The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan's guest this week is author, legal scholar, and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, whose fearless reporting on cultural sacred cows has long made her essential reading. Meghan has followed Heather's work for nearly two decades and brought her on to confront two complex issues where dominant public narratives frequently collide with reality. Together, they look at the recent high...

This is the free shorter version of a premium episode. Become a paid subscriber to The Unspeakeasy on Substack to access the full version. 👉 https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com Meghan's guest this time is author, essayist, and friend of the pod Sarah Hepola, who returns to celebrate her long-awaited memoir, The Only Thing There is to Want. Having survived early drafts, financial close-calls, an...

Meghan's guest is Emma Pettit, a former Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who moved into audio this year at  Longview , the new independent media outlet founded by veteran podcast creator Andy Mills. Her new three-part series,  Street Fight , looks at a conflict playing out on sidewalks across the country: the rights of people living on the street versus the rights of everyone else. Emma trac...

Another episode about local politics that's really about so much more. Meghan's guest is Tanya Tsikanovsky, a candidate for West Hollywood City Council. (West Hollywood is part of greater Los Angeles but functions as its own municipality.) Tanya came out at 14 and founded her high school's first Gay-Straight Alliance, was a die-hard liberal Democrat, and later worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 camp...

Meghan's guest this week is journalist Michael Powell, a staff writer at The Atlantic and longtime former New York Times reporter whom she has admired for years for his willingness to report on thorny, third-rail cultural topics. She talked with him about his recent reporting on chronic street homelessness, drug addiction, and the real-world consequences of progressive governance. Specifically, th...

Meghan's guest this week is Evan Barker, a former progressive operative, fundraising strategist, and author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Meghan was eager to sit down with Evan after following her journey from a working-class Midwestern Obama campaign volunteer to a high-powered consultant who ultimately grew disillusioned with the modern Democratic machine. Together, the...

After a decade of ideological conformity, is American theater ready to laugh at itself again? This week Meghan is joined by Broadway star, comedian, and producer  PJ Adzima , founder of Stage Time NYC and producer of  Slam Frank —a mind-melting new musical that reimagines  The Diary of Anne Frank  through "an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, Afro-Latin hip-hop lens." (You read that right...

This (almost) Fourth of July conversation originally appeared on Jenny Holland's channel,  Saving Culture From Itself , but it's really a "collab," as they say in the pod-biz. Meghan has talked with Jenny before on YouTube livestreams, but this is the first time they've done an official podcast together. This conversation kept circling back to the kinds of tripwires and trigger points that cause p...

Meghan's guest this week is  Lisa Marchiano —Jungian analyst, author, and co-host of the popular podcast  This Jungian Life . She's long been intrigued by Carl Jung's ideas but also found them somewhat elusive. So she asked Lisa to help me understand why Jung resonates so deeply with so many people and why his work feels especially relevant today. They discuss archetypes, the shadow, synchronicity...

Mark Oppenheimer spent decades thinking about Judy Blume before finally writing her biography — and the result is a book that is a serious inquiry into Blume's books, her personal story, and social and cultural dynamics of the 80-plus years in which she has lived. In this conversation, we talk about what it meant to be a boy who loved Judy Blume, why realist fiction for young people has largely gi...

Adam Miller is one of more than a dozen candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles, but unlike some of his rivals, he comes from the worlds of tech and nonprofit management rather than politics. Miller founded the e-learning company Cornerstone and the homelessness prevention nonprofit Better Angels, and says he entered the race because he believes the city's failures — especially around homeless...

Writer and cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy joins Meghan to discuss her new book, The Last Straight Woman, an exploration of how heterosexual women became suspect — if not pitifully uncool — in progressive culture. They talk about everything from Tumblr-era feminism and the post-#MeToo recalibration of gender politics to the television series Sex and the City and Girls, "photogenic feminism," bac...

Meghan's guest is Spencer Pratt, candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Yes, that Spencer Pratt — the producer-crafted villain from The Hills who later blew a fortune on moldavite crystals and Birkin bags before settling into a quieter life raising a family in Pacific Palisades. That house burned down in the Palisades Fire in January 2025, and what followed was a political awakening that has put him in...

Meghan's guest this week is British journalist and author Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy. Brendan talks about what he sees as a growing "vibe shift" away from elite consensus and toward something like common sense—though not without its own distortions. He and Meghan discuss the UK's role in pushing...

Hadley Freeman is a U.K.-based journalist,  Sunday Times  columnist, and the author of  Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia . She joins the podcast this week to discuss what she calls the "thinness arms race" in the era of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. She and Meghan talk about why extreme thinness is once again being rewarded—if not demanded—of female celebrities, how the current aesthetic diffe...

This week's guest is Estela Lopez, Executive Director of the LA Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which encompasses Los Angeles's Skid Row. With 25 years on the job and a lifetime in the neighborhood, Estela is one of the most clear-eyed, unsparing voices when it comes to what homelessness actually looks like at the ground level. In this conversation, she and Meghan talk about how...

This week, Meghan sits down for an efficient but information-packed conversation with mindset coach Amanda Gertz-Hurdy, author of  The Curiosity Workbook . They discuss how Amanda pivoted from a corporate career to a more creative path before building a thriving practice in the mindfulness and curiosity space—and why she believes radical self-acceptance can only come when you're ready to ask the r...

Bestselling novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to dicuss what might be her most controversial book yet. A Better Life takes on immigration through the story of a progressive Brooklyn woman who opens her home to a migrant. In this interview, she and Meghan discuss the book's themes and central characters, including the deliciously complicated Nico, a basement-dwelling fa...

This week Meghan is joined by actor, humorist, and six-time author Annabelle Gurwitch, who returns to the podcast to discuss her new memoir,  The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker . Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer during COVID, entirely out of the blue, after what she assumed was a meaningless cough. Five years later, she remains an outlier on...

Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we're often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life. Sam explains how today's meth is fundamentally different from the "tweaker" era...

Time for another reunion! Sarah Haider, Meghan's co-host on the late, great A Special Place In Hell, has a lot to say about the Epstein files, so she visited the podcast to unload. After opening the episode with an homage to the classic intro from our former podcast, the ladies talk about how everyone's a pedophile now, why Ghislaine Maxwell was drawn to such bad boyfriends, and why Epstein's favo...

A special solo episode! Now out from behind the paywall. As a recent bonus episode for subscribers, Meghan recorded some thoughts about a media dustup that was making her head explode. In the wake of the latest Epstein document dump, a smaller, unrelated story emerged a few weeks ago that carried some of the same themes. It involved New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's decision not to air an in...

Is it really true that no one—or at least no one under 30—is having sex anymore? In this episode, Meghan talks with neuroscientist, author, and former sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh about her new book Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, a data-packed look at why millennials and Gen Z are having less sex than any cohort on record despite living in the most sexually permissive...

In this episode, Meghan talks with science writer and professional skeptic Michael Shermer about his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, and about why agreeing on basic facts has become so difficult, even when everyone is looking at the same video. They discuss Minneapolis, ICE raids, viral "exposé" culture, the transgender movement, the lab leak theory, the Jeffr...

Jacob Savage, author of the ultra-viral Compact essay "The Lost Generation," was digital media's man of the month in December. Meghan interviewed him on December 26 for a special episode for paying subscribers, and here it is now from behind the paywall. Jacob's argument in a nutshell, is this: Starting around 2014, the push to diversify hiring in elite institutions, particularly academia, journal...