I'm Reed from Bloomington, Illinois.

I'm Jeff Williams from Brooklyn, New York.

The Sound of Yuck America is an independent production supported by listeners like me.

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I'm Jesse Thorne, live on tape from My House in Los Angeles.

It's the Sound of Yuck America from MaximumFund.org and PRI, public radio, international.

It's the Sound of Yuck America.

I'm Jesse Thorne.

My guest, Mark Oppenheimer, is a religion columnist for the New York Times, a professor at Yale University,

which you may have heard of, the director of their journalism project.

And now the author of a new memoir called Wise in Himer, a childhood subject to debate.

It's about the struggles of being a kid who is not really sure what to do with the fact

that he is verbally gifted and not particularly gifted in other areas, not least of which is socially,

and how debate brought him into himself.

Mark, welcome to the Sound of Yuck America.

It's great to have you here.

It's darn good to be here.

Let's talk a little bit about it.

Let's start with your childhood before you got into debate.

You grew up in this kind of classic Jewish Marxist intellectual family.

Yes, my mother was, in fact, a red diaper baby.

Her parents had been members of the Communist Party, and there are sort of legends about FBI files,

...