk about what can be learned from a cancelation, what has become of the “IDW,” and how to move free speech discourse in a more positive direction, less grievance-driven direction. **
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For over a decade, Katherine Brodsky has covered lifestyle and entertainment stories for works like Variety, WIRED, Newsweek, The Guardian, Esquire, The Independent, CNN Travel, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy Magazine, USA Today, Delta Sky, Mashable, and more.
She has interviewed many personalities, including winners and nominees of the Academy Awards, Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, Tonys, and even the Nobel Prize.
You can read her work at her Substack here.
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Seth Kaplan has worked in developing nations throughout the world, studying how corrupt governments, crumbling infrastructure, and a lack of public trust can add up to what’s known as a “fragile state.” In his new book "Fragile Neighborhoods," he explores how these same dynamics can play out on a regional level in the United States.
Reporting from struggling rural areas as well as poor urban neighborhoods across America, Seth discovered that people separated by even just a few miles can have not only dramatically different life experiences but vastly different life expectancies. The culmination of these factors is captured by the concept of "social fabric."
In this conversation, Seth explains how he defines social fabric and describes what kinds of initiatives have the most success at bringing communities together and lifting people out of poverty and why gentrification, when done thoughtfully, can be integral to positive change. He also addresses the question of why cities on the West Coast seem far more prone to unrest, concentrated homelessness, and distrust of institutions than their East Coast counterparts. Finally, Seth shares his personal talks about what he looked for in a neighborhood when he moved his own family from New York City to another state.
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Seth D. Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs.
Visit his website.
Get his book here.
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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Ezzedine Fishere and Bernard Avishai, Dartmouth professors who teach a joint course on Israeli/Palestinian politics.
The first hour and five minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
As university campuses have become sharply divided in the wake of the October Hamas attack and the ensuing war between Israel and Gaza, Dartmouth has emerged as a model for productive dialogue among students and faculty alike. This is due largely to the efforts of Bernard and Ezzedine, who lead by example in and out of the classroom and have recently been featured on Sixty Minutes, PBS, and elsewhere.
In this conversation, they talk about their approaches to teaching, the professional paths that led them to the classroom, and how to honor personal feelings while encouraging intellectual humility over reflexive emotional reaction. Ezzedine also discusses the limits of viewing political history through a colonial/anti-colonial framework and Bernard reflects on the complexities of Zionism and why he was so excited about the Zionist project back in 1968.
GUEST BIOS:
Bernard Avishai, a Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, has taught at Hebrew University, MIT, and Duke. He's a Guggenheim fellow and author of four books. A regular contributor to The New Yorker on political economy and Israeli affairs, he has also written for Harper's, The New York Review, The Nation, and New York Times Magazine. Formerly an editor of Harvard Business Review and KPMG's International Director of Intellectual Capital, his upcoming Harper’s cover story on Israel’s culture wars will be released on January 15.
Ezzedine C. Fishere, a renowned Egyptian writer and academic, is currently a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, teaching Middle East politics and cultures. His vast diplomatic experience includes roles in the Egyptian Foreign Service; UN missions in the Middle East and East Africa; policy advising for the Egyptian foreign minister; and senior political advising in Sudan under Kofi Annan; a senior political advisor to the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) in Jerusalem; and heading the political section at the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
ALSO:
What Is Real? Eli Lake on Disinformation, Despair and Dead Ends in the Israel-Hamas War
Travel Notes From A War
Our Keffiyehs, Ourselves
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In a last-minute, new year’s special, Unspeakable regular ChayaLeah Sufrin stops by the pod to report on her recent trip to Israel with her family. Even though she’s been to Israel countless times, this trip was different in both expected and unexpected ways. ChayaLeah talks about the desperation of the families of hostages, the morale of Israeli soldiers, what Israelis think about America these days, and about visiting the site of the Supernovo Music Festival. She also explains (sort of) how the Iron Dome defense system works. Spoiler: it’s not Jewish space lasers. She also recounts a recent family trip to Kansas and reflects on how warmly her Orthodox family was greeted by locals.
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ChayaLeah Sufrin is the co-host, with Yael Bar-tur, of the podcast Ask A Jew and Executive Director at the Hillel at California State University, Long Beach. Prior to Hillel, she spent 15 years teaching high school Jewish history and was the Education Director of Shul by the Shore.
ChayaLeah has been married to her husband Boruch for 18 years and together they have 4 sons. Jewish education and building community are ChayaLeah’s two main passions - she also loves the New England Patriots.
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Therapist Sasha Ayad was one of the earliest guests on The Unspeakable. Her interview with Meghan in August of 2020 was revelatory for many listeners and she has become a leading figure in the effort to discuss gender through a non-ideological lens. In this wide-ranging conversation, Sasha shares what she’s learned since then, what kind of data has emerged about youth gender medicine, and why medical protocols in Europe have changed even as the U.S. and Canada hold on to the “affirmative care” model.
Sasha gives some background on how highly theoretical concepts like the “gendered soul” got absorbed into medicine, why kids with gender dysphoria are likely to struggle with multiple mental health issues, and how parents can set limits while also supporting their kids.
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Sasha is a Licensed Professional Counselor who works in private practice with teens, young adults, and families impacted by gender issues. Sasha is a well-known advocate for individualized, least-invasive-first approaches to treating gender dysphoria. She has developed a gentle but effective way of working psychologically with rigid beliefs, identity, and social influence.
In her private coaching work, she helps parents to feel better informed and more confident so they can navigate their child’s identity distress with more compassion, discernment and wisdom. Sasha is also the co-host of Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast and played a role in founding several organizations including the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, and The Gender Exploratory Therapy Association.
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Is Civility Better Than Kindness?
This week, author Alexandra Hudson visits the podcast to talk about her new book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves. Civility is one of those concepts onto which people project their own biases and even fears. On the surface, you’d think civility could only be a good thing. But it can also come with a lot of baggage. Those who call for greater civility are sometimes accused of diminishing the suffering of others, glossing over reasons for real anger, or practicing respectability politics. On the other hand, what’s so bad about respectability politics – or plain old respectability?
In this conversation, Alexandra talks about her mother’s career as an etiquette expert, the meaning of classical liberalism, the difference between civility and politeness,why she loves Erasmus of Rotterdam, and why she thinks Larry David is the foremost defender of civilization today.
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Alexandra Hudson is an award-winning journalist, author, and speaker, as well as the founder of Civic Renaissance, a newsletter and intellectual community dedicated to moral and cultural renewal. Her book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, was recently published by St Martin’s Press.
You can read her Substack here: https://bit.ly/48huPXH
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This week, Wall Street Journal Erich Schwartzel joins Meghan for a conversation about his December 2 article about social media super-influencers Rachel and Dave Hollis.
After building a multi-million by branding their own happiness and authenticity, tragedy struck when their marriage ended in bitter divorce and Dave died suddenly of a substance overdose. Erich talks about his months of research into the story and reflects on why so many people want to be influencers — and why even more people want to be influenced.
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RELEVANT LINKS
“Behind the Tragic, Instagram-Perfect Life of an Ex-Disney Executive” by Schwartzel for The Wall Street Journal (🔒): https://on.wsj.com/484qarW
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Erich Schwartzel, a film industry reporter at The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau, wrote “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.” Published in February 2022, the book explores China's growing influence on the American entertainment industry. It received accolades from New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Esquire. Prior to joining the Journal, Schwartzel reported on energy for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His journalism career began at a local paper in his hometown, Latrobe, Penn.
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New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul joins The Unspeakable for a conversation about problematic opinions, obvious truths, the state of book reviewing, the problem with publishing, “feeling French” despite being an American, and much more.
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GUEST BIO
Pamela Paul became an Opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2022. She was previously the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years, where she oversaw book coverage and hosted the Book Review podcast. She is the author of eight books, most recently, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.
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This week, Andrew Sullivan joins The Unspeakable to discuss the evolution of LGBTQ rights and debates. He and Meghan explore how the trans rights movement intersects (and sometimes conflicts) with the goals Sullivan advocated for gay men like himself in the 80s/90s, such as marriage equality. They also discuss his views on the physical realities of transitioning and how the language surrounding “trans kids” and “conversion therapy” are being co-opted in potentially dangerous ways
Andrew and Meghan also revisit messages from the AIDS crisis that inaccurately claimed everyone was at equal risk. Despite criticism, Andrew believes that moderation and reason will ultimately triumph over the impassioned, ideological discourse surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation.
GUEST BIO
Andrew Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. You can find his Weekly Dish newsletter here.
📰 Meghan’s 2012 Believer article about her 1996 New York Time Magazine article about HIV/AIDS public health messaging.
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This week, I had a discussion with Eli Lake regarding the recent tragic attack in Israel and its repercussions. I haven't closely followed this topic over the years, so Eli's insights were invaluable and he politely tolerated some of my more goyishly clueless questions. He has worked as a national security correspondent and possesses extensive knowledge on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
We talked about the present surge of activism and the near-illiterate responses to Israel's attack on Gaza. We also touched on the irony of campus activists demanding safe spaces while condoning violence against Jews. In addition, we dissected the "decolonization framework" that is currently dominating the narrative and discussed how the social justice left is losing credibility due to anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Guest Bio Eli Lake is the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. Currently, he is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a columnist for The Free Press columnist and host of The Re-Education podcast.
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In this episode of Unspeakable, Meghan Daum talks with veteran television writer Rob Long about the state of the entertainment industry. They discuss the Hollywood writers' strike, which according to Rob, mainly resulted in pay raises but didn't address systemic issues for writers. Rob and Meghan also discuss how streaming services like Netflix made a mistake trying to compete with studios by producing expensive original content, when they could have thrived by simply buying content.
Rob also shares some perspectives on how "Sound of Freedom" became such a box office hit despite scoffing from Hollywood elites. He also shares his view on what the future looks like for the entertainment industry and how TV writers' rooms have lost the plot when it comes to hiring quality talent.
GUEST BIO
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood. He began his career on Cheers, serving as co-executive producer. He was the creator and executive producer of The Texanist and showrunner of Kevin Can Wait. He co-founded the podcast network Ricochet and hosts the podcast Martini Shot with The Ankler. He is a contributing editor for National Review, as well as a contributor to TIME, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, and his books include Conversations with My Agent and Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse. He continues working in film and TV in LA and New York.
Find Rob at The Ankler, Commentary, and on Twitter at @rcbl.
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This week, Meghan interrupts her regularly scheduled episode lineup for a visit from Ben Appel, a New York-based writer who’s working on a book about ideological capture on college campuses. In 2016, Ben enrolled at Columbia University as a non-traditional student. Already in his 30s, he’d grown up in a cult-like Christian fundamentalist community that pelted him with homophobia; he considered himself firmly on the political left. But the politics he encountered on campus shocked him, especially many aspects of the Palestinian liberation movement. In this conversation, Ben describes what he encountered there, particularly in classes taught by famed Islamic scholars.
In the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Ben stays overtime and talks about the ideas he explored in his 2022 viral Newsweek article, The New Homophobia. He and Meghan discuss the ways in which the new gender movement takes gay people and tries to fit them into a transgender box, all in the service of the same stereotypes that progressives spent so many years fighting.
Guest Bio Ben Appel is a writer living in New York. His memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, with Bombardier Books, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Spiked, Daily Mail, Washington Examiner, Queer Majority, and UnHerd.
Follow him on Substack here.
And follow him on Twitter (or X) here.
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Today’s guest, Dr. Andrew Hartz, is a psychologist who has noticed how politicized the world of therapy has become. Over the last few years, he has noticed a climate of patients not being able to talk about what’s on their mind without getting a lecture from their therapist about racial injustice, as well as an environment that teaches clinicians to look at patients through a politicized lens.
Guest Bio Dr. Andrew Hartz’s is a clinical psychologist who holds the position of a professor of clinical psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Hartz received training at Columbia Medical Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the William Alanson White Institute, and has completed coursework at Columbia University, Columbia Medical Center, Haverford College, and Long Island University. He uses evidence-based tools from CBT, DBT, and psychodynamic psychotherapies to address the unique needs of each patient.
He is also the founder of The Open Therapy Institute which offers mental health resources for overlooked patient populations in a heated political atmosphere.
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Ethan Strauss went from working seven days a week and falling asleep on the train to Coney Island to one of the most popular sports newsletters on Substack.
He visited The Unspeakable and we talked about sports media and how it has been captured by elite media and lost touch with its core audience as a result. We also talk about the difference between men’s and women’s sports when it comes to business and marketing and who is driving the voice of sports institutions.
In the bonus, we talk about Ethan’s age (obviously), and his article “All Hail The Model,” which reveals his secrets to success but gave me anxiety.
GUEST BIO
Ethan Strauss is a sports writer and podcaster and the eponymous host of House of Strauss.
His career has followed the NBA where he blogged his way about the Golden State Warriors to jobs at Bleacher Report and ESPN. He has bylines in Salon and The Athletic.
Even if you don’t follow sports, listen to his podcast and follow his Substack. It’s incredible.
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How did we get tangled up in a knot of identity obsession, grievance, and one-upmanship? We can look to philosophers like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and, of course, Michel Foucault. And then we can blame it all on Tumblr!
In his new book, The Identity Trap - A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Yascha Mounk discusses his theory of “the identity synthesis” and traces how the once niche views about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity went from marginal to mainstream.
In the bonus, we talk about Yascha’s childhood, his feelings about his age, and his conception of happiness. (He recommends Jonathan Rauch’s 2018 book The Happiness Curve.)
GUEST BIO
Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic who focuses on the crisis of democracy and the defense of liberal values. He has a BA in History from Trinity College Cambridge and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. Currently, he is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Yascha also writes for The Atlantic, is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Founder of Persuasion. He has written five books, including The Identity Trap - A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which explores the influence of new ideas about race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. His work has been published in various major publications, such as The New York Times and Foreign Affairs.
Buy his new book here.
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Listen to his podcast, The Good Fight.
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The ladies from Ask A Jew are back for their biannual visit. This time for the Jewish New Year! In this episode, we talk about the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and (since we apparently have to go over it again) why Orthodox Jews have to get their cars detailed before Passover. (It’s true.)
We also talk about mikvehs. Because you know you were wondering. If you only ever listen to one conversation about mikvehs, let it be this one.
Most importantly, we revisit our evergreen topic: the world’s hottest dictators, despots and garden-variety world leaders. Who was hotter? Stalin or Gadaffi? Is Bibi Netanyahu more your type? Or George H.W. Bush?
In the bonus, I do a solocast where I answer AMA questions and share more of my existential crisis about how to pronounce my last name. Paying subscribers who have questions for me can put them in the comments.
Guest Bio The Ask a Jew podcast is where Yael Bar Tur, a secular Israeli living in New York, and ChayaLeah Sufrin, a Hasidic mother in Los Angeles, discuss everything from Torah to Tinder, no topics are off-limits.
Yael Bar Tur is a digital communications consultant with over 15 years of experience in social media, government, law enforcement and crisis communications. She served as the Director of Social Media and Digital Strategy for the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
Born and raised in Israel, Yael served in the Israeli Army as a foreign press liaison in the height of two wars, as well as volunteering for reserve duty at the Israeli field hospital in Haiti immediately following the 2010 earthquake. She holds a Master's Degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Yael lives in NYC where she has been granted lifetime approval to pet all police K9s.
ChayaLeah Sufrin is the Executive Director at Beach Hillel. Prior to Hillel, she spent 15 years teaching high school Jewish history and was the Education Director of Shul by the Shore.
ChayaLeah has been married to her husband Boruch for 18 years and together they have 4 sons. Jewish education and building community are ChayaLeah’s two main passions - she also loves the New England Patriots. She was recently named one of Hadassah's 18 American Zionist Women You Should Know.
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It seems like everywhere you look, men are struggling to find a sense of meaning and purpose. In fact, men are just getting kind of weird. On the other side of the equation, many women say they can’t find a “good man” who meets their expectations.
Enter Christine Emba, Washington Post columnist and author of the 2022 book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. In a recent WaPo essay, she discusses the crisis of masculinity and where men are looking for models of masculinity, from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate and beyond. In this episode, we chat about her article, her book, the past and present mating economy, and the evolution of her own thinking since her college days and the emergence of “the Princeton mom.”
(Leave it to her to ask the questions Matt Walsh doesn’t.)
In the bonus, we talk about dating apps — everyone’s favorite gripe — in addition to the resurgence of matchmaking and how people got dates and met people in the pre-app world.
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WHO IS CHRISTINE EMBA?
Christine Emba is a writer for The Washington Post's Opinions section. She is also the author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, which challenges the narrative of sex positivity. Prior to joining the staff of The Washington Post, Emba was the Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism at the New Criterion and a deputy editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. She grew up in Virginia and earned an A.B. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.
Follow her substack here: https://bit.ly/3Z8nJ49
Read her article, “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” here: https://wapo.st/45KoHX4
Get her book “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” here: https://amzn.to/3EvpU8A
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To kick off The Unspeakable’s fourth season, comedian Maria Bamford joins Meghan for a conversation about many unspeakable topics. Maria’s new book, Sure I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir Of Mental Illness And The Quest To Belong Anywhere is a rollicking homage to the power of groups. From 12-step meetings to game nights to dog parks, Maria loves gatherings of people. But she’s also spent a lifetime struggling with mental health issues that make her anxious around people.
In this conversation, Maria talks with Meghan about financial survival in the creative economy (she made her first appearance on The Tonight Show while working as a receptionist at NBC), her love for Debtor’s Anonymous and her fascination with money in general, what it’s like to use dating apps when you’re a celebrity, and much much much more.
Paying susbcribers to The Unspeakable With Meghn Daum on Substack get to hear Maria staying overtime to talk about being 53 years old, which is also how old Meghan is. They also talk about Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, “sexual anorexia,” regular anorexia, eating rice cakes, and choosing not to have kids. Become a paying subscribers at https://meghandaum.substack.com/.
GUEST BIO
Awarded Best Club Comic at the American Comedy Awards and Breakout Comedy Star at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Maria Bamford’s critically acclaimed work includes her web series The Maria Bamford Show, Ask My Mom, and her Netflix series Lady Dynamite. Maria’s writing has been featured in The New York Times, LA Weekly and The Onion. She played Debrie Bardeaux on Season 4 of Arrested Development and has contributed comedic voiceovers for such animations as Netflix’s Big Mouth and BoJack Horseman, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, PBS’s Emmy-winning series Word Girl, Nickelodeon’s Kung Fu Panda and Legend of Korra, and the international hit Talking Tom and Friends.
In the latest installment of her unofficial series about death and dying, Meghan talks with writer and palliative care physician Dr. Sunita Puri. Sunita is the author of That Good Night, Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour and has written about end-of-life issues in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and elsewhere. In this conversation, Sunita discusses the ways that medical advancements can cloud the vision of doctors and patients alike when it comes to being realistic –and even humane –about how we die. She describes how terminally ill patients can get treated differently–and often receive different information–depending on a variety of factors, including their age. Sunita also discusses her forthcoming New Yorker article about the complexities and misconceptions around CPR, a practice that turns out to be not nearly as effective as many people think. CPR’s origins also contain some fascinating trivia. For instance, did you know that the expression “blowing smoke up your ass” is said to come from an 18th-century life-saving procedure involving bellows and tobacco smoke?
For paying Substack subscribers, Sunita stays overtime to share personal thoughts about the struggle to overcome a hyper-critical inner voice, whether doctors’ inner voices are extra critical, and why it’s so hard to get into medical school even though there seems to be a shortage of doctors. To hear that portion, visit meghandaum.substack.com and join the listener community.
Guest Bio:
Dr. Sunita Puri is currently the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, where she is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine. She completed medical school and residency training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco followed by a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness.
Even if you don’t recognize Tim Kreider’s name, there’s a good chance you’ve read his work. In addition to his two collections of essays, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, he’s published many short essays in the New York Times opinion section, nearly all of which seem to go viral. The first such essay was The Busy Trap, published more than 10 years ago, wherein he called out Americans’ perpetual condition of being “crazy busy” as “a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy.” He’s also famous for an essay about knowing people are talking about you behind your back, which Meghan has mentioned several times on the podcast and which has been immortalized in a famous meme. In this conversation, Tim shares his thoughts about writing about yourself, writing about other people, teaching writing to college students and (unrelatedly) getting stabbed. He also talks about the process of deciding not to have kids, the difficulty of living with another person as you get older, and a phenomenon he describes as the “soul toupee.”
For paying subscribers, Tim stays overtime and talks about (among other things) being 56-years-old, contemplating mortality, coping with a diminished attention span, and dating his fans – although he insists they’re not really fans once you start dating them. To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at https://meghandaum.substack.com/.
Guest Bio
Tim Kreider is the author of the essay collections We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Men’s Journal, The Comics Journal, Film Quarterly, and Fangoria. His cartoon “The Pain–When Will It End?” ran for 12 years in the Baltimore City Paper and other weeklies and is archived at thepaincomics.com. Learn more about him at timkreider.com
Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of five novels and has published essays and short stories in outlets such as The New Yorker, N+1, and The New York Times Book Review. She visits The Unspeakable this week to talk about "My Adventures In Deconstruction," her essay in the June 9, 2023 edition of The New Yorker. On the surface, the essay recounts a romantic relationship with a college professor 15 years her senior, back in 1990. But the essay goes much deeper than that, mapping the main story onto the landscape of the deconstructive criticism movement in literature, which posited that an author’s intent doesn’t matter and meaning itself is subjective. In this conversation, Lucinda talks about her the process of writing the essay, the 1990s-era trope of the “bad girl,” and the complexity of power dynamics in relationships between very young women and older men. She and Meghan also wander into a surprising conversation about the role that cigarette smoking played in both of their lives when they were in their twenties. Speaking of which, Lucinda stays overtime for paying subscribers to talk about how she feels about being the age that she is, which happens to be the age that Meghan is!
To hear the bonus content, become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com.
Guest Bio:
Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of five novels, including What She Saw and, most recently, Class, which was named a Best Book of 2017 by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her fiction and essays have appeared in N+1, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.
