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Eminent Americans: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Daniel Oppenheimer
Eminent Americans is a 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. It also touches on broader themes and trends in the discourse. danieloppenheimer.substack.com
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- Apr 21, 20261h 26m
Non-Producer Character (NPC)
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 the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college. I’ve never been a serious gamer, but some of it I get. it was part of the mix with my friends when I was growing up, now has a significant presence in the social lives of my 10 and 15 year old sons, and is just this huge thing, obviously, in the social and emotional world of boys and young men and increasingly not so young men. It also seems to me a topic that hasn’t received nearly the degree of serious literary and journalistic attention that it clearly deserves. It gets a lot of ink, in a certain sense, but so much of it is quite shallow, and so little of it seems to even begin to grasp the profound role that games and the ecosystems around them have played, and are playing, in the social and psychological lives of the people who play them.Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you do too. Apologies in advance as the pace of release slows down for a bit. Still working on finding a new producer, and have some good leads, but for a little while at least I’ll be on my own, and so I will not be as productive. Not going away, though! 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
- Apr 2, 20261h 20m
The Reservation Broadcasting System
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 noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.It is, in other words, an immensely fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.Peace 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
- Mar 26, 20261h 25m
I Get Schooled on Marx
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 Karl Marx and his continued influence on the American left. Really, if I’m being honest, I asked them on to help me solve a problem that I’ve been feeling increasingly compelled to solve, which is that I have a very strong intuition that Marxism is a profound drag on the capacity of the American left to achieve what I would like it to achieve, which is to exert meaningful power in opposition to big money in all its forms, but I am embarrassingly vague on the why or how Marx continues to exert such pull. The bosses have so, so much power in America, and I fear it’s slowly killing us, and we desperately to find a way to rebalance the scales. But precisely the kinds of people and groups to whom we’ve looked, historically, to organize fundamental resistance to the evils of big money are the ones who seem least capable of talking and acting in ways that might get the job done. And I blame Marxism for some, though certainly not all, of that incapacity. So I have all these very strong feelings, but I don’t know how to talk to the people I might hope to persuade in a language that might be persuasive to them. I could tell a story about the various sins of various Marxist movements of the last century that might be persuasive to some people — and in fact have told versions of that story — but I don’t think that that story would be persuasive to contemporary Marxist-influenced intellectuals. They know all that history, have already baked it into their perspective. What I’d need to do is talk theory to them, and I don’t really grasp the theory. And maybe even more than not understanding the theory, I don’t understand, viscerally, why people continue to be so drawn to it. I don’t grok the lived experience of being a 21st century American leftist who feels compelled to draw on Marxist concepts and language to think and talk through the problems we face. I can’t mirror those neurons. And it kind of drives me nuts. So this episode is a very selfish effort to help reduce the level of my vexedness, and I appreciate Jim and Andrew for their indulgence of me and for their uncompensated labor in bringing some clarity to my confusion.If you’re interested in learning more about Andrew’s new book, by the way, the American Prestige podcast is producing a six-part series, Marx Prestige, where Andrew and Daniel Bessner work their way through the history covered in the book. I’m looking forward to it.Peace. 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
- Mar 19, 20261h 36m
Crime Story
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comThis 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…
- Mar 5, 20261h 49m
Deconstructing the Broligarchy
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 notes with Vladislav Davidzon, an Eastern European Jewish writer now based in the US. It began when I posted this note. I don’t really get the logic of Trump’s decision to invade. Even if it goes amazingly well, even if a mature liberal democracy magically coalesces in the aftermath, there’s no real constituency for that in the U.S. No one will care in nine months much less two years and nine months.His response: “You really are this clueless??”What’s amusing to me in retrospect is that I genuinely didn’t know which way he was going to go with this, given the dizzying array of theories about the motives for this war and the fact that you can’t even predict, in this case, what someone will say from knowing which side of things they’re on. Is it oil? Israel? Epstein? Dementia? Was it the frictionlessness of the operation in Venezuela?I’d already seen all of these theories, and more, all of them always offered with utter confidence, and I didn’t know which one Davidzon would proffer. The answer was none of them. He sent to me a piece on Tablet by Park MacDougald that was an (utterly deranged, from my perspective) argument that the attack was a carefully calibrated action that followed organically from the very well thought through theory that Trump hold of US foreign policy in the middle east, “an overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy instigated by Barack Obama that transformed the globe into a more dangerous and more unstable place than it has to be.”I said in response that this seemed deranged to me, given what we know about Trump’s psyche, and Davidzon’s response was this:You seem to be deeply integrated into a fanatical worldview - so it seems like a waste of time to engage with that- Trump derangement syndrome is as real as much as he skillfully and sardonically ratchets it up to make the people maddened by him froth at the mouth and attack him - however - Trump - whatever his other failures may be - is a radically perceptive and intuitive about power relations. He has brutal and unsentimental and predatory and often correct judgments of power relations. He is a savage bruiser and that approach is very well matched to the way that things operate in the Middle East.I recount all this not to try to dunk on Davidzon, but to reflect on the fact that 23 years ago I supported the war in Iraq.I was 26 at the time, and wasn’t publishing, so I had the good fortune not be to responsible, even in the tiniest measure, for pushing us towards that terrible mistake. But my reasoned conclusion was that on balance it was a good idea. And I say “reasoned conclusion” earnestly, because even though it was a dumb thing to believe, I really did think it through in a fairly rational way. Doing something to upset the cruel status quo over, I concluded, was better than just tolerating or propping it up, as we’d seemed to cynically be doing for so long. Even rolling the dice