The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

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 elections, Maud talks about her political journey from a typical New York progressive to someone whose centrist views are often deemed transgressive by her liberal neighbors. She recounts how she was fired from the Legal Aid Society for pointing out what she saw as the inherent racism of DEI trainings in the workplace and explains why she won’t shut up about gender politics, regardless of how impolitic that is. Most of all, she responds to the results of the midterms and talks about what she foresees for the Democratic Party. Will she stay or will she go independent? And how much difference does it make anyway?   Guest Bio: Maud Maron is a New York City based attorney and parents’ rights activist. Maud began her career as a criminal defense attorney at the Legal Aid Society where she worked as a staff attorney in Manhattan and the Bronx. She is the co-founder of PLACE NYC, a parent-lead, pro-merit organization dedicated to improving NYC’s public schools. She is a founding member of the Board of Advisors of FAIR and a frequent contributor to many national periodicals including Newsweek, NYPost, NYDaily News and Common Sense.

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 position or opinion may actually be a sign of underlying doubt. Unsurprisingly, this  kind of unconscious cognitive dissonance may in fact have a lot to do with our current troubles as a society when it comes to public discourse. In this conversation, Ilana talks with Meghan about how the word “truth” can often throw people off course and explains how she works with her students to challenge their assumptions and biases. In the second part of the interview, Ilana walks Meghan through a couple of positions about which Meghan feels “certain.” In so doing, she floats a potentially mind-blowing concept: if you replace feeling “certain” with feeling “confident,” your entire worldview can shift in a more productive direction. And you might even be better able to change the minds of others.    Guest Bio: Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Faculty Director of The Mill Institute at UATX. In May of 2022 she published her seminal essay, The Certainty Trap, in Tablet. She is also the co-author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, the creator of the Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes video series and the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting.

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 civility and mutual respect. In this conversation, the three talk about how they manage this feat, why they hold the political views that they do, and how they stay friends despite strong disagreements. Jamie also shares the secret of becoming an “instant New York Times bestseller.” (Hint: it’s easier than you think.) In    Guest Bios: Mike Pesca is the host of the podcast the Gist, the longest running daily news podcast. He is a former sports reporter and producer for NPR, and previously worked for Slate. He is author of the book “Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History”. Virginia Heffernan is a columnist for Wired and is an experienced host of such podcasts as Trumpcast and This Is Critical. Jamie Kirchick is the New York Times bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and a columnist for Tablet Magazine.

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 that progress and looks at how structural changes in society have benefitted women while leaving many men without coherent roles or purpose. In this interview, Richard talks about why he thinks boys should start school a year later than girls, why screens and video games aren’t the boogymen we might think they are, and how the role of “provider” has shifted from men to women, especially in the lower and working classes. He and Meghan discuss why it’s so hard to talk about these issues without being written off as an anti-feminist or men’s rights activist, what Richard has learned from raising three boys himself, and whether Gen-Xers actually grew up in a kind of sexual revolution sweet spot; post equal rights but pre-dating apps and hookup culture.    Guest Bio:  Richard Reeves is the author of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters and What To Do About It. He is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where his research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and family change. A contributor to The Atlantic, National Affairs, Democracy Journal, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, he is also the author of John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It.

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, Michael talks with Meghan about a range of subjects, including what makes certain conspiracy theories take hold, what "cognitive dissonance" really means, why even military pilots can’t be trusted when it come to UFO sightings, and how he went from being a born again Christian to a committed atheist. They also discuss the state of the heterodox movement and ask whether tribalism can be solved with a tribe.   Guest Bio:    Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American and he now writes a weekly Substack column. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain.

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 dismay over seemingly nonsensical school closures led her to become outspoken about the growing hysteria around Covid illness and transmission, particularly as it pertained to children. In this conversation, she explains what was and wasn’t known about things like masking, vaccines, and transmission at various points during the pandemic. She talks about what the pandemic revealed about people’s chronic anxiety, why masking children makes no sense at this point, and how best protect vulnerable populations. Finally, Leslie explains why she told Meghan not to get the second booster shot, even though Meghan got Covid anyway. (Spoiler: that’s the exactly the reason.)   Paying subscribers to The Unspeakable’s Substack page have access to about thirty minutes of bonus content related to a completely different matter — the myths and unnecessary stigmas around fertility treatment. Visit meghandaum.substack.com and join now to hear it.    Guest Bio: Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and professor at the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health. She has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans, including rabies, brucellosis, tuberculosis, hendra virus and others, for many years. She teaches courses on global health, writing, and other topics and has published more than thirty op-eds on Covid policy during the past two years, particularly around children and school closures.

