Kathryn Schulz on Misinformation and Coping with Grief | The Strong Do What They Can but the Weak Must…

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Kathryn Schulz about her new book Lost & Found: A Memoir, the perpetual disconnect between reality and rhetoric, the importance of confronting darkness and dealing with grief, and more. Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for “The Really Big One,” an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent book is Lost & Found, a memoir that grew out of “Losing Streak,” which was originally published in The New Yorker and later anthologized in The Best American Essays. Her other essays and reporting have appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Food Writing. A native of Ohio, she lives with her family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN. CO/STOICNovo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. This year, get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at bank novo.com/STOICNew Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free! As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Kathryn Schulz: Homepage, Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  "The strong do what they can, but the weak must." 2,500 years ago, Thucydides laid it down as the law of geopolitics, and unfortunately, of life. "The strong do what they can," he said, "while the weak struggle as they must." It is this reality that explains why great powers exert their will on the world, often without consequences, and why victims so often are stuck to consequences. While we often focus on the fatalism of the first half of this proverb, the Stoics would point us to the second half, for there is agency and inspiration and courage in it. Was that not the role picked up by Cato and the rest of the Stoic opposition in Rome

• 1:26Speaker 00

  as they fought against tyranny, outvoted, and outgunned, and out of time? Was that not the fate of Stockdale in the prison camp in Vietnam, struggling valiantly against his captors? And is this not now what we see coming out of Ukraine? A sovereign nation brutally and capriciously invaded by a fading great power, and yet resisting with their fists and teeth? A Spartan warrior was once spoken to of surrender by some timid countryman. "He picked up a mouse by the tail and watched it claw and bite at him. When the tiniest creature defends himself like this against aggressors, what ought men do, do you reckon?" he said. "And so too must we resist and fight, that the strong and the evil will do what they

• 2:11Speaker 00

  do, but we can struggle against it. We can make them pay for every inch and dollar of it. We can do what we will. We can do what we must. And as that mouse might attest, no species survives long without a will to do so, without a will, to protect itself." I don't know about you, but I've been inspired. I've been both horrified and also inspired by the events in Ukraine. And I got an email from someone that I know in Ukraine that I've worked with before. And they asked what I might do with my platform. And so I wrote this email today, but I also took the step, you might have seen it, I posted it on Instagram.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  I decided I am going to donate all of the royalties from my Russian and Ukrainian published books. It's not a huge amount, it's about $15,000, but I'm going to donate all that money to a charity I found here in Ukraine called Come Back Alive. You can find it comebackalive.in.ua that donates body armor and supplies and supports the soldiers of Ukraine. You can donate whatever you want. As they say, "Ukraine is the shield of Europe, and we believe that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere." I very much agree with that. And since 2014, Come Back Alive has been the largest foundation providing support to

• 3:38Speaker 00

  the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They've raised more than $20 million from 50 countries, and they provide assistance to around 100 combat units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. There's total transparency and reporting about where that money goes. You can check that out. I hope you can make a donation as well, or just support the people of Ukraine by speaking out, by reaching out to representatives in your country, or your state, or your city. I think they're right. What happens anywhere is a threat to all of us everywhere. And freedom is not just a thing that happens. It's something that we defend, it's something that we insist on, it's something that has to be protected.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And I think you see there in the leadership, not just from President Zelensky, but from the everyday Ukrainian citizens who are acting like I hope we might all act if such a thing were to happen to us. You can support Come Back Alive at comebackalive.in.ua.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  One of the best books I read while I was writing my book, Trust Me, I'm Line, was called Being Wrong by the wonderful Catherine Schultz. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. She's won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize. You may have read this piece. We talk about it in today's interview, about the potential catastrophic tsunami slash earthquake that could hit the Pacific Northwest at any time. So when I found out that she had a new book coming out, Lost and Found, a memoir that grew out of her piece, Losing Streak, in The New Yorker, which was later anthologized in The Best American Essays, just an incredible piece of writing.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  It's about the loss of her father and then the new relationship and ultimately marriage that she has and then having her first kid. This beautiful piece of writing. I was just so excited to have her on. And I always love talking to someone whose work isn't just something that just came out that I like, but actually influenced me and shaped my writing. And Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error was definitely that. And so we ended up having a great conversation. I was really excited to talk to her. You've almost certainly read things that she's written before.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  She's in a million anthologies of the best American writing and just a fascinating thinker and human being. I was really excited to have this. I'm excited to bring it to you. Here is my interview with Catherine Schultz. You can check out her new book, Lost and Found, which was published this year. And of course, her other book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. She's a native of Ohio, but she lives on the eastern shore of Maryland. I think you're really gonna like this interview. You can go to her website at catherineshultz.com or follow her on Twitter at @CatherineSchultz. Enjoy.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  I was, I was reading your New York Times piece about book tour in, in this new world we're in. It is, it is, it's a bit anticlimactic. It's also so much better because you don't have to leave your house.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I know. It really is kind of all of the things at once, you know, as so much of life is. Yeah. I mean, for me in particular, I mentioned that in this piece, but I've got this amazing little five month old daughter and I was steeling myself, you know, back in, in December to get on the plane and just leave her behind. But I admit that I, it's delightful, you know, at most I miss like, you know, 10 minutes of bedtime or something. So I do feel lucky about a lot of it.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  I was, I want to talk about that at the end, but I, I, I know, like now that I haven't left my kids for as much as I haven't left them over the last two years, I'm like, how did I do this all the time? And why did I do it all the time?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  It's like my, my old life is so incomprehensible to me, which is what I kind of think you were talking about in that piece a little bit.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. How old are your kids?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  I have a five year old and a almost three year old.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, fun.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  It's, it's been, it's been crazy.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Fun, chaotic. Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  That was what I was going to start with because I read your piece several years ago about the, the, the potential tsunami slash earthquake in, in Portland or in Oregon. And all I, I feel like existential dread is something that you have thought about a lot as a result of that. And that's one of the feelings I think people have certainly experienced over the last two years. Because like when you, when I read that piece, I, I mean, I took two lessons from it. One, don't live in Oregon, as beautiful as it might be. But then two, that, that there are these massive sort of deliberately unexplored

• 8:45Speaker 00

  or under considered existential risks to us as human beings, perhaps us as a species, climate change, pandemics, et cetera, that if one thinks too much about, you become paralyzed. But if you don't think about it all, you're incredibly vulnerable to. So how do you think about that?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Boy, it's a good question. I mean, it's kind of the big question. You know, in some ways, being a journalist is helpful because on the one hand, there's like an absolute mandate that you do think about it, you know, if you're going to write about this kind of stuff. And it gives you at least the illusion of feeling like you're doing something useful with your thoughts. You know, they're not just keeping you up at 3 a.m., they're keeping you up at 3 a.m., but then you're putting them on the page and hopefully maybe someone somewhere, you know, pulls their house to the foundation and their family survives an earthquake or what have you. I have no illusions that we are nearly as powerful as we wish we were as journalists, but it's nice to feel like you're doing something.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, at the same time, I think it does kind of wards off despair, not only because you feel like you're actively working towards some ends, but also because on some practical level, you do have to go read and learn and think about something else. You know, I guess I could have spent my life after that, just like working on seismic safety issues, and I admire those who do. But for me, since that's not what I do, there is always something else to go think about and life and the world are busy and full of things. So it's fun to go think about other things. But I am also, to be honest, just predisposed towards existential dread. So I think the deep answer is I'm just used to it.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, like I think the pandemic brought forth this phenomenon, which clearly existed before, but this idea of doom scrolling, like, hey, I'm going to pick up my phone. I tend to find like after I'm like waiting for my kids to fall asleep, you know, and I'm just sort of stuck, they're like laying on me or, you know, I can't leave the room just yet, or I'll make noise on the floor and it'll wake them up. For whatever reason, there's a part of my brain that says, this would be a good time to go make yourself profoundly unhappy and worried about what is happening in the world. And I feel like, yeah, whether it's thinking about a tsunami that could wipe out, you know, a good part

