This interview was recorded on August 13. It touches briefly on the story of Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor who was found to have committed multiple acts of plagiarism, fabulism, and fraud and, tragically, was discovered dead in his home on August 14.

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With all that’s been going on over the last year or so, I hadn’t been minding the Unspeakeasy Nuance Store as well as I’d have liked. But after a glow-up and some rebranded merchandise, the store is back, selling your favorite Nuanced AF and Problematic hats, shirts, mugs, and more. There’s even a hat for your dog and a onesie for your baby, which can probably be worn by either.

For a limited time, regular paying subscribers get a 10 percent discount.

Founding members get a 20 percent discount. You should have received a separate email with the promo code. Sorry for all the emails.

To upgrade to a Founding Member or to become a paying subscriber, go here.

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With all that’s been going on over the last year or so, I hadn’t been minding the Unspeakeasy Nuance Store as well as I should have. But after a glow-up and some rebranded merchandise, the store is back and selling your favorite Nuanced AF and Problematic hats, shirts, mugs, and more.

As a Founding Member, you get a 20% discount if you order in the next…

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Technically, I’m supposed to be doing livestreams every other week, but I enjoy them so much I can’t help myself! Here’s the recording of my August 12 conversation with Dr. Lucy McBride about her brand new book, Beyond…

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Special edition livestream today! I spoke with composer and writer David K. Israel about his new novel, The Lost Mozart, which follows an ambitious young music student who discovers an unfinished Mozart string quartet a…

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Today on the livestream, I talked with journalist Alex Gutentag of Public about the state of chronic street homelessness in San Francisco. We discussed how the crisis there compares to the situation in Los Angeles, whet…

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This is technically the August 10 episode. Paying subscribers get early access. Upgrade your subscription here.

What a pleasure to talk with Evan Barker, author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Evan has been on lots of podcasts in the last week or so, but not yet this one. Until now!

Once a Bernie Sanders supporter and successful Democratic fundraiser, Evan spent years working on progressive campaigns before becoming disillusioned with the party she once believed could transform American politics.

In this conversation, we talk about some of the secret tricks of political fundraising, the thrills and horrors of campaign culture, and the machinery of modern Democratic politics. Evan describes the donor ecosystem, the rise of identity politics within the party, and the internal dynamics she believes pushed progressives away from their original economic agenda. She also recounts attending the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which she says included a non-binary Muslim prayer room, a vasectomy van, and an abortion bus. This was real — not an episode of Portlandia.

Evan, along with journalist Alex Gutentag, will be a guest speaker at our Unspeakeasy women’s weekend retreat in San Francisco, September 26-27. Spots are almost full, so get in now. Info and registration here.

Guest Bio:

Evan Barker is the author of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. A first-generation college graduate, Barker earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas in 2015 and worked in Democratic politics for many years, primarily as a fundraiser for progressive politicians and organizations. A columnist, Substack writer, and podcast host, Evan lives in Northern California.

Evan Barker

Writer, podcaster, and former progressive strategist

Housekeeping

🎬 I just released some short videos talking about The Unspeakeasy and what our retreats are like. X/Twitter seems to be throttling them, so please click on over to nudge the algorithm, or check them out on YouTube.

🎏 New format (slightly new, anyway): For the next several months at least, the “official” podcast will publish every other week. (This is one of those.) On the weeks in between, I will do a Substack livestream — exact date and time TBD. The livestream itself is open to all, but the recording will be posted for paying subscribers only. So it’s never been a better time to upgrade your subscription! My most recent livestream was July 21 with Paul Garcia Ryan. Recording here.

📜 For the first time ever—and for a limited time on a limited basis—I’m offering full-length manuscript consultation. Info here.

🚋 We’re going to San Francisco! Our women’s living room weekend retreat in San Fran, Sept 26-27 features guest speakers Alex Gutentag and Evan Barker. Info here.

🍁 Spots for our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza Oct 19-21, featuring Lisa Marchiano, John McWhorter, and PJ Adzima, are going fast. Grab one while you still can. Info here.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. Our next meeting is Sunday, August 30. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

This week I’m 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.)

