Eminent Americans

 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 th...

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 magazi...

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...

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 not...

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 K...

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...

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 psycho...

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 Ne...

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 a...

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...

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 Nel...

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 daniel...

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...

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...

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, an...

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...

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...

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 in...

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...

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 fo...

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...

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 u...

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....