had to be better than leaving Hussein in power, right? Right.Every war is its own thing, and I genuinely hope that somehow this war makes things better for the Iranian people, and the world, somehow. Maybe Davidzon sees things more clearly than I do. I doubt it in this case, but it’s always possible.My point is that I continue to be amazed at how radically differently people who are smart and not overtly crazy can view the same set of facts.I find it fantastical that anyone could look at Donald Trump at this point and see what MacDougald and Davidzon see, which is someone capable of acting strategically in any way, even a brute intuitive way. Davidzon finds it “fanatical” that I view Trump this way, as a captive of his own broken psyche; this is evidence of my Trump Derangement Syndrome.There isn’t a set of algorithms we can run this kind of dispute through in order to resolve who is right and who is wrong. What we can do, I think, is continue to put our ideas and premises and prejudices in genuine conversation with other people who see the world differently than we do. My experience has been that if this process is undertaken earnestly and openly, it tends to
- Feb 26, 20261h 25m
Jonathan Lear, Local Exemplar
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 psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters of the heart.He wrote about Lear, after his death, along with a collection of other remembrances from friends and colleagues of Lear’s:His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”We talk about Lear’s work, but also about what it means to be, or be influenced by, what Lear called a “local exemplar,” which is someone who has a profound influence on the people around him or her. An exemplar could be a real mentor in the classic sense, as Lear was for Jonny and other students of his, or a writer who affects other people just through text, which is how he functioned in my life. It could also be someone who just said or did something once or a few times that stays with us, imprints itself on us, and changes us in ways that unfold over time.So we talk about how Lear played that role in our lives, but also about the ways in which Thakkar may be playing the role of local exemplar, as a teacher, in the lives of his students, and more generally what it is about someone, or something, that makes it capable of influencing us in these ways.One reason we ended up in this space, I think, is that I’ve been wrestling a lot, lately, with the question of how writing does or doesn’t influence people, because I’m writing a book, on relationships and therapy, that edges into the territory of self-help, and I’ve become moderately obsessed with not replicating the mistake that so many self-help books make on this front, which is thinking that in order to help people, the thing to do is give them straightforward advice on how to do or be better.This always seems to me like a fundamental misunderstanding of how texts change people, and in some ways an odd one to make in particular for the therapists and psychologists who write so many of these books. If anyone should understand that the human psyche is tricky and that real change tends be a product of close relationships and communal structures playing out over time, rather than advice distilled to words, it should be therapists.Texts do change people’s lives, but it’s indirect. They’re poetic. They’re narrative. They’re allus
- Feb 19, 202659 min
Big Tent Energy
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comMy 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…
- Feb 5, 20261h 4m
The Mandarins, Their Virtues and Vices
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 New Republic editor and owner Marty Peretz, Peretz’s longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, Vintage Classics legend Gary Fisketjon, New York Review Classics visionary Edwin Frank, and Dick and Jeanette Seaver of Arcade Publishing.It’s a fun conversation that hits on a few of my abiding concerns: the legacy of the WASP elite on our culture and politics, the ways in which we should think about people who do bad things but have made great things, and graphic design, which Ash cares about more than the average magazine editor.I lead off the episode by saying something, perhaps against my better judgement, about Jeffrey Epstein (or Jeff Epstein, as we started calling him in my family for some reason).Here’s what I say. I am genuinely befuddled.I was listening to Jay Kang and Tyler Austin Harper’s podcast, Time to Say Goodbye, and they weren’t full conspiracy on Epstein, but I’d say 70% conspiracy.Here’s Harper, for instance, on a recent episode:it does appear to be true that …. There is an international network of very powerful pedophiles that have a not inconsiderable amount of leverage on various halls of power. It shouldn’t be lost. We’ve said this on the show before, but two out of the last four presidents were people who were very friendly with Epstein. But I think the real story here is that, yes, you have this hard kernel of like true blue elite pedophilesAnd then on the other side of things I was reading some posts by Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi, and their perspective seems to be that Epstein was basically an immensely sleazy guy who paid for sex with young women and didn’t look too closely at whether they were over or under 18 but didn’t necessarily have a particular desire to have sex with underage women. Their paradigm is that a lot of this is Russiagate style hysteria/moral panic, fueled both by conspiracy theorists of all stripes and by various political and media actors who are cynically pumping up the story to drive clicks and gain electoral advantage,Claude AI comes in somewhere in the middle, telling me that “the evidence strongly supports that Epstein … Epstein deliberately and systematically sought out minors. The infrastructure he built—the recruitment network, the payments, the documentation—wasn’t consistent with someone who simply preferred young-looking women and occasionally made mistakes. It was consistent with someone whose preference was specifically for adolescent girls.”It also says that when it comes to the question of other men being involved, it’s murky: “The names that circulate publicly—Clinton, Trump, Dershowitz, various billionaires—appear in flight logs or visitor records, but presence at Epstein’s properties doesn’t establish participation in abuse. Epstein cultivated legitimacy by surrounding himself with prominent people, many of whom may have had no idea what else was happening.”I say all this not to offer my own two cents but just to articulate the opposite, which is that I have no clue. The evidence is too vast, and my time too limited, to feel as though I can have a direct interpretation of the evidence, and many of the people to whom I typically turn for a relatively sober account of reality, against conspiracy theory, or moderately conspiratorial. And then the people like Tracey and Taibbi complicate things too, because although their extreme skepticism of official narratives is so often distortionary, and therefore not a good guide to what’s actually going on, in some cases it can provide a very useful signal for when we should be skeptical of official narratives,They were more right than wrong about Russiagate, or at least right about certain things that most people got wrong. So is this Russiagate all over
About Eminent Americans
Eminent Americans is a 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. It also touches on broader themes and trends in the discourse. danieloppenheimer.substack.com
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