Slam Frank was conceived by composer and lyricist Andrew Fox, who was stunned and inspired by a Twitter thread in which someone asked, “Did Anne Frank ever examine her white privilege?” (You also read that right.) A play within a play about a progressive theater company twisting itself into knots trying to stay on the right side of history, the show has provoked both walkouts and rave reviews—including in The New York Times. (Again, you read that right.)

PJ and I discuss the transformation of the theater world over the past decade, the legacy of The Book of Mormon (in which he starred for many years), the “Dear White American Theater” manifesto, and why he believes great art cannot be created by checking ideological boxes. We also talk about what happens when artists prioritize pleasing everyone over having a point of view—and why live performance still matters in an era dominated by algorithms and social media.

We’ve recently added PJ as a guest at our Small Gathering for Big Ideas retreat, Oct 19-21 in Kingston, NY. He joins fellow speakers John McWhorter and Lisa Marchiano. Spaces are filling fast. Info here.

Slam Frank opens off-Broadway at New York’s Orpheum Theater in September. Check out its Instagram page here.

Guest Bio

PJ Adzima starred on Broadway in The Book of Mormon and is the founder of Stage Time, an underground-style variety theater company and artist collective in New York City. He is also producer of Slam Frank, a satirical hip-hop musical that tells the story of Anne Frank "through an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, Afro-Latin-hiphop lens.”

Housekeeping

🎬 I just released some short videos talking about The Unspeakeasy and what our retreats are like. X/Twitter seems to be throttling them, so please click on over to nudge the algorithm, or check them out on YouTube.

🎏 New format (slightly new, anyway): For the next several months at least, the “official” podcast will publish every other week. (This is one of those.) On the weeks in between, I will do a Substack livestream — exact date and time TBD. The livestream itself is open to all, but the recording will be posted for paying subscribers only. So it’s never been a better time to upgrade your subscription! My most recent livestream was July 21 with Paul Garcia Ryan. Recording here.

📜 For the first time ever—and for a limited time on a limited basis—I’m offering full-length manuscript consultation. Info here.

🚋 We’re going to San Francisco! We’ve just announced a women’s living room weekend retreat in San Fran, Sept 26-27. Info here.

🍁 Spots for our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza Oct 19-21, featuring Lisa Marchiano, John McWhorter, and PJ Adzima, are going fast. Grab one while you still can. Info here.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. Our next meeting is Sunday, August 30. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

Really excellent conversation today with psychotherapist Paul Garcia Ryan, president of Therapy First. After getting the important stuff out of the way and talking about where I am with the pronunciation of my name, we d…

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This conversation kept circling back to the kinds of tripwires and trigger points that cause people to tune out ideas before they even hear them—for instance my advocacy for Spencer Pratt in the L.A. mayoral race a few months ago and Jenny’s support of . . . Brexit. (She lives in Belfast in Northern Ireland.) We also talked about how I began my career at the tail end of the golden age of magazine journalism, and what it was like watching that world start to shift around 2012-13.

Finally, in the spirit of the season, we talked about American exceptionalism, generosity of spirit, and her husband’s 1987 trip to the US as part of the “Children of the Troubles” program — the trip that made him fall in love with this country.

Here are my two earlier conversations with Jenny.

Housekeeping

🎏 New format (slightly new, anyway): For the next several months at least, the “official” podcast will publish every other week. (This is one of those.) On the weeks in between, I will do a Substack livestream — exact date and time TBD. The livestream itself is open to all, but the recording will be posted for paying subscribers only. So it’s never been a better time to upgrade your subscription! My most recent livestream was July 8 with Tara Henley. Recording here.

📜 For the first time ever—and for a limited time on a limited basis—I’m offering full-length manuscript consultation. Info here.

🚋 We’re going to San Francisco! We’ve just announced a women’s living room weekend retreat in San Fran, Sept 26-27. Info here.

🍁 Spots for our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza Oct 19-21, featuring Lisa Marchiano and John McWhorter, are going fast. Grab one while you still can. Info here.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. We have to skip July, so the next meeting is Sunday, August 30. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

This week’s live stream features journalist and podcaster Tara Henley (Lean Out, former CBC news producer) for a conversation on media trust — using one of the most contested stories in recent Canadian history as our case…

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As you may know, I periodically teach writing workshops and lately have been offering private coaching for essays and shorter-length works. For years, when I’ve been asked whether I work on full-length manuscripts, I’ve always said no and then made referrals to the many capable editors I know who do such things. But since I have a little extra time in my schedule this summer and early fall, I’ve decided to offer this service on a limited basis.

