Libsyn Directory

How To Survive a Mania - Lionel Shriver hates groupthink. And so should everyone else.

Release Date: 07/30/2025

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

September 3 in NYC at 6 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Lionel live at The Village Underground. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.

Bestselling novelist and beloved (and occasionally be-hated) columnist Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to talk about several topics, including her most recent novel, Mania. In that novel, she imagines a society under the grip of “mental parity,” a concept arguing that all individuals possess equal intelligence and no one should be given greater credence or responsibility because of the perception that they are smarter. We also discuss our own intelligence (are we really all that smart?) and wonder what makes us so resistant to groupthink in politics and daily life, especially around movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gender ideology.

In search of a lighter topic, we finally move on to . . . immigration. (Oops.) As a Los Angeles resident, I’ve been alarmed by the ICE raids in my community, and I’m quite upset about the Trump administration’s policies. As a longtime expatriate in the U.K. and as the author of a forthcoming novel about immigration (A Better Life, coming in February 2026), Lionel sees things a little differently.

GUEST BIO

A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in Britain’s The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. Her first nonfiction book, ABOMINATIONS: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-destruction, was published in 2022. It joins a story collection and fifteen novels, including Mania, Should We Stay or Should We Go, The Mandibles, and We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton). Her work has been translated into 35 languages. Her latest novel A Better Life, focused on immigration, will be out in early 2026.

UPCOMING EVENT:

Once again, if you enjoyed this interview, join me in NYC on September 3 at The Village Underground for a conversation with Lionel about The Catastrophe Hour as well as her work. Topics will include (but are not limited to) death, sex, real estate, dogs, beauty, grief, aging, cancelation, incels, femcels, self-destruction, natural disasters, pronatalism, anti-natalism, human intelligence, and cultural stupidity.

Doors open at 5:15, show starts at 6pm. Tix available here. Use promo code CATASTROPHE18 at checkout for a discount.

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.

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:

📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube.

✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.

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