The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

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 v...

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 ma...

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 cre...

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...

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 fine...

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...

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 lat...

"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 go...

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 eld...

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 moral...

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...

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 a...

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 busin...

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 hour...

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 Sm...

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 gifte...

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 episo...

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 Th...

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 Br...

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, the...

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...

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 porno...

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 housew...

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...

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 cul...