Obama finds no easy answers and plenty of contradictions and the problems of our time. But his other books include the breakthrough essay collection, my misspent youth and the unspeakable, which won the penn center usa award for creative nonfiction. Shes also received fellowships from the guggenheim and National Endowment for the arts fellowships and she teaches in the mfa writing program at columbia university. Thank you all for coming out. Im always really relieved when people show up. I love coming to the strand and i love seeing people very early in my career, not that really, actually earlier i was on a book tour i was in minneapolis, in st. Paul and it turned out to be the same night that David Sedaris was doing a reading at the university in minneapolis and in like a stadium basically. Anybody who was anybody who cared about this went to see david who did errors except for one young woman who showed up at my event and she had driven 100 miles from her parents farm to come see me and she was such a big fan and she said like, i thought i wouldnt even get to see you. I thought i wouldnt even get to be near you. He looked around and i was like, youre the only one here. [laughter] so i took her to see David Sedaris and that actually was a great night and we had to see him in the overflow room on the jumbotron. Thats what its like to be on bookstore. Its very glamorous. [laughter] this book i also love that we are on booktv because my father who passed away about a year ago and in whose memory this book is dedicated was such a huge fan of cspan, it was like his favorite thing. I feel like it wherever he is has cspan, is watching. Judith and i are going to talk and im going to read a little bit from the end of the book before i do that i want to say a couple things about it. This book is about a lot of things. Its about the generation gaps, the current political situation and the culture wars. Its about what weve come to call identity politics, whats good about them, whats less useful about them. Its about growing older, its about all kinds of things. But really its about this notion of the problem with everything. The title really refers to not only the way we call somewhat problematic now that the problem with everything is our problem tithing of everything but really ultimately to me the problem with everything refers to that conversation we are always having either with ourselves and with someone else like that thing we are always chewing on. Like whats the problem with everything . Why are things the way they are. Why am i so bothered and why do i have this cognitive dissonance. Really thats at the heart of it. That is something that is captured in the very end of the book which im going to read from. Its going to be a very short reading because ive been told that you cannot tolerate more than 5 to 7 minutes of reading. So that is what it is. This is from the last chapter b whats the problem . Until very recently one of my most abiding ideas about myself was that i was young. The other was that i was tough. The former is ridiculous, the latter is just meaningless everyone loses their youth and everyone is exactly as tough as they need to be at any given time. Another idea i had about myself was that i was a liberal and a feminist. I believe those things are still true but i also now think those labels no longer serve me the way they once did. I actually think labels are part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Labels, bad ass or bigot, social Justice Warrior or whites processed, tamped down contradiction. They leave no room for cognitive dissonance. They deny us our basic human rights to feel conflicted. And as i like to tell my students, if you are not conflicted, youre either lying to yourself or you are not very smart. In the middle of writing this book i went to my 25 year College Reunion in full disclosure i crash the reunion driving up there for the day without reservation after a friend convinced me at the last minute that i should go. Ive never been to a College Reunion. I had complicated feelings about college. Most of them stemming from guilt over the fact that i often didnt bother to get people get to know people as well as i could. Seeing my classmates in middle age i felt i did know them. I knew them because i recognized my weary face in their weary faces. I saw the ways in which the passing of time had yanked some of our certainty out from underneath us. I saw how life had grabbed us by the shoulders and shake and us ever so slightly loose from our foundational coolness. Not that we still work cool, we were just human now too. We were human in the way that you have to go into. We were human in the way that you cant be when you are 20 or even 25. By which i mean, we were in direct dialogue with our failures and limitations. Decades earlier we had been bright, shiny nothings. Now we were fully formed some things in various states of disenchantment in disrepair. At one point in the afternoon in search of the bathroom i turned the corner in a dark dormitory corridor and ran smack into an old friend. We hugged. How long had it been . 20 years at least. She was in the middle of getting divorced my divorce as it happened had recently been finalized. Who wouldve thought it wouldve been like this . We hugged again. How did this all come to pass . How could we have expected it to be any other way. I heard iterations of these questions throughout the day people were getting divorced getting laid off having child custody disputes. Money problems and Health Problems and dying parent problems. People were despondent over trumpet also following News Coverage of the ties of student activism and thinking ab we had been fierce advocates for gay rights. We were one of the gayest colleges in the country. Now gay was passc. Dormitory bathrooms were labeled genderneutral, which was fine we couldnt help but remember the unisex dormitory bathrooms from back in our time when men and women thought nothing of showering and adjacent stalls. Why the big production . And why so much racial discord . We knew it was time for National Reckoning with structural racism. We supported black lives matter or at least said so on facebook. But now from what we are hearing, the entire western canon of our literature and philosophy is being written off as white supremacy. How would this happen. What was wrong with these kids . Or was there something wrong with us . It was like we could taste our own irrelevance. It was the sour taste inside our very mouths. It was a warm june day the pansies and marigolds in the Shakespeare Garden were in full bloom. The tulips lining the quad were holding onto the last breath of spring. Wearing sandals and clutching bags of souvenirs from bookstore the alums strolled along the path of the campus. In the time since we graduated many walkways and buildings had been retrofitted to better accommodate people in wheelchairs. Back in 1990 student protesters had shut the school down for days making demands for such things like hiring a rabbi, offering kosher meals, establishing intercultural center. Those demands at the time had seemed so radical. Today they seemed so reasonable as to the matter of course. Oh the arrival ab the phantom of time haunted me as he drove back to the city and my 17yearold volvo station wagon. If i would follow me back to my apartment where i poured myself a glass of wine and was in bed by 10. In the ensuing year the feeling of irrelevance vacation your Constant Companion it clouded my vision like the membrane cannot have the lizard. Shielding me from what i could comprehend. Sparing me the mortification of my own cluelessness. It had me staring at myself in mirrors and avoiding mirrors. It had me lying awake at night contemplating the end of the world. Or maybe just the end of my world. Woke me when its over i said to myself. Again and again. Its never over though. Every day becomes yesterday, before you know it. But there are always tomorrows problems to look forward to. Tomorrow the young people now nipping at my heels will be walking the brake pads at their own school reunions. Feeling some condemnation of embarrassment and pride of how they used to be. The day after tomorrow their kids might be colonizing mars. In the end, i think i come to realize that the problem with everything isnt meant to be solved. Its meant to feed us. Its meant to pump oxygen through her lungs. Its meant to give us something to talk about. Its meant to fuel comity and inspire great art. Its meant to keep relationships alive until the last possible hour. Its meant to invite our smartest selves to join hands with our stupidest selves and see where the other leads us. The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing despite all evidence to the contrary in the exquisite light of our own relevance. What a gift. What a problem to have. Thank you. [applause] are these on . Thank you. Im going to open a piece of paper to scare you all. A lot of questions but i write them down so that i couldnt ignore them. Always be prepared. Take you. Thats my favorite passage. Its not a spoiler though. You still have to read the book. Its inclusive so theres no ending. But you do sort of lead me into my first question which is about the generation gap, which is what your book is mostly about. Largely about. I was skeptical when i started reading the book because i didnt believe abi should say i was skeptical about five years ago about generation gaps because i dont believe in generations. I think generally generations are about generalizations. They are really about whoever has grabbed the media microphone and managed to define a group. And theyre not born out of any demographic or cultural analysis which is sort of a pile up of memes. But about five years ago 10 years ago i started noticing the phenomenon you talk about. There really is a gap between our generation. You say, you take it back at the end but somewhere in the book you say our generation was all about being tough and their generation is all about being fair, which i would, every generational statement is brought. Its a hypothesis. Im just throwing it out there. Its correct but yes. [laughter] i was a quivering mass of jelly when i was young so tough was not in my vocabulary but definitely i felt a lot of pressure to be a apositive that was a thing our generation was all about. I dont know if the upandcoming generation is necessary all about being fair in the sense of being evenhanded or following due process but they are certainly about being just about changing frameworks or changing norms and policing the changing of norms. Definitely there is a gap where i feel like the discourse of trauma has gone too far and my daughter feels like my 16yearold daughter feels like why did you put up with that . Mike why do you think its okay . My question for you is, how did that happen . What happened between our generation, gen xers and millennial engines e assuming we can use those terms putting them in asterix, what happened what changed . To be honest, im still trying to figure that out. I can answer that by backing up a little bit and talking about how i came to approach this. This book had so many iterations like initially it was going to be all about feminism, it was only going to be called you are not a bad ass and that it was good because you are probably not a bad ass. I was wavering. I assumed Hillary Clinton would be president. This was going way back i started wrestling with all this. Then that didnt happen and the conversation around social justice issues in the culture wars brought