The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Leigh Stein first came on the show in the summer of 2020 to talk about her novel, Self-Care, which spoofs corporate feminism and the cult of the girl boss. Now she’s back to share her observations about the publishing industry and what she’s learned as a book coach, independent editor and consultant for other writers. She thinks that authors (and aspiring authors) need to be realistic about building social media platforms and crafting a personal brand. She also has a pet theory that MFA writing programs are tantamount to multi-level marketing schemes in that they don’t prepare students to actually publish books as much as teach them to teach writing to yet more writing students. In 2016 Leigh cofounded the feminist literary nonprofit Out of the Binders and organized BinderCon, a conference that brought in more than 2,000 attendees. She wrote about that experience in an article out this week in LitHub and spoke with Meghan about how she went broke while leading an organization designed to empower writers. Meghan also shared her own thoughts about the changing literary landscape and why she’s not as excited about publishing her work as she used to be. A video version of this conversion is up on the podcast’s YouTube Channel, The Unspeakable channel. Guest Bio: Leigh Stein is a writer interested in what the internet is doing to our identities, relationships, and politics. She is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care (Penguin, 2020) and the poetry collection What to Miss When (Soft Skull Press, 2021). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Allure, ELLE, and The Cut.

Regular listeners of this podcast are no strangers to the subject of political bias in the news media - especially the left wing, elite-driven bias that’s in heavy rotation in the opinion and culture sections of big news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR. But as much as we talk about the social movements driving this trend, we think less often about the practical reasons and bottom line root causes. That’s exactly Batya Ungar-Sargon explores in her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In this conversation, Batya explains how journalism underwent a “status revolution,” with the job of reporter going from an almost blue collar profession to something on a par (at least socially) with lawyers and bankers. She also explains how the digital era forced a reframing of the business model of media organizations. The bills were no longer paid by advertisers but by subscribers who demanded fealty to their political values. Batya, who was formerly the opinion editor of The Forward and currently deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, considers herself not just on the left, but something of a socialist. As such, she worries that the much of the social justice posturing that dominates mainstream discourse today is distracting from the real emergency of economic inequality. Guest Bio: Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

This week Meghan welcomes comedian Jamie Kilstein. This is the audio version of a video interview they recorded for The Unspeakeasy, the new video feature of the podcast available to Patreon supporters. Meghan decided to make the conversation available as a regular podcast because in addition to talking about comedy and what Jamie’s been up to recently, they got pretty deep into some topics that are near and dear to the show, including Meghan’s signature issue, “nuance.” They ask whether trying to uphold nuance in the face of relentless group signaling and rage bait is a lost cause, not to mention a career killer. Jamie, who considers himself among the “canceled," talks about how that came to pass and about the ideological whiplash that ensued. They open the conversation by talking about how they manage professional stress: Jamie by contemplating trading in his car and Meghan by purchasing domain names for projects she’ll probably never start let alone finish. Guest Bio: Jamie Kilstein hosts the podcasts Rear Naked Radio and A Fuckup's Guide To The Universe. He has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and Late Night With Conan O’Brien.

This week Meghan welcomes guests Larry Clarke and Fielding Edlow. They are actors/writers/producers and also the married couple behind the YouTube series Bitter Homes and Gardens, a comedy, doled in out short episodes, about a married couple named . . Larry and Fielding. This edition of The Unspeakable is a bit of an experiment in that it’s the audio version of a conversation recorded for The Unspeakeasy, the video series that lives on the podcast’s new YouTube channel. Even though Larry and Fielding have solid industry careers going decades, they are emblematic of the way working actors have had to shift gears to accommodate a new creative economy, all the while remaining in nonstop hustle mode. In this conversation, they talk about their show, their marriage, their health insurance struggles, and the tension between loving their work and being frustrated with the turn their industry has taken. They also reveal that Larry and Meghan were roommates in New York City back in the 1990s. Moreover, the other roommate was a struggling actor and comedian named Stephanie Courtney who is now (wait for it . . . ) Flo from Progressive. They talk about Stephanie’s guest appearances on Bitter Homes and Gardens and reminisce about the old days when Larry and Stephanie worked as cater waiters and Meghan slept in the dining room of the grimy New York apartment that’s now a co-op they could never afford. Guest Bios: Fielding Edlow is a writer/comedian/actress who is the creator and star of Bitter Homes and Gardens with her real life husband Larry Clarke. Her debut special “Can’t Say Slut” is now streaming on Amazon Prime and she voiced the character “Roxie” on the Netflix series Bojack Horseman. Larry Clarke has been a steadily working character actor for the last thirty years. He has frequently collaborated with Steven Soderbergh and most recently played Meryl Streep’s lawyer in The Laundromat. He’s currently shooting a recurring on the new Starz series HEELS and also played a “Fusco brother” in the latest Twin Peaks.