It’s been exactly a year since the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, thereby eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion. Last May, shortly after that decision was leaked to the press, bioethicist and legendary abortion rights activist Frances Kissling visited The Unspeakable to talk about the likely implications of this ruling. Now Frances is back to reflect on what’s transpired since then, whether things are better or worse than many people feared, and what the downstream political effects have been. She talks about organizational efforts on the part of medical providers, activists, and even airplane pilots to get women to places where abortion is legally available and how American women are actually now traveling to Mexico to get safe and legal abortions. Finally, she expands on her comments from last May about how the “abortion on demand” messaging of the pro-choice side contributed to the extreme polarization that has made compromise impossible.
Frances is president of Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy and was president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 until 2007. She worked as an abortion provider in New York State in the early 1970s, before the passage of Roe, which she talked about in her May 8, 2022 interview on The Unspeakable. She just celebrated her 80th birthday and she stays over time for paying subscribers to talk about what it’s like to be 80, how she was once told she’d die unless someone donated a kidney to her, and, finally, what it’s like to grow older without children or a partner (it has its upsides!) To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at https://meghandaum.substack.com/.
Guest Bio:
Frances Kissling is currently President of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy in Washington, DC and a professor of philosophy and ethics. She was the president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 to 2007 and has been working in the abortion rights movement since the very early 1970s.
This week, Meghan welcomes evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman. Diana’s areas of research include human sexuality, the effect of hormones on behavior, and how “disgust” (the condition of being disgusted) is an evolutionary adaptation, especially for women. In this conversation, Diana talks about why the field of evolutionary psychology is subject to such much bad-faith misapplication but why uncomfortable truths about human mating patterns can nonetheless offer important lessons. She and Meghan explore the relationship between female social hierarchies and cancel culture (for instance, do women control cancel culture?) and then get into a deep discussion about polyamory. What does it really mean? What does it take to make it work? And how come most people just don’t have the emotional discipline to succeed at it.
For the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Diana talks about how her younger self would feel about her current self, why she’s a transhumanist, what’s stopping the world from embracing “clean meat," why she donated her eggs several years ago and wrote letters to her future genetic offspring, and whether she’d pick herself out of a genetic lineup of embryos. If you’re not yet a paying subscriber, go to meghandaum.substack.com to hear this part of the conversation.
Guest Bio:
Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist and writer.
This week, The Unspeakable welcomes back William Deresiewicz, who enters the pantheon of three-time guest! Bill was first on the pod in the fall of 2020 talking about his book The Death of the Artist and he came back last year to talk about his book of collected works The End of Solitude. He returns now to discuss some articles he published recently about the state of human creativity and the future of creative output. In an article for Tablet called We’re All Bored Of Culture, Bill explores how and why the arts have seemingly become so lackluster in the last several decades and why audiences appear to be so bored. In an article for Persuasion, Bill writes about artificial intelligence and why he thinks that, despite all the fuss, AI, will never be a substitute for human creativity.
As with all of his visits to The Unspeakable, Bill and Meghan talk about why it might be more difficult than ever to be an artist–-not just in terms of making a living but in terms of “making meaning” (whatever that means). Are artists afraid to take risks for fear of public rebuke and the financial penalties that can result? Or does the machinery of the marketplace disincentivize originality in any form? They also talk about Bill’s early career as a dance critic and Meghan’s recent experience revisiting some films that were important to her when she was younger.
For paying subscribers, Bill stays over time to reflect on the aging process and some of his feelings about friendship, masculinity, regret, and (of course) the new gender movement.
Guest Bio:
William Deresiewicz is the author of Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. Find him at www.billderesiewicz.com.
Sandra Martin is an award-winning journalist, literary critic, former obituary writer, and the author of A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices. In that book, which she describes as a social history of the right-to-die movement, Sandra writes about how law, religion, medicine, and social norms can affect people’s bodily autonomy and end-of-life choices in unpredictable and sometimes devastating ways; she also tells some amazing stories. In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about why it’s so difficult to maintain autonomy over our deaths, even if we think we’re making proper arrangements. She explains the difference between physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, what these practices meant in past centuries versus what they mean today, and why we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’ll keep a stash of heavy drugs on hand for when the time comes. She also talks about Canada’s Medical Assistant In Dying Act, better known as MAID. When it was first passed in 2016, MAID allowed adults to obtain medically-assisted death if they were experiencing terrible suffering and their death was "reasonably foreseeable." Since then, MAID has been expanded in ways that have led to some alarming news coverage, including allegations that it’s being offered to people simply because they were chronically ill and couldn’t afford their own care. While Sandra is not an expert on MAID, her familiarity with right-to-die laws in Canada allows her to put those reports in some context and she offers her perspective on how far is too far and, moreover, how overreach by activists could threaten the whole movement.
In the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Sandra stays overtime to talk about how she feels about being the age that she is and what she wants (or thinks she wants) for her own death.
Guest Bio:
Sandra Martin, an award-winning long-form journalist, literary critic, and public policy specialist, is a contributing writer for The Globe and Mail and the author of several books including A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices, a social history of the right to die movement in Canada and around the world. Winner of the B.C. National Non-Fiction Award and a finalist for both the Dafoe Prize and the Donner Prize in Public Policy, A Good Death was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Globe and Mail, the CBC and several other media outlets. Find her at http://www.sandramartinwrites.com.
Fan favorite Sarah Hepola is back! Sarah has visited The Unspeakable to talk about everything from alcoholism to #MeToo to the changes in the media landscape and literary world. Today she returns to discuss a recent solo episode she recorded for Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, the podcast she co-hosts with journalist Nancy Rommelmann. In that episode, Sarah reflected on a semester spent teaching literature and writing to college undergraduates in Dallas, Texas, where she lives. Contrary to public assumptions, the students turned out to be relatively open to new ideas and not hell-bent on canceling their teacher. In this conversation, Sarah talks about what literature the students responded most positively to, what assignments they didn’t like (spoiler: Joan Didion) and what they taught her about the ever-changing English language. Sarah and Meghan also talk about writing memoir, the contradictory social codes of dating, and why little girls touch each other’s hair so much—and why Meghan hated it!
Sarah stayed overtime for bonus content that was so good that Meghan decided to release it along with the main episode. In that portion, they talk about motherhood, non-motherhood, aging, dating, sex and pornography and why older women are so popular with young men on dating apps.
Guest Bio:
Sarah Hepola is the co-host, with Nancy Rommelmann, of the podcast Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em. She is the author of the bestselling memoir Blackout and her essays have appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic, Elle, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Salon, and Texas Monthly. Find her at https://sarahhepola.com.
Relevant links:
https://smokeempodcast.substack.com/p/smoking-diary-16-college-kids-today#details
https://smokeempodcast.substack.com/p/on-not-being-a-mother
Ever since it was introduced in the early 1960s, the birth control pill has been inextricable from the concept of women’s liberation, body autonomy, and just about everyone’s sense of personal freedom and their own life choices. Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening The Pill: Or How We Got Hooked On Hormonal Birth Control, is in favor of all of those things. But she is also among a growing chorus of activists who believe that the sacrosanct nature of the pill discourages honest conversations about the mental and physical health risks posed by hormonal birth control. Instead of taking it for limited spans of time to prevent pregnancy, many women are often on the pill for the bulk of their reproductive lives, which technically is not the way it was designed to be used. In this conversation, Holly talks about how pharmaceutical companies began marketing birth control pills as “lifestyle drugs” and how artificial disruptions to the reproductive system can cause medical problems to go unnoticed and untreated. She also explains how tech-assisted fertility tracking differs from the old-fashioned “rhythm method” and explores the ways in which “infertility as a default setting for women” has affected mating and dating patterns – and not always for the better.
In the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Holly sticks around and talks about the process of developing Teena, a fertility tracking app for teenagers, and also the documentary The Business of Birth Control, which was inspired by her book (and criticized by Meghan on A Special Place In Hell.)
Guest Bio:
Holly Grigg-Spall is the author of Sweetening The Pill: Or How We Got Hooked On Hormonal Birth Control. Released in 2013, the book will mark its ten-year anniversary later this year and was the inspiration for the 2021 documentary The Business Of Birth Control, Holly recently launched Teena, a free education-forward app supporting body literacy for tweens and teens.
This week on the podcast, returning guest Lionel Shriver talks about her latest book, Abominations: Selected Essays From A Career Of Courting Self-Destruction. A collection of her writings from outlets like The Spectator, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, the book also contains some previously unpublished pieces a well as speeches and other public addresses, including a eulogy for her brother. Lionel is perhaps the consummate “thought criminal,” and in this conversation, she talks with Meghan about how she came to assume this mantle (hint: she supported Brexit) and what frustrates her most about culture war discourse. They discuss the Covid lockdown policies, the state of the literary arts, the new gender movement, and the differences between America and the U.K. when it comes to fears about nuanced positions being “weaponized by the other side.” They also consider the “am I canceled or am I just paranoid?” conundrum and wonder how much longer the culture wars can really go on. Finally, Lionel reflects on how perceptions of our own happiness change over time and how, if she could send a message to her younger self, it would be, “you’re not as miserable as you think.” In the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Lionel stays overtime to talk about Meghan’s second favorite subject: end-of-life options. Her last novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, took a darkly funny look at this subject by considering a dozen parallel universes for a couple who planned to kill themselves when they turned 80. Lionel and Meghan pick up on where their conversation left off from Lionel’s last visit to the podcast and talk about their feelings about their own deaths and what it means to enter old age without children or close family. Uplifting stuff! Guest Bio: Lionel Shriver is a columnist for The Specator and the author, most recently, of Abominations: Selected Essays From A Career Of Courting Self-Destruction. Her fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.
We sometimes think of anorexia as an “old school” disease, now eclipsed by disorders such as cutting and similar forms of self-harm. But as journalist Hadley Freeman reports in her new book, the illness has been around for centuries and is still very much with us. In Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, Hadley tells the story of her battle with severe anorexia as a teenager and also investigates the causes, treatments, social factors, and lasting effects of the disease. In this conversation, Hadley explains how even though there’s been a greater focus on self-harm practices such as cutting in recent years, anorexia rose sharply during and after the pandemic and has never been more relevant. She describes how at age 14 she suddenly stopped eating and, within months, lost a third of her body weight and landed in a hospital. It would take three years and nine hospitalizations before she began to get well. It’s often said that anorexia isn’t about being thin as much as it is about retaining control, but Hadley describes her own compulsion as a competitive desire to look ill, with the ultimate success being death itself. Other subjects covered include the connection between anorexia and gender dysphoria, including Meghan’s theory that social media star Dylan Mulvaney is less a gender influencer than an anorexia exhibitionist.
If that’s not unspeakable enough, Hadley stays overtime to talk about Meghan’s favorite third rail, Woody Allen, whom she’s interviewed and written about. They also discuss a recent interview Hadley conducted with author Judy Blume, whose expression of support for JK Rowling got her in trouble on Twitter. To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at https://meghandaum.substack.com/.
Guest Bio:
Hadley Freeman grew up in New York and London. She is a staff writer for The Sunday Times and previously spent 22 years at The Guardian. Her last book, House of Glass, was an international bestseller. Her new book is Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia.
For more than 30 years, Jean Twenge has been studying how generational differences affect the workplace, family life, public policy, interpersonal relationships, and individual identity. Her research has been foundational in many of the current culture war discussions, including in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s seminal book The Coddling of the American Mind. Jean is the author of seven books, including Generation Me and iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. Her new book is Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents and What they Mean for America’s Future. In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about what she’s learned from working with a dataset of 39 million people born between 1925 and 2012. She dispels some of the most common myths about certain generations (for instance that millennials are broke) and talks about the concept of “fast” versus “slow” life strategies. She also talks about how the 1950s got codified as a symbol of traditional values when in fact it was an anonymous case in many ways. For instance, more women were enrolled in college in the 1930s than in the 1950s.
Jean stays overtime for paying Substack subscribers to share her feelings about her own age generation. That happens to be Generation X, which is one of Meghan’s favorite topics. Meghan asks why Gen X is the real "greatest generation." To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at https://meghandaum.substack.com/.
Guest Bio:
Jean Twenge is a professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and the author of several books, including Generation Me, iGen, and The Narcissism Epidemic. Her new book is Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents and What they Mean for America’s Future. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters.
Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist in Ireland who works with adolescents and their families. She’s also an author, documentarian, and speaker, but many Unspeakable listeners may know her from her podcast Gender A Wider Lens, which she co-hosts with therapist (and early Unspeakable guest) Sasha Ayad. This conversation covers aspects of the gender debates, but the main occasion for Stella’s visit is her new book, What Your Teen Is Trying To Tell You: Surviving, Thriving and Reconnecting Through The Teenage Years. In it, she writes about how overreliance on mental health professions has undermined parents’ confidence in their own judgment and instincts. Too often, at the slightest sign of trouble, therapists are brought into the picture, leading everyone to pathologize what in many cases are simply normal, if uncomfortable feelings. Stella discusses the impact of psychotropic prescriptions, the element of social contagion when it comes to “having mental illness,” and posits that the absence of organized religion has created a spiritual void in teenagers that can lead to depression. (Meghan is surprised by this and wonders if this is an Irish thing.) Stell also talks about what it’s been like to be at the forefront of conversations about gender dysphoria and stays overtime to talk about her own dysphoria as a kid.
To hear the bonus portion, become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com.
Guest Bio:
Stella O'Malley is a psychotherapist, best-selling author, public speaker, and parent with many years of experience working in counseling and psychotherapy. Born in Dublin, Stella lives in rural Ireland, where she runs her private practice and lives with her husband and two children. Find her at http://www.stellaomalley.com/.
ChayaLeah Sufrin and Yael Bar-tur hardly need an introduction, since this is their third visit to The Unspeakable! Last fall, the hosts of the acclaimed podcast Ask A Jew explained the meaning of Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkot (or the “autumn holidays,” as Meghan calls them). Now, it’s the spring holiday, and Yael gives her version of the Passover story before ChayaLeah steps in and sets the record straight. ChayaLeah also explains some of the more unusual customs of Orthodox Jews during Passover, including lining your entire kitchen with tin foil and getting your car detailed to make sure it’s completely devoid of crumbs. They also talk about everyone’s favorite topic, the “crisis of masculinity,” and whether matchmaking practices among the Orthodox are better than dating apps. On a lighter note, Yael explains the current political situation in Israel. In the bonus portion for Unspeakale Substack subscribers, Yael and ChayaLeah reflect on being the ages that they are and also talk more about incels. The Unspeakable will take next week off for Passover/Easter/spring break and will return April 17. Guest Bios:
ChayaLeah Sufrin was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Long Beach, CA. After attending university in New York, ChayaLeah moved back to Southern California and spent fifteen years teaching High school Jewish history and as the Education Director at Shul by the Shore. ChayaLeah served as the Senior Jewish Educator at Long Beach Hillel for three years and is now the Executive Director. ChayaLeah, together with her husband Boruch, has four teenage sons.
Yael Bar-tur is a crisis communications and social media consultant who previously served as the director of social media and digital strategy for the New York City Police Department where she developed and implemented the social media and digital communications strategy.
Ruby Warrington has staked out ground in a number of areas. She is the founder of the self-publishing platform The Numinous and also a leading figure in the “sober curious” movement; she coined the term and is also the author of the 2018 book of the same name. She visited The Unspeakable to talk about a subject very close to Meghan’s heart; the decision not to have kids. In her new book Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood, Ruby examines the rise in women (and men) who are childless--either by choice or circumstance--and reports on the “global reproduction slowdown” of the last several decades. She shares her own story and reflects on how much (or how little) the family dynamics of her own childhood shaped her choice not to become a mother. She and Meghan talk about how childless people are planning for their old age, the degree to which concerns about climate change are affecting people’s choices, and whether there really is a global population crisis (and if so, which direction it’s going in).
For paying subscribers to the Unspeakable Susbtack, Ruby stays overtime for a topic that has never been covered on the podcast; astrology! Meghan is skeptical about the whole thing (in other words, a typical Aquarius) but nonetheless interested in what her birth chart might tell her about her struggles of late. They also talk at length about the sober curious movement, including how and why Ruby began hosting sober curious events and how this approach is different from traditional twelve-step programs. Meghan even shares a bit about her still-in-progress year off from drinking.
Guest Bio:
Ruby Warrington is the author of Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood and is the creator of the term “sober curious." Author of the 2018 book Sober Curious and million-download podcast of the same title, her work has spearheaded a global movement to reevaluate our relationship to alcohol. Other works include Material Girl, Mystical World (2017), The Numinous Astro Deck (2019), and The Sober Curious Reset (2020). With 20+ years’ experience as a lifestyle journalist and editor, Ruby is also the founder of the self-publishing incubator Numinous Books.
Stephen Marche is the author of six books, has been a columnist at Esquire, has taught Shakespeare at the college level and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other publications. By any reasonable measure, his career is an unmitigated success. But seen through a different lens (for instance his own) it can also look a lot like failure. That’s true of just about every writer who ever lived and Stephen grapples with this dichotomy in new book, On Writing And Failure, which is both a literary history and a reverse pep talk for aspiring artists. In this conversation, Stephen talks about how writers from James Baldwin to James Joyce to Li Bai (and many, many others) built legacies on the sands of constant rejection. He also shares stories of his own failures and offers some thoughts about how the contours of failure and rejection have changed in the new independent creator economy.
For paying Substack subscribers, Stephen stays overtime to talk about failure outside of the literary arena, including the perils of marriage and childrearing. Meghan shares her story about getting rejected from a dream job because of a typo in her resumé and Stephen remembers what it was like when his first book, a novel, received a positive New York Times review from none other than . . . Meghan! Guest Bio: Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Next Civil War, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). He has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus and many others. He is the host of the hit audio series How Not to Fck Up Your Kids Too Bad, and its sequel How Not to Fck Up Your Marriage Too Bad on Audible. His latest book is On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer (Field Notes).
Lincoln Jones is the director of the American Contemporary Ballet Company in Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 2011. Lincoln took an unusual path to dance and has an approach to performance and stage production that is worth discussing in its own right. But he came across Meghan’s radar because of his unlikely involvement in the new free speech debates. In this conversation, Lincoln explains how that happened (spoiler alert: he didn’t want to perfunctorily post a black square on his company’s website in the summer of 2020) and talks about how even the ballet world has been affected by the censoriousness of the current moment. Most of all, though, he talks about dance. In a conversation unlike you’ve heard on The Unspeakable, Lincoln talks about what choreography means to him, especially the choreography and dance of Fred Astaire, and about how movement maps onto the human experience and translates to the stage.
In the bonus portion for paying subscribers at https://meghandaum.substack.com Lincoln shares his feelings about his age–47 years old–and talks about how awareness of his mortality is fueling his work. He offers his opinion about TikTok dances, Michael Jackson, and discloses how he really feels about the film LaLa Land.
Guest Bio:
Lincoln Jones is the director of the American Contemporary Ballet Company in Los Angeles. Learn more about the company at https://www.acbdances.com.
Freddie deBoer has a very popular Substack newsletter and is the author of the 2020 book, The Cult of Smart. He writes about culture and social politics and is known for his trenchant insights into mental health issues as well as his Marxist politics. He visited The Unspeakable to talk about a number of subjects, including a recent Unspeakable conversation about involuntary psychiatric treatment. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 20, Freddie makes the case that it’s actually quite difficult to find mental healthcare for oneself or for a loved one, particularly in a crisis situation. He talks about the circumstances that led to his first stay in a psychiatric hospital, what services he received both during and after those stays, and why it’s so difficult to find meaningful help for homeless people in visible mental distress.
Freddie also stayed overtime and discussed his recent essay about why the 1990s were objectively the best time to be alive. That’s a favorite subject of Meghan’s, as is the subject of how to cope with the vicissitudes of the new creative economy, and he covered that as well. To hear this portion, become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com.
Guest Bio:
Freddie deBoer’s writing can be found at https://freddiedeboer.substack.com. His 2020 book, The Cult Of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice was published by St. Martin’s Press.
Peter Moskos is a criminologist and sociologist who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is also a former Baltimore City Cop, which was the subject of his award-winning 2008 book, Cop In The Hood. Peter was one of the very first guests on The Unspeakable, back in August of 2020, when he talked about the unrest following the death of George Floyd and the mainstreaming of police abolition messaging. A lot has happened since then and Meghan invited him back to reflect on the last two and a half years and talk about what progress, if any, has been made when it comes to police conduct, media coverage of policing, and, most of all, public perceptions of police brutality and the number of Americans killed by cops every year.
Peter stayed overtime for some still-very-serious but also fun conversation about how he feels about his life these days, what he does and does not miss about the 1980s and 90s, and his relatively new hobby playing the autoharp. Most of all, he talked about the book he’s been writing on the history of policing in New York City from the 1970s onward. To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at meghdaum.substack.com.
Most people associate forcible detentions in psychiatric wards with barbaric practices of the past. But as Canadian investigative journalist Rob Wipond reports in his new book, involuntary psychiatric treatment is all too common today. In Your Consent Is Not Required, Rob shows just how little agency patients often have in their own care and, moreover, how the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry benefit from as many people as possible being classified as “mental patients.” In this conversation, he talks with Meghan about how psychiatric interventions can be weaponized against patients, why therapies such as electroshock remain so widely used, and how wellness checks and calls to suicide hotlines can result in massive overreach that traps patients in a deeply-flawed and often poorly regulated system.
For paying subscribers: Rob stayed overtime for a more personal conversation about how he feels about his life and career these days and how he went from acting in local theater, performing music, and doing various kinds of community work to being an investigative reporter. He also shared his theory as to why Canadians do so well in American late-night television. To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com
Guest Bio: Rob Wipond is a freelance journalist and creative nonfiction writer who writes frequently at the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, community issues, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards, and he’s the author of the book Your Consent is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships (BenBella, 2023).
