Let's Talk About the Anxiety Freedom Can Cause

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and cultural theorist whose work includes the award-winning 2016 book “The Argonauts.” Her newest work, “On Freedom,” pierces right into the heart of America’s founding idea: What if there’s no such thing as freedom, at least not freedom as a state of enduring liberation? And more than that: What if we don’t want to be free? Perhaps that’s the great lie in the American dream: We’re taught to want freedom, but many of us recoil from its touch. Nelson describes herself as a “disobedient thinker,” someone who enjoys looking at “the difficulty of difficult things,” and this conversation bears that out. We talk about when and whether freedom is hard to bear, the difference between a state of liberation and the daily practice of freedom, the hard conversations sexual liberation demands, what it means to live in koans, my problems with the “The Giving Tree,” Nelson’s disagreements with the left, the difficulty of maintaining your own experience of art in an age when the entire internet wants to tell you how to feel about everything, and more. Book Recommendations: Possibilities by David Graeber Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:21Ezra Klein?

  A month or two back, I had Amiya Srinivasan on the show to talk about her book, The Right to Sex. And if you heard that conversation, it's all about the conditions of unfreedom, under which our sexual personas and desires are formed. One of the key essays ends with the words, "We have never yet been free." Those words were in my head as I began to read Maggie Nelson's On Freedom, four songs of care and constraint. Nelson is a cultural critic, she's a poet and an essayist. She's the author of the beautiful books, The Argonauts and Bluettes. But this book, On Freedom, asks a question that Srinivasan's book had put in my head, but that I couldn't quite articulate. What if there's no such thing as freedom?

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  At least not freedom as a state of enduring liberation. And more than that, what if we don't want to be free? What if that's the great lie in the American dream? We're taught to want freedom, but many of us recoil from its touch. Nelson's book is made up of four essays on art, sex, drugs, and climate. It's not against freedom, but it's alive in a really challenging way to the difficulties of freedom and the way our negotiations with the anxieties of freedom often end in the unfreedom of others, even of ourselves. Which is not to say the pursuit isn't worth it, but it is to say that to become freer, and freer is certainly possible, and I think desirable, we have to be alive to

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  the difficult work required to practice freedom, to practice it every day. That is really the key idea of this conversation. What if freedom, it's not something we win, but really something we practice even when it's hard? As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:15Ezra Klein?

  Maggie Nelson, what a pleasure.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. I'm thrilled to be here.

• 2:20Ezra Klein?

  Towards the beginning of your book, you have this wonderful quote from James Baldwin, where he says, "I've met only a very few people, and most of these were not Americans, who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It's not a new idea that freedom can feel bad, but it's not an idea you hear that often in American political discourse where freedom is the word everyone wants to lay claim to." But you write towards the beginning that Americans have developed, quote, "a taste for unfreedom." And I know you're writing that in a political context, but why might unfreedom feel good?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think in the book, there's this truism that, you know, we all yearn to be free and sovereign and make choices and be in control of ourselves and, you know, fulfill our destinies, when in fact, you know, a great amount of human behavior is interested in letting go of the burden of having to make decisions, of having the burden of having to be in control of ourselves all the times, I mean, all kinds of things. So I do think that the notion that the kind of sovereign, unencumbered self is the source of, I don't even know if I would say happiness, but a certain kind of well-being, I think, is not all borne out by the way that we behave.

• 3:39Ezra Klein?

  What's the relationship for you between freedom and anxiety?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's related to what I was just talking about, about indeterminacy. You know, I think for those of us who have struggled with anxiety, we quickly learn that a lot of anxiety has to do with what-if thinking, and what-if thinking is a means of taking the beautiful fact and a liberatory fact of not knowing what is going to happen one instance to the next, but of trying to prophylactically protect ourselves from bad possibilities by imagining the worst thing that might happen. And that's very kind of a hallmark of anxious thinking. So anxiety is like, I think of it as something that we do to our fundamental free state, you know, because that state can be so hard to bear, you know, back to the Baldwin.

• 4:27Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned a moment liberatory feelings and senses. And one of the parts of the book that connected to this moment in politics very deeply for me was your own questions about liberatory visions of freedom. And you write that, quote, "I've long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon." Can you tell me about that?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's tricky because so much liberatory rhetoric has mobilized people to take enormous risks and to win enormous gains that are so necessary. I think that the book is concerned, however, with, you know, what you might call a morning after, or what, you know, Jack Kornfield might call like, you know, after the ecstasy, the laundry, and this kind of feeling of the come down, which I describe vis a vis Michel Foucault's differentiation between moments of liberation versus practices of freedom, where the moment of liberation, again, is very crucial to rearrange structures of domination. But when it has to be followed by a practice of freedom, which is, you know, essentially just the ongoing negotiation of ourselves and others in a shared planet, a shared

• 5:37Speaker 01

  community, that is not always going to feel good, or it's not going to always feel like liberatory practice. And so to try and bear that and to try and understand that it doesn't mean anything went wrong. When people have asked me, like, what's the, what's the main takeaway you want from this book? And I, it's a weird question for such a long and dense and marbled project. But I have been thinking that a kind of recommitment to that entanglement, even when it doesn't feel good, while also trying to think of ways that it might feel better and not just living in a kind of orgy of bad feeling that so many of us seem to be tempted by these days, you know, to me that those were real concerns while writing.

• 6:21Ezra Klein?

  You can tell me if this is overreading, but something that I took from the book as a central concern of it is the tension between event horizon, collective freedoms, and what it takes to get there, potentially, and individual freedom. In that Foucault quote, you gestured to, the beginning of it is liberation paves the way for new power relationships. And I think that's often true. I think something that you particularly find in leftist rhetoric is a sense that there is some form of liberation, some form of equality, economic or otherwise, that will feel like liberation to everyone. And a big problem for the left project is at

• 7:05Ezra Klein?

  least on the way there, people don't tend to see it that way, rightly or wrongly. And in the book, I think you're quite critical of that. I think that you are at least very skeptical of that. Is that a reasonable reading?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the book is a kind of, it's a kind of call not to not be afraid, of entering into that. You know, even anarchist philosophy about politics, you know, is all about methodologies by which individual and collective freedom can be continually negotiated. It's not about arriving at a collective freedom where no individual's desires and have never conflict with something that might be of greater good for the group. It's not about that. That philosophy would be about trying to figure out whether they're through, you know, the endless meeting, consensus, direct action, whatever it is, trying to figure out ways to work with the tensions between the individual and the collective rather than dissolve them.

