Eminent Americans

My frequent conversation partner Blake Smith is back on the pod today to talk about his book-in-progress on the pioneering gay editor Michael Denneny as well as a related essay, “For the Love of the Gay World,” just published in a new anthology.In both endeavors, I think, he's doing some version of the same thing, which is to make his case, that gay men briefly had, then lost, but could have again a coherent, self-reflective cultural and intellectual world by and for themselves. As he writes:Part of what the playwright Larry Kramer called, two decades ago, the tragedy of today's gays is that in order to begin a potentially generative, or productively divisive, conversation about the state of male homosexuality (its culture and politics, its problems and affordances) we must undergo an ordeal of conceptual and historical clarification. Without doing so, we are likely to miss the real objects of our agreement and disagreement, wasting time with opinions expressed in each interlocutor's jumble of inherited, half-comprehended categories.It is hard for gays to talk sensibly to each other about where we are and how we got here; the ideas by which we understand that ‘we' and its emergence in time are so contested and confused. This makes gay thinking peculiarly dizzied, harried and disoriented. It is often in doubt whether there is any gay ‘we' (or any gay thinking) —or whether ‘we' do in fact wish for our talk to reach out to such a ‘we' rather than merely confirm ourselves individually in what we already take ourselves to think and know.In the following I will try to do two things at the same time. I will try to clarify the routes through history by which certain concepts have come down to us, and to trace their relationships and contradictions. Disentangling homosexual, gay, and queer, and the movements by which these terms were conceived and contested, may allow us to talk more with more clarity about the objects of our dis/agreement. At the same time, as I lay out—in a sketchy, rapid, and admittedly contestable fashion—this history, I will show how there came to be, at a few different times and places, a self-conscious articulation of the interest and pleasure that we take in talking to each other about ourselves, and of the desire to perpetuate ourselves individually and collectively that is adumbrated in this talk.Our talking together both reflects and forms what Hannah Arendt (whose relevance to gays will become clearer over the course of this essay) called a world. Which is not a physical place. A world, in this sense, is what is communicable to a group of people, what they can hold together in their talk. It is also the set of practices by which that communicability is maintained (the fact, for instance, of our having a shared vocabulary and grammar, but also of our having reasonably similar psychologies and common objects of perception). Worlds can expand and contract, and also collapse. Whether we want to speak to someone about an apparently external object or an apparently internal thought, the possibility of our doing so successfully depends there being already a world that contains us, our intended interlocutor, and the topic we want to address.His framework involves a periodization of three distinct eras: the “homosexual” phase of the late 19th and early 20th century, when doctors, psychologists, and the men they studied were constructing new categories of identity; the “gay” era that emerged in the mid-20th century and flourished after Stonewall; and the “queer” phase that began in the 1980s and now dominates how we talk about sexual minorities.His argument, stripped down, is that the gay era represented something genuinely new in the world. Before that point there existed various ways of characterizing sex between men, but there wasn't a publicly visible and accessible identity oriented around the idea of two men being together as romantic equals, without one becoming feminized, without requiring a status differential, old and young, top and bottom.This emerged organically from bars and cruising spots and men finding each other in mid-century American cities, and then from that base there evolved a self-conscious culture, one in which Denneny, through his magazine Christopher Street and his editorial work at St. Martin's Press, was a central figure.Then in some respects this culture died, or attenuated. Literally died, in many cases, with so many deaths from AIDS. But also at the hands of the queer paradigm, which supplanted it first in the universities, and then much more broadly in the culture. Queer as an identity, in Blake's construction, did a few things. It conceptualized the queer as a potentially universal, or universally accessible, counter-normative, transgressive force. Anything could be queer, or queered, if it stood or was understood at certain angles to the normative.More problematically, from Blake's stance, it subsumed the gay male identity into a larger queer collective identity that included first lesbians and transgender people but soon anyone, including old fashioned straight folks, who wanted to align themselves with the queer. And this has meant, among other things, that there is simply less psychological and cultural energy available for the maintenance and development of the gay world, as Denneny understood it, particularly in the aftermath of the death of so many gay men from AIDS and particularly because gay men don't biologically reproduce themselves. They need more conscious, deliberate reproduction of their culture, their world.A subtext of our discussion, which we reference but don't really delve into, is that Blake's political orientation has shifted a lot over the last year or so, since Trump was left. He hasn't gone left, precisely. His policy preferences remain roughly the same, basically old new school new deal left liberal social democracy-esque. He's just not interested anymore in aiming his fire at certain elements of the left.I think I've undergone a shift as well, though to a much lesser degree, and with no guilt. I'm more interested in critiquing and thinking about the flaws of the right, now that those flaws are so evident and so damaging to the country. That's definitely a shift. But it still feels important to me to critique the left, in part because that's just my beat, but also because the stakes are really high.To this point, my brother Jonathan said something to me the other day that I hadn't thought about but made a lot of sense. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been involved in the organizing there against the ICE invasion. What he said is that it's pretty clear to him that people in the Twin Cities have internalized the hard lessons from mistakes made after the George Floyd killing. They're thinking, much more strategically than the last time, about how to act so as to elicit sympathy rather than aversion from the broad mass of people in the middle politically. They're sidelining the idiots from antifa and the abolish the police crowd. They're super conscious of the need to avoid riots and looting. Etc.And you can see the results, how powerful and effective their opposition has been. I think critique is a small but important element in the process that leads to that result. So I'll keep being a pain in the ass on that front, but spend more time looking at the right and also try to spend more time in the space where I think blake is right now, which is trying to think constructively, creatively about new possibilities for culture and politics that we might want to explore on the other side of the culture wars. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comIf you want to hear my guest on the show today, Sam Tanenhaus, talk in depth about his magisterial new biography of William F. Buckley, which if there's justice in the world will win all the awards, I recommend you listen to Andrew Sullivan's interview with Tanenhaus, or the Know Your Enemy interview with Sam, or the

My guest on the show today is Justin Driver, the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School and, more importantly, an old friend of mine.Among his many recognitions, he was appointed by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, and is also a recipient of the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize.He's the author of two books, the first of which was The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind, and the second of which is his new one, and the reason I had him on the show, The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education.The first time I met Justin, knowing only that he was a law school professor and not what topics he worked on, I said to him, a propos of I'm not sure what, that it felt like the conversation on race in America was kind of passé. It didn't feel, I said, like there was much going on in the intellectual space around race that was very interesting.This was 2009 or 2010, not long before the death of Trayvon Martin and then the birth of BLM, so it was a comically anti-prophetic thing to say. It was also rather insensitive, given that Justin was a young academic planting his flag, in part, in that space. But I don't think it was wrong, precisely. Given Obama's election, there was certainly a ton of words that people were writing about race, and an older generation of important race-focused intellectuals—the Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates types— still working steadily. What there wasn't, and hadn't been for some years, was a figure able to bend the political intellectual discourse around his or her gravitational force on the topic of race. It would soon be Ta-Nehisi Coates, of course, and then a whole explosion of important intellectuals writing about race, including Justin himself. And so it's been my good fortune to have him as a conversation partner these last 15 or so years, and a pleasure to have the chance to talk to him in the context of his new book, which was a surprising reading experience for me, given that I thought, incorrectly, that I had such a good handle on the debate around affirmative action that even reading an expert on the topic might feel gratuitous. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

On this special Christmas episode of the podcast, my 9-year-old son Gideon interviews me for a school assignment about my writing, my day job, and my theories on why I'm an interesting person. He's hoping there will be comments, so if you have any thoughts please share them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This episode, with Democratic congressional candidate Caitlin Rourk, has an interesting backstory. Back in May my wife wrote an op-ed for the Austin American Statesman criticizing Republic congressman John Carter, whose district is adjacent to the one we live in. Carter isn't particularly noxious, as these people go, but nor is he at all in possession of actual principles. He's just a stooge for Trump and MAGA. My wife was frustrated and feeling powerless, as many of us were and are, and this was a small way to feel like she's doing something, putting Carter on notice, to whatever extent he pays attention to the local news, that people are seeing what he's doing and more importantly not doing, which is actually exercising independent judgement about what's good for the country.Here's a bit of it, to give you a sense:Republican Congressman John Carter, whose 31st district covers North Austin up to northwest of Waco, has long styled himself an old school defender of the U.S. Constitution. He invokes the founding document frequently — to oppose hate crime legislation, advocate for gun rights, criticize the Affordable Care Act, and decry executive actions by Democratic presidents. He presents himself as a public servant guided by deep constitutional principles.When it comes to Donald Trump, however, those principles disappear.In recent months, Trump has been openly contemptuous of the Constitution and its embedded system of checks and balances. He has willfully ignored bipartisan legislation requiring him to force a divestment of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, a direct challenge to the separation of powers and the legislative process. He has deported lawful U.S. residents without due process, in some cases sending them to countries where their lives are in grave danger. He has targeted activists and institutions for exercising their rights to free speech and academic freedom.These are not small matters. They are bright red constitutional lines that no president, regardless of party, should be permitted to cross.Congressman Carter has had nothing to say on the subject. One searches in vain—on his website and social media feeds, in his public appearances and newsletters—for a word of dissent or even disquiet. When he speaks at all, which seems increasingly rare, he focuses elsewhere. On April 14, for example, Carter said nothing about President Trump's suggestion, in a joint press conference with El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, that perhaps American citizens should be sent off to prison in El Salvador. That same day, Carter issued a press release touting proposed legislation to address … a shortage of bus drivers in America.…If he truly cared about the rule of law and the balance of powers, he would speak out when anyone — Republican or Democrat — undermines them. Instead, he reserves his outrage for moments of partisan opportunity. He cries constitutional foul when it suits him and shrugs when the violations come from within his own political tribe.As Thomas Jefferson once put in, in a line that Carter quotes on his own website, “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Carter may wrap himself in the Constitution, but he cannot claim to honor it while turning a blind eye to the fear that the administration is instilling in the people.After that ran, Jess got an email from Rourk, who—at the time of our interview—was planning to run as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Congress in Carter's district. She has now shifted her candidacy to Texas's 10th congressional district, I'm pretty sure because of court rulings on redistricting in Texas. It's an open seat left by the retirement of Michael McCaul, and like Carter's seat, a pretty safely red one, which in a normal election year would safely go to the Republican by 10 or 12 points. So, she's no longer challenging John Carter, but the issues we discuss are all entirely germane.I asked Caitlin to talk I think out of the same motive that drove Jess to write the op-ed. I wanted to do something, or at least think about how one would do something. Winning the open 10th district seat as a Democrat is a long shot, but even if she (or whoever wins the Democratic primary, if it's not her) loses, the fact of running a vigorous challenge is meaningful. A smaller loss than what would occur in a typical election year, e.g., would be a signal to Republicans that Trump is dragging them down. An energetic campaign is also an end in itself. It gets people involved, brings them into the process. It provides information about what kinds of attacks or policies work or don't. It pushes the opposition to defend itself. And, and I think this is important too, it wards off despair.Caitlin and I talk about that. We also talk about her military service, why she chose to run, the realities of running in a district without national party backing, and the challenges—and opportunities—of building a campaign from the ground up. We talk about what it means to be authentic as a candidate, how to connect with voters who feel alienated or overlooked, and the importance of taking risks and trying new approaches in districts where the traditional playbook hasn't worked. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is part two of my two-part episode on Terry Gross. In part one, which was a paid episode, I talked to Sarah Hepola, Jason Thurlkill, and Meghan Daum about Terry Gross, what makes her great, and who should replace her whenever she chooses to retire. On this episode, which is a freebie, I talk to Mark Oppenheimer, Mike Pesca, and Jesse Adams/The Ivy Exile.Aside from being my brother, Mark Oppenheimer is host of his own podcast, the Arc podcast, or Arc with Mark, which is the flagship podcast of the magazine he edits. He is also the author of Judy Blume: A Life, the forthcoming biography of Judy Blume, which drops in March of next year. Mike Pesca is the host of The Gist, the longest running daily news podcast in history, and its affiliated Substack, The Gist List. He has two other, non-daily podcasts: Funny You Should Mention, in which he talks to stand up comedians, and Not Even Mad, which is dedicated to “joyful disagreement.” He is the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History, which came out in 2018. Jesse Adams is the author of The Ivy Exile Substack, and a writer for, among other publications, the Washington Examiner and the New York Post. Thanks to all my guests, and listeners, for joining me in this endeavor. I have no immediate plans to do another special episode, but this felt like a success to me, so I'm sure at some point I'll do it again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comThis is episode one of my long-awaited Terry Gross Project, where I tackle the question of who Terry Gross's successor should be on Fresh Air and what we can learn, by playing around with that question, about the magic of Terry Gross, the cultural meaning and trajectory of NPR, the art of the interview, and various other related topics.

