The Unspeakable Podcast

This week, Meghan talks with Yael Bar-tur and ChayaLeah Sufrin, co-hosts of the podcast Ask A Jew. ChayaLeah was born and raised in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Southern California and remains happily part of that community today. Yael is a secular Israeli Jew now living in New York City. The two became friends through an online community and began a dialogue about  (among other things) Judaism, much of which consisted of Yael asking ChayaLeah questions about the Orthodox world that she would have been afraid or embarrassed to ask most people. The conversations were so interesting that they started recording them — and from there emerged Ask A Jew.    In this conversation, Yael, ChayaLeah and Meghan (who is not Jewish despite having been a guest on Ask a Jew) cover a range of topics; anti-semitism, arranged marriage, policing, what happened to Jon Stewart, why the heterodox space is so male dominated and why the superstar podcaster and journalist Bari Weiss (who’s not a man) is so polarizing as to make people deranged. They also talk about their recent lunch together at a Kosher restaurant in Los Angeles that was founded by Steven Spielberg’s late mother.        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.

Sarah Hepola has been publishing personal essays and articles for decades and is the author of the 2015 bestseller Blackout, a memoir about her years of heavy drinking that focusses on the phenomenon of blackout. As Sarah explains it, blackout is a state of impaired memory that is distinct from being passed out and is often overlooked in conversations about intoxication and sexual consent. Meghan invited Sarah onto the podcast initially not to talk about blackouts but about Sarah’s recent essay in The Atlantic "The Things I’m Afraid To Write About.”: It’s about censorship, specifically the kind we impose on ourselves in a culture where voicing controversial opinions can bring on devastating professional and personal consequences. This topic comes up a lot these days, but Sarah comes to it out of a particular interest: how confusion over the difference between being in a blackout and being unconscious has factored into several high profile sexual assault cases.   One case Sarah has looked into is that of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted in 2016 of sexual assault after he was discovered outside a fraternity house in an encounter with  woman who appeared to be unconscious. The story continues to elicit strong emotions in the public, but Sarah points out that the media narrative, which includes many vivid and troubling details, diverges significantly from the facts in court documents. Sarah’s mention of the Turner case in her Atlantic essay set off a firestorm of anger and invective, thereby illustrating exactly why she’d been so reluctant to speak her mind over the last several years. In this conversation, Sarah talks with Meghan about self-censorship and what’s happened in the media landscape to cause it. But they talk just as much about the Brock Turner case and how the media got so much of the story so wrong and never bothered to correct it. This may be the most “unspeakable” Unspeakable to date.   Bio: Sarah Hepola is the author of the bestselling memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, and the host/creator of America's Girls, a Texas Monthly podcast about the lost history and cultural impact of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. She is currently working on a memoir for The Dial Press/Random House about her ambivalent singlehood. She lives in Dallas.

This week, Meghan devotes another episode to the complexities and under-explored corners of the gender movement and talks with a young man going by the pseudonym “Austin.” A biological male who is now 23, Austin began identifying as a transgender woman as a young teenager and continued to do so well into college. After a series of psychological experiences slowly made him realize he was not transgender, Austin began to reverse course, stopping his cross sex hormone therapy and canceling an upcoming radical surgery. In this interview, Austin talks about the factors that contributed to his gender dysphoria, what it was like start (and stop) taking  hormones, and what happened when he confronted the therapists who had facilitated his transition. He also offers a counterpoint to the common narrative about trans identities in youth being prompted by social media and online influencers. On the contrary, Austin said he rarely used social media and that much of his identity was wrapped up in autogynephilia, a paraphilia wherein men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as women. Because the topic of autogynephilia has been deemed off-limits among many trans activists, it’s rarely discussed and poorly understood even among those familiar with the gender movement. Austin elaborates on this and other aspects of his gender identity path in a series of essays at https://detransqna.github.io.   Note:  This episode contains some graphic language about sexuality and might not be suitable for everyone.      Guest Bio: “Austin” is a pseudonym for a 23-year-old recent college graduate living in the United States.

