Tom is a journalist and author. A former staff writer at GQ and Esquire, the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his Esquire article on Fred Rogers. He’s currently a senior writer at ESPN, and his new memoir is called In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. It was an intense conversation — about dads, sex, Catholicism, and growing older.
An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on being your dad’s wingman as a kid, and the dark secrets that Catholic families often carry — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: his dad’s serious injury at Normandy; emulating leading men in Hollywood; selling women’s handbags; his extreme vanity and obsession with scents; “the first metrosexual”; women flocking to him; making Tom complicit in his countless affairs; how men benefitted from the early Sexual Revolution more than women; Vatican II; Tom’s close relationship with his Catholic mom; Tom fearing his dad; the friends who worshipped him like a celebrity; hiding his Brooklyn accent; hiding extreme porn and dildos in his briefcase that Tom found; sadomasochism and bondage; dad’s sleeping with both Zsa Zsa and Ava Gabor; a mystery mistress who spoke at his dad’s funeral; Tom’s grandmother who was a notorious adulteress in the press who pimped out Tom’s dad and his aunt; and the challenge of writing my own memoir.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on pretty much everything. Here’s a fan looking forward to HW Brands:
His Founding Partisans was one of the best books I ever read! With the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, that is the book that should be talked about and read by everyone.
That’s what we were thinking. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a big fan of last week’s episode on free speech:
Thank you, thank you for having the great Greg Lukianoff on the pod.
FIRE is one of only two nonprofits that get my money. I don’t know how many other small donors they have, but I sure hope conversations like this one inspire more Americans who love their country to start giving. I’m doubling my donation today after listening to your conversation. Tell Greg if he needs volunteers to do research or review things, this recovering lawyer would be proud to donate some time as well.
I agree. With the ACLU now an enemy of free speech, FIRE is a lifesaver. From another listener:
When you and Lukianoff were discussing how students often “shout down” guest speakers they disagree with, I thought of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins:
Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they’re as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who’ll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is more dreary than the ideology of students. ... Kids now don’t have the sense enough to know what they don’t know ... Who can tell them who’s right? Students are a shaky dogmatic lot and the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic.
Percy FTW! Here’s a dissent over something I wrote on the pod page last week:
When talking about potentially debating Sam Harris, you referred to Haviv Rettig Gur as an “Israeli dead-ender.” What do you mean by this? Haviv is a super insightful, thoughtful columnist and podcaster, who in my experience never shies away from criticizing Israel or its government. Just last week he wrote an article in The Free Press about the problem of right-wing extremism in Israel.
I don’t think having a discussion with an Israeli would change your opinions, but as I’ve mentioned multiple times, I do think it would be beneficial to hear from (and ask all your tough questions to) someone who lives there and is extremely familiar with the history of the region. I appreciate that you’re willing to publish dissents about Israel each week, but I don’t understand your hesitation to speak with people who actually live there.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s accurate to call Haviv a “dead-ender” — if by that you mean a “lost cause” in his support of Israel or someone who won’t say every single thing Israel does is wrong/bad. One of the key points he often makes is that Western critics view Israel through a simplistic, ideological lens, treating it as a “moral cartoon” rather than considering its complexity — from both an Israeli and Palestinian perspective. I think if you’re willing to debate Sam on this topic, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be open to talking with Haviv too.
The only problem with this is that I’ve read Gur, and his pose of moderation and reasonableness is just that. Take the piece you cite. Here’s its take on the settler movement in the first paragraph: the problem for Gur is that they “are causing Israel a large and growing headache.” He goes on: “To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel …”
Think about that formulation for a moment. The settler movement is at the heart of the Israeli government; its victims are objectively not Israelis, but Arabs who are being subjected to pogroms, violence, murder, arson, and terrorism — protected by the IDF and Netanyahu’s vile cabinet. But for Gur, it’s a PR problem. That’s the position of the Netanyahu government.
Of these murderous racists and religious fundamentalists, Gur writes this:
