After two years on the Bloggingheads platform, journalists and cultural critics Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Maltz Bovy are taking their popular podcast, Feminine Chaos, independent. In this conversation with Meghan, they share their views on some of contemporary feminism's most pressing concerns, including the purity policing of white women, the new stigmatization of straightness and the importance of preserving "you guys" as a term of address. They also do a deep dive into the identity category k...
Jan 04, 2021•1 hr 27 min
In this very special edition of The Unspeakable Podcast, Meghan departs from the interview format and speaks directly to listeners. Reflecting on the current moment as well as on the election four years ago, she talks about how writing her last book inspired her to create the podcast and also how after 25 years of writing "think pieces" she literally doesn't know what to think anymore. She also talks about how social media has turned "ambient perception" into a substitute for empirical reality a...
Nov 16, 2020•18 min
Bestselling author William Deresiewicz's new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, paints a grim picture of the state of the arts-at least as far as actual artists are concerned. For all the talk about how it's never been easier to be creative, the truth is that it's never been more difficult to do so professionally. In this conversation, Deresiewicz relays what he learned from interviews with more than one hundred working ...
Nov 09, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Sigrid Nunez is the author of seven novels and a memoir. Sigrid's 2018 novel, The Friend, won The National Book Award for fiction and became a bestseller. That book featured a unnamed narrator caring for the dog of a close friend who had committed suicide. This fall she has a new novel out, What Are You Going Through? It's also about a friendship, this time between the narrator and an old acquaintance who's facing terminal cancer and has asked the narrator to be with her as she lives her final d...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Merrill Markoe is an Emmy award winning television writer and celebrated humorist. She's worked on shows ranging from Sex and The City to Moonlighting but is probably best known for her association with The David Letterman Show, where she was the head writer from the show's inception in 1981 until the late 1980s. She's also the author of nine books, including the brand new graphic memoir We Saw Scenery: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe. Here, Merrill draws from an enormous cache of diaries sh...
Oct 25, 2020•1 hr 16 min
Australian broadcaster Josh Szeps is known for his fiercely intelligent and at-times wickedly funny approach to interviews and news analysis. A founding producer and host of the award-winning Huffpost Live, he can currently be heard on ABC Radio Sydney and, during his time in New York, hosted a live show-turned-podcast called #WeThePeople LIVE. Last summer, Josh launched Uncomfortable Conversations, an interview podcast virtually indistinguishable from this one other than the host being Australi...
Oct 18, 2020•1 hr 24 min
Leon Wieseltier, who was for decades the literary editor of The New Republic, is a legendary cultural and media figure. But in 2017, just as he was set to launch a new publication, he was accused of #MeToo transgressions and his professional connections were severed almost overnight. After three years out of the public eye, Leon has reemerged with a new quarterly journal called Liberties, which aims to be "slower, longer and deeper" than just about anything else around. In this conversation, Leo...
Oct 12, 2020•1 hr 18 min
We hear about "identity" so often now that the word no longer carries much meaning. By extension, the term "identity politics" has become a culture war cudgel, recklessly deployed by race baiters on the right as well as some activists on the social justice left. But Laurent Dubreuil, a professor of literature and cognitive science at Cornell University, has studied identity in ways that plunge far deeper than standard discussions about tribalism and narcissism. He's interested in what an identit...
Oct 04, 2020•1 hr
Katie Herzog is a co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the new and wildly successful podcast, Blocked and Reported, which analyzes internet dramas and attempts to bring missing facts to supposedly foregone conclusions. A lifelong liberal who, a few years ago, found herself questioning certain assumptions of both the political left and the queer community to which she'd always belonged, Katie has become beloved figure among heterodox thinkers even as some of her old ideological allies have turned away ...
Sep 27, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Journalist Lenore Skenazy was dubbed "America's Worst Mom" in 2008 for a column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone. The controversy led her to speak out about finding safe ways to allow kids to be more independent and she founded the Free Range Kids movement. In 2018 she co-founded Let Grow, a nonprofit that offers resource materials, school curricula and even does policy work with an aim toward helping kids be more self-sufficient (and helping their parents allow them to be)....
Sep 20, 2020•1 hr 8 min
When Sandra Tsing Loh was beginning her career in the 1980s, she modeled herself after avant garde performance artists like Laurie Anderson. She even put the "Tsing" in her name because she thought it sounded "Yoko Ono-ish." But after becoming an established figure in the Los Angeles arts scene and a prolific writer for alternative publications, Sandra's life began to change and so did the notion of artistry itself. In this interview, Sandra talks about the realties of making art in the current ...
Sep 13, 2020•55 min
"We make long term decisions based on short term feelings." - Evan Marc Katz Evan Marc Katz is a dating coach who specializes in high achieving women seeking male partners. But instead of telling his clients to settle for nothing less than their financial, educational, and professional equals, he encourages them to get real about the dating economy and accept some hard truths about human mating patterns. In this conversation, Evan talks about why people overvalue chemistry, why dating apps are b...
Sep 06, 2020•53 min
British academic Helen Pluckrose is the co-author, with James Lindsay, of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity-And Why This Harms Everybody. She was also part of an infamous academic hoax wherein "grievance studies" papers about subjects such as fat bodybuilding and dog park rape culture were accepted for publication in established journals. In this interview, Helen talks about how the social philosophy known as critical theory came to infor...
Aug 30, 2020•1 hr 12 min
We forget that beyond thoughts and ideas and language there is a three-dimensional reality that gives us valuable experiences and can teach us a lot about how to be in the world. - Sasha Ayad In this edition of the podcast, Meghan speaks with Sasha Ayad, a Licensed Professional Counselor who treats adolescents and young adults dealing with issues related to gender identity. Over the last few years, the number of teens announcing transgender identities has increased dramatically. Some statistics ...
Aug 23, 2020•1 hr 29 min
"You're far less likely to be shot as a black man in New York City than as a white man in Tulsa." - Peter Moskos In this episode, Meghan talks with Peter Moskos, a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who also happens to be a former Baltimore City police officer. They discuss the media's role in public perceptions of policing, the various definitions of "defund the police, the impact of ubiquitous cameras and viral videos and what big city police department...
Aug 16, 2020•1 hr 13 min
"No one escapes. Everyone ends up in the guillotine eventually." In this episode of the podcast, Meghan speaks with celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky, whose career in both medicine and media dates back to the 1980s, when he began co-hosting the nationally syndicated call-in radio program Loveline. Recorded in May on the heels of a controversy over some of Drew's initial comments about the coronavirus pandemic, this conversation delves into Drew's theories about how trauma is driving social med...
Aug 09, 2020•48 min
"It feels so good to feel like you're on the right side of history." In this episode of the podcast, Meghan talks with novelist Leigh Stein, whose wickedly satirical new novel Self Care sends up internet influencers and Goop-flavored millennial startup culture while also slyly poking fun at the commodification of social justice activism. Leigh discusses the feminism, capitalism, and "performative workaholism" that inspired her novel and talks about how she went from being "part of the woke mob" ...
Aug 02, 2020•1 hr 6 min
**Recorded July 15th** "I do think on average men are more likely to be more disruptive than necessary and women are more likely to be less disruptive than necessary" - Dr. Heather Heying Evolutionary biologist Dr. Heather Heying has emerged over the last few years as a free speech advocate, largely because of her connection to a now-infamous set of protests at Evergreen State College, where she and husband, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, taught for fifteen years. But less is known about...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 8 min
