Szego Unplugged Podcast

Welcome to my first video post. It’s non-stop innovation here at Szego Unplugged : no boo boo this time! Esther Takac is a Melbourne-based filmmaker, author and psychologist, who I first met eons ago when she responded to a column I wrote about the challenges of reading the Book of Genesis to my kids by sending me her beautiful, award-winning book, Genesis: The Book With 70 Pages , a “how-to” manu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit szegounplugged.substack.com By popular demand, theologian, author and fellow Stacker Paul Tyson returns to this podcast! We chat about the Jason Arday controversy, a defining, and tragic, episode of the DEI era. Since we recorded this conversation the fallout from the scandal continues with Simon & Schuster releasing the former Cambridg...

For some time now I’ve been keen to speak with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, an anti-Hamas Palestinian nationalist and peace advocate who has a scorching critique of the so-called pro-Palestinian movement in the West. This week I finally got my wish; here, Ahmed talks to me at length about his essay Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages , published this week in The Jewish Quarterly . Ahmed’s piece interrogat...

Chetna Mahadik is general manager at the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne, a fellow stacker and the editor of, and contributor to, a recently published book of essays, Immigration & Multiculturalism: The Past, The Present and The Future . Chetna’s essay, Racism in Australia: Narrative and Reality , tracks her encounters with the country’s sometimes mystifying debates about its national charac...

David Free is a critic (including for the Nine papers), novelist, and fellow-Stacker. In recent times, David, a non-Jew, has drawn attention for his lucid and brave essays on the anti-Jewish hostility that’s found a place in Australia’s literary scene. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter, you really must, and I suggest you start with this post, which we discuss at length here because in it...

Here I talk to Drew Hutton, a man of the moment for all the wrong reasons. Alongside Bob Brown, Hutton co-founded the national Greens in the early 1990s. A week ago the party’s state council in Queensland affirmed an earlier decision to boot him out for refusing to delete “transphobic” comments from others on his Facebook post. He says the party he co-founded has been hijacked by a transgender and...

I’ll explain the “accidental” gag soon — first, the important stuff. In this episode I pick the formidable brain of John Anderson, second-in-charge of Oz from 1999 to 2005 and these days a serious player in the world of long-form podcasting. He was an early adopter of the web-based interview, launching his “Conversations” series in 2017 to tackle the big geopolitical and philosophical questions wi...

In this podcast I speak with Indian filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar, currently in Australia for screenings of her groundbreaking feature-length documentary, Behind the Looking Glass , which explores the lives of women whose male partners have “come out” as trans. (For details of screenings scroll to the end of this post.) These women are sometimes known as “trans widows.” Also joining us is Bronwyn Win...

In this podcast episode (click here for the video version or listen wherever you get your podcasts) I speak with Dr Alan Davison, President of the Free Speech Union Australia , the local chapter of an organisation established in the UK in 2019. As its name suggests, the FSU defends freedom of expression against cancel culture and the increasing trend of governments, particularly those left-of-cent...

Can a believer and a non-believer find enough common ground to have a truly meaty conversation? I’ve always wondered about this. But my podcast guest Dr Paul Tyson, a philosopher, theologian, sociologist and fellow Substacker , reckons these days he finds it easier to talk meaningfully with atheists and feminists than with Christians, many of whom are as woke as the next person. While Tyson is un-...

If four years ago you would have told me that come the next US election we’d be confronting the prospect of Donald Trump: The Resurrection, I’d have suggested you get more fresh air. But here we are. And with his fascinating, if not inspired, choice of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as running mate, Trump redux sharpens his pitch to the embattled American working class. In this post I speak wit...

In this podcast I speak with journalist Bernard Lane, formerly at The Australian and now a fellow Substacker, whose newsletter Gender Clinic News — see the link below — covers the escalating debate over youth gender medicine at home and abroad. For many years Lane was effectively the only journalist doggedly covering what may yet emerge as one of the biggest medical scandals in history. It’s worth...

Over the past 20 years governments have poured billions into the education system, overhauled the national curriculum again and again, reformed the school funding model (or not — but never mind that for now), beefed up teacher training standards, and expounded on the history, maths and reading wars. But for all the frenetic activity on education policy, our kids keep getting dumber. How dumb? Well...

In this podcast I speak with distinguished historian Jeffrey Herf about the global wave of anti-Semitism unleashed in the aftermath of October 7. We discuss the Jew hatred of the right, the left and the Islamist movement — and how Hamas has seduced Western intellectuals into “magical thinking” about its true nature. We also ponder what the future holds for the increasingly fearful Jewish communiti...

Amid a new Israel-Gaza war, the world reeling from unprecedented atrocities against Israeli civilians, former Age editor Michael Gawenda reflects on his life as a Jew — the title of his astonishing new book— and on what he sees as a troubling shift towards activist journalism. During the last Israel-Gaza war two years ago, more than 400 Australian journalists and writers petitioned the media to “d...

Welcome to my inaugural podcast episode! I’m speaking here with journalist Matt Johnson about his latest book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment . The subject couldn’t be closer to my heart because: a) I’m an enduring fan of Christopher Hitchens, a lacerating and erudite polemicist whose death in 2011 left a Hitch-sized hole in the...