Eminent Americans

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?

I'm not the host of today's episode, but rather the guest of writer and podcaster Ken Ilgunas, who had me on his podcast, Out of the Wild with Ken Ilgunas, to talk about my own writing, my life, my thoughts, et cetera. Ken is the author of among other books, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland and This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back.

My guest on the show today is Greg Barnhisel, English professor at Duquesne University and author of the recent book Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power.Our conversation is in one sense about the subject of his book, Norman Holmes Pearson, who was a pioneer of both the American intelligence establishment and the modern study of the humanities. But it's also about the death of what Pearson represented, or embodied, which is the American cold war establishment, or—to abstract even further— the death of any unitary establishment whatsoever possessing the power to author a consensus or narrative to which most of the nation would defer. It's also about one of my abiding preoccupations, as a son of New England, with the old yankee WASP elite culture. Yale men. Taste-makers. Ghostwriters of national narratives. The kind of people who knew how to quote Virgil, chair a foundation meeting, and quietly stage a coup in Latin America. We talk about whether this specific kind of establishment power he represented has faded entirely or morphed into something else (some version of what we sometimes call the professional managerial class.

Hope you enjoy.

Peace

Friend of the pod Blake Smith is back for today’s episode, which is one of my once a month paid episodes, so if you’re not a paid subscriber you’ll only get the first 20 minutes or so.

Our conversation turned out to be another installment in the informal series of post-mortems I seem to be conducting on the heterodox moment in the early 2020s when there coalesced a…

I want to make a strong claim about psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry Awais Aftab, my guest on the podcast today. He is the single best writer out there today for anyone who is interested in intellectually understanding where the field of mental health is right now.

Among the questions to which he has illuminating and often quite profound answers: Is there a crisis of overdiagnosis? What does the anti-psychiatry movement get right and wrong? What does the discipline of psychiatry get right and wrong? Who are the most interesting thinkers in the mental health realm right now? What even is mental illness? Is it time to dispense altogether with the DSM, or does it just need reform? What do and don’t we know about the efficacy, and cultural significance, of the legal drugs so many of us, present company included, are being prescribed.

There are plenty of writers out there who are addressing these and related issues, but I can’t think of anyone who comes close to Aftab in terms of addressing the entire range of them, and doing so in an intellectual serious and aesthetically engaging way. If you want a steady fix of the good shit, in this space, he’s the guy who has it. My guess is that everyone who’s anyone in psychiatry is already reading him, and that a lot of the journalists who seriously cover mental health are reading him as well, or will be soon.

As I say to him in our conversation, I’d been waiting, consciously or not, for someone to fill the space that he has now filled, and it was super exciting to me when I encountered his work. It made my world better, and larger. It’s also just so perfectly connected to the core purpose of this podcast, which is to expose listeners to people and topics they should know if they want to be hip to what’s going on or what will be going on soon. It was great to talk to him.

Aftab is the author of the Psychiatry at the Margins Substack, the recent book from Oxford University Press Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, and a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press titled, provisionally, “Remaking Psychiatry.”

Hope you enjoy.

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

Hope you do too.

My guests on the show today are Lila Corwin Berman and Mark Oppenheimer. We talk about Jews, higher education, Jews in higher education, free speech, Israel, Palestine, and the plight of the liberal intellectual Jew in a time when issues surrounding Jews are provoking decidedly illiberal reactions from both ends of the political spectrum.

Starting this month, I'm going to do two new things. One is that I'll plan on releasing episodes on a more regular schedule, on the first, third, and fourth Thursdays of each month. The other is that the second of those three episodes will be paywalled, and it will be a bit different in content from my usual podcast. It'll be shorter, typically a half hour give or take, and it will be much more topical than I usually like to be. I'll talk to my guest or guests about some current politics and news, and I'll talk about the literary intellectual controversy or trend of the moment, if there's one at hand when we're recording.I won’t be offended if you don't want to pay, but of course will be grateful if you do. And to my stalwart existing paid subscribers who forked over money when I wasn't even paywalling anything, much gratitude. You're on my hall of honors list, which as you know is hanging in the burned out husk of the Friendly's Restaurant on Sumner Ave in Springfield Massachusetts. -Dan

My guest on the podcast today is Derek Guy, who is North America’s premiere men's fashion journalist and critic. This isn’t a highly competitive category—most fashion writing is dumb and corrupt, and most of it is about women’s fashion—but Derek wears the crown exceptionally well. He shows what’s possible in that space, consistently writing thoughtful, substantive essays not just about what’s hip in men’s fashion but what it means culturally, sociologically, politically.

If you’ve heard of Derek, it's almost certainly because for a while he was an accidental celebrity on Twitter. He was just on the platform, doing his well-regarded but relatively obscure men’s fashion thing, slowly building his online presence, when the algorithm took hold of him and made him ubiquitous on the site, dropping him into the feeds of millions of people who had never shown any interest whatsoever in his subject. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023:

Of all the changes at Twitter Inc. under Elon Musk so far, this might be the most unexpected: A California-based menswear writer, who weighs in on incorporating western-style wear into your wardrobe, and on his favorite Italian tailors, suddenly seems to be all over the platform.

The Twitter account @dieworkwear, run by Derek Guy, is popping up left and right in users’ timelines—even for those who don’t follow him. The phenomenon has befuddled users—and Mr. Guy himself.

Derek doesn't know why this happened. He didn't have a backroom deal with Elon Musk. It just happened. He became the “men's wear guy on Twitter.”I initially reached out to Derek not to have him on the podcast, but because I was trying to develop a story pitch on men's fashion in the age of Trump, and I wanted to see if I could pick his brain for ideas. It turned out he was already at work on a few different stories on different aspects of that topic, and it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one podcast episode.

One of the articles we discuss in our conversation hasn’t run yet. The other, his Bloomberg story “The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic,” goes back into the history of macho male fitness influencer fashion to explain why the new crop of alpha male influencers dresses the way it does. Among the interesting ironies it points out is that the styles we currently think of as manosphere chic—Joe Rogan in his super tight jeans and super tight t-shirts, Andrew Tate stuffed into slim fit suits like a misogynistic sausage—are directly descended from 1990s high-end fashions that were intended as rejections of machisimo. Guy writes:

Early adopters of slim-fit style were fashion-forward urbanites who embraced this European vision of youthful cool. They wore shrunken blazers, used chamomile-infused moisturizers, and could explain the difference between Chelsea boots and jodhpurs. But their aesthetic rattled the mainstream. In search of a label, the media landed on “metrosexual,” a term that, not so subtly, cast suspicion on a man’s gender and sexuality. The metrosexual was someone who took pride in taste and understood why “some women have 47 pairs of black shoes.” What set him apart wasn’t just his grooming habits or aesthetic literacy, but his attitude towards gender performance. As the New York Times wrote in 2003, this new archetype possessed “a carefree attitude toward the inevitable suspicion that a man who dresses well… is gay.”

While slim-fit marched down high-fashion runways, it also crept through indie rock shows, early style blogs, and menswear forums like StyleForum and Superfuture. These communities turned fit into a kind of doctrine, elevating silhouettes like APC New Standards and Uniqlo button-downs as markers of elite taste. As The Strokes played onstage in threadbare tees and skin-tight denim, wealthy urbanites chased the look by purchasing Slimane's most popular creations: Dior’s 17 cm and 19 cm jeans, named after the width of their leg openings. Those priced out of luxury labels raided the women’s aisle for tight denim, a gender-bending hack that Levi’s would later celebrate with their 2011 “Ex-Girlfriend Jeans” for men. Even the heritage revival got a trim. The traditional symbols of masculinity—workwear, Ivy tailoring, military surplus—were recut for a different era, one where style was no longer bulky but compressed, tailored close to the bone.

In its early years, slim fit was met with derision and low-grade cultural panic. Critics said consumerism had hollowed out traditional manhood, replacing it with men who spent too much time curating their appearance. Others fretted that the rise of shrunken silhouettes was a symptom of masculine decay. But soon, everyone became metrosexual. Fashion magazines treated slim fit as a kind of pseudo-science: shoulder seams had to sit on the edge of the shoulder bone; trousers must taper just-so; any loose fabric signaled laziness or sloppiness. J.Crew helped bring this new silhouette into everyday offices. Their Liquor Store concept shop, opened in 2008, transformed an after-hours watering hole into a menswear-only boutique laden with 1960s-era references to traditional masculinity—antique rugs, leather club chairs, and Hemmingway novels sitting alongside Red Wings—even as they sold slim chambray shirts and cropped blazers. At the same time, Mad Men introduced a new masculine figure: Don Draper. Emotionally sealed off and impeccably dressed, Draper gave the slim-cut suit an edge of stoic authority. Slim tailoring had became synonymous with professional competence and upward mobility.

Eventually, slim fit stopped feeling radical. Its early ties to gender rebellion faded as the silhouette was absorbed into more conventional ideas of masculinity. What once looked subversive—shrunken jeans, tight shirts, tailoring that clung instead of concealing—became standard fare in offices, weddings, and Tinder profiles. New subcultures rebranded the look with more conventionally masculine associations. EDC (Everyday Carry) enthusiasts, armed with pocket knives, flashlights, and multitools, adopted slim-fit gear as part of a rugged preparedness ethos. Their slim tactical pants and fitted henleys weren’t about gender ambiguity; they were survivalist uniforms. Athleisure brands such as Rhone and Alo Yoga pushed the same silhouette in poly-stretch fabrics, merging gymwear with streetwear into a softer kind of masculine armor. In Silicon Valley, tech founders embraced minimalist wardrobes built around Everlane tees, slim joggers, and all-white sneakers. The aesthetic once dismissed as “metro” was now treated as self-optimization. Slim fit, in the end, didn’t rewrite the code of masculinity. It just offered a new way to perform it.

In addition to the two stories we discuss, he's also gone on to write a new story on a person we discuss in the conversation - Trumpist intellectual Michael Anton, who is a huge clothes horse and for a long time was a regular presence on high end men's fashion forums. It's a fun conversation, partic…

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.