Avsnitt
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As you make your new year’s resolutions or plan for Dry January, returning guest Ruby Warrington has another idea for better living in 2025: go on a “content diet.” In this conversation, Ruby describes the overwhelming nature of content consumption and its impact on mental health and wellbeing. She draws parallels between the “sober curious” movement, which she spearheaded, and the need for conscious content consumption, emphasizing the importance of awareness in our media engagement. We also talk about the pressures of content creation, the role of intimacy in communication, the rise of AI-generated content in the digital landscape, and the important of reading novels and listening to music.
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Ruby Warrington is the author of Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood and is the creator of the term “sober curious." Author of the 2018 book Sober Curious and million-download podcast of the same title, her work has spearheaded a global movement to reevaluate our relationship to alcohol. Other works include Material Girl, Mystical World (2017), The Numinous Astro Deck (2019), and The Sober Curious Reset (2020). With 20+ years’ experience as a lifestyle journalist and editor, Ruby is also the founder of the self-publishing incubator Numinous Books.
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Do journalists ever regret the way they cover events? This week, veteran YouTube journalist and political commentator Ana Kasparian discusses her journey from the progressive left to finding herself politically unaligned, the regrets she still harbors, and the complexities of navigating controversial issues with nuance. She also discusses her thoughts on the election and on Biden's mental decline, the appeal of Trump, and how cultural shifts within the Democratic party affected the election.
Meghan and Ana also discuss motherhood (or in their cases, non-motherhood) and new discourse surrounding the trad movement, pro-natalism and the dark side of the pressure campaign to get people to have more children.
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Ana Kasparian is a political journalist and media personality with nearly two decades of experience in news and analysis. Beginning her career as an assistant producer at CBS Radio in Los Angeles, she later became Executive Producer and co-host of The Young Turks. She now writes a Substack newsletter chronicling her political realignment journey and exploring key political and cultural issues.
Follow her on Substack here.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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What purpose does “wokeness” really serve? Is it a way of thinking that helps lift up marginalized groups? Or is it a convenient way for elites to pay lip service to social justice while maintaining the status quo that benefits them? This week, I’m joined by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions Of A New Elite. In addition to distilling his ideas about wokeness as “cover for elites,” we talk about Musa’s love for French theorists, the value of his community college education, and the culture shock he experienced when arriving at Columbia University. We also explore whether women are overrepresented in elite workplaces and how this might affect perceptions of gender inequality and male dominance.
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Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the “social life” of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.
Follow him on Substack.
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Until 2018, sports betting was almost a sport unto itself. To place a bet, you had to call your bookie, go to the race track, or make a trip to Las Vegas. But in 2018, the Supreme Court put an end to a longtime federal ban on sports betting, and it is now legal in most states and accessible on smartphones.
For years, we’ve been hearing alarm bells about the addictive qualities of online pornography, which many experts believe has dulled the senses and hindered the relationship prospects of generations of young men. But according to Alex Grodd, founder of The Disagreement, a media and education company that puts out a podcast of the same name, sports betting in its current incarnation poses an even greater threat. In this conversation, Alex describes how compulsive betting and predatory marketing is leading to financial ruin for countless users, many of whom he spoke with for a recent episode of The Disagreement. He also talks about how this connects with the “masculinity crisis” as well as the overall drop in attention span for just about everyone.
Listen to The Disagreement here.
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Alex Grodd is the founder and CEO of The Disagreement and hosts its podcast. Prior to starting The Disagreement, Alex founded and ran BetterLesson, an edtech company that provides professional development tools to teachers. Alex forged his love for disagreement by facilitating debates among students during his days as a middle school teacher at public schools in Atlanta and Boston.
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Journalist Ben Ryan returns to the podcast to reflect on the role of the trans debate in the recent election as well as discuss the impact of the Cass Review on pediatric gender medicine and on journalists covering the issue. He also talks about various aspects of gender transition treatments, explains what is known about rates of surgeries among minors and to what extent medical care for trans adults could be affected by Trump administration policies. Finally, he and Meghan discuss the TERF Wars, aka infighting within the “gender critical community.” Is using preferred pronouns a harmless courtesy? Or does it imply acquiescence to the slippery slope of reality denial?
Ben’s May 2024 interview can be found here.
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Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist who focuses on health care and science. He contributes to several major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and NBC News. He has a particular interest in public health, medicine, and psychology, and has spent years reporting on HIV.
