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The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

By: Meghan Daum
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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.2021 Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Better Living Through Dying, with Annabelle Gurwitch

    Better Living Through Dying, with Annabelle Gurwitch
    Mar 16 2026

    This week Meghan is joined by actor, humorist, and six-time author Annabelle Gurwitch, who returns to the podcast to discuss her new memoir, The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker.

    Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer during COVID, entirely out of the blue, after what she assumed was a meaningless cough. Five years later, she remains an outlier on a targeted therapy that has kept her stable. In this conversation, Annabelle talks about how she has resisted the sentimental clichés surrounding illness, why she rejects the idea that cancer is a "battle," and how humor, contrarianism, and facing "the shipwreck of the soul" have shaped the way she lives now.

    Guest Bio:

    Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and New York Times bestselling author of six books and two-time finalist for the Thurber Prize.

    Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Hadassah Magazine, among other publications. Her six books include the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort.

    Annabelle co-hosted the fan favorite Dinner & a Movie on TBS, was a regular commentator for NPR. She is serving in leadership as a patient advocate with the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • It's the Drugs: Sam Quinones on Street Homelessness

    It's the Drugs: Sam Quinones on Street Homelessness
    Mar 2 2026
    Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we're often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life.
    Sam explains how today's meth is fundamentally different from the "tweaker" era of the 1990s and early 2000s: cheaper, purer, more abundant, and more destabilizing. Known as P2P meth, this new form was perfectly suited to mass industrial production and reshaped street homelessness across the country, including places that historically had little visible homelessness at all.

    They also talk about the limitations of a single-cause narrative ("it's all housing costs"), the realities of Housing First, and why many recovery stories begin not with compassion-as-policy, but with the unpopular intervention that removes access to drugs: arrest and incarceration. And then for something completely different . . . Sam talks about his delightfully unexpected new book, The Perfect Tuba, and why band, discipline, and collective effort may offer a strange but persuasive antidote to a culture increasingly engineered for addiction.
    Guest Bio:
    Sam Quinones is an investigative journalist and bestselling author whose work focuses on addiction, drug trafficking, and social breakdown in the United States. He is the author of Dreamland, which examined the origins of the opioid epidemic, and The Least of Us, about fentanyl, methamphetamine, and the transformation of American street life. His latest book, The Perfect Tuba, explores community, discipline, and fulfillment through the unlikely world of band and brass instruments. He writes the Dreamland newsletter on Substack and hosts a podcast on addiction, recovery, and public policy.
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    1 hr and 22 mins
  • A Special Tranche In Hell, with Sarah Haider

    A Special Tranche In Hell, with Sarah Haider
    Feb 23 2026

    Time for another reunion! Sarah Haider, Meghan's co-host on the late, great A Special Place In Hell, has a lot to say about the Epstein files, so she visited the podcast to unload.

    After opening the episode with an homage to the classic intro from our former podcast, the ladies talk about how everyone's a pedophile now, why Ghislaine Maxwell was drawn to such bad boyfriends, and why Epstein's favorite muffins (yes, literal muffins) were so delicious they inspired poetry.

    Because it's Sarah, they also discuss the latest in Fertility Crisis Discourse, including new nostalgia about teenage motherhood and Sarah's idea of a GI Bill for mothers.

    Finally, they reveal the only conditions under which we would revive A Special Place In Hell. The answer may (not) surprise you.
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    1 hr and 27 mins
All stars
Most relevant
The podcast is excellent, it doesn’t skirt hard issues, and you learn a lot. Great for people of love to explore and share ideas. Meghan Daum leaves us all smarter. Be a Daumy not a dumby!

Nuanced, relentless, intelligent

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Meghan Daum's The Unspeakeasable podcast is an anchor of sanity in a polarized world. Great guests, emotionally intelligent hosting. A gem.

For the Independent Thinker

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