Early access to August 30, 2021 episode 

Meghan met actor/author/comedian Chelsea Handler several years ago when they attempted to develop Meghan’s 2014 book, The Unspeakable (no direct connection to this podcast) into a television series. In fine Hollywood tradition, the project failed to launch, but the two remained friendly and Chelsea agreed to come on Meghan’s podcast to talk about her own podcast, Dear Chelsea, which offers advice to lovelorn or otherwise tormented or confused listeners. Chelsea talked about the advice she’s both given and received (and often ignored) over the years, her foray into psychotherapy, her interrogation of her own privilege, and the effect of Trumpism on her political consciousness and mental health. Along the way, she argued a bit with Meghan about progressive activism and challenged Meghan’s assertion that seeing everything through the lens of race is itself a form of racism. Chelsea also discussed her views on parthogenesis, a form of natural asexual reproduction that’s seen in certain reptiles and that might have surprising benefits in humans.

Guest Bio:

Chelsea Handler is a comedian, television host, and bestselling author.  For seven years, she was the host of E!’s top-rated late night show Chelsea Lately and the only female late night talk show host on the air. She then launched a documentary series, Chelsea Does, followed by her talk show Chelsea on Netflix in 2016. Five of her six bestselling books have reached number one on the New York Times Bestseller list, including 2019’s Life Will Be The Death of Me. Most recently, she released her first stand-up special in over six years, the critically acclaimed Chelsea Handler: Evolution on HBO Max, and launched her iHeart Radio advice-based podcast, Dear Chelsea. She is currently on tour with a new standup show, Vaccinated and Horny.

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Of course this one is long.  It's Sam Harris!

Sam Harris is a giant in the world of podcasting. His podcast, Making Sense, which began in 2013 under the name Waking Up, averages more than a million downloads per episode. He is also a philosopher and neuroscientist, a meditation expert, the author of several bestselling books, and a prominent voice in both the “new atheist movement” and in “heterodox” intellectual circles, which has led him to have public debates and disagreements with other high profile thinkers. Meghan and Sam cover lots of ground in this long conversation, including the perils of confusing messaging around vaccines, the cowardice of institutional leadership in the face of social media mobs, and why the debate format can be, as Sam puts it, “a commercial for the limitations of conversation.” Most of all, they talk about what Meghan calls the question of “how not to ruin the dinner party,” which can happen when people who think too much about all of this stuff (like they do) engage in intellectual nitpicking and ruin everyone’s fun.

Note: This is an ad-free version of the show, as always, though there is a short promo for Bridget Phetasy's podcast, Walk-Ins Welcome. This is part of the deal with Podcast One and I hope you can endure it. Bridget is a former guest on The Unspeakable and you should check out her podcast if you haven't already. 

Guest Bio

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers, include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast and is also the creator of the Waking Up app, which offers a modern, rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life. Sam has practiced meditation for over 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

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Frank Bruni spent more than 25 years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a columnist on the opinion page. In June, he left the column to become a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke University. Frank spoke with Meghan about the difficulties—maybe the impossibility— of writing a weekly opinion column while also maintaining  intellectual humility and engaging with your own uncertainty. The author of many books, including a book about higher education, Frank explained how “campus craziness” tropes have been distorted by the media even though students continue to disagree about free speech and administrators continue to pander to a small minority of loud extremists. He also talked about an ongoing medical issue that threatens his eyesight and about which he writes in a forthcoming book.

Guest Bio:

Frank Bruni was a New York Times opinion columnist from 2011 to 2021. He has also served as a White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic for the Times. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers and his newest book, The Beauty of Dusk, about affliction, aging and his brush with blindness, will be published early next year. He ended his op-ed column in June 2021 and moved from New York to North Carolina to become a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke University, but continues to write a popular weekly newsletter (www.nytimes.com/BruniLetter) for the Times.

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This week, Meghan talks with legendary sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage. Recounting thirty years of correspondence from people seeking advice, Dan reflects on how anxieties and concerns have changed over the decades. Whereas he once got mostly practical questions about sex, he now hears from people who describe a relationship dynamic and ask some version of “am I the asshole?” Dan also talks about how he’s become gentler over the years in doling out advice, the legacy of his famous “It Gets Better” campaign, and his discomfort with Meghan’s “favorite” issue, the surge in transgender identity declarations among young people. (That’s not really her favorite issue.)

Meghan also announced some new developments with the podcast, including the first ever Unspeakable Zoom hangout for listeners on August 19. To learn more and to register, click here.

Guest Bio:

Dan Savage is an author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column, and hosts the popular Savage Lovecast. He is the author of several books including The Kid, It Gets Better, The Commitment, Skipping Toward Gomorrah, American Savage, and Savage Love. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth.

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In this very special, guest-free episode of The Unspeakable Podcast, Meghan talks to her listeners about the now ubiquitous concept of the “mid-career pivot.” Drawing from her experience as a longtime freelance writer who has had to shift her entire work philosophy to accommodate a changing media landscape, Meghan shares several ideas and at least one pet theory. That theory  has to do with the ways that Generation X is in an especially precarious position when it comes to this pivot, mostly because they’re too young to retire but too old to be digital natives. She also talks about launching the podcast exactly a year ago, the challenges of promoting it, and the show’s recent move to the Podcast One network.

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Note: This episode contains brief music interstitials. The reason is that I am preparing to make the podcast available for advertisements and this requires "ad markers," which is what those interstitials represent. As a Patreon supporter you will continue to get ad-free editions no matter what.