This week Meghan welcomes back journalist Jamie Kirchick. Jamie was on The Unspeakable last fall with Mike Pesca and Virginia Heffernan, his co-hosts on the political analysis podcast Not Even Mad, which is currently on hiatus. Now, he’s here for a very different reason. On February 4, Jamie published an extraordinarily long and quite remarkable–even shocking– article about the case of the film actor Armie Hammer, whose reputation was annihilated in early 2021 when he was accused by a series of women of physical and sexual violence and even cannibalism. Though investigations have so far turned up nothing along these lines, the court of public opinion has held firm in its rebuke of Hammer and there’s been little incentive in Hollywood or the news media to take an honest look at the facts. But Jamie’s article may be a significant turning point and he came on the podcast to recap the story, talk about what it was like to report it, and reflect on the various cultural dynamics that allowed things to play out as they did. Jamie is a columnist for Tablet Magazine and a writer for the digital news and culture site Air Mail, where his story, Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence, was published.
Jamie stuck around for some bonus chat about Meghan’s favorite question; how he feels about being the age he is (spoiler: 39). That led to other topics; for instance how he feels about being gay amidst a so-called “queer” revolution and how, as an elder millennial, he feels about Gen Z. To hear that portion, go to meghandaudm.substack.com and become a paying subscriber.
Guest Bio:
Jamie Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer-at-large for Air Mail and the author of the bestseller Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.
Richie Hardcore is an educator and public speaker based in New Zealand, where his work explores mental health and wellness, masculinity, and issues around domestic and sexual violence as well as addiction. He is also a former champion fighter, competing in professional kickboxing as well as the Thai combat sport Muay Thai. Richie visited The Unspeakable to talk about his work with young people about understanding their sexuality in relation to sexual messaging in the culture, particularly when it comes to pornography. He reflects on the ethics of sex work, the elevation of kink, and how social media can cause things like depression, anxiety, and trauma to get tangled up with gender identity confusion. He also sticks around for more than 30 minutes of bonus content, where he talks about his recent Master's thesis on hegemonic masculinities, how he feels about being the age he is (42) and answers listener questions about his favorite hardcore bands.
To hear the bonus content, become a paying subscriber at https://meghandaum.substack.com/
Guest Bio:
Former champion Muay Thai fighter Richie Hardcore is an educator, speaker and activist working in family and sexual violence prevention. He talks to people from all walks of life and all ages about masculinity, mental health, pornography and well-being. Richie has spent time as a radio host, community worker in drug and alcohol harm reduction, a campaigner against domestic and sexual violence and as a sexual consent educator.
Comedian Paul Gilmartin is the host of the long running podcast The Mental Illness Happy Hour, where he interviews all kinds of people–from celebrities to friends from his own support groups–about issues related to mental health, addiction, and personal struggles of all varieties. Meghan (despite being 100 percent sane) was a guest on The Mental Illness Happy Hour back in 2011 and she and Paul catch up on what’s transpired since then and how the podcast has evolved. Paul talks about what he’s learned about mental health over the years, how he approaches his interviews, and how his own life circumstances have played a big part in his podcast. Famously upfront about his past and present struggles, Paul talks about his mother’s sexual inappropriateness, his challenges with intimacy, and what it was like to be single again in his 50s after a divorce. He and Meghan also discuss the mental health effects of the pandemic and Paul (who supports masking) shares his theory that some young people will have internalized mask trauma that will develop into a sexual kink later in life. You heard it here first!
If that’s not personal enough, Paul sticks around for 30 minutes of bonus content and reflects on turning 60, staying afloat in the new creative economy, being in a new relationship after divorce, and getting better at intimacy while still enjoying his solitude, and how he felt at 11-years-old when a doctor told him he would never have children. (You read that right.) He asks Meghan some questions, too! To listen to this portion, support the podcast at meghandaum.substack.com and listen to premium episodes there.
Guest Bio:
Paul Gilmartin launched the Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast in 2011. Before that, he hosted TBS’ Dinner and a Movie for 16 years. As a standup he has appeared on Comedy Central Presents: Paul Gilmartin and number other shows. He is a frequent guest on the Jimmy Dore Show, performing political satire as right-wing Congressman Richard Martin.
Find him at:
@mentalpod
@dumbpile
Home - The Mental Illness Happy Hour mentalpod.com
Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and a prominent voice in the effort to bring greater nuance to conversations about anti-racism and identity movements. Erec was on The Unspeakable back in July of 2021 talking about Critical Race Theory, specifically what it means and where it began. Now he’s back for a more free-ranging conversation about the state of racial discussions on campuses, in the workplace and in the culture more broadly. In this episode, he and Meghan discuss the Elimination of Harmful Language initiative released by Stanford last month, which classified words such as “brave” and “guru” as problematic. Erec offers practical advice about how to respond when Critical Race Theory or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion protocols are introduced into your school or workplace; for instance how to distinguish positive and useful implementations of CRT and DEI from counterproductive ones, what questions to ask, who to ask, and how to ask those questions in a non-threatening way. He talks about the concept of a “kairotic moment,” why, as a black academic, he’s become (in his words) a pariah in his field, and why he thinks contemporary anti-racism efforts have a hand in keeping racism alive. This episode offers bonus content! Erec sticks around for some extra conversation that’s available to paying subscribers at https://meghandaum.substack.com. Here, Meghan asks how Erec feels about his life circumstances at this moment–not just professionally but personally. Erec talks about the price he’s paid for not toeing the party line, what it’s like to live in a rural area as an unmarried middle aged person, and the loneliness of being out of ideological step with your peers and neighbors. Guest Bio: Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Although he has eclectic scholarly interests, Smith’s primary focuses on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. He is a co-founder of Free Black Thought, a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia. Smith is a Writing Fellow for Heterodox Academy, a Senior Fellow for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and an advisor for Counterweight, an organization that advocates for classical liberal concepts of social justice.
Tara Henley is a journalist and podcaster based in Canada who has become one of the most celebrated figures in the heterodox space there. She is the author of the 2020 book Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life, and was a longtime producer of television and radio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She left the CBC in late 2021 and made a splash last January with the very first installment of her new Substack newsletter: a post about ideological conformity at the CBC and how it encapsulates disconnect between media in general and the concerns and opinions of ordinary citizens. Tara joined Meghan for a conversation about what’s transpired for her in the last year and, above all, why journalism has changed course so dramatically why so many people are reluctant to speak out even if they profoundly disagree with what’s happening. She also talks about her deeply progressive upbringing in Vancouver, her relationship to second and third wave feminism, and the ways in which she thinks urgent matters around economic hardship and class politics are being ignored.
Tara stuck around for some bonus content that’s available to paying subscribers to the Unspeakable’s Substack. Here, she shares her feelings about aging, speaks candidly about some of the failed promises of the 1980s and, finally, reflects on cancer diagnosis she received in her 20s. She turns the tables and asks Meghan some personal questions, too. To hear this portion, please become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com.
Guest Bio:
Tara Henley is a Canadian writer and podcaster, and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Over the past two decades, her work has appeared on CBC Radio and TV, and in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country and around the world.
Bridget Phetasy is a prominent podcaster, YouTuber and writer in the heterodox (or, as she likes to call it, politically homeless) space. Jeren Montgomery is a family therapist and also Bridget’s husband. As if Bridget didn’t already have enough projects, last year the two started Factory Settings, a podcast that explores how built-in biases affect the way people consume information and form opinions. They visited The Unspeakable to talk about how their own settings affect their relationship and what they’ve discovered in the process of developing the podcast. They also describe how they met in recovery and explain how seeing the world through the lens of sobriety affects their approach to the subjects they cover. This is Bridget’s third appearance on The Unspeakable, but it feels like the first time! Guest Bios: Bridget Phetasy is a writer, comedian and Twitter addict. She is host of the podcast Walk-Ins Welcome and Factory Settings which she co-hosts with her husband, Jeren Montgomery. She also stars in her satirical comedy show Dumpster Fire available on YouTube. Her most important role is mom to her daughter, Matilda.
Jeren Montgomery is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at a mental health and substance abuse treatment center in Los Angeles, California. Avid reader, part-time gamer and husband to Bridget Phetasy, Jeren also spends way too much time online.
Sarah Polley has been acting in film and television since the age of five. She appeared in films like The Adventures of Baron Munchasuen was dubbed “Canada’s Sweetheart” for her starring role in the hit television series The Road To Avonlea. Though she continued acting through her teens, starring in acclaimed films like The Sweet Hereafter, she’s made her career as a writer and director. Her 2006 debut feature, Away From Her, garnered an Best Actress Oscar nomination for star Julie Christie and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Polley. Her other films include Take This Waltz and the 2012 documentary Stories We Tell. Polley's latest film, Women Talking, is her first American studio release and features an almost all-female cast, including Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand. In this interview, Sarah talks about her entire body of film work as well as Run Towards The Danger, a collection of essays she published earlier this year. A longtime political activist with a particular commitment to emotional and physical safeguarding of the casts and crews on her movie sets, she also discusses the complexities of some of the current conversations around #MeToo movement and other social justice movements.
Guest Bio: Sarah Polley received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for her first film as director- Away From Her, based on the short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro. This film also garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for star Julie Christie. Her next film Take This Waltz starred Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, and Sarah Silverman. Stories We Tell, her documentary which examines secrets and memory in her own family, won Best Documentary Film awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as a Writer’s Guild of America award for its screenplay. As an actor, Polley starred in a wide variety of films including Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (Best Supporting Actress award from the Boston Society of Film Critics), Doug Liman’s Go (Independent Spirit Award nomination), Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody opposite Jared Leto, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water opposite Ciaran Hinds, David Cronenberg’s Existenz, Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me (Canadian Screen Award, Best Actress), Audrey Wells’ Guinevere, Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking, Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim, and Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In 2022, Polley released Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, an autobiographical collection of essays detailing her relationship with her body and how her memory of past and present experiences has contributed to her evolving understanding of self.
Zubin Damania is a Stanford trained physician and founder of Turntable Health, an innovative health care clinic and early model of “Health 3.0.” He spent many years working with patients in hospitals, during which he launched a shadow career on YouTube under the pseudonym ZDoggMD. He is now host of the hugely successful podcast the ZDoggMD Show, where he talks about public health and problems within the medical field. In this conversation, Zubin explains not only why it’s so hard to find a doctor these days but why it’s so hard to be a doctor. He also talks about why people in the medical field are prone to groupthink, why Obamacare made things worse, and how self-employed people who buy their own insurance (like Meghan) might begin to rethink their whole approach.
Guest Bio: Dr. Zubin Damania is an internist and former hospitalist and now a leader in the movement to build a new model of health care. He is the host of the ZDoggMD show, which you can find at https://zdoggmd.com.
Last fall, Meghan was commissioned by The New York Times to conduct an interview with a therapist who was politically conservative. The editors were curious about the question of whether most therapists lean toward the political left and whether this causes some some patients to self-censor because they fear judgment. They editors tracked down Dea Bridge, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado, and The Q&A-style interview was published in the October 4, 2022 edition of the Times opinion section. The interivew touched a nerve with readers, both positively and negatively. One of the central questions readers asked was also one of Meghan’s questions: what about Dea’s particular approach was “conservative?” Moreover, why should politics enter into therapy at all? Given the huge response to the conversation, Meghan invited Dea to continue it on The Unspeakable. Here, Dea talks about approaches to (and definitions of) trauma, how her own time in the military influences her work with veterans, and whether an “up by your bootstraps” approach to therapy might be more useful than some people assume. She also talks about how valuable the Times experience has been, even though when the editors first contacted her she wondered if it was an internet scam. Guest Bio
Dea Bridge is a Colorado Licensed Professional Counselor, Nationally Certified Counselor, and a Full Operating Provider/Evaluator through the Colorado Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB). She is also certified in Equine Assisted Psychotherapy through the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA). Her counseling experience includes working with military veterans, law enforcement / corrections officers/first responders, adults involved with the criminal justice system, adults with cognitive or developmental disabilities, and community mental health crisis evaluation and management. She is an Army veteran and former first responder.
Nina Paley is an illustrator, filmmaker, and self-described TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). Corinna Cohn is a transwoman who happens to be Nina’s good friend. According to the culture war playback, the two should be mortal enemies. Instead, they have a podcast together; Heterodorx, which focuses on their daily lives and the current state of the gender wars. In this conversation, Nina and Corinna talk with Meghan about what drew them together as friends, how the podcast emerged, and, above all, how their individual experiences around sex roles, stereotypes and power differentials led to their “gender critical” stance. They also get candid about their relationships to their own sexuality. Nina recalls her adventures in sex positivity in the San Francisco counter culture in her younger years, including putting makeup on her crossdressing boyfriends. Corinna speaks candidly about the physical, psychological and sexual effects of her transition, at age 19, and why she urges caution in kids now seeking medicalized transition. Finally, Nina explains why she uses he/him pronouns for Corinna and Corinna explains why this doesn’t bother her since she has better things to do.
This episode is sponsored by Better Help online therapy. Guest Bios: Corinna Cohn writes about life having undergone the process of gender transition as a teenager in the 1990s. Corinna’s writing has appeared in Quillette and the Washington Post. Nina Paley is the creator of the critically acclaimed animated musical feature films Sita Sings The Blues and Seder-Masochism, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, and Free Culture advocate. Find her at https://blog.ninapaley.com.
Behind every Infamous news story is a journalist trying to hold power to account. Join reporters Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman as they take an in-depth look at the most explosive scandals of this century. From high-profile divorces to sex cults to the lies that started a war, they’ll guide you through the juiciest, most outrageous, celeb-filled stories of the last two decades, and give you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to shine an unflattering light on the world’s most powerful people.
A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production.
Maud Maron had a long career as a public defender and is now a schools advocate in New York City, where she was board president of Manhattan’s largest school district. This year, she competed in the Democratic primary among a large field of candidates gunning for a rare open seat in New York’s 10th district. She didn’t win, but she remains a prominent voice among liberals seeking to elevate moderate Democratic positions. In this conversation, recorded shortly after the evening of the midterm elections, Maud talks about her political journey from a typical New York progressive to someone whose centrist views are often deemed transgressive by her liberal neighbors. She recounts how she was fired from the Legal Aid Society for pointing out what she saw as the inherent racism of DEI trainings in the workplace and explains why she won’t shut up about gender politics, regardless of how impolitic that is. Most of all, she responds to the results of the midterms and talks about what she foresees for the Democratic Party. Will she stay or will she go independent? And how much difference does it make anyway? Guest Bio: Maud Maron is a New York City based attorney and parents’ rights activist. Maud began her career as a criminal defense attorney at the Legal Aid Society where she worked as a staff attorney in Manhattan and the Bronx. She is the co-founder of PLACE NYC, a parent-lead, pro-merit organization dedicated to improving NYC’s public schools. She is a founding member of the Board of Advisors of FAIR and a frequent contributor to many national periodicals including Newsweek, NYPost, NYDaily News and Common Sense.
Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the faculty director and a co-founder of the Mill Institute, an organization aimed at helping educators learn how to foster productive, respectful discussions that make room for a variety of viewpoints in the classroom. In this conversation, Ilana talks about her work around a concept she’s coined “the certainty trap.” The idea is that being "absolutely sure" about a particular position or opinion may actually be a sign of underlying doubt. Unsurprisingly, this kind of unconscious cognitive dissonance may in fact have a lot to do with our current troubles as a society when it comes to public discourse. In this conversation, Ilana talks with Meghan about how the word “truth” can often throw people off course and explains how she works with her students to challenge their assumptions and biases. In the second part of the interview, Ilana walks Meghan through a couple of positions about which Meghan feels “certain.” In so doing, she floats a potentially mind-blowing concept: if you replace feeling “certain” with feeling “confident,” your entire worldview can shift in a more productive direction. And you might even be better able to change the minds of others. Guest Bio: Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Faculty Director of The Mill Institute at UATX. In May of 2022 she published her seminal essay, The Certainty Trap, in Tablet. She is also the co-author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, the creator of the Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes video series and the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting.
This week The Unspeakable welcomes three guests. Mike Pesca, Virginia Heffernan and Jamie Kirchick are the hosts of the brand new podcast Not Even Mad. Mike, who’s the host of the long running podcast The Gist, conceived Not Even Mad as an alternative to the glut of podcasts in which the hosts and guests do nothing but agree with each other. With Virginia representing the political left, Jamie the right and Mike in the middle, Not Even Mad offers balanced, informed discussions that also model civility and mutual respect. In this conversation, the three talk about how they manage this feat, why they hold the political views that they do, and how they stay friends despite strong disagreements. Jamie also shares the secret of becoming an “instant New York Times bestseller.” (Hint: it’s easier than you think.) In Guest Bios: Mike Pesca is the host of the podcast the Gist, the longest running daily news podcast. He is a former sports reporter and producer for NPR, and previously worked for Slate. He is author of the book “Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History”.
Virginia Heffernan is a columnist for Wired and is an experienced host of such podcasts as Trumpcast and This Is Critical.
Jamie Kirchick is the New York Times bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and a columnist for Tablet Magazine.
This week The Unspeakable welcomes three guests. Mike Pesca, Virginia Heffernan and Jamie Kirchick are the hosts of the brand new podcast Not Even Mad. Mike, who’s the host of the long running podcast The Gist, conceived Not Even Mad as an alternative to the glut of podcasts in which the hosts and guests do nothing but agree with each other. With Virginia representing the political left, Jamie the right and Mike in the middle, Not Even Mad offers balanced, informed discussions that also model civility and mutual respect. In this conversation, the three talk about how they manage this feat, why they hold the political views that they do, and how they stay friends despite strong disagreements. Jamie also shares the secret of becoming an “instant New York Times bestseller.” (Hint: it’s easier than you think.) In Guest Bios: Mike Pesca is the host of the podcast the Gist, the longest running daily news podcast. He is a former sports reporter and producer for NPR, and previously worked for Slate. He is author of the book “Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History”.
Virginia Heffernan is a columnist for Wired and is an experienced host of such podcasts as Trumpcast and This Is Critical.
Jamie Kirchick is the New York Times bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and a columnist for Tablet Magazine.
The last several decades have seen countless initiatives to improve educational and professional opportunities for girls and women. And they worked! Women now outpace men across any number of metrics, notably educational attainment but also mental and physical health, home ownership, civic engagement and, increasingly, income. Richard Reeves’s new book, Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It, explores some of the unintended consequences of all that progress and looks at how structural changes in society have benefitted women while leaving many men without coherent roles or purpose. In this interview, Richard talks about why he thinks boys should start school a year later than girls, why screens and video games aren’t the boogymen we might think they are, and how the role of “provider” has shifted from men to women, especially in the lower and working classes. He and Meghan discuss why it’s so hard to talk about these issues without being written off as an anti-feminist or men’s rights activist, what Richard has learned from raising three boys himself, and whether Gen-Xers actually grew up in a kind of sexual revolution sweet spot; post equal rights but pre-dating apps and hookup culture. Guest Bio: Richard Reeves is the author of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It. He is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where his research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and family change. A contributor to The Atlantic, National Affairs, Democracy Journal, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, he is also the author of John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It.
The last several decades have seen countless initiatives to improve educational and professional opportunities for girls and women. And they worked! Women now outpace men across any number of metrics, notably educational attainment but also mental and physical health, home ownership, civic engagement and, increasingly, income. Richard Reeves’s new book, Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It, explores some of the unintended consequences of all that progress and looks at how structural changes in society have benefitted women while leaving many men without coherent roles or purpose. In this interview, Richard talks about why he thinks boys should start school a year later than girls, why screens and video games aren’t the boogymen we might think they are, and how the role of “provider” has shifted from men to women, especially in the lower and working classes. He and Meghan discuss why it’s so hard to talk about these issues without being written off as an anti-feminist or men’s rights activist, what Richard has learned from raising three boys himself, and whether Gen-Xers actually grew up in a kind of sexual revolution sweet spot; post equal rights but pre-dating apps and hookup culture. Guest Bio: Richard Reeves is the author of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It. He is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where his research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and family change. A contributor to The Atlantic, National Affairs, Democracy Journal, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, he is also the author of John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It.
Michael Shermer is a longtime figure in the New Atheist movement that arose in the early 2000s. He is the Founding Editor of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. His new book, Conspiracy: Why The Rational Believe The Irrational, looks at the psychological processes and societal forces that cause people, often en masse, to believe outlandish stories and theories. In this conversation, Michael talks with Meghan about a range of subjects, including what makes certain conspiracy theories take hold, what "cognitive dissonance" really means, why even military pilots can’t be trusted when it come to UFO sightings, and how he went from being a born again Christian to a committed atheist. They also discuss the state of the heterodox movement and ask whether tribalism can be solved with a tribe.
Guest Bio: Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American and he now writes a weekly Substack column. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain.
Michael Shermer is a longtime figure in the New Atheist movement that arose in the early 2000s. He is the Founding Editor of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. His new book, Conspiracy: Why The Rational Believe The Irrational, looks at the psychological processes and societal forces that cause people, often en masse, to believe outlandish stories and theories. In this conversation, Michael talks with Meghan about a range of subjects, including what makes certain conspiracy theories take hold, what "cognitive dissonance" really means, why even military pilots can’t be trusted when it come to UFO sightings, and how he went from being a born again Christian to a committed atheist. They also discuss the state of the heterodox movement and ask whether tribalism can be solved with a tribe.
Guest Bio: Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American and he now writes a weekly Substack column. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain.
It’s a very special "Meghan has Covid” edition of The Unspeakable! With barely any voice, Meghan speaks with Leslie Bienen, a public health expert and author of dozens of op-eds calling for a saner approach to covid safety measures. Unlike most people, including (and especially?) most journalists, Leslie knows how to read and interpret scientific data. She’s also a veterinarian who has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans. In the fall of 2020, her dismay over seemingly nonsensical school closures led her to become outspoken about the growing hysteria around Covid illness and transmission, particularly as it pertained to children. In this conversation, she explains what was and wasn’t known about things like masking, vaccines, and transmission at various points during the pandemic. She talks about what the pandemic revealed about people’s chronic anxiety, why masking children makes no sense at this point, and how best protect vulnerable populations. Finally, Leslie explains why she told Meghan not to get the second booster shot, even though Meghan got Covid anyway. (Spoiler: that’s the exactly the reason.) Paying subscribers to The Unspeakable’s Substack page have access to about thirty minutes of bonus content related to a completely different matter — the myths and unnecessary stigmas around fertility treatment. Visit meghandaum.substack.com and join now to hear it. Guest Bio: Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and professor at the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health. She has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans, including rabies, brucellosis, tuberculosis, hendra virus and others, for many years. She teaches courses on global health, writing, and other topics and has published more than thirty op-eds on Covid policy during the past two years, particularly around children and school closures.
