Eminent Americans

My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and, for the better part of two decades, arguably the most serious scholar in American academia willing to take the paranormal seriously.

Jeff has published a long shelf of books with UChicago press, including a history of the Esalen Institute, Authors of the Impossible, Mutants and Mystics, The Flip, The Superhumanities, and, most recently, How to Think Impossibly.

He also founded what began as the Archives of the Impossible and is now the Center for the Impossible at Rice, which...

My guest on the show today is Willard Spiegelman, emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the former longtime editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of many books on English and American poetry as well as a number of collections of personal essays, including his most recent, My (Lucky) Stars, which he calls a “memoir of taste.” In it, he writes about the mostly middle brow artists who shaped his sensibility, popular entertainers like Gilbert & Sullivan, cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, and the great Patsy Cline.

Someone once said of my show that I ba...

My guest on the show today is writer, activist and retired journalism professor Robert Jensen who has a new book out, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning.

In it, Bob uses his own encounters with different sources of meaning – God, nature, even the idea that we’re free to choose anything at all, rather than just being the mechanistic product of a bunch of subatomic particles interacting with each other in a sequence that gives rise to the illusion of human agency – to make the case for a more down-to-earth, small-m idea of meaning...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

This is the first in my new run of paid episodes, available in full only to paid subscribers. Instead of making every third or fourth of my standard episodes paid, which is what I was doing for a while, I’m going to instead offer one or two additional episodes a month for paid subscribers that have a different vibe.

I’m not going to do much editing on th…

My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of an excellent essay in the most recent issue of The Point, “We Were the 99 Percent.” It’s an unusually thoughtful reflection on the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which Jeff was a participant in, and observer of, from the very beginning.

I asked Jeff to come on the show because I enjoyed the essay, which genuinely altered my perspective on a movement that I thought, in retrospect inaccurately, I more or less understood. Also, though, because he was someon...

My guest on the show today is Rogers Brubaker, professor of sociology at UCLA and author of many books, the most recent of which, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is our subject for discussion on this episode.

If you want a really good kind of primer on this book before you listen to this episode, I recommend you pause and go read the review essay of it, by Shreeharsh Kelkar, that I published on my Substack recently.

Both the book and Shreeharsh’s review of it have the double virtue of taking on a...

My guests on the show today are David Sessions and Blake Smith, who are friends of the pod as well as co-hosts of the Off Christopher Street Podcast, which takes its name from the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street, which aspired to be something like the gay New Yorker during it 20 year run from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s.

This episode is also being released via their show’s feed, and in that spirit (and because David does show notes so much better than I do), here’s that feed’s summary of the conversation:

I...

My guest on the show today is writer Ann Manov, the artist formerly known as personality girl and the author of a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Republican Machines: Can the GOP save the humanities?”

In it, Manov goes back to her alma mater, University of Florida, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, perhaps the best known of the growing number of schools and centers around the country, typically at state universities in red states, dedicated to some mix of the great books and what has come to be called “civic thought...

My guest on the show today is Emmett Rensin, the author of 2024’s The Complications: On Going Insane in America, a really good collection of essays about various aspects of mental illness, how we construct and treat it as a society, and Emmett’s own fairly terrifying history of dealing with it.

I asked Emmett to come on to the show after reading his recent essay in The Lamp Magazine, “Over the Borderline,” which is a profile of the soft anti-psychiatry activist and writer Laura Delano, whose memoir of extricating herself from what she sees as the baleful...

My guest on the show today is David Sugarman, writer, Arc magazine editor, podcast producer of this very show, and agonizing, ambivalent American Jew.

It's in this last capacity that he's joining me today to discuss his essay in the new issue of The Point magazine titled “Goodbye West Orange: Two Paths for the American Jew.”

I want to note, before I say anything more about the essay or our conversation about it, that over the course of the three-plus years that I've been doing this Substack and podcast, there are two issue constellations that I ha...

I would rather that my spark should burn outin a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor, every atomof me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.The function of man is to live, not to exist.I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.I shall use my time.— Jack London

My guest today is Ken Ilgunas, nature writer, adventurer, rewilding advocate, Substacker, podcaster, psychotherapy grad student, group fitness trainer, and shaggy lawn evangelist.

Ken’s adult life, from graduating college unti...

My guest on the show today is Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review, which is the ideas and analysis section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Len, in his freelance life, is a critic whose essays have appeared in Liberties, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

He got his PhD in English from Yale in 2014, spent some time as a postdoc at Harvard, and has spent the years since largely at Chronicle, writing about the intellectual and institutional life of the American university with, from my perspective, an admirable sense of skin in the...

