PODCAST

A Special Place in Hell

Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider

Two girls, one podcast. aspecialplace.substack.com

society & culture news commentary

All Episodes

105:45

Zoomer Dating 101

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/09/27

It’s the second ever special guest episode of A Special Place In Hell! This week, journalist Suzy Weiss visits the pod, not only fulfilling Sarah’s call for a Gen Z guest but also sharing her insights from her recent Common Sense article Generation Swipe. Suzy explains what a decade of dating app culture has done to the psyches and future plans (or lack thereof) for millennial and Gen Z-ers. It is depressing out there, but Suzy is optimistic. (A welcome change from nihilistic Sarah.)Suzy also talks

82:29

Meghan Gets Ratioed. Sarah Gets Offended.

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/09/19

Does Meghan look like a media elite? (Does that blue check make her look fat?) Would wearing hijab help Sarah's career?On Saturday evening, as As Sarah and Meghan recorded this episode of A Special Place In Hell, Meghan was being ratioed on Twitter after posting an article so absurd she felt it needed no comment. (Wrong! The mob thinks she wrote it, and now they’re piling on.) But before assessing the damage, the girls/women respond to listener feedback about some of their earlier conversations

70:32

How to (Not) Have It All

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/09/13

In this episode of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women make some perfunctory remarks about the death of Queen Elizabeth, with Sarah praising the television series The Crown and Meghan explaining why her favorite royal is Camilla Parker Bowles. They then reflect on last week’s conversation with their first ever guest, Kmele Foster of The Fifth Column podcast. Kmele, who met his wife when they were teenagers, had some fascinating things to say about the benefits of finding your mate early in

94:04

Kmele Foster Visits A Special Place

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/09/06

For months, the girls/women have been threatening to have a Special Place special guest. And here he is! Kmele Foster, who’s one-third of the beloved and mega-popular Fifth Column Podcast, visits the pod to talk about . . he’s not sure what. (In fact, he’s not even entirely sure where he is or what he’s doing there.) Sarah and Meghan inform Kmele that he’s there to represent All Men and to explain the current state of masculinity, including why so many men are addicted to porn, unable to form

81:29

Raison D'ebt

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/08/30

Buckle up debtors and non-indebted allies, this episode of A Special Place in Hell has everything: class, college, and fresh cut flowers. The girls/women start by discussing Meghan’s CLASS-ic New Yorker piece, My Misspent Youth, in which she describes her twenty-something struggle to achieve the shabby chic dream life of a working writer in New York City. Trigger warning: her rent was less than $1200 a month. Meanwhile, Sarah shares her experience as an immigrant with a low-income upbringing caught

83:58

Sorry, Not Sorry

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/08/22

It’s the TENTH (10th!) episode of A Special Place In Hell. In this extra special Special Place, Sarah and Meghan honor the work and legacy of Norah Vincent, the immersive journalist whose untimely death was reported last week. For her 2006 book Self-Made Man, Norah* spent eighteen months infiltrating male spaces as “Ned,” an alter-ego that allowed her to observe how men behave when there are no women around. Though the stunt seems dated now, Norah’s work and outlook were strikingly ahead of her

93:07

Rushdie, Ratios and Friend Phrenology

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/08/16

In this 9th episode of A Special Place in Hell, Meghan kicks off the conversation by pondering a friend’s advice that she not make fun of herself for being an “aging Gen Xer.” She asks why Sarah’s tagline gets to be “self-hating millennial” when she, too, is self-hating (to which Sarah explains that she doesn’t hate herself, merely the entire rest of her generation). They then move on to an uncharacteristically somber topic: the attack on writer Salman Rushdie. Sarah expertly lays out the chronology

76:36

Mothers, Martyrs, and Peach Eaters

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/08/08

In this episode of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah and Meghan discuss the recent meme craze spawned by a comic about eating peaches. Since the comic had to do with motherhood, a subject Meghan knows nothing about, Sarah took the lead and explained why mothers sometimes make more work for themselves than is strictly (or remotely) necessary. They then spend some time contemplating hookup culture and “sex positivity,” which Sarah thinks is anti-woman and Meghan suspects (posits? hypothesizes?) is for

103:36

Lowering Women's Voices (Literally!) Incl. BONUS...

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/08/01

In this seventh episode of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah and Meghan are feeling generous and decided to make the bonus content at the end available to everybody (you are all very welcome)! But before they get to the extra-spicy stuff, they take on two medium-spicy topics. The first concerns policing; specifically policing women’s voices. Provoked by a tweet from actor Jane Lynch inveighing upon women to speak in lower registers, the women/girls consider why higher pitches—not to mention “uptalk” —

74:45

Cuddle Party In Hell

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/07/25

In this sixth installment of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah bows to “white supremacy urgency” and powers through her illness, which is either COVID or Monkeypox. Meghan talks about attending a screening of the film Jihad Rehab, a “controversial” documentary that made it to the Sundance Film Festival, only to be deemed “a truckload of hate” and effectively wiped out of existence, leaving the first-time filmmaker without work or any financial or community support. As she watched the film, Meghan

91:09

Has Porn Ruined Sex?

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/07/19

In episode 5 of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah and Meghan get into some pretty spicy territory: the monoculture of academia (may not be suitable for sensitive listeners or people without PhDs) and the omnipresence of pornography. Citing a recent Washington Post article about the percentage of professors whose parents also held PhDs, Sarah talks about the lack of conservative thinkers on college campuses and wonders how anyone can get a complete education in such an environment. She and Meghan ponder

87:24

You Are All Dead To Us

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/07/12

In this fourth installment of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women clarify a few matters, starting with the meaning of the name of the podcast. They then analyze their Apple Podcast reviews and respond to criticism that the show is a departure from their usual seriousness. Are they’re letting down their diehard fans by trafficking in snark rather than upholding their usual gravitas? (Answer: whatever.)Meghan announces that she’s putting The Unspeakable podcast on hiatus for the rest of the

84:19

3: Karen Independence Day!

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/07/04

(Hey! Paying subscribers! This is not the post for you— you are special. For you, we have an extra-long episode, which you can access, here). In this THIRD installment of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women do their best to celebrate Independence Day despite their subjugation by the patriarchy, the Republican Party and the woman-hating world in general. They discuss the tenor of the public conversation around the overturning of Roe v. Wade and wonder if their long range thinking and lack of

86:52

2. Shmashmortion Breakdown

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/06/27

In this (second!) episode of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women discuss the use of the word “girls” in the show’s tagline and whether it’s anti-feminist. Meghan describes visiting the set (well, sitting on a patio outside the set) of Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday to watch Blocked and Reported co-host Katie Herzog’s debut appearance on the show, alongside Andrew Sullivan. Sarah recalls her own guest appearance on Real Time (also with Andrew Sullivan!) and both agree that going on that

93:23

1: The Elephant In The Pickle Jar

A Special Place in Hell ·

2022/06/22

In this inaugural edition of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah and Meghan kick things off with an explanation of how to pronounce (or not bother pronouncing) their names. From there, they ponder their 20-plus year age difference and do not think about the fact that Meghan is technically old enough to be Sarah’s . . oh never mind. They then commence with in-depth discussions of three recent pieces of media content. The first is Ryan Grim’s treatise in the Intercept about the epidemic of personnel

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