It’s a very special "Meghan has Covid” edition of The Unspeakable! With barely any voice, Meghan speaks with Leslie Bienen, a public health expert and author of dozens of op-eds calling for a saner approach to covid safety measures. Unlike most people, including (and especially?) most journalists, Leslie knows how to read and interpret scientific data. She’s also a veterinarian who has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans. In the fall of 2020, her dismay over seemingly nonsensical school closures led her to become outspoken about the growing hysteria around Covid illness and transmission, particularly as it pertained to children. In this conversation, she explains what was and wasn’t known about things like masking, vaccines, and transmission at various points during the pandemic. She talks about what the pandemic revealed about people’s chronic anxiety, why masking children makes no sense at this point, and how best protect vulnerable populations. Finally, Leslie explains why she told Meghan not to get the second booster shot, even though Meghan got Covid anyway. (Spoiler: that’s the exactly the reason.) Paying subscribers to The Unspeakable’s Substack page have access to about thirty minutes of bonus content related to a completely different matter — the myths and unnecessary stigmas around fertility treatment. Visit meghandaum.substack.com and join now to hear it. Guest Bio: Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and professor at the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health. She has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans, including rabies, brucellosis, tuberculosis, hendra virus and others, for many years. She teaches courses on global health, writing, and other topics and has published more than thirty op-eds on Covid policy during the past two years, particularly around children and school closures.
It’s another episode about . . . gender! Specifically what’s really happening when it comes to medical protocols for young people seeking gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. Last month, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, convened for its annual meeting and announced new guidelines for treating gender dysphoric kids, including guidelines about surgery for minors under eighteen. Though the conventional wisdom has long been that actual surgery performed on minors was rare (admittedly, Meghan parroted this line) it’s looking increasingly like such surgery is a lot more common than previously thought. In this conversation, Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who's been writing about the complexities of the new gender wars since 2018, talks with Meghan about the chain of misinformation that results when pediatricians and other clinicians rely on advice from professional medical organizations that have been captured by ideology. He explains what we know about the numbers of kids being medically treated for gender dysphoria and how much data even exists about longterm outcomes. Colin describes—sometimes in graphic detail—what goes into surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and why their high rate of complication seems to be ignored by the medical establishment and the media. He also explains what “intersex” actually means (spoiler: there are not as many intersex people as there are natural redheads) and how the entire concept has been distorted and misused when talking about sex and gender identity. Guest bio: Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and Founding Editor of Reality’s Last Stand a publication and newsletter exploring the biology and sex and gender ideology. He is a contributing editor for Quillette and an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM). He received his PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Colin has published articles in major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Quillette, ad The Times, and has been a guest on many popular podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience.
It’s another episode about . . . gender! Specifically what’s really happening when it comes to medical protocols for young people seeking gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. Last month, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, convened for its annual meeting and announced new guidelines for treating gender dysphoric kids, including guidelines about surgery for minors under eighteen. Though the conventional wisdom has long been that actual surgery performed on minors was rare (admittedly, Meghan parroted this line) it’s looking increasingly like such surgery is a lot more common than previously thought. In this conversation, Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who's been writing about the complexities of the new gender wars since 2018, talks with Meghan about the chain of misinformation that results when pediatricians and other clinicians rely on advice from professional medical organizations that have been captured by ideology. He explains what we know about the numbers of kids being medically treated for gender dysphoria and how much data even exists about longterm outcomes. Colin describes—sometimes in graphic detail—what goes into surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and why their high rate of complication seems to be ignored by the medical establishment and the media. He also explains what “intersex” actually means (spoiler: there are not as many intersex people as there are natural redheads) and how the entire concept has been distorted and misused when talking about sex and gender identity. Guest bio: Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and Founding Editor of Reality’s Last Stand a publication and newsletter exploring the biology and sex and gender ideology. He is a contributing editor for Quillette and an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM). He received his PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Colin has published articles in major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Quillette, ad The Times, and has been a guest on many popular podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience.
If you are terrorized by your Fitbit, guilt tripped by half the items in your refrigerator, or broke from trying every new juice cleanse that comes along, this week’s guest, Rina Raphael, will make you feel better. Her new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the Promise of Self-Care, examines the roots and ramifications of America’s latest health craze; extreme health.
Rina is perhaps not your typical Unspeakale guest. She’s not full of “dangerous” ideas or “unspeakable" opinions. But she had the courage to look not only at the wellness industry but also the validity of now-sacred concepts like self-care and clean eating. Surprise, surprise; many hypocrisies and contradictions lurk within. Rina is a longtime journalist who’s covered the health and the fitness industries decades. In this conversation, she talks about how healthy living has become a lifestyle brand, explains what orthorexia means and reflects on her own obsessive patterns when it comes to diet and exercise. (Meghan, in turn, explains why when she eats a donut she always breaks off and discards one piece before finishing the rest.) Rina talks about the meaninglessness of the term “natural,” why women turn to self-care partly because they feel let down by the traditional health care system, and how thinking too much about being healthy can sometimes make you quite sick. Rina Raphael is a journalist who specializes in health, wellness, tech, and women’s issues. She was a features contributor for Fast Company magazine and has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC News, and Medium’s Elemental, among other publications. Her wellness industry newsletter, Well To Do, covers trends and news and offers market analysis. Raphael has spoken on the wellness industry at national conferences such as the Global Wellness Summit and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Previously, she served as a senior producer and lifestyle editor at TODAY.com and NBCNews.com.
ChayaLeah and Yael are both Jewish, but in very different ways. ChayaLeah has lived her whole life in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California. Yael is a secular Israeli now living in New York City. In 2020, the two became friends when they met online and began having conversations about Judaism — many of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about orthodox Jews that she would have been afraid or embarrassed to ask someone else. The discussions were so interesting that they began recording them and from there, the ASK A JEW podcast was born. In this conversation, ChayaLeah explains the meaning behind the various Jewish holidays this season, which Meghan mostly associates with parking rules suspensions in New York City. They also talk about the benefits and drawbacks of living in a religious community, marrying early (in an arranged marriage, no less) versus staying single for a long time, and how ChayaLeah will go about looking for wives for her sons. They also cover timelier subjects, including a recent New York Times article about the quality of eduction in yeshivas. This episode offers juicy bonus content! Last time, the ladies compared notes about which famous terrorists and world dictators qualify as “hot" despite being horrible human beings. They reprise that discussion in the bonus content and also reflect on the death of Queen Elizabeth and the hotness of various royals. You can access this by becoming a paid subscriber to Meghan’s new Substack at https://meghandaum.substack.com. Guest Bios: ChayaLeah Sufrin was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Long Beach, CA. After attending university in New York, ChayaLeah moved back to Southern California and spent fifteen years teaching High school Jewish history and as the Education Director at Shul by the Shore. ChayaLeah served as the Senior Jewish Educator at Long Beach Hillel for three years and is now the Executive Director. ChayaLeah, together with her husband Boruch, has four teenage sons.
**Yael Bar-tur** is a crisis communications and social media consultant who previously served as the director of social media and digital strategy for the New York City Police Department where she developed and implemented the social media and digital communications strategy.
Louise Perry is just thirty-years-old, but she’s written a book that’s poised to take the wind out of more than half a century of feminist activism. The Case Against The Sexual Revolution: A New Guide To Sex in the 21st Century is a manifesto of sorts. But it’s also a carefully researched, deeply considered interrogation into whether the sexual liberation movement was really as good for women as is commonly assumed. In this conversation, Louise explains why she thinks the feminist movement’s disregard for certain fundamental differences between men and women—not to mention its glossing over issues around motherhood— led to unintended consequences that few are willing to acknowledge. She also talks about the effects of pornography, the brutal inequities of the dating economy, whether the tech economy has rendered physical strength less valuable in the workplace, and whether being a mother is fundamentally incompatible with being an individual.
Guest Bio: Louise Perry is a writer and activist based in London. This year she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
If you’re a fan of The Unspeakable, you’re almost certainly a fan of Jon Ronson. When it comes to the subject of ruinous humiliation via mobs (online or otherwise) Jon’s 2015 bestselling book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is both a field guide and a sacred text. His 2017 podcast The Butterfly Effect, looked at the downstream effects of the pornogrpahy industry. It also circled around a theme that arises frequently in his work; the way a single moment or seemingly random choice by just one person can result in a massive cultural or political shift. Last year, in collaboration with the BBC, Jon created the podcast Things Fell Apart, an eight-part series telling the origin stories of some of our most contentious cultural battles, including the right to abortion, book banning in schools, and the mania known as the satantic pre-school panic. In this interview, Jon talks with Meghan about that podcast as well as his thoughts about “cancel culture” seven years since the release of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He reveals what parts of the culture wars he’s still afraid to take on, why the Rachel Dolezal story felt like a missed opportunity for a meaningful examination of race, and why he got so burnt out on the whole subject a few years ago and had to take a break.
Paid subscribers to The Unsepakable’s new Substack page can hear a bonus version of this episode containing lots of extra content. Visit https://meghandaum.substack.com/ to get in on it! Guest Bio: Jon Ronson is the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Lost At Sea, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Most recently, Jon released the BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, named by The Observer as the number one audio show of 201. Before that came two Audible Original audio series, The Butterfly Effect (2017) and The Last Days of August (2019). Both went straight to number one in the U.S. and U.K. audiobook charts and were named by multiple critics as two of the best podcasts of recent years.
If you’re a fan of The Unspeakable, you’re almost certainly a fan of Jon Ronson. When it comes to the subject of ruinous humiliation via mobs (online or otherwise) Jon’s 2015 bestselling book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is both a field guide and a sacred text. His 2017 podcast The Butterfly Effect, looked at the downstream effects of the pornogrpahy industry. It also circled around a theme that arises frequently in his work; the way a single moment or seemingly random choice by just one person can result in a massive cultural or political shift. Last year, in collaboration with the BBC, Jon created the podcast Things Fell Apart, an eight-part series telling the origin stories of some of our most contentious cultural battles, including the right to abortion, book banning in schools, and the mania known as the satantic pre-school panic. In this interview, Jon talks with Meghan about that podcast as well as his thoughts about “cancel culture” seven years since the release of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He reveals what parts of the culture wars he’s still afraid to take on, why the Rachel Dolezal story felt like a missed opportunity for a meaningful examination of race, and why he got so burnt out on the whole subject a few years ago and had to take a break.
Paid subscribers to The Unsepakable’s new Substack page can hear a bonus version of this episode containing lots of extra content. Visit https://meghandaum.substack.com/ to get in on it! Guest Bio: Jon Ronson is the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Lost At Sea, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Most recently, Jon released the BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, named by The Observer as the number one audio show of 201. Before that came two Audible Original audio series, The Butterfly Effect (2017) and The Last Days of August (2019). Both went straight to number one in the U.S. and U.K. audiobook charts and were named by multiple critics as two of the best podcasts of recent years.
Almost two years ago, author William Deresiewicz visited The Unspeakable to talk about his book The Death Of The Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. It was an insightful and moving conversation about the near-impossibility of surviving as a working artist in a “creator economy." Many listeners wrote to Meghan to express their gratitude as well as their sorrow over the hard truths Bill laid out. Now Bill is back to talk about his new book, a collection of essays entitled The Death Of Solitude. The essays span more than a decade and cover everything from education to technology to friendship. Bill talks about why he wrote them as well as what it was like to revisit the work when the culture has changed so radically in such a short time. He also reflects on the intellectual shifts he’s experienced in the last few years as he discovered the world of heterodox podcasts and dissident journalists. A longtime contributor to outlets like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Harper’s, he's now begun writing for outlets like Quillette and Unherd. How did that happen? (Meghan may be partly to blame.)
Guest Bio:
William Deresiewicz taught at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer in 2008. He is the author of the best-selling book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He spoke with Meghan about his previous book The Death of the Artist on the November 9, 2020 edition of this podcast. His new book The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society, was just published by Henry Holt.
This week on the podcast, author and podcaster Sarah Hepola is back! On her last visit to The Unspeakable, back in March, Sarah and Meghan talked about Sarah's bombshell Atlantic Magazine article, The Things I’m Afraid To Write. But they got a little sidetracked by some other subjects, including the barely-known details of the Stanford swimmer rape case, which Sarah has researched in depth. In this conversation, which was recorded exactly a week after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Sarah talks about the immediate aftermath of that decision in Texas, where she lives, and why the alarm bells on social media don’t necessarily correspond to the actual mood on the ground. She reflects on her own choices and wonders if those who will now be forced to become parents will find their positions change—in both directions—as the result of their circumstances. Finally, she and Meghan reflect on being called “neocons” by someone on Twitter and wonder what happened around 2014 that caused some of the freest and most privileged women in the world to reimagine their lives as a chronic struggle. Note: The Unspeakable Podcast will be on summer hiatus until Labor Day. In the meantime, you can check out Meghan’s new podcast with Sarah Haider, A Special Place In Hell, at aspecialplace.substack.com or wherever you get your podcast. You can also learn about The Unspeakeasy, Meghan’s community-in-progress for freethinking women at theunspeakeasy.com Guest Bio: Sarah Hepola is the author of the memoir Blackout, the host of the Texas Monthly-produced documentary podcast America’s Girls and the co-host, with Nancy Rommelmann of the podcast Smoke 'em If You Got Em. She lives in Dallas, Texas.
This week’s episode is the second of a two part series about guns in America, a conversation between two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who’s a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In 2018 they were part of Guns: An American Conversation, a collaboration between TIME Magazine and a consortium of local media outlets that brought together 21 people with wide ranging views on gun control for a two-day discussion. Despite their opposing views, Jon and Melanie developed a friendship that has transcended their differences, though they still do plenty of arguing. In this final half of this interivew, Jon explains what those who aren’t “gun people” don’t understand about guns and Melanie and Meghan both admit there’s a lot they don’t understand. He and Melanie also talk about their overall sense of personal safety in the world and how they handle concerns like home invasion. Jon explains why he often carries a firearm and what he sees as the uses of owning assault style guns. Melanie reflects on a shooting that occurred at her high school when she was a student and wonders how much worse things would have been if the shooter had used an AR-15 instead of a pistol. Finally, Jon and Melanie talk about what sorts of legislative compromises might be possible on guns and what they think lawmakers could learn from them if they only asked. Guest Bios: Melanie Jeffcoat received her MFA in Acting from the Professional Actor Training Program at the University of Washington in Seattle and has worked around the country in theater and film. Her acting credits include “All My Children,” “Ordinary Joe” and “The Wonder Years.” Her producing, directing and writing credits include "Man in the Glass: The Dale Brown Story,” “Gip,” and Open Secret,” which won the Audience Choice Award at the 2010 Politics on Film Festival in Washington, D.C. Melanie is co-founder of Chaotic Good Improv in Birmingham, Alabama and is a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. She lives near Birmingham, Alabama Jon Godfrey worked in law enforcement for several decades, serving as Deputy County Sheriff in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, a criminal investigator in Kansas and Chief of Police for the US Dept. Of Veterans Affairs Police Service in Syracuse, New York. A retired army veteran, he lives in a rural area outside Syracuse, New York.
This week’s episode is the first of a two part series about guns in America. It’s a conversation between Meghan and two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who’s a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In this part of this conversation, Jon and Melanie talk about how their backgrounds shaped their feelings about guns and compare and contrast their reactions to the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde,Texas. While Melanie is perplexed as to why anyone would need something like an AR-15, Jon explains why he owns such weapons and why he advocates for proper training and better mental health screenings rather than restrictions on the guns themselves. Above all, they talk about how they came to know one another. In 2018 they were part of Guns: An American Conversation, a collaboration between TIME Magazine and a consortium of local media outlets that brought together 21 people with wide ranging views on gun control for a two-day discussion. Despite their opposing views, Jon and Melanie developed a friendship that has transcended their differences, though they still do plenty of arguing. Guest Bios:
Melanie Jeffcoat received her MFA in Acting from the Professional Actor Training Program at the University of Washington in Seattle and has worked around the country in theater and film. Her acting credits include “All My Children,” “Ordinary Joe” and “The Wonder Years.” Her producing, directing and writing credits include "Man in the Glass: The Dale Brown Story,” “Gip,” and Open Secret,” which won the Audience Choice Award at the 2010 Politics on Film Festival in Washington, D.C. Melanie is co-founder of Chaotic Good Improv in Birmingham, Alabama and is a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. She lives near Birmingham, Alabama Jon Godfrey worked in law enforcement for several decades, serving as Deputy County Sheriff in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, a criminal investigator in Kansas and Chief of Police for the US Dept. Of Veterans Affairs Police Service in Syracuse, New York. A retired army veteran, he lives in a rural area outside Syracuse, New York.
Known by his nom de guerre “The Greatest American Living Writer,” Neal Pollack has published eleven books, including a rock history satire, several crime thrillers (including two yoga-themed crime thrillers), and memoirs on subjects ranging from fatherhood to yoga to marijuana addiction. His latest book is Edge of Safety, a satirical dystopian novel set at some indeterminate point in the future. In this world, the obedient citizens of Canada live in an almost perpetual state of high COVID alert, walking their dogs on treadmills and receiving food deliveries by drone during “stay home” orders relayed by their public service mascot, Safety Moose. The United States, meanwhile, has descended into ecological and infra-structural chaos thanks to its lack of unified response. In this conversation, Neal talks about the pandemic in relation to his fictional characters as well as his own real life friends and neighbors. He and Meghan also compare notes about their struggles to stay afloat in the new creative economy and Neal’s side career as a competitive trivia player, which includes winning more than $60,000 on Jeopardy!. They also reminisce about People Who Suck, their short-lived but legendary talk show group on the Clubhouse social media app.
Guest Bio:
Neal Pollack, The Greatest Living American Writer, has written 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Repeat, Jewball, Keep Mars Weird, Downward-Facing Death, and, most recently, Edge of Safety. He's also the author of the bestselling memoirs Alternadad, Stretch, and Pothead, and many magazine articles, blogposts, short pieces of Internet satire, and corporate training manuals. A three-time Jeopardy! champion and aspiring semi-professional poker player, Pollack lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.
Stephanie Lepp is an artist, a film and video producer and Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, where she leads the production of the podcast Your Undivided Attention. Her latest independent project is Deep Reckonings, a series of “deep fake” videos that depict prominent figures making public statements that have been reimagined as empathetic and morally courageous. In this conversation, Stephanie talks about the origins and goals of Deep Reckoning as well as a variety of concepts that she’s developed in response to the current iteration of so-called “post-truth world.” This includes her her theory of “promiscuous pragmatic pluralism.” She also recounts a conversation she had with economist Glenn Loury on his podcast earlier this spring and why she thinks the next presidential debate will be an “anti-debate” on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Guest Bio:
Stephanie Lepp is the Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, where she leads the production of the podcast Your Undivided Attention. Her latest independent project is Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly-marked deep fake videos that imagine morally courageous versions of our public figures.
Sarah Haider is an activist and a writer who became a noted figure in the new atheist movement around 2013, when she co-founded the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America. That is a nonprofit that promotes secular values, advocates for acceptance of religious dissent and works to combat discrimination faced by people who leave Islam in the U.S. and Canada. Her work there led to her trenches of the new free speech and free-think movements and she now writes on Substack, covering issues around race, identity, gender and social politics of various kinds. Despite their 20-year age difference, Sarah and Meghan have a lot of overlapping interests; the monoculture of elite media, the social and political myopia of elites in general, the inconvenient truths of the mating economy and and misconceptions around mens’s rights, to name just a few.
In the public version of this episode, Sarah and Meghan cover those topics and more. The Patreon version includes an extra 40 minutes where they talk about Sarah’s upbringing and her relationship to Islam. Sarah came to the U.S. from Pakistan at age seven and was a devout Muslim until she had a dramatic change of perspective as a teenager. To hear that part, join the Patreon at patreon.com/theunspeakable.
Guest Bio:
Sarah Haider has spent much of her professional life in the charitable world, co-founding two nonprofit organizations, including Ex-Muslims of North America. Today she spends much of her time thinking and writing about belief, social dynamics, and culture. You can find her writing on her Substack newsletter, Hold That Thought. Also find on Twitter at @SarahtheHaider.
If you’re familiar with the so-called “heterodox” space, this week’s guest on The Unspeakable scarcely needs an introduction. In 2018, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, along with author and first amendment advocate Gregg Lukianoff, published The Coddling of The American Mind: How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure. The book was central to a burgeoning public conversation that asked why young people, especially students on college campuses, were so unwilling to engage with ideas they perceived as dangerous—and in fact why they found so many ideas dangerous to begin with. Jon’s research offered crucial datapoints as to why this was happening and suggested that a handful of intersecting cultural trends—fearful parenting, omnipresent social media and the corporatization of higher education, to name a few—had resulted in a generation marked by high anxiety and a low sense of autonomy. His more recent work, including his article last month in The Atlantic, “Why The Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” goes beyond what’s happened with young people and looks at our collapsing institutions more broadly. Jon and Meghan talked about that article and covered lots of new territory, too, including a project of Meghan’s that she has just begun to talk about, a heterodox women’s community. Many of her observations about the male dominated “free think” space and women’s reluctance to speak their minds map on to Jon’s own research about girls’ social development. Relevant links: https://www.thecoddling.com https://heterodoxacademy.org https://letgrow.org https://openmindplatform.org Guest Bio: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff.) Haidt has given four TED talks and is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. Since 2018, he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction and he is currently writing a new book, "Life After Babel: Adapting To A World We Can No Longer Share.”
Amy Bloom is the author of ten books, mostly works of fiction, and her short story collections have been finalists for The National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book, In Love, is a memoir about her husband Brian’s diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s in his mid-sixties and Brian's decision to end his life on his own terms. This required traveling to Zurich, Switzerland, where an organization called Dignitas facilitates what they call “accompanied suicide." Amy talked with Meghan about what was involved in getting to Digntas and why even though assisted dying is technically legal in some states in the U.S., the process is much more difficult than most people realize. In addition to being an author and a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Amy has also been a practicing psychotherapist for decades and she talks about how that role intersects with her writing life and what she’s learned about relationships and compatibility after years of hearing people’s stories and telling her own. Guest Bio:
Amy Bloom is the author of four novels and three collections of short stories, including Come To Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed NY Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Silverberg-Shapiro Professor of Creating Writing at Wesleyan University.
