My guest on the show today is David Sugarman, writer, Arc magazine editor, podcast producer of this very show, and agonizing, ambivalent American Jew.

It's in this last capacity that he's joining me today to discuss his essay in the new issue of The Point magazine titled “Goodbye West Orange: Two Paths for the American Jew.”

I want to note, before I say anything more about the essay or our conversation about it, that over the course of the three-plus years that I've been doing this Substack and podcast, there are two issue constellations that I have been especially gun-shy about confronting. One is the various issues surrounding trans people and policies in America, and the other, of course, is Israel-Palestine.

As to why I've been so gun-shy, it should almost go without saying. There is no winning when you wade into these topics. They seem to devour people's capacity to contain nuance or complexity. They also seem to just devour people. You think you're just dipping in a toe, and then suddenly you're neck deep. Then you are underwater, completely defined by the issue, captured by the emotions around it, forever stigmatized or lionized as a hero or villain of the debate, and I have not wanted that fate for myself. I thought and continue to think that it is honorable to abstain from public comment when no one is waiting around breathlessly to hear your opinion, when you don't know that much, and when you don't feel like you have anything particularly interesting or useful to say. So that is why I've stayed away.

As to why I'm breaking with that policy, both with this episode with David and with my upcoming episode with sociologist Rogers Brubaker, whose new book, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is very much in the space of the trans issue, I'm not wholly sure. It may be that I have a touch of a bad conscience for opting out to this point, notwithstanding my protestations of honorability around abstention. Or maybe, and this isn't mutually exclusive, I've just started to glimpse a narrow opening, where I didn’t before, for the having of complicated conversations about these immensely complicated topics. And maybe I have been waiting, without realizing I’m waiting, to run across texts that dignify my desire have a different kind of conversation, and then I found them.

David's essay, "Goodbye West Orange: Two Paths for the American Jew," is about two Jews, Moshe and Tova. It's about them both as themselves in their human complexity and about them as avatars of rival sides of the increasingly stark divide in American Jewry between what we might call (and David and I get into our discomfort about just reducing it to this) the Zionists and the anti-Zionists. It's also about David's own lived experience, if you will, as a former member in good standing of both camps, and about his current disaffection with both. It's also about why language itself has become such a battlefield in this intra-American contest, and it's about what comes next for all of us.

To give you a taste, here's David writing in the piece:

Each side demanded, Moshe’s and Tova’s, that I disavow the other: the antisemitic left, the genocidal right; progressive secularism with all its dangerous bedfellows, Zionism in all forms. The logics were nearly identical: look at this community you belong to, this failed project you’ve supported; look at what it’s doing in the world and at the rot at its core: What would you need to see to finally understand its immorality?

Moshe and his community monopolized the pull of peoplehood, and of historical trauma, and of a rising sense of insecurity that has only deepened, as Jews have been murdered in D.C., in Manchester, in Melbourne. Moshe, I’d assume, has both an explanation and solution: antisemitism; Zionism.

Tova, too: empire; revolution. Such an explanation frames Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, or the state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank, or the war against Iran and Lebanon, as parts of a coherent colonial project that should be resisted by any means necessary—even the violent means deployed by Hezbollah and Hamas.

…How can anti-authoritarians be so forgiving of some forms of authoritarianism? I wonder about this as I drive from Moshe’s house to Tova’s, a ground-level unit in a quiet complex surrounded by woods. It’s a matter of language, I conclude—that our words can’t really travel with us, even from one side of West Orange to another. To talk about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Moshe is entirely different from talking about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Tova, the words hollowed out by conflicting interpretations. Into that vacuum rush politicians, university professors, the media, the synagogue, the family, all working to impose their own definitions. When I say Zionist or anti-Zionist, I do so against the background of what those words have been made to mean, and by whom.

Which is not to say that these coalitions don’t hold real appeal. To live in a community like Moshe’s, as I once did, is to know its deep cohesion and spiritual intensity. To have left it and joined a secular and progressive community like Tova’s is to know its powerful sense of justice. And to have been a part of either is to know their shortcomings. The dogmatism and conformity, the us/them thinking. It is also to know the blind spots: sometimes there really are colonizers in the synagogues; sometimes it really is a Hamas supporter on the front lawn.

So that's just a taste. It's a really good piece. You should read it maybe before listening to the rest of this podcast, or if not then after.

Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with David's employer, the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and distributed through its publication, Arc, of which David is deputy editor. You can find all of Arc's podcasts and much more at arcmag.org.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. I know I did. You can email me with thoughts, comments, hate, love at [email protected].

I would rather that my spark should burn outin a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor, every atomof me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.The function of man is to live, not to exist.I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.I shall use my time.— Jack London

My guest today is Ken Ilgunas, nature writer, adventurer, rewilding advocate, Substacker, podcaster, psychotherapy grad student, group fitness trainer, and shaggy lawn evangelist.

Ken’s adult life, from graduating college until just a small number of years ago, was basically a series of solo adventures. He went out into the world, natural and not-so-natural, and walked it. And walked and walked, and boated, and hitchhiked, and drove and hopped trains and whatever other mode of transportation was available. He met wild people and wild animals.

Along the way he wrote various books, including Walden on Wheels, about, among other things, living in a van down by the river while in grad school; Trespassing Across America, about an often quite illegal sojourn along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route; This Land Is Our Land, about the lost but maybe someday to be regained American right to roam freely across lands both public and private; and A Walk Across Suburbia, which is about a three day walk across suburbia, in this case the specific suburb where he grew up.

I met Ken a few years, when he was already ensconced in the more domesticated phase of his life– married, father of a very cute daughter, and homeowner in, and civic minded resident of, a small, tidy village just a few train stops out from Edinburgh, Scotland.

Ken’s now working on a book proposal called The Future Wild, which is about both current efforts to re-wild the world in various ways, homespun and science fictional, and also what the natural world might look like if we give it a few hundred years to reassert itself, perhaps with some help along the way.

In this episode we talk about the new project, his hitchhiking trip in his early 20s from Alaska to Buffalo, New York. We talk about American Prairie, the three-point-two million acre re-wilding project in north central Montana that almost nobody has heard of, which Ken hiked across last year with his nephew and which he describes as maybe the boldest conservation project in the world. We talk about de-extinction of species like wooly mammoths revival, direwolves, aurochs, all that Jurassic Park shit. We talk about whether depopulation is bad news or good news for the planet, whether environmentalism has been its own worst enemy, and whether a right to roam could ever come to America. And we spend some time on what it’s actually like to be a very hardcore introvert who has, over the course of his forties, had to negotiate between the part of himself that just wants to disappear into the wilderness for months at a time and the part that wants a family and a home and a steady job.

What I most dig about Ken’s work, and Ken as a person, is that even as he’s utterly clear-eyed about environmental threats, current and future, he walks the world with a real wonder at what it still is and what it might still become.

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 Magazine.

Enjoy this conversation with my comrade in wandering Ken. Peace.

My guest on the show today is Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review, which is the ideas and analysis section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Len, in his freelance life, is a critic whose essays have appeared in Liberties, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

He got his PhD in English from Yale in 2014, spent some time as a postdoc at Harvard, and has spent the years since largely at Chronicle, writing about the intellectual and institutional life of the American university with, from my perspective, an admirable sense of skin in the game; is somebody who cares about this stuff, and you can sense it in his writing.

This episode with Len is something of a throwback for the show. A lot of my early episodes were pretty squarely focused on the culture wars — wokeness, anti-wokeness, what was going on in the academy, in journalism, in politics that kind of thing — and I have definitely drifted away from that territory, I think for good reason, in large part because I, like so many other people, kind of ran out of interesting new things to say about it.

But I am coming back to it here because Len’s recent [paywalled - email Len for access] essay in Liberties, which he titles “Reading for Sins,” is the kind of piece that can probably only be written in retrospect, with a bit of distance from the hullabaloo. Len takes on what he calls at one point, maybe with a hint of apology, “snowflake hermeneutics”: the tendency, particularly acute in the literary humanities over the last decade or so, to read works of art primarily, or at least substantially, for the sins they contain; to fixate on the morally or politically objectionable aspects of books at the expense of everything else about them.

He approaches that less to condemn it, though there’s no secret as you’re reading it that he’s not a fan of this approach to literature, than to give it what I think of as a genuine institutional and intellectual history — to understand it as something other than the thing that gives Chris Rufo too many owie feelings.

To do that, Len ranges pretty widely. He gets into the sociology of taboo, the history of literary education, and, among other examples, a 2023 controversy over Merve Emre’s New Yorker review of John Guillory’s book Professing Criticism.

Guillory’s book argued that literary scholars as a profession had made a rather grievous conceptual error at some point along the way: they came to think that their work as scholars was justified, at least in part, on the basis of its beneficial political impact on society. In some extreme cases, scholars saw themselves explicitly as activists, but in many cases it was somewhat more indirect. They had constructed a paradigm in which the critical, inquisitive, deconstructive work they did served clear political ends.

Guillory was critical of that. Emre, reviewing his book for The New Yorker, lexplored his argument and then added some of her own, drawing on her own experience in academia. In doing so, and this is key to how Len gets into it in his essay, she repeatedly used a phrase that Guillory himself had used to characterize what had happened to his field: “professional deformation.” It is the English translation of what was a originally a French expression used to describe actual physical deformations, like the way coal miners might develop a distinctive slump or hunch.

That phrase then provided the spark for an explosion of outrage from members of a public Facebook group called Remaking the University, administered by a former president of the Modern Language Association and populated by tenured and tenure-track faculty at high-prestige institutions. They did not like Emre’s use of “professional deformation.” Here is how Len, in his Liberties essay, characterizes what he observed in that Facebook group:

I paid more than usual attention to the reception of Professing Criticism, because I had written about it several times myself. I was interested to see what the folks at a popular public Facebook page devoted to “Remaking the University,” hosted by a recent president ofthe Modern Language Association, would make of Emre’s review. They didn’t like it. And several of them — tenured professors of English, not naïve or overeager freshmen — were appalled by Guillory’s use of the phrase “deformation,” as well as by Emre’s approving use of it throughout her review. The subject is introduced thus, by a distinguished Victorianist: “I just read this and I’m feeling dismayed” by the “flippant, careless, and damaging work, including the unspeakable use of ‘deformation’ here, not to mention the Anglocentrism, elitism, etc.” This professor goes on: “It is horrifying that a person can use ‘deformed’/‘deformation’ in 2023 in an article in a major magazine and nobody flagged it.” Then another professor — like the first, a well-known scholar in her field — weighs in: “the ableism was stunning.” And the first professor returns to the charge: “I just did a search for ‘deformed’ and felt physically ill. She uses it nine times in the article, starting with ‘hideously deformed.’ What the hell? How are disabled scholars supposed to feel when they read that? How is it possible that she could think it was cute to use such a derogatory term and that the editors didn’t flag it? I don’t even see how one can debate the merits of the idea with slurs like that sitting in the prose.”

In a less interesting essay than Len’s, we would simply be presented with this as blatant evidence of snowflakes doing their snowflake hermeneutics. Len’s approach is more interesting. He is somewhat taking for granted that it’s absurd, but he’s asking: what is actually going on here? What does it mean to say that one feels physically ill from reading the word “deformation” in this context? What feelings or reactions are being submerged, evaded, or sublimated in this kind of discussion? For what ulterior purpose was the accusation of ableism serving as a stalking horse? And why were people so pissed off in the first place?

One answer Len gives has to do with the idea of words themselves as magic, as sacred, as having the power to heal or harm or alter the fabric of the universe. He points out that this is not a novel relationship to words — it is in fact ancient, and it connects in a pretty clear way, once he lays it out, to a much longer and then much more modern history of how literature, and the study of literature and other humanities, has functioned in the modern West as a kind of substitute for religion in the aftermath of the collapse of organized Christianity as a taken-for-granted source of meaning, vessel for sacred energies. The close reading of difficult texts was, within that period, understood as a serious spiritual practice.

What Len argues — and what I find genuinely compelling and pretty persuasive — is that snowflake hermeneutics is in part a rearguard response to the loss of that function. The prestige that attached to literary study in that earlier period has drained away, and nobody quite knows how to recover from it. Snowflake hermeneutics is, in this reading, an unconscious attempt to restore some of literature’s old sacred charge by treating certain words and representations as sacred but in a negative register, because the positive ones can no longer serve. They’ve been vanquished from the inside by the contemporary academy, and then more thoroughly vanquished by the macro forces we’re all buffeted by — neoliberalism, postmodernity, capital, techno-futurism, whatever you want to call them.

That is a much more interesting conversation to have than simply “snowflakes bad,” which isn’t really a conversation at all. Also interesting is where Len and I end up when we try to take seriously the role of taboo, the idea that certain words are genuinely destabilizing and that we need protection from them. We talk about whether taboos of some kind are necessary to the functioning of any society, whether any culture can really do entirely without taboos, whether everything should truly be on the table in a scholarly or intellectual context.

We go deep on those things and others, and I had a lot of fun.

One small production note: Len’s dog makes a brief but notable appearance early in the conversation. His barking, though loud, does not last long. He is not a bad dog. He is a good dog. But if you hear him and it feels disruptive, it will pass soon.

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, including this one, and much more online at arcmag.org.

It was a real pleasure to have Len on for this semi-throwback episode. Peace.

0:00 Intro – Dan introduces guest Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review0:55 Framing the episode as a “throwback” to earlier culture-war coverage1:19 Len’s Liberties essay “Reading for Sins” and “snowflake hermeneutics”2:21 Sociology of taboo, literary education, and the Guillory/Emre controversy4:46 The “professional deformation” Facebook group outrage6:39 Len’s real question: why do people feel “physically ill” from a word?7:34 Words as sacred/magical — literature as substitute for religion9:19 Snowflake hermeneutics as grief response to lost prestige of humanities10:24 Preview: taboo, necessity of taboos in any culture10:56 Note on a barking dog early in the interview10:56 Danforth Center/Arc Magazine credits10:14 Interview begins — Len’s background and title at The Chronicle11:16 Len summarizes “Reading for Sins”13:20 Len’s academic background, PhD at Yale (2014)14:23 State of campus politics circa 2003–2014 (”interregnum”)16:02 2014 Yale grad student “atmospheric concerns” moment17:02 Postdoc years at Harvard, sensing the shift building19:20 The complicated student/faculty dynamic behind the culture wars22:46 Case study #1: the “N-word” podcast and classroom taboo rules26:52 The Michael Warner “faggotry” anecdote28:09 Slurs as concentrated sites of language’s power29:22 Workplace-norm slippage into classroom/literary norms32:14 The Odyssey, disturbing content, and professional hypocrisy36:14 Dave Hickey/Mapplethorpe/Jesse Helms tangent on art’s power to disturb39:17 Double-edged strategy: aggrandizing vs. vitiating one’s subject41:15 Right-wing “manosphere” vs. left-wing academic parallels (Barbara Kruger)46:44 Case study #2: Guillory’s “professional deformation,” Emre’s New Yorker review, and the Facebook backlash50:53 Is public Facebook commentary fair game as evidence?54:24 Faculty fear of students posting to social media57:00 Christian right’s historical claim to being the “OG” trigger-warning enforcers60:34 Hypocrisy on both sides of the free-speech/academic-freedom debate64:29 Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” and academic freedom skepticism65:04 Psychoanalyzing the Facebook group’s outrage — displacement theory68:57 What was the actual “betrayal” in Guillory’s book and Emre’s review?70:42 Timing: 2023, the fraying of “woke consensus,” and October 7th73:15 Case study #3: Paul Moses and the 1960s Huckleberry Finn controversy at U Chicago80:29 Should there be any taboos in arts education? Céline as test case88:19 Circling back: blasphemy, sacralization, and STEM’s rising prestige93:52 AI as an accelerant of the loss of literary culture95:53 What a “mature” response to loss/grief might look like97:22 Closing thoughts and outro/credits

My guest on the show today is Tuhin Chakrabarty, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University and the culprit behind my first ever trigger warning on eminent Americans.

Here we go: if a big part of your identity is vested in being a writer, and you are already experiencing existential dread about the prospect of AI getting better than you at writing, you may want to not listen to this podcast, or at least you may need to take a Xanax or a gummy before listening. Because Tuhin’s work, training AI to produce super high quality samples of high literary writing, is existentially threatening. It goes right at the heart of what we wordsmiths do.

Just to give a sense, here’s a passage from a New Yorker article by Vauhini Vara that explores what Tuhin has found:

I asked Chakrabarty to run an informal version of his experiment on my writing, with a twist: I would pit his model directly against me. To start, he fine-tuned a model on my published writing, much as he’d done in the formal experiment. Then I sent him four short excerpts from a novel that I’m currently writing. No one else had read these excerpts; they had never been published or circulated. There was no way that a large language model could have seen them before.

The narrator of my novel in progress is an Indian American ex-journalist. She runs a nonprofit that publishes stories from immigrant and refugee women, but it’s strapped for funding, so she courts an Indian American venture capitalist as a potential donor. Chakrabarty used an L.L.M. to create content summaries of the excerpts I’d sent him. (One representative sentence, from a summary about the narrator’s journaling habit, explains, “A pivotal memory is introduced: in ninth grade, the narrator’s mother read this journal, an act seen as a profound betrayal.”) Finally, he gave the summaries to his fine-tuned model, and he asked it to compose passages “in the style of Vauhini Vara.”

Going into all this, I was self-assured, even smug. I’d always felt that my style was original and, more important, that my books were totally distinct from one another. I figured that, even if the A.I. model could imitate my past books, it couldn’t predict the style of the novel in progress. So, when Chakrabarty sent me the A.I.-generated imitations, I was genuinely confused. Like Díaz and Nunez, I found lots of stylistic details—rhythm, verbiage—annoying. But the text produced by the model was eerily close to mine. Reading some of its lines next to my own, I couldn’t remember which was which. Unlike Díaz or Nunez, I even preferred some of the doppelgänger’s versions. My style seemed to be more consistent across projects than I’d realized.

I sent four passages to some readers who’d liked my previous books, explaining that half were mine and half were the model’s. I wanted them to guess which were which. … The first of my readers to respond was Dana Mauriello, my best friend from college and an accomplished tech entrepreneur. “Truth: this was terrifying!” she wrote. “I was so nervous that I would say that AI wrote something that you wrote, and you would be insulted!!!” Her anxiety, it turned out, was justified. She didn’t get any of them right.

Dana blamed this partly on her not being a writer. But, of my seven readers, none correctly identified more than half the passages. One of the last people I heard from was the novelist Karan Mahajan, a professor of literary arts at Brown University. He and I learned to write together in college, along with Tony Tulathimutte, and have been sharing drafts with each other ever since. He’s among the most perceptive writers and readers I’ve met. “Oof, this was really confusing and mindmelting,” Karan wrote. Then he, too, misidentified all four excerpts.

To be clear, Tuhin isn’t claiming that AI, except under the very specific, rather contrived circumstances of his experiments, can already match the best human writers. And he doesn’t know if they ever will be able to match or surpass us. I don’t know how much consolation that affords, though; what he has done is threatening enough.

Moreover, in this episode we’re doing what is sometimes the most anxiety producing thing of all when it comes to fraught questions: We’re sitting in the uncertainty, and poking at it. How does his method work? What does and doesn’t it prove? Why did he think to do it in the first place? What are its implications? What technical challenges would need to be solved for it to move from short samples, where detailed plot points and themes are provided by a human, to actually generating a full book with just a short prompt or a broad outline? And what are we human writers owed if it’s our work, used as training data, that creates the conditions for being superseded by AI? Etc.

I wrote a long essay, not too long ago, about my intuition that most of the fiercest responses to AI out there, both from the hardcore boosters and the hardcore haters, are flip sides of the same coin. They’re dysfunctional manifestations of the anxiety that so many of us have right now in the face of what may be an extinction level event not so much in the Skynet takes over the world sense but of a more existential sort. We may soon be deprived of some of the core ways we’ve understood what it means to be distinctively human, how we’ve constructed our unique purpose as humans.

Because of this fear, Tuhin has gotten a bit of hate for what he’s done and shown, but from my perspective he’s dealing with the existential threat we face in exactly the right way, the psychologically functional way. He’s looking directly at it. He’s rejecting both utopian boosterism and head in the sand denialism as strategies of evasion. He’s being creative with the thing itself. And he’s thinking in super pragmatic ways about how to best serve human interests in the long run. And not just thinking about that but doing something concrete and positive about it, collaborating with legal scholars on how to think about and craft policies that protect and compensate authors.

So I’m sorry to stoke your anxieties, dear listeners, if that’s what we do, but I’m not sorry I had Tuhin on the show. He’s a fascinating and flexible thinker, a hard core computer scientist and a true lover of literature.

Also: Eminent Americans, my sweet baby, is now 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.

Hope you enjoy the show, and that the radiant beams of humanity and thoughtfulness that Tuhin and I generate between us don’t just soothe your anxiety but ultimately help you to process it.

Peace.

I had the good fortune to be joined on this episode by the redoubtable Sheila Heti, award-winning novelist, avant-garde memoirist, incisive essayist, and all-around Canadian woman of letters.

I asked Sheila to come on the show after I read “Good Medicine,” her recent essay in Granta, which is the report of her experience taking a series of guided psychedelic trips. It is also, though she didn’t set out with this in mind, a kind of midlife crisis essay, reflecting on where she’s been, where she’s going, what’s left for her, and so on.

One thing that really struck me about the essay is that it really is, in the most basic way, a report on her experience. It’s here’s what she did, here’s what she felt, here’s who she met, here’s what came up psychologically during her trips, here’s what she felt like in its aftermath. And when a piece of writing feels so plain but so effortlessly holds your interest and propels you through the length of it, you know, if you’re somebody who’s tried your hand at writing yourself, that you’re in the hands of someone who has an exquisite command of language, and also that it’s who doesn’t need to prove it to you with every sentence she writes or every essay or story or novel. So I just appreciated that. I appreciated the craft of it.

It also just vibed for me because a lot of the issues that she ends up confronting during the course of her trips are ones that I face, too. We also had some great conversation about other topics of interest to both of us, including clothing and fashion, class, money, success, and our mutual affection for the late, great essayist and critic Dave Hickey, who was a benevolent, generous, cantankerous spirit in both of our lives.

So I really enjoyed this conversation, which was the official first episode of the second phase of an anticipated eight-phase journey of this podcast. As of this episode, 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.

This won't change much about what I'm doing here. You'll now get some dulcet-toned promos for Arc and its flagship podcast. The occasional guest on my podcast will be someone who's written something recently for the magazine, or otherwise has something interesting or compelling to say about a topic the magazine has covered. Otherwise, though, we'll keep on keeping on Eminent Americans style.

Peace.

My guest on the show today is returning guest and all-around friend of the pod David Sessions, a Boston-based freelance writer and the co-host, along with Blake Smith, of the relatively new Off Christopher Street Podcast and and Substack newsletter, about the history and present of gay male life and culture in America.

David, Blake and I have recorded a crossover episode of Eminent Americans that focuses on their new endeavor, which should be out in the next month or two or three, but on this episode David and I are talking pornography, its ubiquity, the effect it may or may not have on our culture and kids, and related issues around technology, moral panic, and modern life.

A few key differences between the two of us structure the discussion. One is our ages. David is 40. I’m now 50, and though it’s not a huge difference from one angle, it represents a fundamentally different generational growing up experience when it comes the internet, social media, and smart phones, none of which I basically had growing up, all of which David got relatively early on.

Another is kids. I have three of them. David doesn’t have any. And a third is our backgrounds. I’m from a liberal secular Jewish home in the northeast where sex was discussed pretty openly, and porn wasn’t permitted but wasn’t really stigmatized either. David grew up in what he describes as a deeply conservative, Christian-nationalist home. He went to a Christian college, married a good Christian woman, and then came out as gay in his mid-thirties.

One consequence of that background, for David, is that he’s unusually attuned to some of the ways that mainstream discourse around issues like porn, smart phones, the internet, and social media has been influenced by savvy right wing Christian groups, who recognized pretty early on that if they wanted to move the mainstream they would have to find rhetorical frames that weren’t aversive to establishment media. So instead of sin and god and traditional values they talk about public health harms, addiction, exploitation, objectification of women, etc.

So David comes to these debates with an awareness of how they’ve often been covertly shaped by religious groups and motives. He also has the experience, as a gay man, of living a pretty flourishing social life that is enabled in all sorts of positive ways by the technologies that a concerned parent like me can easily fall into perceiving as purely pernicious.

And one last thing I want to bring up, which I think is important as context for this conversation, is that so many of the discussions around the effects of tech on kids lack a real perspective on how it plays out differently depending on the socioeconomic class of the kids in question. Who is really speaking for, or from, the kids who aren’t living with the kind of social and cultural capital that David and I both, albeit in very different ways, had growing up. Two parent homes, relatively intact communities, financially secure, high parental investment, and so on. David and I, and my kids, and his kids if he has them, have been or will be raised with psychological protective factor layered on top of psychological protective factor. What about the kids who don’t have all that? Are we condescending to their parents in imagining that their kids are just at the mercy of the evil tech gods, that they’re not able to sufficiently protect and nurture them. Or, alternatively, are we just basically ignoring them when we have these discussions, as elites, as though their kids are just like our kids, having basically the same experiences. I don’t know, and David doesn’t either, and – and this is maybe the worst part – who would I even turn to to help me answer it? So that’s in the background of this conversation too.

Two quick housekeeping notes. The first is a thanks to Joshua Howard for manfully editing this episode, as he has the last few. The second is that this the last episode of what I will retrospectively refer to as the scrappy, underground, indie era of this podcast. Starting in a week or two, I’ll be launching a partnership with Arc Magazine, which is published out of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

I’ll say more about that when we officially launch, but one thing I’ll say now is that Arc’s touch on the content and vibe of the show will be very very light. Occasionally I’ll have on a guest who is doing something for the magazine, there will be brief promos for other Arc content, and I hope to do some fun experiments that I didn’t have the bandwidth to do when it was just me and producer Robert. For the most part, though, I’m going to go about my business as I’ve done for the last few years. I’ll have on whoever I want. We’ll talk about whatever I want. And I’ll swear whenever I fucking want.

Peace.

 My guest on the show today, our special Fourth of July sesquicentennial episode, is Jacob Siegel. He's a writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, an Iraq and Afghanistan vet, co-host of the Manifesto! podcast, and author of the new book, The Information State, which we don’t discuss on the episode.

Our topic, instead, is the “The Disappearing American Man,” the first installment of a column that Jacob is now writing for Tablet.

To give you a sense of the essay, which is slightly to the left or maybe to the right or just below or above the typical crisis of masculinity polemic, here’s a particularly pungent passage from it:

What I see in many prominent and representative American men today is a dribbling sludge of bitterness. A peacocking display of impotence, debility, worminess, insincerity, lack of competence, lack of confidence, lack of élan, pettiness, selfishness, scheming, and self-pity. Not all men, as the saying goes, but enough to pass a civilizational tipping point. The young men standing up at town hall meetings are almost pompous in their bitterness. The anonymous posters online have turned cattiness and petty sadism into a group erotic ritual. The politicians are embittered, the podcasters are embittered, even the popular comedians are embittered. Probably the comedians are the most bitter of all.

Much of this bitterness seems to stem from an ambient feeling of betrayal. Today’s American man knows that he has been wronged. By globalist elites and international pedophile rings or else by his own toxic masculinity. By immigrants or perhaps by his innate racism. By “woke capital”; diversity, equity, and inclusion; greedy billionaires; and unappreciative modern women. And by the Jews, of course. Always by the Jews.

So that's just a taste. It's a pretty intense, hard-charging essay. I would say there's more or less two overlapping arguments in the essay. One is about this bitterness as it's expressed in the more venomous, less inhibited regions of the right, which Siegel traces to the effects of the failed wars after 9/11, the thesis being something like: when the globe-bestriding American military colossus can't beat a bunch of goat herders, it powerfully undermines the projective identity that so many men, and particularly men on the right, have had with American military power. Its power is our power, is how they felt, and so then when its power is undermined so thoroughly, it strikes right at the core of people's identity, their sense of themselves as men. And what some people did with that searing sense of impotence was to turn it not just against the left, which is traditional right-wing move, but against the American soldier himself, and then behind him against what the American soldier traditionally has represented, which is American power, American might, American manliness.

Attached to that is a historical narrative, a quite conspiratorial one, that the long period that most of us think of as a kind of golden age of American power and manliness, from the end of WW II to the end of the Cold War, was in fact a long, deep con perpetrated by the globalists on the real American men, who were its innocent victims. All that time that we thought we were powerful, by virtue of our affiliation and identification with American power, we were in fact being manipulated and betrayed. (Jacob and I wouldn’t say “we,” of course, since as Jews we were perpetrators of the con, not its victims.)

So that's argument one, and the other argument, which I think is downstream of that one, is that an effect of all that — the loss of the wars, the cultural and political reaction to it — is that the cultural ideal of the American man has become exhausted. That figure who stood a certain way, held a cigarette a certain way, often looked on the world with a certain cool disdain, has died or at least has gone conspicuously silent. An archetype that was capacious enough over the decades to manifest in figures as diverse as manly Hemingway, the dandy Gatsby, the stoic Marlboro Man, swaggering Muhammad Ali, and the alienated Kurt Cobain seems no longer to be producing new manifestations of itself. The world spirit has abandoned him/us.

Then braiding through these two arguments is Jacob’s own story of being in the wars. He did 15 months in Iraq, and then after some years in which he rather failed to figure out life as a civilian, he signed up again and went to Afghanistan. And it was in that space, he writes, that he was able to reassemble himself in a way that could eventually go on to do some flourishing in the aftermath.

The piece opens with a road trip he takes with a bunch of enlisted guys from his unit, men over whom he had command. They semi-licitly liberated a van from the motor pool, and they went to see families of two soldiers who'd been killed by an IED in their last month over there. He talks about being the only officer in this tight group of enlisted men, some of whom had some real suspicion of him. He writes about his sense of guilt and dislocation during the interregnum between his two stints.

He and I talk about that. We go into his theory of how the right talked itself into treating World War II as the original sin of American betrayal, how that recasts the Greatest Generation as a bunch of cucks, how a guy like Tucker Carlson, who was such a cheerleader for the Iraq War, has re-imagined himself into a state of metaphysical victimhood and purity, and how the big story of the betrayal of the American man has a weird double-sidedness to it— the true American man is pure, because he’s not responsible for the nation’s sins, but he also has no agency. He’s a dupe, a cuck.

And so on. We get deep in the shit, in other words. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hope you do too. Peace.

Damon Linker is back on the pod to talk about another former guest, the notorious R.O.D., Ray Oliver Dreher Jr. — i.e. Rod Dreher, one of the more fascinating, tragic, and infuriating writers of the Christian right over the last few decades.

Linker and Dreher first met back when Linker, who is now a man of the solid center-left, was a conservative and an editor at the Catholic conservative magazine First Things. They bonded over their shared horror at the Catholic priest abuse scandal, a lot of details of which were unfolding at the time, and also over their shared frustration with various figures on the Catholic right, including some important people at First Things, who seemed to be in some kind of denial about the severity of the scandal, or if not in denial about the severity of it then intent on shifting as much blame as possible away from the Catholic Church and onto other folks or forces.

The two remained friends over the next decade and a half, even as both of them went through various evolutions and migrations. Linker migrated towards the left, although not too far to the left, and Dreher went through a series of shifts, or perhaps repetitions, ever in search of some kind of structure or vessel or institution to contain or pacify his various aspirations, contradictions, and demons.

A few years ago they broke, as Dreher has broken with many former friends and comrades over the decades, over what Linker would characterize as Dreher’s extremism, though they’ve been in touch a bit more recently in the aftermath of Dreher’s public denunciations of the right’s tolerance of anti-Semites within its ranks.

In a recent essay, Linker writes of Dreher:

I’ve written enough posts about Rod Dreher down through the years that I could almost dedicate a stand-alone section of this newsletter to him. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Here is the most recent post, from just a few months ago, in which he plays an important part.) When I write something on him, my most engaged readers usually respond in comments that they used to admire Dreher and read him fruitfully but that at some point he became a reactionary and racist crank they could no longer abide. I’ve had periods when I’ve felt like that. But I keep coming back to him, even as he’s drifted further and further away from the (perhaps idiosyncratic) skeptical and pessimistic liberalism I affirm in my work.

One reason why I keep coming back to Rod is that I know him personally, we developed a friendship nearly a quarter century ago, and I don’t believe in dropping friends for political reasons. There are limits to that, of course. (A friend who began telling me Adolf Hitler made a lot of good points in Mein Kampf would no longer get invited over to dinner.) But I try as best I can to exemplify the ancient virtue of liberality in my dealings with people. That means demonstrating generosity and openness to difference.

But it wouldn’t be entirely honest to suggest I remain drawn to Rod purely out of a principled commitment to tolerate a longstanding friend who holds views with which I sharply disagree. The truth is that I feel like I “get” him on a deep, spiritual level.

I don’t feel like I get Dreher on a spiritual level, but I do feel like I perceive him insightfully, from the outside, on a psychological level, and though my perceptions and Linker’s don’t perfectly align, they end up proving (as you’ll appreciate it you listen to our conversation) quite complementary.

For both of us, Dreher is such a compellingly open wound of a person. He’s endlessly vulnerable, incredibly affable in one-on-one interactions (as I learned when I did my interview with him), reliably hysterical and apocalyptic when he’s dealing with the broad sweep of things, and also very principled in his idiosyncratic way, unable to gloss over the sins of his own side, in the name of unity, when they conflict with deeply held values of his.

This all is, in other words, primo Eminent Americans content, and it was a pleasure to have Linker back on for it.

My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia, my longtime collaborator on the podcast.

Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans, his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college.

I’ve never been a serious gamer, but some of it I get. it was part of the mix with my friends when I was growing up, now has a significant presence in the social lives of my 10 and 15 year old sons, and is just this huge thing, obviously, in the social and emotional world of boys and young men and increasingly not so young men. It also seems to me a topic that hasn’t received nearly the degree of serious literary and journalistic attention that it clearly deserves. It gets a lot of ink, in a certain sense, but so much of it is quite shallow, and so little of it seems to even begin to grasp the profound role that games and the ecosystems around them have played, and are playing, in the social and psychological lives of the people who play them.Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you do too. Apologies in advance as the pace of release slows down for a bit. Still working on finding a new producer, and have some good leads, but for a little while at least I’ll be on my own, and so I will not be as productive. Not going away, though!

My guest on the show today is the inimitable Sherman Alexie, poet, novelist, Substacker, and occasional screenwriter.

I would be surprised if you don’t already know who Alexi ise, given that he’s been an award winning and best-selling writer for decades now and is almsot certainly the best known Native American writer of our time.

I asked him on, naturally, to talk about genre television. I’d noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.

It is, in other words, an immensely fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.

Peace