Eminent Americans

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 p...

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...

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 huma...

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

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...

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 In...

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

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 to...

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...

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 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 g...

My guest on the show today is Jon Baskin , co-founder and editor of The Point magazine, 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 actuall...

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 na...

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, bra...

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 pole...

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 proba...

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 t...

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...

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 thi...

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-brand...

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, sin...

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...

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 Gasda My 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...

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 mi...

“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...