Obviously, every manuscript is different, so no two arrangements will be exactly alike. Also, please keep in mind that I’m only accepting projects where I think I can be truly helpful. This is a matching process as much as anything else.

Here’s what’s included:

• A full read of your manuscript

• A written editorial letter with my thoughts on structure, voice, and next steps

• An hour-long meeting on Zoom (or in person, if geography allows)

Turnaround is about one to two weeks from when I start. This is for full-length manuscripts — 40,000 words minimum. Pricing is as follows:

• 40,000–65,000 words: $7,000

• 65,000–90,000 words: $8,500

• 90,000+ words: $9,500-plus (let’s talk)

If you’re interested, email me at meghan@meghandaum.com with a brief description of your manuscript, its word count, and where it stands (finished draft, near-finished, etc.).

If you’ve forgotten that I’m a writer and not just a podcaster and event planner (sometimes I forget, too), here’s a bona fides refresher.

Subscribe now

I’ve long been intrigued by Carl Jung’s ideas but also found them somewhat elusive. So I asked Lisa to help me understand why Jung resonates so deeply with so many people and why his work feels especially relevant today.

We discuss archetypes, the shadow, synchronicity, Jung’s break with Freud, and how Jungian psychology can help us make sense of political polarization, ideology, loneliness, and our search for meaning in an increasingly fractured culture.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you can continue it in person! Lisa will join us this October at The Unspeakeasy’s second annual Small Gathering for Big Ideas in Kingston, New York (October 19–21), alongside John McWhorter. Learn more at theunspeakeasy.com/retreats.

Guest Bio:

Lisa Marchiano is an award-winning author, certified Jungian analyst, and co-host of the popular depth psychology podcast This Jungian Life, which has garnered more than 10 million downloads. The author of several acclaimed books that draw on the healing wisdom of fairy tales, Lisa holds degrees from Brown University, Columbia University, and New York University, trained at the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and lectures and leads workshops internationally on Jungian psychology and personal growth.

Housekeeping

🚋 We’re going to San Francisco! We’ve just announced a women’s living room weekend retreat in San Fran, Sept 26-27. Info here.

🍁 Spots for our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza Oct 19-21, featuring Lisa Marchiano and John McWhorter, are going fast. Grab one while you still can. Info here.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. We have to skip July, so the next meeting is Sunday, August 30. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

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 8…

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It’s been, as people say when they can’t think of what else to say, quite a journey.

Since early this spring, I’ve been publicly supporting reality star Spencer Pratt in his run for L.A. Mayor. Pratt now appears to have come in third in the June 2 primary, taking him out of the running altogether. Overnight, the chatter surrounding him shifted from irrational and sometimes bot-driven exuberance on social media to accusations of a stolen election.

Before I go any further, I will say that I don’t believe there was outright fraud. I’m in favor of reasonable Voter ID laws and I suspect ballot harvesting needs to be seriously reevaluated and probably eliminated. But so far, I see no evidence of a stolen election – only evidence of Los Angeles being Los Angeles.

I have registered my support for Pratt with the same care and nuance I try to bring to everything I do, including squawking about him on X, the care and nuance capital of the internet. In addition to interviewing him for my May 4 podcast, I published an article in The Atlantic on May 15 about his unlikely momentum among Democrat–leaning voters, who, myself included, were willing to take a chance on him despite his general aura of ridiculousness. The response from readers ranged from perplexed to apoplectic. One woman emailed directly to inform me that I was a neo-fascist shill. Many of the 300-plus reader comments chalked me up to be either a MAGA apologist and/or just a standard idiot. There were lots of promises to cancel subscriptions, the ultimate fighting words of educated elites.

