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PODCAST

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Author, essayist and journalist Meghan Daum has spent decades giving voice—and bringing nuance, humor and surprising perspectives—to things that lots of people are thinking but are afraid to say out loud. Now, she brings her observations to the realm of conversation. In candid, free-ranging interviews, Meghan talks with artists, entertainers, journalists, scientists, scholars, and anyone else who"s willing to do the "unspeakable" and question prevailing cultural and moral assumptions.

society & culture

All Episodes

21:22

Advice To My Daughter: Marry Young - Larissa Phillips...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/08/19

In the latest installment of Casual August, writer and educator Larissa Phillips joins the pod to respond to the August 2 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis, who theorized that childless cat ladies were secretly happier than moms, especially moms raising young children while caring for aging parents. Larissa related to much of what Vanessa said, but she had several things to add, including her later-in-life recognition that early motherhood makes more sense than later-in-life motherhood — and,

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13:49

How To Cancel A Poet: Emmalea Russo’s "chain of...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/08/12

“While some might argue that collaboration with fascists, TERFs, and racist edgelords does not constitute endorsement of violent and anti-liberation views, we disagree. There can be no innocent collaboration with such people.” That was the official statement from Hiding Press, the small, independent poetry press that was set to publish writer Emmalea Russo’s fourth book of poetry. But when word got out that she had been “collaborating” with the wrong people, they canceled the book. By

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12:58

Do Childless Women Get The Last Laugh? Journalist...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/08/05

Meghan, a childless dog lady, had a whole other episode cued up for this week when her friend Vanessa Grigoriadis called her with a surprising observation. According to Vanessa, moms today are so stressed out (even miserable) that childless women are getting the last laugh. This is especially true for women in midlife who started families in their late 30s to early 40s and are now saddled with elder care for aging parents while also having school-aged children. Does she have a point? In this

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13:36

Morally and Medically Appalling: Jamie Reed blows the...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/07/29

This is a premium episode with Jamie Reed.This episode is available to paid listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Jamie will be in The Unspeakeasy as part of our Unspeakers Series on Aug. 7, 2024. Apply to join The Unspeakeasy now if you want the chance to meet her in a private, off-the-record hangout. “What is happening to scores of children . . . is morally and medically appalling.” Those were the words of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a gender clinic

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56:52

Who Was The Hollywood Con Queen? Scott Johnson on the...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/07/22

Between 2013 and 2020, hundreds of people who worked in the entertainment industry—from actors and writers to photographers, makeup artists, and security personnel—were targeted by brilliant and bizarre scammer who came to be known as the Con Queen of Hollywood. The Con Queen impersonated famous female studio executives and convinced many of her marks to spend huge sums of money—often on trips to Indonesia—under the pretext of doing research for film projects that would be their big break

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30:58

The Inconvenient Truth About Divorce: Bridget Phetasy...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/07/15

We hear all the time that children are resilient — and should be even more so! But do divorcing parents overestimate their kids’ resilience to justify their actions? Should “staying together for the children” come back into style? Returning guest Bridget Phetasy talks about her recent article for The Spectator about an aspect of divorce that rarely gets discussed: the ripple effects over decades as adult children and grandchildren are spread thin among multiple families and step-families. Bridget’s

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24:37

Building A Post-Woke Brand: Jennifer Sey gets back to...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/07/08

Jennifer Sey has been an elite gymnast, a high level marketing executive at Levi’s, and an outspoken critic of protracted school closures during the Covid pandemic. That last role led her to become a prominent figure in the new free speech movement, and she fulfilled that role by writing a book and starting a Substack about her conscription into the culture wars. But her real skills are as a business person, so she decided to apply those skills and start a retail brand. XX-XY Athletics, which

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01:16:43

Has Gay Pride Shamed Itself? FAIR director Monica...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/07/01

Are you relieved that Gay Pride month is over? Monica Harris, an author, attorney, activist, and the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) fought for LGBT civil rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, she finds herself dismayed by the current state of that movement. In this conversation, Monica talks about how we went from Ellen DeGeneres to drag queen story hours, why gay rights organizations turned their attention to trans issues, and why she believes homophobia

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44:56

Sarah Hepola Does Dallas

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/06/24

Writer and podcaster Sarah Hepola returns to The Unspeakable to talk about love, sex, #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein’s overturned rape conviction, her new job at The Dallas Morning News, her book in progress, and why she thinks local reporting will lead the way out of the media abyss. GUEST BIO Sarah Hepola is a features staff writer at the Dallas Morning News, the cohost with Nancy Rommelmann of the Smoke ‘Em If You Got Em podcast and author of the 2015 best-selling memoir Blackout. She was also the