• 11:06Speaker 00

  of the Northern Pacific, or yeah, climate change or whatever, we have this tendency to just sort of fixate on these massive dangers over which we have very little control. And it's almost like a form of torture slash entertainment.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I have tried really hard over the last several years to to make a habit of not lying awake worrying or or sitting around at midday worrying without just getting up and doing something. This is not actually entirely practical all the time, and I'm certainly not good at it all the time. But at some point, you know, in 2016, when I did sort of, my father had just died, the world in general seemed like it was careening off in terrifying directions. And my propensity to lie awake worrying was was getting was also careening off in terrifying directions. And I just thought, I can't, I can't do this to myself. It's useless to the world. It's destructive to me.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  This, this is a silly way of coping. And so I try hard to do something. And sometimes that feels like something practical, you know, go actually help someone, you know, use my money or my resources or my mind or whatever, whatever I can to be useful in the world. And sometimes it's just acknowledging that there is nothing useful to be done in that moment, including worrying, and that I would be much better served by, you know, going and reading a novel or whatever I can do to kind of center myself in in the things I actually cherish about humanity and cherish about the world and kind of refresh myself that way and start over.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then it's like there's the propensity to doom scroll and which is obviously impotent and doesn't do that much. And then I definitely have seen during COVID, there's another part of society that that decides, well, because that makes me uncomfortable and would be unpleasant, I'm not only not going to think about it, I'm going to deny that it exists altogether and almost create a religion around rejecting this uncomfortable truth that journalists or scientists or whomever, who have very little agenda or motivation to make it up, you know, just accuse them of making it up, which it's a, I haven't quite figured that out either.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you and me both, you know, I wish I had the novelistic abilities ascribed to, you know, the quote mainstream media. I wish I had invented this vast, complicated web of conspiracies to control the world, but I'm not that creative. And like most of us, I just look around and try to learn from experts and figure out what's really going on. But yeah, I mean, denial is a really interesting thing, right? You know, and I, it's obviously a very deep psychological response, and it obviously operates at every level, from the personal to the collective and the political. And it is a little shocking to live in an era where I feel like it is taking on incredibly broad scale communal and political shape. Not that it doesn't always exist there to some extent, but you

• 14:13Speaker 01

  know, I think if you'd asked me 15 years ago to talk about denial, I would have thought about primarily the kind of personal experiences of it, you know, a reaction to grief or to sudden bad news, or just unwillingness.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Maybe the Holocaust denial. That was like the one area.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Maybe the Holocaust denial, right, sure, sure. And yes, I do feel like since then, we've just, you know, I mean, the Sandy Hook denial undid me, you know, and we live in an era of so much right now, you know, people who don't believe in the vaccines, people who don't believe in climate change, people who believe the election was stolen. I mean, it could go on and on. There's, there's, there's kind of no baseline empirical fact that someone isn't prepared to stand up and say, that's not true. And it's very difficult to live in a world that looks like that, you know, and it's hard to extend charity towards others, which I, which I do try very hard to do. When you feel like, are we, are we on the same planet here?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it's weird, too, because the ones you just mentioned, I'm not sure if this was true in the past, but it tended to be there was, there were a handful of disparate conspiracy theories, you know, maybe you have someone who's a Holocaust denier, then you have someone over here who doesn't believe the moon landing or whatever. But like the ones you just mentioned, they seem to all be the same. Percentage of like that is like a through line like I just read a piece and it was sort of specifically about the anti vax movement, but it was basically that it's it's too big to fail at this point like it's it's not such a fringe group that it can be written off, it's having to be absorbed like when there's that many people who are into it, inevitably politically, culturally, etc., people will have to start to cater to it

• 15:52Speaker 00

  because it almost has a gravitational pull because it's so many people. And it is strange how that denialism has become just almost a subculture of just like people who just reject information that is uncomfortable or in some way in dieting of the status quo. You know what I mean? I think that's what they all have in common is that to like if you accept them, it creates some either the need for moral outrage or, you know, change, like lifestyle change or political change. But if you reject them, then you just get to keep being who you are and you don't have to do anything.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, you know, I'm terrified by the notion that suddenly, you know, we will start to see more and more people cater to what should by rights be fringe beliefs? I mean, start to we're obviously already seeing it, right? I mean, plenty of people who know better are endorsing absolutely wrongheaded and dangerous notions about, you know, the last presidential election, about the vaccines, etc. And yeah, it's hard to see, it's hard to say the good way out of that, you know, because I don't think we can just seed reality or seed our moral responsibility toward one another in the kind of craven name of, well, there's so many of them, you know, we can't just confront

• 17:19Speaker 01

  them, confront them head on, or we'll lose their money, or we'll lose their votes, or we'll lose their respect, or what have you. And I sort of feel like, well, we have none of those right now. You know, what is it you think you have to lose? That should not be the starting position. The starting position should be, you know, we actively advocate for what we believe in.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Or and and that that having to state and restate basic facts that this is somehow like a transgressive or even political act. Right. So like, like, I can already, I can already predict emails that I will get for this little conversation we're having where people are like, why did you have to get political? Why did you have to talk about that? But which is inherently not a political act like there, there is such a thing as information and data, in fact. And it has come to this place where, like, yeah, that writing, hey, I think Oregon is at risk of being wiped out in an earthquake is somehow like an activist position.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Right. Or something, right? Like, it feels because, again, because by writing about it, you're essentially prompting people to do a thing like the conclusion is so obvious based on the information you're providing. And yet people really seem to just reject the idea of being prodded or that like it be implied that they should have to do or change or accept anything.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Well, I'm very pleased to say I have not yet encountered, you know, a large battalion of like tsunami truthers who don't believe this is gonna happen. But but I certainly take the broader point, which is it is. It's very, very hard to get people to change their mind, you know? And I think actually, one of the difficult jobs that that all of us should be confronting is figuring out how to do a better job of that because I don't really see that we have a choice at this point.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  No, I and I loved I love I have your first book in hardcover, which I read when it came out. I loved it so much. I was just I pulled it off the shelf and I could see all the the notes that I took when I when I read it. I thought it was so so great because it's a tricky thing, right? Like even what we're talking about.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  The idea of doubt or asking questions is so essential. And yet, it's almost as if those very critical things have been sort of weaponized or used against, like certainty, as you say in the book, is very, very dangerous. And so when people are just asking questions or proposing alternative whatever, that feels like it's in line with getting towards truth. And so it should be a good thing. And yet, it's somehow leading us not closer to being right, but closer to being wrong about more things.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  I mean, believe me, Ryan, I have thought often and hard about what this book would look like if I had written it 10 years later. And I think the short answer is I probably wouldn't have.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  You wouldn't have written it at all, you think? Because it's too unstable a ground?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, who knows, right? But I certainly, on the one hand, look, I absolutely stand by what I wrote in that book. And I believe very deeply in epistemological humility, right? And in doubt as a, as a very healthy kind of posture towards the world, and for that matter, the cosmos. And I believe, as I, as I said a moment ago, I believe in trying to extend charity to people with whom I disagree. So the kind of core tenets of this book still feel right to me, and they still feel like me. On the other hand, you're absolutely right that I watched them get weaponized, you know?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And I watched, I watched the, the position of, of that kind of humility and of extending charity start to feel, I think, in the culture at large, but certainly within me, a little less and less tenable, if not intellectually, then certainly politically. You know, there are, there is a larger list today of things I'm confident that I'm right about and other people are wrong about than there was, you know, when I wrote that book. And I don't think that's because I've become more arrogant over that time. I think it's because of what you and I were just describing, this increasing disconnect

