Eminent Americans

On this episode of the podcast, I talk to Sam Kahn and Julianne Werlin about how institutions and experts produce culture and authority; how two institutions in particular, the academy and journalism, are rapidly eroding in authority, resources, and maybe influence; and how Sam, Julianne, and I are reckoning, personally and professionally, with these big shifts.

Among the issues we address: Why is Sam so bullish on Substack, and why is he is planning to launch a new publication on it soon? What is it like for Julianne to teach in an English department that has lost so many majors that it can’t even fill a lecture hall anymore for any of their classes, including even the big Shakespeare surveys? Can Substack do as good a job as establishment publications in producing high quality book criticism? Can it have a role to play in the academic infrastructure? What’s it like to spend ten years on a scholarly book and then have to wait another three to get a review of it?

Sam is an editor at Persuasion magazine and the author of the Substack Castalia . Julianne is an associate professor of English at Duke University and author of Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press). Her substack is Life and Letters.

The genesis of this conversation is a piece that Julianne wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time,” and then a few related pieces, including:

* Sam’s piece for Compact, “We Are in a Writing Renaissance”

* becca rothfeld’s Substack post, “why i am skeptical that substack can or should replace legacy media”

* Sam’s somewhat angry response to Becca’s piece, “Against Becca Rothfeld”

* Becca’s very civil response to Sam’s response to Becca, “a brief addendum: in response to my critic(s)”

As of this episode of the podcast, I have a new/old collaborator, audio whiz Robert Scaramuccia. Robert produced the pilot episode of the pod, on Ezra Klein. He’s now back for the indefinite future, so if the quality of the show suddenly seems higher, that’s why.

I also have some new intro and outro music on the podcast. It’s from “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood,” by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah . Thanks to friend of the pod, and former guest, Alec Ounsworth for permission to use that.

I have a poor eye for specific sociological detail but a good brain for psychology and the things that drive people to block and hurt others. —Matthew Gasda

My guest on this episode of the podcast is poet, novelist, essayist and playwright Matthew Gasda, with playwright being the most salient of those descriptors. His play Denmark just finished up a short run at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, which Gasda founded and runs, and he is best known for his play Dimes Square, which helped fix the notorious New York downtown microneighborhood in the public imagination.

In 2022, The New York Times published a very substantive profile of Gasda, tracking his emergence into hipster prominence during Covid:

In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”

“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.

Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.

Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.

Set in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.

Matt and I talk about a great number of things over the course of this quite long and I think quite rich conversation, which we recorded in two separate sessions. He helps me come asymptotically closer to understanding what the Dimes Square scene is or was (I’m pretty sure it’s was at this point).

We talk about his very middle-class youth in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the difficulties of making the transition from that world, and the world of his middle-class degrees from Syracuse and Lehigh, to the very specialized set of manners and expectations that structure life and society in New York City.

We talk about the general challenges of making it in as playwright (and by extension as screenwriter or tv writer), as well as the specific challenges of making it when you’ve been classified as politically suspect, as Matt has.

We end, more or less, with my expressing my hope that Matt can continue to protect and nurture his talent and his desire to connect even as, of necessity, he has to live and work in various scences in New York that can be quite toxic.   

AI-generated show notes. They seem mostly accurate.

00:00 Introduction to Eminent Americans

00:32 Meet Matthew Gazda: Playwright Extraordinaire

01:10 The Dime Square Phenomenon

02:29 Exploring Denmark and Other Plays

03:37 Defining Dime Square

05:26 The Scene and Its Key Figures

08:07 The Evolution of Dime Square

21:03 The Genesis of the Play

27:43 Matthew Gazda's Background

39:36 Navigating Social Classes and Upbringings

40:58 The Art of Performativity and Banter

42:55 Algorithmic Conversations and AI's Impact

44:04 Flirting and Social Dynamics

46:14 Authenticity vs. Performativity in Plays

48:26 Cynicism and Artistic Integrity

57:13 Challenges of a Playwright's Career

01:00:40 Exploring Dimes Square and Its Impact

01:19:22 The HBO Deal and Dimes Square

01:19:49 Canceled Party and Industry Politics

01:21:24 Theater World Challenges

01:25:08 Class and Credentials in the Arts

01:28:52 Navigating Bitterness and Cynicism

01:33:28 The Reality of Artistic Success

01:44:00 Final Thoughts and Future Plans

Some of the questions I prepared in advance, many but not all of which I ended up asking:

In the most concrete, least abstract terms possible: What was Dimes Square and who were the major players within it? And should I be talking about it in the past tense?  Tell me about Bethlehem? You seem like a hustler from the provinces, much much more driven than the people around you. True? One of the tensions in your plays, at least in the ones I've read, is between what I guess I'd just call earnestness, or authenticity, and the alternatives to that—on the one hand a kind of ironic performativity, which is what constitutes much of Dimes Square, and then on the other hand just a zoned out deflection of emotion, which is what you get so much of in your play Zoomers. Does that sound right to you? You just wrote this piece, "Credentialist Cretins," that is just immensely cynical about the people around you. But then you seem like a fairly earnest person, interested in connecting. And you've been pretty protective of your friends in the scene, people who a lot of others would like to see as ironic performative too cool for school types. Square that circle for me. My brother always says that theater will be the last refuge of wokeness, that it will be land acknowledgements until we all sink into the sea. Is that right? How do you fit into the scene? Are you endangering your career prospects either through the plays, and their use of certain language and expression of certain ideas, or through your political writing? Are you cutting yourself off from the money flows? What the hell is going on with Zoomers? I found it an interesting read, but I wasn't sure what you were doing? Am I too old? Would it have been more apparent if I saw the play in person?

Excerpts from Matt’s essay “Downtown Demons,” about the development and meaning of the Dimes Square scene:

The creation of scenes was aided and accelerated by temporarily cheaper rents and inflated tech wages (and crypto fortunes). Large apartments and lofts were secured, sometimes in two-year leases. A new, politically ambiguous patron class appeared at the same time that subscriber-supported writers and podcasters were challenging mainstream news and opinion. You could listen to a podcast or read a Substack, and meet the podcaster or writer the same night at a party or a bar (though these shuttered in the early evening, for those who remember, on the totally scientific theory that the virus hunts at night); shifts in perspective were happening in real time.

Old political boundaries were temporarily porous and fluid and ideological lines could be crossed and retraced again. At a given party, you might meet—to name a few examples at random—a liberal New York Times columnist, a Big Five novelist with a forthcoming debut (typically less daring than her conversation), a dirtbag podcaster, a powerful editor, an out-of-work actor, a fashion model, a filmmaker, an influencer, a Thiel Fellowship winner, a grad student on a stipend, a union organizer, a Bitcoin multimillionaire; the melange was the message.

In effect, the pandemic downtown moment was, from the very beginning, infected with spirit of the very-online, which, while latent for a long time, never went away; there was a tension between those who really truly wanted to leave the internet behind, and those who instinctively wanted to integrate the online into the fabric of nightlife—and the latter won out.

The mimetic violence of downtown discourse—the denunciations, the trollings, the doxxings, the terroristic threats—that is manifest in the way people talk to, and more often, about one another, presages real political conflict in the future.

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Princeton sociologist Shamus Rahman Kahn, who is the author of a number of books, most notably for our purposes Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

I described the book, in a previous post, thusly:

Privilege is an extraordinary book. People throw that word around too easily, but I really mean it in this case. It blew my mind in a way that it hadn’t been blown in a long while. Khan is a very good writer of sentences, an insightful theorist, and perhaps above all an observer of rare acuity. He just sees a lot more, and a lot more clearly, than most people would in a similar context, even if they went in with similarly ethnographic objectives. The result is a book packed with striking insight and fascinating detail. As it happens I went to a high school that wasn’t too different from St. Paul’s. It wasn’t as fancy, didn’t cater to quite as many sons and daughters of the high elite, but it was similar enough for me to vouch for Khan’s descriptions. They ring true. He captures with nuance what such places, which are so easy to caricature, are actually like.

The post that I wrote about Privilege was by far the most popular thing I’ve written for this newsletter, which is a testament to my own eloquence, to the fascination of the subject, and to the intensity and insight with which Kahn explored it.

