Eminent Americans

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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...

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Kevin LaTorre, a poet and writer living with his family in North Carolina. His work has appeared in The Blotter , Echo Literary Magazine , Walter Magazine , Ad Fontes , and the Front Porch Republic . He writes about poetry, Christianity, and literature at A Stylist Submits . I asked Kevin to pick one text, idea, person, encounter that he thought captured...

In his recent essay in Tablet , “ Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics ,” Blake Smith writes about the Bulgarian-French-American critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva, and in particular her fruitful and fascinating analyses of the viciously anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. For Kristeva, Céline is, among many other things, a great example...

Back on the ‘pod this week is Naomi Kanakia, author of the just released novel The Default World . We talk about Vekhi , a 1909 collection of essays from ex- and never-Marxist Russian intellectuals; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the dissident Black liberal writer; internecine battles in the trans woman world; why Naomi and I try (and fail) to stay out of bullshit culture war discussions; why we may...

Two quick opening notes on this episode of the Eminent Americans podcast: * According to some post by some guy that I read somewhere once, most podcasts don’t make it past 20 episodes. This is episode 21, which I take to mean not only that I’m more stubborn and self-absorbed than all those sub-21-ep scrubs—who have appropriately realized by episode 20 that the world doesn’t need another podcaster...

I first encountered Alec Ounsworth back in 2005 or 2006, when I was an arts writer for the Valley Advocate , an alt weekly in western Massachusetts that now, like so many other alt weekles, exists only in zombie form . The National was playing at the Iron Horse , Northampton’s storied small music venue, and I got tickets to go see them. Opening for them was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the band that...

Stella Tsantekidou begins her essay " I too am an unfuckable hate nerd " with the kind of inside-outside two-step that characterizes much of the writing on The Human Carbohydrate, her very compelling Substack newsletter. She's at a party in London talking to another writer. The topic is a recent piece they've both read on the phenomenon of the "unfuckable hate nerd," that very 21st century type wh...

Our text for today’s episode is “ John Thompson, b. 1941 ,” a short eulogy essay by the writer Kiese Laymon in which he reflects on the special affection that not just he but also his “aunts, mother and grandmother” felt for Thompson and his Georgetown basketball team when Laymon was growing up. The coach was more than just a winning coach; he was an avatar of Black America, and a symbol of Black...

Reading List * The Lure of Divorce , by Emily Gould * Goulded Cages, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy * The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad , by Elizabeth Weil * Can polyamory save this marriage? by Phoebe Maltz Bovy My guest on today’s episode, which is part of my ongoing double secret probationary special series on the state of the discourse late winter/early spring 2024, is New York born, T...

Reading List: * “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin) , 2 (Lionel Trilling ), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr) , by Damon Linker. * “Philosophy and the Far Right”— Part 1 and Part 2 * “Conservatism and Skepticism”— Part 1 and Part 2 My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias occasionally punch i...