• 21:44Speaker 01

  between reality and rhetoric, the increasing number of people who have been persuaded to abandon. Actually, all the other tools I have to keep for in this book, you know, research, reason, science, empiricism, the deep humility, not the shallow one of like, well, I'm just wondering about things, the deep doubt of is this really how the world works, not just the kind of doubt kind of cynically strewn by politicians. And I, yeah, I don't, I don't know that I could advocate for, I'm sure I could, but I don't know that I would have spent four years of my life, you know, let's say the last four years of my life, thinking about how to make peace with my own fallibility and the likelihood

• 22:28Speaker 01

  that I'm wrong in an atmosphere, as important as I think that project is, in an atmosphere when a great number of people are telling me I'm wrong about things I'm, to be honest, quite confident I'm not wrong about, and nor are you, and nor are most of us, you know, who believe in, in

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  in ways of getting to the, to the root of things.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Well, that, that's what I think is interesting about it is that like you, you're talking about there's more things you're certain about than, than you were in the past. It's almost as if because generally, let's say the Overton window was different, or just like the stakes of the discussions were lower, it's like you didn't need to have an opinion on the thing, you didn't need to get to a place of certainty because generally, reality had sort of coalesced around those things. And now that people are questioning the very fabric of the, it's like, it's like, how strong did your beliefs in liberal democracy need to be when everyone is more or less agreed that liberal democracy is a good thing?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  And then when people start to undermine the foundations of that thing, it forces you to go, hey, this is, this is, this is important. We can't take this for granted. So I wonder if part of it is just, we could be a little bit more epistemologically loose and flexible when we were all on the same, we were all roughly on the same page. Now we're not even reading the same book.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, and I don't want to pretend that there was some kind of, you know, harmonious past where we, in any kind of broad sense, we all were on the same page. And yet, I certainly share, you know, your sense that somehow what was a kind of tenuous center holding has now is kind of spiraling dangerously toward collapse. And yes, in that context, it's not that appealing to me to expend my intellectual energy contemplating what if all my core beliefs are wrong, you know? Like, actually, no, I do believe in democracy, and I believe that the fundament of democracy is that every single person has an unimpeded right to vote. You're not going to talk me out of that position.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And in fact, I will, you know, very clearly state that I can't imagine a more important position to articulate again and again into uncertain terms these days. So, yes, it's not, we are no longer, I think, living in an atmosphere conducive to the kind of caution and humility with respect to all of our beliefs that I endorse in the book, which, again, isn't to say that I think that the tragedy to me is, I actually do think those are good postures, and I wish we lived in a moment when we could all inhabit them, because I think you're right to suggest that it's a sign of a healthy culture, right? It's a sign of people able to agree sufficiently that disagreement feels productive and healthy and fruitful.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Well, there's that aphorism about sort of strong opinions loosely held, right? And I think that works in an environment where people are operating with good faith. The problem with your opinion being loosely held in a time of propaganda, or gaslighting, or outright sort of subversion and, you know, let's call it anti-democratic or anti-scientific thought, is they are attempting to

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Manipulate or attack the fact that they know you could change your mind, right? And so, so like what gaslighting does is exploit your, your very sort of good, good graces. Right? That's the, that's like the really tricky part about it. Like, um, I think about this, like where people go, I'm just asking questions, right? And, uh, uh, it's like, yes, but are you asking questions because you want to get an answer? Or are you just asking questions because you're trying to sow uncertainty? And so that trick, that it's like, how do you respond to someone attempting to sow uncertainty?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  If not by becoming a little bit more certain about the sort of first principles on which your life or society needs to be based.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I guess, listening to, I'm realizing that actually I, my, my feelings about that book are slightly more complicated, complicated than I just suggested because of course, the, the effect of feeling, um, more certain about more things and, and more like, more, more clear on the political and ethical importance of feeling certain about those things is that actually, of course, it means that there's a, you know, larger body of people than ever to whom I am inclined very strongly to recommend my book. Meaning obviously I wish, as ever, you know, that, that, that people who disagreed with me were able to adopt these positions of, of, um, sincerely questioning themselves, not the cynical, I'm just asking questions that you're referring to, but, but sincerely

• 27:23Speaker 01

  question why they believe what they do and, and the motives of people who are persuading them to do that and, and the company they're keeping and, and how they came to hold those beliefs. Of course, I wish that, um, that people held that and it feels, of course, deeply hypocritical to, to feel that my own hold on that is loosening exactly at the moment that I want other people, uh, to, to embrace it further. And yet I, you know, to your point, I think that is kind of the plight of our current political moment because it does feel more important to me right now to stand up for what I believe than to question.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Well, in a way, I feel like it makes the book much more important and relevant, particularly if you're anyone with any sort of public platform or in some sort of knowledge business, because, yeah, as a journalist, let's say, the stakes of what you're doing have never been higher. And so the tendency to see it as some sort of crusade or sort of moral act also makes you, you know, more likely to get it really wrong about certain things or to reject potentially disconfirming information. And so in a sense, like, you need that intellectual humility and self-awareness more than ever, so you know what to really

• 28:42Speaker 00

  be certain about and then what, you know, what to question. And obviously, I think that's what's so tricky. Yeah, it's like, let's say in a pandemic, when people are sort of trying to gaslight or sow disinformation about some pretty well-established things, how do you separate those pretty well-established things with those new things that are coming out that it's impossible for it to have well, like, whether it's a new variant or, you know, update, like, like, let's say, like, the mask debate is such an interesting one, right? Because it's like, first off, they were late, they told us not to use masks, and maybe that was like, there was a political reason for that, and they told us to use masks. And then there was the logistical constraint of like, what kind of masks were

• 29:23Speaker 00

  available. And then there was, as the variants changed, the efficacy of them changes through time. And so how do you, how do you maintain a general consistent belief in something that the studies seem to largely support, but then also be flexible inside of it, like, as to what kind of mask works, how effective it is under this variant or that variant? That, it's like, this is like graduate-level stuff that we are asking people who maybe don't even have a high school education to wrap their heads around.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's incredibly complex and, you know, I certainly think you're right that actually it is a moment that calls on us to think a lot about even, I stand by this sense of actually, right now, we need to be standing up for our beliefs, but those are, as you said, kind of the core tenants, the really indispensable things without which we kind of lose our moral ground floor. But obviously, above and beyond that, there's sort of, we are confronted with endless information right now and the struggle to make sense of what's accurate and what's useful. And sometimes those things are pinned, are kind of pitted against each other in unfortunate ways. And yeah, the mask situation is a great example. You know, I do think it's been a long, strange road through the pandemic.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And I think part of, and again, here's a place where I really stand by the book, you know, as the kind of illiberalism has crept into our culture and our politics further and deeper, I do think there's been a kind of liberal closing of ranks. And there do become certain things you're not supposed to question and certain things you just sort of obviously nod your head along with. And I think that's dangerous as well, you know. And I think you're absolutely right to think that that something political was happening when we were initially told not to wear masks. And I'm upset about it to this day. I think it cost a lot of lives, to be honest.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Totally. And I don't think it was done in sincerity. I think it was done in the face of very, you know, a very complicated moment in the pandemic. And I don't think anyone was out to kill anyone. But I certainly don't think it was, you know, science and public health, you know, at their finest. And it continues to be really complicated that way, you know, should elementary school kids be wearing masks? You know, should we be closing schools? Should we be keeping kids out for 10 days at a time to figure out, you know, whether they they're actually contagious or not? I mean, these are, these are really, really hard questions. And it is interesting, you know, there's a lot of, as ever, there's, there's a lot of passion on both sides of them, sometimes unmoored from what feels to me like.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Both the facts of the matter and the and the authentic complexity of it, you know, because I I think when you engage with the authentic complexity, complexity has a wonderful way of being a kind of cooling function on passion, you know, in in in a good way. I think that the minute you understand, ah, this is actually quite complicated, you can continue to advocate for what you believe, of course, but I think it's harder to dismiss out of hand those who disagree with you.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  It's almost like also there's this kind of like intellectual or epistemological nihilism, where they would go like, because we're just talking about with mass, where it's like, there's this, and there's this, and there's this, and there's this. So because all that is confusing or somewhat contradictory, nothing works. We know nothing, right? And so it's almost this tendency, and this is, I think, where gaslighting comes in, where people, I think the Russians have a name for this tactic, too, like, where if the Russians want to, like, compromise a politician, or they want to, let's say they want to invade Crimea, they're like, let's just flood the zone with information, right? Let's just throw so much, like, maybe he's guilty of this, maybe she's guilty of that,