it out into the intersection malady whatever that means that we can get into that. So the topic had to go beyond women but i will say that in trying to figure out the answer to that question i had to think about the fact that i grew up right alongside second wave feminism. I was born in 1970, i was three years old when roe v wade past. I remember being 12 years old in 1982 sitting at the Kitchen Table with my mother listening to npr not cspan but npr. Hearing that the equal rights amendment had not been ratified. I remember my mother being really sad about that. I remember talking about who is philip schlafly and how can anybody be like that. Phyllis lashley was the leading opponent of the antirights movement. I remember having these conversations and i remember at the same time growing up in those decades never feeling like i as a girl was any less powerful than any boy, in fact, the girls were doing better i thought it was better to be a girl. We had a greater spectrum of expression. There were more ways to be in the world. Girls did better in school. At the time i got to college there were more women than men in college and then got out of college and we were just doing better, buying their own real estate. Having babies. All that stuff. Fast forward a couple decades may be about five years ago, six or seven years ago suddenly the default premise of the conversation around women is that we are this underclass. And that somehow we live under the thumb of this patriarchy that we are constantly fighting against. I wondered, my first instinct was to say thats wrong and stupid. I wrote a lot of pages saying that. Then i had to think, i if you believe in my own age you think thats true. Where this book really lives is that conflict. Edit know if i was right or not. The book more than anything is the self and self interrogation. I think there are certain conditions that we enjoyed as genex people that later generations did not have the benefit of i think if you grew up in the 70s as a kid there was just a sort of androgyny to being a child at that time like everybody watch the bad news bears. Remember resume, there was just an aesthetic. There was an androgynous aesthetic that really affected the experience of being a kid. I dont think its any accident that the two biggest child celebrities of the 70s were jodie foster and kristi mcnichol. Both major outlet. Everybody wanted to be that. They were not out at the time but come on, they were. Just for the record. They were not out at the time but they were not girly girls. It was not cool to be a girly girl. We did not have the dizzy ab Disney Princess phenomenon. I think we have a benefit of an agency around our gender expression that for a variety of reasons started to go away later on. I think that maybe makes us a little cavalier about how we moved to the world. Certainly i had to check myself in that regard. What is driving this gender differentiation . Would you say social media that reinforces stereotypes . Would you say pornography that also reinforces sexual intensive sexual stereotypes. We do not grow up with a big brutus online pornography or any abi think we have to recognize that and cut them some slack with that. I have to say, this was kind of like a crackpot theory but im beginning to think this is more and more true. When the technology became available to know the sex of a fetus in utero i think that was the moment when it started to change. I think parents subconsciously internalized gender stereotypes and it may have affected how the children were raised. He come home to a nursery decked out in pink taffeta versus we all came home to my room was like a closet. I feel like thats all of our parents. You just throw out a quote that i found fascinating. I also thought you were sort of being a little disingenuous. You say what im justified in not understanding is what women stand to gain by reinforcing a narrative that they are persecuted group. This is of course were fearing to the notorious sensitivity that the generation we are talking about get criticized for. Safe spaces, trigger warnings. The trauma of having your ass grab, whatever it is. What do they stand to gain by reinforcing a narrative that they are persecuted group . I have a couple different answers to that. But one of the answers, what you have to stand to gain from identifying as a persecuted group . Group affiliation. I think we are really lonely. This manifests in all areas not just grievance areas but ideology. People are really lonely, not having inperson interactions. With any of these identitybased discussions particularly around women there is a set of approved messages. As a set of assumptions. Around women it might just be women on College Campuses are in grave danger of Sexual Assault that would be one. The gender wage gap is the result of largely or entirely of systemic discrimination. Women are being prevented from entering stem fields because of misogyny in those fields. Those ideas then get connected to slogans and am aware that the main critique is that they are based on two unbelievably unrepresented studies of commuter campuses nothing like the campuses the people who cite them are hand rape is defined very broadly and their statistical relevance is way overblown. I know about that. I agree with that. To even ask that question is to roam into a territory thats become so taboo no one can even have a conversation and therefore we cant identify what is fact and take steps to actually remedy the problem. Claire cain miller identifies it, shes really good, i dont know if you read her follow her, shes sort of the sex and economics reporter for the times. Sex and economics reporter . And making that phrase up. Theres been a whole discourse about the fact that its really abits a motherhood of