• 7:58Ezra Klein?

  I want to situate us in the chapter about art here for a minute, because I think it gets at these tensions really beautifully. You spent some time on the controversy around an artwork called Scaffold. You describe it in the book as, quote, "a large outdoor sculpture that replicated parts of seven historical gallows, including one on which thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in 1862," end quote. But from what I can tell, it looks like a large wood structure with those seven gallows attached to one another. Could you talk through the controversy around that piece and what you took from it?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, the artist is Sam Durant, who I should say was a colleague of mine at Keller Arts, where I taught for many years. Durant has done work on whiteness and social justice for many years, and he made a piece that was installed at the Walker. It had been... Installed in other places around the world, but it was a kind of compendium of different scaffolds upon which peoples had been hanged. And, you know, I'm sure that Sam meant the piece to be reckoning with history. And, well, I won't speak for him. He's spoken for himself about the piece. But when the piece was put up on the Dakota homeland without outreach to the community and was visible from the road and was looked to be just a mock scaffold

• 9:13Speaker 01

  of the same scaffold upon which this horrific historical event had occurred. People were very upset and felt like it was, you know, very mindless and very ignorant and very harmful to the community. And then the piece became a kind of magnet for people both protesting it, but then also for, you know, bigots who were kind of distorting the piece for their cause. And then Sam Durant went into a council of elders with the tribe in question. And that was a private event that Durant has written about some. But out of that council, Durant agreed to have the piece removed and destroyed and that the intellectual ownership would be transferred to the tribe.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  I should say that that outcome was somewhat in keeping with Durant's practice, which has had to do with social justice and had to do with interacting with different communities and also with a certain conceptual practice where the fact that this was the piece's fate could be easily absorbed into his practice in a way that I think would be different for different artists. So, yeah, that's something about scaffold.

• 10:20Ezra Klein?

  And how did you read that? Because I'd not followed this story when it initially happened. And I found it to be a pretty moving story in a couple of dimensions. One, because I could really see both sides of it. You could imagine what Durant was trying to do and might even have done for some audiences. You could certainly understand the offense that would be taken at the piece. And then there's this long time discussion that you talk about in the chapter of what should art be? What is its capacity to shock? What happens when there are almost violently different readings of something? And should art ever be destroyed? So how, from these perspectives, did you read the outcome of that?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think that the outcome of scaffold was, is really interesting because I think that because of the structure that the tribe was able to offer as a means of discussing the issue, you didn't have your kind of classic stalemate of like rich museum with, you know, board and administrators, you know, coming up against angry protesters demanding a piece of art be removed. You know, you had this other forum, which in some ways was able to enact principles of transformative justice more than other things in that the people who felt most harmed or most at issue, instead of amplifying it, were able to actually reduce it to get the people most involved in the issue

• 11:43Speaker 01

  in the same room to talk, which is different than something that's just kind of seen as more generally offensive, you know, to a kind of like, to just kind of like the loudest dissenters or something. So I think in that way, there was a lot about it that was a model of resolution. But I do, in the chapter, I mean, it is true and it is, you know, obviously remains controversial. But I do think in the chapter that I generally come out thinking that of all the things that need to change in the art world, of which are, are many, and of all of the toxic legacies that exist, that I, I personally don't think that protesting individual pieces of art and having them be removed is the place where I would put the onus of my activism.

• 12:25Ezra Klein?

  Let me try a thought on you because this connected to a book I read a few years ago by John Height and Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind. And this is one of those books about cancel culture and freedom on campus. And they have throughout this argument that cognitive behavioral therapy is a, is a pretty effective way of helping people manage everyday anxiety. And the way it works is by telling you to interpret events in the most generous, least calamitous fashion. And their critique of a lot of what is happening on campuses is that it feels to them it's gone in the opposite way, that people are being taught to interpret events in the most, I think, within the context of your book, it would be called paranoid, but in the context of this, the most victimized fashion, the, the least generous fashion.

• 13:11Ezra Klein?

  And what I found complicated about that book, and I've talked to Hyde about this on a previous version of the show, is that I think these two ways of being might both make sense on different levels, that to change things, you might want the more intense read of them, you might want the collective to say, no, we've decided this is not all right. But as an individual, you might want to try to have the generous read of everything. And there might just not be an answer between them. There might really not be a synthesis that the way you want people to interpret things to make change is different than the way you want them to move through the world for the maximum level of kind of comfort

• 13:54Ezra Klein?

  and freedom for themselves. And I'm curious if you see it that way, or you see there as being more potential for synthesis?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I really, that's so interesting. And I think that part of the problem with the argument that you're laying out from about the coddling of the, is that the American mind, I haven't read it, but I think from what I understand in you saying is that part of the problem is that approaching things with that same generosity also needs to be brought to people with strong complaint, you know, like, so if someone has a strong complaint and really wants to be registered and to be heard about something, going after them with a kind of like tone policing, or, you know, or saying, you know, this is, you know, you're, you're, you're reading in a paranoid fashion, I won't have it because, you know, that's not enacting the same kind of generosity that you'd like to, that you're calling for. So I think that you can't skip over the step of having to hear and to absorb

• 14:46Speaker 01

  and take in, even if you don't agree with all of it, you know, and I think that the chapter about art in my book tries to do something kind of tricky, which is, the idea was trying to demonstrate what it might look like to be able to hear, absorb, also lodge one's own complaints or opinions while at the same time trying to model what, how, how that process doesn't have to lead us inevitably to the most constricted, most paranoid space that we could have a conversation, or, as you say, make change.

• 15:21Ezra Klein?

