In this episode, Sarah and Meghan welcome business coach, blogger and all-around opinion-ista, Penelope Trunk. Should women get plastic surgery? Are video games the key to a future as a business tycoon? Can women run businesses anyway?? Penelope is a professional career coach, so she tells Sarah and Meghan what they are doing wrong (spoiler: almost everything) and why they will never make it in this business (or perhaps, any other). She also administers some tests to determine whether they’re au...
This week, Meghan and Sarah revisit their conversation from the previous episode about hormonal birth control. Is Sarah an anti-birth control zealot secretly advocating for legislation to ban all contraception? Is Meghan too forgiving of men who hate condoms? They then move onto late breaking Twitter news (now known as “old news”). As they recorded, Matt Taibbi’s bombshell thread about political bias and content suppression at Twitter was unspooling in real time. Can they make sense of it? (Most...
In this episode of A Special Place in Hell, recorded on Thanksgiving eve, Sarah and Meghan discuss their plans, including why it’s taken Sarah awhile to get the hang of this holiday, especially the cranberry sauce and eating at 2pm part. (You can read Meghan’s take on Thanksgiving in her latest Substack essay .) After touching on a few breaking news stories that everyone’s forgotten by now, they turn to the subject of birth control. Sarah read a book about it and Meghan watched a documentary and...
This week, superstar podcaster Katie Herzog visits A Special Place In Hell to talk about what it’s like to dwell in that sordid sphincter of public discourse known as Twitter. Her podcast, Blocked and Reported, which she co-hosts with Jesse Signal, may live in indentured servitude to some of the the worst the Internet has to offer, but Katie herself knows how to live off the land — or at least touch grass. Here, she talks with Sarah and Meghan about how her wife keeps her grounded, how she fears...
This week (or was it last week?) the girls/women monitor the midterm election returns as they re -record the episode (#BecauseStandards). Along the way they discuss the latest object of mass cultural derangement: Elon Musk. Is Musk the new Trump? Is Twitter really any different than it was a few weeks ago? It’s difficult to say, but as it happens Meghan spent several days hanging out with Musk several years ago when she profiled him for Vogue (in 2015; not in 2014 like she kept saying). She desc...
In this edition of the podcast, the girls/women kick off the discussion with reports on their respective special events; Sarah’s Rights and Religions Forum conference in Washington, DC and Meghan’s latest Unspeakeasy retreat in New York. Lamenting their ongoing habit of saying “I’m a liberal, but . . .” before talking about anything that might be construed as right wing, Sarah says the noticed the same tic in a book she’s reading about the unintended consequences of the birth control pill. #NotT...
On this episode of A Special Place in Hell, the girls/women tackle it all; marriage, sexism, racism, jock smells. This is despite physical and emotional exhaustion from their very special projects; Sarah’s conference and Meghan’s Unspeakeasy retreat. Sarah begins by wondering whether “self-hating millennial” is misleading and, god forbid, cringe . Meghan wonders whether all of childhood is cringe. They then move onto the topic of marriage and expectations and whether mothers should move into “La...
In this episode of A Special Place in Hell, the girls/women wade through the sorry details of last week’s scandale littéraire involving Hobart, a literary magazine no one had ever heard of until last Wednesday. Meghan is a veteran of the literary world and it turns out it’s her job to educate Sarah about how things work. They discuss the phenomenon of “white Brooklyn ladies of the publishing business,” as coined by the writer Alex Perez, a Cuban American writer and Iowa Writers Workshop alum who...
In this episode of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women lose their sh*t over Jon Stewart’s latest virtue signal flare from the ideological bunker in which he appears to be held captive. It’s especially egregious considering a new Reuters story that, for the first time, lays out actual numbers about how many kids are being medicalized for gender dysphoria, including getting invasive surgeries. But before that, they discuss Meghan’s New York Times interview with a “conservative therapist” that...
This week on A Special Place in Hell, the girls/women spend way too much time on names. Are you a racist for mispronouncing Nimrata Nikki Randhawa? (Yes). Is the aforementioned a white supremacist for changing her name to Nikki Haley? (Yes). Should Meghan become Meghan X Daum? (Definitely). Why did George W. Bush call his wife “Bushie”? (Unclear). The girls/women then move on to a lighter topic: the new guidelines announced at the recent World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPA...
It’s the second ever special guest episode of A Special Place In Hell! This week, journalist Suzy Weiss visits the pod, not only fulfilling Sarah’s call for a Gen Z guest but also sharing her insights from her recent Common Sense article Generation Swipe . Suzy explains what a decade of dating app culture has done to the psyches and future plans (or lack thereof) for millennial and Gen Z-ers. It is depressing out there, but Suzy is optimistic. (A welcome change from nihilistic Sarah.) Suzy also ...
Does Meghan look like a media elite? (Does that blue check make her look fat?) Would wearing hijab help Sarah's career? On Saturday evening, as As Sarah and Meghan recorded this episode of A Special Place In Hell, Meghan was being ratioed on Twitter after posting an article so absurd she felt it needed no comment. (Wrong! The mob thinks she wrote it, and now they’re piling on.) But before assessing the damage, the girls/women respond to listener feedback about some of their earlier conversations...
