Eminent Americans

My guest on the show today is Chris Cillizza. You may know from his many years writing for the Washington Post, his many years on-air for CNN, or his recent third act on Substack, but I know Chris from way back when, as a friend and classmate in the Loomis Chaffee class of 1994. We didn't stay in close touch after we graduated, but we’ve stayed friendly and have crossed paths occasionally in the 30 years since. When Chris agreed to do this, I'd intended to focus on his long and successful career in journalism, concluding with a discussion of his unexpected lay-off from CNN, in 2022, and his subsequent re-invention on Substack. We do some of that, but the overall vibe is less professional than it is mid-life existential. We talk about the arcs of our lives over the last few decades — how we've balanced ambition and responsibility, what we're thinking about now that life has beaten the shit out of us a fair amount and we have a little bit of wisdom about things, and what comes next.To give you a taste, here's a lightly edited passage from the conversation where Chris and I are talking about how ambition sometimes got the better of him when he was working at CNN:Cillizza: There's this great quote from a German philosopher [Arthur Schopenhauer] that I think about all the time: “Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become. And the same is true of fame.”So when I got to CNN from the Post, I was bigger than before. More people knew me. More people read me. I made more money. And you know what I spent most of my time thinking? ‘Why am I not anchoring? Why am I not on the 7:00 to 11:00 PM election night coverage? Why am I on the midnight to 4:00 AM election coverage?' Oppenheimer: Do you worry about falling back into that? Up until three years ago, you were on that train and were being driven by those incentives. Then you had this massive shock to the system. Since then you've done a lot of introspection. You’ve grown. But look, you're a talented guy. You're still a hardworking guy. You could go back up again, right? That could happen, whether it’s growing to 5 million subscribers on Substack and you're making a shit ton of money, or CNN calls, or MSNBC calls, or the next Democratic administration calls and says, ‘Hey, we need a press secretary.’It's not implausible that you could be back up, or even get to greater levels of fame and influence. Do you worry that you could get sucked back into it? Do you feel like you have enough guardrails in place or you've done enough introspection? I just think about it with you because while the sudden epiphany is great, it can also be very evanescent, right?Cillizza: Totally, and certainly in the first 18 months after CNN laid me off, if NBC had called and been like, ‘Hey, you wanna come work here?’ I would have said, 'Absolutely.' The reason that I am on this path now is partly because I chose it, but also partly because no one else asked.So I don't think it’s likely that someone will ask, but yes, of course, if you've gone down a road before, it makes it more likely that you’ll go down it again.I think two things are true. One is that it’s almost impossible that one of those places would call and say, ‘Chris, we want you back.’ And I think it is equally unlikely that I would say yes, for a number of reasons. The first is that this is where I’ve been most my true self. It's a better space to be in. But also it is unlikely they would pay me enough to make it worth it.I think you always have to be mindful of it, and yes I have put guardrails in place, but you hit a guardrail hard enough and it breaks. It's not a guarantor.Oppenheimer: So maybe it's not a news network. What if it's this scenario? What if you write a memoir? You write a memoir about your midlife crisis, and most books don't do much of anything, but let's say it hits. Your book is a bestseller. It's not a Tuesdays with Morrie bestseller, but it's a solid bestseller. You're already on the speaking circuit, but its success vaults you up to the next level of the speaking circuit.Now there's more that you're being asked to do than you can do while also maintaining a healthy life and spending enough time with your wife and kids and working on yourself to make more close friends. That’s a plausible trajectory. Maybe it won't happen, but it's plausible. And so you would have to be very strong to be able to say, ‘You are offering me $50,000 to go for the weekend to give this talk, and I just can't. I can't do it. My son has a baseball game.'It’s a really good, wide-ranging conversation. You should listen. 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 public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Join Terry Real, a renowned couples therapist and author of bestselling books on relationships, as he shares insights into male vulnerability and depression. He tackles the complexities of masculinity and the impact of patriarchy, advocating for authentic connections. Explore the challenges of communication in relationships, especially around passive-aggressive behaviors, and the evolving dynamics between male and female voices. With humor, Terry discusses the duality of masculinity, drawing inspiration from Maasai culture, while emphasizing the importance of interdependence.

