Eminent Americans

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comOne of the essays in my private canon of great essays that no one else seems to have read is philosopher Nancy Bauer’s essay “Pornutopia,” which first ran in the winter 2007 issue of N+1 and then was included in Bauer’s 2015 book How to Do Things With Pornography.I don’t talk much about my enthusiasm for this essay because it’s embarrassing. You can’t r…

My guest on the show today is Matt Dinniman, author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is seven books into a projected 10 volume run.I happened upon the book when I was trawling Kindle unlimited for science fiction to read. It kept recommending it to me, and I kept resisting, because it was hard to take seriously a novel called Dungeon Crawler Carl. Finally I gave it a try, and literally within about three weeks I’d burned through all seven novels in the series, each of which runs around 600 pages or more.They are a blast: hilarious, absurd, propulsively plotted, just an immense amount of fun. Matt and I talk about the series, which was initially self-published but has now been re-issued by a big commercial publisher and is being adapted for television by Seth MacFarlane. We talk about his career prior to the recent success, when he mostly made his money by painting cats and dogs. We talk about changes in the publishing industry, and more. I enjoyed talking to Matt, who is precisely the kind of person you want enjoying this kind of unexpected mid life success. 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 Brady Dale, crypto reporter for Axios and author of the 2023 biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy.Our topic, as you may have guessed, is crypto. And more broadly: what are the ideologies and ideas swirling around the technology of cryptocurrency. I just re-listened to the conversation, and I think it ended up being a really good, smart but not too technical primer on crypto in general.I used Brady, in a sense, to answer all my questions about what crypto is, who some of the key players are, what the utopian aspirations around it were, and whether any of them survive to the present. 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.comFreddie deBoer an author, blogger, essayist, and now Substacker who has carved out a niche for himself as a left-wing critic of liberals and the left, with a particular emphasis on the characteristic flaws and sins of identity politics and what we now call wokeness. He's also a critic of education reform and certain modes of mental health and disability rights advocacy. He's also a bit of a pill.

My guest on the show today is John Pistelli, proprietor of the Grand Hotel Abyss Substack newsletter and its affiliated lecture course, The Invisible College. John is also the author of the novel Major Arcana, which was originally serialized on Substack. It was then picked up and republished by Belt Publishing, an indie press (now under the auspices of Arcadia, a larger indie press) founded to promote voices from the Rust Belt. We talk a lot of about John’s novel, which I enjoyed immensely, but we talk more about what the novel represents, and has led to, in terms of the arc of John's career and his public reputation. In a very modest way, he's blown up over the last year or two. He's one of the presiding sages of Substack. He's been mentioned, mostly favorably, in the New Yorker. He's been criticized respectfully in the Wall Street Journal and somewhat derisively in Compact magazine. I ask him: What has that felt like? Is there discomfort in being the center of some attention when his sense of himself as a literary figure was forged as someone on the margins. Is he enjoying the attention? What does he make of the criticism he’s received? What was it like to travel to New York to launch the book? Was it as romantic as he made it sound? 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

I'm not the host of today's episode, but rather the guest of writer and podcaster Ken Ilgunas, who had me on his podcast, Out of the Wild with Ken Ilgunas, to talk about my own writing, my life, my thoughts, et cetera. Ken is the author of among other books, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland and This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back. 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 Greg Barnhisel, English professor at Duquesne University and author of the recent book Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power.Our conversation is in one sense about the subject of his book, Norman Holmes Pearson, who was a pioneer of both the American intelligence establishment and the modern study of the humanities. But it's also about the death of what Pearson represented, or embodied, which is the American cold war establishment, or—to abstract even further— the death of any unitary establishment whatsoever possessing the power to author a consensus or narrative to which most of the nation would defer. It's also about one of my abiding preoccupations, as a son of New England, with the old yankee WASP elite culture. Yale men. Taste-makers. Ghostwriters of national narratives. The kind of people who knew how to quote Virgil, chair a foundation meeting, and quietly stage a coup in Latin America. We talk about whether this specific kind of establishment power he represented has faded entirely or morphed into something else (some version of what we sometimes call the professional managerial class.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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comFriend of the pod Blake Smith is back for today’s episode, which is one of my once a month paid episodes, so if you’re not a paid subscriber you’ll only get the first 20 minutes or so.Our conversation turned out to be another installment in the informal series of post-mortems I seem to be conducting on the heterodox moment in the early 2020s when there coalesced a…

In this enlightening discussion, Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry, shares his profound insights on mental health. He tackles the pressing issues of overdiagnosis and critiques the DSM's relevance. Aftab reflects on the contrasts between psychotherapy approaches and advocates for a more nuanced understanding of mental illnesses, including the complexities of diagnosing conditions like OCD and depression. With a call for holistic care and critical thinking, he emphasizes the importance of diverse perspectives in mental health discourse.

Anna Gat is a political intellectual, so we talk some politics, e.g. on how things have changed for the worse in her native country of Hungary, why she thinks that a certain nerdy subset of American conservatives seems to have a raging hard-on for the country and its leader Viktor Orban, and what lessons it all holds for the potential of authoritarianism in the US. Mostly, though, we talk about InterIntellect, which is the company she created that hosts intellectual salons, both in person and online, and about what she’s learned from starting and running the company about the art of facilitating good conversation. This is how Anna makes her bread, and so she has a deep investment, and deep expertise, in making her salons enjoyable and satisfying to people. She’s thought a lot about it. She’s iterated a lot. She has wisdom and insight that most other people don’t have. And I found it fascinating.Hope you do too. 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