The Truth Is Out There

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…

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 Center for the Impossible itself, which resides in a three-story, very cold warehouse outside Houston.Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and is distributed through its publication, Arc Magazine. You can find all of Arc’s podcasts and much more online at arcmag.org.It was a real pleasure to reconnect with Jeff for this one.The truth is out there. 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

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

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 equivalence between Al-Qaeda’s violence and U.S. militarism abroad.4:46 — Dan on Jensen as a person: someone unusually willing to say what he believes and remarkably open to evidence that he’s been wrong, even when the process of growth is painful.5:00 — Overview of the conversation: the new book, the 9/11 essay, left-wing activism, a traumatic childhood, therapy, Ray Wylie Hubbard, digging ditches in rural New Mexico, and what it means to be alive.5:00 — Show credits: produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and its publication, *Arc*.5:16 — Interview begins. Jensen on never once making the Hook ‘em Horns sign in 26 years at UT Austin, and his biggest scrape with the university administration after 9/11.6:26 — Jensen on his emeritus title: “a Latin word that means, ‘Thank God that guy finally retired.’”6:32 — Jensen reflects warmly on his teaching career at UT Austin (1992–2018), his love of teaching first-year students, and academic freedom at the university.7:52 — Why Jensen preferred teaching 18-year-olds over graduate students: their rawness, curiosity, and the exciting mix of students at UT Austin.9:32 — Dan proposes Jensen as the ideal professor for first-years — combining strong conviction with a belief that students should argue with him and find their own convictions.10:41 — Jensen on his teaching philosophy: “Reasonable people can disagree.” Making his own thinking process visible to students, including his confusion.12:12 — Jensen on a colleague who bragged that his students didn’t know how he voted — and why Jensen disagreed with that approach.13:04 — Dan on a renewed appreciation for the “view from nowhere” in journalism after the last decade of media chaos; Jensen agrees and discusses monitoring right-wing media in retirement.15:03 — Jensen on rethinking left-wing critiques: “you can be wrong, your side can be wrong,” and the book as a plea for humility.16:09 — Jensen on the 9/11 fallout: the fear of the rush to war, publishing the op-ed, the wave of hate mail, and being condemned by name by UT Austin’s president.20:10 — Jensen on the specific content of the op-ed: pointing out U.S. war crimes in Vietnam and beyond, and how overseas audiences found the analysis routine while Americans were outraged.21:50 — Dan pivots to the book and Jensen’s childhood. Dan says Jensen has a “questing quality” and “traumatic childhood energy” that he’s spent years in therapy working on.23:18 — Jensen on David Hume — “Reason is and always will be a slave to the passions” — and his abusive, alcoholic, dysfunctional childhood, dissociation, and struggling to construct an origin story.25:18 — The four things Jensen doesn’t believe in: God, a spiritual plane, nature mysticism, and free will. Writing the book for himself rather than an audience.26:44 — Jensen on modeling that men can speak openly about being victims of abuse and survive it.26:50 — Dan on Jensen’s “ministerial vibe” — a gentleness and attraction to the numinous despite his non-belief. Asks whether Jensen feels an attraction to transcendent experiences.28:46 — Jensen: “From the time I can remember, I never understood what people were talking about when they talked about God or spirituality.” Finding fulfillment in intellectual wor… 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