My guest on the show today is Jon Baskin, co-founder and editor of The Pointmagazine, which over the last 16 years has managed to carve out for itself a really distinctive and important space within the broader American literary intellectual scene. Jon and I have traded emails over the years, but like a lot of people who I think of as loose comrades within the broader scene, we had never actually gazed on each other’s faces or heard each other’s voices before we got on Zoom to do this. So it was nice to connect.We talk a lot about the birth and development of The Point, in particular its origins in the Committee on Social Thought program at the University of Chicago. We talk about its relationship to N+1 , which is in many ways the seminal magazine of the last few decades of political intellectual life on the left in America. We get into how Jon and his co-editors have managed to keep their bearings while so many other publications have been whipsawed and in some cases destroyed by the violent political energies of the past decade. And we talk about how The Point does and doesn’t intersect with the emerging media landscape.This is a really fun conversation with Jon. Hope you enjoy.AI Show notes courtesy of Descript:00:00 Introduction to Eminent Americans00:17 Meet John Baskin: Co-founder of The Point Magazine01:28 The Birth and Evolution of The Point Magazine02:21 Upcoming Conversations and Projects04:38 John Baskin's Intellectual Journey05:45 The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago11:49 Influences and Inspirations Behind The Point23:28 The Role of Philosophy in The Point's Editorial Vision36:30 Challenges and Conflicts in Editorial Direction43:00 The Convergence of Magazines in the Late 2000s44:43 The Role of DNA in Magazine Identity45:28 Challenges in Finding Writers47:06 Impact of Substack on Traditional Magazines49:50 Balancing Established and New Writers57:31 Exploring the Political Spectrum of The Point01:03:32 The Relationship Between Political and Cultural Conservatism01:08:22 The Point's Foray into Substack01:17:39 The Mystique of The Point and Its Editors01:19:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts 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 the first episode of Eminent Americans where I’ve had the pleasure of talking to both the subject of a published profile and the profile writer at the same time. Kevin LaTorre, a return guest on the show, recently wrote “The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu,” a long piece about philosopher and metafictionist Justin Smith-Ruiu. Or maybe Justin wrote it himself, appropriating Kevin’s name and likeness as another one of his authorial alter-egos. Maybe “Kevin” doesn’t even exist. I mean, I think he does, since I’ve talked to him before on zoom, and perused his digital profile, but what if he’s just a gifted improviser who was hired by Justin to play Kevin on my podcast? What if the plan all along was to create a real-seeming “Kevin LaTorre” persona, with a fully fleshed out online profile, in order to add yet another layer of semi-unreality to the many layers of the Hinternet, Justin’s vast and sprawling endeavor.This seems unlikely, given that “Kevin” and I don’t even talk about Justin in our first podcast interview, but who knows? If you’re going to create a plausible “Kevin LaTorre” in the world, then you need to have him doing plausibly Kevin LaTorre-esque things, like coming on my podcast to discuss his “faith,” the essayist “Jia Tolentino,” and “climate change.”Anyhoo — such are the questions one begins to ask oneself after one has spent more than a certain amount of time in Justin’s world. The conversation, which I really enjoyed, is primarily about Justin and his Hinternet project. We also talk about the challenges that Kevin faced in profiling Justin, Justin’s disillusionment with academia, and Justin's scooter accident of a few years ago, which marked a profound break in his life and career. And much, much more.Hinternet posts we discuss include (descriptors and parentheticals from Kevin)* His re-version story* His past audio-mixing history* This metafiction: "The Storyteller"* His case against euthanasia (by far, the most technoskeptic take I've read from him)* His case for pacifism (by far the most dissident-left stance he has, I think -- antiwar in a pro-war Democratic party)* His reflection on his post-2020 developments (where he uses the "old-time religion" of love which sums up plenty about him lately)The show notes, according to ChatGPT:🕰️ Episode Show Notes: Justin Smith-Ruiu & Kevin Latorre on Metafiction, Belief, and Intellectual Rupture[00:00] — Introduction: Dan sets the tone, welcomes listeners, and introduces Justin and Kevin. Also explains the wounded ignoramus moniker.[01:00] — The premise: A first for Eminent Americans—bringing together the subject of a profile and its author. Kevin describes how the episode came to be.[03:00] — Who is Justin Smith-Ruiu? Justin gives his intellectual and personal background—from Sacramento to Paris, academic to substacker.[05:30] — The Lime Scooter incident: Real or not real? Justin discusses the tall tale and his metafictional approach to truth and storytelling.[10:00] — What is The Hinternet? Justin outlines his sprawling, layered Substack project, blending essay, fiction, and pseudonymous experimentation.