The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

This week Meghan welcomes guests Larry Clarke and Fielding Edlow. They are actors/writers/producers and also the married couple behind the YouTube series Bitter Homes and Gardens, a comedy, doled in out short episodes, about a married couple named . . Larry and Fielding. This edition of The Unspeakable is a bit of an experiment in that it's the audio version of a conversation recorded for The Unsp...

Lara Bazelon has a decades-long career as a public defender. She worked as a trial attorney in the office of the public defender in Los Angeles for many years and is currently a law professor at the University of San Francisco, where she directs programs focusing on juvenile criminal justice and racial justice. But she's also a journalist and novelist. This year she published A Good Mother, a lega...

In 2015, journalist Carla Power published If The Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and Journey Into the Heart of the Quran, which chronicled her friendship with a madrasa­-trained sheikh who lead her through a deep reading of the Koran. That book was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In her new book, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Bac...

Part three of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In the third and final part of the podcast's weeklong "Gender Nuance" series, Meghan talks with journalist Lisa Selin Davis about the cultural and political forces that have factored into the current gender movement and why the media has failed to cover the whole story. The author of a book about the evolution of gend...

Part two of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In part two of this week's three-part "Gender Nuance" series, Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper returns to answer questions from "Jolene and Marie," two pseudonymous moms of gender-dysphoric kids who were originally interviewed on The Unspeakable last July. Dr. Edwards-Leeper, who talked alone with Meghan in part one of this ser...

Part one of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 Clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper has worked with transgender and gender questioning youth since 2007 and has helped facilitate many successful medical transitions in young people. She has also, in the last year or so, begun to publicly voice concerns that some clinicians in her field have adopted a philoso...

Meghan's guests this week are father and daughter Dr. Drew Pinsky and Paulina Pinsky, who are coauthors of the new book, It Doesn't Have To Be Awkward: Dealing With Relationships, Consent and Other Hard-To-Talk-About Stuff. In the book, they address issues around relationships, boundaries and sexual consent and seek to bridge the generation gap between baby boomers like Drew and millennials like P...

Gen Xers and young Baby Boomers can be nostalgic about the freedoms of growing up in the 1970s. But there was a darker side to that era, too, especially for girls. Feminism was on the ascent, but the sexual revolution was moving even faster, bringing profound changes to behavioral norms and assumptions about pleasure and consent. In her new memoir, The Big Hurt, Erika Schickel recalls a childhood...

Husband and wife evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are the authors of the new book A Hunter Gatherer's Guide To the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. Former professors at Washington's Evergreen State College, their involvement in a 2017 controversy that became a touchstone "campus culture war" event led them to become major figures in the so-called...

Incel stands for "involuntary celibate" and refers most often to young men whose sexual and romantic rejection has led them to spend lots of time denigrating women online. Over the last decade, a handful of high profile mass killings has led to a media narrative suggesting that incels are an organized hate group of violent misogynists. They've even been classified as a domestic terrorist threat. B...

Meghan met actor/author/comedian Chelsea Handler several years ago when they attempted to develop Meghan's 2014 book, The Unspeakable (no direct connection to this podcast) into a television series. In fine Hollywood tradition, the project failed to launch, but the two remained friendly and Chelsea agreed to come on Meghan's podcast to talk about her own podcast, Dear Chelsea, which offers advice...

Sam Harris is a giant in the world of podcasting. His podcast, Making Sense, which began in 2013 under the name Waking Up, averages more than a million downloads per episode. He is also a philosopher and neuroscientist, a meditation expert, the author of several bestselling books, and a prominent voice in both the "new atheist movement" and in "heterodox" intellectual circles, which has led him to...

Frank Bruni spent more than 25 years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a columnist on the opinion page. In June, he left the column to become a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke University. Frank spoke with Meghan about the difficulties — maybe the impossibility— of writing a weekly opinion column while also maintaining intellectual humility and engaging with your own...

This week, Meghan talks with legendary sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage. Recounting thirty years of correspondence from people seeking advice, Dan reflects on how anxieties and concerns have changed over the decades. Whereas he once got mostly practical questions about sex, he now hears from people who describe a relationship dynamic and ask some version of "am I the asshole?" Dan also ta...

In this very special, guest-free episode of The Unspeakable Podcast, Meghan talks to her listeners about the now ubiquitous concept of the "mid-career pivot." Drawing from her experience as a longtime freelance writer who has had to shift her entire work philosophy to accommodate a changing media landscape, Meghan shares several ideas and at least one pet theory. That theory has to do with the way...

Science writer Tom Chivers is the author of How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics In The News (And Knowing When to Trust Them) which he co-wrote with his cousin, the economist David Chivers. He came to Meghan's attention recently because of an article he wrote for the British publication, UnHerd, where he serves as science editor. That article, entitled Twitter Trolls Mentally Ill?, was a res...

Approximately 554,000 Americans experienced homelessness last year, and over half of were in California. In Los Angeles County alone, 66,000 people were unhoused in 2020, a 16 percent increase from the previous year. Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles who often speaks about policy issues and ideas for addressing the crisis. He was also homeless himself for ten years, li...

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is everywhere all of a sudden. Having made its way from academia to K-12 education, it came to the attention of the Trump Administration last year and quickly became a bogeyman of the political right. From there, state legislatures began crafting bills that would ban the "divisive concepts" allegedly embedded in CRT-based curriculum. But the bills have only added to p...

This week's episode is a little different. Meghan's two guests appear anonymously and speak about their sons' struggles with gender dysphoria and subsequent desires to transition into females. Calling themselves Jolene and Marie, they explain why they're wary of the "affirmative" model of care, which operates from an assumption that even very young children can know for sure if they are in the wro...

Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick is one of the most celebrated humorists of his generation. From his 1993 breakout off-Broadway hit play, Jeffrey to Broadway hits like I Hate Hamlet and screenplays for films like In and Out, Addams Family Values and Sister Act, Paul is a master of not just the quippy one-liner but also deeply realized characters and relatable, if often absurd si...

Novelist Lionel Shriver is known for placing social topics (sometimes radioactive ones) inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting akin to the Columbine massacre. Lionel's thirteen other novels take...

One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of convicted sex offenders. But The National Sex Offender Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it's yet anot...

Libby Emmons now works mainly as a journalist, writing articles about ideological divides in culture and politics for places like Quilllette, The Federalist and The Spectator, and serving as editor of the conservative Canadian news magazine The Post Millennial. But before she entered the sphere of public debate about the news, Libby was in the theater world, specifically the radical feminist theat...

Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and a speaker and educator about transgender issues, particularly issues related to trans healthcare. Now in his late 50s, he transitioned from female to male in his late 20s and has more recently became a controversial figure in certain corners of the trans community. He talked with Meghan about why he's so controversial, what it's been like to spend decades on mascu...

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of many novels, including You Should Have Known, which became the basis for last fall's hit HBO limited series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Her brand new novel, The Plot, is a literary suspense thriller about a struggling writer who stumbles upon what by all accounts is the greatest story ever (or in this case never) told. The problem is, it...