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 uncertainty. The author of many books, including a book about higher education, Frank explained how ...
Aug 16, 2021•1 hr 34 min
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 talks about how he’s become gentler over the years in doling out advice, the legacy of his famous “It ...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 33 min
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 ways that Generation X is in an especially precarious position when it comes to this pivot, mostly beca...
Aug 02, 2021•28 min
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 response to a widely circulated statement by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who wrote about defam...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 5 min
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, living for most of that time in an encampment in Koreatown, where he and his longtime husband dealt wi...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 22 min
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 public confusion over what CRT really means and partisan media coverage has whipped up the whole deba...
Jul 11, 2021•1 hr 33 min
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 wrong gender and often demonizes parents who question the approach. Jolene and Marie talk about how thi...
Jul 04, 2021•1 hr 36 min
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 situations. He's also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades and is the author of se...
Jun 27, 2021•1 hr 11 min
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 on such subjects as obesity, the US healthcare system, the national debt, global overpopulation, an...
Jun 20, 2021•1 hr 7 min
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 another blunt instrument of "tough on crime" 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to ruins lives t...
Jun 13, 2021•1 hr 15 min
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 theater community. The author of a many award-winning dramatic works, including the play How To Sell Your...
Jun 06, 2021•1 hr
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 masculinizing hormone therapy, and why he's worried about the number of clinicians now prescribing such t...
May 30, 2021•1 hr 21 min
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 belongs to someone else. In this conversation Jean talks with Meghan about what a "story" really is...
May 23, 2021•1 hr 8 min
You've probably noticed more buzz than usual lately about anti-racism training modules in schools and workplaces. Often referred to as DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion, this framework has turned into a big business, with concepts like "white fragility" and "black despair" sometimes weaponized in the name of fighting inequality. Amid the swirl of approaches (which are often indistinguishable from one another), a 27-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Chloé Valdary has developed an alterna...
May 16, 2021•1 hr 9 min
For most of her career, University of Sussex Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Stock was known primarily as a scholar on philosophical questions related to fiction and the concept of imagination. But in 2018, she began to speak and write about the issue of gender identity. Among her questions were why her philosophy colleagues were so reluctant to discuss something so seemingly ripe for the kind of inquiry philosophers live for. The backlash came swiftly but so did tacit messages of support and o...
May 09, 2021•1 hr 36 min
John McWhorter teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University, is the author of more than 20 books, a contributor to The Atlantic and the host of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley. If you're a fan of The Unspeakable, you may know John best from his commentary around issues of race. Since 2007, he has been in regular conversation with economist Glenn Loury on the Bloggingheads platform, where is his known as a uniquely honest voice on the complexities-and often the hypocrisies-of cer...
May 02, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Yasmine Mohammad is an author and human rights activist, advocating for the rights of those living under religious extremism. You wouldn't think that would be controversial, but the extremism she focuses on is Islamic extremism, specifically the fundamentalism that has arisen in the Islamic world over the last several decades and imposed draconian rules on women. Because progressive norms in the west often now frame criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry, Yasmine, who considers herself an ex-Mu...
Apr 18, 2021•1 hr 38 min
Jesse Singal's new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, challenges many long held assumptions about society and human behavior: for instance the myth of the super predator, the so-called "power pose," the use of positive psychology in the military, even the concept of implicit bias. We've come to take these ideas as truths, but as Jesse explains, many are based on based on faulty methodology, shoddy interpretation and sometimes just wishful thinking. Jesse talks wit...
Apr 11, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Time Magazine columnist for 20 years, Joel Stein is known for his humorous, irreverent and often deadpan inquiries into American life and social politics. His latest book is In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book, which despite the subtitle, is a serious minded, though also quite funny, journey through the parts of America that, in the wake of the Trump election, Joel realized he didn't understand at all. Joel talks with Meghan abou...
Apr 04, 2021•1 hr 45 min
If you've been following the seemingly endless battles on college campuses over free speech, you may have noticed that professors are a frequent target of censorship and complaint. Sometimes this because students object to curriculum and sometimes the infraction is as trivial as a professor sending a a "problematic" tweet. The recently launched Academic Freedom Alliance seeks to help educators navigate these waters. Its chair, constitutional law scholar and political science professor Keith Whit...
