The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.