[13:00] — On writing after rupture: Justin reflects on how his philosophical and creative instincts changed after 2020 and his break with academic norms.[17:00] — Kevin on profiling Justin: The challenges of writing about a slippery, self-multiplying metafictional presence.[21:00] — Metafiction, Nabokov, and Timothy Pnin: Literary precedents for Justin’s work, and why The Hinternet feels more like a fictional universe than a newsletter.[24:00] — A ghost among us: Justin discusses how COVID-era disillusionment led to a sense of living as a “ghost,” and how that figures into his work.[28:00] — Academia and its discontents: Justin explains the psychological and professional struggle of leaving the norms of philosophy behind.[32:00] — Class background stories: Dan, Kevin, and Justin reflect on their families, social mobility, and the strange fluidity of class in America.[38:00] — Fiction vs. performance art: Kevin and Justin discuss how The Hinternet functions like a long-form installation piece as much as a writing project.[42:00] — Future plans for The Hinternet: Justin teases the upcoming Ort Cloud Review, and ambitions to grow The Hinternet into a nonprofit media institution.[47:00] — On returning to Catholicism: Justin shares his path back to the church, the limits of secular humanism, and the desire for a faith tradition “for the dumbest people you can find.”[52:00] — Kevin on faith and refinement through suffering: The personal and emotional stakes of belief.[56:00] — Theology vs. intellectual pride: Justin discusses the difference between elite theology and his desire for something simpler, more grounded.[01:00:00] — Writing as a spiritual and psychological response: Dan reflects on faith, fiction, and the psycho-spiritual stakes of writing and thinking in the 2020s.[01:04:00] — Will The Hinternet become a book? Maybe not. Justin sees it as an evolving structure with other aims.[01:07:00] — On the pleasure of the work: Why The Hinternet is fun to read, and why that joy is essential to its value.[01:11:00] — Wrap-up: Dan reflects on the episode’s tone and richness, and plugs Kevin’s profile and Justin’s best pieces. 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 Maggie Bullock, author of Kingdom of Prep, the Inside Story of The Rise and (Near) Fall of J Crew. Maggie’s also the co-author of the Substack newsletter The Spread, which offers an insider’s look and cultural commentary on the world of women’s magazines.Maggie and I talk primarily about the subject of her book, J Crew, which holds a special place in my heart, brain and psyche. We talk about our own respective experiences of preppy culture, particularly in high school, and about how fashion relates to issues of politics, race, culture, weight, history, class, psychology, and more. We talk about the key figures in the creation of the two J Crew golden ages, first the founding visionaries, Arthur Cinader and his daughter Emily Cinader, and then the saviors of the brand after it was wrecked by private equity, retail wiz Mickey Drexler and chief designer Jenna Lyons.It's a really interesting conversation, I think, even if you’re not interested in clothes in the way that Maggie and I are.The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of J. Crew: An Insider's LookIn this episode of Eminent Americans, host Dan Oppenheimer interviews Maggie Bullock, author of 'Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of The Rise and Fall of J. Crew.' They explore the fascinating history of J. Crew, from its founding by Arthur and Emily Senatore, its evolution and perfectionism, to its tumultuous relationship with private equity and eventual decline. The discussion also delves into the cultural impact of the brand, its transformation under Mickey Drexler and Jenna Lyons, and the intersection of fashion with issues such as race, class, and gender. The episode is dedicated to Dan's late friend, Aaron Hess, and his iconic J. Crew role-neck sweater.00:39 Diving into J Crew: A Brand Close to Our Hearts00:50 Exploring Preppy Culture and Fashion's Broader Impact01:26 Dedication to a Friend01:55 Welcoming Maggie Bullock02:36 The Kingdom of Prep: J Crew's Story03:33 The Business and Cultural Evolution of J Crew06:31 Private Equity and Its Impact on Fashion08:52 The Origins and Growth of J Crew18:52 Personal Reflections on Preppy Culture23:59 The Iconic Role Neck Sweater30:44 Landing Supermodel Linda Evangelista34:06 The Fashion Moment That Elevated J Crew34:36 The Influence of Male Models36:05 J Crew's Cultural Impact in Schools39:45 The Perfectionism of J Crew's Founders43:52 Mickey Drexler's Turnaround Strategy57:03 Jenna Lyons' Creative Vision01:02:50 The Challenges of High Fashion01:06:17 The Resilience of Preppy Style01:08:53 Conclusion and Future Prospects 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 this episode of the podcast is William Deresiewicz, author of a number of books, most notably Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, and the Substack newsletter Derisivist.Bill and I end up spending a fair amount of time discussing an as-yet-untitled essay of his that’s forthcoming in Salmagundi, and at what I'd say are the two poles of it. On the one hand, it’s a lament for the decline of the left, which he argues has made itself the enemy of cultural vitality. On the other hand, it’s an initial sketch of what he calls the "not