Eminent Americans

Daniel Oppenheimer
Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a newsletter and occasional podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it. So people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Yang, Elizabeth Bruenig, Ross Douthat, Nikole Hannah Jones, Jia Tolentino, Freddie Deboer, Rod Dreher, Ibram Kendi, Ezra Klein, Bari Weiss, the Red Scare podcast hosts, Andrew Sullivan, etc. Although the newsletter will touch on the political and intellectual issues that concern these folks, the focus is less the topics than the people — their backstories, what drives them, how they’ve evolved, who cares the most about them, what role they play in the larger ecosystem, and what trends do they embody or influence. In one sense, then, it’s a rather meta concept. It’s an intellectual (me) talking about other intellectuals in their roles as intellectuals, and occasionally doing in conversation with yet more intellectuals. From another angle, it’s simply an attempt to investigate and describe the contemporary American scene through and with the people who constitute it. danieloppenheimer.substack.com

  1. 9 JAN

    Sins of the Father: The Coates Chronicles Episode 3

    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’t want to talk about what he’s actually done.” We talk about the article, which goes into a lot of depth about the authors and texts published by Coates’s indie press, Black Classic Press, and then also about the broader context. Why did the National Book Foundation seek to recognize Coates in the first place? Why did they not know (and we're taking it as a given that they didn't know) that he had a record of publishing homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist writers? Why have they remained mostly silent on the topic, since better information has come out, and why has the part of the media that tends to cover literary controversies opted out of covering this one. In addition to his work for Arc, Mark is the author of five books, including Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting & the Soul of a Neighborhood, and Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. He’s finishing up a biography of Judy Blume, which should come out in the next year or two. Show Notes Here's the summary and time stamps that the Descript bot gave me, which seem roughly accurate if not always super helpful.00:00 Introduction and Milestones01:28 Upcoming Episodes and Guests03:06 Interview with Mark Oppenheimer05:25 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press08:28 Controversies and Criticisms23:16 Media Response and Broader Implications38:12 The Role of Myths in Society38:47 Debate on Afrocentric Myths39:43 Flexibility of Religious Myths41:50 Healthy vs. Poisonous Myths43:06 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press48:50 The National Book Foundation Controversy58:31 The Role of the Free Press01:09:52 Concluding Thoughts on Intellectual Discourse Previous Episodes of the Coates Chronicles Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 21m
  2. 17/12/2024

    What Was the Post-Left?

    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 this episode of the podcast. One answer comes from a piece on the phenomenon that Park MacDougald wrote a few years ago for Unherd. In it, he wrote: The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois. … Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent. Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What’s Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers. To put it another way, this was not the class-first, anti-woke internal critique that I think is more familiar to many us. It shares some DNA with that critique. Like that crew, the post-lefties thought identitarian politics were a fraud, a way for already elite actors to make themselves out to be tribunes of the people, to claim oppressed status in order to advance themselves. But unlike that class firsters, the post-lefties also thought the class first critique was a fraud too. It’s all fraud all the way down, wholly disconnected from the vulnerable people it claims to represent, all a project of the elite for the elite. Geoff and I talk about the origins of this group, his own adjacency to it for a little while, the distinctions between the post-left and other post-something groups, including his own crew at Compact, the dangers of finding your identity in pure critique, and just in general the challenges of staying thoughtful in a politically chaotic time. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 37m
  3. 05/12/2024

    Dreher's Demons

    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-branded and re-imagined under the auspices of its new editor in chief, my brother Mark Oppenheimer. I’ll link to the interview in the show notes. You should read it, and check out the magazine, which is publishing a lot of really interesting stuff. To give you some context for this conversation, which launches right into a recent experience that Dreher had of having a kind of low key exorcism, his new book is mostly about the experiences that he and others have had of what I would call the supernatural, but he would call the divine or the demonic. So hauntings, possessions, exorcisms, divine epiphanies, psychedelic experiences of alternate realities, even alien abductions and visitations. For Rod, this is all evidence of the fact that world is far stranger and more wondrous than materialists like me can perceive. I don’t agree with him on most or all of this, or on most of his conservative politics, but I spend almost no time in this conversation arguing with him on either front. That’s because I’m not that interested in arguing with him. I’m interested in understanding him and his perspective, which is one that I’ve long found compelling even as I’ve also found it alarmist and wrong-headed. I keep reading Rod, book after book, year after year, precisely because he sees the world so differently than me, and because I never doubt his desire to live thoughtfully and authentically in the world, and I never doubt that he’s in touch with interesting cultural vibrations, even if they may not be the ones he thinks they are. A few final notes before I launch into the conversation, which starts rather abruptly because I forgot to hit record when we first started talking. One is I have some exciting episodes coming up, which you should be on the lookout for. One is with the aforementioned Mark Oppenheimer. We’re going to talk about his recent piece in Arc on Paul Coates, Ta Nehisi Coates’s father, who was recently given a lifetime achievement award by the National Book Foundation for his work as founder and editor of Black Classic Press. Mark writes about the uncomfortable reality of how many of the books and authors who Coates has championed have bizarre and often quite nasty views about race, sexuality, and Jews. I also have an upcoming episode with Geoff Schullenberger, managing editor of Compact Magazine, about the post-left. I’m still not quite sure what the post-left is, even after the conversation, but I really enjoyed talking to Geoff about it. So stay tuned for those episodes, and whatever comes next. I have an invitation out to Lorne Michaels, creator and master of Saturday Night Live, but I haven’t heard anything back yet, so we’ll see. My hopes are not high. What else? Oh, yeah, Rod is currently living in Hungary. This comes up in our conversation. Finally, I start with Rod’s recent exorcism, in the conversation, in part because it’s an example of what the book is about, though it happened after the book was written, but also because his discussion of what needed to be exorcised goes directly to his personal history of family trauma and dysfunction. In our written interview, and in this conversation, he talks openly and with great vulnerability about his painful relationship with his late father and about how, in his view, the pain opened up traumatic cracks in his psyche that dark spirits were able to sneak in through. Enjoy the show. Read the interview. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    55 min
  4. 26/11/2024

