The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

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.

Aaron Kimberly is a mental health clinician with longtime experience providing care to transgender and gender questioning patients. He is also a trans man who made his transition fifteen years ago. In recent years, he has been speaking out against what has become the prevailing wisdom and standard protocol in transgender medicine: that people identifying as transgender, even adolescents and sometimes children, effectively “know who they are” and have a right to begin hormone therapy without comprehensive psychological assessment. Known as the affirmative care model, this approach has been promoted by activists and largely embraced by the medical establishment and the mainstream media. In many cases, the alliance with that approach comes from a fear of being labeled transphobic or of “gatekeeping.” But as listeners of The Unspeakable know, the issue is far more layered and complex than the many people in general public—and even many well-meaning health care providers—realize. On the heels of a January 13, 2022 New York Times story, which for the first time gave credence to the idea that the affirmative care model might not be the best approach for young people (and which featured two time Unspeakable guest Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper), Meghan returns to the topic to speak with Aaron about what’s gone awry in gender medicine and why so few people have been willing to talk about it. Guest Bio: Aaron Kimberly is (by his own terms) a transsexual man, born female with a rare ovotesticular intersex condition. He’s worked as a mental health clinician since 2008 in hospital and community settings. In 2021 he founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance to educate about different types of gender dysphoria from an evidence base, without the lens of political ideology. He is also co-host of the Transparency podcast.

Chris Kavanagh is cognitive anthropologist and one-half of the team behind Decoding The Gurus, a podcast that bills itself as “an anthropologist and a psychologist listening to the greatest minds the world has to offer and trying their best to understand what they’re talking about.” By “greatest minds” Chris and his co-host, the Australian psychologist Matthew Browne, are talking mainly about aspiring or established public intellectuals who’ve gained large followings on YouTube, often for questioning mainstream media narratives and challenging liberal pieties. (Listeners of The Unspeakable are no doubt familiar with at least some of these figures, a few of whom have appeared on the show.) They’ve also done deep dives into figures like Joe Rogan, Russel Brand, Brené Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow. Chris and Matt are sympathetic to some of what these folks have to say, but skeptical of the overall phenomenon of intellectuals as internet influencers and they spend a lot of time laughing at the self-seriousness of their subjects. That said, anyone they discuss has a standing offer to come on show and defend themselves. In this conversation, Chris and Meghan talk about why these figures can be at once fascinating and maddening, what happened when YouTuber Chris Williamson joined the show to defend himself, and why Chris, who’s originally from Northern Ireland and currently lives in Japan, thinks Americans are especially receptive to guru logic.   Guest Bio: Chris Kavanagh is a Specially appointed Associate Professor at the College of Contemporary Psychology and a Researcher at the Center for Studies of Social Cohesion at Oxford University. His research interests include East Asian religions, ritual behavior, and the bonding effects of shared dysphoria. Currently he is based in Japan.   The episode of The Unspeakable is sponsored by Better Help online therapy. Visit Betterhelp.com/Unspeakable for a special offer.

Journalist Michael Wolff is best known for his juicy and deeply reported dispatches from various corridors of power. His many books include the 2008 Rupert Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns The News, and the 2018 sensation Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, which was easily the most talked about political book of the Trump era. His two other books about the Trump years are Siege: Trump Under Fire and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency. Michael's most recent book, Too Famous: The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious, collects selected works of biographical journalism over the last two decades, including lengthy treatises on Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner. The word perhaps most often associated with Michael is “access.” He has a way of achieving astonishingly close constant with sources who seem willing to carry on as if he’s not there at all, knowing full well he’s writing everything down. This has made him famous in his own right, and prone to his own controversies. But Meghan invited him onto the podcast mostly to talk about writing itself: the craft of it, the business of it, the psychological toll it can take on author and subject alike. They cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including how Michael’s first big break came from a tip form his mother, how his second published piece was for Ms. Magazine, and why he thinks “controversy" isn’t so controversial anymore. They also get into one of Meghan’s (irrationally?) favorite subjects, the improbable lionization of Ronan Farrow, which Michael covers in Too Famous but that no magazine would give him an assignment to write about.     Guest Bio: Michael Wolff is the author of ten books including, most recently, Too Famous, a collection of essays, and three best-selling books about the Trump presidency. Over the past twenty years he has been a regular columnist for New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQ, The Guardian, and The Hollywood Reporter. He has won numerous awards in the U.S. and U.K., including two National Magazine Awards. He lives in New York City and has five children. 

In a solo episode to wrap up the season, Meghan reflects on how the The Unspeakable Podcast is doing since launching fifteen months ago and how she’s feeling about the venture overall. With radical honesty and perhaps a touch of self-sabotage, she lays out the download numbers and explains why they’re as indicative of a failed show as a successful one. She lists the things she’s done to try to earn money from the podcast and ruminates on what changes she might make to increase her numbers — and why she’s not making them. With stunning bravery, Meghan confesses to struggling with professional envy toward other podcasters, so much so that her phone sometimes feels like a hot stove when their episodes drop. Finally, after much soul searching, she realizes that The Unspeakable Podcast isn’t fueled by the culture wars as much as guided by the spirit of the book after which it was named. (Warning: this episode contain a SHOCKING REVEAL about Roxane Gay.)

Writer Stephen Elliott was once a bonafide member of the independent literary scene. In 2009 he founded the literary site The Rumpus, which helped launch the careers of writers like Roxane Gay and Cheryl Strayed. His eight books include the memoir The Adderall Diaries and the novel Happy Baby, which draws from his experiences in the child welfare system as a teenager and his subsequent involvement in the BDSM community. Both of those books were adapted into films, one of which he directed. He also wrote and directed the film “After Cherry” and made a web series. In 2017, Stephen was among more than 70 men whose names appeared on the so-called “Shitty Media Men List," an anonymously sourced Google document that accused the men of various levels of sexual misconduct. Stephen was among those accused of rape. He eventually decided to sue the list’s creator because, he says, he was in the “unique position of knowing not only that I didn't rape anyone, but that there was no one out in the world who believed I had raped them.” In this conversation, Stephen explained what he means by that and what he hopes to accomplish with the lawsuit. But the interview is not really about the lawsuit or the list. It’s about Meghan’s favorite subject, the mid-career pivot, and how Stephen put his life back together after being about as cancelled as it’s possible to be. They talked about how Stephen managed to become a real estate investor with very little startup money and about his “Self Help” newsletter, which he’s dubbed “financial advice for poets.” Stephen shared his belief that literary writers are especially likely to participate in social media mobs and also offered his biggest piece of advice for anyone: buy a house. This interview was originally recorded on video for the podcast’s Unspeakeasy video series. A partial version can be seen on the Unspeakable YouTube channel. The full version is available to Patreon supporters of the podcast at Patrreon.com/theunspeakable. Guest Bio: Stephen Elliott is the author of The Adderall Diaries and the novel Happy Baby, which draws from his experiences in the child welfare system as a teenager and his subsequent involvement in the BDSM community. Both of those books were adapted into films, one of which he directed. He also wrote and directed the film “After Cherry” and made a web series.