The text for today's episode is Conversations with Kiese Laymon, which is a new anthology of interviews with Laymon. My guests are Laymon himself, , a previous guest on the podcast and one of the best nonfiction writers of my generation, and the editor of the book, Constance Bailey.Laymon's memoir Heavy, which came out in 2018, was #60 on the New York Times list of the best hundred books of the 21st Century, and that really understates its brilliance. It's a pretty amazing book, which you should read. He is also the author of the novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has a new children's book out this year, City Summer, Country Summer, and is scheduled to have another memoir out next year, which is provisionally titled Good God. Constance Bailey is an assistant professor of African American literature and folklore at Georgia State University and, like Laymon, a native of Mississippi, though neither of them lives there now. Bailey's in Atlanta and Laymon, who did go back home for a number of years to teach at Old Miss, is now in Houston, where he has an endowed chair of English and creative writing at Rice University.We talk about the origins of the book, both in terms of how Bailey sold it, as a new installment in part of the University of Mississippi Press's storied “Literary Conversation” series, and why it was so appealing for Laymon to sign on (the series, as we learn in the conversation, was a meaningful influence on his development and self-conception as a young writer).We talk a lot about Mississippi itself and how it's affected both of their lives and writing. We talk about race, money, writing, speaking, and what it means to perform for white dollars. It's a good conversation—such a good conversation, in fact, that if anyone ever plans to do another collection of interviews with Kiese, they should let me know and I will send them the transcript of this conversation and give them permission to include it in their collection. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comBlake and I talk about the long essays that each of us has written recently: Blake's essay in Aeon on the New York intellectual and art critic Harold Rosenberg, and mine on the recent back and forth between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We also engage Blake's feelings about the the recent death of his father, Billy Smith, or rather on his evasion of my effort to get him to talk about his feelings

I invited Alex Perez and Ross Barkan to join me for this episode of the podcast because I'd seen both of them write essays or posts recently reflecting on their days as baseball players.Ross, as you'll hear, topped out as a decent high school player. Alex was recruited to play for a top college team, and for a while had not implausible dreams of playing professionally.Both have experienced an intimate relationship between baseball and their lives and identities as writers.We talk about that. We also talk about the locker room culture and camaraderie of sports teams in general, its complicated set of pros and cons. We talk about the rival cultures of sports and literature, and how class status and mores play out in these two domains.One of my old friends who listens to the show said to me once that it's all really just about men and masculinity. I don't think that's quite true, but it's not totally untrue either. I could easily assemble a playlist of episodes of the podcast that deal either explicitly or heavily implicitly with the topic, and this one would certainly be on it.Ross is a writer and author who writes most often for New York magazine and also frequently for the New York Times Magazine. He is the founder and co-editor of the Substack native publication The Metropolitan Review, and his latest books are a novel, Glass Century, and a nonfiction work, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. He's working on a book about presumptive New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.Alex is an associate editor at Panamerica Books, which is the new publishing imprint of County Highway. He's also an editor for Real Clear Books, and has written for Tablet, County Highway, Compact, and other places. My opening anointment of him as an eminent America “by the power vested in me by the white women of publishing,” is a reference to a notorious interview he did with the Hobart Review (which I would link to except that it's been taken down from their site) that featured a great deal of his unvarnished thoughts on issues of race, gender, and class in publishing. It led to a total meltdown of that journal as well as the creation of a general aura around Alex as a kind of barbarian of the literary scene.It's a fun conversation. Hope you enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This episode of the podcast, with Sam Kahn and David Sessions, was recorded after Sam, David, and I happened to have all written essays about our divorce from, or ongoing issues with, the American left. The conversation isn't an extended attack on the left, though. It's more an exploration of what the left is or has been or could be, what our own personal relationships to it are, and how it exists in relationship to the liberal space that I think David and I inhabit and maybe Sam too, though he seems more unallied at this point, politically and philosophically, than we do. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comOne of the essays in my private canon of great essays that no one else seems to have read is philosopher Nancy Bauer's essay “Pornutopia,” which first ran in the winter 2007 issue of N+1 and then was included in Bauer's 2015 book How to Do Things With Pornography.I don't talk much about my enthusiasm for this essay because it's embarrassing. You can't r…

My guest on the show today is Matt Dinniman, author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is seven books into a projected 10 volume run.I happened upon the book when I was trawling Kindle unlimited for science fiction to read. It kept recommending it to me, and I kept resisting, because it was hard to take seriously a novel called Dungeon Crawler Carl. Finally I gave it a try, and literally within about three weeks I'd burned through all seven novels in the series, each of which runs around 600 pages or more.They are a blast: hilarious, absurd, propulsively plotted, just an immense amount of fun. Matt and I talk about the series, which was initially self-published but has now been re-issued by a big commercial publisher and is being adapted for television by Seth MacFarlane. We talk about his career prior to the recent success, when he mostly made his money by painting cats and dogs. We talk about changes in the publishing industry, and more. I enjoyed talking to Matt, who is precisely the kind of person you want enjoying this kind of unexpected mid life success. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Brady Dale, crypto reporter for Axios and author of the 2023 biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy.Our topic, as you may have guessed, is crypto. And more broadly: what are the ideologies and ideas swirling around the technology of cryptocurrency. I just re-listened to the conversation, and I think it ended up being a really good, smart but not too technical primer on crypto in general.I used Brady, in a sense, to answer all my questions about what crypto is, who some of the key players are, what the utopian aspirations around it were, and whether any of them survive to the present. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comFreddie deBoer an author, blogger, essayist, and now Substacker who has carved out a niche for himself as a left-wing critic of liberals and the left, with a particular emphasis on the characteristic flaws and sins of identity politics and what we now call wokeness. He's also a critic of education reform and certain modes of mental health and disability rights advocacy. He's also a bit of a pill.

My guest on the show today is John Pistelli, proprietor of the Grand Hotel Abyss Substack newsletter and its affiliated lecture course, The Invisible College. John is also the author of the novel Major Arcana, which was originally serialized on Substack. It was then picked up and republished by Belt Publishing, an indie press (now under the auspices of Arcadia, a larger indie press) founded to promote voices from the Rust Belt. We talk a lot of about John's novel, which I enjoyed immensely, but we talk more about what the novel represents, and has led to, in terms of the arc of John's career and his public reputation. In a very modest way, he's blown up over the last year or two. He's one of the presiding sages of Substack. He's been mentioned, mostly favorably, in the New Yorker. He's been criticized respectfully in the Wall Street Journal and somewhat derisively in Compact magazine. I ask him: What has that felt like? Is there discomfort in being the center of some attention when his sense of himself as a literary figure was forged as someone on the margins. Is he enjoying the attention? What does he make of the criticism he's received? What was it like to travel to New York to launch the book? Was it as romantic as he made it sound? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

I'm not the host of today's episode, but rather the guest of writer and podcaster Ken Ilgunas, who had me on his podcast, Out of the Wild with Ken Ilgunas, to talk about my own writing, my life, my thoughts, et cetera. Ken is the author of among other books, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland and This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Greg Barnhisel, English professor at Duquesne University and author of the recent book Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power.Our conversation is in one sense about the subject of his book, Norman Holmes Pearson, who was a pioneer of both the American intelligence establishment and the modern study of the humanities. But it's also about the death of what Pearson represented, or embodied, which is the American cold war establishment, or—to abstract even further— the death of any unitary establishment whatsoever possessing the power to author a consensus or narrative to which most of the nation would defer. It's also about one of my abiding preoccupations, as a son of New England, with the old yankee WASP elite culture. Yale men. Taste-makers. Ghostwriters of national narratives. The kind of people who knew how to quote Virgil, chair a foundation meeting, and quietly stage a coup in Latin America. We talk about whether this specific kind of establishment power he represented has faded entirely or morphed into something else (some version of what we sometimes call the professional managerial class.Hope you enjoy.Peace This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comFriend of the pod Blake Smith is back for today's episode, which is one of my once a month paid episodes, so if you're not a paid subscriber you'll only get the first 20 minutes or so.Our conversation turned out to be another installment in the informal series of post-mortems I seem to be conducting on the heterodox moment in the early 2020s when there coalesced a…