Science writer Tom Chivers is the author of How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics In The News (And Knowing When to Trust Them) which he co-wrote with his cousin, the economist David Chivers. He came to Meghan’s attention recently because of an article he wrote for the British publication, UnHerd, where he serves as science editor. That article, entitled Twitter Trolls Mentally Ill?, was a response to a widely circulated statement by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who wrote about defamation she’d experienced from a former student and about how the language of empathy and self-care is now often repurposed as a cudgel. Tom's piece expanded on some of these ideas, suggesting that mental health struggles and personality disorders have become engines of social media and that the kind of behavior that’s rewarded on places like Twitter is sometimes the same behavior that’s associated with diagnoses like Borderline Personality Disorder. Tom spoke with Meghan about this article and about related ideas in his book, including the ways misperceptions of harm can turn people into catastrophists.

Relevant links:

Are Twitter Trolls Mentally Ill? by Tom Chivers

It Is Obscene by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Tom Chivers website

Guest Bio:

Tom Chivers is science editor at UnHerd and the co-author with David Chivers of How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics In The News (And Knowing When to Trust Them). He is a two Tim winner of the Royal Statistical Society’s “statistical excellence in journalism” award.

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As some of you noticed, there were a few technical glitches yesterday on the main feed, but I think they've been ironed out. I'll update you more as this rolls out. Thanks, as always, for your generous support as the show moves forward. 

Early access to July 19, 2021 edition 

Approximately 554,000 Americans experienced homelessness last year, and over half of were in California. In Los Angeles County alone, 66,000 people were unhoused in 2020, a 16 percent increase from the previous year. Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles who often speaks about policy issues and ideas for addressing the crisis. He was also homeless himself for ten years, living for most of that time in an encampment in Koreatown, where he and his longtime husband dealt with medical problems, addiction issues, street violence and tried several times to find jobs and housing. Shawn also happens to be a Yale graduate who once worked on Wall Street and later owned his own business. The stories of how he entered and finally escaped homelessness are remarkable. But even more remarkable is his perspective on the bigger crisis. Shawn spoke with Meghan about not just the day to day life of someone living on the street but also what city and state officials are getting wrong about when they talk about how to fix the problem.

Guest Bio:

Shawn Pleasants is an advocate for unhoused people in Los Angeles. A former banker and business owner, he lived on the street for ten years. He has been housed since late 2019.

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Early access to July 12, 2021 edition 

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is everywhere all of a sudden. Having made its way from elite academia to K-12 public education, it came to the attention of the Trump Administration last year and quickly became a bogeyman of the political right. From there, state legislatures began crafting bills that would ban the “divisive concepts” allegedly embedded in CRT-based curriculum. But the bills have only added to public confusion over what CRT really means and partisan media coverage has whipped up the whole debate into something resembling a moral panic.

Dr. Erec Smith is a professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania and has written extensively about race and its role in pedagogy and public debate. He talked with Meghan about the origins of CRT, when it can be useful, how it’s often misapplied and, above all, how most of what’s got people so upset these days has little to do with CRT in the first place.

Guest Bio:

Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and focuses primarily on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. He is a co-founder of Free Black Thought, a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia. His latest book is A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment.

Relevant links:

 Newsweek: Why I Still Talk To White People About Racism 

Quillette: Towards Practical Empowerment  

Areo: Virtue Racism 

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Relevant links:

Genspect: A voice for parents with gender questioning kids https://genspect.org

Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM)

One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria

Unspeakable Podcast interview with gender therapist Sasha Ayad, Aug 24, 2020 (highly recommended!) 

Guest Bios:

Jolene and Marie are pseudonyms for two moms of gender questioning kids. They live in the United States.

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Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick is one of the most celebrated humorists of his generation. From his 1993 breakout off-Broadway hit play, Jeffrey to Broadway hits like I Hate Hamlet and screenplays for films like In and Out, Addams Family Values and Sister Act, Paul is a master of not just the quippy one-liner but also deeply realized characters and relatable, if often absurd situations. He’s also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades and is the author of several books, mostly recently the novel Playing the Palace, which is about a gay relationship between a young New York party planner and an imagined version of the Prince of Wales. Paul spoke with Meghan about gay subject matter in his work over time, his fascination with the British royal family, his latest project for HBO and his feelings about the ever shifting battle lines of the new wars. They also talked about growing up in New Jersey, which is its own kind of culture war.

Guest Bio:

Paul Rudnick is a novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter. His Obie award winning plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and include I Hate Hamlet, Jeffery, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.  His screenplays include Addams Family Values, In and Out and Sister and his many book include Social Disease, I’ll Take It and, most recently, Playing the Palace.

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Novelist Lionel Shriver is known for placing social topics (sometimes radioactive ones) inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting akin to the Columbine massacre. Lionel's thirteen other novels take on such subjects as obesity, the US healthcare system, the national debt, global overpopulation, and homegrown terrorism. Her new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, is about suicide, specifically the pros and cons of ending your life on your own terms before nature—or modern medicine—prolongs it in ghastly fashion. Lionel spoke with Meghan about her new book and also her feelings about illness, medicine and her own death.  As an American who’s lived in the UK for several decades and still lives in New York part time, Lionel also offers her thoughts about single payer health care and what the venerated National Health Service does right as well as often gets wrong.

Guest Bio:

Lionel Shriver’s fiction includes The Mandibles, Property,  So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular  column for The Spectator in the UK.  She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.

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One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of convicted sex offenders. But The National Sex Offender Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it’s yet another blunt instrument of “tough on crime” 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to ruins lives than to protect kids. Emily spoke with Meghan about what led her to this work and why our assumptions about sexual predators are often wrong. She also  explained some of the reasons why sexual abuse against children, and sexual violence in general, has declined over the last 30 years—for reasons having nothing to do with the registry.

Relevant links:

New York Times: At 18, He Had Consensual Gay Sex. Montana Wants Him to Stay a Registered Sex Offender

New York Times: Did The Supreme Court Base a Ruling on a Myth?

