The Unspeakable Podcast Meghan Daum

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
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

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
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women:https://bit.ly/44dnw0v
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: aspecialplace.substack.com

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!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week, author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis returns for her third visit to The Unspeakable. Lisa is best known to listeners for her thorough and rigorous reporting on the new gender movement and her probing insights into how ideas around gender nonconformity have shifted over time.
But she has a new book out about something completely (or at least mostly) different: the concept of the housewife. In Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead, Lisa traces the social history of the housewife, examines the evolutionary and economic roots of housewifery, and wrestles with why the iconic 50s housewife has such a strong hold on the public consciousness despite not lasting all that long. In this conversation, she discusses what she learned in the course of her reporting, shares her own conflicting feelings about being a wife and mother, and talks about the rise of the “trad wife influencer.” Can Instagramming everything from your home birth to your home school be interpreted through a feminist lens? Lisa says yes!
In the second part of the conversation, for paying subscribers, Lisa returns to form and talks about gender, which is the subject of her next book.
GUEST BIO
Lisa Selin Davis’s new book is Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead. She is also the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History & Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
Follow her writing on her Substack, Broadview.
You can pick up a copy of Housewife here.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

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 for many years before being an author herself, and in this conversation, she talks about how office culture has changed over the last decade, especially in the wake of #MeToo, and what it was like to work with famous authors like Joan Didion and Sandra Cisneros in the final glory days of publishing. Meghan and Sloane also explore the phenomenon of collective grief over animals that become symbols of something much larger: for instance, the response to the death a few months ago of Flaco, the Eurasian owl that got out of a zoo enclosure and flew around upper Manhattan for more than a year, captivating not just the New Yorkers who saw him in real life but people all over the world following his whereabouts on social media.
GUEST BIO
Sloane Crosley is the author of two novels and three essay collections, including the bestsellers I Was Told They’re Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number? Her new book is the memoir Grief Is For People. She lives in New York City.
You can buy her new book here.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

This week, Meghan welcomes Arielle Isaac Norman, an Austin-based comedian who has opened for Louie C.K., Bobcat Goldthwait, Tim Dillon, Joe DeRosa, Eddie Pepitone and Maria Bamford, among others. Arielle, who describes herself as a “politically non-binary lesbian,” has a new YouTube special, Ellen DeGenderless, in which she discusses gender identity, sexuality, pronouns, social issues, and pop culture. This conversation covers all of those topics and more — including Arielle’s friendship with Louis CK and her thoughts about his sexual behaviors and resulting cancelation.
GUEST BIO
Arielle Isaac Norman is an Austin-based comedian. Her new special, Ellen Degenderless, is now streaming on YouTube. Find her on Instagram at @ellendegenderless and on YouTube or Spotify at Politically Non-binary.
Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.
HOUSEKEEPING
✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we’re going to be in 2024!
🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.
🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.