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18:50

How Victimhood Can Work For You! Andrew Boryga on his...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/06/17

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Andrew Boryga. The first portion of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Who says you can’t write a novel skewing social justice excesses? Andrew Boryga has done just that — to critical acclaim. His debut novel VICTIM tells the story of Javier Perez, an academically gifted kid from The Bronx who lands at an elite college and soon discovers the advantages of playing up his

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40:50

Is Working At Denny’s Better Than Going To College?...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/06/03

Is college pointless? Is an “elite education” more about networking than learning? Returning guest William Deresiewicz has been pondering these questions for more than a decade. They were the subject of his bestselling 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. That book has just been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition and in this episode, William talks with Meghan about what’s changed (i.e. what’s gotten worse) and what, if anything, can

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13:08

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted: Nellie Bowles reports...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/05/20

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Nellie Bowles. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. You may know Nellie Bowles from TGIF, her popular news roundup in The Free Press. Before that, she reported on Silicon Valley for The New York Times. Now she’s out with her first book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History. Filled with keenly observed details about the

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01:17:19

The Many Lives of Glenn Loury

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/05/13

This week’s guest is economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury. Glenn is almost certainly no stranger to Unspeakable listeners, many of whom know him from his long-running podcast The Glenn Show. In addition to opining there about political and social issues, Glenn is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. He grew up on the south side of Chicago and eventually

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59:05

The "Right Kind" of Black Person: Erec Smith on...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/05/06

This episode is with one of our guest speakers at The Unspeakeasy retreat in Chicago. If you’re interested in going, learn more here. This week Meghan welcomes returning guest Erec Smith. He is an academic whose area of scholarship is Rhetoric, but he also writes and speaks frequently about the state of race politics in America, particularly the perils (and uses) of DEI. In this conversation, they talk about the concept of prescriptive racism, which Erec wrote about in a recent Boston Globe column,

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09:09

Gender, Data & What the Cass Review *Doesn’t* Say:...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/05/03

This interview with Benjamin Ryan is a BONUS episode for paying subscribers only. The first few minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. On April 10th, a big story broke in the gender world: The long-awaited report commissioned by the UK's National Health Service, known as the Cass Review, was released. As soon as the report hit the news cycle, gender-critical activists celebrated it as the final nail in the coffin of

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01:21:37

Defending Pornography, Hate Speech and the ACLU:...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/04/29

This week, Meghan talks with legal scholar, former law professor, and legendary free speech advocate Nadine Strossen. Nadine was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and she’s the author of many books, including Defending Pornography, which has just been reissued nearly 30 years after its original publication. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nadine talks about pornography, campus speech codes, generational divides when it comes to ideas about words causing harm, and

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29:02

From Betty Friedan to Ballerina Farms: Lisa Selin...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/04/22

This week, author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis returns for her third visit to The Unspeakable. Lisa is best known to listeners for her thorough and rigorous reporting on the new gender movement and her probing insights into how ideas around gender nonconformity have shifted over time. But she has a new book out about something completely (or at least mostly) different: the concept of the housewife. In Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead, Lisa traces the social history of the

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43:32

Grief Is The Thing With Feathers: Sloane Crosley on...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/04/15

This week, I’m talking with author Sloane Crosley. Best known for her humorous and existentially probing essays, Sloane’s latest book is a departure of sorts. Grief Is For People, a memoir, covers the year in her life following the death of Russell Perreault, a veteran of book publishing who’d been her boss before becoming her closest friend. A month before Russell’s death, Sloane’s apartment was burglarized by a jewel thief, turning her into an amateur detective as she attempted to retrieve family

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47:28

How Did Comedy Lose Its Humor? Arielle Isaac Norman...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/04/08

This week, Meghan welcomes Arielle Isaac Norman, an Austin-based comedian who has opened for Louie C.K., Bobcat Goldthwait, Tim Dillon, Joe DeRosa, Eddie Pepitone and Maria Bamford, among others. Arielle, who describes herself as a “politically non-binary lesbian,” has a new YouTube special, Ellen DeGenderless, in which she discusses gender identity, sexuality, pronouns, social issues, and pop culture. This conversation covers all of those topics and more — including Arielle’s friendship with Louis

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33:30

Is Therapy Making Us Crazy? Abigail Shrier on what's...

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum ·

2024/04/01

This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research,

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239 results

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