Eminent Americans
Eminent Americans
Wanderers Above the Sea of Digital Fog: A state of the discourse episode
0:00
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:05:28
-1:05:28

Wanderers Above the Sea of Digital Fog: A state of the discourse episode

John Pistelli, Ross Barkan and I explore whether we're entering a new age of romanticism.

Reading List:

My guests on the show today are writers Ross Barkan and John Pistelli, and they’re here to help me launch something new on the podcast, which is a series of shorter episodes that are dedicated to taking stock of the state of the intellectual discourse.

I don’t have a grand schema for what means. I’ve just been reaching out to a bunch of interesting people, some of them prior guests on the podcast, and asking them to “pick one idea, writer, cultural encounter, or text that you think has been significant in the past year or so.”

My only other criterion is that I’ve asked folks to try to avoid going too directly at the culture wars topics that suck up so much energy in the discourse right now. Those topics are important, of course, and no doubt we’ll touch on many of them in the course of things, including in today’s episode, but I didn’t want to start there.

John proposed today’s texts, which are two connected essays that suggest that we may be entering, if not necessarily a new romantic age, then at least a period in which certain romantic tendencies swirl more forcefully than they have in a long time. One is Ross’s December 2023 essay in the Guardian, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange romantic backlash to the tech era looms.” The other is “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” a Substack essay by cultural critic Ted Gioia.

I’d add to this mix some of the writing that John has been doing on his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss; some of Ross’s work on his Substack, Political Currents; and maybe also some of the modern British literature lectures that John has been beaming out via his substack to his paid subscribers, of whom I’m one.

Ross Barkan is the author of three books, including the novel The Night Burns Bright. He's a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and his reporting and essays have appeared in a wide array of publications, including New York Magazine, The Nation, and the Guardian. He teaches journalism and writing at NYU. 

John Pistelli has written four novels, as well as short fiction, poetry and criticism for venues as diverse as Rain Taxi, The Millions, Tablet, and The Spectator. At his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, he publishes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture, serializes his latest novel, and offers independent literature courses, including on the writers of the Romantic era.

Leave a comment

Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.