The New Yorker: The List

Guest bio:

Emily Horowitz is a professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of a number of articles about the harms of sex offense registries, including the book Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. At St. Francis College she co-directs a program that helps those with criminal justice involvement earn college degrees and she is currently conducting research on the experiences of veterans with sex offense convictions.

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Libby Emmons now works mainly as a journalist, writing articles about ideological divides in culture and politics for places like Quilllette, The Federalist and The Spectator, and serving as editor of the conservative Canadian news magazine The Post Millennial. But before she entered the sphere of public debate about the news, Libby was in the theater world, specifically the radical feminist theater community. The author of a many award-winning dramatic works, including the play How To Sell Your Gang Rape Baby For Parts, Libby was a founder of the New York downtown theater company, Puss Collective. But when she published an article about transhumanism that made a conceptual comparison with transgenderism, she was exiled from the theater community and began to see culture and politics in a new way.

Libby talks with Meghan about how this evolution came about and what frustrates—and inspires—her most about the current political moment. She also explains what “transhumanism” is all about. (You sort of don’t want to know. But you also want to know!)

Guest Bio:

Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial and a senior contributor to The Federalist. She has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

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Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and a speaker and educator about transgender issues, particularly issues related to trans healthcare. Now in his late 50s, he transitioned from female to male in his late 20s and has more recently became a controversial figure in certain corners of the trans community. He talked with Meghan about why he’s so controversial, what it’s been like to spend decades on masculinizing hormone therapy, and why he’s worried about the number of clinicians now prescribing such therapies to young people after minimal psychological counseling.

For the record: at one point in the interview Buck mistakenly referred to the biotech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt as Martine Rathbaum. He also suggested that Rothblatt, who is the founder of the biotech company United Therapeutics, is among the billionaire class. As of March 2021, United Therapeutics was reportedly worth $7.1 billion. Rothblatt herself, according to Forbes, is worth $390 million.

Guest Bio:

Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and educator in the area of trans male healthcare and sexual wellness. He has also been a groundbreaking figure in the porn industry, which you can learn about on his website and also in a documentary about his life, Mr. Angel, which was released in 2013 and premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.

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Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of many novels, including You Should Have Known, which became the basis for last fall’s hit HBO limited series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Her brand new novel, The Plot, is a literary suspense thriller about a struggling writer who stumbles upon what by all accounts is the greatest story ever (or in this case never) told. The problem is, it belongs to someone else. In this conversation Jean talks with Meghan about what a “story” really is and why the boundaries of ownership can get so murky. She also discusses some of her other books, two of which, 2009’s Admission and 2017’s The Devil and Webster, were set on college campuses and delve into the lives of school administrators trying to negotiate a changing world. Jean has a lot to say about the state of higher education, the state of higher culture, and how reading—and writing—has been reshaped by the constraints of the pandemic.

Guest Bio:

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine books, most recently The Plot, just out from Macmillan’s Celadon Books. Yet another novel, The Latecomer, will be published in 2022. With her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, Jean adapted James Joyce’s The Dead as an immersive theatrical event that was performed at New York’s s American Irish Historical Society. She is also the founder of Book The Writer, a pop-up book club enterprise that brings authors and readers together for curated book discussion groups.

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You’ve probably noticed more buzz than usual lately about anti-racism training modules in schools and workplaces. Often referred to as DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion, this framework has turned into a big business, with concepts like “white fragility” and “black despair” sometimes weaponized in the name of fighting inequality. Amid the swirl of approaches (which are often indistinguishable from one another), a 27-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Chloé Valdary has developed an alternative model. Called The Theory of Enchantment, it model uses the arts and developmental psychology to help people of find a common humanity through a shared love of culture.

In this interview, Chloé talks with Meghan about how she came up with this idea, how her own unusual family background made her resistant to essentialist identity categories, and why she thinks the frequently invoked social justice refrain “it’s not my job to educate you” is so misguided.

Relevant links:

Black People Are Far More Powerful Than Critical Race Theory Teaches, by Chloe Valdary

I Refuse To Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated, by Grace Church School teacher Paul Rossi

What Is Systemic Racism? John McWhorter, Lara Bazelon, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and Kenny Xu weigh in.

Guest Bio:

Chloé Valdary is the creator of Theory of Enchantment, a framework for compassionate antiracism that she has introduced to workplaces around the world, including in South Africa, The Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. She has lectured at universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown and she has been a Bartley fellow at the Wall Street Journal and written for that publication as well as The New York Times and elsewhere.

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For most of her career, University of Sussex Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Stock was known primarily as a scholar on philosophical questions related to fiction and the concept of imagination. But in 2018, she began to speak and write about the issue of gender identity. Among her questions were why her philosophy colleagues were so reluctant to discuss something so seemingly ripe for the kind of inquiry philosophers live for. The backlash came swiftly but so did tacit messages of support and over time Kathleen has become a leading voice on gender identity theory, policy reform, and their effects on women and girls. 

Kathleen spoke with Meghan about this unexpected turn in her career and also the various tensions between recognizing the rights of transgender people and recognizing certain material facts. She also explained the difference between sex and gender, which, despite the ubiquity of those terms, many people remain confused about.

Guest bio:

Kathleen Stock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex in England. Her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism was just published by Little Brown in the U.K. and is available everywhere on Kindle. The U.S. edition will be published on September 21, 2021.

photo credit: Sonali Fernando

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John McWhorter teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University, is the author of more than 20 books, a contributor to The Atlantic and the host of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley. If you’re a fan of The Unspeakable, you may know John best from his commentary around issues of race. Since 2007, he has been in regular conversation with economist Glenn Loury on the Bloggingheads platform, where is his known as a uniquely honest voice on the complexities—and often the hypocrisies—of certain progressive antiracist orthodoxies. Last summer, he began writing a new book on this subject. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists is being made available in serialized form on Substack and will be published later this year. Meanwhile, yet another book, Nine Nasty Words, is out this week. Meghan spoke with John about his work over the last several years, his relationship to academia (including being raised by a leftist professor mom), and how the inspiration for The Elect came from none other than cookbook author Alison Roman.