  Something you seem to me to be centrally concerned with in that chapter is the freedom to have your own reading or experience of a piece of art, a piece of music, a piece of visual art, a book. Your book doesn't talk that much about the internet. It doesn't talk that much about social media as this global nerve center and community where we are told how to read things before we ever come into contact with them. I know from interviews you've given that you'd consider doing a chapter on digital media and didn't, but I'm curious if there were some ideas about the internet you were working with here. Because when I think about my own freedom to experience the world in the way I would

• 16:06Ezra Klein?

  experience it, day to day, the internet and the pressure to know how I'm supposed to react to something already is actually pretty hard to escape. And so I'm curious if you have reflections on that.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would have disqualified me from writing that chapter, the fact that I don't have any social media accounts and never have. Like, I don't, I don't know that I, I don't, I mean, I think there's a distance from it that I think actually is fruitful to look at. It's not that I don't see things on social media or, and I understand what you're talking about, about kind of people being pushed into thinking they need to have feelings or thoughts about something before they've encountered it. But I, just as in a personal way, as a writer and as a writer who considers some of my books, I mean, some of them are criticism, but I consider them a form of creating that I, that I would relate to art. It's really important for me to stay very close to the ground with what I think and

• 17:02Speaker 01

  with testing that out via reading other people's really considered and usually pretty elaborate accounts of what they think. And I really believe in the encounter with art. You know, encountering it, not just like encountering, like going to a museum and looking around, but you know, I'm very, I'm very riveted by, there's a great book by TJ Clark called The Sight of Death, and I just finished Hisham Matar's book, The Return. And there are these certain people who return to paintings over and over again, every day, to see what the same painting has to tell them on different days. I'm very riveted by that kind of slow looking, all of which is to say, because I'm so devoted to all that as a mode of being, and would actually like to be more devoted to it as a mode of being,

• 17:44Speaker 01

  than being pushed around by, you know, internet mobs as to what I'm supposed to be outraged about would really be not something I could afford intellectually, I don't think.

• 17:54Ezra Klein?

  And I'd even take this down a level. We all, I think, have our concerns about the internet mobs, but I actually want to discuss something here smaller than that. Before the internet mobs, just the global sense of sentiment. The, this is good, this is not great, you gotta hear this, this new album dropped, Beyonce's a god. When I think about what it was like to absorb culture when I was younger, and I'm, I'm a generation that straddles the internet, there just wasn't that much way to know about what I was going to see. I couldn't read every aggregated review on Rotten Tomatoes before I saw a film. And I don't mean to sound too old fashioned about this, but, but it did connect to something

• 18:36Ezra Klein?

  in, in your book for me, which is, you, you talk, building off of an essay from, from Ta-Nehisi Coates about I versus we freedoms. And that essay is, is talking more about liberatory movements, but in a smaller sense, I do think there is something you lose in terms of your individual freedom, simply by being more plugged into a collective we. Putting away policing and mobs and everything, there's just a pressure on interpretation in the same way that living in a small cohesive community is different than being sort of anonymous in a large urban center, far from your family. And I wonder how you think about that in terms of practices of freedom. I think it's so easy to consider here statute

• 19:19Ezra Klein?

  and, um, you know, cancellation, but just being a person in the world who wants to practice a, a free way of seeing, how you approach that?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say that what you're describing with the kind of like, you know, you should see this, or this is terrible, or whatever, you know, a lot of it tends to fall into, you know, what I would call kind of idealized or degrade logic, you know, which of course, you could, you could boil down to a thumbs up, thumbs down kind of a thing. But I think, and then in my book, I talk about queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, who, in talking about, again, paranoid reading, was talking about paranoid readings tendency, you know, she called it like, to divide things up into like, the good, bad, you know, puppy dog obedience school model, you know, and I think that that kind of idealized degrade, you know, like you were just saying, Beyonce is a god, Beyonce is, you know, a corporate shill, whatever, that kind of vacillation between idealizing and degradation that paranoid

• 20:14Speaker 01

  reading is so rife with, it's not the space of contemplating cultural artifact that is very interesting to me. I don't, I don't, I don't have, the only thing that's interesting to me about someone telling me something, something's great, is that I will read it, and then I will think, I will have my own experience, you know, but I'm not looking for gods and heroes in my art, or in my authors, you know, I'm, or in my, the art that I love. I'm looking for experiences that make something palpable or sensible to me, that hadn't heretofore an experience I hadn't had, you know.

• 20:49Ezra Klein?

  We've circled the Eve Sedgwick essay on paranoid and reparative readings. Can you just talk a bit about those terms and how they apply in this conversation?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, her essay is, it's a complicated essay, but it's one that it's worth for your listeners, you know, reading and rereading, I think, over the, over the years, if you can, if you can bear, or if you may celebrate her dense theoretical style. I think that the way that her essay has traveled so much has been, it's kind of diagnosis of a paranoid kind of reading, which basically just kind of looks for the weak spot, the thing you disagree with, and then kind of takes that piece of it and kind of says, aha, like, I knew that this was rotten all along, and now that I've identified this, you know, one black spot, I'm gonna watch it bleed out, and, and kind of infect the whole. And

• 21:42Speaker 01

  you can notice in this, a lot of, you know, the kind of logic that you can see with certain cancellations online or something about a kind of, the move. Between a bad action to a bad person, you know, but that same kind of paranoid move. And then, but she goes on more with paranoia, talking about how it's a, it's a strong theory that seeks to explain everything. It seeks to ward off threat, ward off bad surprises. You can see here why anxiety and paranoia might be best buddies. The reparative is something very different, and I think relates to what you were talking about before, about trying to take a more generous stance towards things, which is trying to imagine, I mean, it may not be possible, but it's the kind of thing that

• 22:24Speaker 01

  a viewer or a reader in this context about art does, where one is trying to find or, you know, or succeeding in finding ways of being nurtured by objects that may or may not have been put there, designed for your nurturance. You know, it's a kind of activity that finds a way to transform what's offered into nourishment and make repair. And I just, lastly, I just want to say about the paranoid and the reparative, even though a lot of people have read Sedgwick's essay and say, oh yeah, paranoid is bad, we have to get away from that, you know, reparative reading, good, we'll feel better if we do this, you know. Sedgwick is very clear that the paranoid and the reparative are intermeshed with each

• 23:06Speaker 01

  other, that her own criticism vastly links between them. I think my own criticism has elements of the paranoid and elements of the reparative. I've tried consciously to weight it towards the reparative because paranoia is, I find, a very seductive, but eventually a kind of dead end intellectual activity for me. But Sedgwick would be the first to say that paranoia has produced a lot of strong theories that can be of great importance in movements and things. It's not so much the question of is it bad, it's more the question is what habits of mind does paranoia make possible and which ones does it obscure or not give space to bloom?

• 23:45Ezra Klein?

