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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Meghan's guest this week is journalist Michael Powell, a staff writer at The Atlantic and longtime former New York Times reporter whom she has admired for years for his willingness to report on thorny, third-rail cultural topics. She talked with him about his recent reporting on chronic street homelessness, drug addiction, and the real-world consequences of progressive governance. Specifically,…
Meghan's guest this week is Evan Barker, a former progressive operative, fundraising strategist, and author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Meghan was eager to sit down with Evan after following her journey from a working-class Midwestern Obama campaign volunteer to a high-powered consultant who ultimately grew disillusioned with the modern Democratic machine. Together,…
After a decade of ideological conformity, is American theater ready to laugh at itself again? This week Meghan is joined by Broadway star, comedian, and producer PJ Adzima , founder of Stage Time NYC and producer of Slam Frank —a mind-melting new musical that reimagines The Diary of Anne Frank through "an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, Afro-Latin hip-hop lens." (You read that right.)…
This (almost) Fourth of July conversation originally appeared on Jenny Holland's channel, Saving Culture From Itself , but it's really a "collab," as they say in the pod-biz. Meghan has talked with Jenny before on YouTube livestreams, but this is the first time they've done an official podcast together. This conversation kept circling back to the kinds of tripwires and trigger points that cause…
Meghan's guest this week is Lisa Marchiano —Jungian analyst, author, and co-host of the popular podcast This Jungian Life . She's long been intrigued by Carl Jung's ideas but also found them somewhat elusive. So she asked Lisa to help me understand why Jung resonates so deeply with so many people and why his work feels especially relevant today. They discuss archetypes, the shadow, synchronicity,…
Mark Oppenheimer spent decades thinking about Judy Blume before finally writing her biography — and the result is a book that is a serious inquiry into Blume's books, her personal story, and social and cultural dynamics of the 80-plus years in which she has lived. In this conversation, we talk about what it meant to be a boy who loved Judy Blume, why realist fiction for young people has largely…
Adam Miller is one of more than a dozen candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles, but unlike some of his rivals, he comes from the worlds of tech and nonprofit management rather than politics. Miller founded the e-learning company Cornerstone and the homelessness prevention nonprofit Better Angels, and says he entered the race because he believes the city's failures — especially around…
Writer and cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy joins Meghan to discuss her new book, The Last Straight Woman, an exploration of how heterosexual women became suspect — if not pitifully uncool — in progressive culture. They talk about everything from Tumblr-era feminism and the post-#MeToo recalibration of gender politics to the television series Sex and the City and Girls, "photogenic feminism,"…
Meghan's guest is Spencer Pratt, candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Yes, that Spencer Pratt — the producer-crafted villain from The Hills who later blew a fortune on moldavite crystals and Birkin bags before settling into a quieter life raising a family in Pacific Palisades. That house burned down in the Palisades Fire in January 2025, and what followed was a political awakening that has put him in…
Meghan's guest this week is British journalist and author Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy. Brendan talks about what he sees as a growing "vibe shift" away from elite consensus and toward something like common sense—though not without its own distortions. He and Meghan discuss the UK's role in pushing…
Hadley Freeman is a U.K.-based journalist, Sunday Times columnist, and the author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia . She joins the podcast this week to discuss what she calls the "thinness arms race" in the era of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. She and Meghan talk about why extreme thinness is once again being rewarded—if not demanded—of female celebrities, how the current aesthetic differs…
