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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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- 4 days ago41 min
The State of Liberalism Is...Strong?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com This conversation with Mary Jane Eyre and John Encaustum is a follow-up, in a sense, to an essay I wrote not too long ago about how Ezra Klein's recent reflections on Woke 1.0 and his own complicity in its failures are evidence of the return of some common sense to American liberalism. It’s evidence of a healthier equilibrium asserting itself against the craziness from both the r…
- 1 weeks ago1h 25m
The Truth Is Out There
My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and, for the better part of two decades, arguably the most serious scholar in American academia willing to take the paranormal seriously. Jeff has published a long shelf of books with UChicago press, including a history of the Esalen Institute, Authors of the Impossible, Mutants and Mystics, The Flip, The Superhumanities, and, most recently, How to Think Impossibly.He also founded what began as the Archives of the Impossible and is now the Center for the Impossible at Rice, which by his count includes more than a million documents, letters, recordings, and case files on telepathy, near-death experiences, precognition, mediumship, UFOs, and alien abduction. And as of this month he’s on television, hosting a six-part docuseries on SundanceTV and AMC+ called Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena. It premiered the day after we recorded.Jeff and I got to know each other fifteen-odd years ago, when my wife Jessica was writing her history of humanistic psychology, a story that runs straight through Esalen, the retreat center on Big Sur about which Jeff wrote a big book and for which he’s served on the board.The occasion for this conversation is a recent essay Jeff wrote for Arc called “The Flying Saucer and the Quest.” It reviews two books: Paul Gutjahr’s Faith in Space, a history of American religious belief in extraterrestrial life, and the seventh and final volume of Jacques Vallée’s journals, Forbidden Science.Vallée, as background, is a French astronomer turned computer scientist turned researcher on UFO phenomena. He came to UT Austin in the early sixties and helped map Mars on some of the first computers, and he was the real-life model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He started out as a nuts-and-bolts UFO guy: spaceships, other planets, reconnaissance. Then, disgusted with what he saw as the reflexive dismissiveness of American science, he went back to France and in 1968 wrote Passport to Magonia, which broke with that whole model. The book tracks the uncanny parallels between modern UFO encounters and centuries of European folklore about fairies, elves, and visitors from elsewhere.In 2014, Vallée, who’s still alive, asked Jeff to help him find a university home for his papers, and Rice said yes. Other collections followed. One is a selection of the few thousand most fascinating of the hundreds of thousands letters sent to alien abduction survivor Whitley Strieber after the publication of his book Communion, his 1987 account of his abduction. Another is the papers of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who went looking for psychopathology in abductees and didn’t find it.What unites all of this, and what animates the TV show, is Jeff’s now decades long scholarly exploration of these phenomena, which he sees as misrepresented, in some key ways, both by the materialist debunkers and by the avowed paranormal experiencers. His notion, which we explore in our conversation, is that what we get in first hand accounts to is better understood as evidence not of what they say it’s evidence of but rather as a product of their “ontological shock” – their encounter with a reality that our brains aren’t really evolved or equipped to perceive directly, a reality exists beyond or beside or below the day to day material reality.Jeff also has argued that religion – his official field of study – is in key respects a record of people experiencing this thing beyond as well. It’s all ontological shock all the way back.An irony of our conversation is that neither Jeff nor I has had any of these experiences. Maybe not ironic in my case, since I’ve never presented as a believer, but certainly ironic in Jeff’s case, given his life’s work. He even flew to Brazil for ayahuasca and did not see the elves. So some of our conversation is about what you do with experiences you don’t have.My own answer, as a nonfiction storyteller, is that whether these accounts are true or not, they’re fascinating human stories either way, and utterly worth exploring in that respect even if we choose to remain skeptical or agnostic about the degree to which they correspond to reality.We also talk about precognition and 9/11, the Myth of Er at the end of The Republic, Jeff’s coming trilogy on the occult origins of modern science, and the very arc of the covenant in the secret government warehouse vibe of the
- 2 weeks ago1h 26m
The Very Model of a Modern Major Middlebrow