    Winters Is Coming

    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, since I finished the books, when I came across his name again in a surprising place, as one of the co-creators of the CBS show Tracker, the first season of which I’d just binged. I don’t usually go deep into the cast and crew of shows like Tracker, which is a fun but fairly generic CBS action series, but I’d been surprised to see that the show had been the single most popular scripted drama of the year. I was curious whether there was something in the zeitgeist it was capturing that I simply hadn’t perceived. So I started researching the creators, and there Ben was. The more I read about him, the more fascinated I became. In addition to The Last Policeman novels, he’s also the author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which was the second in the “Quirk Classics” series, after Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He also wrote the third volume in that series, Android Karenina. Other science fiction and thriller titles include Underground Airlines, Golden State, The Quiet Boy, and this year’s Big Time. As a TV writer, in addition to Tracker, he’s also worked on Legion, the trippy Marvel series, and Manhunt, about the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Lincoln. Ben and I end up talking a lot about how to make a career as a writer, the unpredictabilities of the entertainment industry, and the ways in which Tracker blends conservative and liberal sensibilities. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    35 min
  5. 20/11/2024

    These Hollow Halls

    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 Sam so bullish on Substack, and why is he is planning to launch a new publication on it soon? What is it like for Julianne to teach in an English department that has lost so many majors that it can’t even fill a lecture hall anymore for any of their classes, including even the big Shakespeare surveys? Can Substack do as good a job as establishment publications in producing high quality book criticism? Can it have a role to play in the academic infrastructure? What’s it like to spend ten years on a scholarly book and then have to wait another three to get a review of it? Sam is an editor at Persuasion magazine and the author of the Substack Castalia . Julianne is an associate professor of English at Duke University and author of Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press). Her substack is Life and Letters. The genesis of this conversation is a piece that Julianne wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time,” and then a few related pieces, including: * Sam’s piece for Compact, “We Are in a Writing Renaissance” * becca rothfeld’s Substack post, “why i am skeptical that substack can or should replace legacy media” * Sam’s somewhat angry response to Becca’s piece, “Against Becca Rothfeld” * Becca’s very civil response to Sam’s response to Becca, “a brief addendum: in response to my critic(s)” As of this episode of the podcast, I have a new/old collaborator, audio whiz Robert Scaramuccia. Robert produced the pilot episode of the pod, on Ezra Klein. He’s now back for the indefinite future, so if the quality of the show suddenly seems higher, that’s why. I also have some new intro and outro music on the podcast. It’s from “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood,” by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah . Thanks to friend of the pod, and former guest, Alec Ounsworth for permission to use that. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 19m
  6. 24/10/2024

    I Can Haz Dimes Square? w/Matthew Gasda

    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 Research, which Gasda founded and runs, and he is best known for his play Dimes Square, which helped fix the notorious New York downtown microneighborhood in the public imagination. In 2022, The New York Times published a very substantive profile of Gasda, tracking his emergence into hipster prominence during Covid: In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.” “Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said. Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on. Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play. Set in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age. Matt and I talk about a great number of things over the course of this quite long and I think quite rich conversation, which we recorded in two separate sessions. He helps me come asymptotically closer to understanding what the Dimes Square scene is or was (I’m pretty sure it’s was at this point). We talk about his very middle-class youth in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the difficulties of making the transition from that world, and the world of his middle-class degrees from Syracuse and Lehigh, to the very specialized set of manners and expectations that structure life and society in New York City. We talk about the general challenges of making it in as playwright (and by extension as screenwriter or tv writer), as well as the specific challenges of making it when you’ve been classified as politically suspect, as Matt has. We end, more or less, with my expressing my hope that Matt can continue to protect and nurture his talent and his desire to connect even as, of necessity, he has to live and work in various scences in New York that can be quite toxic.    AI-generated show notes. They seem mostly accurate. 00:00 Introduction to Eminent Americans 00:32 Meet Matthew Gazda: Playwright Extraordinaire 01:10 The Dime Square Phenomenon 02:29 Exploring Denmark and Other Plays 03:37 Defining Dime Square 05:26 The Scene and Its Key Figures 08:07 The Evolution of Dime Square 21:03 The Genesis of the Play 27:43 Matthew Gazda's Background 39:36 Navigating Social Classes and Upbringings 40:58 The Art of Performativity and Banter 42:55 Algorithmic Conversations and AI's Impact 44:04 Flirting and Social Dynamics 46:14 Authenticity vs. Performativity in Plays 48:26 Cynicism and Artistic Integrity 57:13 Challenges of a Playwright's Career 01:00:40 Exploring Dimes Square and Its Impact 01:19:22 The HBO Deal and Dimes Square 01:19:49 Canceled Party and Industry Politics 01:21:24 Theater World Challenges 01:25