Lara Bazelon has a decades-long career as a public defender. She worked as a trial attorney in the office of the public defender in Los Angeles for many years and is currently a law professor at the University of San Francisco, where she directs programs focusing on juvenile criminal justice and racial justice. But she’s also a journalist and novelist. This year she published A Good Mother, a legal thriller about a tireless public defender who cuts short her maternity leave to return to work to defend a client. That client, a 19-year-old mother with a baby roughly the same age, has been accused of killing her husband. For all the novel’s twists and turns, the real tension is in the subtext, which wrestles with questions like why motherhood can feel exponentially more demanding than fatherhood, whether being a “good mother” is compatible with extreme professional ambition and, most unsettling of all, what makes a “bad mother.” Lara spoke with Meghan about how these questions have embedded themselves in her own career and why romantic notions of perfect motherhood can actually hurt families.They also talked about a complicated defense case she worked on with her sister, the journalist Emily Bazelon, Lara’s controversial work defending men accused of sexual assault on college campuses, and their shared feelings about idealized depictions of the work-life balance of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Guest Bio: Lara Bazelon is professor of law and the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She has taught law at Loyola Law School, where she directed the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. She was a trial attorney in the federal Public Defender’s office in Los Angeles for seven years and has published journalism in Slate, Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book, Ambitious Like A Mother, will be published in April of 2022.

In 2015, journalist Carla Power published If The Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and Journey Into the Heart of the Quran, which chronicled her friendship with a madrasa­-trained sheikh who lead her through a deep reading of the Koran. That book was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In her new book, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism, Carla confronts some of the questions she hadn’t engaged with in the last book, namely what draws ordinary Muslims into violent extremist groups like Isis and Al Qaeda and how reliable are the roads back? Through dozens of interviews with ex-jihadis, their family members, and those who seek to rehabilitate them, Carla connects the dots of a constellation of reasons and motivations to join extremist groups. The patterns that emerge are both surprising (in one case an entire extended family was lured by the promise of a better life in the Islamic State) and all too familiar (social media plays a role, no surprise). Carla, an American who spent much of her youth in the middle east, spoke with Meghan about what her reporting taught her about human loneliness, cultural isolation, and youthful impressionability. Moreover, she explained how what’s commonly referred to as the “Islamic world” is in fact many worlds, each with its own characteristics and complications. Guest Bio: Carla Power is a journalist and the author of both Home, Land, Security and If The Oceans Were Ink, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was raised in St. Louis, with years in Iran, India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Italy. She began her career as a writer and foreign correspondent at Newsweek, and subsequently contributed essays and reportage to a wide range of publications, including Time, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Guardian. She lives with her family in East Sussex, England.

Part three of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In the third and final part of the podcast’s weeklong “Gender Nuance” series, Meghan talks with journalist Lisa Selin Davis about the cultural and political forces that have factored into the current gender movement and why the media has failed to cover the whole story. The author of a book about the evolution of gender stereotypes and herself the mother of a gender nonconforming child, Lisa explains how the movement was galvanized by shifts in journalistic norms during the Trump administration and how institutions like schools, the nonprofit sector and the medical establishment got caught up in a worldview and treatment protocol that’s backed up by very little reliable data. She traces some of the history of gender nonconformity and explains what the concept of a “third gender” means in indigenous, nonwestern populations in places like India and Samoa. Mostly, Lisa talks about what she’s learned as a journalist covering gender issues in recent years and why it’s so difficult to publish anything that deviates from the accepted narrative. Ultimately, she says, we have to accept that talking honestly about the subject entails dealing with "a giant mess” and that “we have to get comfortable with the fact that are some things we simply can’t know.” Guest Bio: Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History of Girls Who Dare to Be Different, and the forthcoming Housewife: Exploding the Myths of Motherhood, Women’s Work and the Modern Family. She has written articles, essays and op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and many other outlets, and has published two novels, Belly and Lost Stars. She writes a regular Substack newsletter about gender issues called Broadview.

