Death On A Movie Set - Rachel Mason on Last Take, her documentary about the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Release Date: 07/09/2025
A Post-Truth World Is Not Acceptable, with Michael Shermer
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
In this episode, Meghan talks with science writer and professional skeptic Michael Shermer about his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, and about why agreeing on basic facts has become so difficult, even when everyone is looking at the same video. They discuss Minneapolis, ICE raids, viral “exposé” culture, the transgender movement, the lab leak theory, the Jeffrey Epstein case, the way activism distorts institutions that are supposed to care about evidence, and why humans are much better at defending beliefs than revising them. Note that this episode...
info_outline
How Young White Men Got Screwed, with Jacob Savage
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Jacob Savage, author of the ultra-viral Compact essay “The Lost Generation," was digital media’s man of the month in December. Meghan interviewed him on December 26 for a special episode for paying subscribers, and here it is now from behind the paywall. Jacob’s argument in a nutshell, is this: Starting around 2014, the push to diversify hiring in elite institutions, particularly academia, journalism/book publishing and entertainment, hit millennial white men hardest. Despite talent, hardwork, and even privileged connections, many were denied professional opportunities solely because of...
info_outline
It’s Bari Weiss’s World! with Mike Pesca
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
We’re back from the holiday break! (Sort of.) This interview with the inimitable Mike Pesca was recorded on Boxing Day and released right away to paying subscribers. Now it’s available to everyone. Host of The Gist and author of the newsletters Pesca Profundities and The Gist List, Mike has turned the humble “bonus segment” into a multi-level rmarketing scheme multi-tiered pricing philosophy. How does he do it? We’ll find out! We also talk about the hardest part of the creator economy (discovery), the incentives that reward martyrdom and outrage, and, most of all, Mike’s December...
info_outline
The Secrets of Joan Didion. The Secret of Eve Babitz, with Lili Anolik
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week, I talk with author Lili Anolik about her book on two writers whose lives overlapped in ways that were both unlikely and (in retrospect) inevitable. One is Eve Babitz, the exuberant chronicler of 1970s Hollywood. The other is Joan Didion, whose notoriously “cool,” exacting style defined a particular vision of Los Angeles and helped make her one of the most influential writers of the last century. The two writers are often framed as opposites, but in Didion & Babitz, Lili explores how they shared similar burdens of the times–burdens around creativity, ambition, and...
info_outline
Fatherhood As Literary Art, with Thomas Beller
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Writer and editor Thomas Beller joins me to discuss his new essay collection Degas at the Gas Station. The essays trace his experience of fatherhood through the landscapes of his own childhood, including the early death of his psychoanalyst father and Tom’s later return—wife and children in tow—to the very Manhattan apartment where he was raised. We talk about some of the fundamental conflicts of personal writing, including the ethics of writing about your children and even your ambivalence about parenthood. We also discuss why some writers feel trapped inside the genres that come...
info_outline
A Special Place In Hell Reunion, with Sarah Haider
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Thanksgiving has come early! A year after bidding farewell to our much-loved/occasionally-despised podcast , Sarah Haider joins me for a catch-up. A lot has happened in the last few weeks, not to mention the last year. We discuss the killing of Charlie Kirk, the wave of anti-Indian hate on X, the phenomenon of South Asian troll farming, the uses and abuses of AI, and, of course, the discourse around “the great feminization,” which was the entire premise of A Special Place In Hell. (Did someone steal our idea?) We also discuss Sarah’s new baby and whether her pregnancy was worse than my...
info_outline
Should We Bring Back Asylums? with Dr. Sally Satel
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Why is it so difficult to find meaningful help for the severely mentally ill, including those exhibiting patterns of violence? And why has this question become politicized? Policy expert and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel is not typically a fan of Donald Trump, but she agrees with the president’s recent executive order on mental health policy. That order called for “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment to restore public order.” This issue, she says, should not be about...
info_outline
The Making of A Gender Heretic, with Ben Appel
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
This week, Ben Appel joins me to talk about his new book, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, a memoir about leaving one kind of cult only to stumble into another. Raised in a rigid Christian community, Ben found refuge in the gay rights movement and, later, the Ivy League—until “allyship” started to look less like solidarity and more like a loyalty oath. We discuss • Why he chose the deliberately provocative title Cis, White, Gay — and what reactions revealed about current identity politics. • How queer “community” has become...
info_outline
How Do You Want Your Life To End? with Dr. Sunita Puri
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
My guest is Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. We talk about what it really means to care for patients when cure is no longer the goal, why our medical system resists honest conversations about death, and how clarity and compassion can coexist at the end of life. Topics we cover: • What palliative care really provides (beyond hospice) • Why “more treatment” ≠ “more life” • Prognosis, probabilities, and telling the truth kindly • How...
info_outline
Have Women Ruined The World? Helen Andrews on The Great Feminization
The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum
Less than 24 hours after her Compact essay, “The Great Feminization,” set off a thousand group texts, writer Helen Andrews joined to talk about what she means by “feminization,” why the 2020 moral fervor looked the way it did, and how workplace culture shifts when women become the numerical majority. We also compare “agreeableness” with the kind of conflict that actually moves ideas forward (and where each belongs). In this episode we discuss: How Helen defines “the great feminization” and why she thinks it explains contemporary “wokeness” What...
info_outlineIn this episode, I speak with filmmaker Rachel Mason about her documentary Last Take*: Rust and the Story of Halyna*, which explores the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. On October 21, 20221, Alec Badwin, who starred in the film, pulled the trigger on a gun he thought was not loaded, killing Halyna and injuring director Joel Souza. Through the lens of grief, media spectacle, and justice. Rachel, a close friend of Halyna’s, offers an intimate perspective on the aftermath of the incident and how it was experienced by those who knew Halyna beyond the headlines.
We also talk about Rachel’s recent docuseries, An Update on Our Family, which investigates the world of family vlogging on YouTube—particularly the story of Myka and James Stauffer, whose decision to rehome their adopted son sparked public outrage and raised ethical questions about online parenting content. Toward the end of our conversation, Rachel talks about her next project, a collaborative effort to unravel a legendary unsolved murder case in Los Angeles. It's a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation that touches on art, ethics, personal loss, and the complexities of telling true stories in a digital age. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
GUEST BIO
Rachel Mason is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker. She received an Emmy Nomination for her Netflix Original Documentary Circus of Books, based on her biographical telling of growing up the child of owners of an adult bookstore that was a fixture of the gay community during the height of the AIDS era. In 2025 a series Mason directed called “An Update on Our Family” was released on HBO MAX and has been cited in legal arguments proposing legislation changes regarding children on the internet. Following that, Hulu released the authorized documentary about her friend Halyna Hutchins death on the Alec Baldwin film Rust. She is currently completing a documentary about the murder of a young gay man in 1990 named Billy London, which was until 2022 a cold case. The film is being made independently and has been a volunteer effort from the community, who helped to solve the crime.
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna- Hulu
An Update on Our Family- HBO Max
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays, 3-4 pm ET. We will meet on Zoom.
📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream takes place every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.
Stuff to read and listen to:
New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help
Recent(ish) solo episodes:
- January 9: The First 24 Hours
- January 16: The Immaterial World
- January 27: Housing Wars
- February 5: Remembrance Of Things Past
- February 13: What Is A "Catastrophe?"
- March 2: A Mental Infection
- March 31: Dignity Is Out Of Style
📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.
✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.