This is episode one of my long-awaited Terry Gross Project, where I tackle the question of who Terry Gross’s successor should be on Fresh Air and what we can learn, by playing around with that question, about the magic of Terry Gross, the cultural meaning and trajectory of NPR, the art of the interview, and various other related topics.

The text for today’s episode is Conversations with Kiese Laymon, which is a new anthology of interviews with Laymon. My guests are Laymon himself, , a previous guest on the podcast and one of the best nonfiction writers of my generation, and the editor of the book, Constance Bailey.

Laymon’s memoir Heavy, which came out in 2018, was #60 on the New York Times list of the best hundred books of the 21st Century, and that really understates its brilliance. It’s a pretty amazing book, which you should read. He is also the author of the novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has a new children’s book out this year, City Summer, Country Summer, and is scheduled to have another memoir out next year, which is provisionally titled Good God.

Constance Bailey is an assistant professor of African American literature and folklore at Georgia State University and, like Laymon, a native of Mississippi, though neither of them lives there now. Bailey’s in Atlanta and Laymon, who did go back home for a number of years to teach at Old Miss, is now in Houston, where he has an endowed chair of English and creative writing at Rice University.

We talk about the origins of the book, both in terms of how Bailey sold it, as a new installment in part of the University of Mississippi Press’s storied “Literary Conversation” series, and why it was so appealing for Laymon to sign on (the series, as we learn in the conversation, was a meaningful influence on his development and self-conception as a young writer).

We talk a lot about Mississippi itself and how it’s affected both of their lives and writing. We talk about race, money, writing, speaking, and what it means to perform for white dollars. It’s a good conversation—such a good conversation, in fact, that if anyone ever plans to do another collection of interviews with Kiese, they should let me know and I will send them the transcript of this conversation and give them permission to include it in their collection.

Blake and I talk about the long essays that each of us has written recently: Blake’s essay in Aeon on the New York intellectual and art critic Harold Rosenberg, and mine on the recent back and forth between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We also engage Blake’s feelings about the the recent death of his father, Billy Smith, or rather on his evasion of my effort to get him to talk about his feelings

I invited Alex Perez and Ross Barkan to join me for this episode of the podcast because I’d seen both of them write essays or posts recently reflecting on their days as baseball players.

Ross, as you’ll hear, topped out as a decent high school player. Alex was recruited to play for a top college team, and for a while had not implausible dreams of playing professionally.

Both have experienced an intimate relationship between baseball and their lives and identities as writers.

We talk about that. We also talk about the locker room culture and camaraderie of sports teams in general, its complicated set of pros and cons. We talk about the rival cultures of sports and literature, and how class status and mores play out in these two domains.

One of my old friends who listens to the show said to me once that it’s all really just about men and masculinity. I don’t think that’s quite true, but it’s not totally untrue either. I could easily assemble a playlist of episodes of the podcast that deal either explicitly or heavily implicitly with the topic, and this one would certainly be on it.

Ross is a writer and author who writes most often for New York magazine and also frequently for the New York Times Magazine. He is the founder and co-editor of the Substack native publication The Metropolitan Review, and his latest books are a novel, Glass Century, and a nonfiction work, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. He’s working on a book about presumptive New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Alex is an associate editor at Panamerica Books, which is the new publishing imprint of County Highway. He’s also an editor for Real Clear Books, and has written for Tablet, County Highway, Compact, and other places.

My opening anointment of him as an eminent America “by the power vested in me by the white women of publishing,” is a reference to a notorious interview he did with the Hobart Review (which I would link to except that it’s been taken down from their site) that featured a great deal of his unvarnished thoughts on issues of race, gender, and class in publishing. It led to a total meltdown of that journal as well as the creation of a general aura around Alex as a kind of barbarian of the literary scene.

It’s a fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.

This episode of the podcast, with Sam Kahn and David Sessions, was recorded after Sam, David, and I happened to have all written essays about our divorce from, or ongoing issues with, the American left.

The conversation isn’t an extended attack on the left, though. It’s more an exploration of what the left is or has been or could be, what our own personal relationships to it are, and how it exists in relationship to the liberal space that I think David and I inhabit and maybe Sam too, though he seems more unallied at this point, politically and philosophically, than we do.

One 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.

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.

Freddie 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?