Guest Bio:

John McWhorter teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University. His new book about the new antiracist movement, The Elect, is cu being rolled out on his Substack. His book on language Nine Nasty Words, is out this week. You can find him in regular conversation with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show at Bloggingheads.tv.

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Heather Havrilesky is the popular and beloved creator of the “Ask Polly” advice column, which she has just moved to Substack after a long run in New York Magazine. Meghan invited Heather onto the podcast to talk about the legacy of “Ask Polly,” the creation of Polly’s alter ego in the advice giving world, "Ask Molly,” and about how she came to be an existential advisor to people who feel lost in the world or confused by life. This interview is a little different from the usual Unspeakable fare. Meghan and Heather have been friends for a long time and have had some differences over the last couple of years over culture war issues such as #MeToo and whether misapplied intersectionality is impeding public discourse. (You can probably guess what Meghan thinks.) They get into some robust disagreement in this conversation, so fasten your seatbelt. Don’t worry, everyone gets home safe.

Guest Bio:

Heather Havrilesky writes the "Ask Polly" advice columnist on Substack and is the author of What If This Were Enough (2018), How to Be a Person in the World (2016), and Disaster Preparedness (2010). She also maintains the Ask Molly newsletter, written by Polly’s evil twin, and has written regularly for New York Magazine, Bookforum, the New York Times Magazine, The Awl, and several others.

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Note: Despite the announcement at the beginning, this version does NOT have an ad! There's a sponsor message in the public version, but Patreon supporters will always have ad-free versions of the podcast. So disregard that little message.

Yasmine Mohammad is an author and human rights activist, advocating for the rights of those living under religious extremism. You wouldn’t think that would be controversial, but the extremism she focuses on is Islamic extremism, specifically the fundamentalism that has arisen in the Islamic world over the last several decades and imposed draconian rules on women. Because progressive norms in the west often now frame criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry, Yasmine, who considers herself an ex-Muslim, is now considered both a heretic of Islam and inconvenient social justice figure among western activists. She spoke with Meghan about this strange position and also shared her own story of growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic household and was being forced into marriage to a man who turned out to be a member of Al Qaeda. She also talked about what it’s like to be forced to wear the hijab as well the prevalence of practices like female genital mutilation in both the Islamic world and within immigrant communities in the west.

Guest Bio:

Yasmine Mohammed is the is the author of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam and the founder of Free Hearts Free Minds, which provides support for women—and men—who need help freeing themselves from the suppressions of religious extremism in the Islamic World.

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Jesse Singal’s new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, challenges many long held assumptions about society and human behavior: for instance the myth of the super predator, the so-called “power pose,” the use of positive psychology in the military, even the concept of implicit bias. We’ve come to take these ideas as truths, but as Jesse explains, many are based on based on faulty methodology, shoddy interpretation and sometimes just wishful thinking. Jesse talks with Meghan about all of that as well as a subject that is not in the book, his research into childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria and its relationship to the recent surge in young people identifying as transgender or nonbinary. This work, despite its very careful methodology, has incurred the wrath of a certain corner of trans activism, mostly on Twitter, and he talks about why this might be and how much it should matter.

Guest Bio:

Jesse Singal is the author of the new book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He is a contributing writer to New York Magazine and has written for The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Slate and Reason, among other publications. He is the cohost, with Katie Herzog, of the Blocked and Reported podcast and writes regularly at https://jessesingal.substack.com.

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A Time Magazine columnist for 20 years, Joel Stein is known for his humorous, irreverent and often deadpan inquiries into American life and social politics. His latest book is In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book, which despite the subtitle, is a serious minded, though also quite funny, journey through the parts of America that, in the wake of the Trump election, Joel realized he didn’t understand at all. Joel talks with Meghan about the people he met, what surprised him the most, and explains the distinction between what he calls the Intellectual Elite and the Boat Elite. He also shows his age during the interview by receiving a phone call on his “landline” and having the call picked up by a device called an “answering machine.”

Guest Bio:

Joel Stein's latest book, In Defense of Elitism, is out in paperback this month. He is also the author of Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. In addition to Time Magazine, he has been a columnist at Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angles Times. Joel has taught at Princeton as well as written for several television sitcoms.

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If you’ve been following the seemingly endless battles on college campuses over free speech, you may have noticed that professors are a frequent target of censorship and complaint. Sometimes this because students object to curriculum and sometimes the infraction is as trivial as a professor sending a a “problematic” tweet. The recently launched Academic Freedom Alliance seeks to help educators navigate these waters. Its chair, constitutional law scholar and political science professor Keith Whittington, is Meghan’s guest this week. Keith talked why an organization like the AFA is so necessary right now, how academia has changed over the course of his career, and why it’s important to remember that speech suppressions comes from the political right as well as the activist left. He also talked about why professors are often inclined to apologize or try to explain themselves when that’s often the worst thing you can do when you the mob comes after you.

Guest bio:

Keith Whittington is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. You can find the Academic Freedom Alliance at academicfreedom.org

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The Unspeakable Podcast didn't start until late last summer, but believe it or not I'd been trying to figure out how to do one for a long time before that. Before deciding to do the show on my own, there'd been some thought that I'd put it on an existing platform, and for that reason I went to Los Angeles in December 2019 to record two demo interviews. One was with comedian Chelsea Handler and the other, this one, was with comedian, writer and podcaster Bridget Phetasy. I'm releasing it now as a companion to this week's podcast, which features a conversation I did with Bridget last week.  

