Is The Racial Reckoning Over? John McWhorter on language, art, and defunding the grammar police
Release Date: 08/19/2025
Are Therapists Crazy? Andrew Hartz's quest for sanity in clinical psychology
The Unspeakable Podcast
Dr. Andrew Hartz is a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, an organization dedicated to overcoming sociopolitical bias in the mental health field. He was last here in 2023 and returns now to talk about what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the mental-health landscape since then. We discuss the rise of “everyday dissociation,” how screens and Zoom relationships dull presence and feeling, and why talk therapy can miss the mark when the problem is disconnection from the body. Andrew also explains how anxiety became a form of social currency (from...
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All The World’s A Hype House: What Leigh Stein's TikTok novel reveals about the way we live now
The Unspeakable Podcast
Novelist, essayist, and publishing coach Leigh Stein returns to the show to discuss her new gothic-inspired novel, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. Set in a Los Angeles “hype house,” the book follows a 39-year-old woman managing a mansion full of TikTok influencers—and confronting the realities of aging out of digital media. Leigh talks about the inspirations behind the novel, from a Frank Lloyd Wright house to parasocial relationships to the controversies around Joan Didion’s private papers. We also explore bigger questions: the future of Substack, fandom as a...
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How Are Those Luxury Beliefs Working Out? Rob Henderson and the coinage that keeps on giving (FULL INTERVIEW)
The Unspeakable Podcast
This week, I welcome back Rob Henderson, the social psychologist, author, and commentator who coined the concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the upper class while inflicting real costs on lower-income communities. Rob was last here in early 2024 discussing his memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, which chronicles his journey through California’s foster system to the Air Force, and onward to Yale and Cambridge. In this conversation, we explore what he’s been thinking about since the book’s release—particularly the so-called “mating...
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Is The Racial Reckoning Over? John McWhorter on language, art, and defunding the grammar police
The Unspeakable Podcast
This is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers. Author, New York Times columnist, and superstar linguist John McWhorter returns to the pod to catch us up on what’s been on his mind now that the Woke Emergency is over . . . or is it over? We talk about how figures like Robin D’Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi have receded from the spotlight and then move on to more pressing questions topics, such as whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s “I vs me” confusion is disqualifying (I say yes), whether a smart person would say “stupider”...
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Is Everything Terrible? Tablet editor Alana Newhouse on the problem with burning it all down.
The Unspeakable Podcast
This week I’m joined by Alana Newhouse, journalist, cultural critic, and founder/editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine. Since launching Tablet in 2009, Alana has carved out a space for nuanced and surprising reporting on Jewish identity and the larger cultural questions shaping those issues, as well as the broader issues of our time. We discuss her 2021 essay, Everything Is Broken, in which she diagnoses systemic failures in medicine, media, education, and culture. Alana traces these breakdowns to a pervasive cultural force she calls flatness — the drive toward frictionless...
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Extreme Religious Conversion - Kelsey Osgood on women, religious transformations, and what anorexia has to do with it. (FULL INTERVIEW)
The Unspeakable Podcast
This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In...
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How To Survive a Mania - Lionel Shriver hates groupthink. And so should everyone else.
The Unspeakable Podcast
September 3 in NYC at 6 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Lionel live at The Village Underground. Tix available . 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...
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Extreme Religious Conversion - Kelsey Osgood on women, religious transformations, and what anorexia has to do with it (PREVIEW)
The Unspeakable Podcast
This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In...
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70 Million Songs: The Catastrophe Hour Book Club Week 7
The Unspeakable Podcast
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 23, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fifth essay of the collection, Playlist of Tears. The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET. The book club is for yearly paid Substack subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription at . About The Catastrophe Hour "One of our most important essayists . . . The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that...
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Do Women Owe Men An Apology? with Dr. Carole Hooven
The Unspeakable Podcast
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, , Carole recounts how a media...
info_outlineThis is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers.
We also discuss John’s long-running conversations with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show and how their divergent views on the Trump phenomenon have changed (and also not changed) the dynamics of their discussions. (Listen to my 2024 interview with Glenn Loury here.) John reflects on Glenn’s 2024 memoir and explains why he would be reluctant to expand the personal writing in his columns into an entire book. Finally, we talk about the definition of a public intellectual and why so many people with microphones count themselves as such. Would a legendary public intellectual like Susan Sontag have adapted to the YouTube era? What John has to say might surprise you.
John McWhorter is one of several speakers featured at the Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas rereat in New York City October 11-12, 2025. Find out more at https://theunspeakeasy.com/nyc
GUEST BIO
John McWhorter writes a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and the author or more than 20 books, most recently Pronoun Trouble, Nine Nasty Words, and Woke Racism.
HOUSEKEEPING
Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.
Join the listener and reader community by subscribing to my Substack at theunspeakablepodcast.com. 
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