About - The Unspeakeasy with Meghan Daum

Welcome to The Unspeakeasy!

Writing, community, and the podcast formerly known as The Unspeakable.

Glad you found your way here! Here’s what you get for subscribing. (For more info about this Substack and about me, scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

Free Subscriber

As a free subscriber you will receive periodic updates about what I’m doing. That includes writing classes, public events, the latest about The Unspeakeasy and links to things I publish here and elsewhere. Periodically I will publish a piece of new writing on the page for free and, as a subscriber, you’ll know about it before it goes mega-viral on Twitter. You’ll also be able to access the entire catalog of Unspeakable episodes right here on the Substack page, though you won’t have access to premium content.

Monthly Subscriber $7/month

You get complete access to every episode. Free subscribers and those listening to the public feed hear a portion of the paywalled episodes, but then they fade out and they need to become paying subscribers to hear the rest. Since you’ll already be a paying subscriber, that won’t happen to you! You’ll also receive the episode early—usually the Friday or Saturday before the main version drops—on a private RSS feed.
Up until 2024, most podcast episodes included a bonus portion for paying subscribers, where the guest stayed overtime and we talked a little more informally (this was often the best part). As a paying subscriber, your back catalog access will include those bonus portions.
Commenting privileges. As a paid subscriber, you can participate in comment threads about the podcast or anything else I post. This is fun because the commenters are exceptionally smart and interesting - i.e. Nuanced AF
All sorts of Unspeakable extras, including discounts on Nuanced AF merchandise in The Nuance Store, access to premium versions of the podcast, and the ability to leave comments.

Founding Member $250/year

You get all of the above, plus you can join Zoom hangouts with me and your fellow founding members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET/5pm PT. We’ll talk about the podcast, the state of the world, and whatever’s on your mind These are private and unrecorded.

A few other things to note:

The non-Substack wing of The Unspeakeasy is a community for freethinkers offering in-person retreats and other events. It has its own website and mailing list and is wholly separate from Substack. But I’ll keep you updated about it here as much as possible.

The Unspeakeasy Podcast also has a YouTube channel, where you can watch all of the episodes and become a paying member, though right now the only way to get early access to episodes and all the other membership perks is to being a paying subscriber here on Substack.

Here’s a little about me (in the third person).

Meghan Daum is the creator and host of The Unspeakable Podcast and the author of seven books, including the new collection The Catastrophe Hour. Her previous book The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars, was a 2019 New York Times Notable Bookand her collection of original essays, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, won the 2015 Pen Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. A Los Angeles Times opinion columnist from 2005 to 2016, she has written for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Vogue. Meghan is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught graduate writing students at Columbia University and The University of Iowa and now teaches private workshops in personal essay, memoir and op-ed. In 2022, she founded The Unspeakeasy, a community for which she leads “free speech vacation” retreats across the U.S. The Unspeakeasy started as a women-only enterprise but is now officially coed.