A few weeks later, my position didn’t seem quite as outlandish. While I remained one of the few, if not the only, members of the so-called liberal media elite publicly supporting Pratt (I made a few videos under the tongue-in-cheek heading “Liberal Elites For Pratt”), his polling numbers were up and there were murmurings of a growing contingent of “shy voters.” Several educated, Volvo-driving, NPR-listening (yes, still) types I knew had donated money to his campaign and planned to vote for him if they lived in L.A. city limits. A May 2 letter I’d emailed to Los Angeles friends laying out my case for Pratt began to feel slightly less like social suicide with every passing day.

My case, in a nutshell, was this. Spencer Pratt is an inconvenient messenger for an urgent message: that Los Angeles is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis regarding street homelessness. (There are plenty of other problems too, ranging from wildfire response to potholes, but I’ll stick with this one for now.) Pratt is inexperienced, unserious, and, if not actually MAGA at least “MAGA-coded” in a way that makes any attempt to woo a deep blue city not just an uphill battle but a Sisyphean ultra-marathon. Still, he had one major advantage over his competitors; he was willing to open his mouth and state the truth about what his eyes were showing him. Even if he got into office and managed to do nothing but state those truths over and over for four years, I for one believed that would be an improvement over what we have now and what his opponents are offering.

That’s not to say Pratt didn’t have a plan. He had several, some of them fairly substantive, like the plan for addressing street homelessness that he outlined in this 9-minute video. I wish more people had watched that and not the endless AI slopgasms put out by his fans–each declared more of a “banger” than the last. Those videos may have been catnip for angry young men on social media, not to mention a certain breed of Beltway bubble-dwelling political commentator who called them “game changing” and “the future of political campaigns.” But they were almost certainly repellent to actual voters in L.A. At least that’s what I feared, and I said as much repeatedly.

I also said I didn’t like Pratt calling homeless people zombies or calling Mayor Bass “Karen Basura” or calling every Democrat he didn’t like a commie–not just because it was juvenile but because I thought it hurt his chances with the disaffected liberal voters he needed to reach.

Pratt superfans told me I was wrong about that. They said I was behind the times, applying fusty respectability standards to a post-respectability world. Insofar as we don’t yet know exactly what campaign tactics worked in Pratt’s favor and what worked against him, it’s possible I was indeed wrong. I honestly have no idea. But I do know that supporting this candidate these last several months has made me feel like a defense lawyer trying to prove the innocence of someone who might as well have framed himself for murder. I took a certain thrill in the rhetorical challenge.

Trying to separate Pratt’s common-sense policies from his ludicrous persona was like threading a microscopic needle. The eye of that needle was about as narrow as the path to success I imagined Pratt might be able to carve out if he got elected and somehow did everything right – in other words, a very long shot. But at least there was a path and not the permanent blockade of the entrenched ruling party. As I saw it, if Pratt had a five percent chance of implementing a plan that would get sick people off the streets and into appropriate treatment, that was better than the zero percent chance I’d give his competitors, who didn’t seem interested in even trying.

When making my argument to naysayers, I chose words that were nonthreatening and vaguely TED Talk-y. “I know picking the least qualified candidate is counterintuitive,” I’d say. “I know the logic might feel like a heavy lift. He’s a wild card and the prospect of him actually fixing anything in this broken city is a Hail Mary Pass. But given the options before us and given how dire things have become, this is the only glimmer of hope that I see. Can you see what I see?”

A few could, but many could not. (Homeless encampments? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I drove to Erewhon today and it was fine!) Many people, after hearing me explain Pratt’s actual positions, conceded that they agreed with most if not all of them but could not get past the fact that he was a registered Republican. Many more were not able to separate the Pratt phenomenon from the Trump phenomenon and, in the process, were not able to see me as anything but a friend (now former friend, perhaps) who had at best fallen for a grift (everyone’s favorite word was now grift) and at worst was some kind of newly minted quack trying to slip through a side door into MAGA-land.

Not that they didn’t already know me as a holder of controversial opinions. Most were accustomed to me and my edgy takes. But this, somehow, was a bridge too far.

“I think I’ve really done it this time,” I said to a longtime confidant. “Of all the wrong-thinky opinions I’ve had over the years, this is the wrong-thinkiest of all.”

