The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Tara Henley is a journalist and podcaster based in Canada who has become one of the most celebrated figures in the heterodox space there. She is the author of the 2020 book Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life, and was a longtime producer of television and radio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She left the CBC in late 2021 and made a splash last January with the very fir...

Bridget Phetasy is a prominent podcaster, YouTuber and writer in the heterodox (or, as she likes to call it, politically homeless) space. Jeren Montgomery is a family therapist and also Bridget's husband. As if Bridget didn't already have enough projects, last year the two started Factory Settings, a podcast that explores how built-in biases affect the way people consume information and form opini...

Sarah Polley has been acting in film and television since the age of five. She appeared in films like The Adventures of Baron Munchasuen was dubbed "Canada's Sweetheart" for her starring role in the hit television series The Road To Avonlea. Though she continued acting through her teens, starring in acclaimed films like The Sweet Hereafter, she's made her career as a writer and director. Her 2006...

Zubin Damania is a Stanford trained physician and founder of Turntable Health, an innovative health care clinic and early model of "Health 3.0." He spent many years working with patients in hospitals, during which he launched a shadow career on YouTube under the pseudonym ZDoggMD. He is now host of the hugely successful podcast the ZDoggMD Show, where he talks about public health and problems with...

Last fall, Meghan was commissioned by The New York Times to conduct an interview with a therapist who was politically conservative. The editors were curious about the question of whether most therapists lean toward the political left and whether this causes some some patients to self-censor because they fear judgment. They editors tracked down Dea Bridge, a licensed professional counselor in Color...

Nina Paley is an illustrator, filmmaker, and self-described TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). Corinna Cohn is a transwoman who happens to be Nina's good friend. According to the culture war playback, the two should be mortal enemies. Instead, they have a podcast together; Heterodorx, which focuses on their daily lives and the current state of the gender wars. In this conversation, Nina a...

Behind every Infamous news story is a journalist trying to hold power to account. Join reporters Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman as they take an in-depth look at the most explosive scandals of this century. From high-profile divorces to sex cults to the lies that started a war, they'll guide you through the juiciest, most outrageous, celeb-filled stories of the last two decades, and give y...

Maud Maron had a long career as a public defender and is now a schools advocate in New York City, where she was board president of Manhattan's largest school district. This year, she competed in the Democratic primary among a large field of candidates gunning for a rare open seat in New York's 10th district. She didn't win, but she remains a prominent voice among liberals seeking to elevate modera...

Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the faculty director and a co-founder of the Mill Institute, an organization aimed at helping educators learn how to foster productive, respectful discussions that make room for a variety of viewpoints in the classroom. In this conversation, Ilana talks about her work around a conce...

This week The Unspeakable welcomes three guests. Mike Pesca, Virginia Heffernan and Jamie Kirchick are the hosts of the brand new podcast Not Even Mad. Mike, who's the host of the long running podcast The Gist, conceived Not Even Mad as an alternative to the glut of podcasts in which the hosts and guests do nothing but agree with each other. With Virginia representing the political left, Jamie the...

The last several decades have seen countless initiatives to improve educational and professional opportunities for girls and women. And they worked! Women now outpace men across any number of metrics, notably educational attainment but also mental and physical health, home ownership, civic engagement and, increasingly, income. Richard Reeves's new book, Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggl...

Michael Shermer is a longtime figure in the New Atheist movement that arose in the early 2000s. He is the Founding Editor of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. His new book, Conspiracy: Why The Rational Believe The Irrational, looks at the psychological processes and societal forces t...

It's a very special "Meghan has Covid" edition of The Unspeakable! With barely any voice, Meghan speaks with Leslie Bienen, a public health expert and author of dozens of op-eds calling for a saner approach to covid safety measures. Unlike most people, including (and especially?) most journalists, Leslie knows how to read and interpret scientific data. She's also a veterinarian who has studied and...

It's another episode about . . . gender! Specifically what's really happening when it comes to medical protocols for young people seeking gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. Last month, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, convened for its annual meeting and announced new guidelines for treating gender dysphoric kids, including guidelines about su...

If you are terrorized by your Fitbit, guilt tripped by half the items in your refrigerator, or broke from trying every new juice cleanse that comes along, this week's guest, Rina Raphael, will make you feel better. Her new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the Promise of Self-Care, examines the roots and ramifications of America's latest health craze; extreme health.  Rina is per...

ChayaLeah and Yael are both Jewish, but in very different ways. ChayaLeah has lived her whole life in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California. Yael is a secular Israeli now living in New York City. In 2020, the two became friends when they met online and began having conversations about Judaism — many of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about orthodox Jews that she w...

Louise Perry is just thirty-years-old, but she's written a book that's poised to take the wind out of more than half a century of feminist activism. The Case Against The Sexual Revolution: A New Guide To Sex in the 21st Century is a manifesto of sorts. But it's also a carefully researched, deeply considered interrogation into whether the sexual liberation movement was really as good for women as i...

If you're a fan of The Unspeakable, you're almost certainly a fan of Jon Ronson. When it comes to the subject of ruinous humiliation via mobs (online or otherwise) Jon's 2015 bestselling book So You've Been Publicly Shamed is both a field guide and a sacred text. His 2017 podcast The Butterfly Effect, looked at the downstream effects of the pornogrpahy industry. It also circled around a theme that...

Almost two years ago, author William Deresiewicz visited The Unspeakable to talk about his book  The Death Of The Artist:  How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech . It was an insightful and moving conversation about the near-impossibility of surviving as a working artist in a "creator economy." Many listeners wrote to Meghan to express their gratitude as well...

This week on the podcast, author and podcaster Sarah Hepola is back!  On her last visit to The Unspeakable, back in March, Sarah and Meghan talked about Sarah's bombshell Atlantic Magazine article, The Things I'm Afraid To Write. But they got a little sidetracked by some other subjects, including the barely-known details of the Stanford swimmer rape case, which Sarah has researched in depth. In th...

This week's episode is the second of a two part series about guns in America, a conversation between two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who's a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In 2018 they were part of...

This week's episode is the first of a two part series about guns in America. It's a conversation between Meghan and two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who's a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In this par...

Known by his  nom de guerre  "The Greatest American Living Writer," Neal Pollack has published eleven books, including a rock history satire, several crime thrillers (including two yoga-themed crime thrillers), and memoirs on subjects ranging from fatherhood to yoga to marijuana addiction. His latest book is  Edge of Safety , a satirical dystopian novel set at some indeterminate point in the futur...

Stephanie Lepp is an artist, a film and video producer and Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, where she leads the production of the podcast Your Undivided Attention. Her latest independent project is Deep Reckonings, a series of "deep fake" videos that depict prominent figures making public statements that have been reimagined as empathetic and morally courageous. In this conv...

Sarah Haider is an activist and a writer who became a noted figure in the new atheist movement around 2013, when she co-founded the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America. That is a nonprofit that promotes secular values, advocates for acceptance of religious dissent and works to combat discrimination faced by people who leave Islam in the U.S. and Canada. Her work there led to her trenches of...