• 33:18Speaker 00

  maybe what is happening in this picture, who knows? What about this lie that they told, you know? And then all of a sudden, you're like, I don't know anything. And then this goes to your point about certainty. Because I can't be certain about it, I'll just throw up my hands.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Throw up my hands, yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And and just because something is confusing doesn't mean you can't make educated guesses, guesses, or there aren't sort of safe enough assumptions you can make. And so I think that's really also what's tricky is is it's like, we're so confused, there's so much information, and then so many people acting in bad faith to to muddy the waters even further. People are just like, well, I don't know, so I'm just going to go with whatever inconveniences me less.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I guess my feeling about this is I have an instinctive dislike of the throw up your hands response, and yet, and yet I have a lot of sympathy. And I do, that's a moment where I feel like, actually, the useful expenditure of time is not in trying to help, you know, 10 million separate people work their way through the zone of misinformation. It's in, it's in dealing with the bad actors, right? In dealing with the bad faith and, and trying to kind of right the civic ship. Because you will never, kind of, person by person, I don't think, be able to solve this problem. I, I,

• 34:48Speaker 01

  I think it really is a problem that is being deliberately perpetrated on a mass scale. And, and it's the deliberate sewers of the information that, that need to be addressed, not, which is not to say, you know, abandon the, the recipients of the misinformation and, and abandon those who have just concluded it's, you know, easiest to throw up their hands and, and assume, you know, some kind of semi skeptical stance about 100% of things, rather than, you know, threading their way through this kind of complicated maze of information. But I think you have to go after the misinformation itself.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  I do too. I, I wrote about this in my first book, which is what I'd read your book for. And, and, and actually, as it happens, Upton Sinclair wrote this expose of journalism in the 1900s, right, like, right after he wrote The Jungle. And he was sort of talking about, you basically, just information, just like the food system, or the environment, or whatever, is a, is a public good, right? It's owned by private companies, but it's a, it's a, the public sphere. And when you have people who are poisoning it, or abusing their rights to that, to that parkland, or idea, or water, or whatever it is, you have

• 36:06Speaker 00

  to stop that because it ruins it for everyone. And I do think we have people who are effectively poisoning the aquifer that we all drink from. And some of us have the, the education, or just frankly, the free time to Figure things out to do our own research in the actual sense of what that phrase means. And then other of us, because we're old, because we don't have, we don't even have a computer. We just read stuff on Facebook when we're, you know, working our hourly job at a cash register. You know, it's impossible for us to sort through that. And those are the people who I think get poisoned the most by these bad actors.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that metaphor of poisoning the intellectual aquifer is exactly right. You know, and obviously a significantly long, slow, often unsuccessful battle to go after even the people poisoning the literal aquifer. So it's not that I have high hopes of this turning around quickly, but I, but I think it's where we have to direct our collective attention.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. And, and then I think, you know, again, to go to your point, you look at the existential dread of like a tsunami. What do you do? You know, it's like, go help one person, right? Like, go help one, one, your aunt who really was just asking questions or was confused. Just call her up and go, look, here's, let me walk you through this because I'm going to stop one person from propagating it. You know what I mean? I, I think all we can do is really start at that, like, super small level.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, sure, I'll qualify what I said. I, I think absolutely we have to figure out how to, how to kind of stop the, the poisoners of the aquifer. But it doesn't mean that, that we should let people around us just keep drinking from it willy nilly, you know?

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  It's interesting, you know, in my new book, I write, I write some about my family, well, my family of origin, but also the family that I married into, and they're very different. And I have married into not my kind of immediate, certainly not my partner, not my immediate in-laws. But, but I've married into a broader family and a broader community of people. And I now in fact, live in a part of the world where my, my friends and neighbors and, and

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Where do you live?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Community members. I live on the eastern shore of Maryland. Okay. So if you don't know anything about the eastern part of Maryland, which there's no reason you would, I didn't before I moved down here, but you know, it's the part of Maryland that really reminds you that all of Maryland is is south of the Mason Dixon line. It is, it's much more identified culturally and politically with the south than with the north. It is, parts of it have become very, very affluent in the in the last two decades, but it's historically a agricultural and a kind of water-based economy. It's very rural and working class. And, you know, it's, it's, you're absolutely right about having the

• 39:07Speaker 01

  hard conversations. You know, we have, we have very dear family members, my partner and I, who we've had to just sit down and say, no, you know, the vaccines aren't a hoax, hoax, you know, yes, the virus is real. Here's why you can't come meet our baby until or unless you, you know, get vaccinated and wear a mask. And, and you're absolutely right. I mean, those feel important and have in some cases been persuasive. And that's very heartening to me, you know, and I, I don't think we can abandon those kinds of of one-on-one conversations at all. But they're tough, you know, and I admire, it's interesting, my, I regard my, my partner as vastly kind of morally braver than I am. And, you know,

• 39:50Speaker 01

  she literally talked our neighbors into taking down the Confederate flag in front of their house, which I thought was a fool's errand, to be perfectly honest. Sure. That's a great example. Like, I wrote off, I wrote off someone I shouldn't have written off, you know, and, and in fact, you know, they, they did, first they just moved it to the backyard, but that actually felt like an improvement. And then it came down entirely. And it was a little reminder of, right, actually, we do have to have the hard conversations. And we do have to share our values out loud, because how else are we ever gonna make them compelling and help them to spread?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Well, and that obligation, obviously, we're all neighbors, so we all have that. But it's commensurate to what you what you have access to as part of your profession. Like, I was reading, I was reading Michael Lewis's book on the pandemic, which is really good, The Premonition. And like, I didn't know that the Priscilla Zuckerberg, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute funded a lot of the really early pandemic research that probably saved tens of or hundreds of thousands of lives. You're like, oh, this is great. Here they are, they're very wealthy, they're spending money on this thing to start this pandemic. And then you're like, but also, this guy wakes up every day and goes to work at a place

• 41:00Speaker 00

  that could actively change, you know, the way this information is being spread, but then sort of goes, you know, of course, we have no, no ability to do that. So it's always, it's always interesting, I think, too, how we decide to see what like our obligations are. It's, yeah, it's having the tough conversations with your neighbor. And then it's also like, well, what power or influence do you have in society? And do you take those steps there, too, I think?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's, it's very easy to underestimate our power and influence in society. And I say that specifically to kind of indict my own class and background. I think it's, you know, obviously, a lot of people have a lot more money and resources than they think they do. You know, you wish you were Zuckerberg, but, but, you know, you might not be the 1%, but you're probably the 10% and, you know, you could be doing something in all kinds of ways. But also, I think, kind of across the board, I mean, I'm, I'm awed and inspired over and over again by people who have vastly less than I do and do vastly more. And in fact, I take that to be kind of paradigmatic, in the sense that some of the people I know

• 42:09Speaker 01

  who actually help their neighbors and families the most and actually have committed most to genuine social change actually have, like, You know, very little and everything to lose. So I do think we're often a little, a little prone to underestimating our power, which I get, right? You know, it's