This week, comedian Jamie Kilstein returns to The Unspeakable for a wide-ranging, profanity-laced conversation about creativity, cancellation, relationships, sex, dating, breakups and numerous other subjects. Last fall, Jamie and Meghan talked about their respective podcasting woes and surviving in the new creative economy, which poses extra challenges for Jamie, since he was the target of a cancellation mob several years ago. This time, they get more personal. In addition to discussing Jamie’s recent return to standup, they talk about their relationship patterns, their attachment styles, and, most importantly, which members of the so-called IDW Jamie would sleep with. The answers to that question are mostly confined to bonus content on the Patreon-only version of the episode. But, don’t worry, the public version has plenty to offer, including some offensive yet politically relevant jokes about Trader Joe’s and abortion. In that spirit, Meghan explains why she doesn’t believe she is cancelled and Jamie suggests that Meghan is “cancelled adjacent.” Finally, they consider whether to start a collaborative effort with other thought criminals called The Cancelled Collective and call upon listeners to offer suggestions. Guest Bio: Jamie is a comedian and host of A Fuckup's Guide to the Universe. He has been on Joe Rogan, Conan, and more. Support him at patreon.com/jamiekilstein.
Last week, a draft of a Supreme Court opinion indicating that the court was poised to overturn the landmark abortion decision Roe V. Wade was leaked to the press. Supporters of abortion rights—and, technically speaking, that means the majority of Americans—were stunned and deeply dismayed by the news, with social media users predicting the coming of a Handmaids’s Tale-style dystopia and and oped pieces decrying red state legislators as misogynist bigots. In the hopes of having a sober-minded conversation about practical, realistic ways to keep abortion accessible in a post-Roe world, Meghan called upon activist, ethicist and policy expert Frances Kissling. A longtime prominent figure in the fight for abortion rights, Kissling has been called “the philosopher of the pro-choice movement.” She ran an abortion clinic in New York City in the early 1970s before the passage of Roe, when the procedure was only legal in a handful of states. Later she was the founding President of that National Abortion Federation and after that served for 25 years as president of Catholics for Choice. In this is remarkable interview, Kissling talks about the history of Roe, the emotions surrounding it on both sides, the validity of the arguments on both sides of the issue, and why, despite the current tumult and distress, overturning Roe is not going to set the nation back to pre-1973. As she sees it, it’s time to shift the focus away from legislation in red states and focus on how blue states can serve women from all over the country.Guest Bio:
Frances Kissling is currently President of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy in Washington, DC and a professor of philosophy and ethics. She was the president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 to 2007 and has been working in the abortion rights movements since the very early 1970s.
If your doomscrolling over the past few years has led you to any of the so-called “dissident doctors” who are calling for more clarity and less catastrophizing when it comes public messaging around COVID, you might be familiar with Dr. Lucy McBride. When the pandemic lockdowns began, Dr. McBride, a practicing internist in Washington, D.C., began sending her patients email blasts explaining what was known (and unknown) about the virus and what they could (and couldn’t) do to try to stay safe. Those emails evolved into a popular newsletter that has put Dr. McBride centerstage in the call for a more reasonable, evidence-based approach to COVID measures. This week, Dr. McBride talks with Meghan about what the latest data says about COVID safety and why she thinks the public has lost perspective on what constitutes normal risk. She explains why the drug Ivermectin has been politicized and therefore weaponized, why the CDC has scared parents into seeing kids as germ vectors, and, above all, why it’s urgent that we prioritize mental health and stop fantasizing about “zero COVID.” She also talks about her new podcast, Beyond The Prescription, which debuts this week. Guest Bio: Dr. Lucy McBride is a practicing internist in Washington, DC and the author of the popular COVID 19 newsletter, which you can find at lucymcbride.com. She attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her new podcast Beyond The Prescription debuts this week.
Jennifer Sey spent more than twenty years at Levis Strauss and Company, rising through the ranks to Chief Marketing Office and then Global Brand President. In 2020, she was in line to become CEO of the company when the Covid pandemic hit and she found herself working from home with four kids out out school. Soon, she became frustrated by school closures and puzzled about lockdown polices for kids in general. And she started speaking up about it. This did not sit well Levis and Jennifer was eventually forced out of the company — and offered a million dollar severance package in exchange for singing a non-disclosure agreement. But Jennifer was so committed to speaking out that she turned down the deal. In this interview, Jennifer and Meghan talk about how social media has blurred the lines between professional comportment and personal beliefs. They ask what it means when corporations take public political stances, how to tell a genuine expression of company values from virtue signaling, and whether corporate wokeness actually helps sell products. They also discuss Jennifer's career as an an elite gymnast and how her decision to come forward about abuses in USA gymnastics paved the way for her current activism around kids and covid policy. Guest Bio:
Jennifer Sey spent close to 23 years at Levi Strauss & Company, holding a variety of leadership positions, including Global Brand President. She was first woman to hold that post. She is also a former elite gymnast and was the U.S. National all-around champion in 1986. In 2008, she released a memoir, Chalked Up, about her life in gymnastics and she is also the producer of the Emmy award-winning documentary Athlete A, about abuses within competitive gymnastics, including the sexual abuses of hundreds of young gymnasts committed by team doctor Larry Nassar.
Last week, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for over 41 billion dollars. This came on the heels of his purchase last month of nearly ten percent of the company. This activity has invited speculation that the platform might shift away from what some users see as infamous censoriousness and into more free speech direction. That’s why Meghan invited Meghan Murphy onto the podcast. In 2018, Murphy, an independent journalist and blogger, was permanently banned from Twitter for, as she sees it, a few banal tweets about who counts as a woman, a man or anything else. She was never told what exactly was wrong with her tweets and she lost her appeals to be reinstated on the platform. In this conversation, Murphy talks about rebuilding her professional platform after losing access to most of her audience and why Twitter is especially crucial for independent creators. The two Meghans also talk about whether it’s easier for them to speak up about controversial subjects because they don’t have spouses or kids who might face repercussions. Guest Bio: Meghan Murphy is a Canadian writer, the founder and editor of Feminist Current, and the host of the Feminist Current podcast. She was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018 for questioning gender identity ideology and for referring to a male as "he." She hosts The Same Drugs podcast on YouTube and Anchor.fm. Follow her work on Substack: https://meghanmurphy.substack.com/ and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meghanemilymurphy. She is currently based in Mexico.
This week, Meghan talks with Yael Bar-tur and ChayaLeah Sufrin, co-hosts of the podcast Ask A Jew. ChayaLeah was born and raised in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California and remains happily part of that community today. Yael is a secular Israeli Jew now living in New York City. The two became friends through an online community and began a dialogue about (among other things) Judaism, much of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about the Orthodox world that she would have been afraid or embarrassed to ask most people. The conversations were so interesting that they started recording them — and from there emerged Ask A Jew. In this conversation, Yael, ChayaLeah and Meghan (who is not Jewish despite having been a guest on Ask a Jew) cover a range of topics; anti-semitism, arranged marriage, policing, what happened to Jon Stewart, why the heterodox space is so male dominated and why the superstar podcaster and journalist Bari Weiss (who’s not a man) is so polarizing as to make people deranged. They also talk about their recent lunch together at a Kosher restaurant in Los Angeles that was founded by Steven Spielberg’s late mother. Guest Bios: ChayaLeah Sufrin was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Long Beach, CA. After attending university in New York, ChayaLeah moved back to Southern California and spent fifteen years teaching High school Jewish history and as the Education Director at Shul by the Shore. ChayaLeah served as the Senior Jewish Educator at Long Beach Hillel for three years and is now the Executive Director. ChayaLeah, together with her husband Boruch, has four teenage sons.
**Yael Bar-tur** is a crisis communications and social media consultant who previously served as the director of social media and digital strategy for the New York City Police Department where she developed and implemented the social media and digital communications strategy.
Sarah Hepola has been publishing personal essays and articles for decades and is the author of the 2015 bestseller Blackout, a memoir about her years of heavy drinking that focusses on the phenomenon of blackout. As Sarah explains it, blackout is a state of impaired memory that is distinct from being passed out and is often overlooked in conversations about intoxication and sexual consent. Meghan invited Sarah onto the podcast initially not to talk about blackouts but about Sarah’s recent essay in The Atlantic "The Things I’m Afraid To Write About.”: It’s about censorship, specifically the kind we impose on ourselves in a culture where voicing controversial opinions can bring on devastating professional and personal consequences. This topic comes up a lot these days, but Sarah comes to it out of a particular interest: how confusion over the difference between being in a blackout and being unconscious has factored into several high profile sexual assault cases. One case Sarah has looked into is that of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted in 2016 of sexual assault after he was discovered outside a fraternity house in an encounter with woman who appeared to be unconscious. The story continues to elicit strong emotions in the public, but Sarah points out that the media narrative, which includes many vivid and troubling details, diverges significantly from the facts in court documents. Sarah’s mention of the Turner case in her Atlantic essay set off a firestorm of anger and invective, thereby illustrating exactly why she’d been so reluctant to speak her mind over the last several years. In this conversation, Sarah talks with Meghan about self-censorship and what’s happened in the media landscape to cause it. But they talk just as much about the Brock Turner case and how the media got so much of the story so wrong and never bothered to correct it. This may be the most “unspeakable” Unspeakable to date. Bio: Sarah Hepola is the author of the bestselling memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, and the host/creator of America's Girls, a Texas Monthly podcast about the lost history and cultural impact of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. She is currently working on a memoir for The Dial Press/Random House about her ambivalent singlehood. She lives in Dallas.
This week, Meghan devotes another episode to the complexities and under-explored corners of the gender movement and talks with a young man going by the pseudonym “Austin.” A biological male who is now 23, Austin began identifying as a transgender woman as a young teenager and continued to do so well into college. After a series of psychological experiences slowly made him realize he was not transgender, Austin began to reverse course, stopping his cross sex hormone therapy and canceling an upcoming radical surgery. In this interview, Austin talks about the factors that contributed to his gender dysphoria, what it was like start (and stop) taking hormones, and what happened when he confronted the therapists who had facilitated his transition. He also offers a counterpoint to the common narrative about trans identities in youth being prompted by social media and online influencers. On the contrary, Austin said he rarely used social media and that much of his identity was wrapped up in autogynephilia, a paraphilia wherein men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as women. Because the topic of autogynephilia has been deemed off-limits among many trans activists, it’s rarely discussed and poorly understood even among those familiar with the gender movement. Austin elaborates on this and other aspects of his gender identity path in a series of essays at https://detransqna.github.io. Note: This episode contains some graphic language about sexuality and might not be suitable for everyone. Guest Bio: “Austin” is a pseudonym for a 23-year-old recent college graduate living in the United States.
This week’s guest on The Unspeakable is British journalist, broadcaster and filmmaker David Fuller. In 2018 David founded Rebel Wisdom, a multi-format media platform devoted to intellectually honest, self-scrutinizing conversations about complex topics. The platform is part ecosystem of though that has come to be called “sense making” and Rebel Wisdom offers everything from a YouTube channel to online courses in its aim to showcase a range of thinkers and foster connections between likeminded—or even not so likeminded—people all over the world. David’s very first Rebel Wisdom was an interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and in the years since he has become both immersed in the so-called IDW space and somewhat disenchanted with it. Meghan was a guest on Rebel Wisdom last December and spoke with David about the phenomenon of audience capture and what happens when honest brokering threatens your “brand.” She invited David on The Unspeakable to continue the conversation and compare notes on how they’re feeling about the heterodoxy these days. Is it failing in its initial mission to promote viewpoint diversity and becoming more like a “homodoxy?” Or is a new cohort of more nuanced, less didactic thinkers about to emerge onto the scene? Guest Bio: David Fuller is the founder of Rebel Wisdom, a media project that attempts to make new paradigm thinking accessible and compelling to a new generation. He worked for the UK's top news program Channel 4 News for ten years as reporter, producer and director and was the first mainstream TV journalist to cover the renaissance of psychedelic science back in 2008. David began making documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 in 2011, primarily for the Emmy award-winning series ‘Unreported World’. His documentary ‘The Invisible People’, about the plight of disabled Syrian refugees in Lebanon was shortlisted for the "Royal Television Society awards in 2015.
Editor, journalist and podcaster Jonathan Kay is the author of several books, has worked as an editor and columnist at the Canadian newspaper The National Post and is currently the Canadian editor of Quillette, a digital publication founded in 2015 as a haven for what Jonathan has called “ideological refugees. In this interview, he talks with Meghan about a range of topics, including a question Meghan has been pondering a lot lately: What is a conservative? Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from his work over the last several years, Jonathan has spent much of his life identifying as a conservative. (His mother, the columnist Barbara Kay, has been a high profile conservative figure in Canada for decades.) He talked about what terms like “conservative” and “liberal” even mean in the post-Trump era, why he thinks political correctness hurts people on the left far more on the right and why he’s losing interest in culture war topics and would rather focus on subjects like ancient history. Most of all, he talks about why it’s time for “heterodox” thinkers to stop obsessing about culture war issues and pursue other interests. Guest Bio: Jonathan Kay is Canadian Editor of Quillette, a TedX speaker, an op-ed writer at National Post, and co-host of the Quillette podcast. His freelance work has appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Gotham, Canadian Jewish News, and other publications. Kay's books include Among The Truthers (2011), Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America (2016), Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life (2019), Panics and Persecutions (2020), and Magic In The Dark: One Family’s Century Of Adventures In The Movie Business (2022). Follow him on Twitter at @jonkay.
Journalist and author Jennifer Senior has been a columnist and book critic for The New York Times and is now a staff writer for The Atlantic, where a recent article, “It’s The Friends That Break Your Heart,” struck a particular chord with readers. It was about the complexities of friendship in adulthood and how things like professional envy and perceived slights over personal decisions can result in devastating impasses. Jennifer talked with Meghan about what inspired her to write the article, how the pandemic has affected friendships, how her own friendships have changed over the years, and how things like parenthood and big career changes can put a strain on friendships. The two also talked about the horror of knowing your friends are talking about you behind your back and reflected on the most profound gestures their friends have offered throughout their lives. Finally, Meghan asked about an article Jennifer published last September called “What Bobby McIlvaine Left behind,” which followed a family’s struggle to make sense of 9/11 after their son died at the towers that day. Guest Bio: Jennifer Senior is staff writer at The Atlantic and has been a daily book critic and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Before that, she spent eighteen years at New York Magazine, writing profiles and cover stories about politics, social science, and mental health. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthoodl and lives in New York with her husband and son.
For seven years Mike Pesca hosted the political commentary podcast The Gist under the aegis of the Slate Media Company. The show became the longest running daily podcast of all time, racking up somewhere around 1400 episodes and attracting an enormous audience that accounted for a significant portion of Slate’s revenue. Last February, Slate suspended The Gist following an office meltdown over a race-related—actually a race vocabulary-related— discussion on the company Slack channel. This led to a seven-month investigation that made Mike yet another high profile casualty of cancel culture. He’s anything but canceled though, which is proven by the return of The Gist, which he’s doing on his own steam. Mike spoke with Meghan about what went down with the old Gist (which he calls Season One, even though it lasted seven years) and what’s coming up for the podcast going forward. They also talked about what makes podcasts work, how much effort podcasts require and what it was like working at NPR back when, as it Mike put, workplaces of all kinds came with a certain esprit du corp — or jovial feeling of pride and unity in an organization. Somewhere along the way, Mike points out, esprit de corps was replaced with struggle sessions. Guest Bio: Mike Pesca is the host and creator of The Gist, the longest running daily news podcast, and the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs In Sports History. In addition to guest-hosting NPR Programs All Things Considered and the news quiz Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, Mike’s work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. He has frequently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and The PBS Newshour, and written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Slate, and Baseball Prospectus.
Writer and editor Sari Botton has a long career in the publishing world — some would even call her a “legend.” Her essays have appeared in places like The New York Times and The Guardian. She was the longtime essays editor at the digital magazine Longreads, is now a contributing editor at Catapult and she edited two acclaimed anthologies, including Goodbye To All That: Loving and Leaving New York. Her latest venture is Oldster Magazine, and even though it’s about aging it’s not about being old. It’s about getting older and it features articles and observations from people at every stage of life. Sari is a bonafide Gen Xer and Meghan was curious not just about the process of creating Oldster but also about the challenges of building something in the new creative economy after a long career in traditional media. They talk about what constitutes an “ideal” age, what it’s like to get older when you don’t “follow the script” of traditional family life, and why many aging people worry as much (if not more) about having enough money than about their health. (Pro tip: Sari buys lottery tickets.) Guest Bio: Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. She publishes Oldster Magazine, which explores what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian,and elsewhere. She's a contributing editor at Catapult, the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and she edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY. Her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself... will be published by Heliotrope in Summer, 2022.
Cultural critic Laura Kipnis is revered, even beloved, for her bold, counterintuitive observations about aesthetics in art, sexual politics, moral ambiguity, and the complexities of human relationships. Her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic explored the hypocrisies and reductive logic behind the monogamy industrial complex. Her latest book, Love In The Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, is a follow up of sorts to Against Love. Born out of the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic and Laura's lockdown experience with her longtime boyfriend, the book examines how the cracks in interpersonal relationships can mirror the breakdown of political systems, economies, cultural life and public trust. In this conversation, Laura talks with Meghan about what she learned from interviewing dozens of people who were locked down with their romantic partners—or in some cases their soon to be ex-partners—during the first year of the pandemic. They also talk about the evolving legacy of the #MeToo movement, the impact of online pornography, the role of alcohol in life and in love, and “BDE” or so-called Big Dick Energy. Laura also reflects on the aftermath of the events described in her previous book, Unwanted Advances, which chronicled a journey through the campus court system after students at her university filed Title Nine charges against her for publishing an article that they claimed created a “hostile environment.” Guest Bio: Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and the author of seven books, including Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; How to Become A Scandal; Against Love: A Polemic; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability; and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Her latest book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, is out February, 8 2022 from Pantheon.
Terms like neurodiversity and neuroatyptical are everywhere these days. And though they can refer to any everything from social functioning to learning differences, the terms are most often applied to people on the autism spectrum. Because of that—and because autism has historically been associated with boys and men—there hasn’t been a lot of thinking about neurodivergence in females. Jenara Nerenberg is trying to change that. Growing up in the 1990s, she was considered a “sensitive” child but was high functioning enough to thrive academically and eventually establish a successful career in journalism, not least of all because of her ability to remain hyperfocused on tasks. But later, when the hyperfocus began to compromise her daily life, she looked deeper into her traits and learned that she was actually on the autism spectrum and struggled with ADHD. This led her down a research path that resulted in a book, Divergent Mind, which looks at how diagnoses like autism, high sensitive, sensory processing disorder, and synesthesia play out in women and why a combination of inadequate medical research and a tendency among women to mask their symptoms has led to rampant misdiagnosis and misunderstanding. Jenara talked with Meghan about what this new information has meant for her and, more importantly, why she thinks it’s crucial that neurodivergence be understood as something far being the scope of autism. Guest Bio: Jenara Nerenberg is a writer who began her career with Fast Company and CNN in Asia after graduating from the Harvard School of Public Health. When she returned to the U.S. she chronicled her journey through the field of “neurodiversity” in her book, Divergent Mind, and began covering science and psychology books for the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, prompting her to switch to the world of book publishing. She now hosts bestselling authors live in San Francisco and online, and is head of the agency Divergent Literary, in addition to running publicity for international publishers. She appears at public events and conferences with The Aspen Institute and Commonwealth Club, and continues to speak widely on the rhetoric of psychology and implications for society. The episode of The Unspeakable is sponsored by Better Help online therapy. Visit Betterhelp.com/Unspeakable for a special offer.
Aaron Kimberly is a mental health clinician with longtime experience providing care to transgender and gender questioning patients. He is also a trans man who made his transition fifteen years ago. In recent years, he has been speaking out against what has become the prevailing wisdom and standard protocol in transgender medicine: that people identifying as transgender, even adolescents and sometimes children, effectively “know who they are” and have a right to begin hormone therapy without comprehensive psychological assessment. Known as the affirmative care model, this approach has been promoted by activists and largely embraced by the medical establishment and the mainstream media. In many cases, the alliance with that approach comes from a fear of being labeled transphobic or of “gatekeeping.” But as listeners of The Unspeakable know, the issue is far more layered and complex than the many people in general public—and even many well-meaning health care providers—realize. On the heels of a January 13, 2022 New York Times story, which for the first time gave credence to the idea that the affirmative care model might not be the best approach for young people (and which featured two time Unspeakable guest Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper), Meghan returns to the topic to speak with Aaron about what’s gone awry in gender medicine and why so few people have been willing to talk about it.
Guest Bio:
Aaron Kimberly is (by his own terms) a transsexual man, born female with a rare ovotesticular intersex condition. He’s worked as a mental health clinician since 2008 in hospital and community settings. In 2021 he founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance to educate about different types of gender dysphoria from an evidence base, without the lens of political ideology. He is also co-host of the Transparency podcast.
Chris Kavanagh is cognitive anthropologist and one-half of the team behind Decoding The Gurus, a podcast that bills itself as “an anthropologist and a psychologist listening to the greatest minds the world has to offer and trying their best to understand what they’re talking about.” By “greatest minds” Chris and his co-host, the Australian psychologist Matthew Browne, are talking mainly about aspiring or established public intellectuals who’ve gained large followings on YouTube, often for questioning mainstream media narratives and challenging liberal pieties. (Listeners of The Unspeakable are no doubt familiar with at least some of these figures, a few of whom have appeared on the show.) They’ve also done deep dives into figures like Joe Rogan, Russel Brand, Brené Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow. Chris and Matt are sympathetic to some of what these folks have to say, but skeptical of the overall phenomenon of intellectuals as internet influencers and they spend a lot of time laughing at the self-seriousness of their subjects. That said, anyone they discuss has a standing offer to come on show and defend themselves. In this conversation, Chris and Meghan talk about why these figures can be at once fascinating and maddening, what happened when YouTuber Chris Williamson joined the show to defend himself, and why Chris, who’s originally from Northern Ireland and currently lives in Japan, thinks Americans are especially receptive to guru logic. Guest Bio: Chris Kavanagh is a Specially appointed Associate Professor at the College of Contemporary Psychology and a Researcher at the Center for Studies of Social Cohesion at Oxford University. His research interests include East Asian religions, ritual behavior, and the bonding effects of shared dysphoria. Currently he is based in Japan. The episode of The Unspeakable is sponsored by Better Help online therapy. Visit Betterhelp.com/Unspeakable for a special offer.
