The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

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...

If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there's a good chance you were assigned Sherman's classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school. The book is semi-autobiogr...

On podcasts devoted to free speech and so-called heterodox discourse, the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind is probably mentioned more frequently than any other. Written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar and Greg Lukianoff, who now heads the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it is effectively the bible of the Heterodox crowd. And now it's a mov...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Alex Byrne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . Philosopher Alex Byrne spent most of his career innocently studying subjects like epistemology and metaphysics. But a few years ago, he became interested in — wait for it —  gender, and he became a "dissid...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Katherine Dee. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . Katherine Dee is a writer, cultural commentator, and a phenomenally astute observer of online culture. If you want to understand the rise of the "tradcels," the "girl boss" trope (and subsequent backlas...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Rob Henderson. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . If you listen to this podcast and others like it, you may have heard of the concept of luxury beliefs. It was coined by this week's guest Rob Henderson. Rob holds a PhD in psychology, has written for lo...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Lori Gottlieb. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . Psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb visited The Unspeakable in 2021 to talk about her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone . She returns for a Valentine's Day episode about finding lov...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with John Vervaeke and Shawn Coyne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . Meghan has been threatening to do an episode on artificial intelligence, and finally she makes good. This week, she welcomes two guests: the philosopher, neuroscientist, and popular YouT...

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Kathrine Brodsky. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here . Cultural critic Katherine Brodsky is an example of what Meghan likes to call "Heterodoxy 2.0." She's committed to fighting censorship and groupthink but is also mindful of not becoming an ideologue h...

Seth Kaplan has worked in developing nations throughout the world, studying how corrupt governments, crumbling infrastructure, and a lack of public trust can add up to what's known as a "fragile state." In his new book "Fragile Neighborhoods," he explores how these same dynamics can play out on a regional level in the United States. Reporting from struggling rural areas as well as poor urban neigh...

**Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Ezzedine Fishere and Bernard Avishai, Dartmouth professors who teach a joint course on Israeli/Palestinian politics.** **The first hour and five minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here .**  As university campuses have become sharply divided in the wake of the O...

In a last-minute, new year's special, Unspeakable regular ChayaLeah Sufrin stops by the pod to report on her recent trip to Israel with her family. Even though she's been to Israel countless times, this trip was different in both expected and unexpected ways. ChayaLeah talks about the desperation of the families of hostages, the morale of Israeli soldiers, what Israelis think about America these d...

Therapist Sasha Ayad was one of the earliest guests on The Unspeakable. Her interview with Meghan in August of 2020 was revelatory for many listeners and she has become a leading figure in the effort to discuss gender through a non-ideological lens. In this wide-ranging conversation, Sasha shares what she's learned since then, what kind of data has emerged about youth gender medicine, and why medi...

🔔 Did you like this episode? Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a comment down below. ✌️This is a free preview. Upgrade your subscription if you want to hear the whole conversation: https://bit.ly/3LgpZ3A Is Civility Better Than Kindness? This week, author Alexandra Hudson visits the podcast to talk about her new book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves...

✌️This is just a free preview. Upgrade your subscription if you want to hear the full conversation:  https://bit.ly/3LgpZ3A This week, Wall Street Journal Erich Schwartzel joins Meghan for a conversation about his December 2 article about social media super-influencers Rachel and Dave Hollis. After building a multi-million by branding their own happiness and authenticity, tragedy struck when their...

New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul joins The Unspeakable for a conversation about problematic opinions, obvious truths, the state of book reviewing, the problem with publishing, "feeling French" despite being an American, and much more. You can upgrade your subscription here: https://bit.ly/3LgpZ3A GUEST BIO Pamela Paul became an Opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2022. She was...

This week, Andrew Sullivan joins The Unspeakable to discuss the evolution of LGBTQ rights and debates. He and Meghan explore how the trans rights movement intersects (and sometimes conflicts) with the goals Sullivan advocated for gay men like himself in the 80s/90s, such as marriage equality. They also discuss his views on the physical realities of transitioning and how the language surrounding "t...

This week, I had a discussion with Eli Lake regarding the recent tragic attack in Israel and its repercussions. I haven't closely followed this topic over the years, so Eli's insights were invaluable and he politely tolerated some of my more goyishly clueless questions. He has worked as a national security correspondent and possesses extensive knowledge on the history of the Israel/Palestine confl...

In this episode of Unspeakable, Meghan Daum talks with veteran television writer Rob Long about the state of the entertainment industry. They discuss the Hollywood writers' strike, which according to Rob, mainly resulted in pay raises but didn't address systemic issues for writers. Rob and Meghan also discuss how streaming services like Netflix made a mistake trying to compete with studios by prod...

This week, Meghan interrupts her regularly scheduled episode lineup for a visit from Ben Appel, a New York-based writer who's working on a book about ideological capture on college campuses. In 2016, Ben enrolled at Columbia University as a non-traditional student. Already in his 30s, he'd grown up in a cult-like Christian fundamentalist community that pelted him with homophobia; he considered him...

Today's guest, Dr. Andrew Hartz, is a psychologist who has noticed how politicized the world of therapy has become. Over the last few years, he has noticed a climate of patients not being able to talk about what's on their mind without getting a lecture from their therapist about racial injustice, as well as an environment that teaches clinicians to look at patients through a politicized lens. Gue...

Ethan Strauss went from working seven days a week and falling asleep on the train to Coney Island to one of the most popular sports newsletters on Substack. He visited The Unspeakable and we talked about sports media and how it has been captured by elite media and lost touch with its core audience as a result. We also talk about the difference between men's and women's sports when it comes to busi...

How did we get tangled up in a knot of identity obsession, grievance, and one-upmanship? We can look to philosophers like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and, of course, Michel Foucault. And then we can blame it all on Tumblr! In his new book, The Identity Trap - A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time , Yascha Mounk discusses his theory of "the identity synthesis" and...

The ladies from Ask A Jew are back for their biannual visit. This time for the Jewish New Year! In this episode, we talk about the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and (since we apparently have to go over it again) why Orthodox Jews have to get their cars detailed before Passover. (It's true.) We also talk about mikvehs. Because you know you were wondering. If you only ever listen to one conve...

It seems like everywhere you look, men are struggling to find a sense of meaning and purpose. In fact, men are just getting kind of weird. On the other side of the equation, many women say they can't find a "good man" who meets their expectations. Enter Christine Emba, Washington Post columnist and author of the 2022 book  Rethinking Sex: A Provocation . In a recent WaPo  essay , she discusses the...