It’s been three weeks since my house burned to the ground in the Los Angeles wildfires. Here are some thoughts on rent gouging, couch surfing, and the lifestyles of the rich and unhoused.

A note on this photo. I took it from Farnsworth Park in Altadena on New Year’s Day, one week before the fire. That thing in the sky is the Goodyear Blimp hovering over Rose Bowl Stadium during the game.

Earlier dispatches.

January 9: The First 24 Hours

January 16: The Immaterial World

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In the hours of January 8, my house burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA. Here are some thoughts I recorded on January 15.

HOUSEKEEPING

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As you make your new year’s resolutions or plan for Dry January, returning guest Ruby Warrington has another idea for better living in 2025: go on a “content diet.” In this conversation, Ruby describes the overwhelming nature of content consumption and its impact on mental health and wellbeing. She draws parallels between the “sober curious” movement, which she spearheaded, and the need for conscious content consumption, emphasizing the importance of awareness in our media engagement. We also talk about the pressures of content creation, the role of intimacy in communication, the rise of AI-generated content in the digital landscape, and the important of reading novels and listening to music.

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Ruby Warrington is the author of Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood and is the creator of the term “sober curious." Author of the 2018 book Sober Curious and million-download podcast of the same title, her work has spearheaded a global movement to reevaluate our relationship to alcohol. Other works include Material Girl, Mystical World (2017), The Numinous Astro Deck (2019), and The Sober Curious Reset (2020). With 20+ years’ experience as a lifestyle journalist and editor, Ruby is also the founder of the self-publishing incubator Numinous Books.

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HOUSEKEEPING

Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube!

Unspeakeasy 2025 retreats. We’re going to Texas, Los Angeles, upstate NY and beyond. See where we'll be!

Join The Unspeakeasy, my “women’s shelter for the politically homeless.”

Do journalists ever regret the way they cover events? This week, veteran YouTube journalist and political commentator Ana Kasparian discusses her journey from the progressive left to finding herself politically unaligned, the regrets she still harbors, and the complexities of navigating controversial issues with nuance. She also discusses her thoughts on the election and on Biden's mental decline, the appeal of Trump, and how cultural shifts within the Democratic party affected the election.

Meghan and Ana also discuss motherhood (or in their cases, non-motherhood) and new discourse surrounding the trad movement, pro-natalism and the dark side of the pressure campaign to get people to have more children.

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Ana Kasparian is a political journalist and media personality with nearly two decades of experience in news and analysis. Beginning her career as an assistant producer at CBS Radio in Los Angeles, she later became Executive Producer and co-host of The Young Turks. She now writes a Substack newsletter chronicling her political realignment journey and exploring key political and cultural issues.

Follow her on Substack here.

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What purpose does “wokeness” really serve? Is it a way of thinking that helps lift up marginalized groups? Or is it a convenient way for elites to pay lip service to social justice while maintaining the status quo that benefits them? This week, I’m joined by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions Of A New Elite. In addition to distilling his ideas about wokeness as “cover for elites,” we talk about Musa’s love for French theorists, the value of his community college education, and the culture shock he experienced when arriving at Columbia University. We also explore whether women are overrepresented in elite workplaces and how this might affect perceptions of gender inequality and male dominance.

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Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the “social life” of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.

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🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

Until 2018, sports betting was almost a sport unto itself. To place a bet, you had to call your bookie, go to the race track, or make a trip to Las Vegas. But in 2018, the Supreme Court put an end to a longtime federal ban on sports betting, and it is now legal in most states and accessible on smartphones.

For years, we’ve been hearing alarm bells about the addictive qualities of online pornography, which many experts believe has dulled the senses and hindered the relationship prospects of generations of young men. But according to Alex Grodd, founder of The Disagreement, a media and education company that puts out a podcast of the same name, sports betting in its current incarnation poses an even greater threat. In this conversation, Alex describes how compulsive betting and predatory marketing is leading to financial ruin for countless users, many of whom he spoke with for a recent episode of The Disagreement. He also talks about how this connects with the “masculinity crisis” as well as the overall drop in attention span for just about everyone.

Listen to The Disagreement here.

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Alex Grodd is the founder and CEO of The Disagreement and hosts its podcast. Prior to starting The Disagreement, Alex founded and ran BetterLesson, an edtech company that provides professional development tools to teachers. Alex forged his love for disagreement by facilitating debates among students during his days as a middle school teacher at public schools in Atlanta and Boston.

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HOUSEKEEPING

📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube!

✈️ The Unspeakeasy has new retreats for 2025. See where we'll be!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.