Mar 28, 2021•1 hr 24 min
Writer, comedian and popular podcaster and YouTuber Bridget Phetasy is known her her uniquely astute analysis of the news of the day - and also her views on what shouldn't be news. In this conversation, sparked by recent remarks from the comedian Sarah Silverman, Bridget and Meghan talk about what's happened to comedy in the age of (often manufactured) hypersensitivity, why they, in turn, are hypersensitive to that hypersensitivity, and what it's like to watch entertainers and other public figur...
Mar 21, 2021•1 hr 2 min
A conservative who has always been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens often manages to annoy his would-be allies on the right while consistently inflaming Times readers who are on the left. In this conversation, Bret and Meghan compare notes on how column writing has changed over the last decade and parse some of Bret's more controversial pieces, including columns he's written on climate change, Jewish intellectual achievement, and the sexual abuse ...
Mar 14, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Angel Eduardo is a writer, musician and visual artist based in New York City. Last summer, he wrote an article that appeared in Areo Magazine called I'm a Nobody, The Harper's Letter Was For Me The now-infamous Open Letter on Justice and Debate published in Harper's Magazine, addressed a climate of growing intolerance for ideological diversity and was signed by more than 150 prominent artists and intellectuals. Among the criticisms of the so-called "Harper's Letter" was that it amounted to a bun...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 30 min
Writer and performer Annabelle Gurwitch never got rich over the course her decades-long career, but she managed to carve out a decent life as a working actor and published author. In her fifties, however, her fortunes changed and she found herself divorced, renting out a room in her house, and wondering how a middle class existence can slip away after a lifetime of hard work. She chronicles these struggles-often hilariously-in her fifth book You're Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility. ...
Mar 01, 2021•1 hr 7 min
In her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, author Lori Gottlieb tells the stories of five people in psychotherapy. Four are her own patients and one is Lori herself. A practicing therapist for more than a decade, she took an unusual route to her vocation, working as a television writer and then attending medical school before realizing that her love of storytelling could be combined with helping people in a clinical setting. Since then, she's become celebrated as a writer and as a...
Feb 22, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Moses Farrow is a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in what he calls adoption trauma. Born in South Korea in 1978, he was adopted by actress Mia Farrow when he was two-years-old, becoming one of ten adopted and four biological children in that family. He was later adopted by Mia's former partner, Woody Allen and in 2018 published a stunning account of what it was like growing up in this family and why he supports his father in the highly publicized sexual abuse allegations m...
Feb 15, 2021•58 min
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the prevailing wisdom from government officials and much of the scientific community is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in an animal and at some point jumped to humans. The idea that it might have accidentally escaped from a lab has been widely dismissed as conspiracy theory, partly because it was easily conflated with inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration. But plenty of scientists and policy have quietly taken the so-c...
Feb 08, 2021•1 hr 24 min
Veteran reporter Nancy Rommelmann is based in New York City these days, but she was a longtime resident of Portland, Oregon who knows the city-and its people, politics, and assorted proclivities-with a unique combination of intimacy and objectivity. As the city erupted into protests last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Nancy returned to Portland and began covering the action for Reason Magazine. This conversation is divided into two parts. In the first part, recorded in late D...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Bruce Wagner, a successful Hollywood screenwriter and the author of twelve novels, has been a beloved literary figure for decades, especially in his home city of Los Angeles. His most recent novel, The Marvel Universe, was enthusiastically acquired by a small press until, he says, the publisher objected to certain "problematic" language, specifically the word "fat," which a character uses to describe herself. This led Bruce to release the book into the public domain by making it available on his...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 15 min
Podcaster and journalist Katie Herzog returns to the podcast to discuss her article Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?, which talked about a trend she's observed wherein many of her lesbian friends are now identifying as transgender or nonbinary. She explains how she sees the nonbinary identity as a "regressive trend" because it ultimately puts limits on gender expression even as it purports to do the opposite. She also talks about the woman who coined the phrase "the future is female," the recen...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 7 min
