Eminent Americans

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com  This conversation with Mary Jane Eyre and John Encaustum is a follow-up, in a sense, to an essay I wrote not too long ago about how Ezra Klein's recent reflections on Woke 1.0 and his own complicity in its failures are evidence of the return of some common sense to American liberalism. It’s evidence of a...

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 Sup...

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 most...

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 in...

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 diffe...

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...

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 p...

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, a...

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 an...

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...

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 conve...

I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of 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...

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...

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 li...

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’...

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 tha...

 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…