His work has received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, including the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award. Benjamin is a cancer survivor and enjoys reading, theatre, movies, biking, cooking, and photography in his spare time.
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Playwright and performer Sandra Tsing Loh returns to the podcast (after four years!) to discuss her surprise hit play Madwomen of the West, which featured a superstar cast including Caroline Aaron, Marilu Henner, Melanie Mayron, and JoBeth Williams. After the Los Angeles theater establishment deemed the show too woman-centric, Sandra mounted an independent production, which she eventually took to New York and London. She now has a new one-woman show — a 70-minute "You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again”-style rant — about the “journey” of that production called I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It will be performed for just two nights at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. November 16 and November 23. Info and tickets here.
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Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of several books, including "The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones," which was selected as one of the New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books. Her previous book, "Mother on Fire," was inspired by her hit solo show about Los Angeles public education.
Her off-Broadway solo shows include "Aliens in America" and "Bad Sex With Bud Kemp." Her comic memoirs include The New York Times New and Noteworthy "Madwoman and the Roomba"; The New York Times 100 Notable Books "Madwoman in the Volvo"; "Mother on Fire"; "A Year in Van Nuys"; and "Depth Takes a Holiday." The Los Angeles Times named her 1998 novel "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now" a 100 Best Fiction Book. An Atlantic contributing editor, Loh has been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, PRI's Marketplace and This American Life. She currently hosts the LAist/NPR daily radio science minute “The Loh Down on Science.”
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For this first post-election episode, Meghan welcomes back author Lionel Shriver, who is arguably America’s (and the U.K.’s) most controversial woman of letters. They talk about the over/under on the end of democracy, whether J.D. Vance is following a Trump-mandated script, how trans issues replaced abortion rights as a priority for many female voters, and whether Kamala Harris is secretly relieved that she doesn’t have to be President of the United States. They also discuss why writers must oppose Israel to remain in good standing in the literary world and how they feel about the current pronatalism movement with respect to their own reproductive choices.
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Lionel Shriver is a columnist for The Spectator and the author, most recently, of Mania, a novel. Her fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much For That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. A longtime American expat in the U.K, she now lives in Portugal.
Hundreds Of Authors Pledge To Boycott Israeli Institutions: https://bit.ly/40EBf2r
Lionel Shriver contributed an essay to Meghan’s 2015 anthology “Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids”: https://amzn.to/40MHC3F
Lionel’s previous interviews on The Unspeakable: https://bit.ly/3O66FHu and https://bit.ly/3YOgNcC
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In this premium episode, writer, editor, and friend of the pod Leigh Stein returns to talk about the state of book publishing, including the importance of promotion via digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Leigh may be the Jane Goodall of BookTok. She has spent countless hours in the wild, studying the platform’s users and creators for insights into its addictive magic. As a book coach who helps authors sell their manuscripts to publishers and then (hopefully) sell lots of copies, she understands the changing landscape of publishing and sees endless potential and opportunity. Where many authors and editors feel only fear and dread, Leigh feels joy. Recently, she helped literary agent turned novelist Betsy Lerner become an unlikely TikTok star.
Want in on more of Leigh’s secrets? On November 14, The Unspeakeasy is offering a one-time webinar with Leigh called How To Get A Book Deal The Easy Way. It’s open to everyone (not just ladies) and may change your life. And it’s only $150! Visit the course page in The Unspeakeasy for more details and to sign up.
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Leigh Stein is a writer exploring the impact of the internet on our identities, relationships, and politics. She has written five books, including the satirical novel Self Care (Penguin, 2020) and the poetry collection What to Miss When (Soft Skull Press, 2021). Her non-fiction work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Allure, ELLE, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate.
Leigh founded Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist literary nonprofit organization that supported women and gender variant writers. BinderCon events in NYC and LA welcomed nearly 2,000 writers to hear speakers such as Lisa Kudrow, Anna Quindlen, Claudia Rankine, Jill Abramson, Elif Batuman, Effie Brown, Leslie Jamison, Suki Kim, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Leigh also moderated a Facebook community of 40,000 writers. She is no longer on Facebook.
Leigh’s website.
Leigh’s newsletter.