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Very hard to feel powerful in the face of these incredibly sweeping forces. On the other hand, and it's discouraging to feel powerful and then be reminded a million times a day that you aren't in all kinds of ways. On the other hand, it does actually seem ultimately better, not only practically, but also emotionally than than feeling impotent.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Well, so how does that, how does what we're talking about intersect with, I was, I was fascinated with the piece you wrote on the Underground Railroad, which has sort of become part of the, you know, the American, not revisionist history, but, but as we, as we look at this dark, terrible moment in American history, we also look for like bright spots or, you know, things we can, we can take as, as inspiring. And you were sort of saying that, that the, that, that the Underground Railroad, not that it wasn't real, and not that the people who were involved in it weren't incredibly heroic, but it's almost a way of kind of like patting ourselves on the back or, or

• 43:27Speaker 00

  fooling ourselves about how like change and what our obligations to each other, where, where that actually is.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, so I said, I live on the eastern shore of Maryland and one really remarkable thing about the eastern shore of Maryland is it gave us, I think, two of the greatest American patriots of all time. It gave us Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. So I thought a lot about the Underground Railroad. I live, I live near various kind of obviously early southern stops on it, but yeah, I mean, look, on the one hand, I think it's incredibly wonderful that we, as a culture, more and more identify with, with our best histories and our best stories and our bravest acts. And There's a part of me that takes heart in in the desire of everyone to believe that,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  you know, Grandma's house was on the Underground Railroad, or, you know, great-grandpa participated in it, or or all this, you know, the kind of the kind of claiming of it. Because I think it's a beautiful thing, you know, it suggests we want to be on the side of of the angels, right? We want to be on the side of freedom and liberation. And we want to feel, once history has shown us the way, we want to feel that we always would have known it. And and I admire and and want to nurture in all of us the impulse to to be aligned with with what we regard as good and right. What's very tricky, of course, is that, I mean, first of all, look, just as a as a

• 44:59Speaker 01

  kind of practical matter, the Underground Railway was a, you know, a very small collection of extraordinarily brave individuals, many of them African-American and and not just the kind of white folks along the way, who I think have by and large gotten a lot more, other than Harriet Tubman, have gotten a lot more attention. But, you know, more than more than that, more than the kind of overblown sense of how large the phenomenon was, and thus the sense that everyone could kind of claim a piece of it, which is universal, I should say, I mean, everyone in France thinks their relatives were part of the French Resistance.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  I was just gonna, I was just gonna mention that. It's like, it's like, less than five, it's like, the country is literally overrun by the Nazis, and less than 5% of the population was like, I object, you know, like, I'm gonna do something about this.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, you know, it's it's troubling to me because, right, so so the exact same thing was true here, right? You know, I mean, slavery was not sustained in place for as long as it was by, you know, a handful of vicious individuals. It was it was an incredibly widespread and institutionalized system. And it, you know, it was aided and abetted enormously by the North, which which often likes to take a moral pass for it these days. And, you know, I I guess what's troubling to me is, you know,

• 46:37Speaker 01

  If you think that you would have been a part of the Underground Railroad, look around today and tell me, you know, what's the unbelievably brave, in fact, you know, livelihood risking, life risking thing you are doing on behalf of what you believe to be right? Because, you know, unless, if you're not doing that, you would not have been a part of Underground Railroad. But one of the scariest things you possibly could have done, right? One of the riskiest things you possibly could have done. And as ever, very few people have that kind of moral courage. And I think it's a, again, I think on the good side, I think it's a, it's a beautiful thing to aspire to be our best selves. But I think it has to come hand in hand with the reckoning of like, well, it doesn't really matter who you think you would have been.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  What matters is who are you, you know, and what are you actually doing with your life? Who are you today, right? What are you doing with your life?

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is, right. It's, it's easy to get in this debate over what was right and wrong 200 years ago or whatever. And then you're like, but you know where your socks were made and you bought them because they were cheaper than the alternative that was made differently, right?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  It's true. But also, I mean, never mind 200 years ago, you know, 50 years ago, right? I mean, the stats on who actually supported the civil rights movement are horrifying. You know, the vast majority of white Americans were gravely troubled by the civil rights movement. You know, they were, they disapproved of the Freedom Riders, they disapproved of Martin Luther King. You know, it is only, it is a great act of retroactive revision that has claimed this, even for some of us, tragically not for all of us, as, as, as an obvious right and as the destined course of American history, you know, would that it were so. But, but again, it took, you know, it took the passage of time and the clear sense of

• 48:31Speaker 01

  like, actually, no, you know, you didn't want to be on the side of Wallace and the police dogs. You know, that, that's not where any of us, well, that's not where hopefully most of us want to stand today, but certainly wasn't, wasn't a widespread belief at the time. And that's just, you know, again, it's 50, 60 years ago.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, or even, you know, I remember when they passed Prop 8 in California, right? That was in 2008. That was like 14 years ago. And you're just like, oh, yeah, like people. It's not because I think what's so interesting about is we tell ourselves that a lot of the injustices of the past were acts of indifference, but they were also overt acts, right? Like, it wasn't like gay marriage was illegal in California and people had to be activated to change it. It was, it was actually the opposite. I think that's what's so interesting about these forces is that it's, it's not even a defensive sort of conservative energy.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  I don't mean that in the political sense. I mean that in the preserving of the status quo. It's often an aggressive outward energy. Like, the myth we tell ourselves about the Civil War is that slavery was just this thing that always existed. No, slavery was an aggressive expansive power that was attempting not just to be what it was, but to dominate everything. Like, Lincoln doesn't even have to campaign on, Lincoln's transgressive act wasn't the eradication of slavery, he was just like, no more. Like, let's not let it be bigger than it is. And so, I think so overwhelming, whether we're talking about some of the pandemic stuff, or some of these civil rights issues, is that you're not, the mob isn't just this

• 50:18Speaker 00

  thing resisting change, but often driving change. Or, do you know what I mean? That it's this overwhelming force that we get caught up in. And I think that that dark energy is, it's ever-present and it moves like from issue to issue. And you've got to ask yourself, are you in it or are you resisting?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, believe me, it's interesting you bring up Prop 8 and gay marriage and gay rights in general. You know, I think about it all the time. I am gay married, you know? And I, and, you know, it's funny, like, this new book of mine, part of it, a full third of it is basically a love story. It's about, it's about the families that make us, but it's also about the families that we make.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  I have thought a lot about how remarkable it is that I could write a book like this right now and that, in fact, it is, by and large, and certainly in the kind of circles that are talking about books and buying books, it's not even being received, somehow miraculously, it's no longer even being received as like, you know, a lesbian memoir. It's a love story, which it is, you know, and a grief story and many other things. But I'm really mindful of how tenuous that situation is, you know, how recently it was one. I mean, I'm shocked all the time and heartened in good ways by, when I despair about political change, I think about gay rights, right? Because actually, they happened with shocking speed, which is

• 51:51Speaker 01

  all the more amazing because you're right to point out that it was never just a, you know, a kind of new right we carved out and gained. It was a, there was a, and remains, a very active, very vituperative in that case and in most cases, very powerful force trying to oppose it, you know? And I have no illusions that that couldn't resurge at any point in time. I mean, we're looking at a moment, obviously, when another very hard-fought right, the right of a woman to control the most fundamental choices about her body and her future, seems extraordinarily tenuous and very likely to be rolled back and to be fought all over again. So, yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, for many of

• 52:35Speaker 01

  us, you know, these are not, for some people, you know, there is a kind of a move to these rights and we want to live in the kind of country that regards all of its citizens as equal, or that cherishes voting rights and civil rights, or that, you know, lets anyone marry, lets anyone control their body when it comes to private and fundamental decisions. But, you know, for a lot of people, it's not about what kind of country you want to live in. It's, can you vote? It's, you know, can you marry? You know, can you feel, I mentioned when we were just chatting at the beginning, I have this beautiful five-month-old daughter. Can I feel absolutely certain that no one is going to have the power to ever take her away from me or deny the fact that I'm her mom? And, you know, it's a...