motherhood penalty. These ideas are so constantly reinforced that we dont know what were actually talking about. By the way i dont even talk about the gender wage gap in this book. Spoiler alert. You dont like twitter feminism camino mike slogan fast feminism. What kind of feminine and it is out abwhat kind of feminism is out there that you like . Elect feminism that doesnt have to advertise itself. What is feminism even mean . A lot of it is semantic. Its interesting. I was a columnist for the los angeles time for over 10 years from 2005 to 2015 or 16. I was writing about celebrities issues during that time and lets not forget that is when nobody would use the word feminist. He would interview, they would interview celebrities and say, not a feminist but b when sara palin came along in 2008 and said everyone was like who is this . She used the word feminist and everyone was like, no, thats not what we met. Hillary clinton wasnt calling herself a feminist. My feeling was, guess what, if youre not going to use the word, someone will take it from you. Thats the turning point for you . This was starting to bother me leading up to that. Who constructed the beyoncc moment . I cant because ab im so out of it in terms of pop culture. The beyoncc moment she steps in front of this giant sign that says feminist at the vma awards, twerking, thats sex positive. She chose for herself to twerk. I love that you cite phyllis aand sarah palin, its always driven me crazy that these antifeminist who believe women should go back into the home of these mega careers travel travel all over the country. She had like six kids. She should have written a parenting book. I would welcome that. I want to put you between a rock and a hard place. Christine blasey ford and Brett Kavanaugh, i think you tiptoe around this a little bit and i dont blame you because its the third rail. Completely the third rail right now. It comes in the context of i think it comes in the contest of a discussion about due process. One thing we know is kavanaugh shouldnt have been confirmed because he lied about having a drinking problem under oath. That much has been established. I think unfortunately her claim does not rise to the necessary evidentiary standard. I dont think theres anything they could have done. I believe her. I absolutely believe her. I just think, is this what its come to . Why cant we have these discussions absent the iconography here. Let me take it from another avenue, rick avenue, ass hole, Brett Kavanaugh teenage ass hole. Did a lot of really crappy stuff. Then went on to lead really upright life and apparently unbelievably fair boss two women promoted women made sure his office was 50 women. I wrote the book trying to figure out why we have such a hard time talking about this. We need to grandfather some people and set a date and say whatever happened abthe stuff is really new. Whatever you do after this point. Youre on the record you will be accountable. My paygrade would be much higher. Going to work for betsy devos or Something Like that. [multiple speakers] she was right about one thing. Right. There is not a rule do you think there is no rule with the rule we want you the rules are established now you cant violate them. Or you should have known this stuff is so new. I really think we have to put this into perspective its only been 60 years that the Birth Control pill has been available. The idea that women would be in a workplace deciding when and if to have children deciding what kind of careers and lives they want to have to be working alongside men the idea that this would happen and propel itself forward at such a rapid rate in 60 years is a marvel. The idea we could figure this out at this time is absurd. These questions are really difficult and i think they will take a lot longer then since 2017. A minute ago with the same question in a different way me too, on the one hand harvey weinstein, on the other stand a afor those who dont know hes a comedian there was an article you talk about it in your book. And as told to about really bad day he kept trying to have sex and she kept saying number it was a really bad day. Was a me too moment are really bad date . I think those marks are the edges. Once in the middle . To me it tips over if its a criminal act if something is between two consenting adults nobody is in a situation theres a quid pro quo. Anybody read about this aon the front page of the times. I saw a little bit. I had my husband described it to me. Anyone in the audience who disagrees with my characterization feel free but basically absleeps with one or two young women in the profession he doesnt have direct oversight over them. He is very powerful and his opinion could affect their career. They said they felt pressure to sleep with him or to go back to sleep with him, yes to sleep with him but they went back to his apartment voluntarily where they felt pressure to sleep with him. Me too access . Me too moment . Its not abits me too access abmaybe we should cut start calling it Something Else maybe another category. A lot of people have felt pressure to have sex with people for any number of reasons. Thats not a crime. He could be traumatized by it it can make you feel shady for the rest of your life. I wrote a piece for the times that i discovered its against the law to require someone to have sex with you once you said you dont want to have sex with you, even though you gone home to their apartment and got really drunk. What is required of them to have sex with you mean . Force themselves. Yes. But abdidnt force himself but they just went out. I know you dont have a daughter and i know you famously written about choosing to be childless a choice i defend especially because i do have children. [laughter] the parents always understand my position