Claire Lehmann On Staying Independent

It’s very difficult for most people in the Trump era.

(Chris and I are taking a spring break this week, and the full Dish — including the column and the contest — will return next Friday.)

Claire Lehmann is a journalist and publisher. In 2015, after leaving academia, she founded the online magazine Quillette, where she is still editor-in-chief. She’s also a newspaper columnist for The Australian.

For two clips of our convo — on how journalists shouldn’t be too friendly with one another, and how postmodernism takes the joy out of literature — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: a modest upbringing in Adelaide; her hippie parents; their small-c conservatism; her many working-class jobs; ADHD; aspiring to be a Shakespeare scholar; enjoying Foucault … at first; her “great disillusionment” with pomo theory; the impenetrable prose of Butler; the great Germaine Greer; praising Camille Paglia; evolutionary psychology; Wright’s The Moral Animal and Pinker’s The Blank Slate; Claire switching to forensic psychology after an abusive relationship; the TV show Adolescence; getting hired by the Sydney Morning Herald to write op-eds — her first on marriage equality; Bush’s federal amendment; competition among women; tribalism and mass migration; soaring housing costs in Australia; rising populism in the West; creating Quillette; the IDW; being anti-anti-Trump; audience capture; Islamism and Charlie Hebdo; Covid; critical Trump theory; tariffs; reflexive anti-elitism; Joe Rogan; Almost Famous; Orwell; Spinoza; Oakeshott; Fukuyama and boredom; tech billionaires on Inauguration Day; the sycophants of Trump 2.0; and X as a state propaganda platform.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next week: David Graham on Project 2025. After that: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

So many readers have been asking me my views on our new American Pope that I’ll share some very basic first impressions. What has struck me most is a quality that I rarely find in myself and that was absent in the last two papacies: equanimity. He seems poised, unhurried, with a quietness that usually indicates spiritual strength. He also seems rather elegant in an Obama-Chicago way.

But I also think that absent an obvious major signal — which definitely marked the emergence of both Benedict XVI and Francis — we should pray for him, and wait and see.

Invite your friends and earn rewards

If you enjoy The Weekly Dish, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.

Invite Friends