Libsyn Directory

Do Women Owe Men An Apology? with Dr. Carole Hooven

Release Date: 07/14/2025

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

More Episodes

This episode starts with a Very Special introduction in which I explain what’s been going on with the podcast over the last six months (lots of different offerings, which possibly caused some confusion) and talk about the ongoing challenges of the subscriber model. (Short version, please stick around!)

I then have the great pleasure of interviewing evolutionary biologist Dr. Carole Hooven, who’s been a speaker at several Unspeakeasy events but never actually a guest on the podcast. As we approach the four-year anniversary of the publication of her book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole recounts how a media appearance defending “male” and “female” as meaningful scientific categories led to unexpected controversy and her eventual departure from Harvard, where she’d taught for many years. She talks about how ideological influence has made even basic scientific facts about sex contentious and cites the importance of precise use of language, especially on topics like sex differences and women’s rights, which she feels have been muddied by cultural and political agendas.

Most fascinatingly (to me, anyway), Carole argues that a predominantly female, progressive teaching culture favors girls’ learning styles—while boys, wired differently by biology, are stigmatized and alienated. Meanwhile, it’s become culturally verboten to even acknowledge men’s intense sexual drives and emotional vulnerability, and she calls for a return to rites of passage that acknowledge male biology without shame.

Finally, we talk about a recent controversy surrounding her husband, MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne (who was a guest on the podcast back in March 2024), after he was invited to contribute to a U.S. Health and Human Services report on sex and gender. Although the team was politically diverse, Alex’s name was leaked via PDF metadata, and he faced fierce criticism from activist students and colleagues. He responded with a Washington Post op-ed explaining his position.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Carole Hooven is a human evolutionary biologist, the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

HOUSEKEEPING

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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:

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Housekeeping

📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.

✈️ The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. We’ll be in Texas, New York, Los Angeles, and more.

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