more back say you had a daughter who is my age who is 16, who a member of the audience knows here. What would you say to her about dating and sex. What would you say to her going off to college what would your advice be met. I would say take care of yourself. Be aware of the situation, read the room. Read the room not just the room youre in but the culture of the campus. Theres nothing wrong with being an activist around this. However you want to handle the issue of consent thats your business. I think its really easy for us who grew up without dating apps were not necessarily in sexual situations with people we met 45 seconds ago and we also have the benefit of learning how to negotiate in person interactions without screen ethic its easy for us to be cavalier about knowing how to get out of something. I would say to her i would ask her what is it about a situation like that that makes you feel like you cant get out of it. What is it about feeling awkward or guilty about not doing what some guy wants and then translates into a file had no choice and i feel this is a violation end because i really think we need some give and take because our way is not always right and their way is not either. I would say dont get completely blackout drunk in any circumstance. Dont be drunk anywhere in the privacy of your own home, in your class, and exam, blackout, dont get blackout drunk no matter where it is. Call me crazy. What was wrong with the way we handled it . What was wrong with the way we handled it . Yes. Im not actually sure. I think we did okay. I think that there are definitely things that went on that have been adjudicated and we are framing differently today and we need to learn from that and figure out what is that we will get rid of and what we are going to keep but this is all just moving forward. All of this stuff is a process of figuring out. Thats why i say, its only been 60 years that any of this has been relevant to any discussions whatsoever. I dont think its like a terrible thing to say, we got some of this wrong with felt we were doing this right. Lets try to figure out how to do it better but we were not completely wrong about it. I dont really know how to answer that question. I dont think we can go back and say, we handled it completely wrong. We did what we did. All right. Ive come to the end of my questions and i think i mightve come to the end of my time. In terms of, we have no audience questions . Okay. Im not going to ask you questions anymore we are taking questions from the audience. And i want to make a little speech about not making speeches. If you stand up and ask a question, which is what you are here to do, make sure its a question please. If i feel like you are making a speech, which i know youre not going to do, i will cut you off. So having threatened to you and intimidated you, please go ahead and ask any questions. I will be the man who asked the first question. You talk a lot about nuance and the importance of nuance. Lately ive been reading about deriding nuance which is really shocking to me. I hadnt heard that argument before i was really surprised. But also i wonder how you think that shame plays into all this. I think people are afraid of nuance because they are afraid of being shamed or ashamed of me to feel ashamed. I wonder how that figures . Its true. Ive seen nuance weapon eyes. Ive seen it like on twitter a couple times some people post articles and say, another nuance take as if nuances ab or some kind of opinion that its too complicated to sort through so it must be about opinion. Im glad you asked that because we been talking about a lot about me too and the political sides but this is really a book about public discourse. This is a book about talking and thinking and living with complexity and conflict in the need for nuance around that. Thats really most of what i chew on in this book and so ive never thought about this like we have shame so we want to organize our experience into one side or another and then thats it. [inaudible] a lot of people told me not to write the book. I think you should write a book, every book you write you should approach as if it might be the last book you read. I felt like if i didnt take on this moment and sort through everything that was going on in the conversation and just what has become the dialogue and perception i would be derelict in my duties as a writer. But i think its true if you try to go on social media and Say Something that has any sort of complexity or requires a couple leaps of logic, you not only going to be ignored. You could be penalized. There is a reward system for saying things that are very reductive and simplistic and theres a penalty for trying to become located. But i think that is changing. People are really sick of this. I can tell you. So that shame, weve got to get past that. If the smart thoughtful people dont stand up then and try to take this on the stupid thoughtless people are happy to do the job for us. Frank. My college professor. Thank you. Him what do you feel with your students today are some of the major problems you face in confronting and teaching . Its gotten really really hard for people to be intellectually honest. I started off as a writer in the early to mid 90s i was all always controversial. Only would like the word provocateur because that implies being per touristy ab always liked working with the a seeing between what was the conventional and what was people actually thinking and feeling. I would write essays and articles that made people angry. And they were published in major publications. I would be hired to do another assignment because that was the job of the writer. It was the job of people thinking publicly. He needed to take intellectual risks and you needed to invite your reader to go