It was a bid for reassurance. I wanted to be told that everything was fine, that no one was saying anything bad about me and, besides, I was right and eventually everyone would see that. What I got back instead was, “yeah, you might have really done it this time.”

But what have I done exactly? Taken an axe to what remained of my liberal elite bona fides? Supplied countless opportunities for my adversaries to say “grift?”-- a term I’m convinced is only in such heavy rotation because the word itself is fun to say in an ASMR trigger kind of way, the verbal equivalent of popping a zit.

Maybe so. But I sense bigger things on the horizon.

As I said in the last line of my Atlantic article, “even if Pratt never becomes mayor, it’s possible that simply saying the truth out loud will make him a bigger force for change than whoever does.” That feels even truer today than it did a few weeks ago. That’s because despite the charges that he was running for mayor for the grift (it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just for that), the Spencer Pratt mayoral campaign was never about Spencer Pratt. It was about citizens coming together over a shared reality.

He may have lost the election, but he shifted the Overton Window, which is arguably a bigger feat. For the first time in years, there is a critical mass of citizens who are done pretending that what they see before their eyes isn’t really there. The people in charge will have to answer to those citizens. And if they don’t, the election four years from now may look very different from this one.

Meanwhile, the people not in charge–people like me– must start doing our part, whatever that means. Over the last several months, I’ve been devoting more episodes of my podcast to issues around street homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. I plan to do much more. Hell, maybe the entire show will become about that. Stranger things have happened.

Strange things happen all the time. And Spencer Pratt, the villain from The Hills, kicking off a people’s revolt for common sense, might be the strangest of all.

This Substack relies on paying subscribers, though lately I’ve been making most of the content available to all. If you appreciate what I do here, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Founding Members get to attend monthly Zoom hangouts with me on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET.

Housekeeping

✈️ Our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza is open for registration! Sign up now to get our early bird special. Details below. To register, go to the website.

🤣 Don’t miss my special April Fool’s Day episode with “curiosity coach” Amanda Gertz-Hurdy. It just might change your life.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. The next meeting is Sunday, June 28. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

Related Posts

There’s been a lot of talk lately about reducing street homelessness by “just enforcing the law” and mandating treatment for all those drug addicts and mentally ill people camping on the sidewalk.

But it’s not that easy. (W…

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This is a bonus episode that will be available to all next week. Paying subscribers can listen now. To upgrade your subscription, go here.

Here I am with another episode about the Los Angeles mayor’s race.

As I have said, this is not an ordinary election. If it were, I suspect my guest, Adam Miller, who’s one of more than a dozen may…

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Writer and cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy joins me to discuss her new book, The Last Straight Woman, an exploration of how heterosexual women became suspect — if not pitifully uncool — in progressive culture. We 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,” bachelorette parties at gay bars, late-in-life lesbians, hookup culture, and why admitting you’re a “boring straight woman” may now qualify as a radical act. We also revisit the “lesbian chic” era of the 1990s (my personal heyday), the discourse around the viral New Yorker short story Cat Person, the appeal (and limits) of sexual fluidity narratives, and the cultural overlap between straight female culture and gay male sensibilities.

Bonus: We also switched gears in the last 15 minutes and did a Deep Dive™ into the subject of buying secondhand clothing from online marketplaces such as Poshmark. This portion is available to paying subscribers. To upgrade your subscription, go here.

Guest Bio

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto-based cultural critic and the author. She is co-host, with Kat Rosenfield, of the Feminine Chaos podcast, Opinion Editor at The Canadian Jewish News, and host of the Canadian Jewish News podcast, The Jewish Angle. She contributes regularly to The Globe and Mail and is the author of The Perils of “Privilege” (St. Martins, 2017). She also runs a Substack called Close-Reading the Reruns with Phoebe Maltz Bovy.

Feminine Chaos

A podcast for problematic faves, dissident feminism, and interrupting poodles.

By Kat Rosenfield

Housekeeping

✈️ Our Unspeakeasy coed retreat-a-polooza is open for registration! Sign up now to get our early bird special. Details below. To register, go to the website.

Also . . .

📝 I’m leading a three-night women’s writing retreat in New York’s Catskill Mountains Sept 28-Oct 1. Application deadine is August 13 for the Catskills retreat.