I want to make a strong claim about psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry Awais Aftab, my guest on the podcast today. He is the single best writer out there today for anyone who is interested in intellectually understanding where the field of mental health is right now.Among the questions to which he has illuminating and often quite profound answers: Is there a crisis of overdiagnosis? What does the anti-psychiatry movement get right and wrong? What does the discipline of psychiatry get right and wrong? Who are the most interesting thinkers in the mental health realm right now? What even is mental illness? Is it time to dispense altogether with the DSM, or does it just need reform? What do and don't we know about the efficacy, and cultural significance, of the legal drugs so many of us, present company included, are being prescribed.There are plenty of writers out there who are addressing these and related issues, but I can't think of anyone who comes close to Aftab in terms of addressing the entire range of them, and doing so in an intellectual serious and aesthetically engaging way. If you want a steady fix of the good shit, in this space, he's the guy who has it. My guess is that everyone who's anyone in psychiatry is already reading him, and that a lot of the journalists who seriously cover mental health are reading him as well, or will be soon.As I say to him in our conversation, I'd been waiting, consciously or not, for someone to fill the space that he has now filled, and it was super exciting to me when I encountered his work. It made my world better, and larger. It's also just so perfectly connected to the core purpose of this podcast, which is to expose listeners to people and topics they should know if they want to be hip to what's going on or what will be going on soon. It was great to talk to him.Aftab is the author of the Psychiatry at the Margins Substack, the recent book from Oxford University Press Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, and a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press titled, provisionally, “Remaking Psychiatry.”Hope you enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Anna Gat is a political intellectual, so we talk some politics, e.g. on how things have changed for the worse in her native country of Hungary, why she thinks that a certain nerdy subset of American conservatives seems to have a raging hard-on for the country and its leader Viktor Orban, and what lessons it all holds for the potential of authoritarianism in the US. Mostly, though, we talk about InterIntellect, which is the company she created that hosts intellectual salons, both in person and online, and about what she's learned from starting and running the company about the art of facilitating good conversation. This is how Anna makes her bread, and so she has a deep investment, and deep expertise, in making her salons enjoyable and satisfying to people. She's thought a lot about it. She's iterated a lot. She has wisdom and insight that most other people don't have. And I found it fascinating.Hope you do too. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comMy guests on the show today are Lila Corwin Berman and Mark Oppenheimer. We talk about Jews, higher education, Jews in higher education, free speech, Israel, Palestine, and the plight of the liberal intellectual Jew in a time when issues surrounding Jews are provoking decidedly illiberal reactions from both ends of the political spectrum.

Starting this month, I'm going to do two new things. One is that I'll plan on releasing episodes on a more regular schedule, on the first, third, and fourth Thursdays of each month. The other is that the second of those three episodes will be paywalled, and it will be a bit different in content from my usual podcast. It'll be shorter, typically a half hour give or take, and it will be much more topical than I usually like to be. I'll talk to my guest or guests about some current politics and news, and I'll talk about the literary intellectual controversy or trend of the moment, if there's one at hand when we're recording.I won't be offended if you don't want to pay, but of course will be grateful if you do. And to my stalwart existing paid subscribers who forked over money when I wasn't even paywalling anything, much gratitude. You're on my hall of honors list, which as you know is hanging in the burned out husk of the Friendly's Restaurant on Sumner Ave in Springfield Massachusetts. -DanMy guest on the podcast today is Derek Guy, who is North America's premiere men's fashion journalist and critic. This isn't a highly competitive category—most fashion writing is dumb and corrupt, and most of it is about women's fashion—but Derek wears the crown exceptionally well. He shows what's possible in that space, consistently writing thoughtful, substantive essays not just about what's hip in men's fashion but what it means culturally, sociologically, politically.If you've heard of Derek, it's almost certainly because for a while he was an accidental celebrity on Twitter. He was just on the platform, doing his well-regarded but relatively obscure men's fashion thing, slowly building his online presence, when the algorithm took hold of him and made him ubiquitous on the site, dropping him into the feeds of millions of people who had never shown any interest whatsoever in his subject. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023:Of all the changes at Twitter Inc. under Elon Musk so far, this might be the most unexpected: A California-based menswear writer, who weighs in on incorporating western-style wear into your wardrobe, and on his favorite Italian tailors, suddenly seems to be all over the platform.The Twitter account @dieworkwear, run by Derek Guy, is popping up left and right in users' timelines—even for those who don't follow him. The phenomenon has befuddled users—and Mr. Guy himself.Derek doesn't know why this happened. He didn't have a backroom deal with Elon Musk. It just happened. He became the “men's wear guy on Twitter.”I initially reached out to Derek not to have him on the podcast, but because I was trying to develop a story pitch on men's fashion in the age of Trump, and I wanted to see if I could pick his brain for ideas. It turned out he was already at work on a few different stories on different aspects of that topic, and it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one podcast episode. One of the articles we discuss in our conversation hasn't run yet. The other, his Bloomberg story “The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic,” goes back into the history of macho male fitness influencer fashion to explain why the new crop of alpha male influencers dresses the way it does. Among the interesting ironies it points out is that the styles we currently think of as manosphere chic—Joe Rogan in his super tight jeans and super tight t-shirts, Andrew Tate stuffed into slim fit suits like a misogynistic sausage—are directly descended from 1990s high-end fashions that were intended as rejections of machisimo. Guy writes:Early adopters of slim-fit style were fashion-forward urbanites who embraced this European vision of youthful cool. They wore shrunken blazers, used chamomile-infused moisturizers, and could explain the difference between Chelsea boots and jodhpurs. But their aesthetic rattled the mainstream. In search of a label, the media landed on “metrosexual,” a term that, not so subtly, cast suspicion on a man's gender and sexuality. The metrosexual was someone who took pride in taste and understood why “some women have 47 pairs of black shoes.” What set him apart wasn't just his grooming habits or aesthetic literacy, but his attitude towards gender performance. As the New York Times wrote in 2003, this new archetype possessed “a carefree attitude toward the inevitable suspicion that a man who dresses well… is gay.”While slim-fit marched down high-fashion runways, it also crept through indie rock shows, early style blogs, and menswear forums like StyleForum and Superfuture. These communities turned fit into a kind of doctrine, elevating silhouettes like APC New Standards and Uniqlo button-downs as markers of elite taste. As The Strokes played onstage in threadbare tees and skin-tight denim, wealthy urbanites chased the look by purchasing Slimane's most popular creations: Dior's 17 cm and 19 cm jeans, named after the width of their leg openings. Those priced out of luxury labels raided the women's aisle for tight denim, a gender-bending hack that Levi's would later celebrate with their 2011 “Ex-Girlfriend Jeans” for men. Even the heritage revival got a trim. The traditional symbols of masculinity—workwear, Ivy tailoring, military surplus—were recut for a different era, one where style was no longer bulky but compressed, tailored close to the bone. In its early years, slim fit was met with derision and low-grade cultural panic. Critics said consumerism had hollowed out traditional manhood, replacing it with men who spent too much time curating their appearance. Others fretted that the rise of shrunken silhouettes was a symptom of masculine decay. But soon, everyone became metrosexual. Fashion magazines treated slim fit as a kind of pseudo-science: shoulder seams had to sit on the edge of the shoulder bone; trousers must taper just-so; any loose fabric signaled laziness or sloppiness. J.Crew helped bring this new silhouette into everyday offices. Their Liquor Store concept shop, opened in 2008, transformed an after-hours watering hole into a menswear-only boutique laden with 1960s-era references to traditional masculinity—antique rugs, leather club chairs, and Hemmingway novels sitting alongside Red Wings—even as they sold slim chambray shirts and cropped blazers. At the same time, Mad Men introduced a new masculine figure: Don Draper. Emotionally sealed off and impeccably dressed, Draper gave the slim-cut suit an edge of stoic authority. Slim tailoring had became synonymous with professional competence and upward mobility.Eventually, slim fit stopped feeling radical. Its early ties to gender rebellion faded as the silhouette was absorbed into more conventional ideas of masculinity. What once looked subversive—shrunken jeans, tight shirts, tailoring that clung instead of concealing—became standard fare in offices, weddings, and Tinder profiles. New subcultures rebranded the look with more conventionally masculine associations. EDC (Everyday Carry) enthusiasts, armed with pocket knives, flashlights, and multitools, adopted slim-fit gear as part of a rugged preparedness ethos. Their slim tactical pants and fitted henleys weren't about gender ambiguity; they were survivalist uniforms. Athleisure brands such as Rhone and Alo Yoga pushed the same silhouette in poly-stretch fabrics, merging gymwear with streetwear into a softer kind of masculine armor. In Silicon Valley, tech founders embraced minimalist wardrobes built around Everlane tees, slim joggers, and all-white sneakers. The aesthetic once dismissed as “metro” was now treated as self-optimization. Slim fit, in the end, didn't rewrite the code of masculinity. It just offered a new way to perform it.In addition to the two stories we discuss, he's also gone on to write a new story on a person we discuss in the conversation - Trumpist intellectual Michael Anton, who is a huge clothes horse and for a long time was a regular presence on high end men's fashion forums. It's a fun conversation, particularly if you're interested in questions of masculinity, culture, and identity. Listen! Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Chris Cillizza. You may know from his many years writing for the Washington Post, his many years on-air for CNN, or his recent third act on Substack, but I know Chris from way back when, as a friend and classmate in the Loomis Chaffee class of 1994. We didn't stay in close touch after we graduated, but we've stayed friendly and have crossed paths occasionally in the 30 years since. When Chris agreed to do this, I'd intended to focus on his long and successful career in journalism, concluding with a discussion of his unexpected lay-off from CNN, in 2022, and his subsequent re-invention on Substack. We do some of that, but the overall vibe is less professional than it is mid-life existential. We talk about the arcs of our lives over the last few decades — how we've balanced ambition and responsibility, what we're thinking about now that life has beaten the shit out of us a fair amount and we have a little bit of wisdom about things, and what comes next.To give you a taste, here's a lightly edited passage from the conversation where Chris and I are talking about how ambition sometimes got the better of him when he was working at CNN:Cillizza: There's this great quote from a German philosopher [Arthur Schopenhauer] that I think about all the time: “Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become. And the same is true of fame.”So when I got to CNN from the Post, I was bigger than before. More people knew me. More people read me. I made more money. And you know what I spent most of my time thinking? ‘Why am I not anchoring? Why am I not on the 7:00 to 11:00 PM election night coverage? Why am I on the midnight to 4:00 AM election coverage?' Oppenheimer: Do you worry about falling back into that? Up until three years ago, you were on that train and were being driven by those incentives. Then you had this massive shock to the system. Since then you've done a lot of introspection. You've grown. But look, you're a talented guy. You're still a hardworking guy. You could go back up again, right? That could happen, whether it's growing to 5 million subscribers on Substack and you're making a shit ton of money, or CNN calls, or MSNBC calls, or the next Democratic administration calls and says, ‘Hey, we need a press secretary.'It's not implausible that you could be back up, or even get to greater levels of fame and influence. Do you worry that you could get sucked back into it? Do you feel like you have enough guardrails in place or you've done enough introspection? I just think about it with you because while the sudden epiphany is great, it can also be very evanescent, right?Cillizza: Totally, and certainly in the first 18 months after CNN laid me off, if NBC had called and been like, ‘Hey, you wanna come work here?' I would have said, 'Absolutely.' The reason that I am on this path now is partly because I chose it, but also partly because no one else asked.So I don't think it's likely that someone will ask, but yes, of course, if you've gone down a road before, it makes it more likely that you'll go down it again.I think two things are true. One is that it's almost impossible that one of those places would call and say, ‘Chris, we want you back.' And I think it is equally unlikely that I would say yes, for a number of reasons. The first is that this is where I've been most my true self. It's a better space to be in. But also it is unlikely they would pay me enough to make it worth it.I think you always have to be mindful of it, and yes I have put guardrails in place, but you hit a guardrail hard enough and it breaks. It's not a guarantor.Oppenheimer: So maybe it's not a news network. What if it's this scenario? What if you write a memoir? You write a memoir about your midlife crisis, and most books don't do much of anything, but let's say it hits. Your book is a bestseller. It's not a Tuesdays with Morrie bestseller, but it's a solid bestseller. You're already on the speaking circuit, but its success vaults you up to the next level of the speaking circuit.Now there's more that you're being asked to do than you can do while also maintaining a healthy life and spending enough time with your wife and kids and working on yourself to make more close friends. That's a plausible trajectory. Maybe it won't happen, but it's plausible. And so you would have to be very strong to be able to say, ‘You are offering me $50,000 to go for the weekend to give this talk, and I just can't. I can't do it. My son has a baseball game.'It's a really good, wide-ranging conversation. You should listen. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of the podcast is eminent couples therapist Terry Real, who is the author of various bestselling books on relationships and a great audio-only book, Fierce Intimacy, that I recommend to people all the time if they want a highly efficient rhetorical punch to the gut to change their lives for the better.Terry was also, briefly, my couples therapist. I wrote about this at great length in The New York Times Magazine, and then wrote a little bit more about it here on the Substack. He did eight sessions with my wife and me, all of which were recorded and shared with us, and recently dropped in on our regularly scheduled session with Desirae Ysasi, a close colleague of his to whom he referred us after our course of therapy with him was done. You don't have to read either of these pieces to enjoy this conversation, but reading them in advance will enrich your experience of the conversation, because you'll have a better sense of why I lead Terry in the particular directions that I do. I'm a skeptic of self-help literature, in general, but I suspend my skepticism in Terry's case. I think his way of thinking about relationships, and through them about individual virtue, bypasses a lot of the traps that we're stuck in when it comes to both politics and psychology. On issues around masculinity, in particular, he points toward a way forward for men that avoids the pitfalls of traditional right-coded masculinity and the inadequacies of feminist anti-masculinity. He gives us a way to be powerful and loving, feminist and strong, at the same time. That's some of what we talk about in the conversation. We also talk about politics, about different therapeutic strategies for working with “blatant” and “latent” partners in a relationship, and plenty more. -DanShow notes from AI:00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:31 Terry Real's Background and Work01:03 Male Depression and Boyhood Trauma03:45 Relational Life Therapy (RLT) Origins05:35 Therapeutic Leverage in Couples Therapy08:56 Phases of Relational Life Therapy12:12 Patriarchy and Its Impact on Therapy15:46 Confronting Grandiosity in Therapy30:22 Challenges in Addressing Male Depression35:11 Ecological Wisdom and Relational Technology35:40 Teaching Relationship Skills with Humility36:05 Confronting Criticism and Gender Dynamics40:50 Empowerment Strategies for Latents and Blatants48:43 Political Implications of Relational Wisdom56:43 The Balance of Power and Love in Politics01:07:50 Sexual Dynamics and Relational Flexibility01:10:22 The Wisdom of Knowing the Right Moment Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Jon Baskin, co-founder and editor of The Pointmagazine, which over the last 16 years has managed to carve out for itself a really distinctive and important space within the broader American literary intellectual scene. Jon and I have traded emails over the years, but like a lot of people who I think of as loose comrades within the broader scene, we had never actually gazed on each other's faces or heard each other's voices before we got on Zoom to do this. So it was nice to connect.We talk a lot about the birth and development of The Point, in particular its origins in the Committee on Social Thought program at the University of Chicago. We talk about its relationship to N+1 , which is in many ways the seminal magazine of the last few decades of political intellectual life on the left in America. We get into how Jon and his co-editors have managed to keep their bearings while so many other publications have been whipsawed and in some cases destroyed by the violent political energies of the past decade. And we talk about how The Point does and doesn't intersect with the emerging media landscape.This is a really fun conversation with Jon. Hope you enjoy.AI Show notes courtesy of Descript:00:00 Introduction to Eminent Americans00:17 Meet John Baskin: Co-founder of The Point Magazine01:28 The Birth and Evolution of The Point Magazine02:21 Upcoming Conversations and Projects04:38 John Baskin's Intellectual Journey05:45 The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago11:49 Influences and Inspirations Behind The Point23:28 The Role of Philosophy in The Point's Editorial Vision36:30 Challenges and Conflicts in Editorial Direction43:00 The Convergence of Magazines in the Late 2000s44:43 The Role of DNA in Magazine Identity45:28 Challenges in Finding Writers47:06 Impact of Substack on Traditional Magazines49:50 Balancing Established and New Writers57:31 Exploring the Political Spectrum of The Point01:03:32 The Relationship Between Political and Cultural Conservatism01:08:22 The Point's Foray into Substack01:17:39 The Mystique of The Point and Its Editors01:19:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first episode of Eminent Americans where I've had the pleasure of talking to both the subject of a published profile and the profile writer at the same time. Kevin LaTorre, a return guest on the show, recently wrote “The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu,” a long piece about philosopher and metafictionist Justin Smith-Ruiu. Or maybe Justin wrote it himself, appropriating Kevin's name and likeness as another one of his authorial alter-egos. Maybe “Kevin” doesn't even exist. I mean, I think he does, since I've talked to him before on zoom, and perused his digital profile, but what if he's just a gifted improviser who was hired by Justin to play Kevin on my podcast? What if the plan all along was to create a real-seeming “Kevin LaTorre” persona, with a fully fleshed out online profile, in order to add yet another layer of semi-unreality to the many layers of the Hinternet, Justin's vast and sprawling endeavor.This seems unlikely, given that “Kevin” and I don't even talk about Justin in our first podcast interview, but who knows? If you're going to create a plausible “Kevin LaTorre” in the world, then you need to have him doing plausibly Kevin LaTorre-esque things, like coming on my podcast to discuss his “faith,” the essayist “Jia Tolentino,” and “climate change.”Anyhoo — such are the questions one begins to ask oneself after one has spent more than a certain amount of time in Justin's world. The conversation, which I really enjoyed, is primarily about Justin and his Hinternet project. We also talk about the challenges that Kevin faced in profiling Justin, Justin's disillusionment with academia, and Justin's scooter accident of a few years ago, which marked a profound break in his life and career. And much, much more.Hinternet posts we discuss include (descriptors and parentheticals from Kevin)* His re-version story* His past audio-mixing history* This metafiction: "The Storyteller"* His case against euthanasia (by far, the most technoskeptic take I've read from him)* His case for pacifism (by far the most dissident-left stance he has, I think -- antiwar in a pro-war Democratic party)* His reflection on his post-2020 developments (where he uses the "old-time religion" of love which sums up plenty about him lately)The show notes, according to ChatGPT:

My guest on the show today is Maggie Bullock, author of Kingdom of Prep, the Inside Story of The Rise and (Near) Fall of J Crew. Maggie's also the co-author of the Substack newsletter The Spread, which offers an insider's look and cultural commentary on the world of women's magazines.Maggie and I talk primarily about the subject of her book, J Crew, which holds a special place in my heart, brain and psyche. We talk about our own respective experiences of preppy culture, particularly in high school, and about how fashion relates to issues of politics, race, culture, weight, history, class, psychology, and more. We talk about the key figures in the creation of the two J Crew golden ages, first the founding visionaries, Arthur Cinader and his daughter Emily Cinader, and then the saviors of the brand after it was wrecked by private equity, retail wiz Mickey Drexler and chief designer Jenna Lyons.It's a really interesting conversation, I think, even if you're not interested in clothes in the way that Maggie and I are.The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of J. Crew: An Insider's LookIn this episode of Eminent Americans, host Dan Oppenheimer interviews Maggie Bullock, author of 'Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of The Rise and Fall of J. Crew.' They explore the fascinating history of J. Crew, from its founding by Arthur and Emily Senatore, its evolution and perfectionism, to its tumultuous relationship with private equity and eventual decline. The discussion also delves into the cultural impact of the brand, its transformation under Mickey Drexler and Jenna Lyons, and the intersection of fashion with issues such as race, class, and gender. The episode is dedicated to Dan's late friend, Aaron Hess, and his iconic J. Crew role-neck sweater.00:39 Diving into J Crew: A Brand Close to Our Hearts00:50 Exploring Preppy Culture and Fashion's Broader Impact01:26 Dedication to a Friend01:55 Welcoming Maggie Bullock02:36 The Kingdom of Prep: J Crew's Story03:33 The Business and Cultural Evolution of J Crew06:31 Private Equity and Its Impact on Fashion08:52 The Origins and Growth of J Crew18:52 Personal Reflections on Preppy Culture23:59 The Iconic Role Neck Sweater30:44 Landing Supermodel Linda Evangelista34:06 The Fashion Moment That Elevated J Crew34:36 The Influence of Male Models36:05 J Crew's Cultural Impact in Schools39:45 The Perfectionism of J Crew's Founders43:52 Mickey Drexler's Turnaround Strategy57:03 Jenna Lyons' Creative Vision01:02:50 The Challenges of High Fashion01:06:17 The Resilience of Preppy Style01:08:53 Conclusion and Future Prospects Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of the podcast is William Deresiewicz, author of a number of books, most notably Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, and the Substack newsletter Derisivist.Bill and I end up spending a fair amount of time discussing an as-yet-untitled essay of his that's forthcoming in Salmagundi, and at what I'd say are the two poles of it. On the one hand, it's a lament for the decline of the left, which he argues has made itself the enemy of cultural vitality. On the other hand, it's an initial sketch of what he calls the "not left," which is some kind of loose constellation of people (including Bill and me) who still take their policy bearings from the left but who feel profoundly alienated from its current cultural and institutional manifestations. He writes:"It comes to this: the left has made itself the enemy of the life force—of vitality, of eros. It fears it and it wants to shackle it. It feels, with a deep, instinctive revulsion, that it is incompatible with goodness, with morality. So it subordinates it to morality, or rewrites it in its terms. … The not-left, like the left in the 60s and 70s, is the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony, and curiosity. As opposed to solemnity, self-censorship, defensiveness, literalism, and prudery. The left is 'no'; the not-left is 'yes.' The left is 'post-,' the prefix of imaginative depletion. The not-left is 'neo-,' the sign of new beginnings."I thought of waiting to send this out until his essay was available, but I decided not to. Our conversation stands on its own, and it also spends a lot of time on other topics, including Bill's childhood in a modern Orthodox Jewish home, his early efforts to be a good boy and pursue a career in the sciences, his transition to English literature, and then his eventual break from academia. And much more.It's a great conversation. Bill and I have been consuming a lot of the same stuff over the past few years, and the result is a shared frame of reference that allows us to bounce and spark off each other in a pretty ideal way. You can feel us arriving at new ideas, and nuancing old ones, in the moment, which is what the interview-style podcast achieves at its best.Essays and podcast episodes we mention during the conversation, in addition to Bill's forthcoming essay, are:Last Boys at the Beginning of History: Thymos comes to the capitalby Mana AfsariWhy I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering): I didn't have a choice. Thousands of people are driven out of the profession each year.by William DeresiewiczWhat Was the Post-Left?Geoff Shullenberger and I autopsy a movement, and moment, in timeNuance: A Love Story: My affair with the intellectual dark webBy Meghan DaumThese Hollow Halls: Whither the Academy, journalism, Substack, and the rest of it.I talk to Julianne Werlin and Sam Kahn about the state of the Academy and other things.Gatecrashers: A podcast about the hidden history of Jews and the Ivy LeagueBy Mark Oppenheimer.Show notes:00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:45 Early Life and Education01:15 Graduate School Challenges01:59 Career Beginnings and Dance Criticism02:26 Teaching at Yale04:04 Leaving Academia04:59 Transition to Writing06:46 Staying Relevant in Culture09:04 Podcasting and Media Consumption22:13 Critique of Elite Education32:24 The Pressure of High Achievement33:44 Navigating Anxiety in a Competitive World34:33 Personal Reflections and Self-Selection36:29 The Fascination with Emptiness39:36 The Elite and Their Inner Lives50:59 Jewish Intellectualism and Cultural Influence56:43 The Role of Physical and Virtual Intellectual Communities01:00:24 Exploring Jewish Identity and Continuity01:07:39 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