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Right, the idea that just a few, that just a few years ago, like, you might not have been able to be on the same healthcare plan. Like, how incomprehensibly

• 53:34Speaker 00

  banal that is, and outwardly evil at the same time.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Or on the birth certificate, which, you know, is, in some ways, you know, in a kind of practical day-to-day, or really, like, month-by-month, considering how we pay the bills, like, it's, you know, it's, it's less important in a certain sense to be on the birth, birth certificate, but I can tell you, having been there in the hospital, it's, it's not emotionally less important, it's not psychologically less important, to feel like, from, from, from minute one, I was this baby's mother. And, and, yeah, you know, these are, um, these are hard-fought rights, and, uh, it is, um, you know, I, I, I guess, I feel so grateful, I really do feel like I've, um, I've lived at a very fortunate time in all kinds of ways, and now that I feel a little bit less that way, it's, it's

• 54:21Speaker 01

  galvanizing. I feel like I owe it to, to my daughter and to others, to help them feel that they lived in fortunate times as well.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Well, maybe that, yeah, that this, there's that sort of myth, uh, at, at the end of the Cold War, that we were at the end of history, and that sort of everything was, was heading, uh, in, not in a progressive direction, again, politically, but that, but that we were, the, these sort of fundamental battles over right and wrong, or rights, uh, in, in inherent and inalienable rights were sort of over. And then it's like, no, not even close, not even close. Uh, and, and that, that one has a sort of moral obligation to participate in that. Um, because, yeah, if you've ever met a single person who these things affect, you realize these aren't just, like, abstract markers in a culture war,

• 55:14Speaker 00

  but things that affect, like, actual human beings. Uh, you know, and you meet someone who, again, you can have whatever squeamish or, uh, you know, uh, thoughts you, you want to have about, say, like, pro-life or pro-choice, and then, like, meet someone who was not able to get, uh, an abortion, that, that felt, you know, they need, like, just, just feel the weight of that, and it suddenly not, it becomes not such a black-and-white thing.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, we talked earlier about the importance of conversations with individuals. And I do think a deep and tragic disconnect in our culture is, is, is the way we are. I think quite deliberately separated from people of other backgrounds, people of other means, people of other life experiences in all kinds of ways. And it is, it's, it's, it's a corrosive force, you know? It's hard to understand poverty if you have never lived anywhere near poverty. It's hard to understand the exigencies of, of healthcare if you've never had to worry about whether you yourself have, and maybe you're frustrated by, you know, Blue Cross, Blue Shield or whatever, because who isn't?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  But you've never had to contend with what it's like to actually not get healthcare or to over and over and over again, get inferior healthcare, you know? And I do think, yeah, you know, it's a strange thing. Millions of people in this country live in precarity and in poverty and without access to healthcare and without access to basic civil rights in certain kinds of ways that that should never apply in the first world. And yet somehow millions of the rest of us manage to not ever actually deeply engage with that as a reality.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yes, right. And I think to go back to your point about understanding history, I think to understand, you know, that picture of those people screaming at Ruby Bridges or whatever. And then, of course, to realize that Ruby Bridges is like 65 years old right now, right? If you want to understand how recent it is. But like, when you, when you get, like, I remember reading about the civil rights movement, that there was a Kennedy was, is in the middle of arguing whether it's the, I forget which governor it is, but let's say Mississippi or Alabama. He goes,

• 57:38Speaker 00

  He suddenly understands the civil war from a different perspective. He's like, oh, this is that energy. He's like, obviously, we're not fighting about literal slavery anymore. But this is that energy that Lincoln was dealing with and that Grant was dealing. This is that energy. And I think, you know, my experience, you know, dealing with some of that sort of dark internet energy in the last couple of years has then informed how I understand that picture of those people screaming at that child. You go, oh, this makes sense to me. Like, not that it's right, but you're like, I see who I know. I have touched that energy, you know, in a modern context. And it's, it's, uh, it's.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  It's terrifying is what it is. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's very, it's very, very scary to confront what you're calling that dark energy, which, to be honest, I think is often truly hatred in a way that's so uncomfortable to confront. And, you know, I said part of this new book is a love story. Part of it is also kind of an elegy to my father, who died in 2016. And my dad was a refugee to this country. He was born in Tel Aviv, back when it was still part of Palestine, to a Polish mother who, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  She had 12 siblings and 11 of the 12 of them, and her parents all died in Auschwitz. And my family on that side, you know, was kind of kicked around the globe by the combined forces of poverty and genocide and political instability until my dad finally wound up in Detroit as a, as a very young teenager, 12, 13. And I grew up with a sense of.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  This is real in the world, right? The desire to literally exterminate a people. This is a, this is, this exists, you know? And, and it's a terrible thing to have to confront as a child or as anyone. I mean, I think a lot about actually how on earth I'm ever gonna teach my incredibly cheerful, precious, beautiful little daughter about truths like these because they're terrifying.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  About the darkness.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  About the darkness. Uh, and, and yet it's there and it's ultimately, um, much scarier, certainly as a species, if not as individuals, if we fail to confront it. And, um, you know, it's, it's, it's shocking to me every time it incarnates itself in, in some new form or in some old form, you know? I mean, antisemitism is obviously on the rise globally. Uh, I, I, I slightly, optimistically, I don't generally believe that progress is, you know, uh, irreversible and, and, and history always marches forward towards better times. But, um, but I, I thought slightly that the days of, um, widespread vituperative anti,

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  anti queer energy was largely behind us. And I've been proven wrong about that too, although again, I feel grateful every day that it's not the kind of, uh, real animosity and, and violence that it once was. But yeah, you know, in all of these forms, uh, we, we are, you know, the present, uh, reminds us every day that it's actually a part of history and that we're living through it. And, uh, it, it rattles its very terrifying chains, uh, in our faces all the time. And I think, you know, I, I guess, um, I guess we should embrace the part of ourselves that thinks we would be part of the Underground Railroad because God knows we need as many people as we can to stand up and say, I want to be on, I want to be on the right side

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  this time.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Have you read, uh, have you read Cormac McCarthy's The Road?

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Funny you should ask. So I have a policy with respect to Cormac McCarthy. I read one novel every 10 years because I swear to you that's like as much as I can take. I'm a huge admirer, actually. I really am. I think he's incredibly gifted and both literarily, I think he writes incredible sentences and also kind of as a visionary, although let's all hope his vision is not the only one. But no, I most recently read Blood Meridian and I'm only like two and a half years into my 10-year stint, which I'm slightly exaggerating about, but somehow I'm the last person in America not to have read The Road, even though I understand exactly why I should.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  I think I read it, I reread it at the beginning of the pandemic, which was both a good and a terrible idea because I'd read it before I had kids.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  It was much, it was much back in the literary news at the beginning of the pandemic, yes.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I remember I just, you know, I went into my son's room when he was asleep and I just sort of broke down, weeping. But, but like, you know, in the book he talks about, and obviously that, we talk about dark energy, that's the culmination of the dark energy that sort of destroys the world. But the beautiful sort of theme in the book is they talk about carrying the fire. The fire being like, are you one of the good guys or are you one of the bad guys? And I suppose that the myth we tell ourselves about the Underground Railroad, if there's any productive part to it, it's the idea that like, they were carrying the fire just as, you know, the, insert whatever heroic group from whatever generation that you want to celebrate, you know, they were carrying the fire just as

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  the Freedom Riders were carrying the fire, just as the gay rights activists were carrying the fire, just as, you know, the scientists who invent the vaccine are carrying the fire. That it's all sort of part of this, you know, procession of torches towards keeping that goodness alive despite the darkness. And there's something, I think, I do think there's something about having kids that reminds you not just of the necessity of that, but your obligation as a parent to...