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…

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, international group suspicious of existing left organizations, experimenting with whether to issue demands or build a constituency. Early debates included a Tobin tax on financial transactions.[27:15] The “We Are the 99%” slogan’s populist power — Jeff traces its origins to his Spanish friends Begonia and Luis, Chris from Food Not Bombs, and David Graeber assembling it together.[29:30] The core insight of early Occupy: the left-right partisan axis wasn’t capturing the fundamental problem of massive wealth redistribution toward elites — a framing that remains powerful.[32:00] The encampment at Zuccotti Park lasted about two months (September 17 – late November 2011). Jeff identifies two competing currents: the autonomous/horizontal current and the institutional left current.[33:30] The institutional narrative won: Occupy as a rebirth of the left, to be articulated into institutional political power. Jeff argues this proved self-defeating — reducing everything to “is this left or not?”[36:00] Tracing the autonomous current forward: Occupy Sandy (mutual aid after Hurricane Sandy in 2012), Strike Debt (buying up student debt, later pushing Biden on debt cancellation), the 16 Beaver reading group, connections to BLM, Standing Rock, and Gaza.[39:00] The institutional side: N+1’s “Left Populism” editorial, Jacobin, Astra Taylor’s involvement, the Occupy Gazette, Bernie’s campaign, the DSA, and the Squad.[42:00] Dan and Jeff dig into the theory of left populism via Laclau and Mouffe — the “chain of equivalences” approach linking disparate group demands into a coalition, versus older economic populism.[46:00] Mid-roll break: Dan highlights new writing at *Arc* Magazine — essays by Amelia Morris on motherhood, Lydia Dugdale on illiteracy, and Travis Alexander on Zionism and queerness.[47:30] Two definitions of populism: (1) economic populism rooted in broad shared material interests (”We are the 99%”), and (2) Laclau/Mouffe’s “chain of equivalents” populism linking the distinct demands of different identity groups. Jeff argues the left conflated the two.[50:00] Latin American populist governments (Chávez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, the Kirchners in Argentina) as the laboratory for left populism. Jeff argues this paradigm is now exhausted — right-wing governments have won the last several elections across the region.[55:00] Dan pushes back: Wasn’t Latin American populism largely about petrodollars and payoffs rather than genuine chain-of-equivalences politics? Jeff partially agrees but argues there were real redistributive achievements for a period.[1:08:00] Jeff’s key argument: When people like Matt Karp or Benjamin Kunkel say “we need populism,” they’re often confusing two very different things. The left needs fine-grained theoretical clarity about which populism it means.[1:12:00] Dan asks: What’s the difference between chain-of-equivalences populism and old-fashioned Democratic coalition politics? Jeff’s answer: populism requires an antagonism — a defined enemy — which Democratic coalition politics doesn’t.[1:16:00] The problem of subdivided antagonisms: instead of one universal “people vs. elites,” the chain-of-equivalences approach slices the antagonist into multiple enemies (whites, straights, cis people, Israel), creating more political opposition than it can overcome.[1:19:00] Jeff on the abolitionist movement’s refusal to answer basic questions (e.g., “What do you do when someone commits a murder?”) — he sees this as fundamentally unserious and unwilling to win politically.[1:23:00] Mamdani as a potential new model: re… 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

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

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, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.* James Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.* James Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.* David Sessions, “The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist,” December 22, 2025.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. 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

My guest on the show today is writer Ann Manov, the artist formerly known as personality girl and the author of a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Republican Machines: Can the GOP save the humanities?”In it, Manov goes back to her alma mater, University of Florida, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, perhaps the best known of the growing number of schools and centers around the country, typically at state universities in red states, dedicated to some mix of the great books and what has come to be called “civic thought.” On their website, the Hamilton school says that it teaches “the ideas and habits of thought that founded our country and sustain our free society.”The question Manov set out to answer, in her reporting, was basically whether these civic centers were, as they billed themselves, the saviors of liberal arts education in the US, or were they what their liberal and left-wing critics warned they were: indoctrination centers to incubate young right wing culture warriors and/or “Trojan horses designed to ravage humanities departments across the nation.”Or, and this is what Manov set out to determine, something else entirely? She writes: It struck me that, as an undergraduate at UF, I might have preferred to take Hamilton’s Great Books of the Medieval World over the English department’s Survey of American Literature, whose syllabus from this past spring included Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sailor Moon, and A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. It also struck me as sufficiently unusual for a member of the GOP to go on national news, as Sasse had, to say that “the answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts.” I decided I would go back to Gainesville and investigate for myself.As I get into some in the conversation, this is of more than just academic interest to me. I work at a college of liberal arts at a flagship state university in a red state that has not just a school of civic leadership but a separate institute in this philosophical space and a separate center in this space and a new great books-focused core curriculum that all students will be required to fulfill when it’s launched in a year or two. Also, of course, I just care about these issues, because I’m a humanities guy down to my DNA.So many of the people in my life are humanities folks as well. Some of them are in one camp or another, and many are just worried about the state of the humanities, the liberal arts, in America, which we all seem to agree are under threat even if we differ from whence the threat come, whether it’s the left, the right, neoliberalism, or big bad AI. So the stakes is high, as the great De La Soul once said.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. Peace.Here are timestamped show notes for the episode:- 0:00 — Intro: guest Ann Manov and her Harper’s essay “Republican Machines: Can the GOP Save the Humanities?”- 0:32 — Overview of the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and the rise of “civic thought” centers- 5:58 — Manov joins the conversation- 7:42 — How Manov got the idea for the piece and her UF background- 10:58 — What exactly are these “civic centers”? Legislative origins (e.g., Florida’s SB-266)- 14:38 — Role of money and donors (Ken Griffin, Tikvah) and the relative weakness of great-books enrollment vs. PPEL- 16:58 — Political and financial motives behind funding: Zionism, anti-”woke” messaging, donor pressure- 22:38 — Why centers become “schools”: hiring power and bypassing traditional departments- 24:06 — Politicization of academic hiring lines and curriculum specialization- 30:32 — Faculty quality at these schools; political diversity questions- 32:40 — Laptops, ChatGPT, and declining classroom rigor- 38:33 — Comparing reading loads: poli sci vs. Hamilton School’s PPEL intro course- 42:40 — Jennifer Frey’s ouster from University of Tulsa’s Honors College- 46:42 — New College of Florida case study: political control without academic rigor- 51:02 — Why elite schools could enforce rigor but mostly don’t- 56:31 — Institutional inertia, grading pressures, and fear of enrollment loss- 1:06:01 — Critique of “teaching critical thinking, not content” pedagogy- 1:12:22 — Tension between elite and mass education models; philosophy as a stable-enrollment outlier- 1:22:45 — Comparing University of Austin and Hamilton School trajectories- 1:27:29 — What’s the actual case for a shared liberal arts education?- 1:30:03 — Closing thoughts on specialization, declining reading loads, and scaling Tulsa’s model- 1:32:11 — Outro and creditsWant me to trim this down to a shorter version, or format it differently (e.g., bullet list without links) for pasting into a specific show notes platform? 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