Part two of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In part two of this week’s three-part “Gender Nuance” series, Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper returns to answer questions from “Jolene and Marie,” two pseudonymous moms of gender-dysphoric kids who were originally interviewed on The Unspeakable last July. Dr. Edwards-Leeper, who talked alone with Meghan in part one of this series, speaks about what is involved in a comprehensive assessment of a young person seeking medicalized treatment for gender dysphoria, how such dysphoria can exist independently of being transgender, and how and why an ideological rift has emerged within her field and, in her view, shut down crucial and lifesaving dialogue within the medical establishment. She also explains how the cohort of patients who are over eighteen but younger than mid-twenties can be especially vulnerable to the inadequacies of a system that often does not coordinate psychological care with medical intervention. Guest Bio: Dr. Edwards-Leeper is an Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Hillsboro, Oregon. She also works with clients through her private practice in Beaverton, Oregon. Dr. Edwards-Leeper was a member of the American Psychological Association Task Force that developed practice guidelines for working with transgender individuals. She is currently the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and is involved in the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) 8 revision. She is an ally to the LGBTQ community and is considered an international expert in this field.

Part one of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 Clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper has worked with transgender and gender questioning youth since 2007 and has helped facilitate many successful medical transitions in young people. She has also, in the last year or so, begun to publicly voice concerns that some clinicians in her field have adopted a philosophy that overlooks, even eschews, the importance of proper patient assessment. In this conversation, the first of a three-part series this week, Dr. Leeper talks with Meghan about the concept of “gender affirming care” and how lack of access to specialized care can lead young patients to providers who follow protocols for adult patients, which may or may not be appropriate. She describes how she works with her own patients and talks about why something as fundamental as proper assessment has become so controversial in her field. Guest Bio: Dr. Edwards-Leeper is an Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Hillsboro, Oregon. She also works with clients through her private practice in Beaverton, Oregon. Dr. Edwards-Leeper was a member of the American Psychological Association Task Force that developed practice guidelines for working with transgender individuals. She is currently the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and is involved in the WPATH Standards of Care (SOC) 8 revision. She is an ally to the LGBTQ community and is considered an international expert in this field.

Meghan’s guests this week are father and daughter Dr. Drew Pinsky and Paulina Pinsky, who are coauthors of the new book, It Doesn’t Have To Be Awkward: Dealing With Relationships, Consent and Other Hard-To-Talk-About Stuff. In the book, they address issues around relationships, boundaries and sexual consent and seek to bridge the generation gap between baby boomers like Drew and millennials like Paulina 28. (Gen-Xers are once again excused from the table.) In this interview, Drew and Paulina talk about why this particular generation gap seems more pronounced than previous ones, especially with regard to young people wanting to leave the nest. They also talk about how the oft-cited concept of “boundaries” is much broader and more complex than we often assume, which Paulina learned when she started college and compulsively introduced herself to everyone she met. (Meghan did this, too, and was affectionately deemed by one friend “a conversational slut” —a totally okay thing to say back then!) As a longtime devotee of Loveline, the no-holds-barred syndicated radio call-in program that Drew co-hosted with Adam Carolla for three decades, Meghan is especially keen to parse generational differences as they apply to cultural sensitivities and comic sensibilities. As such, they revisit a classic Loveline clip from long ago featuring David Alan Grier riffing off the names of birth control pills as hypothetical names for his children. Paulina, who writes comedy herself, explains what she thinks of that bit while Drew talks about how much he misses those days. Guest Bios: Dr. Drew Pinsky is a practicing internist and addiction medicine specialist, a New York Times bestselling author and prolific television, radio and podcasting host. In addition to his thirty-plus years hosting the iconic radio show Loveline, he has hosted numerous award-winning television shows including Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew on VH1 and DrDrew on HLN. His digital platforms include The Dr. Drew Podcast, the Adam and Dr. Drew Show, and Dr. Drew After Dark, and his two streaming shows, #AskDrDrew and Dose of Dr. Drew. Paulina Pinsky teaches comedy writing to high schoolers at Columbia University and writes about female sexuality and feminism. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.