This week’s guest on The Unspeakable is British journalist, broadcaster and filmmaker David Fuller. In 2018 David founded Rebel Wisdom, a multi-format media platform devoted to intellectually honest, self-scrutinizing conversations about complex topics. The platform is part ecosystem of though that has come to be called “sense making” and Rebel Wisdom offers everything from a YouTube channel to online courses in its aim to showcase a range of thinkers and foster connections between likeminded—or even not so likeminded—people all over the world. David’s very first Rebel Wisdom was an interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and in the years since he has become both immersed in the so-called IDW space and somewhat disenchanted with it. Meghan was a guest on Rebel Wisdom last December and spoke with David about the phenomenon of audience capture and what happens when honest brokering threatens your “brand.” She invited David on The Unspeakable to continue the conversation and compare notes on how they’re feeling about the heterodoxy these days. Is it failing in its initial mission to promote viewpoint diversity and becoming more like a “homodoxy?” Or is a new cohort of more nuanced, less didactic thinkers about to emerge onto the scene?      Guest Bio: David Fuller is the founder of Rebel Wisdom, a media project that attempts to make new paradigm thinking accessible and compelling to a new generation. He worked for the UK's top news program Channel 4 News for ten years as reporter, producer and director and was the first mainstream TV journalist to cover the renaissance of psychedelic science back in 2008. David began making documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 in 2011, primarily for the Emmy award-winning series ‘Unreported World’. His documentary ‘The Invisible People’, about the plight of disabled Syrian refugees in Lebanon was shortlisted for the "Royal Television Society awards in 2015.

Editor, journalist and podcaster Jonathan Kay is the author of several books, has worked as an editor and columnist at the Canadian newspaper The National Post and is currently the Canadian editor of Quillette, a digital publication founded in 2015 as a haven for what Jonathan has called “ideological refugees. In this interview, he talks with Meghan about a range of topics, including a question Meghan has been pondering a lot lately:  What is a conservative? Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from his work over the last several years, Jonathan has spent much of his life identifying as a conservative. (His mother, the columnist Barbara Kay, has been a high profile conservative figure in Canada for decades.) He talked about what terms like “conservative” and “liberal” even mean in the post-Trump era, why he thinks political correctness hurts people on the left far more on the right and why he’s losing interest in culture war topics and would rather focus on subjects like ancient history. Most of all, he talks about why it’s time for “heterodox” thinkers to stop obsessing about culture war issues and pursue other interests.      Guest Bio: Jonathan Kay is Canadian Editor of Quillette, a TedX speaker, an op-ed writer at National Post, and co-host of the Quillette podcast. His freelance work has appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Gotham, Canadian Jewish News, and other publications. Kay's books include Among The Truthers (2011), Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America (2016), Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life (2019), Panics and Persecutions (2020), and Magic In The Dark: One Family’s Century Of Adventures In The Movie Business (2022). Follow him on Twitter at @jonkay.

Journalist and author Jennifer Senior has been a columnist and book critic for The New York Times and is now a staff writer for The Atlantic, where a recent article, “It’s The Friends That Break Your Heart,” struck a particular chord with readers. It was about the complexities of friendship in adulthood and how things like professional envy and perceived slights over personal decisions can result in devastating impasses. Jennifer talked with Meghan about what inspired her to write the article, how the pandemic has affected friendships, how her own friendships have changed over the years, and how things like parenthood and big career changes can put a strain on friendships. The two also talked about the horror of knowing your friends are talking about you behind your back and reflected on the most profound gestures their friends have offered throughout their lives. Finally, Meghan asked about an article Jennifer published last September called “What Bobby McIlvaine Left behind,” which followed a family’s struggle to make sense of 9/11 after their son died at the towers that day.   Guest Bio:  Jennifer Senior is staff writer at The Atlantic and has been a daily book critic and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Before that, she spent eighteen years at New York Magazine, writing profiles and cover stories about politics, social science, and mental health. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthoodl and lives in New York with her husband and son.

For seven years Mike Pesca hosted the political commentary podcast The Gist under the aegis of the Slate Media Company. The show became the longest running daily podcast of all time, racking up somewhere around 1400 episodes and attracting an enormous audience that accounted for a significant portion of Slate’s revenue. Last February, Slate suspended The Gist following an office meltdown over a race-related—actually a race vocabulary-related— discussion on the company Slack channel. This led to a seven-month investigation that made Mike yet another high profile casualty of cancel culture. He’s anything but canceled though, which is proven by the return of The Gist, which he’s doing on his own steam. Mike spoke with Meghan about what went down with the old Gist (which he calls Season One, even though it lasted seven years) and what’s coming up for the podcast going forward. They also talked about what makes podcasts work, how much effort podcasts require and what it was like working at NPR back when, as it Mike put, workplaces of all kinds came with a certain esprit du corp — or jovial feeling of pride and unity in an organization. Somewhere along the way, Mike points out, esprit de corps was replaced with struggle sessions.   Guest Bio: Mike Pesca is the host and creator of The Gist, the longest running daily news podcast, and the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs In Sports History. In addition to guest-hosting NPR Programs All Things Considered and the news quiz Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, Mike’s work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. He has frequently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and The PBS Newshour, and written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Slate, and Baseball Prospectus.

