A Conversation About the Highest Values and the Best Things

Thoughts inspired by listening to a stimulating podcast conversation

A visitor observes the Raphael Rooms at the Vatican Museums, with the 'School of Athens' fresco in the background, on February 04, 2021 in Vatican City. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

In a moment overflowing with intimations of political and cultural dystopia, including outright attacks on universities, we don’t acknowledge enough how delightful it can be to live the life of the mind—and how it is still possible to do so, and sometimes more easily than ever before, right now, in the present.

Allow me to explain what I mean by way of an example.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite podcasts, Eminent Americans by author Daniel Oppenheimer, released an episode devoted to a conversation with Jon Baskin, co-founder and co-editor of The Point, one of the most impressive and consistently excellent English-language intellectual journals founded in this century. I’ve read pieces from The Point down through the years since its founding in 2009, and I met Baskin at a conference in Vienna back in 2019.

All of which means you’d expect me to be firmly within the target audience for this particular podcast discussion. And so I was—though even I wound up surprised by just how perfect the match turned out to be. Because, you see, I didn’t just find the conservation engaging. I found it incredibly stimulating, in multiple respects and in ways I suspect will prove long-lastingly fruitful for my intellect.

And therein lies the delight I mentioned above: The fortuitousness of Oppenheimer interviewing Baskin at length on a podcast to which I happen to subscribe has sent my mind down unanticipated paths that may well contribute in a vital way to my own thinking and writing over the coming weeks, months, and maybe even years. That’s something wonderful and rare that’s facilitated by the strange technological landscape in which we now live and think, read and write. This post is a tribute to what I got out of listening to this specific conversation, and thereby also a kind of tribute to the digital world that makes such an experience possible.