Meghan interviews housing market analyst Melody Wright about why purchasing a home has reached historic levels of unaffordability. A rising star on YouTube, Melody was on the front lines of the mortgage implosion during the Great Financial Crisis and has devoted the last few years to scratching beneath the surface of the affordability crisis in housing. Though low inventory remains a problem in many regions, you might be surprised to learn that in many parts of the country, new construction has saturated the marketplace and countless homes are sitting empty. Melody talks about how this happened, why the media doesn’t report more on it, and where she sees similarities to the run-up to the housing market crash in 2008. Plus, fun fact: did you know that the word mortgage is derived from the very old French legal term “death pledge?”

ABOUT THE GUEST

Follow Melody on Substack.

Melody on YouTube.

Follow her on X.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

HOUSEKEEPING

✈️ We have new retreats for 2025. See where we'll be!

✏️ Take a memoir writing course with me (or another awesome course!) Learn more here.

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

Writer, performer, and Gen-X legend Moon Unit Zappa joins Meghan for a conversation about her new memoir Earth To Moon. She talks about being the eldest child of iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa, growing up in the chaos of the 1970s and 80s rock-and-roll scene, the cultural phenomenon of the hit single Valley Girl, fissures within the Zappa family, and forging a life and career in the today’s creative economy.

GUEST BIO

Moon Unit Zappa was born in 1967 to legendary musician Frank Vincent Zappa and his second wife, Gail Zappa. At the age of 14, she appeared in Frank Zappa’s career-defining song, “Valley Girl,” which later helped jump-start Moon’s career. Since then, Moon has firmly established herself as a writer, actress, comedian, artist, podcaster, and tea merchant.

Buy the book.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

HOUSEKEEPING

✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: New ones will be announced soon. See where we'll be!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

This is a PREVIEW of a PREMIUM episode for paying subscribers, Meghan welcomes back writer and physician Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care specialist who writes with exquisite care and candor about end-of-life issues. Sunita was on the podcast a little over a year ago talking about the hidden harms of CPR, which she wrote about for The New Yorker. She’s back to discuss two articles she published this summer. One in The Atlantic about how doctors deal with terminal illness in younger patients and another in The Wall Street Journal about dying at home. We’ve been taught to assume that a good death means dying at home, or at least not in a hospital, but Sunita points out that this can be better in theory than in practice. This is another extraordinary conversation with one of listeners’ favorite guests.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Sunita Puri is a palliative care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a literary memoir recounting her journey to the practice of palliative care and what it means to help people find dignity, purpose, and comfort when facing serious illnesses and the end of life. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles times, Tricycle, The Wall Street Journal and Slate. This fall, she is joining the UC Irvine Medical Center faculty as the director of the inpatient palliative care service and associate professor of medicine. She was recently awarded a one-month Bogliasco fellowship for exceptional artists and has received writing residencies from Yaddo and MacDowell, among other places.

The Atlantic, The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennial Deaths

The Wall Street Journal, Most People Are Dying At Home. Is That A Good Thing?

Sunita’s previous interview on The Unspeakable.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

HOUSEKEEPING

✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: New ones will be announced soon. See where we'll be!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

The Unspeakable is moving to video! Here’s the scoop, in case you missed it.

The Unspeakable’s debut video guest is one of Meghan’s favorite people to talk with about our confounding political times: journalist and podcaster Tara Henley. Since visiting the pod back in early 2023, Tara’s podcast and Substack newsletter Lean Out has become a major force in the heterodox space. She is one of the finest interviewers and sharpest thinkers working today.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Meghan and Tara talk about how to avoid the phenomenon of audience capture, how to think about J.D. Vance, how to find the joy (or at least the fun memes) in Kamala Harris, and what’s behind the mating crisis, the masculinity crisis, the economic crisis, and any number of other crises (not necessarily in that order).

This conversation was recorded on August 15, 2024. The video will appear on The Unspeakable’s YouTube channel soon.

Tara will be a guest speaker at the October 21-24 Unspeakeasy retreat in Woodstock, NY. There still may be spots left. Find out more here.

Follow Tara on Substack.