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This week, journalist and legendary feminist activist Julie Bindel talks about her new podcast series, Julie in Genderland, which explores the complexities surrounding gender identity, particularly from the perspective of parents of children who’ve become caught up in gender ideology. Julie discusses the role of social services and educators in shaping children's understanding of gender, the intersection of class and gender issues, and the parallels with social justice movements around the sex trade and surrogacy. She also reflects on her reporting of grooming gangs in the UK, linking it to broader issues of misogyny and systemic failures in protecting vulnerable girls.
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Julie Bindel is a British journalist, broadcaster, author and a feminist campaigner against male violence towards women and girls. Her latest book, Lesbians: Where Are We Now? will be published by Swift Press in Spring 2025 and her new podcast, Julie In Genderland, premiered in September 2024.
Follow Julie on Substack.
Listen to Julie in Genderland.
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Stephanie Lepp is a video artist and producer whose work focuses on bringing together different viewpoints to arrive at a perspective that goes beyond “common ground” and emerges as a true integration, or synthesis. She was on the podcast in July 2022 to talk about a project called Deep Reckonings. In it, she considered the cases of public figures who’d responded to personal controversy in less-than-ideal ways and reimagined responses that would have conveyed genuine learning.
Now she’s back with a new video series, Faces of X, which illustrates an argument using a single performer to act out the three parts of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis schematic. Those performers include Buck Angel, Liv Boeree, Magatte Wade, and herself.
In this conversation, I talk with Stephanie about why it’s so hard to check your confirmation bias (even — and maybe even especially — when you pride yourself on being able to do so), the difference between synthesis and “both sidesism,” and why she’s optimistic about the future of public discourse about complicated issues.
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Stephanie Lepp is the founder of Synthesis Media, a production studio devoted to integrating perspectives into a bigger picture. In 2022, she debuted Reckonings, a narrative podcast that explores how we change our hearts and minds, and Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly-marked deepfake videos that imagine morally courageous versions of our public figures. Her new project is Faces of X.
Watch Deep Reckonings.
Watch Faces of X.
Listen to Stephanie Lepp’s previous interview on The Unspeakable.
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To doomers and nihilists, the whole world is a joke — and it’s not even funny. Writer Neal Pollack may be a natural skeptic, but he thinks that’s nonsense and he returns to the podcast to talk about better living through laughter (and not in a “live, love, laugh” kind of way). He discusses his various careers — professional writer, professional poker player, three-time Jeopardy champion — his thoughts on COVID-19 lockdowns, the culture of Austin, and his recent battle with sofa dermatitis.
Most importantly, he talks about his upcoming course for The Unspeakeasy School of Thought, Writing Humor in Humorless Times. Unlike most writing workshops, which limit students to the arduous activity of writing, Neal will also be available to teach students how to be funny on Twitter/X, TikTok, at dinner parties, or even while muttering to themselves while walking down the street.
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Neal Pollack is the author of 12 semi-bestselling works of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoirs Alternadad, Stretch, and Pothead, the novels Jewball, Keep Mars Weird, Edge of Safety, and Never Mind the Pollacks, and the cult short-fiction classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. His “Greatest Living American Writer” satire pieces have appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, The Federalist, The Spectator, and the Jewish Daily Forward/. He is a three-time Jeopardy! champion, a certified yoga instructor, a semi-professional poker player, a Generation X legend, and the editor-in-chief of Book and Film Globe.
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If you have a pet, you’ve probably wondered lately what in the world has happened to veterinary medicine. Why is it so expensive? Why is it so hard to get an appointment? And why, despite all of that, do domestic animals seem to have more health problems than ever?
In this conversation, financial reporter Helaine Olen, a longtime dog owner and author of the April 2024 Atlantic article Why Your Vet Bill Is So High, explains how a combination of advancing technologies, private equity, and let's face it, people being really, really attached to their pets have made it costlier and more complicated than ever to own a pet.
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Helaine Olen is Managing Editor at the American Economic Liberties Project and a contributing columnist for MSNBC.com. She is the author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry and a co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated. A former columnist for The Washington Post opinion page and Slate, her work has also appeared in numerous other publications, including The Atlantic, where Why is Your Vet Bill So High appeared.
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This interview with Kat Timpf is free to all subscribers. To hear bonus conversations and get early access to other episodes, become a paying subscriber here.
Meghan interviews Kat Timpf, Fox News analyst and co-host of Gutfeld, about her new book "I Used to Like You Until... (How Binary Thinking Divides Us)." They discuss Kat’s education and early political evolution, her frustrations with ideological tribalism, and her thoughts about red-pilled manosphere discourse regarding dating, mating, and female fertility.