For my recent New York Times Magazine article on my experience of doing couples therapy with noted therapist Terry Real, I interviewed Terry's old friend and former collaborator Carol Gilligan. This is an edited version of that conversation, which is in part about Terry but also more broadly about issues of gender roles and relationships, patriarchy and politics.Gilligan, now in her 80s, is probably best known for her landmark 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, which proposed a new model of early psychological development that distinguished between how boys and girls develop.She's since written a host of other books, including The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love; Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development; Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance; and most recently Why does patriarchy persist? and Darkness now visible: patriarchy's resurgence and feminist resistance.I wrote about Gilligan and Real in a recent post on this Substack, describing how they met and ended up collaborating:“I think there's a deep love of men in Terry,” says the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, who first met Real in the late 1990s, after she positively reviewed his book on male depression, I Don't Want to Talk About It, in The New York Times. Gilligan had just returned to the US from England to accept a chair in gender studies at Harvard, and Real was teaching and practicing nearby at a family therapy institute in Cambridge. She was invited to visit the institute, and while there she observed Real, through a one way mirror, working with a married couple. She was struck by the intensity of his therapeutic presence, and by the way that his confrontation of men was able to simultaneously draw in both halves of the couple.“I hadn't seen a therapist who had the ability Terry had to talk with men,” she says, “and to name what was going on. I think men could hear it, and I would watch the woman, and her eyes would open wide: 'Oh my god, somebody's saying it.'”Soon Gilligan and Real began seeing couples together. At the time, Gilligan was also working with psychologist Judy Chu on a project observing four-year-old boys in pre-school. What she and Chu ended up charting was a kind of inverse of the psychological stunting process that Gilligan had identified in her earlier, groundbreaking work on the development of girls. Where girls, beginning in adolescence, would often suppress their “masculine” assertiveness and voice, boys, at age four or so, would begin to suppress their “feminine” capacities to perceive and respond to the internal states of themselves and others. Under pressure from their peers and parents, they'd begin to go emotionally dumb. Gilligan wondered if many of the romantic conflicts faced by adult couples were rooted in these parallel failures of development, and whether one could heal adult relationships by bringing these earlier selves into relation to each other in therapy.“Where was the emotionally honest 11-year-old girl who said what she saw and felt?” she says. “And where was that emotionally intelligent four-year-old boy from my studies with boys who would say things like, 'Mommy, why do you smile when you're sad?' I thought: if you could get these two people in the room, they could work out the problems in the relationship.”We talk about her work with Terry, her work with fathers of young boys, early psychological development, her take on Terry's approach to working with me, and much more. It's a relatively brief, but I think quite rich, conversation. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on today's episode is podcast and radio producer Avery Trufelman. For about seven years, Avery was a producer for design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible, from which she eventually spun off her own podcast, Articles of Interest, which she describes as a podcast “about what we wear.” I asked Avery on the show to talk about season 3 of the show, the entirety of which was dedicated to one topic, the story of preppy clothes and style in America. I was totally mesmerized by the seven episode season, which she titled “American Ivy.” It incorporates so many of the topics I'm interested in. Class, status, clothes, fashion, politics, Jews. It's all in there in the story of prep, which runs through, among other focal points of cultural influence, elite universities, Jewish garment makers, Black civil rights activists and jazz musicians, Japanese obsessives, and every level of the extended Ralph Lauren preppy universe.There's also a very personal angle we get into. Avery and I both went to prep schools. We both had complicated relationships with preppy style. She rebelled against it, pushing the dress code with Haight-Ashbury influenced vintage finds. I wanted to conform but never quite cracked the code. I knew the rules existed, but they were unwritten and opaque, the kind of thing you absorbed from family, from summer camps, from generations of insider knowledge. The right khakis, the right boat shoes, the right rollneck sweaters—not just the brand, but how they were worn, how they signaled status.It's a rich conversation. Hope you enjoy. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode of the show I'm talking to Mark Oppenheimer, my older brother and the recently anointed editor of Arc, the magazine formerly known as Religion and Politics.Our text is recent article of his, “Why Is a Publisher of Antisemitic and Homophobic Authors Winning a National Book Award? Paul Coates, father of Ta-Nehisi Coates, is getting a lifetime achievement award from people who don't want to talk about what he's actually done.”We talk about the article, which goes into a lot of depth about the authors and texts published by Coates's indie press, Black Classic Press, and then also about the broader context. Why did the National Book Foundation seek to recognize Coates in the first place? Why did they not know (and we're taking it as a given that they didn't know) that he had a record of publishing homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist writers? Why have they remained mostly silent on the topic, since better information has come out, and why has the part of the media that tends to cover literary controversies opted out of covering this one. In addition to his work for Arc, Mark is the author of five books, including Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting & the Soul of a Neighborhood, and Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. He's finishing up a biography of Judy Blume, which should come out in the next year or two. Show NotesHere's the summary and time stamps that the Descript bot gave me, which seem roughly accurate if not always super helpful.00:00 Introduction and Milestones01:28 Upcoming Episodes and Guests03:06 Interview with Mark Oppenheimer05:25 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press08:28 Controversies and Criticisms23:16 Media Response and Broader Implications38:12 The Role of Myths in Society38:47 Debate on Afrocentric Myths39:43 Flexibility of Religious Myths41:50 Healthy vs. Poisonous Myths43:06 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press48:50 The National Book Foundation Controversy58:31 The Role of the Free Press01:09:52 Concluding Thoughts on Intellectual DiscoursePrevious Episodes of the Coates Chronicles Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor of Compact magazine and host of their Blame Theory podcast. Geoff emailed me a few months back, after a post of mine that touched on the the risks of hitching one's identity too thoroughly to hating on the left. What do I think, he asked, about the “post-left.”To which my answer was, “What's that?”That's the topic of much of this episode of the podcast. One answer comes from a piece on the phenomenon that Park MacDougald wrote a few years ago for Unherd. In it, he wrote:The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.… Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent.Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What's Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers.To put it another way, this was not the class-first, anti-woke internal critique that I think is more familiar to many us. It shares some DNA with that critique. Like that crew, the post-lefties thought identitarian politics were a fraud, a way for already elite actors to make themselves out to be tribunes of the people, to claim oppressed status in order to advance themselves. But unlike that class firsters, the post-lefties also thought the class first critique was a fraud too. It's all fraud all the way down, wholly disconnected from the vulnerable people it claims to represent, all a project of the elite for the elite. Geoff and I talk about the origins of this group, his own adjacency to it for a little while, the distinctions between the post-left and other post-something groups, including his own crew at Compact, the dangers of finding your identity in pure critique, and just in general the challenges of staying thoughtful in a politically chaotic time. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is Rod Dreher, conservative Christian writer and author of many books, most recently Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which came out in October from Zondervan press.This is the audio complement to a written interview I did with Dreher that's just out in Arc, the magazine formerly known as Religion and Politics. It was recently re-branded and re-imagined under the auspices of its new editor in chief, my brother Mark Oppenheimer. I'll link to the interview in the show notes. You should read it, and check out the magazine, which is publishing a lot of really interesting stuff.To give you some context for this conversation, which launches right into a recent experience that Dreher had of having a kind of low key exorcism, his new book is mostly about the experiences that he and others have had of what I would call the supernatural, but he would call the divine or the demonic.So hauntings, possessions, exorcisms, divine epiphanies, psychedelic experiences of alternate realities, even alien abductions and visitations. For Rod, this is all evidence of the fact that world is far stranger and more wondrous than materialists like me can perceive.I don't agree with him on most or all of this, or on most of his conservative politics, but I spend almost no time in this conversation arguing with him on either front. That's because I'm not that interested in arguing with him. I'm interested in understanding him and his perspective, which is one that I've long found compelling even as I've also found it alarmist and wrong-headed.I keep reading Rod, book after book, year after year, precisely because he sees the world so differently than me, and because I never doubt his desire to live thoughtfully and authentically in the world, and I never doubt that he's in touch with interesting cultural vibrations, even if they may not be the ones he thinks they are.A few final notes before I launch into the conversation, which starts rather abruptly because I forgot to hit record when we first started talking.One is I have some exciting episodes coming up, which you should be on the lookout for. One is with the aforementioned Mark Oppenheimer. We're going to talk about his recent piece in Arc on Paul Coates, Ta Nehisi Coates's father, who was recently given a lifetime achievement award by the National Book Foundation for his work as founder and editor of Black Classic Press. Mark writes about the uncomfortable reality of how many of the books and authors who Coates has championed have bizarre and often quite nasty views about race, sexuality, and Jews.I also have an upcoming episode with Geoff Schullenberger, managing editor of Compact Magazine, about the post-left. I'm still not quite sure what the post-left is, even after the conversation, but I really enjoyed talking to Geoff about it.So stay tuned for those episodes, and whatever comes next. I have an invitation out to Lorne Michaels, creator and master of Saturday Night Live, but I haven't heard anything back yet, so we'll see. My hopes are not high.What else? Oh, yeah, Rod is currently living in Hungary. This comes up in our conversation.Finally, I start with Rod's recent exorcism, in the conversation, in part because it's an example of what the book is about, though it happened after the book was written, but also because his discussion of what needed to be exorcised goes directly to his personal history of family trauma and dysfunction. In our written interview, and in this conversation, he talks openly and with great vulnerability about his painful relationship with his late father and about how, in his view, the pain opened up traumatic cracks in his psyche that dark spirits were able to sneak in through.Enjoy the show. Read the interview. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on the show today is novelist and TV writer Ben H. Winters. I first encountered Ben as the author of the wonder and wonderfully sad Last Policeman trilogy of science fiction novels, which are about a small town cop who keeps investigating and solving crimes even as a planet-destroying asteroid continues on its deadly trajectory toward Earth. I hadn't thought of him in about a decade, since I finished the books, when I came across his name again in a surprising place, as one of the co-creators of the CBS show Tracker, the first season of which I'd just binged. I don't usually go deep into the cast and crew of shows like Tracker, which is a fun but fairly generic CBS action series, but I'd been surprised to see that the show had been the single most popular scripted drama of the year. I was curious whether there was something in the zeitgeist it was capturing that I simply hadn't perceived.So I started researching the creators, and there Ben was. The more I read about him, the more fascinated I became. In addition to The Last Policeman novels, he's also the author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which was the second in the “Quirk Classics” series, after Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He also wrote the third volume in that series, Android Karenina. Other science fiction and thriller titles include Underground Airlines, Golden State, The Quiet Boy, and this year's Big Time. As a TV writer, in addition to Tracker, he's also worked on Legion, the trippy Marvel series, and Manhunt, about the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Lincoln.Ben and I end up talking a lot about how to make a career as a writer, the unpredictabilities of the entertainment industry, and the ways in which Tracker blends conservative and liberal sensibilities. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode of the podcast, I talk to Sam Kahn and Julianne Werlin about how institutions and experts produce culture and authority; how two institutions in particular, the academy and journalism, are rapidly eroding in authority, resources, and maybe influence; and how Sam, Julianne, and I are reckoning, personally and professionally, with these big shifts.Among the issues we address: Why is Sam so bullish on Substack, and why is he is planning to launch a new publication on it soon? What is it like for Julianne to teach in an English department that has lost so many majors that it can't even fill a lecture hall anymore for any of their classes, including even the big Shakespeare surveys? Can Substack do as good a job as establishment publications in producing high quality book criticism? Can it have a role to play in the academic infrastructure? What's it like to spend ten years on a scholarly book and then have to wait another three to get a review of it?Sam is an editor at Persuasion magazine and the author of the Substack Castalia . Julianne is an associate professor of English at Duke University and author of Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press). Her substack is Life and Letters.The genesis of this conversation is a piece that Julianne wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time,” and then a few related pieces, including:* Sam's piece for Compact, “We Are in a Writing Renaissance”* becca rothfeld's Substack post, “why i am skeptical that substack can or should replace legacy media”* Sam's somewhat angry response to Becca's piece, “Against Becca Rothfeld”* Becca's very civil response to Sam's response to Becca, “a brief addendum: in response to my critic(s)”As of this episode of the podcast, I have a new/old collaborator, audio whiz Robert Scaramuccia. Robert produced the pilot episode of the pod, on Ezra Klein. He's now back for the indefinite future, so if the quality of the show suddenly seems higher, that's why. I also have some new intro and outro music on the podcast. It's from “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood,” by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah . Thanks to friend of the pod, and former guest, Alec Ounsworth for permission to use that. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