We recorded this on Bridget's sofa as her dog, Hope (wearing a cone of shame), snored in the background. I love this conversation because it gets into Bridget's personal story and how it informed some of her ideas about #MeToo and reductive notions of the patriarchy. I also love it because it reminds us how much better the audio sounds when you can do in-person interviews rather than having to record remotely!   

This interview has never been released and so is exclusive to you, my mid-tier and higher level Patreon supporters. Enjoy! 

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Writer, comedian and popular podcaster and YouTuber Bridget Phetasy is known her her uniquely astute analysis of the news of the day — and also her views on what shouldn’t be news. In this conversation, sparked by recent remarks from the comedian Sarah Silverman, Bridget and Meghan talk about what’s happened to comedy in the age of (often manufactured) hypersensitivity, why they, in turn, are hypersensitive to that hypersensitivity, and what it’s like to watch entertainers and other public figures begin to distance themselves from the Trump outrage machine. Bridget also shares what she learned about gender relations from writing for Playboy and how she thinks overcoming addiction and spending time in 12-step programs has given her an especially keen nose for the cultural hypocrisy of the moment.

Note: A separate (and very different) conversation with Bridget, recorded in late 2019 at Bridget’s home, will be available for $10/month and higher Patreon subscribers later in the weekend. 

Guest Bio:

Bridget Phetasy is a writer, comedian, and host of the Walk-Ins Welcome podcast and The Weekly Dumpster Fire show on YouTube.

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A conservative who has always been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens often manages to annoy his would-be allies on the right while consistently inflaming Times readers who are on the left. In this conversation, Bret and Meghan compare notes on how column writing has changed over the last decade and parse some of Bret's more controversial pieces, including columns he’s written on climate change, Jewish intellectual achievement, and the sexual abuse allegations against filmmaker Woody Allen. They also discuss the spinelessness of many instiutional leaders today, the Substack phenomenon, and a recent column of Bret's entitled Woke Me When It’s Over, a phrase Meghan almost used as the title for her last book.

Guest bio:

Bret Stephens is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He was previously foreign-affairs columnist at The Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. He was raised in Mexico City.

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Angel Eduardo is a writer, musician and visual artist based in New York City. Last summer, he wrote an article that appeared in Areo Magazine called I’m a Nobody, The Harper’s Letter Was For Me  The now-infamous Open Letter on Justice and Debate  published in Harper’s Magazine, addressed a climate of growing intolerance for ideological diversity and was signed by more than 150 prominent artists and intellectuals. Among the criticisms of the so-called “Harper’s Letter” was that it amounted to a bunch of elitists whining about having their voices muted by the democratization of opinion. But Angel, a 35-year-old millennial with immigrant parents, a day job and a fledgling artistic career, saw things differently. In this conversation, Angel talks with Meghan about why he wrote the article, why the new leftist groupthink reminds him of his own religious upbringing, why he thinks fetishizing the n-word does more to incite racism than fight it. He also explains a rhetorical concept he’s come up with called “star-manning.”

Guest Bio:

Angel Eduardo is a musician, photographer, and designer based in New York City. He is a staff writer and content creator for Idealist and contributes a monthly column for the Center for Inquiry called Searching for Better Angels. Learn more about him, see his visual art and hear his music on his official website, angeleduardo.com.

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Writer and performer Annabelle Gurwitch never got rich over the course her decades-long career, but she managed to carve out a decent life as a working actor and published author. In her fifties, however, her fortunes changed and she found herself divorced, renting out a room in her house, and wondering how a middle class existence can slip away after a lifetime of hard work. She chronicles these struggles—often hilariously—in her fifth book You’re Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility. In this conversation, Annabelle speaks with Meghan about how she thinks she got to this place, what she’s learned about homelessness and access to health care, and how a recent medical crisis has raised her stakes even further. She also speaks about her child, now a young adult, who identifies as nonbinary and how coming to understand that identity led her to think that future  generations might be able to make better sense of the world than we do.

Guest Bio:

Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, LA Magazine and Hadassah among other publications. Her latest book is You’re Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility, published by Counterpoint Press.

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In her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, author Lori Gottlieb tells the stories of five people in psychotherapy. Four are her own patients and one is Lori herself. A practicing therapist for more than a decade, she took an unusual route to her vocation, working as a television writer and then attending medical school before realizing that her love of storytelling could be combined with helping people in a clinical setting. Since then, she’s become celebrated as a writer and as a therapist. Lori spoke with Meghan what's most often misunderstood about therapy, what therapists secretly think of their patients and how to know when it’s time to end treatment. She also talked about her work with singles seeking committed partnerships, the pros and cons of dating apps and how having realistic expectations is not the same thing as “settling.”

Guest Bio:

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is currently being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the “Dear Therapist” advice column for The Atlantic and is co-host of the popular “Dear Therapists” podcast. Her recent TED talk was one of the top ten most watched of the year. Find her at https://lorigottlieb.com.

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Moses Farrow is a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in what he calls adoption trauma. Born in South Korea in 1978, he was adopted by actress Mia Farrow when he was two-years-old, becoming one of ten adopted and four biological children in that family. He was later adopted by Mia’s former partner, Woody Allen and in 2018 published a stunning account of what it was like growing up in this family and why he supports his father in the highly publicized sexual abuse allegations made in the wake of a custody battle in 1992. Moses spoke with Meghan about his mission to help adoptees make sense of their lives and shared his personal experiences as a survivor of abuse, attempted suicide, and suicide loss.

Read Moses’s 2018 blog post about his family story here: http://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com.

Guest Bio:

Moses Farrow, LMFT is an Adoption Trauma Therapist, with over 20 years in the mental health field. He is also an outspoken advocate for mental health, suicide prevention and adoption reform. Most recently, he has created videos on YouTube and gave his first newspaper interview with The Guardian, about his family and adoption work. He has begun the #truthislouder movement which encourages adoptees to speak their truths and invites everyone to become an ally to the adoptee community to help save adoptee lives.

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Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the prevailing wisdom from government officials and much of the scientific community is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in an animal and at some point jumped to humans. The idea that it might have accidentally escaped from a lab has been widely dismissed as conspiracy theory, partly because it was easily conflated with inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration. But plenty of scientists and policy have quietly taken the so-called “lab-leak hypothesis” seriously and now that the volume has been lowered on some of Trump’s more dangerous distortions they’re starting to talk about it.

Two experts that have been talking about it all along are Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, and Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert and senior research fellow at King’s College London. Together, they spoke with Meghan about what we do and don’t know about the origins of the virus, why knowing the origins matters in the first place, and, above all, why people have such difficulty separating the idea of a deliberately released bioweapon, which no serious person has suggested, with the possibility of an unintentional lab spill-over, for which there is plenty of room for questions in this case.

Guest Bios:

Dr. Alina Chan is a recent Human Frontier Science Program fellow with 12+ years of research training in medical genetics, biochemistry, synthetic biology, and vector engineering. At the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Dr. Chan is currently researching next generation AAV vectors for human gene therapy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chan began to investigate problems relevant to finding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and spearheaded the development of the COVID-19 CoV Genetics (covidcg.org) browser for scientists worldwide to rapidly track emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants by locations and date ranges of interest. Follow her on Twitter @ayjchan.

A new article about COVID origins, co-written by Dr. Chan and Matt Ridley appears in the February 6 edition of The Telegraph.  It's currently behind a paywall but I'll post the free version when it goes up. 

Filippa Lentzos, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, where she has a joint appointment in the Department of War Studies and the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. She is also an Associate Senior Researcher within armament and disarmament program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a biosecurity columnist at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an editor of the social science journal BioSocieties, and the NGO Coordinator for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Her May 5, 2020 article on the need for a credible investigation into the virus’s origins appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For more about her work see www.filippalentzos.com or follow her on twitter @FilippaLentzos.

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Veteran reporter Nancy Rommelmann is based in New York City these days, but she was a longtime resident of Portland, Oregon who knows the city—and its people, politics, and assorted proclivities—with a unique combination of intimacy and objectivity. As the city erupted into protests last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Nancy returned to Portland and began covering the action for Reason Magazine. 

This conversation is divided into two parts. In the first part, recorded in late December, Nancy focuses on Portland and helps define the boundaries between leftist so-called antifacist groups like Antifa, anarchist movements like Black bloc, and the peaceful protestors whose efforts are sometimes overshadowed by extremists. In the second part, recorded after the January 6 siege at the Capitol and the subsequent inauguration of President Biden, she talks about some of the differences between the Capitol protestors and the ones she’s reported on in Portland.

Guest Bio:

Nancy Rommelmann is a journalist whose work appears in Reason, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other publications. Her latest book is To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder. Find her at nancyromm.com, follow on Twitter @nancyromm and Substack. She lives in New York City.

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Early Access to January 25, 2021 edition 

Bruce Wagner, a successful Hollywood screenwriter and the author of twelve novels, has been a beloved literary figure for decades, especially in his home city of Los Angeles. His most recent novel, The Marvel Universe, was enthusiastically acquired by a small press until, he says, the publisher objected to certain “problematic” language, specifically the word “fat,” which a character uses to describe herself. This led Bruce to release the book into the public domain by making it available on his website for free. In this conversation, Bruce talks about how a public domain release differs from self-publishing, how sensitivity readers are setting the tone for much of the culture now, and what this means for artists who are drawn to the more monstrous qualities of the human condition.

Guest Bio:

Bruce Wagner is the author of twelve novels, including Dead Stars, I’m Losing You, and I’ll Let You Go. His latest novel, The Marvel Universe, is available for free at brucewagner.la. He is also the creator of the television series Wild Palms.

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Are Lesbians Going Extinct? Katie Herzog Reports From The Field

Podcaster and journalist Katie Herzog returns to the podcast to discuss her article Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?, which talked about a trend she’s observed wherein many of her lesbian friends are now identifying as transgender or nonbinary. She explains how she sees the nonbinary identity as a "regressive trend” because it ultimately puts limits on gender expression even as it purports to do the opposite. She also talks about the woman who coined the phrase “the future is female,” the recent announcement that the actor once known as Ellen Page now identifies as male, and (not unrelatedly) her former career as a professional whitewater kayaker.

The extended, Patreon-only version of the interview contains a 20-plus minute conversation at the end in which Katie explains her ongoing investigation into the ethics and health ramifications of dog spaying and neutering. More can be found on her Substack newsletter, Moose Nuggets. 

Attached is the long (previously unpublished) version of Where Have All The Lesbians Gone? 

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Super early access to the January 4, 2021 episode   (Happy Holidays!)

After two years on the Bloggingheads platform, journalists and cultural critics Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Maltz Bovy are taking their popular podcast, Feminine Chaos, independent. In this conversation with Meghan, they share their views on some of contemporary feminism’s most pressing concerns, including the purity policing of white women, the new stigmatization of straightness and the importance of preserving “you guys” as a term of address. They also do a deep dive into the identity category known as “demisexual” and ask if this designation is worthy of special dispensation.

Guest Bios:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy writes for publications including The Globe and Mail and The Washington Post and is the author of the 2017 book The Perils of “Privilege.

Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and novelist. Her next book No One Will Miss Her, will be published by William Morrow in 2021.

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And Now For Something Completely Different!

In this VERY special edition of The Unspeakable Podcast, I depart from the interview format and speak directly to . .  you. 

There's no guest this time. Instead, I decided to reflect on the current moment (I recorded this the day after the election was called) and look back on the election four years ago. At that time, I'd recently begun writing the book that would eventually become The Problem With Everything and I talk here about how impossible that task felt at times and how it ultimately inspired me to create the podcast. I also admit that after 25 years of writing "think pieces” I literally don't know what to think anymore. I'm more confused than ever about just about everything. That's another reason I started the podcast. I wanted to listen to other people talk about what they thought. 

This little soliloquy is also about my belief that the best way to fight "cancel culture" is to stop talking about it so much and just contribute to the culture itself. Be the culture. That means trusting your audience to be smart enough to understand what you're saying, to get it. When you have that trust, nothing is off limits. I learned that from you guys.

Finally, I also announce that the podcast will be on a brief hiatus until the first of the year. (Alas, I have to attend to my "real" work.)  But it will be back! 

Don't worry, this is less than 17 minutes.

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(Sorry, in all the excitement I forgot to post this last night!) 

All Artists Are Starving Artists Now: William Deresiewicz on The Rigged Creative Economy

Bestselling author William Deresiewicz’s new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, paints a grim picture of the state of the arts—at least as far as actual artists are concerned. For all the talk about how it’s never been easier to be creative, the truth is that it’s never been more difficult to do so professionally. In this conversation, Deresiewicz relays what he learned from interviews with more than one hundred working artists, how the digital economy has obliterated the creative economy, and what he portends for the future of his own career.

Guest Bio:

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges and other venues, and a former professor of English at Yale. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, and many other publications. He is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing and is the New York Times bestselling author of Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and A Jane Austen Education.

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How Does Any Of Us Get Through? Sigrid Nunez on Living, Dying, Friendship and Solitude

Sigrid Nunez is the author of seven novels and a memoir. Sigrid’s 2018 novel, The Friend, won The National Book Award for fiction and became a bestseller. That book featured a unnamed narrator caring for the dog of a close friend who had committed suicide. This fall she has a new novel out, What Are You Going Through? It’s also about a friendship, this time between the narrator and an old acquaintance who’s facing terminal cancer and has asked the narrator to be with her as she lives her final days before taking drugs to end her own life. Sigrid spoke with Meghan about this work as well as her past work, not only The Friend but also Salvation City, a novel she published a decade ago about a global flu pandemic. She also talked about her relationship with the late Susan Sontag, with whom she lived while in a relationship with Sontag’s son and who was the subject of her 2014 memoir, Sempre Susan.

Guest Bio:

Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

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Merrill Markoe is an Emmy award winning television writer and celebrated humorist. She’s worked on shows ranging from Sex and The City to Moonlighting but is probably best known for her association with The David Letterman Show, where she was the head writer from the show’s inception in 1981 until the late 1980s. She’s also the author of nine books, including the brand new graphic memoir We Saw Scenery: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe. Here, Merrill draws from an enormous cache of diaries she kept from approximately the fourth grade through her first year of college. In this conversation, Merrill talks about the book, about growing up female and funny, about harnessing that funniness into a career, and about working with—and being the longtime girlfriend of—David Letterman. She also talks about what it’s like to pursue comedy in this era of heightened sensitivities and why it’s a myth that you’re not allowed to be funny anymore.

Guest Bio:

Merrill Markoe was recently awarded the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement. Her new book, We Saw Scenery: The Early Diaries of Merrill Markoe, is just out from Algonquin Books.

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Australian broadcaster Josh Szeps is known for his fiercely intelligent and at-times wickedly funny approach to interviews and news analysis. A founding producer and host of the award-winning Huffpost Live, he can currently be heard on ABC Radio Sydney and, during his time in New York, hosted a live show-turned-podcast called #WeThePeople LIVE. Last summer, Josh launched Uncomfortable Conversations, an interview podcast virtually indistinguishable from this one other than the host being Australian and slightly younger and more famous. Josh spoke with Meghan about why podcasts like theirs are so desperately needed in these dark times and how the fate of the world of ideas rests on their shoulders. They also talked about the pronunciation of Meghan’s name, why Alec Baldwin’s calling a paparazzo a “c_sucker” was not an expression of homophobia, when they stopped feeling young and precocious, and what makes Josh a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.”

Guest Bio:

Josh Szeps is the host of the new podcast Uncomfortable Conversations and can be heard on ABC Radio Sydney. He lives in Sydney with his husband and twin toddlers.

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Can Old-School Intellectualism Make a Comeback In A New Era? A conversation with Leon Wieseltier

Leon Wieseltier, who was for decades the literary editor of The New Republic, is a legendary cultural and media figure. But in 2017, just as he was set to launch a new publication, he was accused of #MeToo transgressions and his professional connections were severed almost overnight. After three years out of the public eye, Leon has reemerged with a new quarterly journal called Liberties, which aims to be “slower, longer and deeper” than just about anything else around. In this conversation, Leon talks with Meghan about his hopes for the magazine, his frustrations with political and cultural discourse today, and the fallout and lessons from the #MeToo allegations made against him. They also talk about sexual dynamics in mentor relationships, the virtues of the Louis CK film Pootie Tang, and why Leon wishes he could list “intellectual” on his passport as his occupation.

Guest Bio:

Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties - a Journal of Culture and Politics. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic.

