Sarah Polley has been acting in film and television since the age of five. She appeared in films like The Adventures of Baron Munchasuen was dubbed “Canada’s Sweetheart” for her starring role in the hit television series The Road To Avonlea. Though she continued acting through her teens, starring in acclaimed films like The Sweet Hereafter, she’s made her career as a writer and director. Her 2006 debut feature, Away From Her, garnered an Best Actress Oscar nomination for star Julie Christie and ...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 25 min
Zubin Damania is a Stanford trained physician and founder of Turntable Health, an innovative health care clinic and early model of “Health 3.0.” He spent many years working with patients in hospitals, during which he launched a shadow career on YouTube under the pseudonym ZDoggMD. He is now host of the hugely successful podcast the ZDoggMD Show, where he talks about public health and problems within the medical field. In this conversation, Zubin explains not only why it’s so hard to find a docto...
Dec 12, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Last fall, Meghan was commissioned by The New York Times to conduct an interview with a therapist who was politically conservative. The editors were curious about the question of whether most therapists lean toward the political left and whether this causes some some patients to self-censor because they fear judgment. They editors tracked down Dea Bridge, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado, and The Q&A-style interview was published in the October 4, 2022 edition of the Times opini...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Nina Paley is an illustrator, filmmaker, and self-described TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). Corinna Cohn is a transwoman who happens to be Nina’s good friend. According to the culture war playback, the two should be mortal enemies. Instead, they have a podcast together; Heterodorx, which focuses on their daily lives and the current state of the gender wars. In this conversation, Nina and Corinna talk with Meghan about what drew them together as friends, how the podcast emerged, and, ...
Nov 24, 2022•1 hr 27 min
Behind every Infamous news story is a journalist trying to hold power to account. Join reporters Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman as they take an in-depth look at the most explosive scandals of this century. From high-profile divorces to sex cults to the lies that started a war, they’ll guide you through the juiciest, most outrageous, celeb-filled stories of the last two decades, and give you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to shine an unflattering light on the world’s most powe...
Nov 18, 2022•5 min
Maud Maron had a long career as a public defender and is now a schools advocate in New York City, where she was board president of Manhattan’s largest school district. This year, she competed in the Democratic primary among a large field of candidates gunning for a rare open seat in New York’s 10th district. She didn’t win, but she remains a prominent voice among liberals seeking to elevate moderate Democratic positions. In this conversation, recorded shortly after the evening of the midterm ele...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the faculty director and a co-founder of the Mill Institute, an organization aimed at helping educators learn how to foster productive, respectful discussions that make room for a variety of viewpoints in the classroom. In this conversation, Ilana talks about her work around a concept she’s coined “the certainty trap.” The idea is that being "absolutely sure" about a particular po...
