Time Magazine columnist for 20 years, Joel Stein is known for his humorous, irreverent and often deadpan inquiries into American life and social politics. His latest book is In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book, which despite the subtitle, is a serious minded, though also quite funny, journey through the parts of America that, in the wake of the Trump election, Joel realized he didn't understand at all. Joel talks with Meghan about the people he met, what surprised him the most, and explains the distinction between what he calls the Intellectual Elite and the Boat Elite. He also shows his age during the interview by receiving a phone call on his "landline" and having the call picked up by a device called an "answering machine."      Guest Bio: Joel Stein's latest book, In Defense of Elitism, is out in paperback this month. He is also the author of Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. In addition to Time Magazine, he has been a columnist at Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angles Times. Joel has taught at Princeton as well as written for several television sitcoms.

How To Be A Better Person (Than Everyone Else): Joel Stein On The Lost Art Of Elitism

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.

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Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Nellie Bowles. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. You may know Nellie Bowles from TGIF, her popular news roundup in The Free Press. Before that, she reported on Silicon Valley for The New York Times. Now she’s out with her first book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History. Filled with keenly observed details about the cultural and political battles of the last couple of years, it’s also an honest appraisal of her own political evolution. A self-described “lesbian from San Francisco lesbian who held all the values associated with that,” Nellie is now among those considered non-grata by progressives—her marriage to Bari Weiss would attest to that—and in this conversation, she talks about coming to terms with that as well as her reporting on everything from Antifa militants to the incel movement. She also talks about her own past life as a member of the progressive purity police. GUEST BIO Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife to build The Free Press, a new media company. Get a copy of her book here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted: Nellie Bowles reports from the morning after.

This week’s guest is economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury. Glenn is almost certainly no stranger to Unspeakable listeners, many of whom know him from his long-running podcast The Glenn Show. In addition to opining there about political and social issues, Glenn is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. He grew up on the south side of Chicago and eventually became the first black professor of economics at Harvard and a prominent conservative thinker and policy expert. The Glenn Show debuted in 2012, and Glenn’s conversations about race with linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter were foundational to the emergence of the independent media sphere sometimes called the “heterodoxy” (at least they were Meghan’s gateway drug). Glenn has published numerous books, but his latest, a memoir, is a major departure. Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is not just an account of his professional trajectory but also an unflinching interrogation of his personal choices. This interview is stunningly candid and also utterly delightful. Meghan is grateful to Glenn for his honesty, deep insight, and great humor. GUEST BIO Glenn Loury is a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University. His new book Late Admissions: Confessions of A Black Conservative is out May 14. You can find him on Substack here. Pre-order or purchase Glenn’s book  here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 

The Many Lives of Glenn Loury

This episode is with one of our guest speakers at The Unspeakeasy retreat in Chicago. If you’re interested in going, learn more here. This week Meghan welcomes returning guest Erec Smith. He is an academic whose area of scholarship is Rhetoric, but he also writes and speaks frequently about the state of race politics in America, particularly the perils (and uses) of DEI. In this conversation, they talk about the concept of prescriptive racism, which Erec wrote about in a recent Boston Globe  column, and ask whether the emergence of the concept of microaggressions has resulted mainly in people steering clear of one another. They also discuss what’s happened on college campuses since Erec was on the  podcast a year ago, including the ouster of college presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and U Penn’s Liz Magill over free speech policies. He also discusses what he was like as a college student carrying around a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and how he would have felt if he’d been told that he was living under the thumb of white supremacy. Erec will be a guest speaker at the first-ever Unspeakeasy coed retreat in Chicago on June 4-5. We’ll also be joined by recent Unspeakable guests  Nadine Strossen and  Lisa Selin Davis. To find out about that go to theunspeakeasy.com.) Make sure you listen all the way to the end, so you can hear an excerpt from Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist from the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q. (Probably not coming to a high school theater near you.) GUEST BIO Erec Smith is a professor of rhetoric at York College of PA, a research scholar at the Cato Insitute, and a co-founder and an editor at Free Black Thought. Read Erec’s recent Boston Globe column on prescriptive racism. Listen to the last time he was on the podcast. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 

The "Right Kind" of Black Person: Erec Smith on prescriptive racism.

This interview with Benjamin Ryan is a BONUS episode for paying subscribers only. The first few minutes of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. On April 10th, a big story broke in the gender world: The long-awaited report commissioned by the UK's National Health Service, known as the Cass Review, was released. As soon as the report hit the news cycle, gender-critical activists celebrated it as the final nail in the coffin of harmful practices, while trans-rights activists accused it of faulty methodology. So who was right? This week, I spoke with Benjamin Ryan, a health and science reporter, to help unpack the Cass Review's data. Ben has spent years covering the intersection of health and public policy. He has a remarkably clear head and is a disciplined thinker about the youth gender medicine debate, so he is a great person to explain what is and is not in the Cass Review. GUEST BIO Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist who focuses on health care and science. He contributes to several major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and NBC News. He has a particular interest in public health, medicine, and psychology, and has spent years reporting on HIV. His work has received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, including the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award. Benjamin is a cancer survivor and enjoys reading, theatre, movies, biking, cooking, and photography in his spare time. Follow him on Twitter here. Follow his Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n 

Gender, Data & What the Cass Review *Doesn’t* Say: Journalist Ben Ryan examines the evidence — or lack thereof — for youth gender transition.

This week, Meghan talks with legal scholar, former law professor, and legendary free speech advocate Nadine Strossen. Nadine was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and she’s the author of many books, including Defending Pornography, which has just been reissued nearly 30 years after its original publication. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nadine talks about pornography, campus speech codes, generational divides when it comes to ideas about words causing harm, and changes in institutions like the ACLU. This week, almost the entire conversation is available to everyone, but paying Substack subscribers get a fascinating and very funny tangent at the end about a subject (mostly) unrelated to free speech: the subject of choosing not to have children. Nadine always knew she never wanted kids and she talks candidly about what was behind that impulse and how she feels about it now that she’s in her 70s. GUEST BIO Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen also serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that promote free speech and academic freedom. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING ✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we'll be in 2024! 

How To Be A Better Person (Than Everyone Else): Joel Stein On The Lost Art Of Elitism

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