left," which is some kind of loose constellation of people (including Bill and me) who still take their policy bearings from the left but who feel profoundly alienated from its current cultural and institutional manifestations. He writes:"It comes to this: the left has made itself the enemy of the life force—of vitality, of eros. It fears it and it wants to shackle it. It feels, with a deep, instinctive revulsion, that it is incompatible with goodness, with morality. So it subordinates it to morality, or rewrites it in its terms. … The not-left, like the left in the 60s and 70s, is the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony, and curiosity. As opposed to solemnity, self-censorship, defensiveness, literalism, and prudery. The left is 'no'; the not-left is 'yes.' The left is 'post-,' the prefix of imaginative depletion. The not-left is 'neo-,' the sign of new beginnings."I thought of waiting to send this out until his essay was available, but I decided not to. Our conversation stands on its own, and it also spends a lot of time on other topics, including Bill's childhood in a modern Orthodox Jewish home, his early efforts to be a good boy and pursue a career in the sciences, his transition to English literature, and then his eventual break from academia. And much more.It's a great conversation. Bill and I have been consuming a lot of the same stuff over the past few years, and the result is a shared frame of reference that allows us to bounce and spark off each other in a pretty ideal way. You can feel us arriving at new ideas, and nuancing old ones, in the moment, which is what the interview-style podcast achieves at its best.Essays and podcast episodes we mention during the conversation, in addition to Bill's forthcoming essay, are:Last Boys at the Beginning of History: Thymos comes to the capitalby Mana AfsariWhy I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering): I didn’t have a choice. Thousands of people are driven out of the profession each year.by William DeresiewiczWhat Was the Post-Left?Geoff Shullenberger and I autopsy a movement, and moment, in timeNuance: A Love Story: My affair with the intellectual dark webBy Meghan DaumThese Hollow Halls: Whither the Academy, journalism, Substack, and the rest of it.I talk to Julianne Werlin and Sam Kahn about the state of the Academy and other things.Gatecrashers: A podcast about the hidden history of Jews and the Ivy LeagueBy Mark Oppenheimer.Show notes:00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:45 Early Life and Education01:15 Graduate School Challenges01:59 Career Beginnings and Dance Criticism02:26 Teaching at Yale04:04 Leaving Academia04:59 Transition to Writing06:46 Staying Relevant in Culture09:04 Podcasting and Media Consumption22:13 Critique of Elite Education32:24 The Pressure of High Achievement33:44 Navigating Anxiety in a Competitive World34:33 Personal Reflections and Self-Selection36:29 The Fascination with Emptiness39:36 The Elite and Their Inner Lives50:59 Jewish Intellectualism and Cultural Influence56:43 The Role of Physical and Virtual Intellectual Communities01:00:24 Exploring Jewish Identity and Continuity01:07:39 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans 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

For my recent New York Times Magazine article on my experience of doing couples therapy with noted therapist Terry Real, I interviewed Terry’s old friend and former collaborator Carol Gilligan. This is an edited version of that conversation, which is in part about Terry but also more broadly about issues of gender roles and relationships, patriarchy and politics.Gilligan, now in her 80s, is probably best known for her landmark 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, which proposed a new model of early psychological development that distinguished between how boys and girls develop.She’s since written a host of other books, including The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love; Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development; Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance; and most recently Why does patriarchy persist? and Darkness now visible: patriarchy's resurgence and feminist resistance.I wrote about Gilligan and Real in a recent post on this Substack, describing how they met and ended up collaborating:“I think there’s a deep love of men in Terry,” says the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, who first met Real in the late 1990s, after she positively reviewed his book on male depression, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, in The New York Times. Gilligan had just returned to the US from England to accept a chair in gender studies at Harvard, and Real was teaching and practicing nearby at a family therapy institute in Cambridge. She was invited to visit the institute, and while there she observed Real, through a one way mirror, working with a married couple. She was struck by the intensity of his therapeutic presence, and by the way that his confrontation of men was able to simultaneously draw in both halves of the couple.