Nov 07, 2022•59 min
This week The Unspeakable welcomes three guests. Mike Pesca, Virginia Heffernan and Jamie Kirchick are the hosts of the brand new podcast Not Even Mad. Mike, who’s the host of the long running podcast The Gist, conceived Not Even Mad as an alternative to the glut of podcasts in which the hosts and guests do nothing but agree with each other. With Virginia representing the political left, Jamie the right and Mike in the middle, Not Even Mad offers balanced, informed discussions that also model ci...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 10 min
The last several decades have seen countless initiatives to improve educational and professional opportunities for girls and women. And they worked! Women now outpace men across any number of metrics, notably educational attainment but also mental and physical health, home ownership, civic engagement and, increasingly, income. Richard Reeves’s new book, Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It , explores some of the unintended consequences of all th...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Michael Shermer is a longtime figure in the New Atheist movement that arose in the early 2000s. He is the Founding Editor of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. His new book, Conspiracy: Why The Rational Believe The Irrational, looks at the psychological processes and societal forces that cause people, often en masse, to believe outlandish stories and theories. In this conversation, ...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 29 min
It’s a very special "Meghan has Covid” edition of The Unspeakable! With barely any voice, Meghan speaks with Leslie Bienen, a public health expert and author of dozens of op-eds calling for a saner approach to covid safety measures. Unlike most people, including (and especially?) most journalists, Leslie knows how to read and interpret scientific data. She’s also a veterinarian who has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans. In the fall of 2020, her disma...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 9 min
It’s another episode about . . . gender! Specifically what’s really happening when it comes to medical protocols for young people seeking gender reassignment surgery or medicalized transition. Last month, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, convened for its annual meeting and announced new guidelines for treating gender dysphoric kids, including guidelines about surgery for minors under eighteen. Though the conventional wisdom has long been that actual surgery pe...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 19 min
If you are terrorized by your Fitbit, guilt tripped by half the items in your refrigerator, or broke from trying every new juice cleanse that comes along, this week’s guest, Rina Raphael, will make you feel better. Her new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the Promise of Self-Care, examines the roots and ramifications of America’s latest health craze; extreme health. Rina is perhaps not your typical Unspeakale guest. She’s not full of “dangerous” ideas or “unspeakable" opinions...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 14 min
ChayaLeah and Yael are both Jewish, but in very different ways. ChayaLeah has lived her whole life in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California. Yael is a secular Israeli now living in New York City. In 2020, the two became friends when they met online and began having conversations about Judaism — many of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about orthodox Jews that she would have been afraid or embarrassed to ask someone else. The discussions were so interesting that t...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 37 min
Louise Perry is just thirty-years-old, but she’s written a book that’s poised to take the wind out of more than half a century of feminist activism. The Case Against The Sexual Revolution: A New Guide To Sex in the 21st Century is a manifesto of sorts. But it’s also a carefully researched, deeply considered interrogation into whether the sexual liberation movement was really as good for women as is commonly assumed. In this conversation, Louise explains why she thinks the feminist movement’s dis...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 36 min
If you’re a fan of The Unspeakable, you’re almost certainly a fan of Jon Ronson. When it comes to the subject of ruinous humiliation via mobs (online or otherwise) Jon’s 2015 bestselling book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is both a field guide and a sacred text. His 2017 podcast The Butterfly Effect, looked at the downstream effects of the pornogrpahy industry. It also circled around a theme that arises frequently in his work; the way a single moment or seemingly random choice by just one perso...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 31 min
Almost two years ago, author William Deresiewicz visited The Unspeakable to talk about his book The Death Of The Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech . It was an insightful and moving conversation about the near-impossibility of surviving as a working artist in a “creator economy." Many listeners wrote to Meghan to express their gratitude as well as their sorrow over the hard truths Bill laid out. Now Bill is back to talk about his new book, a co...
Aug 29, 2022•1 hr 16 min
This week on the podcast, author and podcaster Sarah Hepola is back! On her last visit to The Unspeakable, back in March, Sarah and Meghan talked about Sarah's bombshell Atlantic Magazine article, The Things I’m Afraid To Write. But they got a little sidetracked by some other subjects, including the barely-known details of the Stanford swimmer rape case, which Sarah has researched in depth. In this conversation, which was recorded exactly a week after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Sarah talks ...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 37 min
This week’s episode is the second of a two part series about guns in America, a conversation between two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who’s a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In 2018 they were part of Guns: An American Conversation, a collaboration between TIME Magazine and a consortium of local medi...
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 2 min
This week’s episode is the first of a two part series about guns in America. It’s a conversation between Meghan and two people with very different feelings about the issue. Melanie Jeffcoat is an actor, filmmaker and gun control activist who lives in Alabama. Jon Godfrey is a retired law enforcement officer who’s a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and lives in upstate New York. In this part of this conversation, Jon and Melanie talk about how their backgrounds shaped their feelings about...