  I appreciate that disclaimer there at the end, because I do think it is important to say they both have their uses, but something that I took from your discussion of that is I was fascinated by the way you frame them also in terms of

• 24:02Ezra Klein?

  A paranoid reading being a definitive reading, a reading that says you know what this thing is. And a reparative reading as being a more ambiguous reading, a more open reading, an approach where maybe you don't know what this thing is, or maybe what it is to somebody else is not what it is to you. Or what it is to you, and I think this is actually very important, is not what it is to somebody else. And I was curious if you could talk a bit about that side of the theory.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I have long been a fan of unchaperoned experiences in life and art. I mean, I think there's a way of doing like trigger warnings or having museum wall texts. I mean, it's great. I have kids, you know, you're like, it's great to know what you, you know, you're walking into something that's going to be ultra violent or something. It's good to know those things. But I think that, you know, I've always felt very disobedient about being told what something means, being told what to think about it. And I think that one of the virtues of living for a while, and I noticed this when I wrote a previous book of mine from 2011 called The Art of Cruelty, is that, you know, if you live long enough, you also know that your reactions to things,

• 25:12Speaker 01

  whether it's political event, whether it's people in your life, whether it's art objects, whether it's books that you love, whether it's whole philosophies or religions, you know, none of it stays static over time. And you get, this is the reparative part, you, you take what you need from things at the moment that you are where you encounter them. And being able to honor that and to make space for it and to understand that, of course, there can't be a definitive read, not only for other people, but for your own self, to me, is a, is a grand practice of freedom. And it also just allows one to change. I'm just thinking, you know, when I was at a youth, I didn't get Virginia Woolf at all. And when I read, you know, Mrs. Dalloway a couple of years ago, I was like on my knees weeping with thinking,

• 25:55Speaker 01

  how did I live without this book? And I don't know, all of that is totally fascinating to me. And it's, it's even more fascinating when you think about millennia, not just your lifetime in terms of how art means, how philosophies mean throughout a much grander scope of time.

• 26:13Ezra Klein?

  I could imagine someone in the audience right now thinking, well, that's all very good for high art and complex literary theory.

• 26:22Ezra Klein?

  But I spent all the time reading children's books. And the other morning, I didn't even know we owned The Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein book. But at six in the morning, my son somehow pulled out The Giving Tree, which is, of course, about a boy and this tree that gives everything, down to the very material of its existence to the boy. And I will say, we had very different interpretations of that book. It is a tough book to read. He's sitting there enjoying this tale about a tree, and you're sitting there thinking about how you're gonna die alone and unappreciated. And then I was joking on Twitter the other day about the series of books, I Want My Hat Back, and This Is Not My Hat, which is where animals steal each other's hats, and then the bigger one eats a smaller one to get the hat back.

• 27:07Ezra Klein?

  And I was tweeting about it because I find the whole thing funny. But some people were very activated that I didn't see that they're just funny books about animals killing each other over hats, not serious books about animals killing each other over hats. And it's all there. I mean, there's nothing harder to interpret than a children's book, and nothing that gets more kinds of interpretation than a children's book, because what a 37-year-old and what a three-year-old will read in them are really different.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I've, I think I've already given my son the feminist lecture on The Giving Tree, because it's so horrifying.

• 27:37Ezra Klein?

  So horrifying.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And I would bet that my feelings about those books will probably change again, you know? Because it's also the, the context matters, right? Like, there's reading The Giving Tree on your own, and then there's reading it to a child absorbing it. And then, you know, as a parent, you're paranoid about what messages they're absorbing. And, you know, and you, I mean, talk about chaperoning or unchaperoning. You know, there's all kinds of wanting to chaperon the experiences our children have or to explain them for them. But, you know, as they get older, that chaperoning has to fall away, you know? And they have to be able to encounter things on their own and come up with their own response, you know?

• 28:15Ezra Klein?

  And I'll add two more pieces there, because I actually think The Giving Tree is weirdly a good text for this conversation. I felt very self-righteous about my set of tweets about this, and I thought everybody would agree with me, because of course, The Giving Tree is a horrifying book about the worst boy in the world. But two things happened after that. One is that my mom told me she loved the book and thought it was profound in the way that it believes that part of life is giving yourself away to others. And that, of course, made me wonder if I'm a terrible son, but it also is a different read of it than I had. But then someone on Twitter, and this did move me, and it did, it was a lesson to me in not being certain that other people have the same reaction to art that I have, even if I think my reaction is obvious.

• 29:00Ezra Klein?

  But he is the father of an autistic child. And he said, the book really moves him because his child cannot always convey gratitude easily. But it does bring him joy to parent, to help, to provide for his child. And that's a very different context to bring to that book than I did and a very different reaction to it. And so my high dudgeon, I mean, not really high dudgeon, these were joking tweets about reading my son a book. But nevertheless, the kernel of genuine dudgeon in them about the book is really mine. It is not universal, and it's not that there's only one, one way of seeing what is happening in that text.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  And there's also the activity of the reparative, which isn't trying to make everything all better necessarily, but it is, again, about like finding what you need in certain things. And I think that that activity can make us almost insensible to the other parts, you know? And I think, for some reason, while you were talking about the giving tree, I kept thinking about the movie Purple Rain because when Prince died, and I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about what Prince had meant to me, like coming up in terms of sexual permission, about a kind of horniness and perversion that was, you know, really crucial to me growing up. So I watched the movie Purple Rain again, and like a lot of people, I was like, oh my God, like I got all of that out of this.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Like, I kind of had this foundational, not reparative, but just, you know, utterly permission giving and kind of life-changing attitude towards energy and sexuality. And then, of course, the movie is, you know, just littered with horrific sexism, you know, throwing women into dumpsters and you know, even whatever, I mean, you name it. Now, at first, you feel sad for yourself, like, oh, wow, I took all this in when I was 12. And where did I put it, you know? But instead of getting very paranoid about it of kind of thinking like, why did I have to absorb all of that along with getting this? You know, like, did I absorb a toxin along with the poison? You know, I think there's a kind of, maybe this relates back to the beginning of our conversation about the event horizon of freedom.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  It's not that I don't want children's books or purple rain or whatever. It's not that I want these officious parts of them to be there, but I think that the locating in oneself, this deep hunger for like a tool with no blood on it, or like a, or like a perfect piece of art, that nothing about it would bother us or have a rough edge, or would be, you know, as we like to say problematic. You know, noticing that part of oneself and what that desire is for and how it doesn't link up with the world of, um, you know, crazy, wild, imperfect, traumatized, damaged, beautiful humans that we live in, I think can be really important work.