    1h 57m
  7. 18/09/2024

    On Privilege

    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 mind in a way that it hadn’t been blown in a long while. Khan is a very good writer of sentences, an insightful theorist, and perhaps above all an observer of rare acuity. He just sees a lot more, and a lot more clearly, than most people would in a similar context, even if they went in with similarly ethnographic objectives. The result is a book packed with striking insight and fascinating detail. As it happens I went to a high school that wasn’t too different from St. Paul’s. It wasn’t as fancy, didn’t cater to quite as many sons and daughters of the high elite, but it was similar enough for me to vouch for Khan’s descriptions. They ring true. He captures with nuance what such places, which are so easy to caricature, are actually like. The post that I wrote about Privilege was by far the most popular thing I’ve written for this newsletter, which is a testament to my own eloquence, to the fascination of the subject, and to the intensity and insight with which Kahn explored it. Shamus and I had a great conversation. We talked about the book; his experience as both a student and a teacher at St. Paul’s School; his training at the University of Wisconsin; his good timing in the selection of subjects; what it feels like to be of the elite; and much more. Show breakdown (according to AI - I have no idea how closely this tracks the reality, but it feels better than nothing) 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest 01:07 Discussing the Book 'Privilege' 02:44 Exploring Elite Education and Inequality 04:35 The Role of Quantitative and Qualitative Research 17:21 Personal Background and Experience at St. Paul's 30:21 Changes in Elite Education Over Time 46:55 The Origins of Meritocracy 48:40 Challenges of Meritocracy 49:18 Meritocracy and Social Mobility 51:40 Ethnographic Insights on Privilege 52:57 Understanding Inequality 56:32 The Role of Education in Inequality 57:08 Class and Political Mobilization 01:01:37 American Inequality and Historical Perspectives 01:02:25 The Astor Family and American Finance 01:09:07 The Influence of Wealth in Politics 01:15:54 Navigating Elite Institutions 01:17:44 The Future of Elite Coordination 01:26:22 Concluding Thoughts on Elites and Power 01:29:27 Closing Remarks and Outro Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 31m
  8. 03/09/2024

    Literature w/out Lorentzen

    “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 in Granta, “Literature Without Literature,” which was the talk of the literary scene for a few weeks. Christian’s piece is both a (highly disparaging) review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and a broader critique of the sociological turn in the academic study of literature. On this broader point, Christian writes: “These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.” We talk about the piece, my profound misunderstanding of Christian’s motives, Ross's ambivalent experience of graduate school, when Zain is going to get his act together and get a real job, and the terror and wonder of Christian’s life as an eternal freelancer. 00:00 Introduction and Technical Difficulties 00:35 Meet the Guests 2:25 The backstory on “Literature Without Literature” 07:43 Discussion on Literary Criticism and Market Forces 16:26 Ross's Academic Background and Views on Literature 20:18 Christian's Perspective on Academia and Writing 31:31 Zane's Insights on Writing and Influence 34:06 The Art of Writing and Transitions 35:34 A Hilarious Excerpt and Reflections on Academic Careerism 37:46 Balancing Writing and Life 41:01 The Struggles of a Writer's Life 45:36 Future Plans and Career Reflections 49:28 Current Projects and Final Thoughts Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

    1 hr

About

Eminent Americans is a newsletter and occasional podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it. So people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Yang, Elizabeth Bruenig, Ross Douthat, Nikole Hannah Jones, Jia Tolentino, Freddie Deboer, Rod Dreher, Ibram Kendi, Ezra Klein, Bari Weiss, the Red Scare podcast hosts, Andrew Sullivan, etc. Although the newsletter will touch on the political and intellectual issues that concern these folks, the focus is less the topics than the people — their backstories, what drives them, how they’ve evolved, who cares the most about them, what role they play in the larger ecosystem, and what trends do they embody or influence. In one sense, then, it’s a rather meta concept. It’s an intellectual (me) talking about other intellectuals in their roles as intellectuals, and occasionally doing in conversation with yet more intellectuals. From another angle, it’s simply an attempt to investigate and describe the contemporary American scene through and with the people who constitute it. danieloppenheimer.substack.com

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