Jun 27, 2022•59 min
Known by his nom de guerre “The Greatest American Living Writer,” Neal Pollack has published eleven books, including a rock history satire, several crime thrillers (including two yoga-themed crime thrillers), and memoirs on subjects ranging from fatherhood to yoga to marijuana addiction. His latest book is Edge of Safety , a satirical dystopian novel set at some indeterminate point in the future. In this world, the obedient citizens of Canada live in an almost perpetual state of high COVID alert...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Stephanie Lepp is an artist, a film and video producer and Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, where she leads the production of the podcast Your Undivided Attention. Her latest independent project is Deep Reckonings, a series of “deep fake” videos that depict prominent figures making public statements that have been reimagined as empathetic and morally courageous. In this conversation, Stephanie talks about the origins and goals of Deep Reckoning as well as a variety of conc...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Sarah Haider is an activist and a writer who became a noted figure in the new atheist movement around 2013, when she co-founded the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America. That is a nonprofit that promotes secular values, advocates for acceptance of religious dissent and works to combat discrimination faced by people who leave Islam in the U.S. and Canada. Her work there led to her trenches of the new free speech and free-think movements and she now writes on Substack, covering issues around...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min
If you’re familiar with the so-called “heterodox” space, this week’s guest on The Unspeakable scarcely needs an introduction. In 2018, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, along with author and first amendment advocate Gregg Lukianoff, published The Coddling of The American Mind: How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure . The book was central to a burgeoning public conversation that asked why young people, especially students on college campuses, were so unwil...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Amy Bloom is the author of ten books, mostly works of fiction, and her short story collections have been finalists for The National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book, In Love , is a memoir about her husband Brian’s diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s in his mid-sixties and Brian's decision to end his life on his own terms. This required traveling to Zurich, Switzerland, where an organization called Dignitas facilitates what they call “accompanied suicide." A...
May 22, 2022•57 min
This week, comedian Jamie Kilstein returns to The Unspeakable for a wide-ranging, profanity-laced conversation about creativity, cancellation, relationships, sex, dating, breakups and numerous other subjects. Last fall, Jamie and Meghan talked about their respective podcasting woes and surviving in the new creative economy, which poses extra challenges for Jamie, since he was the target of a cancellation mob several years ago. This time, they get more personal. In addition to discussing Jamie’s ...
May 16, 2022•1 hr 48 min
Last week, a draft of a Supreme Court opinion indicating that the court was poised to overturn the landmark abortion decision Roe V. Wade was leaked to the press. Supporters of abortion rights—and, technically speaking, that means the majority of Americans—were stunned and deeply dismayed by the news, with social media users predicting the coming of a Handmaids’s Tale-style dystopia and and oped pieces decrying red state legislators as misogynist bigots. In the hopes of having a sober-minded con...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 2 min
If your doomscrolling over the past few years has led you to any of the so-called “dissident doctors” who are calling for more clarity and less catastrophizing when it comes public messaging around COVID, you might be familiar with Dr. Lucy McBride. When the pandemic lockdowns began, Dr. McBride, a practicing internist in Washington, D.C., began sending her patients email blasts explaining what was known (and unknown) about the virus and what they could (and couldn’t) do to try to stay safe. Tho...
May 02, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Jennifer Sey spent more than twenty years at Levis Strauss and Company, rising through the ranks to Chief Marketing Office and then Global Brand President. In 2020, she was in line to become CEO of the company when the Covid pandemic hit and she found herself working from home with four kids out out school. Soon, she became frustrated by school closures and puzzled about lockdown polices for kids in general. And she started speaking up about it. This did not sit well Levis and Jennifer was event...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Last week, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for over 41 billion dollars. This came on the heels of his purchase last month of nearly ten percent of the company. This activity has invited speculation that the platform might shift away from what some users see as infamous censoriousness and into more free speech direction. That’s why Meghan invited Meghan Murphy onto the podcast. In 2018, Murphy, an independent journalist and blogger, was permanently banned from Twitter for, as she sees it, a few ...
Apr 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min