• 31:37Ezra Klein?

  One thing that connects in your book to me is you've a wonderful discussion, I thought, of the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who writes in her book about this idea of no right, no wrong. Do you just want to describe that and your discussion of what it means? The difficulty of living in cones?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that was such an interesting part of the book for me because, I mean, even as you just say it, no right, no wrong. The profound challenge that that kind of thinking poses to especially a cultural moment so defined by ethical certainty and moral righteousness is very, um, in, in the face of so many, you know, noxious and brutal challenges that, that we face and that cause so much suffering. The challenge of what Chodron's laying out and obviously in Buddhist tradition is laying out is nearly so scary or unthinkable, I think, for so many people to just imagine trying on that they don't even want to get into the room with it. You know, I find that room totally fascinating. And what was I was gonna say, what was so fascinating about this part of the book was

• 32:36Speaker 01

  that I was really writing into a lot of her formulations about how us and them thinking, dividing things into right and wrong, has its own aggression that we're responsible for and to. And I was really interested in her discussions about, and again, as I say in the book way before, it was kind of a common word to talk about safe spaces. She's talking about what it means to try and make like a Buddhist retreat at which the environment is safe, but the teachings are profoundly threatening because letting go of ego pursuits or trying on a no right, no wrong mindset can be, you know, so frightening or debilitating

• 33:17Speaker 01

  and different for habits of mind. And then that's where the teachings can become threatening, even if it feels safe. You know, a koan is like, it's a riddle without an answer. And to me, sometimes it means something that has unbearable contradictions, that it's our privilege and burden to hold, you know, and that that can mean wanting to stay off of our bodies and wanting to stay to protect our bodies. It can mean wanting to rush into dangerous experience without chaperone or protection, and it can mean wanting to be protected from any bad consequence. Holding them, to me, is at the root, you know, what you might call like a prefigurative politics, like, you know, finding a way to have how

• 34:02Speaker 01

  we live be more in line with the world that we want to see in the future. So a kind of merging of the event horizon and the daily practice of freedom.

• 34:12Ezra Klein?

  The flip of no right, no wrong, as I was reflecting on it, is also all right, all wrong. You had this lovely line earlier in our conversation about the human yearning for a tool with no blood on it. And one way to hear no right, no wrong, that kind of interpretive freedom is that it's a space that can bear no judgment. And I also think there is a version of it where what you're saying is there will always be excess judgment, that everything is going to be checkered and you're going to live knowing that. And I'm curious how you think about the difference between looking at the world as no right, no wrong, or looking at it as all right, all wrong.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's really tricky, right? I mean, I think it's one of the things that so many of us are most interested in figuring out right now, which is, I mean, in the book, I quote Adam Phillips, a British psychologist, who says, you know, what can we do with people who do unacceptable things if the idea is not just to punish them, you know? And I think that that's a question that we have in so many spheres right now. And I think that, back to the beginning of our conversation, like the difficulties of entanglement mean that a carceral culture aims to kind of shed the duty of entanglement towards those who've done, you know, quote unquote, unacceptable things by putting them in cages and putting them away, you know?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, we've seen this the most with kind of Me Too movement and the kind of like lock them up mentality and then, and then the difficulty that, I mean, not the entire difficulty, but the kind of, you know, the split that I think has erupted in some sense between people call, you know, carceral feminism and anti-carceral feminists, you know, it's very profound and I think it's quite real. I don't think it's like split into camps that can't ever meet, but I think it has to contend with the fact that, I mean, this relates to what we were saying before when you were talking about people and the coddling of the American mind. You can't skip over people's rage. You can't skip over people's punitive desires. You can't skip over people's desires to shun and expel people.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And I think it's a misunderstanding of my book to say that those emotions are not ones that people should have. But, you know, I, I wrote two earlier books in my career about my mother's sister who was murdered in 1969. And the first book I wrote was when the murder was, you know, long unsolved. And the second book I wrote was a kind of journalistic account of the courtroom trial for the accused. And I guess I just feel like I've had a very close up seat to what you might call, you know, a lot of wrong. In that vis a vis, you know, a sexualized murder of someone in my family and sitting

• 36:59Speaker 01

  in a courtroom face to face with the person who's eventually convicted of shooting and strangling her. And I think I have learned so much from those environments in terms of working with strong feeling and working with great pain and what to do with it if you don't want to weaponize it into a desire to punish in the more fruitless ways that our society offers. And like I said, I think it's, I think it's where we all should be thinking, you know, right now, especially as it links up with prison abolition and other forms of racial justice.

• 37:32Ezra Klein?

  Before we leave the art chapter, you make a really interesting point about the different way some forms of art now seek to change us. And I'd not read this before, but it made immediate sense when I did, which is you say, quote, "The 20th century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed, hence an aesthetics of shock. Whereas the 21st century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection, hence an aesthetics of care." Could you tell me a bit about that?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, as in the part that you read, I see both an aesthetics of care and an aesthetics of shock. I see them both as related to what art critic Grant Kester called an orthopedic aesthetic, which is this kind of idea, there's something wrong with us that art can fix. You know, you imagine orthopedic like setting a broken limb or something. And, you know, I've long had a lot of reservations about that particular approach to art, that orthopedic aesthetic approach to art. So I think that my chapter on this, about noting this rhetoric of care, which is often, as I say, opposed to an idea of freedom. I was wary, you know, and I was also wary because care is gendered.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  And for any of those of us who've been in the feminist field for a long time have read a lot about care and that care is not as simple a solution or a panacea as it can often be rendered because of its historical relationship to coercion and it's placing care upon certain bodies, mostly women and slaves or other subjugated peoples, and in order to produce the free subject of the man who can, you know, appear in the public square or make the great art or what have you. So I was had a lot of, I had a lot of anxieties around the, a kind of uncritical mobilization of care. And I wanted to take a whole lot, a whole lot of time to try and sort out what I heard

• 39:31Speaker 01

  happening in contemporary rhetoric about it.

• 39:34Ezra Klein?

