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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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We hear all the time that children are resilient — and should be even more so! But do divorcing parents overestimate their kids' resilience to justify their actions? Should "staying together for the children" come back into style? Returning guest Bridget Phetasy talks about her recent article for The Spectator about an aspect of divorce that rarely gets discussed: the ripple effects over decades as adult children and grandchildren are spread thin among multiple families and step-families. Bridget's parents, who had five children under 12 when they divorced, followed the logic that parental happiness is better for children than "staying together for the kids." But is that really true? Bridget's essay kicked off a huge conversation online and touched a lot of nerves (and ruffled a lot of feathers) and she and Meghan continue that conversation here.

They also talk about their shared desire to quit the content creator hustle and move to the woods. Also, Bridget apologizes to Meghan for a microaggression that's been haunting her, even though Meghan has no memory of it.

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Bridget Phetasy is a Spectator columnist and contributing editor. She is also the host of the Weekly Dumpster Fire on YouTube and the Walk-Ins Welcome podcast. Follow her on Twitter, Rumble and YouTube, or join her community at phetasy.com.

You can read her article for The Spectator here: https://bit.ly/465I5yv

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Jennifer Sey has been an elite gymnast, a high level marketing executive at Levi's, and an outspoken critic of protracted school closures during the Covid pandemic. That last role led her to become a prominent figure in the new free speech movement, and she fulfilled that role by writing a book and starting a Substack about her conscription into the culture wars. But her real skills are as a business person, so she decided to apply those skills and start a retail brand. XX-XY Athletics, which launched in late March, is an apparel line that sells athletic clothing for men and women but is branded around the idea of standing up for women's sports

Given the fraught politics around this issue, XX-XY may be the first "gender critical" retail business. But does it make sense to build a brand around a culture war issue? In this wide-ranging conversation, Jennifer talks about the legacy of corporate virtue signaling, the inner turmoil of wealthy executives who want to look like progressives, her attempts to get another job after being designated as problematic, and the day to day tasks of building a business. She also explains how HR departments gained massive power in corporations and why executives are so afraid of their young staffers.

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Jennifer Sey is a corporate marketing executive turned author, activist, documentary filmmaker (we didn't even talk about that) and now the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.

You can find her on her Substack here.

Check out XX-XY here.

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