places they might not have thought to go or be afraid to go. That has been the basis of my sensibility as a writer for decades and thats absolutely true in the last few years i have students that say i want to write about this subject but im afraid to do it because my classmates in this very room will shun me and say this is taboo im not allowed to talk about this. I do not teach poetry but ive had people who are primarily poets come into my office and say i can he write the poem i want to write because im speaking from a perspective in this one line that is not my own. Its really really sad. As a person in the world i hope we can get past it. Im also aware that people are dealing with the set of conditions that we didnt have to deal with. I was not having anticipatory anxiety with every paragraph i wrote. I have somebody who came back with a story about a transgender kid who insisted their pronoun would not be bag but day but judy in honor of judith butler. The theorist of transgression of sexuality. The mother of all of it. One with catherine mckinnon. The pronoun was judy. Judy abjudy stuff that sort of thing. She wrote this really hilarious defense of the paranormal real function in the english language which i thought was brilliant. I happen to think my kids have a lot of transgender friends. This is a hilarious piece about politics and grammar. She said, over my dead body. So this lives in her computer. Anyone else . I teach feminism to ninth graders. Its a unique privilege. Im wondering as a teacher how you navigate the minefields in the space of educational. I wonder how you do that. Its funny, i talked about this in the book. I was a disney professor at the university of iowa couple years ago and was right after the elections trump was just in office was really hard time for everybody especially to be in a place like iowa even though it was iowa city. Teaching a cultural criticism class. It was like i couldnt get through the material. I was teaching them these essays that were really meaningful to me. We couldnt get through it because the students would say theres so much misogyny in this i can even go any further. One day i was joking around and said, you guys are driving me so crazy that one of these days im going to teach a whole class of be nothing but problematic material. I was joking and i said, thats a brilliant idea. I came home and went back to columbia and said, how about we do a classicist can be called whats problematic. I teach this class its a master class its usually like six weeks. Called whats problematic. We look at material that does this very thing that makes people uncomfortable. We talked about it some more and what became evident in discussing it with them was that what was actually happening was that the kids in the school were being taught this abcoming out of intertextuality and telling a lot of the boys they needed to sit down and be quiet. That they were the oppressor, they were interpreting it that way. That was making them vulnerable to this kind of youtube out right adjacent adjacent. That was actually the dynamic. So what was happening was this theory was enabling White Nationalist influence and that was the story. It was like a horseshoe theory. That shouldve been the piece. But that took me so long to explain that i dont even think there is the bandwidth for that kind of argument. At least not like abit would be another nuanced piece i roll. Thats the sort of thing that really worries me as a person in the world. What are your feelings on the way for a feminism is developing . I agree what youre saying about the loss of nuance and debate but i think the movement is me too abshining a light on places that have the previously been shown. A bit more about you think feminism is veered too far off course. Has gone too far off course . I guess i just feel like at the moment its kind of like heavy on style and light on substance. So much of the book is me wondering what im missing here. Probably a great deal. I think there is a valid observation i couldve used my own experience as a test case and i think its true but unfortunately we are in a moment where you cannot really represent someone elses experience. There are two options. I could either not say anything or just talk about my own personal egocentric view of this so to answer that question in egocentric way i would say for me as someone just sort of like allergic to performative expressions of political ideas it feels a little bit overly theatrical. Thats just my take. Im less interested in what i actually what my experience is then why we cant talk about our different experiences. We been talking a lot about feminism here but the book really is about thoughts and conversation and how to square those things. Can i offer a thought about that . I do have this theory that a lot of what we think of is feminism is just what people who grabbed the mic say is feminism. Its definitely the case there is this real focus on these intense personal interactions and monitoring them and making sure they have them in a certain way but theres this whole other world of feminism, which just isnt getting a lot of attention. Which i would call economic feminism. There are real problems. For example, be mystifying and indefensible, devaluation of household labor. The domestic the organization of domestic workers. The battle against guns and partner abuse. More at risk than other countries . You made fun of that statistics and i wonder how much of it has to do with the saturation of our culture. I can find the passage and quote it to you but let me go back and say theres really good and important battle being fought right now against murder of women. Its a really good book out that just came out about this. Women being murdered by their partners which is enabled