I have a poor eye for specific sociological detail but a good brain for psychology and the things that drive people to block and hurt others. —Matthew GasdaMy guest on this episode of the podcast is poet, novelist, essayist and playwright Matthew Gasda, with playwright being the most salient of those descriptors. His play Denmark just finished up a short run at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, which Gasda founded and runs, and he is best known for his play Dimes Square, which helped fix the notorious New York downtown microneighborhood in the public imagination.In 2022, The New York Times published a very substantive profile of Gasda, tracking his emergence into hipster prominence during Covid:In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that's where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn't appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene's turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.Set in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It's filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda's spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Matt and I talk about a great number of things over the course of this quite long and I think quite rich conversation, which we recorded in two separate sessions. He helps me come asymptotically closer to understanding what the Dimes Square scene is or was (I'm pretty sure it's was at this point).We talk about his very middle-class youth in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the difficulties of making the transition from that world, and the world of his middle-class degrees from Syracuse and Lehigh, to the very specialized set of manners and expectations that structure life and society in New York City.We talk about the general challenges of making it in as playwright (and by extension as screenwriter or tv writer), as well as the specific challenges of making it when you've been classified as politically suspect, as Matt has.We end, more or less, with my expressing my hope that Matt can continue to protect and nurture his talent and his desire to connect even as, of necessity, he has to live and work in various scences in New York that can be quite toxic.   AI-generated show notes. They seem mostly accurate.00:00 Introduction to Eminent Americans00:32 Meet Matthew Gazda: Playwright Extraordinaire01:10 The Dime Square Phenomenon02:29 Exploring Denmark and Other Plays03:37 Defining Dime Square05:26 The Scene and Its Key Figures08:07 The Evolution of Dime Square21:03 The Genesis of the Play27:43 Matthew Gazda's Background39:36 Navigating Social Classes and Upbringings40:58 The Art of Performativity and Banter42:55 Algorithmic Conversations and AI's Impact44:04 Flirting and Social Dynamics46:14 Authenticity vs. Performativity in Plays48:26 Cynicism and Artistic Integrity57:13 Challenges of a Playwright's Career01:00:40 Exploring Dimes Square and Its Impact01:19:22 The HBO Deal and Dimes Square01:19:49 Canceled Party and Industry Politics01:21:24 Theater World Challenges01:25:08 Class and Credentials in the Arts01:28:52 Navigating Bitterness and Cynicism01:33:28 The Reality of Artistic Success01:44:00 Final Thoughts and Future PlansSome of the questions I prepared in advance, many but not all of which I ended up asking:In the most concrete, least abstract terms possible: What was Dimes Square and who were the major players within it? And should I be talking about it in the past tense?  Tell me about Bethlehem? You seem like a hustler from the provinces, much much more driven than the people around you. True? One of the tensions in your plays, at least in the ones I've read, is between what I guess I'd just call earnestness, or authenticity, and the alternatives to that—on the one hand a kind of ironic performativity, which is what constitutes much of Dimes Square, and then on the other hand just a zoned out deflection of emotion, which is what you get so much of in your play Zoomers. Does that sound right to you? You just wrote this piece, "Credentialist Cretins," that is just immensely cynical about the people around you. But then you seem like a fairly earnest person, interested in connecting. And you've been pretty protective of your friends in the scene, people who a lot of others would like to see as ironic performative too cool for school types. Square that circle for me. My brother always says that theater will be the last refuge of wokeness, that it will be land acknowledgements until we all sink into the sea. Is that right? How do you fit into the scene? Are you endangering your career prospects either through the plays, and their use of certain language and expression of certain ideas, or through your political writing? Are you cutting yourself off from the money flows? What the hell is going on with Zoomers? I found it an interesting read, but I wasn't sure what you were doing? Am I too old? Would it have been more apparent if I saw the play in person?Excerpts from Matt's essay “Downtown Demons,” about the development and meaning of the Dimes Square scene:The creation of scenes was aided and accelerated by temporarily cheaper rents and inflated tech wages (and crypto fortunes). Large apartments and lofts were secured, sometimes in two-year leases. A new, politically ambiguous patron class appeared at the same time that subscriber-supported writers and podcasters were challenging mainstream news and opinion. You could listen to a podcast or read a Substack, and meet the podcaster or writer the same night at a party or a bar (though these shuttered in the early evening, for those who remember, on the totally scientific theory that the virus hunts at night); shifts in perspective were happening in real time.Old political boundaries were temporarily porous and fluid and ideological lines could be crossed and retraced again. At a given party, you might meet—to name a few examples at random—a liberal New York Times columnist, a Big Five novelist with a forthcoming debut (typically less daring than her conversation), a dirtbag podcaster, a powerful editor, an out-of-work actor, a fashion model, a filmmaker, an influencer, a Thiel Fellowship winner, a grad student on a stipend, a union organizer, a Bitcoin multimillionaire; the melange was the message.In effect, the pandemic downtown moment was, from the very beginning, infected with spirit of the very-online, which, while latent for a long time, never went away; there was a tension between those who really truly wanted to leave the internet behind, and those who instinctively wanted to integrate the online into the fabric of nightlife—and the latter won out.The mimetic violence of downtown discourse—the denunciations, the trollings, the doxxings, the terroristic threats—that is manifest in the way people talk to, and more often, about one another, presages real political conflict in the future. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Princeton sociologist Shamus Rahman Kahn, who is the author of a number of books, most notably for our purposes Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School.I described the book, in a previous post, thusly:Privilege is an extraordinary book. People throw that word around too easily, but I really mean it in this case. It blew my mind in a way that it hadn't been blown in a long while. Khan is a very good writer of sentences, an insightful theorist, and perhaps above all an observer of rare acuity. He just sees a lot more, and a lot more clearly, than most people would in a similar context, even if they went in with similarly ethnographic objectives. The result is a book packed with striking insight and fascinating detail. As it happens I went to a high school that wasn't too different from St. Paul's. It wasn't as fancy, didn't cater to quite as many sons and daughters of the high elite, but it was similar enough for me to vouch for Khan's descriptions. They ring true. He captures with nuance what such places, which are so easy to caricature, are actually like.The post that I wrote about Privilege was by far the most popular thing I've written for this newsletter, which is a testament to my own eloquence, to the fascination of the subject, and to the intensity and insight with which Kahn explored it. Shamus and I had a great conversation. We talked about the book; his experience as both a student and a teacher at St. Paul's School; his training at the University of Wisconsin; his good timing in the selection of subjects; what it feels like to be of the elite; and much more.Show breakdown (according to AI - I have no idea how closely this tracks the reality, but it feels better than nothing)00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest01:07 Discussing the Book 'Privilege'02:44 Exploring Elite Education and Inequality04:35 The Role of Quantitative and Qualitative Research17:21 Personal Background and Experience at St. Paul's30:21 Changes in Elite Education Over Time46:55 The Origins of Meritocracy48:40 Challenges of Meritocracy49:18 Meritocracy and Social Mobility51:40 Ethnographic Insights on Privilege52:57 Understanding Inequality56:32 The Role of Education in Inequality57:08 Class and Political Mobilization01:01:37 American Inequality and Historical Perspectives01:02:25 The Astor Family and American Finance01:09:07 The Influence of Wealth in Politics01:15:54 Navigating Elite Institutions01:17:44 The Future of Elite Coordination01:26:22 Concluding Thoughts on Elites and Power01:29:27 Closing Remarks and Outro Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