  And can you say a bit more about where you come down on that? I think the idea that care can be in tension with freedom is not very intuitive. And I would say, just in my own travels on the, the more left edge of the spectrum, that rhetoric really is dominant in politics too now. And it is very rarely questioned because care sounds great. We want to be cared for. We believe others should be cared for. And so I was interested by your interest in complicating it.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, care edges up against a lot of difficult arenas. I mean, it edges up against paternalism. It edges up against presuming to know for others how they want to be cared for. Judith Butler has been really, I think, cogent on this account in her critique of not a politics of care that would provide services that I think a lot of us listening might support, but rather what her critique has been more around has been what it means to kind of come up with a conceptual category called the vulnerable and that she does not think that that is a fruitful categorical designation and that one, I mean, back to our conversation before about the left and its ambivalence relationship to power.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Does not seem like to her like it's one that will be sustainable and fruitful. And then there's also in art, and this is different from politics, you know, it's different from arguments about, you know, affordable healthcare or the things that can dominate in the political realm. Art is, doesn't aim to provide direct service, I mean, some art might, but most art does not. Most art doesn't have a nameable function, or even if it did, even if the artist said, "I made this work to do X," it doesn't matter because the artist's intention doesn't determine its worth or value, or how it circulates in the world. So that indirectness about art doesn't make for a direct caring relationship, and that's when you engage things like the reparative that are actually quite indirect. And so I think in that way, it's just very, very complicated to imagine art that cares

• 41:30Speaker 01

  and art that harms. I think it's a really counterproductive, counterproductive categories in art, but also maybe, I don't know, I'm not totally sure what I think about this, but, but, but likely in politics too, in the, I think we've seen, and I know that you've been on the, you know, much more on the front lines of seeing and talking about this than I am, but as I quote in the beginning of my book, this slogan that I think we've all seen in COVID, kind of saying like, "How do I explain to you that you need to care for other people?" You know, that you should care for other people, and this kind of like, constant drumbeat of the selfish, uncaring people over there, and then the caring, victimized by the unvaccinated those of us over here. I, I don't think these are fruitful formulations, I just really don't.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Um, I, it's not that I don't feel them myself, but I think, again, with habits of thought, just because you feel it doesn't mean it's a habit of thought that you should deepen and deepen the groove of it. I think it's worth interrogating.

• 42:51Ezra Klein?

  You have a fascinating chapter on sex that I want to explore a little bit, and what sexual liberation did and didn't achieve, which I think really relates to that formulation you offer. And you say that the sexual liberation promised and fought for was real, and it really did achieve liberation. But, quote, "What they didn't do, because no one can, is bring about a world in which the burdens and blessings of practicing freedom have been lifted from the living." Can you talk a bit more about that, about the ways in which the liberation itself has become difficult?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sympathize with, and I obviously in the face of what's happening in Texas and elsewhere, I mean, I sympathize thoroughly with this feeling that we're in backlash, or we're backsliding, or certain things that were promised, sexual freedoms haven't yet arrived, or have been attenuated, or are in danger of being lost. So all of that I agree with. But I think that only focusing on that, you know, kind of reinscribes a habit of not looking at and growing the places where we do have freedom, and where we can practice freedom and experiment in our lives. And I think that there's a lot about sex that can make people feel bad, or constricted, or it's not good enough, and what's on offer isn't fair.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Again, those things are, they're real. But a lot of me, myself, people that I know, you know, that is not, that's not a full and complete picture of their erotic and sexual lives, and where there's so much possibility, and where there is real freedom to pick one's partners, you know, not for everybody, but for a lot of people, and to move towards and away different sexual experiences that one might want or not want to have. And I think that when I say the burdens of practicing freedom, the burdens and blessings haven't been lifted from the living, I think it's because sex is a... You can have all of the conditions met for, quote unquote, like, good or ethical sex in the world, and it doesn't mean that you're not going to still be wrestling with...

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Shame, vulnerability, disappointment, feelings of humiliation, and not always of the hot variety, you know, all kinds of things that sex also, I think, just inhales, because I think interrelation entails those things when you're contending with doing something with another person who's non-synonymous with you, especially if it involves degrees of nakedness or degrees of losing the self or offering up the self, where the self is porous, you know, often quite literally. None of that's going to be wished away and replaced by a non-vulnerable, non-risky, only-good-feeling experience that we call sex, or at least that's what I believe, so.

• 45:38Ezra Klein?

  This is a place in the book where I think you describe a very interesting practice of freedom, to go back to that language, which is approaching sex, at least in your own life, I think, is where you put it, as a site for learning and intelligence. Can you describe that a bit more?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the strongest currents of that chapter was just to say that, you know, as we have this discourse of complaint and protest of the not good enough, that doesn't substitute for other conversations in which we can speak about sex and desire in ways that particularly for women are just, I just, the deafening silence around them is staggering. And I think that what I was really trying to get at is that like, we have these frames, and for women, talking about sex as a frame of trauma or violation is actually, even though it breaks a lot of, it can be incredibly brave to do so in certain circumstances, to talk about sex that way, to only talk about sex that way

• 46:39Speaker 01

  or to have that kind of bleed into, it can actually unwittingly reperform the fact that that's actually an acceptable frame for women to talk about sex because it doesn't, because it renders them victims and it renders them non-subjects in the experience. And so I think, and then to be a subject, and to be a subject that desires, you know, it's utterly crucial, I think, to occupy that position. And I think to do so, other frames have to be available to you. And I think one of the ones I offer in that chapter Which was given to me by Jennifer Doyle in her book Campus Sex, Campus Security, was the idea of sex as a scene of learning. Again, we don't have to displace when there are traumas and violations that occur. We don't have to displace that frame with

• 47:22Speaker 01

  that, but that we have to have other places that when we want to talk about experiences that weren't that, that we can inhabit and use to speak from.

