My guest on this episode of the podcast is William Deresiewicz, author of a number of books, most notably Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, and the Substack newsletter Derisivist.
Bill and I end up spending a fair amount of time discussing an as-yet-untitled essay of his that’s forthcoming in Salmagundi, and at what I'd say are the two poles of it. On the one hand, it’s a lament for the decline of the left, which he argues has made itself the enemy of cultural vitality. On the other hand, it’s an initial sketch of what he calls the "not left," which is some kind of loose constellation of people (including Bill and me) who still take their policy bearings from the left but who feel profoundly alienated from its current cultural and institutional manifestations. He writes:
"It comes to this: the left has made itself the enemy of the life force—of vitality, of eros. It fears it and it wants to shackle it. It feels, with a deep, instinctive revulsion, that it is incompatible with goodness, with morality. So it subordinates it to morality, or rewrites it in its terms. … The not-left, like the left in the 60s and 70s, is the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony, and curiosity. As opposed to solemnity, self-censorship, defensiveness, literalism, and prudery. The left is 'no'; the not-left is 'yes.' The left is 'post-,' the prefix of imaginative depletion. The not-left is 'neo-,' the sign of new beginnings."
I thought of waiting to send this out until his essay was available, but I decided not to. Our conversation stands on its own, and it also spends a lot of time on other topics, including Bill's childhood in a modern Orthodox Jewish home, his early efforts to be a good boy and pursue a career in the sciences, his transition to English literature, and then his eventual break from academia. And much more.
It's a great conversation. Bill and I have been consuming a lot of the same stuff over the past few years, and the result is a shared frame of reference that allows us to bounce and spark off each other in a pretty ideal way. You can feel us arriving at new ideas, and nuancing old ones, in the moment, which is what the interview-style podcast achieves at its best.
Essays and podcast episodes we mention during the conversation, in addition to Bill's forthcoming essay, are:
Last Boys at the Beginning of History: Thymos comes to the capital
by Mana Afsari
Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering): I didn’t have a choice. Thousands of people are driven out of the profession each year.
by William Deresiewicz
Geoff Shullenberger and I autopsy a movement, and moment, in time
Nuance: A Love Story: My affair with the intellectual dark web
By Meghan Daum
These Hollow Halls: Whither the Academy, journalism, Substack, and the rest of it.
I talk to Julianne Werlin and Sam Kahn about the state of the Academy and other things.
Gatecrashers: A podcast about the hidden history of Jews and the Ivy League
By Mark Oppenheimer.
Show notes:
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:45 Early Life and Education
01:15 Graduate School Challenges
01:59 Career Beginnings and Dance Criticism
02:26 Teaching at Yale
04:04 Leaving Academia
04:59 Transition to Writing
06:46 Staying Relevant in Culture
09:04 Podcasting and Media Consumption
22:13 Critique of Elite Education
32:24 The Pressure of High Achievement
33:44 Navigating Anxiety in a Competitive World
34:33 Personal Reflections and Self-Selection
36:29 The Fascination with Emptiness
39:36 The Elite and Their Inner Lives
50:59 Jewish Intellectualism and Cultural Influence
56:43 The Role of Physical and Virtual Intellectual Communities
01:00:24 Exploring Jewish Identity and Continuity
01:07:39 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans
Share this post