“The cynicism of this notion is impressive, if also disgusting.” – Christian Lorentzen, “Literature without Literature”“Publishing houses, publicists, agents, and even editors do not create works of literature. The creator does.” – Ross Barkan, “The War on Genius”In this episode of Eminent Americans, I talk with Christian Lorentzen, Ross Barkan, and Zain Khalid about Christian's recent piece in Granta, “Literature Without Literature,” which was the talk of the literary scene for a few weeks. Christian's piece is both a (highly disparaging) review of Dan Sinykin's Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and a broader critique of the sociological turn in the academic study of literature. On this broader point, Christian writes:“These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.”We talk about the piece, my profound misunderstanding of Christian's motives, Ross's ambivalent experience of graduate school, when Zain is going to get his act together and get a real job, and the terror and wonder of Christian's life as an eternal freelancer.00:00 Introduction and Technical Difficulties 00:35 Meet the Guests 2:25 The backstory on “Literature Without Literature” 07:43 Discussion on Literary Criticism and Market Forces 16:26 Ross's Academic Background and Views on Literature 20:18 Christian's Perspective on Academia and Writing 31:31 Zane's Insights on Writing and Influence 34:06 The Art of Writing and Transitions 35:34 A Hilarious Excerpt and Reflections on Academic Careerism 37:46 Balancing Writing and Life 41:01 The Struggles of a Writer's Life 45:36 Future Plans and Career Reflections 49:28 Current Projects and Final Thoughts Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Kevin LaTorre, a poet and writer living with his family in North Carolina. His work has appeared in The Blotter, Echo Literary Magazine, Walter Magazine, Ad Fontes, and the Front Porch Republic. He writes about poetry, Christianity, and literature at A Stylist Submits.I asked Kevin to pick one text, idea, person, encounter that he thought captured something about where things are today, and his choice was What to Do with Climate Emotions, by Jia Tolentino, in the New Yorker.Kevin also suggested we have a number of other essays present in the background of our conversation about climate change, catastrophism, pro- and anti-natalism, Tolentino, environmentalism, Christianity, etc. His notes on the background reading:* "Is Abortion Sacred?" by Tolentino in TNY: This 2022 piece discusses the birth of children with a similar ecological pessimism as "Climate Emotions" (arguably to a stronger extent, and again in religious/Christian terms)* "Ha ha! Ha ha!" by Lauren Oyler in The London Review of Books: the premier takedown of Tolentino in polite literary circles - the piece is itself questionable and deeply rude but charges Tolentino as one of the "hysterical critics" who makes everything about her and her own "shoddy mode of [narcissistic] thinking" (I don't know if I fully agree, but the self-centeredness charge is interesting for discussing "Climate Emotions" and how Tolentino seemingly echoes her sources)* Your [i.e. my] piece on The New Yorker: the idea that The New Yorker must "artfully neutralize the cognitive dissonance of liberals" can help us describe Tolentino's development as the aspirational female writer of the 2010s (from Hairpin and Jezebel to TNY staff writer in 2016, fortuitous for her career but possibly at the cost of her teeth and devilish humor?)* "Is It OK to Have a Child?" by Meehan Crist in The London Review of Books: defines pretty well the intellectuals' ecological anti-natalism/pessimism towards birth that Tolentino very much flirts with* Ecological anti-natalism as a philosophy present in environmental activism: there's a long history of this pretty anti-human belief system, and its current iteration that very much simulates the Christian concept of original sin (again, something Tolentino seems to accord with given her evangelical background)Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

In his recent essay in Tablet, “Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics,” Blake Smith writes about the Bulgarian-French-American critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva, and in particular her fruitful and fascinating analyses of the viciously anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. For Kristeva, Céline is, among many other things, a great example of how anti-Semitism is embedded in western culture in a way that precedes even the very early Christian antipathy to Jews for their role in rejecting Jesus. We are anti-Semitic, in the West, because our very psyches were formed, before Jesus was even a gleam in God's eye, when the rival but intimately bound figures of the Jewish patriarch and the Jewish prophet set the archetypal boundaries within which we would live and develop. When we rebel, as we must, it is against one or the other of these figures. Blake writes:Western fathers, Kristeva insisted, are Jewish. Even Westerners who are neither Jewish nor religious derive from the heritage of the Bible their profoundest and most intimate understanding not only of God—a loving, punishing, powerful, yet often apparently absent or vindictive father—but of everything associated with the “paternal function.” Our sense of political authority, of social norms, of our own fathers and our own fatherhood, is suffused with biblical legacies. A vision of a bearded older man, compounded of God and the patriarchs with whom God spoke, hangs like a superimposed image before every one of our apparently secular leaders, judges, and dads. Whenever we rebel against their authority, and seek to extirpate from ourselves and our culture that authority's deepest, most hidden foundations, we therefore may easily find ourselves locked no longer in struggle with real, empirical fathers and powers (who may well need to be overcome) but with the abstract, symbolic, Jewish “paternal function” which, never exhaustively embodied by anything, may nevertheless be figured, as a scapegoat, by Jews.But the Bible contains both Law and Prophets: a power that compels obedience to rules and measures all men's worth by them, and a power that compels some men to strangely singularize themselves through antinomian acts of outrageous transgression—powers both called God. The prophets marry whores, lay for months unmoving in bizarre positions, eat disgusting bread, report dreams and sightings in which respectable authorities are laid low by vicious pagan foreigners. Here a relation to God seems not to assure the continuity of patriarchal tradition, of sons becoming fathers through adherence to rules and roles, but rather to endanger everything that might make one socially recognizable as a decent person. The prophets, unsurprisingly, are often reluctant, pleading with God that they are not well-suited for such a task, or simply fleeing it.The traditions of the West, Kristeva posited, since they derive in large measure from the Bible, turn on its central tension between, on the one hand, seeing God as granter of the Law, guarantor of the social order and our place with in it, and, on the other, hearing God's summons to undo ourself and the world that they might be remade. To hold on rightly both to the “very risky right to be different” as revealed by the Prophets through their bewilderingly personal access to the divine, and “the Law” as given publicly, plainly, to everyone, once and for all, is a difficult venture, and perhaps one bound to teeter endlessly between stifling conformist legalism and reckless individualist fanaticism.In addition to Blake's essay on Kristeva on Céline, we also talk about lots of other stuff, including Blake's efforts to launch a magazine about gay male life and culture, why I (somewhat surprisingly) don't like Tom Wolfe; and Blake's very loving parents who didn't exactly come through when he came out. What thematically unifies the episode, I think, is the shared concern that Blake and I have with how we can reverse the polarity of our current political and cultural equilibrium, in which culture is boring and limp and predictable and politics are intense and transgressive and surprising. Without quite signing on to Kristeva's vision of western civilization being premised on the tension between the Jewish father and the Jewish rebel, we find it a useful frame with which to think. Hope you enjoy. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Back on the ‘pod this week is Naomi Kanakia, author of the just released novel The Default World. We talk about Vekhi, a 1909 collection of essays from ex- and never-Marxist Russian intellectuals; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the dissident Black liberal writer; internecine battles in the trans woman world; why Naomi and I try (and fail) to stay out of bullshit culture war discussions; why we may go too easy on the right because we don't really expect much from them; why everyone is so angry; and how all we really need is love. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Two quick opening notes on this episode of the Eminent Americans podcast:* According to some post by some guy that I read somewhere once, most podcasts don't make it past 20 episodes. This is episode 21, which I take to mean not only that I'm more stubborn and self-absorbed than all those sub-21-ep scrubs—who have appropriately realized by episode 20 that the world doesn't need another podcaster in it—but that this is surely one of those tipping point situations where if you make it past 20, then the next few hundred are all but assured. So I'll be in your life for a while, or at least until you unsubscribe. * This is the second episode in a row in which I flamboyantly refuse to pay any attention to the text that my guest has selected as our topic of conversation. I should probably reconsider my approach to these State of the Discourse episodes. * The opening clip is from Beanie Siegel's “The Truth.”My guest on this episode of the podcast is James Livingston, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers and the author of, among other books, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century and Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913. He's currently hard at work on a new book on pragmatism, provisionally titled The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008.The Mark Edmundson essay we discuss is “Truth Takes a Vacation: Trumpism and the American philosophical tradition.” James's response to it, published on his Substack newsletter Politics, Letters, Persons, is “Pragmatism: An Old Name for a New Kind of Nihilism?”Here's how the AI software Claude describes our conversation. It's basically accurate, but I feel as though it fails to capture the unique essence of our charm and brilliance.This conversation is between Daniel Oppenheimer, the host of the podcast Eminent Americans, and his guest James Livingston, an intellectual historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University. The main focus of their discussion is pragmatism, the philosophical tradition associated with thinkers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Richard Rorty.Livingston argues that pragmatism is still very relevant to American culture and politics. He sees it as a perspective that dismantles traditional dualisms and binary oppositions in favor of more fluid, constructed notions of truth. A key pragmatist idea they discuss is that truths are made by humans rather than existing independently, and that facts cannot be separated from the values and purposes that shape them.They then apply this pragmatist lens to the current polarized political climate in the US. Livingston suggests that the contemporary right-wing, characterized by the "MAGA nation," is motivated by a desire to defend traditional hierarchies and values like male supremacy that are threatened by more egalitarian social changes. He and Oppenheimer debate whether directly confronting this regressive impulse is necessary and desirable.While Oppenheimer is skeptical that heightened politicization and polarization is productive, Livingston argues it is clarifying essential conflicts in American society around issues like racism and sexism. However, they agree that approaching political opponents with empathy and an attempt to understand the experiences and values motivating them is important.Throughout, they reflect on the role of intellectuals and the nature of progress. The conversation showcases the continued relevance of pragmatist ideas for making sense of truth, politics and social change in the United States today. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