Writer and editor Sari Botton has a long career in the publishing world — some would even call her a “legend.” Her essays have appeared in places like The New York Times and The Guardian. She was the longtime essays editor at the digital magazine Longreads, is now a contributing editor at Catapult and she edited two acclaimed anthologies, including Goodbye To All That: Loving and Leaving New York. Her latest venture is Oldster Magazine, and even though it’s about aging it’s not about being old. It’s about getting older and it features articles and observations from people at every stage of life. Sari is a bonafide Gen Xer and Meghan was curious not just about the process of creating Oldster but also  about the challenges of building something in the new creative economy after a long career in traditional media. They talk about what constitutes an “ideal” age, what it’s like to get older when you don’t “follow the script” of traditional family life, and why many aging people worry as much (if not more) about having enough money than about their health.  (Pro tip: Sari buys lottery tickets.)   Guest Bio: Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. She publishes Oldster Magazine, which explores what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She's a contributing editor at Catapult, the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and she edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY. Her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself... will be published by Heliotrope in Summer, 2022.

Cultural critic Laura Kipnis is revered, even beloved, for her bold, counterintuitive observations about aesthetics in art, sexual politics, moral ambiguity, and the complexities of human relationships. Her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic explored the hypocrisies and reductive logic behind the monogamy industrial complex. Her latest book, Love In The Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, is a follow up of sorts to Against Love. Born out of the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic and Laura's lockdown experience with her longtime boyfriend, the book examines how the cracks in interpersonal relationships can mirror the breakdown of political systems, economies, cultural life and public trust. In this conversation, Laura talks with Meghan about what she learned from interviewing dozens of people who were locked down with their romantic partners—or in some cases their soon to be ex-partners—during the first year of the pandemic. They also talk about the evolving  legacy of the #MeToo movement, the impact of online pornography, the role of alcohol in life and in love, and “BDE” or so-called Big Dick Energy. Laura also reflects on the aftermath of the events described in her previous book, Unwanted Advances, which chronicled a journey through the campus court system after students at her university filed Title Nine charges against her for publishing an article that they claimed created a “hostile environment.”   Guest Bio:   Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and the author of seven books, including Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; How to Become A Scandal; Against Love: A Polemic; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability; and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Her latest book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, is out February, 8 2022 from Pantheon.

Terms like neurodiversity and neuroatyptical are everywhere these days. And though they can refer to any everything from social functioning to learning differences, the terms are most often applied to people on the autism spectrum. Because of that—and because autism has historically been associated with boys and men—there hasn’t been a lot of thinking about neurodivergence in females. Jenara Nerenberg is trying to change that. Growing up in the 1990s, she was considered a “sensitive” child but was high functioning enough to thrive academically and eventually  establish a successful career in journalism, not least of all because of her ability to remain hyperfocused on tasks. But later, when the hyperfocus began to compromise her daily life, she looked deeper into her traits and learned that she was actually on the autism spectrum and struggled with ADHD. This led her down a research path that resulted in a book, Divergent Mind, which looks at how diagnoses like autism, high sensitive, sensory processing disorder, and synesthesia play out in women and why a combination of inadequate medical research and a tendency among women to mask their symptoms has led to rampant misdiagnosis and misunderstanding. Jenara talked with Meghan about what this new information has meant for her and, more importantly, why she thinks it’s crucial that neurodivergence be understood as something far being the scope of autism.       Guest Bio:   Jenara Nerenberg is a writer who began her career with Fast Company and CNN in Asia after graduating from the Harvard School of Public Health. When she returned to the U.S. she chronicled her journey through the field of “neurodiversity” in her book, Divergent Mind, and began covering science and psychology books for the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, prompting her to switch to the world of book publishing. She now hosts bestselling authors live in San Francisco and online, and is head of the agency Divergent Literary, in addition to running publicity for international publishers. She appears at public events and conferences with The Aspen Institute and Commonwealth Club, and continues to speak widely on the rhetoric of psychology and implications for society.    The episode of The Unspeakable is sponsored by Better Help online therapy. Visit Betterhelp.com/Unspeakable for a special offer.