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Kat Timpf is a writer, comedian, and television personality. She’s currently the co-host of “Gutfeld!” on Fox News weeknights at 10 p.m. and a Fox News analyst. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestsellers "You Can’t Joke About That: Why Everything is Funny, Nothing is Sacred, and We’re All in This Together," and "I Used To Like You Until... (How Binary Thinking Divides Us).”
Follow Kat Timpf on Twitter and Instagram.
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Over the last decade, Planned Parenthood has become one of the country’s leading providers of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In August, journalist Jennifer Block published an article in The Free Press entitled “How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?” The article follows the story of a teenager who visited her local Planned Parenthood and was fast-tracked into medical transition and then surgery that she almost immediately regretted. In this conversation, Jennifer talks about how this happened, why the public has been slow to realize it, and how to find an intellectual consistency between supporting abortion rights and opposing medicalized gender transition for young people.
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Jennifer Block is an independent journalist who writes frequently about health, gender, and contested areas of medicine. Her articles and commentary have appeared in The Boston Globe, Romper, The BMJ, The Cut, The New York Times, The Baffler, **and many other outlets. Her 2007 book Pushed, led a wave of attention to the national crisis in maternity care and is a foundational text in university curricula and birth worker training. She’s also the author the 2019 book Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.
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Meghan interviews housing market analyst Melody Wright about why purchasing a home has reached historic levels of unaffordability. A rising star on YouTube, Melody was on the front lines of the mortgage implosion during the Great Financial Crisis and has devoted the last few years to scratching beneath the surface of the affordability crisis in housing. Though low inventory remains a problem in many regions, you might be surprised to learn that in many parts of the country, new construction has saturated the marketplace and countless homes are sitting empty. Melody talks about how this happened, why the media doesn’t report more on it, and where she sees similarities to the run-up to the housing market crash in 2008. Plus, fun fact: did you know that the word mortgage is derived from the very old French legal term “death pledge?”
ABOUT THE GUEST
Follow Melody on Substack.
Melody on YouTube.
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Writer, performer, and Gen-X legend Moon Unit Zappa joins Meghan for a conversation about her new memoir Earth To Moon. She talks about being the eldest child of iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa, growing up in the chaos of the 1970s and 80s rock-and-roll scene, the cultural phenomenon of the hit single Valley Girl, fissures within the Zappa family, and forging a life and career in the today’s creative economy.
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Moon Unit Zappa was born in 1967 to legendary musician Frank Vincent Zappa and his second wife, Gail Zappa. At the age of 14, she appeared in Frank Zappa’s career-defining song, “Valley Girl,” which later helped jump-start Moon’s career. Since then, Moon has firmly established herself as a writer, actress, comedian, artist, podcaster, and tea merchant.
Buy the book.
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This is a PREVIEW of a PREMIUM episode for paying subscribers, Meghan welcomes back writer and physician Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care specialist who writes with exquisite care and candor about end-of-life issues. Sunita was on the podcast a little over a year ago talking about the hidden harms of CPR, which she wrote about for The New Yorker. She’s back to discuss two articles she published this summer. One in The Atlantic about how doctors deal with terminal illness in younger patients and another in The Wall Street Journal about dying at home. We’ve been taught to assume that a good death means dying at home, or at least not in a hospital, but Sunita points out that this can be better in theory than in practice. This is another extraordinary conversation with one of listeners’ favorite guests.
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Dr. Sunita Puri is a palliative care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a literary memoir recounting her journey to the practice of palliative care and what it means to help people find dignity, purpose, and comfort when facing serious illnesses and the end of life. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles times, Tricycle, The Wall Street Journal and Slate. This fall, she is joining the UC Irvine Medical Center faculty as the director of the inpatient palliative care service and associate professor of medicine. She was recently awarded a one-month Bogliasco fellowship for exceptional artists and has received writing residencies from Yaddo and MacDowell, among other places.
The Atlantic, The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennial Deaths
The Wall Street Journal, Most People Are Dying At Home. Is That A Good Thing?
Sunita’s previous interview on The Unspeakable.
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The Unspeakable is moving to video! Here’s the scoop, in case you missed it.
