The Unspeakable Podcast
Author, essayist and journalist Meghan Daum has spent decades giving voice—and bringing nuance, humor and surprising perspectives—to things that lots of people are thinking but are afraid to say out loud. Now, she brings her observations to the realm of conversation. In candid, free-ranging interviews, Meghan talks with artists, entertainers, journalists, scientists, scholars, and anyone else who’s willing to do the “unspeakable” and question prevailing cultural and moral assumptions.
Episodes
This is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers.
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,...
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 ...
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 discus...
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...
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 discus...
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 www.theunspeakablepodcast.
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 Unspeakeas...
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16, 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 www.theunspeakablepodcast.
In 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 ...
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 9, 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 www.theunspeakablepodcast.
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, July 2, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the fourth essay of the collection, Species Of Grief.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET, beginning June 11. The book club is for yearly paid subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription.
Species Of Grief was written in May of 2019 and appeared as one of...
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, June 25, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the third essay of the collection, Basically Dead.
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 www.theunspeakablepodcast.com.
How to Join The Book Club
Yearly subscriber...
In his new memoir, An Exercise In Uncertainty, journalist and editor Jonathan Gluck chronicles more than 20 years of living with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. He joined me to talk about how he’s coped with illness, why he chose this moment to write about it, and, most importantly, how he’s learned to deal with a condition all of us face to one degree or another: uncertainty.
Jon explains the concept of “prede...
The next meeting of The Catastrophe Hour Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, June 18, at 3:00 p.m. ET. We will discuss the second essay of the collection, Same Life, Higher Rent.
The book club meets for 14 consecutive Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. ET, beginning June 11. The book club is for yearly paid subscribers only, so if you want to join, please upgrade your subscription.
This week I’m joined by Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of beloved author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser’s latest book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust In The Time Of Serial Killers, is a notable departure from the world of sunbonnets and covered wagons. This time, she explores the proliferation of serial killers—figures like the Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway, I-5 killer Randall Woodf...
The Catastrophe Hour Book Club begins June 11 with a discussion of the first essay in the book, The Broken-In World, an examination of divorce, loss, and finding unexpected peace and camaraderie in a world that “can no longer support pretense.”
The book club runs for 14 consecutive Wednesdays from 3-4 p.m. ET. We will discuss one essay per week
To learn more about the book club and join, visit https://www.
Alma Deutscher, often described as a modern-day Mozart, was a prodigy whose early accomplishments include composing a piano sonata at age six, a short opera at seven, a violin concerto at nine, and her first full-length opera at ten. At twelve, she was profiled on 60 Minutes, and in 2021 began conducting studies in Vienna with Johannes Wildner.
Now 20, Alma has just written her first ballet score—a collaboration with Lincoln Jones,...
This week, I share an essay from The Catastrophe Hour. There’s no audiobook available (yet), so I offer this reading of the final essay in the collection, The End Of The Personal. It’s a meditation on first-person writing in a world that seems to have overdosed on oversharing.
The era of the personal is over. The writer sees this now. One day, she just gets it. Everything is personal so nothing is personal. The erosion has been a l...
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GUEST BIO
Peter Moskos teaches in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York C...
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