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  To light that within them, or to not extinguish it within them, because that's the only hope for humanity.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's been much on my mind, both because of my daughter and because I really did try to wrestle in this new book with how we live with the inevitability of loss and grief and with suffering and devastation of all kinds on every scale, you know, tsunamis, genocides, pandemics, as well as the kind of private devastations of losing people we love. And it kind of landed on the place of believing in the importance of caretaking, you know, of being the watchmen and the watchwomen of our communities and of our generations,

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  because it's all we can do, you know, is try to protect those around us and the world around us and kind of pass it along in the best condition we can. But it's, you know, it's painful. It's sad and scary at various times.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Well, I was gonna ask you about grief, because that is a theme in the new book. And then, of course, collectively, you know, America is experiencing, and probably no one wants to put our finger on that as, you know, sort of driving force. But I feel like grief is the explanation for so much of the darkness we're seeing, whether it's grief from the destruction of the opioid crisis, whether it's grief from the collapse of certain industries, you know, collapse of, in some ways, our image about ourselves, and then, of course, the literal devastation of the pandemic.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  It strikes me as grief is both a very personal and loving emotion, but it also seems like it can manifest itself in a toxic way also.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, yes, I have spent a lot of the last, you know, call it five years now, thinking about grief. The book is called Lost and Found, and the whole first part, Lost, is very explicitly about grief. And to be honest, it then kind of runs continuously as a theme through the rest of it in various ways. And, you know, it's interesting. I think you're diagnostically right. I think we are grieving society right now. I think that's been wildly exacerbated and actually also made wildly, tragically literal in the pandemic. But I think you're right that that was true beforehand.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  You know, we have this language of deaths of despair, and I think there is a lot of despair in our culture right now. I think, yes, collapse of industries, yes, opioid crisis. I think also the unraveling of a lot of institutions that kept people supported and kept them in a community, or at least under someone's watchful eye, you know. And I don't want to suggest that was a paradoxical time either. You know, there were real problems to living under the close scrutiny of one another. And yet, I do think that we have frayed apart in all kinds of ways and left ourselves exposed to terrible grief. And the thing about grief

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  is it's very lonely. It's lonely even when you're lucky, like me, right? You know, I mean, I was lucky in every way in the kind of grief I'm documenting in the book. I make a very strong point of making it clear that my father's death was not a tragedy. You know, it was incredibly sad to me. He was an amazing person. But he was 74 years old. He had a remarkable life and died, I hope, at peace and certainly surrounded by the people he loved. So it was, you know, basically a good death, insofar as there is such a thing. But what's shocking, of course, is that even with all of that going for him, and even with everything I have going for me, which is every imaginable kind of privilege and comfort, you know, a partner,

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  a great job, financial resources, healthcare, to your point, it was still unmooring and devastating.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  It's tough to cope with grief and tougher the with every single resource you take away, a sibling, a partner, a way to pay your next bill, it it it becomes, it magnifies its force, you know, it will take over any part of your life that you allow it to. And and it is lonely, you know, even if even if many other people are mourning in the same way you are, it's it's a very private experience and it's not shared. And, you know, I think that as a culture, I it's one thing to talk

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  about what to do about a private grief, you know. And there's a huge proliferation of books and podcasts and therapists and so on that will help you navigate the loss of someone you love, down to every level of specificity, if you lost a sibling, if you lost a partner, if you lost a parent, all of which I think is wonderful. And I'm not at all disparaging it. I think it's great that that we're trying to support people in these ways. But there's very little written about what to do about just the problem of loss in general, you know, about, you know, an unmoored culture, about, you know, what happens when, you know, you lose your father, but also your job, you know, or or, you

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  know, when your when your community is is undone by some kind of mass event, you know, like like an earthquake or like a tsunami. We don't, we don't have good means for dealing with that kind of grief. And you often see that see a kind of brief coming together in the face of real crisis, you know, which is a beautiful thing. We saw it when when everyone in New York, you know, cheered first responders at seven o'clock every day. And there was this sense of kind of resurgent faith in humanity, you know, we love each other, we support each other. And and then here we are, you know, two years into a pandemic, and our first responders are woefully underpaid, woefully exposed to the pandemic, yelled

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  at and screamed at by the people they're trying to take care of, you know. We haven't, I don't think, provided the kind of durable love and care, but also just practical resources to to help one another out of the grief of the pandemic. And again, that's just the pandemic. That's before we get to the kinds of issues you're raising, which were the The, I think, sort of fissures and neglect in our society that made so much preexisting grief flow into the pandemic and become very obvious as it kind of fractured us apart.

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  I think that's right. Slightly more cheerful note as we wrap up. How have you, I was reading about your sister, who's a childhood development expert, right?

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  How is, how is having that in the family shaped your thinking about raising, is it son or daughter? How have you thought about raising your kid in light of the wealth of knowledge you have access to? Or do you just tune it out entirely?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  That is such a funny question. Yes, my sister is a professor of cognitive science at MIT. She's brilliant and incredible with kids. Actually, coming to visit again pretty soon because she can't stay away from her little niece, much to my delight. Do I think about it? I mean, I guess occasionally I've called my sister and said, like, you know, can you explain why my daughter is like absolutely obsessed with this like insane stuffed peacock someone gave us that I was about to donate, but now it's like she loves it so much, we joke that it's her babysitter because she'll stare at him for 20 hours. So I've occasionally reached out to her about things like that. But to be honest, mostly what I value in my sister is, and I think this is probably why she got into the field, not a consequence of her being in the field, she just loves kids and she's amazing with

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  them. So mostly I think of her and her personal capacity as my sister and my baby's aunt more than I do as a, in her scientific capacity. Although I also find the kind of unfurling of a consciousness and the unfurling of a self to be just the most fascinating thing to watch in the whole world. So I do have all kinds of questions about it. And I'm sure that as my daughter gets older, I will pester my sister about them relentlessly.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  It does, it does feel, you were talking in your New York Times piece about, so we have the grief of what we've lost, but one of the, one of the things we can focus on is what we gain in the, what we go through. And it struck me at some point, I've traveled a little bit now for, for some stuff, and then it seemed like it's closed again. Like you, it all, it always seems like, right, as a book is about to come out, that's when, that's when suddenly all the things get closed down again. But, but I realized that I, I spent, I did 500 consecutive bedtimes, like in person, and realizing that I'll probably never get that again in my life. And probably had never, even before I had kids, I'd never

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  gone 500 days without getting on an airplane, probably in my whole life, right? And just, just, it's like, inside the trauma and the loss of all of it, there is also the time that we've gotten that you ordinarily would be on a plane away from your, your kid not, not there, because work is also important. And now you've got to do it in a different way.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, there's a reason I landed on this, like, very everyday title, Lost and Found, for this book. I, it's incredible what we discover, sometimes without even knowing it was missing from our lives. You know, you said this beautiful thing before we got on, that you, you can't even understand why you weren't doing this before. And, and it's true, you know? I mean, yeah, the pandemic has been full of losses of every kind, including ones pertaining to my daughter. You know, I, like, parents everywhere, I have thought a lot about what is and isn't safe, you know, to what extent she can, you know, go play at her aunt's house, or, you know, is it, is it safe for my elderly mother to get on

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  an airplane and come visit? And how do I keep her safe and the baby safe? And, you know, it's, there's been a lot of confusion and anxiety around it all. But you're absolutely right, that also, I just, I'm at her side all the time, and I put her to bed every night, and, and I'm there when she wakes up every morning. And it does feel like a tremendous gift. And, you know, for good or ill, I, I think a lot of

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  What is very difficult in life is often conjoined to something incredibly beautiful or failing that incredibly meaningful. And conversely, much of what we love and cherish most in life reminds us of how fragile it is and how precious it is. So I do think we're always living with both at once.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I found to be, as you said, it's a very simple title, but there is a profundity to it because, yeah, what you lose presents often the opportunity to find something else. And, you know, or at the very least, what did you, what did you learn from what you lost, whether it was gratitude or appreciation or whatever? It is, yeah, even just, even just like, okay, sure, we haven't been able to do these things. We also haven't gotten sick as a family in two years, you know, which, as you know, is just like a reality of having kids. And it's like, oh, my God, this is so nice. Could it be like this all the time?

