This week, I’m talking with author Sloane Crosley. Best known for her humorous and existentially probing essays, Sloane’s latest book is a departure of sorts. Grief Is For People, a memoir, covers the year in her life following the death of Russell Perreault, a veteran of book publishing who’d been her boss before becoming her closest friend. A month before Russell’s death, Sloane’s apartment was burglarized by a jewel thief, turning her into an amateur detective as she attempted to retrieve family heirlooms while reckoning with loss across several dimensions. Sloane worked as a book publicist ..read more

This week’s guest is journalist Abigail Shrier. In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, she delves into why so many children, teens, and young adults have received mental health diagnoses over the last few decades. Is it because society is finally recognizing emotional suffering? Or is it because society has become irrationally fixated on the idea of suffering? Abigail says it’s the latter, and in this conversation, she talks about how mediocre clinicians, flawed research, overzealous prescribing of medications, and, above all, a cultural obsession with trauma and emotion ..read more

If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there’s a good chance you were assigned Sherman’s classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school. The book is semi-autobiographical. Sherman grew up on that reservation in the 1970s and 80s and is a member of the Spokane Tribe. He is also arguably — or perhaps inarguably — the most significant native American writer of the ..read more

On podcasts devoted to free speech and so-called heterodox discourse, the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind is probably mentioned more frequently than any other. Written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar and Greg Lukianoff, who now heads the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it is effectively the bible of the Heterodox crowd. And now it’s a movie. My guests are husband and wife filmmaking team Ted Balaker, who directed the film, and Courtney Moorehead Balaker, who produced it. In this conversation, they discuss how they took a book about id ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Alex Byrne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Philosopher Alex Byrne spent most of his career innocently studying subjects like epistemology and metaphysics. But a few years ago, he became interested in — wait for it —  gender, and he became a “dissident” scholar just for exploring foundational questions. His book Trouble with Gender, covers a lot of ground. But above all, it wrestles with the linguistic confusion of gender. What does the word ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Katherine Dee. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Katherine Dee is a writer, cultural commentator, and a phenomenally astute observer of online culture. If you want to understand the rise of the “tradcels,” the “girl boss” trope (and subsequent backlash), and how identity concepts like “otherkin” become connected to social justice politics, Katherine is the one to explain it. In this conversation, she talks with Meghan about how ideas on places like ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Rob Henderson. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. If you listen to this podcast and others like it, you may have heard of the concept of luxury beliefs. It was coined by this week’s guest Rob Henderson. Rob holds a PhD in psychology, has written for lots of media outlets, and writes a popular Sustack newsletter about social issues and how they relate to class dynamics, economic forces, and personal psychology. He also has a brand new book, Troubled ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Lori Gottlieb. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb visited The Unspeakable in 2021 to talk about her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. She returns for a Valentine’s Day episode about finding love, staying in love, and what to make of all the social scientists constantly going on about how marriage and family are essential for mental, physical and even economic well-being. To that, Lori says ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with John Vervaeke and Shawn Coyne. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Meghan has been threatening to do an episode on artificial intelligence, and finally she makes good. This week, she welcomes two guests: the philosopher, neuroscientist, and popular YouTuber John Vervaeke and the editor and publishing entrepreneur Shawn Coyne. They have collaborated on Mentoring The Machines,  a series of short books–technically, it’s one book in four parts–about ..read more

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Kathrine Brodsky. The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here. Cultural critic Katherine Brodsky is an example of what Meghan likes to call “Heterodoxy 2.0.” She’s committed to fighting censorship and groupthink but is also mindful of not becoming an ideologue herself. Born in the Soviet Union, she emigrated with her family to Israel and then Canada and is acutely sensitive to signs of creeping authoritarianism. She now lives in Vancouver and writes about a v ..read more