by our gun culture and a lot of women are fighting that fight. Economic feminism, antigun feminism. Theres a lot of different kinds of feminism out there that are just this kind of what i call twitter feminism. I would push back on that a little bit and also just to to your point, i worry about that because we are so much safer than in other countries. Are you suggested women are murdered abhang on a second, are you suggesting women are murdered by their partners more this country than others . I think possibly yes because of the availability of guns. I was reading this book by Rachel Louise snyder whose name i cant remember. On partner murder partners. She had a really quite shocking figure and its not because american men or more violent and because american men or in some cases same. There is a Thomson Reuters poll that came out spring of last year they lifted the most 10 dangerous countries in the world. They polled 500 or so global experts in Womens Health and the list somalia, afghanistan, pakistan, india. Number 10 on the list was the United States. When asked why that was, the representatives from the polls said, in the wake of me too we thought it was important to include the u. S. So people are aware that just because you are rich country doesnt mean youre immune to this kind of violence. I just think that sort of thing is important. It diminishes real risk and real violence in the wake of me too its important to be aware is not a data point. My question is, what are we getting out of this kind of narrative. Why do we want so badly for the United States to be number 10 on the list because it makes for great social media. You can post that and get a million clicks it will benefit the publications that run with the story and it doesnt make any sense. There is a lot of work to be done. Thats the not the same as living in a country where there is female genital mutilation and honor killings. In your brotherinlaw can kill you. I think that is something we really have to stop pretending im having a hard time believing that Thompson Reuter would publish a pole like that. Anybody who you get a free email to that link if you buy the book. Is there anything that trump has done that you like or support . Is there anything that trump has done that i like . I said at least this will be interesting. As a columnist, great. Im always looking for stuff. Its so profoundly uninteresting. Its so boring. I actually cannot think of one good thing. Can you . And new york review i had to read it three times it was so mindboggling to me. Do you want to do a deep dive into more of this or satire because you are very good at satire. Do you want to do a deep dive into more of this or satire because you are very good at satire. This book was really really hard to write. It is like playing whack a mole you are writing about the current moment it is almost impossible. Spending weeks writing about a brouhaha that seemed relevant and then it isnt. I dont think i will write another book about this immediately but it is interesting. And it is predictable. The book is itself a critique of current opinion. I would be disappointed if the critics gave that away. But i think that is what is important about it. If you really think the left is the biggest problem then look at the white house. But because the trump situation is so broad and powerless all the more reason the other side has to get its act together to have a coherent approach. To talk about preventing this from happening in Voter Suppression and gerrymandering not we dont need to bottle the outrage. And political consultant i am a writer and i approach this on the level of creativity and artistry. It is an unusual book because im not submitting an argument but allowing the readers to think alongside me as i work it out. It is personal and this feeling of your relevance and there were some versions of it and it seems that the only way to pull it of off. We have time for one last question when did this become so appealing to people . Its like a dopamine hit. I talk about this in the book people look at their computers we really dont have as much time to get together in person i was talking about this the other day even talking on the phone remember back in the nineties if you didnt go out with your friends you would just call somebody and sit there for hours talking to them and you didnt walk around with your phone. The phone was attached to the wall. [laughter] remember . You would sit there and focus so there were very focused conversations and you could metabolize emotions in a much more natural and healthy way as you are sorting through things with your friends. Then you call the next person. Like you are driving your car or walking down the street. So because we dont have the opportunity to vent our ideas and emotions in the way we were designed to as humans to get channeled into these reactions online so then you Say Something and outrage gets a response. And then you get a reaction its like a dopamine hit its like hitting the lever and i see it all the time. I do want to end on a positive note because people say is there any solution . But the fact that people are watching or listening to podcasts for three hours. [laughter] that is an indication there is appetite for more nuance and complexity in conversation. I dont think at this current level or deductive reasoning is sustainable. We go around and talk about this and its pretty remarkable. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] welcome to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the director of education and we are very honored to host mister brown for his book think and imagine it is wonderful to have yall here with us this evening at the museum and those of at home watching on cspan. We have a wonderful presentation