My guest on the show today is Willard Spiegelman, emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the former longtime editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of many books on English and American poetry as well as a number of collections of personal essays, including his most recent, My (Lucky) Stars, which he calls a “memoir of taste.” In it, he writes about the mostly middle brow artists who shaped his sensibility, popular entertainers like Gilbert & Sullivan, cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, and the great Patsy Cline.Someone once said of my show that I basically just interview Jews and Gays, and so it’s probably worth noting that from that perspective Willard is what we in the business call a two-fer, both gay and Jewish. We talk about both of those aspects of his life – growing up gay in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Philadelphia, the relative ease, looking back, of his coming out, and so on – but in some ways I think this episode fits better into two other Eminent Americans thematic lineages.One is Texas, where Willard lived for many decades as a prof at SMU and for which he developed a multi-layered appreciation. We talk about the institutions of high culture in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, which have been the beneficiaries of generations of oil money. There are the hard charging women of the SMU sororities, to whom Willard gave sage counsel, and their complex hierarchies, rituals, and manners, which deserve more artistic representation than they’ve received. And there is two-step dancing, which Willard fell in love with.The other genealogy into which I’d slot this episode is my series of episodes that spend time valuing the best of popular and middlebrow culture for the ways in which it can unite and even civilize our fractious, pluralistic nation. I’m thinking of my fashion episodes, on J. Crew and Ivy Style and men’s fashion; my conversation with Sherman Alexie on our shared appreciation for genre television; talking to Matt Dinniman on his Dungeon Crawler Carl series; and perhaps most gloriously my special two part episode on that great goddess of middlebrow culture, NPR’s Terry Gross.For Willard, and for me too, there is something genuinely significant, and interesting, in the ways we connect with our fellow Americans via these sometimes quite brilliant and often quite frivolous cultural products. It could be Legally Blonde, to pick one of Willard’s favorite movies, or the comedies of Judd Apatow, which he and I both dig. Or Saturday Night Live, which he liked back in the day, and which I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I still kind of like. His new collection is a love letter to some older iterations of this kind of work, and also, as the memoir in taste framing would suggest, an indirect reflection on himself and what he half-jokingly, but I think also half-seriously, refers to as his deep superficiality.Eminent Americans is a collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and a brother by another mother to its publication, Arc magazine. Read and listen to more from Arc at arcmag.org.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
- 3 weeks ago1h 35m
Digging Ditches in New Mexico
My guest on the show today is writer, activist and retired journalism professor Robert Jensen who has a new book out, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning.In it, Bob uses his own encounters with different sources of meaning – God, nature, even the idea that we’re free to choose anything at all, rather than just being the mechanistic product of a bunch of subatomic particles interacting with each other in a sequence that gives rise to the illusion of human agency – to make the case for a more down-to-earth, small-m idea of meaning. He also talks, in ways I found quite moving, about his own struggles to patch together an adult life of purpose after a childhood so abusive and chaotic that he genuinely doesn’t remember a lot of it.Bob spent most of his career as a journalism professor at UT Austin and as a writer of short, plainspoken books advocating for his brand of left-wing politics, including The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; and without question the best titled of his many books: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.I first heard of Bob, I’m pretty sure, when a lot of people first heard of him, which was when he published an op-ed three days after 9/11 that drew a deliberate moral equivalence between the Al-Qaeda attacks on us and the history of U.S. aggression in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, and Chile. He wasn’t defending Al Qaeda; his point was that we kind of sucked too, and, more importantly, we almost certainly were about to suck quite hard again.Here he is, for instance, talking about the fear that took hold of him after the attacks, which wasn’t the fear that most people had, of more attacks on what we began to almost immediately call “the homeland,” but rather a fear of how we were going to respond militarily. He writes:I almost immediately had to face the question: “When will the United States, without regard for civilian casualties, retaliate?” I wish the question were, “Will the United States retaliate?” But if history is a guide, it is a question only of when and where. So, the question is which civilians will be unlucky enough to be in the way of the U.S. bombs and missiles that might be unleashed.Those are a few sentences that have worn quite well in the now 25 years since he first wrote them. There are others in the piece, as we discuss, that didn’t wear so well. But in both cases, the well- and ill-considered alike, they’re a testament to part of what I’ve always appreciated about Bob, whom I met some years later, first via email and then eventually in person when I moved to Austin, where he taught at UT. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. He just me much less fear than most of the rest of us experience, certainly including myself, when what we see doesn’t align with the perspectives and sentiments of the people around us.Bob also, and you’ll get a rich sense of this from our conversation, is unusually open to evidence that he’s been wrong. He doesn’t seem to fear that either, reflecting on his mistakes and trying to do better, though as he writes about in his new memoir, his conceptual openness to change and growth has rarely meant that the actual process has been smooth or fast. A lot of therapy. A lot of failure and pain. A lot of help from other people who saw more in him than he often saw in himself.I’m saying all this, about him, because when I try to summarize what stuff we talked about in the conversation, I struggle. We talk about his new book. We talk about his 9/11 essay, his history of left-wing activism, his retreat from that activism. We talk about his pretty nightmarish childhood, and the ways in which he’s tried to repair the damage it’s done. We talk about the wisdom of Ray Wiley Hubbard. We talk about digging ditches in rural New Mexico, where he now lives. And various other things. But really we talk about what it what it means to be alive, man, and how hard and beautiful that can be. I think it’s a special conversation. I hope you agree.Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and with its offshoot publication, Arc. To learn more about what’s going on at Arc, visit the magazine at arcmag.org.Peace.Show notes:0:00 — Cold open: Dan introduces Robert Jensen and his new semi-memoir, *This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life Without Meaning*, referencing Jensen’s controversial post-9/11 op-ed.2:02 — Dan reads from Jensen’s 9/11 op-ed, written three days after the attacks, drawing a moral equiva
- 4 weeks ago4 min
For the Love of the Game
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comThis is the first in my new run of paid episodes, available in full only to paid subscribers. Instead of making every third or fourth of my standard episodes paid, which is what I was doing for a while, I’m going to instead offer one or two additional episodes a month for paid subscribers that have a different vibe.I’m not going to do much editing on th…
- Oct 3, 20261h 45m
The People’s (Podcast) Microphone
My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of an excellent essay in the most recent issue of The Point, “We Were the 99 Percent.” It’s an unusually thoughtful reflection on the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which Jeff was a participant in, and observer of, from the very beginning.I asked Jeff to come on the show because I enjoyed the essay, which genuinely altered my perspective on a movement that I thought, in retrospect inaccurately, I more or less understood. Also, though, because he was someone who’d been popping up in my Substack feed recently in a way that I’d noticed, and it was striking to me that he’d gone in the space of a month or two from someone I’d never heard of to someone I now knew from both Substack and The Point, which are two of the key ingredients in my personal intellectual diet.There’s nothing magical about this. Big world, small tax bracket, as someone once said to me. Jeff I overlap in terms of background and interests in all sorts of ways. But I like to pay attention to these signals anyway. They often end up meaning something. One of the thing that turns out to be interesting about Jeff’s case, as you’ll see in the conversation, is that for all that we do share, intellectually, he’s also coming from a substantively different place, in terms of his scholarship and political experiences, than many of the rest of us, and it’s that difference – his grounding in both Spanish and English language literature, and his personal connections to activists from Latin America and Europe – that has a lot to do with what makes his work surprising.Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And keep an eye on Jeff. He’s a comer.Also keep an eye on my the new logo for the show, designed by Arc magazine intern Mina Fujii. It is, as the kids say 🔥. It jazzes up the whole joint. I feel at least 46.6% cooler than I did last week.Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and distributed through its publication, Arc. You can read more articles and listen to more podcasts at their website.Peace.Show notes for this ep:[0:00] Intro: Host Dan Oppenheimer welcomes listeners and introduces Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Rutgers University, author of the essay “We Were the 99 Percent” in *The Point* magazine.[0:33] Dan explains why he invited Jeff on the show — the essay genuinely altered his perspective on Occupy Wall Street, and Jeff has been appearing across Substack and *The Point* as a rising intellectual voice.[2:33] Dan notes Jeff’s unique background in both Spanish and English literature and his connections to Latin American and European activists, which shaped his path to Occupy.[4:00] The “people’s mic” at Occupy — Jeff explains how it worked, its visceral power, and its limitations as a kind of physical Twitter.[6:11] Dan admits the essay forced him to reconsider his “easy, stereotypical, condescending” views on Occupy and raises the broader question of whether there’s always something cringe about movements.[7:30] Jeff’s origin story at Occupy — he was in his late 20s, a grad student in comparative literature in New York, connected to Spanish organizers involved in the Indignados (15-M) movement.[9:05] Jeff’s frustration with how left media outlets (Jacobin, N+1) claimed the Occupy narrative after late September 2011, missing the movement’s international prehistory.[10:25] The Spanish Indignados movement as a key influence — 40% of people at Occupy planning meetings in Tompkins Square Park were non-Americans, many from Spain, bringing conviction that a similar movement could work in the US.[12:30] Dan draws a parallel to Black Lives Matter’s internal narrative battles (DeRay Mckesson vs. the hashtag’s founders) and asks what’s at stake in who controls the story.[16:06] Jeff critiques the “Jacobin narrative” and Musa al-Gharbi’s *We Have Never Been Woke* for framing Occupy as purely a project of symbolic elites — and concedes he himself is one.[23:06] Dan argues the professional managerial class critique is potent but not a catch-all delegitimization of movements, citing the civil rights movement and gay rights as movements led by educated middle-class people who did profound good.[24:12] Jeff tells his Occupy story: a heterogeneous, internat
- Sep 25, 20261h 50m
The Gender Identity Episode