My guest on the show today is Emmett Rensin, the author of 2024’s The Complications: On Going Insane in America, a really good collection of essays about various aspects of mental illness, how we construct and treat it as a society, and Emmett’s own fairly terrifying history of dealing with it.I asked Emmett to come on to the show after reading his recent essay in The Lamp Magazine, “Over the Borderline,” which is a profile of the soft anti-psychiatry activist and writer Laura Delano, whose memoir of extricating herself from what she sees as the baleful clutches of the mental health and psychiatric establishment has been a bit of a phenomenon.It’s a really extraordinary piece, which you should all go read.It’s about Delano’s story. It’s about the interesting ways in which she’s gentrifying anti-psychiatry for a new audience. It’s about Emmett’s own wrestling with mental illness, diagnosis, and psychopharmaceuticals. And it’s about how to contend with the fact that our psychiatric regime is both terribly inadequate to the challenge of all the mentally ill or struggling people it has to deal with—uncertain in its science, shameful in its legacy, destined to fail and in some cases do real damage to a fair number of people—and also, in the end, probably the least bad option we have on the table, run by a lot of people with good intentions, a lot of compassion, and a genuine desire to do the best they can with the tools we have for people who are suffering.I didn’t really know much about Emmett before reading this essay, but it’s one of those pieces where you read it and immediately know you’re dealing with a rare intellect and a talent. It’s that good. He’s on my list now of writers I have to keep track of.In addition to the show, one brief aside.Back in 2015, I attended a conference for communications and marketing people that was held on Coronoado Island in San Diego. The keynote speaker was Ezra Klein, who at the time was riding pretty high as the young philosopher king of Vox, which he and Matt Yglesias had founded just the year before.My memory of his talk, which may also just have been a conversation with one of the conference organizers, is pretty vague. But I have a very distinct memory of one thing he said to us, which was that one of the most fascinating things they’d learned from analyzing the metrics for the Vox site was that content about race and gender was massively more effective at driving traffic than almost any other topic.I don’t know if he said it approvingly, like it was evidence that people really did care about these important issues, and that it put the lie to the old status quo assumption that social justice content was boring to readers. He may have said it neutrally, like isn’t this interesting. Or maybe he said it with some alarm, like it was a combustible substance that had to be handled with extreme care.But the fact of it has stayed with me ever since, and I genuinely think it may have helped me in keeping some balance during the period of craziness that was about to ensue. I had this awareness that that kind of culture war content just drove people nuts, shot a bolt of electricity straight to the sub-rational regions of their brains, and was therefore suspicious of the consensus narratives that formed during that time.I was reminded me of Klein’s observations, recently, when I wrote a short essay for the Substack about him, and in particular about his partial mea culpa, on an episode of his podcast where he answered questions from listeners, for what he got wrong during that period, that he missed some of what was going on.Read my essay if you’re interested. It’s good. But what I wanted to observe is that my post about Klein and wokeness drove way more clicks, and new subscribers, than anything I’ve done in a long time, and it wasn’t because it was better, on its own terms, than other stuff I’ve written.It’s because it’s exactly what Klein pointed out, all those years ago. You get attention for delving into culture war topics. And the power of it isn’t just to sizzle readers’ brains but writers too, both because we’re vulnerable to the same provocations and then on top of that we’re vulnerable to how massively incentivized we are to write about these things out of self-interest, because it gets us readers, clicks, attention, money.As a writer and podcaster, I don’t want to overcorrect. I care about these topics too, and when I genuinely have something interesting to say, or an interesting person to interview, I don’t want to not do it out of some misguided sense of having to stand above or apart from out of principle or as an implicit demonstration of how cool I am.But it is a good reminder to be cautious. One of the unexpected blessings of having failed to make the cut as a self-sustaining writer, of having to build a career as a communications professional somewhat to the side of all that, is that I don’t have to play the game, heed the incentives, allow myself to be captured by the audience, in order to provide for myself and my family. I should avail myself of that privilege.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 find all of Arc’s podcasts and much more at arcmag.org.Hope you enjoy this conversation with Emmett Rensin as much as I did.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