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 performed on minors was rare (admittedly, Meghan parroted this line) it’s looking increasingly like such surgery is a lot more common than previously thought. In this conversation, Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who's been writing about the complexities of the new gender wars since 2018, talks with Meghan about the chain of misinformation that results when pediatricians and other clinicians rely on advice from professional medical organizations that have been captured by ideology. He explains what we know about the numbers of kids being medically treated for gender dysphoria and how much data even exists about longterm outcomes. Colin describes—sometimes in graphic detail—what goes into surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and why their high rate of complication seems to be ignored by the medical establishment and the media. He also explains what “intersex” actually means (spoiler: there are not as many intersex people as there are natural redheads) and how the entire concept has been distorted and misused when talking about sex and gender identity.      Guest bio: Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and Founding Editor of Reality’s Last Stand a publication and newsletter exploring the biology and sex and gender ideology. He is a contributing editor for Quillette and an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM).   He received his PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Colin has published articles in major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Quillette, ad The Times, and has been a guest on many popular podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience.

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. But she had the courage to look not only at the wellness industry but also the validity of now-sacred concepts like self-care and clean eating. Surprise, surprise; many hypocrisies and contradictions lurk within. Rina is a longtime journalist who’s covered the health and the fitness industries decades. In this conversation, she talks about how healthy living has become a lifestyle brand, explains what orthorexia means and reflects on her own obsessive patterns when it comes to diet and exercise. (Meghan, in turn, explains why when she eats a donut she always breaks off and discards one piece before finishing the rest.) Rina talks about the meaninglessness of the term “natural,” why women turn to self-care partly because they feel let down by the traditional health care system, and how thinking too much about being healthy can sometimes make you quite sick.   Rina Raphael is a journalist who specializes in health, wellness, tech, and women’s issues. She was a features contributor for Fast Company magazine and has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC News, and Medium’s Elemental, among other publications. Her wellness industry newsletter, Well To Do, covers trends and news and offers market analysis. Raphael has spoken on the wellness industry at national conferences such as the Global Wellness Summit and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Previously, she served as a senior producer and lifestyle editor at TODAY.com and NBCNews.com.

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 they began recording them and from there, the ASK A JEW podcast was born. In this conversation, ChayaLeah explains the meaning behind the various Jewish holidays this season, which Meghan mostly associates with parking rules suspensions in New York City. They also talk about the benefits and drawbacks of living in a religious community, marrying early (in an arranged marriage, no less) versus staying single for a long time, and how ChayaLeah will go about looking for wives for her sons. They also cover timelier subjects, including a recent New York Times article about the quality of eduction in yeshivas.    This episode offers juicy bonus content! Last time, the ladies compared notes about which famous terrorists and world dictators qualify as “hot" despite being horrible human beings. They reprise that discussion in the bonus content and also reflect on the death of Queen Elizabeth and the hotness of various royals. You can access this by becoming a paid subscriber to Meghan’s new Substack at https://meghandaum.substack.com.   Guest Bios: ChayaLeah Sufrin was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Long Beach, CA.  After attending university in New York, ChayaLeah moved back to Southern California and spent fifteen years teaching High school Jewish history and as the Education Director at Shul by the Shore. ChayaLeah served as the Senior Jewish Educator at Long Beach Hillel for three years and is now the Executive Director. ChayaLeah, together with her husband Boruch, has four  teenage sons. Yael Bar-tur is a crisis communications and social media consultant who previously served as the director of social media and digital strategy for the New York City Police Department where she developed and implemented the social media and digital communications strategy.

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 disregard for certain fundamental differences between men and women—not to mention its glossing over issues around motherhood— led to unintended consequences that few are willing to acknowledge.  She also talks about the effects of pornography, the brutal inequities of the dating economy, whether the tech economy has rendered physical strength less valuable in the workplace, and whether being a mother is fundamentally incompatible with being an individual.   Guest Bio: Louise Perry is a writer and activist based in London. This year she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.