Eminent Americans
Eminent Americans
Sell Out With Me, or: Standing Athwart the Herd of Independent Minds
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Sell Out With Me, or: Standing Athwart the Herd of Independent Minds

Naomi Kanakia and I talk early 20th century Russian intellectuals, internecine battles in the trans woman world, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and the task of keeping one's balance in these wacky times

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Back on the ‘pod this week is Naomi Kanakia, author of the just released novel The Default World, which recently earned a glowing review from

on his Substack.

The Default World is actually the second novel that Naomi has published this year. Her YA novel Just Happy to Be Here came out in January. She’s also at work on a non-fiction book, under contract with Princeton University Press, provisionally titled What's So Great About the Great Books, which make the case that the great books have a lot to offer to left wing people and to racial, gender, and sexual minorities.

Naomi and I talk about approximately none of that. Instead we talk about Vekhi, a 1909 collection of essays, from ex- and never-Marxist Russian intellectuals, written and collected in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution.

But really we talk about

, the dissident Black liberal writer, and whether he’s a brave articulator of the world as he sees it (my position) or a rather craven opportunist (Naomi’s position), and then a whole bunch of other things that utterly betray my stated mission to avoid culture war bullshit. These topics include: 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.

Reading list for this episode:

Woman of Letters
Dissident envy
I’m not a big re-reader. I think in the last ten years I’ve re-read Middlemarch, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses bios and the first ten books in David Weber’s Honor Harrington military sci-fi series. I’ve nothing against re…
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Grand Hotel Abyss
BOOK REVIEW: Naomi Kanakia, The Default World
As promised, I will occasionally post brief reviews of new and forthcoming books sent to me in exchange for an honest response. The book reviewed below was released in May and is currently available …
Read more

Discussion about this podcast

Eminent Americans
Eminent Americans
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.