My guest on the show today is Tuhin Chakrabarty, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University and the culprit behind my first ever trigger warning on eminent Americans.

Here we go: if a big part of your identity is vested in being a writer, and you are already experiencing existential dread about the prospect of AI getting better than you at writing, you may want to not listen to this podcast, or at least you may need to take a Xanax or a gummy before listening. Because Tuhin’s work, training AI to produce su...

I had the good fortune to be joined on this episode by the redoubtable Sheila Heti, award-winning novelist, avant-garde memoirist, incisive essayist, and all-around Canadian woman of letters.

I asked Sheila to come on the show after I read “Good Medicine,” her recent essay in Granta, which is the report of her experience taking a series of guided psychedelic trips. It is also, though she didn’t set out with this in mind, a kind of midlife crisis essay, reflecting on where she’s been, where she’s going, what’s left for her, and so on.

One thi...

My guest on the show today is returning guest and all-around friend of the pod David Sessions, a Boston-based freelance writer and the co-host, along with Blake Smith, of the relatively new Off Christopher Street Podcast and and Substack newsletter, about the history and present of gay male life and culture in America.

David, Blake and I have recorded a crossover episode of Eminent Americans that focuses on their new endeavor, which should be out in the next month or two or three, but on this episode David and I are talking pornography, its ubiquity, the effect...

 My guest on the show today, our special Fourth of July sesquicentennial episode, is Jacob Siegel. He's a writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, an Iraq and Afghanistan vet, co-host of the Manifesto! podcast, and author of the new book, The Information State, which we don’t discuss on the episode.

Our topic, instead, is the “The Disappearing American Man,” the first installment of a column that Jacob is now writing for Tablet.

To give you a sense of the essay, which is slightly to the left or maybe to the right or just below or above...

Damon Linker is back on the pod to talk about another former guest, the notorious R.O.D., Ray Oliver Dreher Jr. — i.e. Rod Dreher, one of the more fascinating, tragic, and infuriating writers of the Christian right over the last few decades.

Linker and Dreher first met back when Linker, who is now a man of the solid center-left, was a conservative and an editor at the Catholic conservative magazine First Things. They bonded over their shared horror at the Catholic priest abuse scandal, a lot of details of which were unfolding at the time, an...

My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia, my longtime collaborator on the podcast.

Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans, his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have...

My guest on the show today is the inimitable Sherman Alexie, poet, novelist, Substacker, and occasional screenwriter.

I would be surprised if you don’t already know who Alexi ise, given that he’s been an award winning and best-selling writer for decades now and is almsot certainly the best known Native American writer of our time.

I asked him on, naturally, to talk about genre television. I’d noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would...

My guests on today’s episode are historians Andrew Hartman and James Livingston. Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author, most recently, of Karl Marx in America. Jim is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea.

I asked Andrew and Jim on the show to talk to me about Karl Marx and his continued influence on the American left. Really, if I’m being honest, I asked them on to help me solve a problem that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

This converstion with Greg Berman, former longtime CEO of the Center for Justice Innovation and author of the Small Sanities Substack, is both like and unlike a lot of previous conversations I’ve had in the anti-woke liberal space. It’s like it…

My guest today is friend of the pod Blake Smith We talk mostly about Blake’s recent essay for Colossus magazine, “The Education of the Broligarchy,” which is about what we can learn about the tech elite from what’s become known as the Silicon Valley Canon, a widely shared list of books that all aspiring tech overlords should read. .

Unrelated to that, I want to share an exchange I had on Substack notes with Vladislav Davidzon, an Eastern European Jewish writer now based in the US. It began when I posted this note.

I don’t re...

My guest on the show today is Jonny Thakkar. Jonny is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of The Point. He’s the author of various articles, most recently “Beyond Equality” in the newest issue of the Point, and the 2018 book Plato as Critical Theorist.

I asked Jonny on to talk about his late friend and mentor the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

My guest on the show this week in Timothy Shenk, assistant professor of history at The George Washington University and author, most recently, of Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, which I reviewed for Air Mail some…

My guest on the show today is Ash Carter, writer and editor for Air Mail magazine and all around chronicler of the post-war cultural elite. I asked Ash to come on after reading the most recent in a series of profiles he’s written about great editors of the 20th century, some of whom, for reasons we discuss, were semi-cancelled in the last decade or two.

He’s written about, for instance, former New Republic editor and owner Marty Peretz, Peretz’s longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, Vintage Classics legend Gary Fisketjon, New York Review Classics visionary Edwin...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

If 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 Batt...

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 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...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

This 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 D...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

Blake 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 lock...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com

One 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 ar...

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...

Freddie 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.