In this episode of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women make some perfunctory remarks about the death of Queen Elizabeth, with Sarah praising the television series The Crown and Meghan explaining why her favorite royal is Camilla Parker Bowles. They then reflect on last week’s conversation with their first ever guest, Kmele Foster of The Fifth Column podcast. Kmele, who met his wife when they were teenagers, had some fascinating things to say about the benefits of finding your mate early in ...
For months, the girls/women have been threatening to have a Special Place special guest. And here he is! Kmele Foster, who’s one-third of the beloved and mega-popular Fifth Column Podcast, visits the pod to talk about . . he’s not sure what. (In fact, he’s not even entirely sure where he is or what he’s doing there.) Sarah and Meghan inform Kmele that he’s there to represent All Men and to explain the current state of masculinity, including why so many men are addicted to porn, unable to form me...
Buckle up debtors and non-indebted allies, this episode of A Special Place in Hell has everything: class, college, and fresh cut flowers. The girls/women start by discussing Meghan’s CLASS-ic New Yorker piece, My Misspent Youth, in which she describes her twenty-something struggle to achieve the shabby chic dream life of a working writer in New York City. Trigger warning: her rent was less than $1200 a month. Meanwhile, Sarah shares her experience as an immigrant with a low-income upbringing cau...
It’s the TENTH (10th!) episode of A Special Place In Hell. In this extra special Special Place, Sarah and Meghan honor the work and legacy of Norah Vincent, the immersive journalist whose untimely death was reported last week. For her 2006 book Self-Made Man , Norah* spent eighteen months infiltrating male spaces as “Ned,” an alter-ego that allowed her to observe how men behave when there are no women around. Though the stunt seems dated now, Norah’s work and outlook were strikingly ahead of her...
In this 9th episode of A Special Place in Hell, Meghan kicks off the conversation by pondering a friend’s advice that she not make fun of herself for being an “aging Gen Xer.” She asks why Sarah’s tagline gets to be “self-hating millennial” when she, too, is self-hating (to which Sarah explains that she doesn’t hate herself, merely the entire rest of her generation). They then move on to an uncharacteristically somber topic: the attack on writer Salman Rushdie. Sarah expertly lays out the chrono...
In this episode of A Special Place In Hell, Sarah and Meghan discuss the recent meme craze spawned by a comic about eating peaches. Since the comic had to do with motherhood, a subject Meghan knows nothing about, Sarah took the lead and explained why mothers sometimes make more work for themselves than is strictly (or remotely) necessary. They then spend some time contemplating hookup culture and “sex positivity,” which Sarah thinks is anti-woman and Meghan suspects (posits? hypothesizes?) is fo...
In this seventh episode of A Special Place In Hell , Sarah and Meghan are feeling generous and decided to make the bonus content at the end available to everybody (you are all very welcome)! But before they get to the extra-spicy stuff, they take on two medium-spicy topics. The first concerns policing; specifically policing women’s voices. Provoked by a tweet from actor Jane Lynch inveighing upon women to speak in lower registers, the women/girls consider why higher pitches—not to mention “uptal...
In this sixth installment of A Special Place In Hell , Sarah bows to “white supremacy urgency” and powers through her illness, which is either COVID or Monkeypox. Meghan talks about attending a screening of the film Jihad Rehab , a “controversial” documentary that made it to the Sundance Film Festival, only to be deemed “a truckload of hate” and effectively wiped out of existence, leaving the first-time filmmaker without work or any financial or community support. As she watched the film, Meghan...
In episode 5 of A Special Place In Hell , Sarah and Meghan get into some pretty spicy territory: the monoculture of academia (may not be suitable for sensitive listeners or people without PhDs) and the omnipresence of pornography. Citing a recent Washington Post article about the percentage of professors whose parents also held PhDs, Sarah talks about the lack of conservative thinkers on college campuses and wonders how anyone can get a complete education in such an environment. She and Meghan p...
In this fourth installment of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women clarify a few matters, starting with the meaning of the name of the podcast. They then analyze their Apple Podcast reviews and respond to criticism that the show is a departure from their usual seriousness. Are they’re letting down their diehard fans by trafficking in snark rather than upholding their usual gravitas? (Answer: whatever .) Meghan announces that she’s putting The Unspeakable podcast on hiatus for the rest of the...
( Hey! Paying subscribers! This is not the post for you— you are special . For you, we have an extra-long episode, which you can access, here ). In this THIRD installment of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women do their best to celebrate Independence Day despite their subjugation by the patriarchy, the Republican Party and the woman-hating world in general. They discuss the tenor of the public conversation around the overturning of Roe v. Wade and wonder if their long range thinking and lack...
In this (second!) episode of A Special Place In Hell, the girls/women discuss the use of the word “girls” in the show’s tagline and whether it’s anti-feminist. Meghan describes visiting the set (well, sitting on a patio outside the set) of Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday to watch Blocked and Reported co-host Katie Herzog’s debut appearance on the show, alongside Andrew Sullivan. Sarah recalls her own guest appearance on Real Time (also with Andrew Sullivan!) and both agree that going on that...
Meghan and Sarah launch their podcast with discussions on nonprofit meltdowns, gender ideology, and youth gender transition. They analyze Ryan Grim's article on progressive nonprofits, Matt Walsh's documentary "What Is A Woman?", and Emily Bazelon's NYT piece on medicalized gender transition, exploring the complexities and controversies within these topics.