🤣 Don’t miss my special April Fool’s Day episode with “curiosity coach” Amanda Gertz-Hurdy. It just might change your life.

🏍️ I am hosting Zoom hangouts for Founding Members on the last Sunday of every month at 8pm ET. The next meeting is Sunday, May 31. If you’re a Founding Member, you will get an email with the link. If you’re not yet a Founding Member, you can upgrade your subscription here.

🎁 Make a one-time donation to the podcast. Everything helps and is deeply appreciated. 🙏

📺 Visit The Unspeakeasy on YouTube.

That means he’ll take any guest he can get, but I was still honored to be the first official guest after his initial test episodes, which are already collector’s items. We kicked off the conversation with Richard telling me he’d just been to a dinner party where the question was asked, “what’s going on with Meghan Daum?” (As in “is she okay?”) That remains unanswered, but we did have a lively conversation about my current obsession, the mayoral campaign of Spencer Pratt, who went to the same high school as Richard, but otherwise seems eminently qualified to run the city of Los Angeles.

Thanks to all who joined, including possibly LA city councilwoman and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman.

Housekeeping

Don’t miss my interview with Spencer Pratt. The first time (and possibly last time) doing an on-location video shoot.

Here’s my extraordinary conversation with Estela Lopez, who works with business owners on L.A.’s Skid Row.

And here’s my conversation about the homelessness crisis and the new “super meth,” with investigative journalist Sam Quinones.

Get more from Meghan Daum in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Last weekend, I emailed the letter below to a wide swath of friends in Los Angeles. I wanted to explain my unlikely support for Spencer Pratt for mayor and invite them to examine their skepticism (or disbelief) about this candidate and consider what is really needed to bring our city to a better place.

The response was about what I expected. A few people wrote back right away to tell me how much they appreciated what I had to say. A few offered some respectful pushback. Most didn’t reply, which is fine and normal. People are busy, and the email was long.

Now that my friends have had their time alone with my letter, I thought I’d post it here. Remember, it was written last week, so polling numbers are out of date, and of course, the May 6 debate hadn’t happened yet.

Over on X, I’m afraid I’ve appointed myself the chief representative of Liberal Elites for Pratt. I can’t post videos here, but you can access a few of my short dispatches here and here if you have the misfortune to be on that unholy platform.

May 2, 2026

Dear Los Angeles Friends,

I think you know I’m not the kind of person to send emails about political candidates, or politics at all. But I’m doing something I never imagined; urging those of you who vote in the city of L.A. to consider a mayoral candidate that arguably sounds like the biggest joke in recent political history — and that is a high bar. That would be Spencer Pratt, a former reality show star who is running for mayor.

Pratt is my guest on this week’s podcast. More importantly, though, this letter is for you, my friends and neighbors in L.A., who probably can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. I can’t either. But after a great deal of initial skepticism, I now want this guy to win.

Am I saying that the producer-crafted “villain” from The Hills who later blew his fortune on Birkin bags and moldavite crystals is the best person to be the mayor of the second largest city in America? Uh, no. Am I saying that given the options currently before us, I believe Spencer Pratt is L.A.’s best hope for reversing course on a path towards a crisis that, in my view, grows more heartbreaking by the day? Yes, to my astonishment, I am saying this.

If our media and attention economy was even halfway functional, I would vote for Adam Miller, a more conventional candidate. But, as it is, that economy is broken and Miller, currently polling at around 3%, is not a contender for the primary on June 2.

So here we are. Pratt is currently polling in second place, narrowly ahead of Nithya Raman, the city council representative for District 4. I still think he’s a longshot candidate, partly because of the liability of being a registered Republican with some MAGA-adjacent endorsers.

But Pratt’s actual platform has nothing to do with the national Republican agenda. He’s running on L.A. issues: why the reservoirs were empty when the Palisades Fire started, why billions spent on homelessness has left our streets more dangerous and degraded than ever, why horrific animal abuse on the streets is ignored, why a federal audit found that $2.4 billion in homeless services funding simply couldn’t be accounted for.