• 47:31Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a place where you get back to the question of, I don't exactly want to put this one in the frame of a taste for unfreedom, but maybe freedom being hard to bear. And in this case, particularly interpretive freedom being hard to bear. People have a lot of really difficult sexual experiences. They're the ones that are clear violations. But then, and this is something you explore quite a bit in your chapter, there are the ones where there is a violation that you feel that you are part of. Maybe even the violation was something you did to yourself. You put yourself in a situation to see someone you knew you shouldn't see, or ask for something you knew you shouldn't ask for. This connects a little bit to the drug chapter about sometimes giving up

• 48:12Ezra Klein?

  agency as a kind of freedom, but then maybe one you regret. And I want to be extraordinarily careful about what I'm saying here. I'm not saying that anybody is responsible for the actions of someone else, but interpreting our own actions can be really scary, and it can be a little bit annihilating. And I think sometimes in those contexts, there is a relief in there being some framework that somebody else can give you for how to understand and experience that maybe you don't have a categorization for.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, even, you know, and I respect and I second your, you know, saying you want to be exceedingly careful here. But I would also just point out that part of the reason why we have to, you know, why we feel like we have to be so careful is that victim blaming is so rampant, and it's so pernicious. And yet, if we never

• 49:06Speaker 01

  I'm here talking, you know, about women mostly, but you know, but you know, everybody. But if, but if, but if women never get to engage in this space where they ask themselves questions about their actions and their accountability and their role that they're playing in different scenarios, if we're forever postponing that, deferring it, muting it because we're so afraid about what rape culture has done to us, then we never get to live in a, in a site of sexual agency or subjectivity, you know, worth its value. And I don't, I'm not willing to let that go. So I'm willing to take the risk of whatever willful or pained misreadings will come from that. But I think it's so worth it, that

• 49:47Speaker 01

  like I say, I was willing in this chapter to go out on that limb and to take up that space because it's been so important in my own life because I want to know what I do and what I've done, you know? And I can look back now and see so many patterns of behavior of mine. And if I never could see my part in them, I could repeat things I didn't want to repeat. And I think, you know, some of this gets diceiest in, you know, moving especially into the drug chapter too, where I think that the drive towards obliteration of, of the need to always be protecting the self, especially for women and especially in sexual

• 50:32Speaker 01

  encounters, you know, is totally understandable to me because, you know, again, to go back to like, growing up with my mother's sister having been murdered, the kind of drumbeat of like, if you let down your guard, you're going to end up in a ditch on the side of the road was so constant for me, you know, that of course, one reaction to that is to try and find ways where you can just finally let go of the burden of, of, of having to be so vigilant over your safety all the time. It's exhausting, you know, and it's not, and it's not a form of, of encountering the world that many women, you know, that, that it feels like we've been coerced into it. So there can be whole, whole realms in which we might try and explore, you know, scenes of learning where we try and learn other ways to be.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And acknowledging my part in those, I think, has really has been crucial for me.

• 51:21Ezra Klein?

  I think it is a telling and obvious fact about this sexual moment that there has never been a wider space of sexual freedom available to people. And there's also an extraordinary amount of sexual discomfort and hesitancy. And you see that both in the culture and in what people say, but you also see it just in literal rates of sexual activity among younger people. And it connects very deeply to this idea that freedom often doesn't feel good. It is scary to have such a range of action that you can also be blamed for all these actions. There's nobody there to say exactly this was right and this was wrong. Or if you just stayed on this side of the line.

• 52:06Ezra Klein?

  You get into this really sharply with conversations about consent. And I've done writing in the past about affirmative consent laws. And I tend to be somewhat for them, but they are a very, I mean, I completely understand the view that they make sex pretty unsexy. And they force you then to be so sure if you're not going to live in that affirmative consent world, that, you know, that's a lot of second guessing yourself. And I just think this is a true thing across a lot of society right now. We have a lot of freedom. And that is, to use a phrase from the psychologist Jennifer Richison, that democratizes discomfort. It used to be that you had the discomfort and the second guessing and the hesitation

• 52:46Ezra Klein?

  of certain experiences or risks really falling on particular people or communities entirely. And now it's widened out. And so everybody feels it and that feels unfree. But weirdly, it is a byproduct of freedom.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's really interesting. I never quite thought about it like that before, but I do think that. And I can hear the paranoid reader coming in saying, but is it really so free? But I do think that just on the most basic level, again, I would never say, I mean, like I say, I have kids, I see what still goes on. And even in the most progressive queer friendly-ish circles, I mean, it's not that we've dissipated all kinds of phobias and bigotries at all. But all of that said, there is a lot of freedom. I think you're right.

• 53:37Ezra Klein?

  I think there's something very interesting in your invocation of even the most progressive spaces here, because I live in one of those spaces, more or less. And something that is very evident about them right now is they are obsessed with building structures of communication, of repair. I mean, you hear this on one level with questions simply of consent, but it ladders all the way up of a parrot of justice, of fixing, of calling out. And some of them, you can say are good, and some of them are bad, or maybe they're all good and all bad. But whatever they are, I think one way to understand them is in these spaces that are on some level the most free, they tend to be affluent.

• 54:19Ezra Klein?

  They tend to allow people now a very, very, very wide range of sexual, gender, and emotional expression. They are having to create new structures to help people communicate their way through the gray areas of freedom. And they're not there yet. This kind of freedom, I mean, it's very, very new, even in this country, even in these places. What is normal in San Francisco now is not what was normal even 15 years ago. Things just change a lot, and they've changed even since I was a little bit younger. I mean, I grew up in Southern California. I went to school at UC Santa Cruz. I've lived in fairly permissive environments, and the ones my child will inhabit are going to be different than the ones I did. And so it's interesting.

• 55:05Ezra Klein?

  I think this is all very halting, but I do think we're in an era where, at least the people in these spaces, it's not always framed this way, but it's a lot of work right now to try to build these fairly rigid feeling. And often, it feels like it sucks the fun out of it, but they are structures to manage freedom. And I think they're more usefully conceptualized that way.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I like what I kind of hear under what you're saying of. This acknowledgement that things might be imperfect or beyond imperfect, flawed, or even constricting, but that we're, but that we're in process, you know, and, and that it's okay to not know where we're going or have it all figured out yet. I think that that's important. And at the same time, I think that a little history, which I'm not a very historical minded thinker. I'm more of a, you know, philosophically minded thinker, but I do feel like in my chapter, I, on sex, I tried to offer a little, you know, just a little recent history and maybe mostly laundered

• 56:10Speaker 01

  through philosophy of someone like Foucault to remind us that every attempt to draw circles around what ethical sex is, you know, creates an inside and outside of what that is. And so consent culture would be an example, like you're saying about affirmative or enthusiastic consent. You draw that line and then a sex that doesn't have that begins to be on the outside. And again, you can go back to like no right, no wrong, or us them thinking. It's not that it, I mean, like you say, like these, these, these attempts to build structures matter. They're not just to be thrown out because, um, you know, we can decide that they do more good than harm. You know, we can decide that they're worth their flaws. But I do think it's really important to note what we're doing and to think, as I say

• 56:50Speaker 01

  in my chapter about, um, for people who make those lines and those circles, I think there can be a lot of biases built into them by what maybe for those people seems like ethical or desirable sex. And I think in terms of, you know, back what we talked about earlier with art and audience, to really respect heterogeneity. Um, and this is where like someone like Gail Rubin comes in with her principle of, you know, benign sexual variation. It's really important because we really aren't all the same. And what might mean something to you sexually, a body part, an experience, just even thinking about it or seeing a picture of it, that might trigger something in you that is that you

• 57:33Speaker 01

  feel very wrong about for a variety of reasons. It really, it's important to understand it really might not be that or have that for somebody else.

