Why is it so difficult to find meaningful help for the severely mentally ill, including those exhibiting patterns of violence? And why has this question become politicized?

This week, Ben Appel joins me to talk about his new book, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, a memoir about leaving one kind of cult only to stumble into another. Raised in a rigid Christian community, Ben found refuge in the gay rights movement and, later, the Ivy League—until "allyship" started to look less like solidarity and more like a loyalty oath.

My guest is Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. We talk about what it really means to care for patients when cure is no longer the goal, why our medical system resists honest conversations about death, and how clarity and compassion can coexist at the end of life.

Topics we cover:
• What palliative care really provides (beyond hospice)
• Why "more treatment" ≠ "more life"
• Prognosis, probabilities, and telling the truth kindly
• How families can ask the right questions
• Documentation that matters (and what to avoid)
• The moral distress of clinicians
• Cultural/faith factors that shape decisions
• Dignity, autonomy, and realistic hope

Guest Bio:
Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where she is the Director of the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other publications. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness.

In this episode we discuss:

• How Helen defines "the great feminization" and why she thinks it explains contemporary "wokeness"

• What changes when institutions tip female—journalism, academia, law, nonprofits

• HR-ification, hostile-environment law, and why managers vs. judges should handle culture

• Agreeableness as a social virtue—and a professional liability in truth-seeking fields

• Innovation, risk tolerance, and the gendered vibes around tech, nuclear power, and exploration

• Whether "women in STEM" initiatives help, hurt, or just rebrand office politics

About the guest:
Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her new Compact essay is "The Great Feminization."

This week I interview journalist and author Olga Khazan about her new book on personality change, Me, But Better.

We talk about the Big Five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and how they play out in ordinary life rather than in personality quizzes. Olga explains what research actually shows about how much you can change, how anxiety and depression tie into neuroticism, and why introversion can quietly turn into isolation. We also discuss everyone's favorite personality expert, Carl Jung, the politics of "openness," what's happened to our social lives since the pandemic, and how the culture of "self-care" has blurred into hiding from the world.

Other threads include:
• The science behind gradual, behavioral change instead of "life hacks"
• How "fake it till you make it" can work without faking yourself entirely
• Gender differences in agreeableness and the social cost of being direct
• Why liberals often score higher on neuroticism—and what that might really mean
• The relationship between personality, motherhood, and the urge to optimize everything


Guest Bio:
Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird. She is a two-time recipient of journalism fellowships from the International Reporting Project and the winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing.

Novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner returns to discuss his exceptionally timely new novel Amputation—a strange, exuberant, and ultra meta work set against a topic I've talked about a lot this year, the January LA wildfires. Bruce, an L.A. native and prominent literary figure in the city, explains how the book came together in less than two months, why he resists "political novels" even when writing inside a political moment, and how language (not legacy) keeps him making art.

We also talk about real-life figures who appear as characters (Stephen Colbert, Mayor Karen Bass, Debra Winger, and a Timothée Chalamet student double, among others), the surrealism of driving through miles of leveled neighborhoods, and the deranged comic-tragic chorus of the Nextdoor app. Bruce also reflects on being an L.A. "outsider who outsided his way inside," why the book is opera, not noir, and what it means to keep walking the "narrow, burning road to the palace."

Guest Bio:

Bruce Wagner is the author of fifteen novels, including the "cell phone" trilogy, The Marvel Universe, The Met Gala and Tales of Saints and Seekers, Roar: American Master, and now Amputation. A longtime Hollywood insider/outsider, he has written for film and television and is currently published by Arcade.

Katie Herzog, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast (BarPod), is best known as an anthropologist of, as she puts it, "internet bullshit." But she's swerved far out of her lane for her latest project. In her brand new book, Drink Your Way Sober, Katie combines personal history with deep reporting to chronicle a lifetime of drinking and explain how a little-known drug called naltrexone, combined with an approach called The Sinclair Method, finally allowed her to quit for good.

Photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn has spent years documenting protests, rallies, and moments of public unrest that often look very different on the ground than they do on the evening news. In this conversation, he talks with Meghan about what really happens when a "mostly peaceful protest" turns chaotic, how viral clips can erase context, and why the incentives of freelance journalism can skew coverage. They also discuss what it takes to build trust with sources across ideological divides, the ethics of filming in volatile environments, and how ordinary viewers can tell when the narrative doesn't match reality.