Shamus and I had a great conversation. We talked about the book; his experience as both a student and a teacher at St. Paul’s School; his training at the University of Wisconsin; his good timing in the selection of subjects; what it feels like to be of the elite; and much more.

Show breakdown (according to AI - I have no idea how closely this tracks the reality, but it feels better than nothing)

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest

01:07 Discussing the Book 'Privilege'

02:44 Exploring Elite Education and Inequality

04:35 The Role of Quantitative and Qualitative Research

17:21 Personal Background and Experience at St. Paul's

30:21 Changes in Elite Education Over Time

46:55 The Origins of Meritocracy

48:40 Challenges of Meritocracy

49:18 Meritocracy and Social Mobility

51:40 Ethnographic Insights on Privilege

52:57 Understanding Inequality

56:32 The Role of Education in Inequality

57:08 Class and Political Mobilization

01:01:37 American Inequality and Historical Perspectives

01:02:25 The Astor Family and American Finance

01:09:07 The Influence of Wealth in Politics

01:15:54 Navigating Elite Institutions

01:17:44 The Future of Elite Coordination

01:26:22 Concluding Thoughts on Elites and Power

01:29:27 Closing Remarks and Outro

“The cynicism of this notion is impressive, if also disgusting.” – Christian Lorentzen, “Literature without Literature”

“Publishing houses, publicists, agents, and even editors do not create works of literature. The creator does.” – Ross Barkan, “The War on Genius”

In this episode of Eminent Americans, I talk with Christian Lorentzen, Ross Barkan, and Zain Khalid about Christian's recent piece in Granta, “Literature Without Literature,” which was the talk of the literary scene for a few weeks.

Christian’s piece is both a (highly disparaging) review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and a broader critique of the sociological turn in the academic study of literature.

On this broader point, Christian writes:

“These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.”

We talk about the piece, my profound misunderstanding of Christian’s motives, Ross's ambivalent experience of graduate school, when Zain is going to get his act together and get a real job, and the terror and wonder of Christian’s life as an eternal freelancer.

00:00 Introduction and Technical Difficulties 00:35 Meet the Guests 2:25 The backstory on “Literature Without Literature” 07:43 Discussion on Literary Criticism and Market Forces 16:26 Ross's Academic Background and Views on Literature 20:18 Christian's Perspective on Academia and Writing 31:31 Zane's Insights on Writing and Influence 34:06 The Art of Writing and Transitions 35:34 A Hilarious Excerpt and Reflections on Academic Careerism 37:46 Balancing Writing and Life 41:01 The Struggles of a Writer's Life 45:36 Future Plans and Career Reflections 49:28 Current Projects and Final Thoughts

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Kevin LaTorre, a poet and writer living with his family in North Carolina. His work has appeared in The Blotter, Echo Literary Magazine, Walter Magazine, Ad Fontes, and the Front Porch Republic. He writes about poetry, Christianity, and literature at A Stylist Submits.

I asked Kevin to pick one text, idea, person, encounter that he thought captured something about where things are today, and his choice was What to Do with Climate Emotions, by Jia Tolentino, in the New Yorker.

Kevin also suggested we have a number of other essays present in the background of our conversation about climate change, catastrophism, pro- and anti-natalism, Tolentino, environmentalism, Christianity, etc. His notes on the background reading:

* "Is Abortion Sacred?" by Tolentino in TNY: This 2022 piece discusses the birth of children with a similar ecological pessimism as "Climate Emotions" (arguably to a stronger extent, and again in religious/Christian terms)

* "Ha ha! Ha ha!" by Lauren Oyler in The London Review of Books: the premier takedown of Tolentino in polite literary circles - the piece is itself questionable and deeply rude but charges Tolentino as one of the "hysterical critics" who makes everything about her and her own "shoddy mode of [narcissistic] thinking" (I don't know if I fully agree, but the self-centeredness charge is interesting for discussing "Climate Emotions" and how Tolentino seemingly echoes her sources)

* Your [i.e. my] piece on The New Yorker: the idea that The New Yorker must "artfully neutralize the cognitive dissonance of liberals" can help us describe Tolentino's development as the aspirational female writer of the 2010s (from Hairpin and Jezebel to TNY staff writer in 2016, fortuitous for her career but possibly at the cost of her teeth and devilish humor?)

* "Is It OK to Have a Child?" by Meehan Crist in The London Review of Books: defines pretty well the intellectuals' ecological anti-natalism/pessimism towards birth that Tolentino very much flirts with

* Ecological anti-natalism as a philosophy present in environmental activism: there's a long history of this pretty anti-human belief system, and its current iteration that very much simulates the Christian concept of original sin (again, something Tolentino seems to accord with given her evangelical background)

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In his recent essay in Tablet, “Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics,” Blake Smith writes about the Bulgarian-French-American critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva, and in particular her fruitful and fascinating analyses of the viciously anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

For Kristeva, Céline is, among many other things, a great example of how anti-Semitism is embedded in western culture in a way that precedes even the very early Christian antipathy to Jews for their role in rejecting Jesus. We are anti-Semitic, in the West, because our very psyches were formed, before Jesus was even a gleam in God’s eye, when the rival but intimately bound figures of the Jewish patriarch and the Jewish prophet set the archetypal boundaries within which we would live and develop.

When we rebel, as we must, it is against one or the other of these figures. Blake writes:

Western fathers, Kristeva insisted, are Jewish. Even Westerners who are neither Jewish nor religious derive from the heritage of the Bible their profoundest and most intimate understanding not only of God—a loving, punishing, powerful, yet often apparently absent or vindictive father—but of everything associated with the “paternal function.” Our sense of political authority, of social norms, of our own fathers and our own fatherhood, is suffused with biblical legacies. A vision of a bearded older man, compounded of God and the patriarchs with whom God spoke, hangs like a superimposed image before every one of our apparently secular leaders, judges, and dads. Whenever we rebel against their authority, and seek to extirpate from ourselves and our culture that authority’s deepest, most hidden foundations, we therefore may easily find ourselves locked no longer in struggle with real, empirical fathers and powers (who may well need to be overcome) but with the abstract, symbolic, Jewish “paternal function” which, never exhaustively embodied by anything, may nevertheless be figured, as a scapegoat, by Jews.

But the Bible contains both Law and Prophets: a power that compels obedience to rules and measures all men’s worth by them, and a power that compels some men to strangely singularize themselves through antinomian acts of outrageous transgression—powers both called God. The prophets marry whores, lay for months unmoving in bizarre positions, eat disgusting bread, report dreams and sightings in which respectable authorities are laid low by vicious pagan foreigners. Here a relation to God seems not to assure the continuity of patriarchal tradition, of sons becoming fathers through adherence to rules and roles, but rather to endanger everything that might make one socially recognizable as a decent person. The prophets, unsurprisingly, are often reluctant, pleading with God that they are not well-suited for such a task, or simply fleeing it.

The traditions of the West, Kristeva posited, since they derive in large measure from the Bible, turn on its central tension between, on the one hand, seeing God as granter of the Law, guarantor of the social order and our place with in it, and, on the other, hearing God’s summons to undo ourself and the world that they might be remade. To hold on rightly both to the “very risky right to be different” as revealed by the Prophets through their bewilderingly personal access to the divine, and “the Law” as given publicly, plainly, to everyone, once and for all, is a difficult venture, and perhaps one bound to teeter endlessly between stifling conformist legalism and reckless individualist fanaticism.

In addition to Blake’s essay on Kristeva on Céline, we also talk about lots of other stuff, including Blake’s efforts to launch a magazine about gay male life and culture, why I (somewhat surprisingly) don’t like Tom Wolfe; and Blake’s very loving parents who didn’t exactly come through when he came out.

What thematically unifies the episode, I think, is the shared concern that Blake and I have with how we can reverse the polarity of our current political and cultural equilibrium, in which culture is boring and limp and predictable and politics are intense and transgressive and surprising. Without quite signing on to Kristeva’s vision of western civilization being premised on the tension between the Jewish father and the Jewish rebel, we find it a useful frame with which to think. Hope you enjoy.

Back on the ‘pod this week is Naomi Kanakia, author of the just released novel The Default World. We talk about Vekhi, a 1909 collection of essays from ex- and never-Marxist Russian intellectuals; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the dissident Black liberal writer; internecine battles in the trans woman world; why Naomi and I try (and fail) to stay out of bullshit culture war discussions; why we may go too easy on the right because we don’t really expect much from them; why everyone is so angry; and how all we really need is love.

Two quick opening notes on this episode of the Eminent Americans podcast:

* According to some post by some guy that I read somewhere once, most podcasts don’t make it past 20 episodes. This is episode 21, which I take to mean not only that I’m more stubborn and self-absorbed than all those sub-21-ep scrubs—who have appropriately realized by episode 20 that the world doesn’t need another podcaster in it—but that this is surely one of those tipping point situations where if you make it past 20, then the next few hundred are all but assured. So I’ll be in your life for a while, or at least until you unsubscribe.

* This is the second episode in a row in which I flamboyantly refuse to pay any attention to the text that my guest has selected as our topic of conversation. I should probably reconsider my approach to these State of the Discourse episodes.

* The opening clip is from Beanie Siegel’s “The Truth.”

My guest on this episode of the podcast is James Livingston, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers and the author of, among other books, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century and Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913. He's currently hard at work on a new book on pragmatism, provisionally titled The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008.

The Mark Edmundson essay we discuss is “Truth Takes a Vacation: Trumpism and the American philosophical tradition.” James’s response to it, published on his Substack newsletter Politics, Letters, Persons, is “Pragmatism: An Old Name for a New Kind of Nihilism?”

Here’s how the AI software Claude describes our conversation. It’s basically accurate, but I feel as though it fails to capture the unique essence of our charm and brilliance.

This conversation is between Daniel Oppenheimer, the host of the podcast Eminent Americans, and his guest James Livingston, an intellectual historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University. The main focus of their discussion is pragmatism, the philosophical tradition associated with thinkers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Richard Rorty.

Livingston argues that pragmatism is still very relevant to American culture and politics. He sees it as a perspective that dismantles traditional dualisms and binary oppositions in favor of more fluid, constructed notions of truth. A key pragmatist idea they discuss is that truths are made by humans rather than existing independently, and that facts cannot be separated from the values and purposes that shape them.

They then apply this pragmatist lens to the current polarized political climate in the US. Livingston suggests that the contemporary right-wing, characterized by the "MAGA nation," is motivated by a desire to defend traditional hierarchies and values like male supremacy that are threatened by more egalitarian social changes. He and Oppenheimer debate whether directly confronting this regressive impulse is necessary and desirable.

While Oppenheimer is skeptical that heightened politicization and polarization is productive, Livingston argues it is clarifying essential conflicts in American society around issues like racism and sexism. However, they agree that approaching political opponents with empathy and an attempt to understand the experiences and values motivating them is important.

Throughout, they reflect on the role of intellectuals and the nature of progress. The conversation showcases the continued relevance of pragmatist ideas for making sense of truth, politics and social change in the United States today.

I first encountered Alec Ounsworth back in 2005 or 2006, when I was an arts writer for the Valley Advocate, an alt weekly in western Massachusetts that now, like so many other alt weekles, exists only in zombie form.

The National was playing at the Iron Horse, Northampton’s storied small music venue, and I got tickets to go see them. Opening for them was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the band that Ounsworth had founded and fronted not too long before. I had a vague sense of who they were, and that they were hip, but I didn’t know the degree to which they’d blown up since the tour was booked with them as merely an opening act.

In the interim they’d gotten bigger—more able to attract fans—than The National. The show was packed for their set, and then when they were done most of it emptied out. I’d never seen something like that before in my life, and haven’t since (why if you’ve already paid for a ticket would you leave when you could get more good music!?).

Since then, Ounsworth has made an excellent career for himself (he still tours under the band name, but it’s entirely his operation; band members are hired for shows when needed), which is to say that he’s had his ups and downs. He’s no longer bigger than The National, and hasn’t had a hit on the charts in a while. He continues, however, to be able to book and sell out shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He supports himself and his family as a musician. He collaborates with other fancy people in the industry. As I suggest to him in our conversation, he now seems to have “just the right level of fame,” where he can do most of what he wants but can also live a very regular, non-celebrity-esque life.

I connected with Alec in a more individual way a few years ago when I was hawking my book on Dave Hickey and looking for eminent people who were Hickey fans who could maybe be persuaded to blurb or otherwise offer some kind of promotional boost to the book (this is how I ended up with the Steven Soderbergh blurb, along with some inside knowledge about Soderbergh’s taste in gifs). Ounsworth was one such fan. I managed to reach him and send him a copy of my book; in turn, he sent me a lovely vinyl copy of his 2021 album New Fragility.

We talk about the arc of his career, the continuing wisdom of his choice to stay independent of record labels throughout, the art of evolving as a musician without pandering, the challenge of parenting as a touring musician, and various others things. It’s a good conversation.

One quick note about an aspect of the conversation that is slightly misleading. The opening premise is that we will discuss Jason Farago’s article on the challenge of AI to music, “A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?” We don’t really do that, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m bored of AI. You probably are too.

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Stella Tsantekidou begins her essay "I too am an unfuckable hate nerd" with the kind of inside-outside two-step that characterizes much of the writing on The Human Carbohydrate, her very compelling Substack newsletter. She's at a party in London talking to another writer. The topic is a recent piece they've both read on the phenomenon of the "unfuckable hate nerd," that very 21st century type who populates the nether regions of the internet, marinating in resentment and fury and impotence, taking out his unquenchable hate on the women of the world, particularly those with the gall to think they have opinions worth considering. Stella writes:

My issue with that article is that it misses how many women feel like unfuckable hate nerds too. [The other writer] looked at me unconvinced, as people often do when I try to explain to them my affinity for incels and other basement dwelling online weirdos. Coming out of my mouth it sounds like I am fishing for compliments, trying to get my audience to state the obvious. How could I be an unfuckable hate nerd?

Then the sexy hammer drops. A photo of Stella:

She's hot, in other words. How could this very attractive, apparently well connected woman feel a connection to these terrible, and terribly unattractive, men? The answer, as in much of Stella's writing, is that she's been on both sides of the glass. Born and raised in a small city in Greece, in unremarkable middle class circumstances, she moved to London for college with no connections and no organic insight into the hierarchies and mores that structured British society. Now she's part of the elite political class in the UK, moving back and forth between jobs in government and the advocacy world, with a regular gig doing TV political commentary on the side.In 2024, she's quite good looking and socially successful. As a kid, though, she was a bona fide reject, greasy and awkward and the victim of rather relentless bullying by her classmates. And not weak-ass American-style bullying, but hardcore second world haven't gotten the memo that we don't do that kind of thing anymore bullying. "When I say I was bullied," she writes, "I mean that for six years, on a daily basis, I was reminded that if my peers could exterminate me like a cockroach cornered with an aerosol, they would. ... The boys would push me down the stairs, throw my rucksack out the window, spit on me, call me names no self-respecting heterosexual teenage girl could ever bear to hear directed at her from the lips of boys without contemplating suicide or at least complete voluntary social isolation. ... the only attention I was receiving from boys was to be reminded of how repulsive they all found me. They regularly wondered out loud why I didn’t kill myself."

Stella knows what it's like, in other words, to stew with hate for both oneself and others, to wish the worst things in the world upon others who seem to have more fortune while also desperately seeking and wanting their approval and affection. She knows what it feels like to feel ugly and powerless. "In my heart," she writes, "there is always an unfuckable hate nerd. This is the part of me that takes intense, nostalgic pleasure every time I sense as much as an atom of bullying energy coming my way. It feeds my inner unfuckable hate nerd who is still struggling to accept her new position on the food chain."The final turn in her essay is back toward the fact of her current life in possession of young female attractiveness and what she can see, in no small part thank to the benefit of her early struggles, are its dangers and the relatively short half life of its power. Stells and I talk about these issues; the broad arc of her academic and professional journey from Greece to the U.K. to the U.S. (where she worked on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign) and back to the U.K.; reactionary feminism; and the complex legacy of her parents, among many other things. It's a great conversation.

Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.