Windex F*cks

Eminent Americans

Windex F*cks

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Windex F*cks

A short symposium on the myriad ways in which Windex ain't scared, with Jeff Maurer and Mark Oppenheimer.

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Mar 05, 2024

Reading list:

Windex Ain’t Scared: Here’s Our Statement on Israel/Palestine, by Jeff Maurer
Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell, by The Onion
Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake, by The Onion
American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie, by The Onion

My guests on the podcast today are Jeff Maurer, author of “Windex Ain’t Scared,” and my brother Mark Oppenheimer, who selected the text to be the subject of this installment of my special series on the state of the discourse.

Jeff Maurer served honorably in the federal government for eight years until his standup comedy career led him to being hired as a writer on John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, where Jeff worked for six years, and he is now the author of the Substack newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, which is hilarious and smart.

Mark is a writer and podcaster based in New Haven, Connecticut, author of many books, most recently Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and The Soul of a Neighborhood, also brilliant and hilarious. He's hard at work on a biography of Judy Blume; is the host of The Syllabus, a podcast about campus politics; and Substacks at Oppenheimer.

Discussion about this episode

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.

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