The People’s (Podcast) Microphone

My guest on the show today is Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of an excellent essay in the most recent issue of The Point, “We Were the 99 Percent.” It’s an unusually thoughtful reflection on the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which Jeff was a participant in, and observer of, from the very beginning.

I asked Jeff to come on the show because I enjoyed the essay, which genuinely altered my perspective on a movement that I thought, in retrospect inaccurately, I more or less understood. Also, though, because he was someone who’d been popping up in my Substack feed recently in a way that I’d noticed, and it was striking to me that he’d gone in the space of a month or two from someone I’d never heard of to someone I now knew from both Substack and The Point, which are two of the key ingredients in my personal intellectual diet.

There’s nothing magical about this. Big world, small tax bracket, as someone once said to me. Jeff I overlap in terms of background and interests in all sorts of ways. But I like to pay attention to these signals anyway. They often end up meaning something.

One of the thing that turns out to be interesting about Jeff’s case, as you’ll see in the conversation, is that for all that we do share, intellectually, he’s also coming from a substantively different place, in terms of his scholarship and political experiences, than many of the rest of us, and it’s that difference – his grounding in both Spanish and English language literature, and his personal connections to activists from Latin America and Europe – that has a lot to do with what makes his work surprising.

Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And keep an eye on Jeff. He’s a comer.

Also keep an eye on my the new logo for the show, designed by Arc magazine intern Mina Fujii. It is, as the kids say 🔥. It jazzes up the whole joint. I feel at least 46.6% cooler than I did last week.

Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and distributed through its publication, Arc. You can read more articles and listen to more podcasts at their website.

Peace.

Show notes for this ep:

[0:00] Intro: Host Dan Oppenheimer welcomes listeners and introduces Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Rutgers University, author of the essay “We Were the 99 Percent” in *The Point* magazine.

[0:33] Dan explains why he inv