GUEST BIO

Tara Henley is a Canadian journalist and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Her 22-year career spans TV, radio, online media, magazines, and newspapers. She has worked as a producer on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight and on current affairs morning and afternoon shows at CBC Radio, in both Vancouver and Toronto. Henley's CBC radio documentary "39" was a finalist at the New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards. A former books columnist for The Toronto Star, and for Metro Morning, Toronto's top morning radio show, Henley is a contributor to the books section of The Globe and Mail. Her writing has appeared in outlets across Canada and around the world, and she now publishes a popular current affairs Substack newsletter, Lean Out. Her weekly interview podcast of the same name has listeners in more than 150 countries and 5,000 cities worldwide.

HOUSEKEEPING

📺 Watch episodes on my YouTube Channel here.

✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: New ones will be announced soon. See where we'll be!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

This week, something a little different: Meghan is the interview subject! In a special end-of-summer episode, The Unspeakable pairs up with Michael Callahan and his podcast Where We Go Next. In a conversation that Michael posted earlier this month, he and Meghan talk about how to avoid audience capture in the “heterodox space,”  how the term “community” got tacked onto nearly everything, and how the concept of the “literary citizen” replaced the role of the working writer or even public intellectual. They vent their shared frustration with the marketing demands of algorithms, particularly the YouTube algorithm and its clickbait thumbnail images, and wonder whether Meghan’s Reddit haters are correct that she’s really just a conservative cosplaying as an old-school liberal. Finally, Meghan discusses the origins and current iteration of The Unspeakeasy and Michael reminds her that in her first visit to his podcast, back in July 2021, she declared that she would never launch a freethought community — oops!

Original Where We Go Next episode

I Wasn’t Canceled. I Was Problematized.

Who Killed Creative Writing?

Was Alice Munro An Art Monster?

Michael Callahan is an award-winning commercial director and the host of Where We Go Next, where he has deep-dive conversations with accomplished people doing fascinating things. He enjoys vacationing in the Pacific Northwest, hanging out with his awesome wife, and taking far too many photos of their 3 dogs.

Instagram: @wwgnpodcast

Follow WWGN on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts or Audible.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: 2025 retreats will be announced soon. Last call for our October retreat in Woodstock, NY!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

In the latest installment of Casual August, writer and educator Larissa Phillips joins the pod to respond to the August 2 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis, who theorized that childless cat ladies were secretly happier than moms, especially moms raising young children while caring for aging parents. Larissa related to much of what Vanessa said, but she had several things to add, including her later-in-life recognition that early motherhood makes more sense than later-in-life motherhood — and, what’s more, single motherhood might not be as cool and easy as 1980s media made it out to be.

A GenXer who grew up steeped in second-wave feminism, Larissa now advises her 20-something daughter to marry and start a family early, which is pretty much the opposite of what her own mom advised. In this conversation, Larissa (who was a guest on A Special Place In Hell back in March) explores how her thinking evolved, why her friends were shocked when she got pregnant at 29 (practically a teen mom!), how divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s made an entire generation wary of the nuclear family, and why she invokes Jordan Peterson when she explains to her daughter that being “high value” has a lot to do with being young. She and Meghan also wrestle with whether the hyper-professional, hyper-independent feminist ethos internalized by Gen Xers and millennials will end up being something of a blip in time in the history of civilization.

Larissa also talks about joining The Unspeakeasy at its upcoming retreat in Woodstock, NY this October.

GUEST BIO

Larissa Phillips is the founder and director of the Volunteer Literacy Project, a NPO that teaches reading to adults using a phonics-based curriculum. She also runs an educational program on her family farm in Upstate New York. She can be found on X (@larissaphillip) and Instagram (@honeyhollowfarmstay) and Substack, where she writes about farming, animals, and life as a lapsed Progressive living in Trumpland.

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

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com

“While some might argue that collaboration with fascists, TERFs, and racist edgelords does not constitute endorsement of violent and anti-liberation views, we disagree. There can be no innocent collaboration with such people.”

That was the official statement from Hiding Press, the small, independent poetry press that was set to publish writer Emmalea Russo’s fourth book of poetry. But when word got out that she had been “collaborating” with the wrong people, they canceled the book.  By collaborations, they meant writing for certain journals and appearing as a guest on certain podcasts. By alt-right or fascist-adjacent they were talking about magazines like Compact, a publication that, according to its mission statement, “seeks a new political center devoted to the common good.”

In this conversation, Emmalea talks about the “chain of contamination” that causes panic and public disassociation with anyone even remotely associated with someone designated as “bad.” She also discusses her forthcoming novel, Vivienne, which is about a septuagenarian artist who’s canceled online over rumor and innuendo.

GUEST BIO

Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first novel, Vivienne, is forthcoming in September.