I surely don’t need to tell you that it is commonplace to drive around the city and see trash-strewn rows of tents, piles of hoarded metal and associated junk, dogs chained to abandoned shopping carts, and half-naked human beings smoking pipes, shooting up, vomiting, defecating, passed out or in some cases dead on the sidewalk.

Where I now live, I pass the same cast of characters along my running route every day, including a man almost certainly selling drugs out of a filthy, junk-packed garage across from the metro rail station. One Sunday afternoon, I saw a father and his two young kids leaving the garage and heading back to the station. The kids had their bikes with them, as if out on a normal family excursion. The father stared at the ground as they walked, shoulders slumped as if clouded by shame.

A few hundred feet later, I passed a man so strung-out he was throwing violent punches at the brush and shrubbery along the road. With him was a battered-looking dog on a short leash. I had to look away; not just for my own safety but to make it through the rest of the day.

This is a regular occurrence. It’s also a regular occurrence to hear our elected officials deny the existence of what we’re seeing before our eyes. The term “gaslighting” is woefully overused, but I can think of no better word. As a friend put it, living in Los Angeles today feels like being in an abusive relationship with our own leaders.

Again and again, they fail us, ignore us, and put self-interest above civic duty and even basic logic. Raman, who chairs the city council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, represents some of the most devastated blocks in the city and routinely scoffs at constituents concerned about encampments near schools. Yet we continue to elect these officials, either because we’re so distracted by national politics that we forget to pay attention or because voting for a familiar party confers comfort in distinctly uncomfortable times.

But this is not a normal election. These are not normal times anywhere in the world, and that includes Los Angeles. A fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures because of city mismanagement*. An estimated seven people die on the sidewalks every day. Dogs on Skid Row are being tortured, mutilated, sold for drugs, used for fentanyl testing, and bred again and again to keep the cycle going.

Here’s the thing about the Spencer Pratt case: even if Pratt got into office and did nothing for four years but repeatedly state the obvious, I have to believe it would be an improvement over what we have now. Moreover, I have to believe that whoever came next would have no choice but to govern from a place of shared reality with their constituents.

In my interview with Pratt, you’ll hear us share our stories of losing our homes in the wildfires last year. I did not get a chance to share another story that goes back much farther than that. Fifteen years ago, as some of you might remember, I spent several days in a medically induced coma with multiple organ failure, sepsis, meningoencephalitis, and a platelet count tantamount to a death rattle. (I know some of you will remember, because you were by my side.)

That illness was flea-borne typhus, the same disease that is now surging at epidemic levels throughout the region – mostly because of inhumanely unsanitary conditions in homelessness encampments. L.A. County reported a record 220 cases in 2025, with 90% requiring hospitalization. If it takes a reality show villain to use existing laws to force people off the sidewalks and into treatment–not to mention arrest drug dealers, human traffickers and people committing shocking atrocities against dogs and cats on Skid Row and elsewhere–I’ll gratefully accept the cosmic irony of it all.

To be honest, just saving the animals would be enough. (And by enforcing laws and allowing LAPD and Animal Services to do their jobs, that is something a mayor can do.) If you don’t believe these abuses are really happening, I can assure you they are well-documented and for years have been reported by citizens to city officials, who do nothing. I won’t include links because they’re too upsetting, though the impulse to look away is part of the reason this issue goes largely ignored.

If you have a chance to watch or listen to the podcast episode, I hope you’ll access the Substack version. I also hope you’ll watch it on video, since it’s easier to digest that way. It’s unpaywalled and includes an expanded introduction that talks about why I took the unprecedented step of interviewing a political candidate. I also hope you’ll share this email with fellow Angelenos who vote for L.A. mayor. At the very least, it might strike up an interesting conversation.

Ballots should be hitting your mailboxes now, and the primary is June 2. I have some thoughts about the governor’s race, too, but they’re a lot less interesting.

It should go without saying that if you vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman, we’ll still be friends. I have friends who voted for Jill Stein in 2016, and I forgive them – sort of.

Yours,

Meghan

*In my aim for brevity, this sentence came out a little hamfisted. The causes of the Palisades Fire are too complex to go into here—and more is being discovered all the time— but it would have been more accurate to say that “city failures made a catastrophic situation significantly worse than it needed to be.”