“I hadn’t seen a therapist who had the ability Terry had to talk with men,” she says, “and to name what was going on. I think men could hear it, and I would watch the woman, and her eyes would open wide: ’Oh my god, somebody’s saying it.’”Soon Gilligan and Real began seeing couples together. At the time, Gilligan was also working with psychologist Judy Chu on a project observing four-year-old boys in pre-school. What she and Chu ended up charting was a kind of inverse of the psychological stunting process that Gilligan had identified in her earlier, groundbreaking work on the development of girls. Where girls, beginning in adolescence, would often suppress their “masculine” assertiveness and voice, boys, at age four or so, would begin to suppress their “feminine” capacities to perceive and respond to the internal states of themselves and others. Under pressure from their peers and parents, they’d begin to go emotionally dumb. Gilligan wondered if many of the romantic conflicts faced by adult couples were rooted in these parallel failures of development, and whether one could heal adult relationships by bringing these earlier selves into relation to each other in therapy.“Where was the emotionally honest 11-year-old girl who said what she saw and felt?” she says. “And where was that emotionally intelligent four-year-old boy from my studies with boys who would say things like, ’Mommy, why do you smile when you’re sad?’ I thought: if you could get these two people in the room, they could work out the problems in the relationship.”We talk about her work with Terry, her work with fathers of young boys, early psychological development, her take on Terry’s approach to working with me, and much more. It’s a relatively brief, but I think quite rich, conversation. 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 today’s episode is podcast and radio producer Avery Trufelman. For about seven years, Avery was a producer for design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible, from which she eventually spun off her own podcast, Articles of Interest, which she describes as a podcast “about what we wear.” I asked Avery on the show to talk about season 3 of the show, the entirety of which was dedicated to one topic, the story of preppy clothes and style in America. I was totally mesmerized by the seven episode season, which she titled “American Ivy.” It incorporates so many of the topics I’m interested in. Class, status, clothes, fashion, politics, Jews. It’s all in there in the story of prep, which runs through, among other focal points of cultural influence, elite universities, Jewish garment makers, Black civil rights activists and jazz musicians, Japanese obsessives, and every level of the extended Ralph Lauren preppy universe.There's also a very personal angle we get into. Avery and I both went to prep schools. We both had complicated relationships with preppy style. She rebelled against it, pushing the dress code with Haight-Ashbury influenced vintage finds. I wanted to conform but never quite cracked the code. I knew the rules existed, but they were unwritten and opaque, the kind of thing you absorbed from family, from summer camps, from generations of insider knowledge. The right khakis, the right boat shoes, the right rollneck sweaters—not just the brand, but how they were worn, how they signaled status.It's a rich conversation. Hope you enjoy. 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

On this episode of the show I’m talking to Mark Oppenheimer, my older brother and the recently anointed editor of Arc, the magazine formerly known as Religion and Politics.Our text is recent article of his, “Why Is a Publisher of Antisemitic and Homophobic Authors Winning a National Book Award? Paul Coates, father of Ta-Nehisi Coates, is getting a lifetime achievement award from people who don’t want to talk about what he’s actually done.”We talk about the article, which goes into a lot of depth about the authors and texts published by Coates’s indie press, Black Classic Press, and then also about the broader context. Why did the National Book Foundation seek to recognize Coates in the first place? Why did they not know (and we're taking it as a given that they didn't know) that he had a record of publishing homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist writers? Why have they remained mostly silent on the topic, since better information has come out, and why has the part of the media that tends to cover literary controversies opted out of covering this one. In addition to his work for Arc, Mark is the author of five books, including Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting & the Soul of a Neighborhood, and Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. He’s finishing up a biography of Judy Blume, which should come out in the next year or two. Show NotesHere's the summary and time stamps that the Descript bot gave me, which seem roughly accurate if not always super helpful.00:00 Introduction and Milestones01:28 Upcoming Episodes and Guests03:06 Interview with Mark Oppenheimer05:25 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press08:28 Controversies and Criticisms23:16 Media Response and Broader Implications38:12 The Role of Myths in Society38:47 Debate on Afrocentric Myths39:43 Flexibility of Religious Myths41:50 Healthy vs. Poisonous Myths43:06 Paul Coates and Black Classic Press48:50 The National Book Foundation Controversy58:31 The Role of the Free Press01:09:52 Concluding Thoughts on Intellectual DiscoursePrevious Episodes of the Coates Chronicles 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