My guest on the show today is Rogers Brubaker, professor of sociology at UCLA and author of many books, the most recent of which, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is our subject for discussion on this episode. If you want a really good kind of primer on this book before you listen to this episode, I recommend you pause and go read the review essay of it, by Shreeharsh Kelkar, that I published on my Substack recently. Both the book and Shreeharsh’s review of it have the double virtue of taking on a really fraught topic, one that very easily tends to dysregulate people, with both analytical dispassion and also genuine consideration and compassion for the people for whom these questions of gender identity, and gender identity at variance with biological sex, are not primarily or exclusively analytical ones. I wanted that kind of access point to talking about what I would globally call “trans issues” because it's just a tough topic to address without getting sucked into the culture war binaries. As in so many things, and you will deduce this from listening to the episode, I find myself in neither camp. I'm absolutely a gung-ho defender of equal rights for trans people. I'm absolutely and consistently grossed out by the ways in which the right treats with contempt the real lives of real people for the sake of their political gain and sometimes it seems just for the sake of the kind of pleasures of sadism. I also think the “left” side of this debate (I put it in quotes because in other countries it doesn’t break down as a clean left-right issue) has been profoundly illiberal in its efforts to police the discourse and to relegate to out of bounds all sorts of thorny policy questions that really do pit kind of various rights and concerns that are legitimate against each other in ways that simply can't be reduced to right bad, left good. This conversation with Rogers is really kind of prior to most of that, however. It's about what we're even talking about when we talk about this category of gender identity, which as I think Rogers demonstrates pretty persuasively wasn't until fairly recently even a way of understanding the world. Which is to say it's a social construction, which is not to say that that means that it's illegitimate, that it's not a real or authentic social construction any more than it's real or authentic for us to talk about all the other very real ways that we construct our senses of self. Even the modern idea of having a self, as Rogers and I discuss, is a constructions. At one point, Rogers chastises me a bit in our conversation when I use the term “social contagion” to get at an aspect of this idea of the social constitution of gender identity. And I take the chastisement, to a point. It's implicitly pejorative — suggestive of kind of disease, corruption. It also, inaccurately, suggests something out of the ordinary, a foreign invasion, when the much more banal truth is that how we imagine and construct ourselves is always this immensely complex negotiation between our biology, the things that are coded into our DNA, and the historically contingent ways in which our specific society at this moment in time carves that nature at its joints. Agreeing on that truth, which I think we really should, is not the end of the conversation about how we should live together with each other and treat each other with dignity and respect and balance all the competing concerns and values when it comes to policies around gender identity. It really is the beginning of that conversation, and that's where Roger's book to me is especially valuable, and that's why I'd like to believe this conversation is valuable, too. I hope you agree. Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and distributed through its publication, Arc. You can read more articles and listen to more podcasts at their website.Peace. #oot 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
- Sep 15, 20261h 48m
On Off Christopher Street
My guests on the show today are David Sessions and Blake Smith, who are friends of the pod as well as co-hosts of the Off Christopher Street Podcast, which takes its name from the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street, which aspired to be something like the gay New Yorker during it 20 year run from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. This episode is also being released via their show’s feed, and in that spirit (and because David does show notes so much better than I do), here’s that feed’s summary of the conversation:In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans, we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope, in asking the questions, to provoke you to interest in the gay writing and thought we now have to inherit.Also discussed in this episode:* The political parallels between our political moment and the 1970s* How the editors of Christopher Street took inspiration from feminism but thought gay male culture should be separate from women* The “missing middle” between academic gay studies and the playful performativity of Gay Twitter* Why it’s important that gay men write for a gay audience, not just for whoever will read them in straight magazines* Why “not like other gays” writers like Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson are still part of gay culture* Why Bros is the best gay movie ever madeDavid and Blake on Eminent Americans* David: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)* Blake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)* David: “Left Behind” (May 2025)* Blake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)Sources* Michael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).* “A Conversation with Michel Foucault,” Christopher Street, May 1982.* Ben Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).* Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).* Michael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).* Paul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.* Tom Crewe, “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.lrb.co.u
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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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