For most of her career, University of Sussex Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Stock was known primarily as a scholar on philosophical questions related to fiction and the concept of imagination. But in 2018, she began to speak and write about the issue of gender identity. Among her questions were why her philosophy colleagues were so reluctant to discuss something so seemingly ripe for the kind of inquiry philosophers live for. The backlash came swiftly but so did tacit messages of support and over time Kathleen has become a leading voice on gender identity theory, policy reform, and their effects on women and girls. Kathleen spoke with Meghan about this unexpected turn in her career and also the various tensions between recognizing the rights of transgender people and recognizing certain material facts. She also explained the difference between sex and gender, which, despite the ubiquity of those terms, many people remain confused about.   Guest bio:  Kathleen Stock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex in England. Her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism was just published by Little Brown in the U.K. and is available everywhere on Kindle. The U.S. edition will be published on September 21, 2021.

Why Can’t Philosophers Talk About Gender? Kathleen Stock On How A Rich Topic Became The Third Rail

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 Andrew Boryga. The first portion of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Who says you can’t write a novel skewing social justice excesses? Andrew Boryga has done just that — to critical acclaim. His debut novel VICTIM tells the story of Javier Perez, an academically gifted kid from The Bronx who lands at an elite college and soon discovers the advantages of playing up his disadvantages. In this conversation, Andrew talks about the decade-long process of writing the book, his similarities to Javier, and how he feels about contemporary fiction and the literary world these days. He also discusses what it was like to shop the book to publishers and explores the question of whether a white author could get away with this kind of satire. GUEST BIO Andrew Boryga is a writer and editor who grew up in Bronx, NY and currently likes in Miami with his wife and two children. His debut novel VICTIM, was published in March by Doubleday. Buy VICTIM 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 

How Victimhood Can Work For You! Andrew Boryga on his novel VICTIM.

Is college pointless? Is an “elite education” more about networking than learning? Returning guest William Deresiewicz has been pondering these questions for more than a decade. They were the subject of his bestselling 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. That book has just been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition and in this episode, William talks with Meghan about what’s changed (i.e. what’s gotten worse) and what, if anything, can be done to make things better. They also discuss whether we need affirmative action for men, whether it’s better to get a job waiting tables than go to college right after high school, and whether childless people have any standing to talk—or even care—about this stuff in the first place. GUEST BIO William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which will be published in a 10th-anniversary edition in May 2024. His latest book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. Find his other conversations with Meghan  here,  here, and 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 

Is Working At Denny’s Better Than Going To College? William Deresiewicz on the zombie apocalypse of elite education.

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 

Why Can’t Philosophers Talk About Gender? Kathleen Stock On How A Rich Topic Became The Third Rail

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