• 57:42Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a very sharp way of putting it. Towards the end of the book, you have this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, where he says, "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." And something that really struck me about you ending the book with that quote is that it's not a sentiment you hear that often, not necessarily because people don't believe it, but because it's a politically unhelpful sentiment. I mean, you write in the book about climate crisis and, you know, there's still rampant sexual violence and poverty. And, and there's a kind of constant focus, in many ways correctly, on all the work that needs to be done. And so there is something radical in saying there is more

• 58:26Ezra Klein?

  freedom for probably the kind of people who are reading your book to live a good life and to practice freedom amidst that than they sometimes give themselves credit for or are willing to bear the responsibility of. And so I was curious to hear a little bit about what the quote means to you and how you decided to make it into the finale of the, the book.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'll get to the quote in one minute, but I just think when you were saying that at the end about affluent enough to be, say, listening to this podcast or something like, I think that, you know, really bothers me, and I'm sure you've had this experience as a parent too, like, it really bothers me when fellow parents like at kind of the height of like their political or economic or, you know, varieties, forms of power might just about climate, you know, just kind of be like, well, I guess we screwed it all up for the next generation, you know, and like this kind of just totally premature and to my mind, you know, fairly repugnant, just dumping of the problems of our times, you know, upon the youth, like they'll, like they'll solve it, you know, I, I think it's

• 59:24Speaker 01

  so, um, so I think in that sense that not slipping into a sense that, um, well, these times are bad, but you know, it'll be upon you to render a way to make them good. No, like the Emerson quote, you know, these times are good ones, if only we know what to do with it, like all times. I mean, that's the kicker, right? These times, like all times are good ones, if we know what to do with it. I mean, I'm not quoting it exactly perfectly, but, um, Emerson's quote is a, like a lot of, you know, Buddhist koans or things, it's a, it has a galling aspect to it, you know, because he immediately began attenuating it with like, as I do in the book with like, what do you mean this time? This time with, you know, a mass extinction, this time with this police tuning, you know, this time with the breast cancer I was just diagnosed with, this time with, you know,

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  all these things, right? This time with this pandemic where, you know, we're 20 months in the hole of our houses. I mean, like, give me a break, right? So the galling part of it, though, to me is the, That's the part that I'm most fascinated by because to to allow for that statement to feel true or to allow it, whatever truth is in it to kind of pierce us, we have to let go of something. And we have to let go, I think, in this instance of all of that attenuation to say, what would it mean to say this time, like all times is a is a good one? And what does it mean to know what I want to do with it? What would it mean to hold that feeling in my body, in my mind, you know, and and really feel like it was real? And I feel like

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  by the end of the book, I, I really feel it, you know, and, I mean, someone was interviewing me the other day and they said, like, well, when have you felt most free in your life? And kind of without even thinking about it, I just said, right now, I just said, right now, talking to you, like, right now. And I, it was a strange answer I didn't see coming, but I think it was a result of kind of drenching myself in that Emersonian notion and provocation and really believing it and believing that, you know, another big question that keeps coming out of the climate stuff is like, how do we talk to our children about this mess? How do we not? Because, you know, I think a lot of the mental health issues that,

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  you know, we're all seeing are about a kind of normal feeling of no future, combined with the pressures of climate change and pandemic, a lot of really increased agonies about the notion of futurity itself. I feel a real sense of of duty and desire to transmit something that is about the great opportunity of our times and about the great privilege that it is, you know, to to just be here and, you know, to be talking to you in them. I think it's, I think it's extraordinary, you know, and I, and I hope to be, I hope to be able to both feel it and transmit it in my writing and in my talking.

• 1:02:12Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to come to a close. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  The first one is by David Graeber, an anthropologist who really sadly died, an untimely death during the pandemic. It's called Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. And Graeber, for most of you people who know him, probably know him as associated with anarchist thinking and Occupy movement. But the book, just when I was looking back at it, I realized how deeply it informed my thinking, and in particular, these kinds of trying to get away from paranoid thinking and trying to, as he kind of describes it, what would criticism be like or do if it didn't just listen to other people for long enough to find the thing that we thought was wrong and then to write out our disagreement? Like, what else would it do and how to listen?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Then a book that came out while I was writing my book was Sadia Hartman's Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments. You know, she takes as her project writing about young black women at the turn of the century, the 20th century, that is, in writing about, as she says, "They struggle to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free." And the last book is Judith Butler's book that came out in 2020 called The Force of Nonviolence. And this book came out right when I was turning in my book, and I think I just got one quote from it stuffed into on freedom. But I just wanted to read this little part where Butler writes, "Relationality is not by itself a good thing, a sign of

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  connectedness, an ethical norm to be posited over and over against destruction. Rather, relationality is a vexed and ambivalent field in which the question of ethical obligation has to be worked out, in the light of a persistent and constitutive destructive potential." Her refocus on what nonviolence can mean in the 21st century and her refocus on it not being a suppression. Repression or ignoring of aggressive or destructive impulses in us, but in fact, a kind of nonviolence is kind of a way in which we actually can deal with those things. I found really refreshing and really for those of us committed to nonviolence, a kind of new, a new way of talking about it for a new century.

• 1:04:31Ezra Klein?

  Maggie Nelson, your book is On Freedom. Thank you so much.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. Thank you.

• 1:04:48Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roji Karma, and Annie Galvin. It's fact checked by Michelle Harris and original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.