Read her piece in Compact Magazine, Purity Policing Is Poison To Poetry.

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

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com

Meghan, a childless dog lady, had a whole other episode cued up for this week when her friend Vanessa Grigoriadis called her with a surprising observation. According to Vanessa, moms today are so stressed out (even miserable) that childless women are getting the last laugh. This is especially true for women in midlife who started families in their late 30s to early 40s and are now saddled with elder care for aging parents while also having school-aged children. Does she have a point?

In this conversation, Meghan gloats over her utterly carefree lifestyle while Vanessa lays out what the public discourse around J.D. Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment is getting wrong. An award winning magazine journalist who has done deeply reported features on subjects like the NXIVM cult and whose countless celebrity profiles have included Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift, Vanessa also talks about charting a new professional path (podcasts, naturally) in an economy that’s quickly becoming oversaturated.

GUEST BIO

Vanessa Grigoriadis is a veteran longform journalist and a co-founder of Campside Media. She is the co-creator of the Chameleon and Fallen Angel podcasts, and hosted New York Magazine’s Tabloid series on Ivanka Trump. She is a National Magazine Award winner, and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Her book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, was published in 2017.

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

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com

This is a premium episode with Jamie Reed.This episode is available to paid listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Jamie will be in The Unspeakeasy as part of our Unspeakers Series on Aug. 7, 2024. Apply to join The Unspeakeasy now if you want the chance to meet her in a private, off-the-record hangout.

“What is happening to scores of children . . . is morally and medically appalling.” Those were the words of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a gender clinic in a major American children’s hospital, when she burst on the scene via a Free Press article in February 2023. Since then, she has become known as the most prominent whistleblower in the effort to put the brakes on medicalized gender transition for kids.

In this conversation, Jamie talks about what the last year and a half has been like for her, what the public still needs to understand about this issue,  and why doctors and other medical providers are continuing to misrepresent their treatment protocols. She discusses how institutions serving the most vulnerable kids, including foster care systems (where large numbers of kids now identify as trans), have adopted affirmative care models and explains what it’s like to

Testify before state legislatures about restricting access to non-evidence-based gender-affirming care. As a self-described “queer woman who’s married to a transgender person and is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” it’s the last thing she ever thought she’d be doing. Now it’s her life’s work.

GUEST BIO

Jamie Reed is one of the first public whistleblowers from a pediatric gender clinic in the United States and is now the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the LGBT Courage Coalition, an American-based non-profit of LGBT adults seeking to reform youth gender medicine. She has spoken at numerous conferences including Genspect: The Bigger Picture in Colorado, at the International Perspectives on Evidence- Based Treatment for Gender-Dysphoric Youth in New York, and Psychotherapeutic Process with Young People Experiencing Gender Dysphoria in Tampere, Finland.

Jamie is a gay woman and foster and adoptive parent of five boys. She holds a Master of Science in Clinical Research from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology.

Read the original story in The Free Press 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

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com

Between 2013 and 2020, hundreds of people who worked in the entertainment industry—from actors and writers to photographers, makeup artists, and security personnel—were targeted by brilliant and bizarre scammer who came to be known as the Con Queen of Hollywood. The Con Queen impersonated famous female studio executives and convinced many of her marks to spend huge sums of money—often on trips to Indonesia—under the pretext of doing research for film projects that would be their big break.

Journalist Scott Johnson covered the case for The Hollywood Reporter, eventually reporting that the Con Queen was actually a man named Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, a genius impersonator who was also trying to make it as an Instagram food influencer. Scott’s book about the case, The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius, was published last year and a three-part documentary series based on his book premiered on Apple TV this past May. Scott joined me for a conversation about his years reporting the case and how he finally tracked Hargobind down in England in the early months of the Covid pandemic. He also talks about how reporting from wars and being the son of a CIA officer informed his reporting.

GUEST BIO

Scott C. Johnson is the author of two highly acclaimed books. The Wolf and the Watchman (W.W. Norton, 2013) was long-listed for the National Book Award, the PEN USA award and was named a Washington Post Notable Book. His second book, The Hollywood Con Queen (Harper, 2023) was given a starred review by Publisher’s Weekly and selected as an Amazon editor’s pick.  Scott was a consulting producer of Hollywood Con Queen, a 3-part documentary series to air on Apple TV+ in the spring of 2024. He now lives in France with his wife and two children.

Buy the book

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

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com