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  I, you know, we got a cold a couple of months ago and it was just like, this is terrible. We used to do this all the time. Like, once a month, we all just collectively accepted that the downside of working in an office or going to daycare was that we, we all were debilitated with the flu once every 30 days. I mean, this is madness.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I am slightly starting to wonder how, at what point does it become actually bad for my baby that she hasn't had a cold yet? But, but I'm not quite motivated to go out and, you know, expose us to heaven knows what yet to, you know, put an end to that situation. But I hear you.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, like I, I even like to go to the mask thing. It was like, I remember a couple of years ago, I got mono, probably on an airplane. And, you know, I would just come in from the disgusting airport around these disgusting strangers and just breathe all over these people without a thought to, you know, how one's actions affect anyone else. And so I have, I have thought about the, I do hope for some of us, clearly not all of us, but one of the, one of the upsides, one of the things we should find from this is a greater consideration for like how our choices affect other people, especially kids.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so complicated because on the one hand, I mourn the era in which we all just mingled with one another on the subway, you know, at daycare, wherever it may be, without feeling like a danger to one another. You know, to me, that's been one of the real costs of the pandemic is the sense that other people are somehow imperiling us because I think that's a very, that's a very grim and dangerous place to inhabit.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  No, it's literally antisocial.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  It is literally antisocial, right? And yet, you know, do I share your sense that, that there are lessons to be gleaned from how we've all had to live these last couple of years? You know, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that it was fascinating to watch people make happen in three months what, what, you know, allegedly just was impossible, you know? It's been very snowy. As I'm sure you heard, it's like, you know, there's kind of a snowstorm all up and down the East Coast and my sister-in-law is a special ed teacher and, you know, they had a snow day yesterday. No, wait, today, sorry. It's other pandemic problem. I've lost track of time entirely.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  They had a, they had a snow day today, but.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  That's also having a five-month-old, though.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  That's also having a five-month-old, for sure. Actually, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's like parenthood and what's the pandemic. It is sometimes unclear. But, you know, they, they had a, they had a snow day. It wasn't safe to get into school. But you know what? They did not lose another day of instruction because this time they sent the kids home with the computers they'd been learning on anyway, which is it ideal? No, but do you want kids to lose more learning time after all this time? No. So, you know, there is, I do think there, there are kinds of modifications to society, some of them for the worse, but, but some of them for the better. And I, I hope the ones for the better do emerge intact out of this.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, lot, lot, lost and found. It's beautiful how that works out.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I, beautiful is, um, is where I hope we can kind of ultimately sit with it. I know it's, it's many more things than that and, and I never want to diminish the kind of grief we've all been through these last couple of years, not to mention just the kind of grief life doles out in general. Uh, but I, I try to inhabit the posture of feeling profoundly lucky to be here, kind of no matter what's happening and, and to recognizing, uh, that the grief is actually connected to my abundant love of, of people and of this planet and of the cosmos and, and the human experience writ large. So, uh, yeah, I, I like to think I land on beauty and, and joy at the end of the day.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  Well, then, yeah, to go to your, your point about your, your, your relatives, uh, obviously, you know, no one chooses to go through the, those terrible events. But then, you know, because people are resilient, the, those events change and transform them in a way that, again, they would never have chosen and shouldn't have to go through. But, you know, you, when you talk to, you know, when I would talk to relatives who fought in World War II or lived through the depression, it wasn't a, oh, it was the worst thing that ever happened. My life was never the same. Everything was meaningless and awful afterwards, right? That these events shaped who they became and what they taught to their children

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  and to their grandchildren. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully, I think this idea that this was like purely bad or purely a deprivation for children strikes me as also the wrong way to think about it because, um, it was also an opportunity to teach them so many things, provided, you know, you didn't get sucked into the dark energy we were talking about. But your, your children could also emerge from this, hopefully, uh, better and stronger and wiser and, uh, you know, more connected, uh, just as we can hopefully emerge from it that way.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I tread lightly always with the notion that our suffering will somehow be redeemed, uh, which I, which I think is, you know, partly from growing up with a grandmother who had endured the kind of suffering that is actually irredeemable and, and that in every possible respect impoverished her life rather than, than, um, making it deeper or more meaningful. So I'm, I'm mindful, it's, um, it's easy to be glib on that theme and yet it's a mistake to let go of that theme entirely because of course, uh, short of, short of that scale of, of tragedy, um, obviously we learn from our pain and our suffering and our loss, uh, and, and it's, um,

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  it's, it's right and beautiful, you know, we, we want to try to make it something other than pain and, and that takes our own agency and our own work to make it matter to our lives and, and to acquire some kind of value or something that we can pass on or use to just, um, kind of do better in whatever, in whatever sense in our day to day life. So, yeah, I absolutely think that, um, our losses do sometimes teach us incredibly valuable lessons. It's, it's, you know, it's never not complicated. Um, certainly, I think the generation of schoolchildren, uh, who lost so much socially and intellectually these last couple of years, and especially those who, who were already,

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  uh, you know, in, in a precarious place with respect to schooling, whether by, you know, how well supported their schools were, uh, or, or by whatever special learning needs they themselves had. It's, it's not been pretty, you know, and, and they deserved better. Uh, but I know what you mean, you know, I, I, my, we all know people or know of people who were of the, um, the last generation of pandemic, you know, much has been written about the nineteen eighteen flu. I guess we don't really all know people from then, but, uh, or, or the greatest generation of this kind of thing, you know, obviously there is a narrative that, that is about strength and resilience and redemption. And, um, as I said, I, it's easy to, um,

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  It's easy to lean too hard on that or to kind of fastly decide like, oh, well, it's all, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Which I don't actually think is necessarily the case.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  No, sometimes it just grievously moves you.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you know, there's a reason I got so interested in exploring the category of loss, right? Because I do think that our large losses can teach us about our small ones, and our small ones can teach us about our large ones, and all of them in some ways can teach us, even when the lessons are painful and not strictly speaking redemptive, they can teach us a lot about what it means to be human, because that is one of the very fundamental conditions of being human, is you're going to lose a lot of things, including in the end of your life. And you do have to figure out how to live with that and how to live meaningfully with that.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's like one of the inevitability of suffering in human life has created our uniquely human ability to, if not make that event meaningful, derive some meaning from those experiences. And in fact, that's kind of all we can do, given how powerless we are over, you know, most of what happens to us.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, loss, although inevitable and omnipresent, is seldom, I should not say seldom, but it is certainly not always an unmixed experience or the dominant experience, right? I mean, there are, you know, from my last book, right? I wrote about being wrong. I'm drawn to these abstract categories of human experience, you know?

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  What's it like to err? That's interesting. Well, you know, loss is an abstract category of human experience. We all lose endless things, insane range of things, car keys, you know, elections, fathers. But we also find a really strange range of things also, you know?

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Our car keys back again, you know, but also faith and a sense of self and a career and someone to love and meaning.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Joy.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  And joy, exactly. And I do like to think that these categories are really intimately related to each other and that they do help us make sense of...

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  You know, what it means to be alive and what it means to be mortal in a universe kind of defined by entropy and by things falling apart and leaving us in all kinds of ways. So, yeah, I think, I mean, you heard me say, I err when I can on the side of on the side of joy and on the side of meaning, even in these really grievous losses, because I think it's kind of the best and only thing we can do.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  Well, beautifully said. It was an honor to talk, and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom in these books.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me on. It's a total pleasure.

• 1:26:22Speaker 00

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