Eminent Americans

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....

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...