Journalist Michael Wolff is best known for his juicy and deeply reported dispatches from various corridors of power. His many books include the 2008 Rupert Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns The News, and the 2018 sensation Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, which was easily the most talked about political book of the Trump era. His two other books about the Trump years are Siege: Trump Under Fire and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency. Michael's most recent book, Too Famous: The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious, collects selected works of biographical journalism over the last two decades, including lengthy treatises on Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner. The word perhaps most often associated with Michael is “access.” He has a way of achieving astonishingly close constant with sources who seem willing to carry on as if he’s not there at all, knowing full well he’s writing everything down. This has made him famous in his own right, and prone to his own controversies. But Meghan invited him onto the podcast mostly to talk about writing itself: the craft of it, the business of it, the psychological toll it can take on author and subject alike. They cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including how Michael’s first big break came from a tip form his mother, how his second published piece was for Ms. Magazine, and why he thinks “controversy" isn’t so controversial anymore. They also get into one of Meghan’s (irrationally?) favorite subjects, the improbable lionization of Ronan Farrow, which Michael covers in Too Famous but that no magazine would give him an assignment to write about. Guest Bio: Michael Wolff is the author of ten books including, most recently, Too Famous, a collection of essays, and three best-selling books about the Trump presidency. Over the past twenty years he has been a regular columnist for New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQ, The Guardian, and The Hollywood Reporter. He has won numerous awards in the U.S. and U.K., including two National Magazine Awards. He lives in New York City and has five children.
In a solo episode to wrap up the season, Meghan reflects on how the The Unspeakable Podcast is doing since launching fifteen months ago and how she’s feeling about the venture overall. With radical honesty and perhaps a touch of self-sabotage, she lays out the download numbers and explains why they’re as indicative of a failed show as a successful one. She lists the things she’s done to try to earn money from the podcast and ruminates on what changes she might make to increase her numbers — and why she’s not making them. With stunning bravery, Meghan confesses to struggling with professional envy toward other podcasters, so much so that her phone sometimes feels like a hot stove when their episodes drop. Finally, after much soul searching, she realizes that The Unspeakable Podcast isn’t fueled by the culture wars as much as guided by the spirit of the book after which it was named. (Warning: this episode contain a SHOCKING REVEAL about Roxane Gay.)
Writer Stephen Elliott was once a bonafide member of the independent literary scene. In 2009 he founded the literary site The Rumpus, which helped launch the careers of writers like Roxane Gay and Cheryl Strayed. His eight books include the memoir The Adderall Diaries and the novel Happy Baby, which draws from his experiences in the child welfare system as a teenager and his subsequent involvement in the BDSM community. Both of those books were adapted into films, one of which he directed. He also wrote and directed the film “After Cherry” and made a web series. In 2017, Stephen was among more than 70 men whose names appeared on the so-called “Shitty Media Men List," an anonymously sourced Google document that accused the men of various levels of sexual misconduct. Stephen was among those accused of rape. He eventually decided to sue the list’s creator because, he says, he was in the “unique position of knowing not only that I didn't rape anyone, but that there was no one out in the world who believed I had raped them.” In this conversation, Stephen explained what he means by that and what he hopes to accomplish with the lawsuit. But the interview is not really about the lawsuit or the list. It’s about Meghan’s favorite subject, the mid-career pivot, and how Stephen put his life back together after being about as cancelled as it’s possible to be. They talked about how Stephen managed to become a real estate investor with very little startup money and about his “Self Help” newsletter, which he’s dubbed “financial advice for poets.” Stephen shared his belief that literary writers are especially likely to participate in social media mobs and also offered his biggest piece of advice for anyone: buy a house. This interview was originally recorded on video for the podcast’s Unspeakeasy video series. A partial version can be seen on the Unspeakable YouTube channel. The full version is available to Patreon supporters of the podcast at Patrreon.com/theunspeakable.
Guest Bio:
Stephen Elliott is the author of The Adderall Diaries and the novel Happy Baby, which draws from his experiences in the child welfare system as a teenager and his subsequent involvement in the BDSM community. Both of those books were adapted into films, one of which he directed. He also wrote and directed the film “After Cherry” and made a web series.
Leigh Stein first came on the show in the summer of 2020 to talk about her novel, Self-Care, which spoofs corporate feminism and the cult of the girl boss. Now she’s back to share her observations about the publishing industry and what she’s learned as a book coach, independent editor and consultant for other writers. She thinks that authors (and aspiring authors) need to be realistic about building social media platforms and crafting a personal brand. She also has a pet theory that MFA writing programs are tantamount to multi-level marketing schemes in that they don’t prepare students to actually publish books as much as teach them to teach writing to yet more writing students. In 2016 Leigh cofounded the feminist literary nonprofit Out of the Binders and organized BinderCon, a conference that brought in more than 2,000 attendees. She wrote about that experience in an article out this week in LitHub and spoke with Meghan about how she went broke while leading an organization designed to empower writers. Meghan also shared her own thoughts about the changing literary landscape and why she’s not as excited about publishing her work as she used to be. A video version of this conversion is up on the podcast’s YouTube Channel, The Unspeakable channel. Guest Bio: Leigh Stein is a writer interested in what the internet is doing to our identities, relationships, and politics. She is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care (Penguin, 2020) and the poetry collection What to Miss When (Soft Skull Press, 2021). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Allure, ELLE, and The Cut.
Regular listeners of this podcast are no strangers to the subject of political bias in the news media - especially the left wing, elite-driven bias that’s in heavy rotation in the opinion and culture sections of big news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR. But as much as we talk about the social movements driving this trend, we think less often about the practical reasons and bottom line root causes. That’s exactly Batya Ungar-Sargon explores in her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In this conversation, Batya explains how journalism underwent a “status revolution,” with the job of reporter going from an almost blue collar profession to something on a par (at least socially) with lawyers and bankers. She also explains how the digital era forced a reframing of the business model of media organizations. The bills were no longer paid by advertisers but by subscribers who demanded fealty to their political values. Batya, who was formerly the opinion editor of The Forward and currently deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, considers herself not just on the left, but something of a socialist. As such, she worries that the much of the social justice posturing that dominates mainstream discourse today is distracting from the real emergency of economic inequality. Guest Bio: Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
This week Meghan welcomes comedian Jamie Kilstein. This is the audio version of a video interview they recorded for The Unspeakeasy, the new video feature of the podcast available to Patreon supporters. Meghan decided to make the conversation available as a regular podcast because in addition to talking about comedy and what Jamie’s been up to recently, they got pretty deep into some topics that are near and dear to the show, including Meghan’s signature issue, “nuance.” They ask whether trying to uphold nuance in the face of relentless group signaling and rage bait is a lost cause, not to mention a career killer. Jamie, who considers himself among the “canceled," talks about how that came to pass and about the ideological whiplash that ensued. They open the conversation by talking about how they manage professional stress: Jamie by contemplating trading in his car and Meghan by purchasing domain names for projects she’ll probably never start let alone finish. Guest Bio: Jamie Kilstein hosts the podcasts Rear Naked Radio and A Fuckup's Guide To The Universe. He has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
This week Meghan welcomes guests Larry Clarke and Fielding Edlow. They are actors/writers/producers and also the married couple behind the YouTube series Bitter Homes and Gardens, a comedy, doled in out short episodes, about a married couple named . . Larry and Fielding. This edition of The Unspeakable is a bit of an experiment in that it’s the audio version of a conversation recorded for The Unspeakeasy, the video series that lives on the podcast’s new YouTube channel. Even though Larry and Fielding have solid industry careers going decades, they are emblematic of the way working actors have had to shift gears to accommodate a new creative economy, all the while remaining in nonstop hustle mode. In this conversation, they talk about their show, their marriage, their health insurance struggles, and the tension between loving their work and being frustrated with the turn their industry has taken. They also reveal that Larry and Meghan were roommates in New York City back in the 1990s. Moreover, the other roommate was a struggling actor and comedian named Stephanie Courtney who is now (wait for it . . . ) Flo from Progressive. They talk about Stephanie’s guest appearances on Bitter Homes and Gardens and reminisce about the old days when Larry and Stephanie worked as cater waiters and Meghan slept in the dining room of the grimy New York apartment that’s now a co-op they could never afford. Guest Bios: Fielding Edlow is a writer/comedian/actress who is the creator and star of Bitter Homes and Gardens with her real life husband Larry Clarke. Her debut special “Can’t Say Slut” is now streaming on Amazon Prime and she voiced the character “Roxie” on the Netflix series Bojack Horseman. Larry Clarke has been a steadily working character actor for the last thirty years. He has frequently collaborated with Steven Soderbergh and most recently played Meryl Streep’s lawyer in The Laundromat. He’s currently shooting a recurring on the new Starz series HEELS and also played a “Fusco brother” in the latest Twin Peaks.
Lara Bazelon has a decades-long career as a public defender. She worked as a trial attorney in the office of the public defender in Los Angeles for many years and is currently a law professor at the University of San Francisco, where she directs programs focusing on juvenile criminal justice and racial justice. But she’s also a journalist and novelist. This year she published A Good Mother, a legal thriller about a tireless public defender who cuts short her maternity leave to return to work to defend a client. That client, a 19-year-old mother with a baby roughly the same age, has been accused of killing her husband. For all the novel’s twists and turns, the real tension is in the subtext, which wrestles with questions like why motherhood can feel exponentially more demanding than fatherhood, whether being a “good mother” is compatible with extreme professional ambition and, most unsettling of all, what makes a “bad mother.” Lara spoke with Meghan about how these questions have embedded themselves in her own career and why romantic notions of perfect motherhood can actually hurt families.They also talked about a complicated defense case she worked on with her sister, the journalist Emily Bazelon, Lara’s controversial work defending men accused of sexual assault on college campuses, and their shared feelings about idealized depictions of the work-life balance of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Guest Bio: Lara Bazelon is professor of law and the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She has taught law at Loyola Law School, where she directed the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. She was a trial attorney in the federal Public Defender’s office in Los Angeles for seven years and has published journalism in Slate, Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book, Ambitious Like A Mother, will be published in April of 2022.
In 2015, journalist Carla Power published If The Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and Journey Into the Heart of the Quran, which chronicled her friendship with a madrasa-trained sheikh who lead her through a deep reading of the Koran. That book was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In her new book, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism, Carla confronts some of the questions she hadn’t engaged with in the last book, namely what draws ordinary Muslims into violent extremist groups like Isis and Al Qaeda and how reliable are the roads back? Through dozens of interviews with ex-jihadis, their family members, and those who seek to rehabilitate them, Carla connects the dots of a constellation of reasons and motivations to join extremist groups. The patterns that emerge are both surprising (in one case an entire extended family was lured by the promise of a better life in the Islamic State) and all too familiar (social media plays a role, no surprise). Carla, an American who spent much of her youth in the middle east, spoke with Meghan about what her reporting taught her about human loneliness, cultural isolation, and youthful impressionability. Moreover, she explained how what’s commonly referred to as the “Islamic world” is in fact many worlds, each with its own characteristics and complications. Guest Bio: Carla Power is a journalist and the author of both Home, Land, Security and If The Oceans Were Ink, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was raised in St. Louis, with years in Iran, India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Italy. She began her career as a writer and foreign correspondent at Newsweek, and subsequently contributed essays and reportage to a wide range of publications, including Time, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Guardian. She lives with her family in East Sussex, England.
Part three of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In the third and final part of the podcast’s weeklong “Gender Nuance” series, Meghan talks with journalist Lisa Selin Davis about the cultural and political forces that have factored into the current gender movement and why the media has failed to cover the whole story. The author of a book about the evolution of gender stereotypes and herself the mother of a gender nonconforming child, Lisa explains how the movement was galvanized by shifts in journalistic norms during the Trump administration and how institutions like schools, the nonprofit sector and the medical establishment got caught up in a worldview and treatment protocol that’s backed up by very little reliable data. She traces some of the history of gender nonconformity and explains what the concept of a “third gender” means in indigenous, nonwestern populations in places like India and Samoa. Mostly, Lisa talks about what she’s learned as a journalist covering gender issues in recent years and why it’s so difficult to publish anything that deviates from the accepted narrative. Ultimately, she says, we have to accept that talking honestly about the subject entails dealing with "a giant mess” and that “we have to get comfortable with the fact that are some things we simply can’t know.” Guest Bio: Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History of Girls Who Dare to Be Different, and the forthcoming Housewife: Exploding the Myths of Motherhood, Women’s Work and the Modern Family. She has written articles, essays and op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and many other outlets, and has published two novels, Belly and Lost Stars. She writes a regular Substack newsletter about gender issues called Broadview.
Part two of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In part two of this week’s three-part “Gender Nuance” series, Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper returns to answer questions from “Jolene and Marie,” two pseudonymous moms of gender-dysphoric kids who were originally interviewed on The Unspeakable last July. Dr. Edwards-Leeper, who talked alone with Meghan in part one of this series, speaks about what is involved in a comprehensive assessment of a young person seeking medicalized treatment for gender dysphoria, how such dysphoria can exist independently of being transgender, and how and why an ideological rift has emerged within her field and, in her view, shut down crucial and lifesaving dialogue within the medical establishment. She also explains how the cohort of patients who are over eighteen but younger than mid-twenties can be especially vulnerable to the inadequacies of a system that often does not coordinate psychological care with medical intervention. Guest Bio: Dr. Edwards-Leeper is an Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Hillsboro, Oregon. She also works with clients through her private practice in Beaverton, Oregon. Dr. Edwards-Leeper was a member of the American Psychological Association Task Force that developed practice guidelines for working with transgender individuals. She is currently the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and is involved in the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) 8 revision. She is an ally to the LGBTQ community and is considered an international expert in this field.
Part one of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 Clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper has worked with transgender and gender questioning youth since 2007 and has helped facilitate many successful medical transitions in young people. She has also, in the last year or so, begun to publicly voice concerns that some clinicians in her field have adopted a philosophy that overlooks, even eschews, the importance of proper patient assessment. In this conversation, the first of a three-part series this week, Dr. Leeper talks with Meghan about the concept of “gender affirming care” and how lack of access to specialized care can lead young patients to providers who follow protocols for adult patients, which may or may not be appropriate. She describes how she works with her own patients and talks about why something as fundamental as proper assessment has become so controversial in her field. Guest Bio: Dr. Edwards-Leeper is an Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Hillsboro, Oregon. She also works with clients through her private practice in Beaverton, Oregon. Dr. Edwards-Leeper was a member of the American Psychological Association Task Force that developed practice guidelines for working with transgender individuals. She is currently the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and is involved in the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) 8 revision. She is an ally to the LGBTQ community and is considered an international expert in this field.
Meghan’s guests this week are father and daughter Dr. Drew Pinsky and Paulina Pinsky, who are coauthors of the new book, It Doesn’t Have To Be Awkward: Dealing With Relationships, Consent and Other Hard-To-Talk-About Stuff. In the book, they address issues around relationships, boundaries and sexual consent and seek to bridge the generation gap between baby boomers like Drew and millennials like Paulina 28. (Gen-Xers are once again excused from the table.) In this interview, Drew and Paulina talk about why this particular generation gap seems more pronounced than previous ones, especially with regard to young people wanting to leave the nest. They also talk about how the oft-cited concept of “boundaries” is much broader and more complex than we often assume, which Paulina learned when she started college and compulsively introduced herself to everyone she met. (Meghan did this, too, and was affectionately deemed by one friend “a conversational slut” —a totally okay thing to say back then!) As a longtime devotee of Loveline, the no-holds-barred syndicated radio call-in program that Drew co-hosted with Adam Carolla for three decades, Meghan is especially keen to parse generational differences as they apply to cultural sensitivities and comic sensibilities. As such, they revisit a classic Loveline clip from long ago featuring David Alan Grier riffing off the names of birth control pills as hypothetical names for his children. Paulina, who writes comedy herself, explains what she thinks of that bit while Drew talks about how much he misses those days. Guest Bios: Dr. Drew Pinsky is a practicing internist and addiction medicine specialist, a New York Times bestselling author and prolific television, radio and podcasting host. In addition to his thirty-plus years hosting the iconic radio show Loveline, he has hosted numerous award-winning television shows including Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew on VH1 and DrDrew on HLN. His digital platforms include The Dr. Drew Podcast, the Adam and Dr. Drew Show, and Dr. Drew After Dark, and his two streaming shows, #AskDrDrew and Dose of Dr. Drew. Paulina Pinsky teaches comedy writing to high schoolers at Columbia University and writes about female sexuality and feminism. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Gen Xers and young Baby Boomers can be nostalgic about the freedoms of growing up in the 1970s. But there was a darker side to that era, too, especially for girls. Feminism was on the ascent, but the sexual revolution was moving even faster, bringing profound changes to behavioral norms and assumptions about pleasure and consent. In her new memoir, The Big Hurt, Erika Schickel recalls a childhood that was both magical and ruinous, one in which she played freely on the streets of her Manhattan neighborhood but, at the same time, attended a private school where (with the blessing of the headmaster) Hollywood casting agents scouted for girls to audition for the role of a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby (incidentally, Jeffrey Epstein was teaching math at this school at the time). As a teen at boarding school, Erika was seduced by a male teacher and asked by the administration to leave before graduation. Her mother, meanwhile, applauded the relationship and Erika even briefly lived with the teacher before heading off to college. Decades later, while living the life of a conventional married mom in Los Angeles, Erika found herself embroiled in an obsessive affair with the legendary crime writer James Ellroy, a man who was himself damaged by the violence and tragedy of his youth. Erika spoke to Meghan about the book and the revelations that came to her over the more than ten years it took her to write it. During those years, the #MeToo movement came along, further complicating Erika’s story while making it all the more relevant. Guest Bio: Erika Schickel is the author the memoir The Big Hurt (Hachette Books, 2021) and You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (Kensington Books, 2007). She has taught memoir and essay writing at UCLA and privately. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, LA City Beat, Salon, Ravishly, Tin House, Bust Magazine, and The LA Review of Books, among others.
Husband and wife evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are the authors of the new book A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide To the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. Former professors at Washington’s Evergreen State College, their involvement in a 2017 controversy that became a touchstone “campus culture war” event led them to become major figures in the so-called “heterodox” intellectual space. They now cohost livestreams of Bret’s popular Dark Horse Podcast, where they talk about social, political, scientific (and sometimes medical) issues through an evolutionary lens. In this conversation, Bret and Heather talk with Meghan about their new book, which is premised on the idea that society has become “hypernovel,” meaning that the rate of change is so rapid that “our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out sync.” They define what they mean by the “WEIRD" world (Western, Educated, Industrialized, (relatively) Rich, and Democrat) and explain why human mating and reproductive strategies— and the community structures that are designed to support them — evolved the way they did. They also untangle mysteries such as why appendicitis is almost unknown in the non-industrialized world, why hunter-gatherer civilizations didn’t need orthodonture, and why monogamy is still the best bet for the survival of the human species, despite some rumors to the contrary. Finally, they discuss recent controversial statements they’ve made about the COVID-19 vaccine and the drug Ivermectin. Guest Bios: Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are evolutionary biologists who have been invited to address the US Congress, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, and have spoken before audiences across the globe. They both earned PhDs in Biology from the University of Michigan, were professors at the Evergreen State College for fifteen years, and have more recently been visiting professors at Princeton University. They cohost the weekly livestreams of Bret’s podcast the DarkHorse podcast. Heather is the author of the 2002 book Antipode: Seasons With the Extraordinary Wildlife and Culture of Madagascar and writes the Substack newsletter, Natural Selections.
Incel stands for “involuntary celibate” and refers most often to young men whose sexual and romantic rejection has led them to spend lots of time denigrating women online. Over the last decade, a handful of high profile mass killings has led to a media narrative suggesting that incels are an organized hate group of violent misogynists. They’ve even been classified as a domestic terrorist threat. But Naama Kates, host of the podcast Incel, has been studying and interviewing these men for years and found that the incel phenomenon is not as simple—or as dark—as we’ve been told. She spoke with Meghan about who these young men really are, what cultural and political forces are shaping them, and what factors often go overlooked in favor of easy assumptions about male ideologues. She also talked about the prevalence of mental health struggles and autism as well as changing social norms that can favor girls and demonize or ridicule boys.
Relevant links:
Incel Podcast
How Many Bones Would You Break To Get Laid? New York Magazine
Misogyny and the co-oping of the Isla Vista Tragedy Los Angeles Times
Guest Bio:
Naama Kates is a writer, producer, and creator of Incel, a popular weekly podcast for Crawlspace Media. The show is a deep dive into the involuntary celibate community, and features dozens of interviews with incels, as well as researchers and practitioners in mental health, law enforcement, and security. The show has been featured in the New York Times, Vulture, NY Magazine, CTV, and News 4. Naama has a background in Computer Science and linguistics.