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Inspecting The Machinery of Identity Politics: A Conversation with Writer and Scholar Laurent Dubreuil

We hear about “identity” so often now that the word no longer carries much meaning. By extension, the term “identity politics” has become a culture war cudgel, recklessly deployed by race baiters on the right as well as some activists on the social justice left. But Laurent Dubreuil, a professor of literature and cognitive science at Cornell University, has studied identity in ways that plunge far deeper than standard discussions about tribalism and narcissism. He’s interested in what an identity-based worldview—and the technology that feeds it— is actually, physiologically, doing to our brains.

In this conversation, Laurent talks with Meghan about how social media has undertaken a collective cognitive reprogramming of human beings and the world at large that could have catastrophic effects. He also explains how part of the danger of Twitter is that it’s based on “soliloquy,” how academia’s preoccupation with identity robs students of their rightful educations, and how the recent controversy surrounding the French-Senegalese film Cuties forebodes a time in which we might have to “say goodbye to the arts.”

Guest Bio:

Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science at Cornell University, where he founded the Humanities Lab and heads the French Studies Program. His comparative research explores the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. He is the author of more than twelve books and in 2019 he released in French La dictature des identités, an essay on the current state of “identity politics 2.0” in the United States. Laurent's essay Nonconforming: Against the Erosion of Academic Freedom by Identity Politics, appeared in the September 2020 issue of Harper’s. 

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Why Does Exposing Social Media Hypocrisy Feel So Damn Good? An Interview with Katie Herzog

Katie Herzog is a co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the new and wildly successful podcast, Blocked and Reported, which analyzes internet dramas and attempts to bring missing facts to supposedly foregone conclusions. A lifelong liberal who, a few years ago, found herself questioning certain assumptions of both the political left and the queer community to which she’d always belonged, Katie has become beloved figure among heterodox thinkers even as some of her old ideological allies have turned away from her. She talks with Meghan her political evolution, her professional evolution, COVID confusion, media laziness, and why poking holes in social media hysteria is so delectably—if also guiltily—satisfying.

An extended version of this interview is available for second and third tier level Patreon subscribers.

Guest Bio:
Katie Herzog is the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported. She is a former staff writer at the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, and her work has been published by an array of outlets, including the Atlantic, the Guardian, and Mother Jones. 

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Katie Herzog is a co-host, with Jesse Singal, of the new and wildly successful podcast, Blocked and Reported, which analyzes internet dramas and attempts to bring missing facts to supposedly foregone conclusions. A lifelong liberal who, a few years ago, found herself questioning certain assumptions of both the political left and the queer community to which she’d always belonged, Katie has become beloved figure among heterodox thinkers even as some of her old ideological allies have turned away from her. She talks with Meghan her political evolution, her professional evolution, COVID confusion, media laziness, and why poking holes in social media hysteria is so delectably—if also guiltily—satisfying.

In this bonus, Patrons-only edition, they also talk about gender stuff and why so many of Katie's lesbian friends are now trans men. 

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How To Let Your Kids Live More Dangerously: A conversation with “America’s Worst Mom,” Lenore Skenazy

Journalist Lenore Skenazy was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom” in 2008 for a column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone. The controversy led her to speak out about finding safe ways to allow kids to be more independent and she founded the Free Range Kids movement. In 2018 she co-founded Let Grow, a nonprofit that offers resource materials, school curricula and even does policy work with an aim toward helping kids be more self-sufficient (and helping their parents allow them to be). 

In this interview, Lenore talks with Meghan about her work, her own parenting and the fact that, as she puts it, “There’s never been a safer time to be a child in America.” 

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When Sandra Tsing Loh was beginning her career in the 1980s, she modeled herself after avant garde performance artists like Laurie Anderson. She even put the “Tsing” in her name because she thought it sounded “Yoko Ono-ish.” But after becoming an established figure in the Los Angeles arts scene and a prolific writer for alternative publications, Sandra’s life began to change and so did the notion of artistry itself. In this interview, Sandra talks about the realties of making art in the current economic and cultural landscape, the tyranny of promoting your work on social media, “not being Asian enough,” and much more.  

In this extended version of the interview, Sandra talks about a ridiculous and rather horrifying identity politics-related brouhaha at a playwright's festival.  Available for Patreon subscribers at the second tier and above.

Guest Bio:

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, and radio commentator. Her work has been heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and This American Life. She is a contributing editor to the Atlantic and host of the syndicated daily radio “minute,” The Loh Down on Science. Her latest book is THE MADWOMAN AND THE ROOMBA (W.W. Norton, June 2020). She lives in Pasadena, California.

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When Sandra Tsing Loh was beginning her career in the 1980s, she modeled herself after avant garde performance artists like Laurie Anderson. She even put the “Tsing” in her name because she thought it sounded “Yoko Ono-ish.” But after becoming an established figure in the Los Angeles arts scene and a prolific writer for alternative publications, Sandra’s life began to change and so did the notion of artistry itself. In this interview, Sandra talks about the realties of making art in the current economic and cultural landscape, the tyranny of promoting your work on social media, “not being Asian enough,” and much more.  

An extended version of this interview (wherein Sandra talks about a ridiculous and horrifying identity politics-related brouhaha at a playwright's festival)  is available for Patreon subscribers at the second tier and above.

Guest Bio:

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, and radio commentator. Her work has been heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and This American Life. She is a contributing editor to the Atlantic and host of the syndicated daily radio “minute,” The Loh Down on Science. Her latest book is THE MADWOMAN AND THE ROOMBA (W.W. Norton, June 2020). She lives in Pasadena, California.

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Chelsea was suffering from a yeast infection, but they had a great conversation nonetheless, talking about sex, dating, the challenges of making art and doing comedy in a rapidly-changing culture and how Chelsea was sent to sexual harassment training during the filming of her documentary Are You There Privilege, It's Me Chelsea? (That's training to avoid sexual harassment, not on how to do it.) 

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