The Unspeakable’s debut video guest is one of Meghan’s favorite people to talk with about our confounding political times: journalist and podcaster Tara Henley. Since visiting the pod back in early 2023, Tara’s podcast and Substack newsletter Lean Out has become a major force in the heterodox space. She is one of the finest interviewers and sharpest thinkers working today.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Meghan and Tara talk about how to avoid the phenomenon of audience capture, how to think about J.D. Vance, how to find the joy (or at least the fun memes) in Kamala Harris, and what’s behind the mating crisis, the masculinity crisis, the economic crisis, and any number of other crises (not necessarily in that order).
This conversation was recorded on August 15, 2024. The video will appear on The Unspeakable’s YouTube channel soon.
Tara will be a guest speaker at the October 21-24 Unspeakeasy retreat in Woodstock, NY. There still may be spots left. Find out more here.
Follow Tara on Substack.
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Tara Henley is a Canadian journalist and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Her 22-year career spans TV, radio, online media, magazines, and newspapers. She has worked as a producer on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight and on current affairs morning and afternoon shows at CBC Radio, in both Vancouver and Toronto. Henley's CBC radio documentary "39" was a finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards. A former books columnist for The Toronto Star, and for Metro Morning, Toronto's top morning radio show, Henley is a contributor to the books section of The Globe and Mail. Her writing has appeared in outlets across Canada and around the world, and she now publishes a popular current affairs Substack newsletter, Lean Out. Her weekly interview podcast of the same name has listeners in more than 150 countries and 5,000 cities worldwide.
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This week, something a little different: Meghan is the interview subject! In a special end-of-summer episode, The Unspeakable pairs up with Michael Callahan and his podcast Where We Go Next. In a conversation that Michael posted earlier this month, he and Meghan talk about how to avoid audience capture in the “heterodox space,” how the term “community” got tacked onto nearly everything, and how the concept of the “literary citizen” replaced the role of the working writer or even public intellectual. They vent their shared frustration with the marketing demands of algorithms, particularly the YouTube algorithm and its clickbait thumbnail images, and wonder whether Meghan’s Reddit haters are correct that she’s really just a conservative cosplaying as an old-school liberal. Finally, Meghan discusses the origins and current iteration of The Unspeakeasy and Michael reminds her that in her first visit to his podcast, back in July 2021, she declared that she would never launch a freethought community — oops!
Relevant LinksOriginal Where We Go Next episode
I Wasn’t Canceled. I Was Problematized.
Who Killed Creative Writing?
Was Alice Munro An Art Monster?
About Michael CallahanMichael Callahan is an award-winning commercial director and the host of Where We Go Next, where he has deep-dive conversations with accomplished people doing fascinating things. He enjoys vacationing in the Pacific Northwest, hanging out with his awesome wife, and taking far too many photos of their 3 dogs.
Instagram: @wwgnpodcast
Follow WWGN on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts or Audible.
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In the latest installment of Casual August, writer and educator Larissa Phillips joins the pod to respond to the August 2 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis, who theorized that childless cat ladies were secretly happier than moms, especially moms raising young children while caring for aging parents. Larissa related to much of what Vanessa said, but she had several things to add, including her later-in-life recognition that early motherhood makes more sense than later-in-life motherhood — and, what’s more, single motherhood might not be as cool and easy as 1980s media made it out to be.
A GenXer who grew up steeped in second-wave feminism, Larissa now advises her 20-something daughter to marry and start a family early, which is pretty much the opposite of what her own mom advised. In this conversation, Larissa (who was a guest on A Special Place In Hell back in March) explores how her thinking evolved, why her friends were shocked when she got pregnant at 29 (practically a teen mom!), how divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s made an entire generation wary of the nuclear family, and why she invokes Jordan Peterson when she explains to her daughter that being “high value” has a lot to do with being young. She and Meghan also wrestle with whether the hyper-professional, hyper-independent feminist ethos internalized by Gen Xers and millennials will end up being something of a blip in time in the history of civilization.
Larissa also talks about joining The Unspeakeasy at its upcoming retreat in Woodstock, NY this October.
GUEST BIO
Larissa Phillips is the founder and director of the Volunteer Literacy Project, a NPO that teaches reading to adults using a phonics-based curriculum. She also runs an educational program on her family farm in Upstate New York. She can be found on X (@larissaphillip) and Instagram (@honeyhollowfarmstay) and Substack, where she writes about farming, animals, and life as a lapsed Progressive living in Trumpland.
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HOUSEKEEPING
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- Visa fler