Meghan met actor/author/comedian Chelsea Handler several years ago when they attempted to develop Meghan’s 2014 book, The Unspeakable (no direct connection to this podcast) into a television series. In fine Hollywood tradition, the project failed to launch, but the two remained friendly and Chelsea agreed to come on Meghan’s podcast to talk about her own podcast, Dear Chelsea, which offers advice to lovelorn or otherwise tormented or confused listeners. Chelsea talked about the advice she’s both given and received (and often ignored) over the years, her foray into psychotherapy, her interrogation of her own privilege, and the effect of Trumpism on her political consciousness and mental health. Along the way, she argued a bit with Meghan about progressive activism and challenged Meghan’s assertion that seeing everything through the lens of race is itself a form of racism. Chelsea also discussed her views on parthogenesis, a form of natural asexual reproduction that’s seen in certain reptiles and that might have surprising benefits in humans. Guest Bio: Chelsea Handler is a comedian, television host, and bestselling author. For seven years, she was the host of E!’s top-rated late night show Chelsea Lately and the only female late night talk show host on the air. She then launched a documentary series, Chelsea Does, followed by her talk show Chelsea on Netflix in 2016. Five of her six bestselling books have reached number one on the New York Times Bestseller list, including 2019’s Life Will Be The Death of Me. Most recently, she released her first stand-up special in over six years, the critically acclaimed Chelsea Handler: Evolution on HBO Max, and launched her iHeart Radio advice-based podcast, Dear Chelsea. She is currently on tour with a new standup show, Vaccinated and Horny.
Sam Harris is a giant in the world of podcasting. His podcast, Making Sense, which began in 2013 under the name Waking Up, averages more than a million downloads per episode. He is also a philosopher and neuroscientist, a meditation expert, the author of several bestselling books, and a prominent voice in both the “new atheist movement” and in “heterodox” intellectual circles, which has led him to have public debates and disagreements with other high profile thinkers. Meghan and Sam cover lots of ground in this long conversation, including the perils of confusing messaging around vaccines, the cowardice of institutional leadership in the face of social media mobs, and why the debate format can be, as Sam puts it, “a commercial for the limitations of conversation.” Most of all, they talk about what Meghan calls the question of “how not to ruin the dinner party,” which can happen when people who think too much about all of this stuff (like they do) engage in intellectual nitpicking and ruin everyone’s fun. Guest Bio Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers, include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast and is also the creator of the Waking Up app, which offers a modern, rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life. Sam has practiced meditation for over 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Frank Bruni spent more than 25 years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a columnist on the opinion page. In June, he left the column to become a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke University. Frank spoke with Meghan about the difficulties — maybe the impossibility— of writing a weekly opinion column while also maintaining intellectual humility and engaging with your own uncertainty. The author of many books, including a book about higher education, Frank explained how “campus craziness” tropes have been distorted by the media even though students continue to disagree about free speech and administrators continue to pander to a small minority of loud extremists. He also talked about an ongoing medical issue that threatens his eyesight and about which he writes in a forthcoming book. Guest Bio: Frank Bruni was a New York Times opinion columnist from 2011 to 2021. He has also served as a White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic for the Times. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers and his newest book, The Beauty of Dusk, about affliction, aging and his brush with blindness, will be published early next year. He ended his op-ed column in June 2021 and moved from New York to North Carolina to become a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke University, but continues to write a popular weekly newsletter (www.nytimes.com/BruniLetter) for the Times.
This week, Meghan talks with legendary sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage. Recounting thirty years of correspondence from people seeking advice, Dan reflects on how anxieties and concerns have changed over the decades. Whereas he once got mostly practical questions about sex, he now hears from people who describe a relationship dynamic and ask some version of “am I the asshole?” Dan also talks about how he’s become gentler over the years in doling out advice, the legacy of his famous “It Gets Better” campaign, and his discomfort with Meghan’s “favorite” issue, the surge in transgender identity declarations among young people. (That’s not really her favorite issue.) Meghan also announced some new developments with the podcast, including the first ever Unspeakable Zoom hangout for listeners on August 19. To learn more and to register, click HERE [link] Guest Bio: Dan Savage is an author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column, and hosts the popular Savage Lovecast. He is the author of several books including The Kid, It Gets Better, The Commitment, Skipping Toward Gomorrah, American Savage, and Savage Love. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth.
In this very special, guest-free episode of The Unspeakable Podcast, Meghan talks to her listeners about the now ubiquitous concept of the “mid-career pivot.” Drawing from her experience as a longtime freelance writer who has had to shift her entire work philosophy to accommodate a changing media landscape, Meghan shares several ideas and at least one pet theory. That theory has to do with the ways that Generation X is in an especially precarious position when it comes to this pivot, mostly because they’re too young to retire but too old to be digital natives. She also talks about launching the podcast exactly a year ago, the challenges of promoting it, and the show’s recent move to the Podcast One network.
Science writer Tom Chivers is the author of How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics In The News (And Knowing When to Trust Them) which he co-wrote with his cousin, the economist David Chivers. He came to Meghan’s attention recently because of an article he wrote for the British publication, UnHerd, where he serves as science editor. That article, entitled Twitter Trolls Mentally Ill?, was a response to a widely circulated statement by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who wrote about defamation she’d experienced from a former student and about how the language of empathy and self-care is now often repurposed as a cudgel. Tom's piece expanded on some of these ideas, suggesting that mental health struggles and personality disorders have become engines of social media and that the kind of behavior that’s rewarded on places like Twitter is sometimes the same behavior that’s associated with diagnoses like Borderline Personality Disorder. Tom spoke with Meghan about this article and about related ideas in his book, including the ways misperceptions of harm can turn people into catastrophists. Relevant links: Are Twitter Trolls Mentally Ill? https://unherd.com/2021/06/are-twitter-trolls-mentally-ill/ It Is Obscene by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/ Guest Bio: Tom Chivers is science editor at UnHerd and the co-author with David Chivers of How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics In The News (And Knowing When to Trust Them). He is a two Tim winner of the Royal Statistical Society’s “statistical excellence in journalism” award.
Approximately 554,000 Americans experienced homelessness last year, and over half of were in California. In Los Angeles County alone, 66,000 people were unhoused in 2020, a 16 percent increase from the previous year. Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles who often speaks about policy issues and ideas for addressing the crisis. He was also homeless himself for ten years, living for most of that time in an encampment in Koreatown, where he and his longtime husband dealt with medical problems, addiction issues, street violence and tried several times to find jobs and housing. Shawn also happens to be a Yale graduate who once worked on Wall Street and later owned his own business. The stories of how he entered and finally escaped homelessness are remarkable. But even more remarkable is his perspective on the bigger crisis. Shawn spoke with Meghan about not just the day to day life of someone living on the street but also what city and state officials are getting wrong about when they talk about how to fix the problem.
Guest Bio:
Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for unhoused people in Los Angeles. A former banker and business owner, he lived on the street for ten years. He has been housed since late 2019.
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is everywhere all of a sudden. Having made its way from academia to K-12 education, it came to the attention of the Trump Administration last year and quickly became a bogeyman of the political right. From there, state legislatures began crafting bills that would ban the "divisive concepts" allegedly embedded in CRT-based curriculum. But the bills have only added to public confusion over what CRT really means and partisan media coverage has whipped up the whole debate into something resembling a moral panic. _ Dr. Erec Smith is a professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania and has written extensively about race and its role in pedagogy and public debate. He talked with Meghan about the origins of CRT, when it can be useful, how it's often misapplied and, above all, how most of what's got people so upset these days has little to do with CRT in the first place. Guest Bio: Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and focuses primarily on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. He is a co-founder of Free Black Thought, a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia. His latest book is A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment.
This week's episode is a little different. Meghan's two guests appear anonymously and speak about their sons' struggles with gender dysphoria and subsequent desires to transition into females. Calling themselves Jolene and Marie, they explain why they're wary of the "affirmative" model of care, which operates from an assumption that even very young children can know for sure if they are in the wrong gender and often demonizes parents who question the approach. Jolene and Marie talk about how this issue has affected their whole families, the ways gender dysphoria can intersect with autism and other neurodivergent conditions, and the way online communities can blur the boundaries between gender identity issues and other emotional or psychological challenges. Relevant links: Genspect: A voice for parents with gender questioning kids https://genspect.org Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender DysphoriaGuest Unspeakable Podcast interview with gender therapist Sasha Ayad Bios: Jolene and Marie are pseudonyms for two moms of gender questioning kids. They live in the United States.
Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick is one of the most celebrated humorists of his generation. From his 1993 breakout off-Broadway hit play, Jeffrey to Broadway hits like I Hate Hamlet and screenplays for films like In and Out, Addams Family Values and Sister Act, Paul is a master of not just the quippy one-liner but also deeply realized characters and relatable, if often absurd situations. He's also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades and is the author of several books, mostly recently the novel Playing the Palace, which is about a gay relationship between a young New York party planner and an imagined version of the Prince of Wales. Paul spoke with Meghan about gay subject matter in his work over time, his fascination with the British royal family, his latest project for HBO and his feelings about the ever shifting battle lines of the new wars. They also talked about growing up in New Jersey, which is its own kind of culture war. Guest Bio: Paul Rudnick is a novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter. His Obie award winning plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and include I Hate Hamlet, Jeffery, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, In and Out and Sister and his many book include Social Disease, I'll Take It and, most recently, Playing the Palace.
Novelist Lionel Shriver is known for placing social topics (sometimes radioactive ones) inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting akin to the Columbine massacre. Lionel's thirteen other novels take on such subjects as obesity, the US healthcare system, the national debt, global overpopulation, and homegrown terrorism. Her new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, is about suicide, specifically the pros and cons of ending your life on your own terms before nature-or modern medicine-prolongs it in ghastly fashion. Lionel spoke with Meghan about her new book and also her feelings about illness, medicine and her own death. As an American who's lived in the UK for several decades and still lives in New York part time, Lionel also offers her thoughts about single payer health care and what the venerated National Health Service does right as well as often gets wrong. Guest Bio: Lionel Shriver's fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.
One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of convicted sex offenders. But The National Sex Offender Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it's yet another blunt instrument of "tough on crime" 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to ruins lives than to protect kids. Emily spoke with Meghan about what led her to this work and why our assumptions about sexual predators are often wrong. She also explained some of the reasons why sexual abuse against children, and sexual violence in general, has declined over the last 30 years-for reasons having nothing to do with the registry. Relevant links: New York Times: At 18, He Had Consensual Gay Sex. Montana Wants Him to Stay a Registered Sex Offender New York Times: Did The Supreme Court Base a Ruling on a Myth? The New Yorker: The List Guest bio: Emily Horowitz is a professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of a number of articles about the harms of sex offense registries, including the book Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. At St. Francis College she co-directs a program that helps those with criminal justice involvement earn college degrees and she is currently conducting research on the experiences of veterans with sex offense convictions.
Libby Emmons now works mainly as a journalist, writing articles about ideological divides in culture and politics for places like Quilllette, The Federalist and The Spectator, and serving as editor of the conservative Canadian news magazine The Post Millennial. But before she entered the sphere of public debate about the news, Libby was in the theater world, specifically the radical feminist theater community. The author of a many award-winning dramatic works, including the play How To Sell Your Gang Rape Baby For Parts, Libby was a founder of the New York downtown theater company, Puss Collective. But when she published an article about transhumanism that made a conceptual comparison with transgenderism, she was exiled from the theater community and began to see culture and politics in a new way. Libby talks with Meghan about how this evolution came about and what frustrates-and inspires-her most about the current political moment. She also explains what "transhumanism" is all about. (You sort of don't want to know. But you also want to know!) Guest Bio: Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial and a senior contributor to The Federalist. She has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and a speaker and educator about transgender issues, particularly issues related to trans healthcare. Now in his late 50s, he transitioned from female to male in his late 20s and has more recently became a controversial figure in certain corners of the trans community. He talked with Meghan about why he's so controversial, what it's been like to spend decades on masculinizing hormone therapy, and why he's worried about the number of clinicians now prescribing such therapies to young people after minimal psychological counseling. For the record: at one point in the interview Buck mistakenly referred to the biotech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt as Martine Rathbaum. He also suggested that Rothblatt, who is the founder of the biotech company United Therapeutics, is among the billionaire class. As of March 2021, United Therapeutics was reportedly worth $7.1 billion. Rothblatt herself, according to Forbes, is worth $390 million. Guest Bio: Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and educator in the area of trans male healthcare and sexual wellness. He has also been a groundbreaking figure in the porn industry, which you can learn about on his website and also in a documentary about his life, Mr. Angel, which was released in 2013 and premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of many novels, including You Should Have Known, which became the basis for last fall's hit HBO limited series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Her brand new novel, The Plot, is a literary suspense thriller about a struggling writer who stumbles upon what by all accounts is the greatest story ever (or in this case never) told. The problem is, it belongs to someone else. In this conversation Jean talks with Meghan about what a "story" really is and why the boundaries of ownership can get so murky. She also discusses some of her other books, two of which, 2009's Admission and 2017's The Devil and Webster, were set on college campuses and delve into the lives of school administrators trying to negotiate a changing world. Jean has a lot to say about the state of higher education, the state of higher culture, and how reading-and writing-has been reshaped by the constraints of the pandemic. Guest Bio: Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine books, most recently The Plot, just out from Macmillan's Celadon Books. Yet another novel, The Latecomer, will be published in 2022. With her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, Jean adapted James Joyce's The Dead as an immersive theatrical event that was performed at New York's s American Irish Historical Society. She is also the founder of Book The Writer, a pop up book club enterprise that brings authors and readers together for curated book discussion groups.
You've probably noticed more buzz than usual lately about anti-racism training modules in schools and workplaces. Often referred to as DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion, this framework has turned into a big business, with concepts like "white fragility" and "black despair" sometimes weaponized in the name of fighting inequality. Amid the swirl of approaches (which are often indistinguishable from one another), a 27-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Chloé Valdary has developed an alternative model. Called The Theory of Enchantment, it model uses the arts and developmental psychology to help people of find a common humanity through a shared love of culture. In this interview, Chloé talks with Meghan about how she came up with this idea, how her own unusual family background made her resistant to essentialist identity categories, and why she thinks the frequently invoked social justice refrain "it's not my job to educate you" is so misguided. Relevant links: Black People Are Far More Powerful Than Critical Race Theory Teaches, by Chloe Valdary I Refuse To Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated, by Grace Church School teacher Paul Rossi What Is Systemic Racism? John McWhorter, Lara Bazelon, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and Kenny Xu weigh in. Guest Bio: Chloé Valdary is the creator of Theory of Enchantment, a framework for compassionate antiracism that she has introduced to workplaces around the world, including in South Africa, The Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. She has lectured at universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown and she has been a Bartley fellow at the Wall Street Journal and written for that publication as well as The New York Times and elsewhere.
For most of her career, University of Sussex Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Stock was known primarily as a scholar on philosophical questions related to fiction and the concept of imagination. But in 2018, she began to speak and write about the issue of gender identity. Among her questions were why her philosophy colleagues were so reluctant to discuss something so seemingly ripe for the kind of inquiry philosophers live for. The backlash came swiftly but so did tacit messages of support and over time Kathleen has become a leading voice on gender identity theory, policy reform, and their effects on women and girls. Kathleen spoke with Meghan about this unexpected turn in her career and also the various tensions between recognizing the rights of transgender people and recognizing certain material facts. She also explained the difference between sex and gender, which, despite the ubiquity of those terms, many people remain confused about. Guest bio: Kathleen Stock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex in England. Her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism was just published by Little Brown in the U.K. and is available everywhere on Kindle. The U.S. edition will be published on September 21, 2021.
John McWhorter teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University, is the author of more than 20 books, a contributor to The Atlantic and the host of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley. If you're a fan of The Unspeakable, you may know John best from his commentary around issues of race. Since 2007, he has been in regular conversation with economist Glenn Loury on the Bloggingheads platform, where is his known as a uniquely honest voice on the complexities-and often the hypocrisies-of certain progressive antiracist orthodoxies. Last summer, he began writing a new book on this subject. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists is being made available in serialized form on Substack and will be published later this year. Meanwhile, yet another book, Nine Nasty Words, is out this week. Meghan spoke with John about his work over the last several years, his relationship to academia (including being raised by a leftist professor mom), and how the inspiration for The Elect came from none other than cookbook author Alison Roman. Guest Bio: John McWhorter teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University. His new book about the new antiracist movement, The Elect, is cu being rolled out on his Substack. His book on language Nine Nasty Words, is out this week. You can find him in regular conversation with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show at Bloggingheads.tv.
Yasmine Mohammad is an author and human rights activist, advocating for the rights of those living under religious extremism. You wouldn't think that would be controversial, but the extremism she focuses on is Islamic extremism, specifically the fundamentalism that has arisen in the Islamic world over the last several decades and imposed draconian rules on women. Because progressive norms in the west often now frame criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry, Yasmine, who considers herself an ex-Muslim, is now considered both a heretic of Islam and inconvenient social justice figure among western activists. She spoke with Meghan about this strange position and also shared her own story of growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic household and was being forced into marriage to a man who turned out to be a member of Al Qaeda. She also talked about what it's like to be forced to wear the hijab as well the prevalence of practices like female genital mutilation in both the Islamic world and within immigrant communities in the west. Guest Bio: Yasmine Mohammed is the is the author of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam and the founder of Free Hearts Free Minds, which provides support for women-and men-who need help freeing themselves from the suppressions of religious extremism in the Islamic World.
Jesse Singal's new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, challenges many long held assumptions about society and human behavior: for instance the myth of the super predator, the so-called "power pose," the use of positive psychology in the military, even the concept of implicit bias. We've come to take these ideas as truths, but as Jesse explains, many are based on based on faulty methodology, shoddy interpretation and sometimes just wishful thinking. Jesse talks with Meghan about all of that as well as a subject that is not in the book, his research into childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria and its relationship to the recent surge in young people identifying as transgender or nonbinary. This work, despite its very careful methodology, has incurred the wrath of a certain corner of trans activism, mostly on Twitter, and he talks about why this might be and how much it should matter. Guest Bio: Jesse Singal is the author of the new book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He is a contributing writer to New York Magazine and has written for The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Slate and Reason, among other publications. He is the cohost, with Katie Herzog, of the Blocked and Reported podcast and writes regularly at https://jessesingal.substack.com.
Time Magazine columnist for 20 years, Joel Stein is known for his humorous, irreverent and often deadpan inquiries into American life and social politics. His latest book is In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book, which despite the subtitle, is a serious minded, though also quite funny, journey through the parts of America that, in the wake of the Trump election, Joel realized he didn't understand at all. Joel talks with Meghan about the people he met, what surprised him the most, and explains the distinction between what he calls the Intellectual Elite and the Boat Elite. He also shows his age during the interview by receiving a phone call on his "landline" and having the call picked up by a device called an "answering machine." Guest Bio: Joel Stein's latest book, In Defense of Elitism, is out in paperback this month. He is also the author of Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. In addition to Time Magazine, he has been a columnist at Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angles Times. Joel has taught at Princeton as well as written for several television sitcoms.
If you've been following the seemingly endless battles on college campuses over free speech, you may have noticed that professors are a frequent target of censorship and complaint. Sometimes this because students object to curriculum and sometimes the infraction is as trivial as a professor sending a a "problematic" tweet. The recently launched Academic Freedom Alliance seeks to help educators navigate these waters. Its chair, constitutional law scholar and political science professor Keith Whittington, is Meghan's guest this week. Keith talked why an organization like the AFA is so necessary right now, how academia has changed over the course of his career, and why it's important to remember that speech suppressions comes from the political right as well as the activist left. He also talked about why professors are often inclined to apologize or try to explain themselves when that's often the worst thing you can do when you the mob comes after you. Guest bio: Keith Whittington is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. You can find the Academic Freedom Alliance at academicfreedom.org
Writer, comedian and popular podcaster and YouTuber Bridget Phetasy is known her her uniquely astute analysis of the news of the day - and also her views on what shouldn't be news. In this conversation, sparked by recent remarks from the comedian Sarah Silverman, Bridget and Meghan talk about what's happened to comedy in the age of (often manufactured) hypersensitivity, why they, in turn, are hypersensitive to that hypersensitivity, and what it's like to watch entertainers and other public figures begin to distance themselves from the Trump outrage machine. Bridget also shares what she learned about gender relations from writing for Playboy and how she thinks overcoming addiction and spending time in 12-step programs has given her an especially keen nose for the cultural hypocrisy of the moment. Note: A separate conversation, recorded in late 2019 at Bridget's home, is available for the podcast's Patreon supporters at www.patreon.com/theunspeakable. Guest Bio: Bridget Phetasy is a writer, comedian, and host of the Walk-Ins Welcome podcast and The Weekly Dumpster Fire show on YouTube.
A conservative who has always been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens often manages to annoy his would-be allies on the right while consistently inflaming Times readers who are on the left. In this conversation, Bret and Meghan compare notes on how column writing has changed over the last decade and parse some of Bret's more controversial pieces, including columns he's written on climate change, Jewish intellectual achievement, and the sexual abuse allegations against filmmaker Woody Allen. They also discuss the spinelessness of many instiutional leaders today, the Substack phenomenon, and a recent column of Bret's entitled Woke Me When It's Over, a phrase Meghan almost used as the title for her last book. Guest bio: Bret Stephens is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He was previously foreign-affairs columnist at The Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. He was raised in Mexico City.
Angel Eduardo is a writer, musician and visual artist based in New York City. Last summer, he wrote an article that appeared in Areo Magazine called I'm a Nobody, The Harper's Letter Was For Me The now-infamous Open Letter on Justice and Debate published in Harper's Magazine, addressed a climate of growing intolerance for ideological diversity and was signed by more than 150 prominent artists and intellectuals. Among the criticisms of the so-called "Harper's Letter" was that it amounted to a bunch of elitists whining about having their voices muted by the democratization of opinion. But Angel, a 35-year-old millennial with immigrant parents, a day job and a fledgling artistic career, saw things differently. In this conversation, Angel talks with Meghan about why he wrote the article, why the new leftist groupthink reminds him of his own religious upbringing, why he thinks fetishizing the n-word does more to incite racism than fight it. He also explains a rhetorical concept he's come up with called "star-manning." Guest Bio: Angel Eduardo is a musician, photographer, and designer based in New York City. He is a staff writer and content creator for Idealist and contributes a monthly column for the Center for Inquiry called Searching for Better Angels. Learn more about him, see his visual art and hear his music on his official website, angeleduardo.com.