I first encountered Alec Ounsworth back in 2005 or 2006, when I was an arts writer for the Valley Advocate, an alt weekly in western Massachusetts that now, like so many other alt weekles, exists only in zombie form.The National was playing at the Iron Horse, Northampton's storied small music venue, and I got tickets to go see them. Opening for them was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the band that Ounsworth had founded and fronted not too long before. I had a vague sense of who they were, and that they were hip, but I didn't know the degree to which they'd blown up since the tour was booked with them as merely an opening act.In the interim they'd gotten bigger—more able to attract fans—than The National. The show was packed for their set, and then when they were done most of it emptied out. I'd never seen something like that before in my life, and haven't since (why if you've already paid for a ticket would you leave when you could get more good music!?).Since then, Ounsworth has made an excellent career for himself (he still tours under the band name, but it's entirely his operation; band members are hired for shows when needed), which is to say that he's had his ups and downs. He's no longer bigger than The National, and hasn't had a hit on the charts in a while. He continues, however, to be able to book and sell out shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He supports himself and his family as a musician. He collaborates with other fancy people in the industry. As I suggest to him in our conversation, he now seems to have “just the right level of fame,” where he can do most of what he wants but can also live a very regular, non-celebrity-esque life. I connected with Alec in a more individual way a few years ago when I was hawking my book on Dave Hickey and looking for eminent people who were Hickey fans who could maybe be persuaded to blurb or otherwise offer some kind of promotional boost to the book (this is how I ended up with the Steven Soderbergh blurb, along with some inside knowledge about Soderbergh's taste in gifs). Ounsworth was one such fan. I managed to reach him and send him a copy of my book; in turn, he sent me a lovely vinyl copy of his 2021 album New Fragility.We talk about the arc of his career, the continuing wisdom of his choice to stay independent of record labels throughout, the art of evolving as a musician without pandering, the challenge of parenting as a touring musician, and various others things. It's a good conversation.One quick note about an aspect of the conversation that is slightly misleading. The opening premise is that we will discuss Jason Farago's article on the challenge of AI to music, “A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?” We don't really do that, but it doesn't really matter. I'm bored of AI. You probably are too.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Stella Tsantekidou begins her essay "I too am an unfuckable hate nerd" with the kind of inside-outside two-step that characterizes much of the writing on The Human Carbohydrate, her very compelling Substack newsletter. She's at a party in London talking to another writer. The topic is a recent piece they've both read on the phenomenon of the "unfuckable hate nerd," that very 21st century type who populates the nether regions of the internet, marinating in resentment and fury and impotence, taking out his unquenchable hate on the women of the world, particularly those with the gall to think they have opinions worth considering. Stella writes:My issue with that article is that it misses how many women feel like unfuckable hate nerds too. [The other writer] looked at me unconvinced, as people often do when I try to explain to them my affinity for incels and other basement dwelling online weirdos. Coming out of my mouth it sounds like I am fishing for compliments, trying to get my audience to state the obvious. How could I be an unfuckable hate nerd?Then the sexy hammer drops. A photo of Stella:She's hot, in other words. How could this very attractive, apparently well connected woman feel a connection to these terrible, and terribly unattractive, men? The answer, as in much of Stella's writing, is that she's been on both sides of the glass. Born and raised in a small city in Greece, in unremarkable middle class circumstances, she moved to London for college with no connections and no organic insight into the hierarchies and mores that structured British society. Now she's part of the elite political class in the UK, moving back and forth between jobs in government and the advocacy world, with a regular gig doing TV political commentary on the side.In 2024, she's quite good looking and socially successful. As a kid, though, she was a bona fide reject, greasy and awkward and the victim of rather relentless bullying by her classmates. And not weak-ass American-style bullying, but hardcore second world haven't gotten the memo that we don't do that kind of thing anymore bullying. "When I say I was bullied," she writes, "I mean that for six years, on a daily basis, I was reminded that if my peers could exterminate me like a cockroach cornered with an aerosol, they would. ... The boys would push me down the stairs, throw my rucksack out the window, spit on me, call me names no self-respecting heterosexual teenage girl could ever bear to hear directed at her from the lips of boys without contemplating suicide or at least complete voluntary social isolation. ... the only attention I was receiving from boys was to be reminded of how repulsive they all found me. They regularly wondered out loud why I didn't kill myself."Stella knows what it's like, in other words, to stew with hate for both oneself and others, to wish the worst things in the world upon others who seem to have more fortune while also desperately seeking and wanting their approval and affection. She knows what it feels like to feel ugly and powerless. "In my heart," she writes, "there is always an unfuckable hate nerd. This is the part of me that takes intense, nostalgic pleasure every time I sense as much as an atom of bullying energy coming my way. It feeds my inner unfuckable hate nerd who is still struggling to accept her new position on the food chain."The final turn in her essay is back toward the fact of her current life in possession of young female attractiveness and what she can see, in no small part thank to the benefit of her early struggles, are its dangers and the relatively short half life of its power. Stells and I talk about these issues; the broad arc of her academic and professional journey from Greece to the U.K. to the U.S. (where she worked on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign) and back to the U.K.; reactionary feminism; and the complex legacy of her parents, among many other things. It's a great conversation.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Our text for today's episode is “John Thompson, b. 1941,” a short eulogy essay by the writer Kiese Laymon in which he reflects on the special affection that not just he but also his “aunts, mother and grandmother” felt for Thompson and his Georgetown basketball team when Laymon was growing up. The coach was more than just a winning coach; he was an avatar of Black America, and a symbol of Black excellence and paternal strength and solidity. Laymon writes:From a distance, I saw Thompson as representative, our imaginary coach who was once a decorated player, who backed up Bill Russell for the champion Boston Celtics. That decorated player who backed up Bill Russell was once a scared Black child, like every Black child I'd met in the universe, just longing to have a fair shot at gracefully winning and graciously losing.…Thompson's national championship and his subsequent loss in 1985 made real for me the representative possibilities and consequences of publicly winning and losing in America while Black. Though Thompson was our imaginary coach, in this eerie way we were his real team. If Thompson lost, and Georgetown lost, it felt as if my race lost. Even at 9 I knew there should have been more Black coaches in all the sports I watched since nearly all the best players were Black. I knew that there was nothing as joyful as publicly beating white Americans in anything simply because white Americans were allowed to play, cheat, coach, referee, own and win whether they actually showed up or not. My guests on the show today are Laymon himself, professor of English and creative writing at Rice University and author of, among other books, the essay collection  How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, the novel Long Division, and the memoir Heavy; and Jason Sokol, professor at history the university of New Hampshire and author of, among other books, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights and The Heavens Might Crack The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Two personal notes about this episode: Jason is my oldest friend on the planet. We went to pre-school together and have been close friends since. And Jason and Kiese were friends at Oberlin College, where they played basketball together and talked ideas, history, race, and the rest. As you'll hear on the episode, they haven't spoken since they graduated, so this is a bit of a reunion.The audio clip at the beginning is from the song “Georgetown Press,” by Wale.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List* The Lure of Divorce, by Emily Gould* Goulded Cages, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy* The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad, by Elizabeth Weil* Can polyamory save this marriage? by Phoebe Maltz BovyMy guest on today's episode, which is part of my ongoing double secret probationary special series on the state of the discourse late winter/early spring 2024, is New York born, Toronto-based writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy.I reached out to Phoebe after reading her short post on Substack about the recent big, long, splashy essay by Emily Gould about Gould's descent into bipolar-induced mania, her separation from her husband (writer Keith Gessen), their eventual hard-won reconciliation, and the complex ways in which her feminist analyses of the problems in their marriage were much less useful and clarifying than they initially seemed.Phoebe writes:Gould … steeps herself in the men-are-bastards literature of the past years/decades, and concludes, “This was not quite the way I felt.”I cannot emphasize enough, having read many such items for researching-straight-women purposes, what a tremendous break this is from business as usual. Because if you're a 40ish straight or straightish woman, you're meant to feel one thing.Gould tries to funnel her angst-and-then-some into the expected feminist narrative, but is stymied by her realizations that she's done a lot of bad things, and that her husband, too, is a person. She looks at the facts on the ground and isn't able to blame the patriarchy for her own messy blend of mental illness and bad choices.Phoebe and I talk about Gould and Gessen, the unglamorous realities of the writing life, how much cultural capital is worth compared to actual capital, and Phoebe's review of the recent polyamory memoir by Molly Roden Winter.Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the author of The Perils of “Privilege” (2017). She is a senior editor at the Canadian Jewish News, a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, author of the Substack newsletter Close-reading the Reruns, columnist for the Globe and Mail, and writer for various other publications of note.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List:* “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin), 2 (Lionel Trilling), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr), by Damon Linker.* “Philosophy and the Far Right”—Part 1 and Part 2* “Conservatism and Skepticism”—Part 1 and Part 2My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias occasionally punch it out for the title in an underground fight club built in the tunnels under the charred timbers of the former headquarters of the New Republic). Damon is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Notes from the Middle Ground newsletters on Substack, is a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and is the author of two books, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders.I asked Damon on the show to discuss his recent series of essays on three of the seminal thinkers of post-war liberalism, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. We also got into his conflicted feelings about the philosopher Leo Strauss and the movement—Straussianism—that he birthed.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading list:* Windex Ain't Scared: Here's Our Statement on Israel/Palestine, by Jeff Maurer* Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell, by The Onion* Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake, by The Onion* American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie, by The OnionMy guests on the podcast today are Jeff Maurer, author of “Windex Ain't Scared,” and my brother Mark Oppenheimer, who selected the text to be the subject of this installment of my special series on the state of the discourse.Jeff Maurer served honorably in the federal government for eight years until his standup comedy career led him to being hired as a writer on John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, where Jeff worked for six years, and he is now the author of the Substack newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, which is hilarious and smart. Mark is a writer and podcaster based in New Haven, Connecticut, author of many books, most recently Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and The Soul of a Neighborhood, also brilliant and hilarious. He's hard at work on a biography of Judy Blume; is the host of The Syllabus, a podcast about campus politics; and Substacks at Oppenheimer.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List:* The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms, by Ross Barkan* Notes Toward a New Romanticism, by Ted Gioia* The Invisible College: Modern British Literature, by John Pistelli* The Three Segments of American Culture, by Ross Barkan* Major Arcana: Preface, by John PistelliMy guests on the show today are writers Ross Barkan and John Pistelli, and they're here to help me launch something new on the podcast, which is a series of shorter episodes that are dedicated to taking stock of the state of the intellectual discourse. I don't have a grand schema for what means. I've just been reaching out to a bunch of interesting people, some of them prior guests on the podcast, and asking them to “pick one idea, writer, cultural encounter, or text that you think has been significant in the past year or so.”My only other criterion is that I've asked folks to try to avoid going too directly at the culture wars topics that suck up so much energy in the discourse right now. Those topics are important, of course, and no doubt we'll touch on many of them in the course of things, including in today's episode, but I didn't want to start there.John proposed today's texts, which are two connected essays that suggest that we may be entering, if not necessarily a new romantic age, then at least a period in which certain romantic tendencies swirl more forcefully than they have in a long time. One is Ross's December 2023 essay in the Guardian, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange romantic backlash to the tech era looms.” The other is “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” a Substack essay by cultural critic Ted Gioia.I'd add to this mix some of the writing that John has been doing on his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss; some of Ross's work on his Substack, Political Currents; and maybe also some of the modern British literature lectures that John has been beaming out via his substack to his paid subscribers, of whom I'm one.Ross Barkan is the author of three books, including the novel The Night Burns Bright. He's a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and his reporting and essays have appeared in a wide array of publications, including New York Magazine, The Nation, and the Guardian. He teaches journalism and writing at NYU. John Pistelli has written four novels, as well as short fiction, poetry and criticism for venues as diverse as Rain Taxi, The Millions, Tablet, and The Spectator. At his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, he publishes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture, serializes his latest novel, and offers independent literature courses, including on the writers of the Romantic era.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe