An Informal Sociology of the Discourse

Eminent Americans is a newsletter and occasional podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it. So people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Yang, Elizabeth Bruenig, Ross Douthat, Nikole Hannah Jones, Jia Tolentino, Freddie Deboer, Rod Dreher, Ibram Kendi, Ezra Klein, Bari Weiss, the Red Scare podcast hosts, Andrew Sullivan, etc.

Although the newsletter will touch on the political and intellectual issues that concern these folks, the focus is less the topics than the people — their backstories, what drives them, how they’ve evolved, who cares the most about them, what role they play in the larger ecosystem, and what trends do they embody or influence.

In one sense, then, it’s a rather meta concept. It’s an intellectual (me) talking about other intellectuals in their roles as intellectuals, and occasionally doing in conversation with yet more intellectuals. From another angle, it’s simply an attempt to investigate and describe the contemporary American scene through and with the people who constitute it.

My name is Daniel Oppenheimer. By day I work for UT Austin. By night I’m a freelance writer and the author of two books, Exit Right, which was published in February 2016 by Simon &  Schuster, and Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, which was published in June 2021 by The University of Texas Press.

Eminent Americans is free (for now), but there is an option to subscribe because if I can break even (after paying for some audio production, etc.) it would help me produce more. So subscriptions are super appreciated, but not expected.