Writer and performer Annabelle Gurwitch never got rich over the course her decades-long career, but she managed to carve out a decent life as a working actor and published author. In her fifties, however, her fortunes changed and she found herself divorced, renting out a room in her house, and wondering how a middle class existence can slip away after a lifetime of hard work. She chronicles these struggles-often hilariously-in her fifth book You're Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility. In this conversation, Annabelle speaks with Meghan about how she thinks she got to this place, what she's learned about homelessness and access to health care, and how a recent medical crisis has raised her stakes even further. She also speaks about her child, now a young adult, who identifies as nonbinary and how coming to understand that identity led her to think that future generations might be able to make better sense of the world than we do. Guest Bio: Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. She's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, LA Magazine and Hadassah among other publications. Her latest book is You're Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility, published by Counterpoint Press.
In her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, author Lori Gottlieb tells the stories of five people in psychotherapy. Four are her own patients and one is Lori herself. A practicing therapist for more than a decade, she took an unusual route to her vocation, working as a television writer and then attending medical school before realizing that her love of storytelling could be combined with helping people in a clinical setting. Since then, she's become celebrated as a writer and as a therapist. Lori spoke with Meghan what's most often misunderstood about therapy, what therapists secretly think of their patients and how to know when it's time to end treatment. She also talked about her work with singles seeking committed partnerships, the pros and cons of dating apps and how having realistic expectations is not the same thing as "settling." Guest Bio: Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is currently being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the "Dear Therapist" advice column for The Atlantic and is co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists" podcast. Her recent TED talk was one of the top ten most watched of the year. Find her at https://lorigottlieb.com.
Moses Farrow is a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in what he calls adoption trauma. Born in South Korea in 1978, he was adopted by actress Mia Farrow when he was two-years-old, becoming one of ten adopted and four biological children in that family. He was later adopted by Mia's former partner, Woody Allen and in 2018 published a stunning account of what it was like growing up in this family and why he supports his father in the highly publicized sexual abuse allegations made in the wake of a custody battle in 1992. Moses spoke with Meghan about his mission to help adoptees make sense of their lives and shared his personal experiences as a survivor of abuse, attempted suicide, and suicide loss. Read Moses's 2018 blog post about his family story here: http://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com. Guest Bio: Moses Farrow, LMFT is an Adoption Trauma Therapist, with over 20 years in the mental health field. He is also an outspoken advocate for mental health, suicide prevention and adoption reform. Most recently, he has created videos on YouTube and gave his first newspaper interview with The Guardian, about his family and adoption work. He has begun the #truthislouder movement which encourages adoptees to speak their truths and invites everyone to become an ally to the adoptee community to help save adoptee lives.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the prevailing wisdom from government officials and much of the scientific community is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in an animal and at some point jumped to humans. The idea that it might have accidentally escaped from a lab has been widely dismissed as conspiracy theory, partly because it was easily conflated with inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration. But plenty of scientists and policy have quietly taken the so-called "lab-leak hypothesis" seriously and now that the volume has been lowered on some of Trump's more dangerous distortions they're starting to talk about it. Two experts that have been talking about it all along are Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, and Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert and senior research fellow at King's College London. Together, they spoke with Meghan about what we do and don't know about the origins of the virus, why knowing the origins matters in the first place, and, above all, why people have such difficulty separating the idea of a deliberately released bioweapon, which no serious person has suggested, with the possibility of an unintentional lab spill-over, for which there is plenty of room for questions in this case. Guest Bios: Dr. Alina Chan is a recent Human Frontier Science Program fellow with 12+ years of research training in medical genetics, biochemistry, synthetic biology, and vector engineering. At the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Dr. Chan is currently researching next generation AAV vectors for human gene therapy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chan began to investigate problems relevant to finding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and spearheaded the development of the COVID-19 CoV Genetics (covidcg.org) browser for scientists worldwide to rapidly track emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants by locations and date ranges of interest. Follow her on Twitter @ayjchan. Filippa Lentzos, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, where she has a joint appointment in the Department of War Studies and the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. She is also an Associate Senior Researcher within armament and disarmament program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a biosecurity columnist at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an editor of the social science journal BioSocieties, and the NGO Coordinator for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Her May 5, 2020 article on the need for a credible investigation into the virus's origins appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For more about her work see www.filippalentzos.com or follow her on twitter @FilippaLentzos.
Veteran reporter Nancy Rommelmann is based in New York City these days, but she was a longtime resident of Portland, Oregon who knows the city-and its people, politics, and assorted proclivities-with a unique combination of intimacy and objectivity. As the city erupted into protests last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Nancy returned to Portland and began covering the action for Reason Magazine. This conversation is divided into two parts. In the first part, recorded in late December, Nancy focuses on Portland and helps define the boundaries between leftist so-called antifacist groups like Antifa, anarchist movements like Black bloc, and the peaceful protestors whose efforts are sometimes overshadowed by extremists. In the second part, recorded after the January 6 siege at the Capitol and the subsequent inauguration of President Biden, she talks about some of the differences between the Capitol protestors and the ones she's reported on in Portland. Guest Bio: Nancy Rommelmann is a journalist whose work appears in Reason, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other publications. Her latest book is To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder. Find her at nancyromm.com, follow on Twitter @nancyromm and Substack. She lives in New York City.
Bruce Wagner, a successful Hollywood screenwriter and the author of twelve novels, has been a beloved literary figure for decades, especially in his home city of Los Angeles. His most recent novel, The Marvel Universe, was enthusiastically acquired by a small press until, he says, the publisher objected to certain "problematic" language, specifically the word "fat," which a character uses to describe herself. This led Bruce to release the book into the public domain by making it available on his website for free. In this conversation, Bruce talks about how a public domain release differs from self-publishing, how sensitivity readers are setting the tone for much of the culture now, and what this means for artists who are drawn to the more monstrous qualities of the human condition. Guest Bio: Bruce Wagner is the author of twelve novels, including Dead Stars, I'm Losing You, and I'll Let You Go. His latest novel, The Marvel Universe, is available for free at brucewagner.la. He is also the creator of the television series Wild Palms.
Podcaster and journalist Katie Herzog returns to the podcast to discuss her article Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?, which talked about a trend she's observed wherein many of her lesbian friends are now identifying as transgender or nonbinary. She explains how she sees the nonbinary identity as a "regressive trend" because it ultimately puts limits on gender expression even as it purports to do the opposite. She also talks about the woman who coined the phrase "the future is female," the recent announcement that the actor once known as Ellen Page now identifies as male, and (not unrelatedly) her former career as a professional whitewater kayaker. An extended version of this interview, along with a longform version of Katie's article, is available on the podcast's Patreon page at Patreon.com/theunspeakable. Guest Bio: Katie Herzog is the co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the podcast Blocked and Reported. She is a former writer for Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper, The Stranger.
After two years on the Bloggingheads platform, journalists and cultural critics Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Maltz Bovy are taking their popular podcast, Feminine Chaos, independent. In this conversation with Meghan, they share their views on some of contemporary feminism's most pressing concerns, including the purity policing of white women, the new stigmatization of straightness and the importance of preserving "you guys" as a term of address. They also do a deep dive into the identity category known as "demisexual" and ask if this designation is worthy of special dispensation. Guest Bios: Phoebe Maltz Bovy writes for publications including The Globe and Mail and The Washington Post and is the author of the 2017 book The Perils of "Privilege. Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and novelist. Her next book No One Will Miss Her, will be published by William Morrow in 2021.
In this very special edition of The Unspeakable Podcast, Meghan departs from the interview format and speaks directly to listeners. Reflecting on the current moment as well as on the election four years ago, she talks about how writing her last book inspired her to create the podcast and also how after 25 years of writing "think pieces" she literally doesn't know what to think anymore. She also talks about how social media has turned "ambient perception" into a substitute for empirical reality and posits that the best antidote to cancel culture is to stop obsessing about it and have faith in the intelligence of audiences. She also announces that the podcast will be on a brief hiatus until the first of the year. But it will be back!
Bestselling author William Deresiewicz's new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, paints a grim picture of the state of the arts-at least as far as actual artists are concerned. For all the talk about how it's never been easier to be creative, the truth is that it's never been more difficult to do so professionally. In this conversation, Deresiewicz relays what he learned from interviews with more than one hundred working artists, how the digital economy has obliterated the creative economy, and what he portends for the future of his own career. Guest Bio: William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges and other venues, and a former professor of English at Yale. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, and many other publications. He is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing and is the New York Times bestselling author of Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and A Jane Austen Education.
Sigrid Nunez is the author of seven novels and a memoir. Sigrid's 2018 novel, The Friend, won The National Book Award for fiction and became a bestseller. That book featured a unnamed narrator caring for the dog of a close friend who had committed suicide. This fall she has a new novel out, What Are You Going Through? It's also about a friendship, this time between the narrator and an old acquaintance who's facing terminal cancer and has asked the narrator to be with her as she lives her final days before taking drugs to end her own life. Sigrid spoke with Meghan about this work as well as her past work, not only The Friend but also Salvation City, a novel she published a decade ago about a global flu pandemic. She also talked about her relationship with the late Susan Sontag, with whom she lived while in a relationship with Sontag's son and who was the subject of her 2014 memoir, Sempre Susan. Guest Bio: Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
Merrill Markoe is an Emmy award winning television writer and celebrated humorist. She's worked on shows ranging from Sex and The City to Moonlighting but is probably best known for her association with The David Letterman Show, where she was the head writer from the show's inception in 1981 until the late 1980s. She's also the author of nine books, including the brand new graphic memoir We Saw Scenery: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe. Here, Merrill draws from an enormous cache of diaries she kept from approximately the fourth grade through her first year of college. In this conversation, Merrill talks about the book, about growing up female and funny, about harnessing that funniness into a career, and about working with-and being the longtime girlfriend of-David Letterman. She also talks about what it's like to pursue comedy in this era of heightened sensitivities and why it's a myth that you're not allowed to be funny anymore. Guest Bio: Merrill Markoe was recently awarded the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement. Her new book, We Saw Scenery: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe, is just out from Algonquin Books.
Australian broadcaster Josh Szeps is known for his fiercely intelligent and at-times wickedly funny approach to interviews and news analysis. A founding producer and host of the award-winning Huffpost Live, he can currently be heard on ABC Radio Sydney and, during his time in New York, hosted a live show-turned-podcast called #WeThePeople LIVE. Last summer, Josh launched Uncomfortable Conversations, an interview podcast virtually indistinguishable from this one other than the host being Australian and slightly younger and more famous. Josh spoke with Meghan about why podcasts like theirs are so desperately needed in these dark times and how the fate of the world of ideas rests on their shoulders. They also talked about the pronunciation of Meghan's name, why Alec Baldwin's calling a paparazzo a "c_sucker" was not an expression of homophobia, when they stopped feeling young and precocious, and what makes Josh a "fox" rather than a "hedgehog." Guest Bio: Josh Szeps is the host of the new podcast Uncomfortable Conversations and can be heard on ABC Radio Sydney. He lives in Sydney with his husband and twin toddlers.
Leon Wieseltier, who was for decades the literary editor of The New Republic, is a legendary cultural and media figure. But in 2017, just as he was set to launch a new publication, he was accused of #MeToo transgressions and his professional connections were severed almost overnight. After three years out of the public eye, Leon has reemerged with a new quarterly journal called Liberties, which aims to be "slower, longer and deeper" than just about anything else around. In this conversation, Leon talks with Meghan about his hopes for the magazine, his frustrations with political and cultural discourse today, and the fallout and lessons from the #MeToo allegations made against him. They also talk about sexual dynamics in mentor relationships, the virtues of the Louis CK film Pootie Tang, and why Leon wishes he could list "intellectual" on his passport as his occupation. Guest Bio: Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties - a Journal of Culture and Politics. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic.
We hear about "identity" so often now that the word no longer carries much meaning. By extension, the term "identity politics" has become a culture war cudgel, recklessly deployed by race baiters on the right as well as some activists on the social justice left. But Laurent Dubreuil, a professor of literature and cognitive science at Cornell University, has studied identity in ways that plunge far deeper than standard discussions about tribalism and narcissism. He's interested in what an identity-based worldview-and the technology that feeds it- is actually, physiologically, doing to our brains. In this conversation, Laurent talks with Meghan about how social media has undertaken a collective cognitive reprogramming of human beings and the world at large that could have catastrophic effects. He also explains how part of the danger of Twitter is that it's based on "soliloquy," how academia's preoccupation with identity robs students of their rightful educations, and how the recent controversy surrounding the French-Senegalese film Cuties forebodes a time in which we might have to "say goodbye to the arts." Guest Bio: Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science at Cornell University, where he founded the Humanities Lab and heads the French Studies Program. His comparative research explores the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. He is the author of more than twelve books and in 2019 he released in French La dictature des identités, an essay on the current state of "identity politics 2.0" in the United States. Laurent's essay Nonconforming: Against the Erosion of Academic Freedom by Identity Politics, appeared in the September 2020 issue of Harper's.
Katie Herzog is a co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the new and wildly successful podcast, Blocked and Reported, which analyzes internet dramas and attempts to bring missing facts to supposedly foregone conclusions. A lifelong liberal who, a few years ago, found herself questioning certain assumptions of both the political left and the queer community to which she'd always belonged, Katie has become beloved figure among heterodox thinkers even as some of her old ideological allies have turned away from her. She talks with Meghan her political evolution, her professional evolution, COVID confusion, media laziness, and why poking holes in social media hysteria is so delectably-if also guiltily-satisfying. An extended version of this interview is available for second and third tier level Patreon subscribers. Visit www.Patreon.com/theunspeakable to join! Guest Bio: Katie Herzog is the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported. She is a former staff writer at the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, and her work has been published by an array of outlets, including the Atlantic, the Guardian, and Mother Jones.
Journalist Lenore Skenazy was dubbed "America's Worst Mom" in 2008 for a column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone. The controversy led her to speak out about finding safe ways to allow kids to be more independent and she founded the Free Range Kids movement. In 2018 she co-founded Let Grow, a nonprofit that offers resource materials, school curricula and even does policy work with an aim toward helping kids be more self-sufficient (and helping their parents allow them to be). In this interview, Lenore talks with Meghan about her work, her own parenting and the fact that, as she puts it, "There's never been a safer time to be a child in America." Guest Bio: Lenore Skenazy is co-founder and president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting independence as a critical part of childhood. Ever since her column "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone" created a media firestorm, Lenore has been declaring that our kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. She is the author of Free-Range Kids, the book-turned-movement that garnered her the nickname, "America's Worst Mom."
When Sandra Tsing Loh was beginning her career in the 1980s, she modeled herself after avant garde performance artists like Laurie Anderson. She even put the "Tsing" in her name because she thought it sounded "Yoko Ono-ish." But after becoming an established figure in the Los Angeles arts scene and a prolific writer for alternative publications, Sandra's life began to change and so did the notion of artistry itself. In this interview, Sandra talks about the realties of making art in the current economic and cultural landscape, the tyranny of promoting your work on social media, "not being Asian enough," and much more. An extended version of this interview is available for second-tier Patreon subscribers at www.Patreon.com/theunspeakable. Guest Bio: Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, and radio commentator. Her work has been heard on NPR's Morning Edition and This American Life. She is a contributing editor to the Atlantic and host of the syndicated daily radio "minute," The Loh Down on Science. Her latest book is THE MADWOMAN AND THE ROOMBA (W.W. Norton, June 2020). She lives in Pasadena, California.
"We make long term decisions based on short term feelings." - Evan Marc Katz Evan Marc Katz is a dating coach who specializes in high achieving women seeking male partners. But instead of telling his clients to settle for nothing less than their financial, educational, and professional equals, he encourages them to get real about the dating economy and accept some hard truths about human mating patterns. In this conversation, Evan talks about why people overvalue chemistry, why dating apps are better for men than for women, and whether men, as a rule, are more prone to suffering than women are these days. He also razzes lone wolf Meghan about her stubbornness when it comes to romance. Billed as a "personal trainer for smart, strong, successful women," Evan Marc Katz is a dating coach who has been helping singles since 2003. He is the author of four books, most recently Believe In Love, and has been featured in hundreds of media outlets, including Today, the New York Times, and CNN. Since 2015, Evan's blog has over 30 million readers, his podcast has over 1 million downloads and 12,000 women have graduated from Love U, his six-month video course that helps women understand men and find love. Evan is very happily married and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children. Visit him at www.evanmarckatz.com.
British academic Helen Pluckrose is the co-author, with James Lindsay, of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity-And Why This Harms Everybody. She was also part of an infamous academic hoax wherein "grievance studies" papers about subjects such as fat bodybuilding and dog park rape culture were accepted for publication in established journals. In this interview, Helen talks about how the social philosophy known as critical theory came to inform mainstream culture and politics and how we can understand it better while also stop pretending to understand what is fundamentally nonsense. She also gives a concise definition of "intersectionality" and offers tips on what to say when your friend or boss asks you to read White Fragility. Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and commentator currently focusing on postmodernism and Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism. She is the editor of Areo, a digital magazine looking at politics, culture, science and art from a broadly liberal and humanist perspective. Helen's background is in late medieval and early modern religious writing by and about women. She took part in the "grievance studies affair" with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian and her book with James Lindsay breaking down Critical Social Justice scholarship is entitled Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race Gender and Identity - And How This Harms Everyone.
We forget that beyond thoughts and ideas and language there is a three-dimensional reality that gives us valuable experiences and can teach us a lot about how to be in the world. - Sasha Ayad In this edition of the podcast, Meghan speaks with Sasha Ayad, a Licensed Professional Counselor who treats adolescents and young adults dealing with issues related to gender identity. Over the last few years, the number of teens announcing transgender identities has increased dramatically. Some statistics point to increases of more than 1000 percent in the annual rate of children seeking specialized gender services. Sasha talks about what may be driving this phenomenon, why it's more common in girls, why trans identification often appears in clusters within peer groups, and how the power of trans activism has affected treatment models and standards of care. Sasha Ayad is a Licensed Professional Counselor who works in private practice, and has treated adolescents for over 10 years. Her work focuses on teens and young adults struggling with issues of gender dysphoria and gender identity. She became interested in the sharp rise in teenagers, mostly girls, who declare a trans identity for the first time during adolescence. She discovered, through working with hundreds of families, that teens were developing gender dysphoria only after adopting a transgender identity. She questions the practice of medical transition for children and adolescents, and her clinical work focuses on a developmentally appropriate, least-invasive-first talk therapy approach to gender dysphoria. Visit her at www.inspiredteentherapy.com
"You're far less likely to be shot as a black man in New York City than as a white man in Tulsa." - Peter Moskos In this episode, Meghan talks with Peter Moskos, a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who also happens to be a former Baltimore City police officer. They discuss the media's role in public perceptions of policing, the various definitions of "defund the police, the impact of ubiquitous cameras and viral videos and what big city police departments get right that smaller ones tend to get wrong. Peter also talks about the death of George Floyd and shares his theory about what the other officers on the scene might have been thinking as they watched the events transpire. Professor Peter Moskos (A.B. Princeton, PhD Harvard) is chairperson of the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is the director of John Jay College's NYPD Executive Master's Program and a former Baltimore City Police Officer. In addition to his primary duties at John Jay College, Moskos is a faculty member in CUNY's Doctoral Program in Sociology, has taught introductory criminal justice classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, and is a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. Moskos is the author of three books: Cop in the Hood, In Defense of Flogging, and Greek Americans. In 2011 he was recognized as one of The Atlantic Magazine's "Brave Thinkers" of the year. Visit his website at www.petermoskos.com
"No one escapes. Everyone ends up in the guillotine eventually." In this episode of the podcast, Meghan speaks with celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky, whose career in both medicine and media dates back to the 1980s, when he began co-hosting the nationally syndicated call-in radio program Loveline. Recorded in May on the heels of a controversy over some of Drew's initial comments about the coronavirus pandemic, this conversation delves into Drew's theories about how trauma is driving social media mobs, his own "traumatic reenactments" and how the whole world has been taken over by the Dunning Kruger Effect. They also talk about the inherent uncertainties of epidemiological medicine and how some of the chaotic public health messaging of the AIDS crisis mirrors what we're experiencing today around COVID-19. Visit Dr. Drew at www.drdrew.com
"It feels so good to feel like you're on the right side of history." In this episode of the podcast, Meghan talks with novelist Leigh Stein, whose wickedly satirical new novel Self Care sends up internet influencers and Goop-flavored millennial startup culture while also slyly poking fun at the commodification of social justice activism. Leigh discusses the feminism, capitalism, and "performative workaholism" that inspired her novel and talks about how she went from being "part of the woke mob" to embracing more nuanced discussions. Leigh Stein is the author of four books, including the novel Self Care. From 2014-2017, she ran a secret Facebook group of 40,000 women writers, in her role as cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist nonprofit organization. She's been called a "leading feminist" by the Washington Post and "poet laureate of The Bachelor" by The Cut. Self-Care has been called "highbrow brilliant" by New York Magazine's Approval Matrix and is on numerous must-read summer book lists, including those of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Publisher's Weekly and Vulture. Visit Leigh at www.leighstein.com
Recorded July 15th "I do think on average men are more likely to be more disruptive than necessary and women are more likely to be less disruptive than necessary" - Dr. Heather Heying Evolutionary biologist Dr. Heather Heying has emerged over the last few years as a free speech advocate, largely because of her connection to a now-infamous set of protests at Evergreen State College, where she and husband, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, taught for fifteen years. But less is known about Heather's own story. In a wide-ranging conversation that covers sex differences, sex discrimination, and what it was like to grow up in the 1970s and 1980s as a girl who felt "invincible," Heather talks about doing field work in Madagascar, wanting to be a science fiction writer, and why there aren't more women in the "Intellectual Dark Web." GUEST BIO: Heather Heying is a scientist, educator, and author. Currently a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton, she was a professor at The Evergreen State College for 15 years, where she pushed students from their comfort zones, in part through exploring remote sites in the neotropics. She earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, receiving the university's top honor for her dissertation, and has a B.A. in Anthropology. Her first book is Antipode (2002), written while she was studying the sex lives of poison frogs in Madagascar. With husband Bret Weinstein, she is now writing A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which will provide an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honorable life as an ape in the 21st century. Visit Heather Heying at https://heatherheying.com