Transcripts For CSPAN2 Meghan Daum The Problem With Everything 20240713

Joining her to discuss the problem with everything is judith shes a critic and journalist and the author of the sabbath world glimpses of a different order of time. Former the editor of lynn walt franco Deputy Editor of new York Magazine and science editor of the new republic shes written for the New York Times book review among numerous others. Thank you to our friends at cspan for joining us to film us conversation for book tv. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming meghan and judas. [applause]abmeghan and judith. Am 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 early actually but earlier i was on a book tour and i was in minneapolis, i was in st. Paul, it turned out to be the same night that David Sedaris was doing a reading at the university and minneapolis and in like a stadium basically. Anybody who was anybody who cared about those things went to see David Sedaris 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 cant, i thought i wouldnt even get to see you. I thought i would even get to be near you. We looked around and i was like, well, you are the only one here. So i took her to see David Sedaris and that was actually a great night. We had to see him in the overflow room on the jumbotron. Thats what its like to be on book tour. Its very glamorous. I also love that we are on book tv 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, its really true. Like his favorite thing. I feel like, if wherever he is has cspan, he 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 in 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 so much problematic now, the problem with everything is our problem enticing of everything but really ultimately to me the problem with everything refers to that conversation we are always having either with ourselves and if we are lucky, with somebody else. Its like the thing we are always chewing on like what is it about the world, whats the problem with everything . Why are things the way they are and why am i bothered and why do i have this cognitive dissonance . Thats at the heart of this and that is something thats captured in the very end of the book which im going to read from. Its can be 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, 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 use 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 think labels are part of what brought us into this mess in the first place. Labels the bad for bigot, social justice warrior, white supremacist, tamp down contradictions. They leave no room for cognitive dissidents. They deny us our basic human right to feel conflicted. As i like to tell my students, if you are not conflicted, you are either lying to yourself or not very smart. In the middle of writing this book i went to my 25 year College Reunion in full disclosure i crashed the reunion driving up there for the day without a reservation after a friend convinced me at the last minute that i should go. I had never been to a College Reunion i have complicated feelings about college most of them stemming from guilt over the fact that i often didnt bother to get to know people as well as i could have. Seeing my classmates in middle age though i felt i did know them. I knew them because i recognize 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 shaking us ever so slightly loose from our foundational coolness. Not that that we still werent cool, we were just human now too. We were human in that way that you have to go into. We were human in the way that you cant be when you are 20 or even 25. I wish i mean, we were in direct dialogue with our failures and limitation. Decades earlier we had been bright shiny nothings now we were fully formed some things in various states of disenchantment and disrepair. At one point in the afternoon in search of a bathroom i turned the corner in a dark dormitory corridor and ran smack into an old friend, we had, how long had it been . 20 years at least. She was in the middle of getting divorced, my divorce as it happened had just recently been finalized. Who would have thought it would have 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, having money Problems Health problems and dying parent problems. People were despondent over trumpet but also following News Coverage of the ties of student activism and thinking the waters were maybe starting to laugh a little too far over the shores. Back in our day we had campaign for South African divestment now the kids were calling for boycotts and divestment in israel we had been fierce advocates for gay rights, we were one of the gayest colleges in the country. Now gaia was passc. Transgender activism had students turning in their professors over improper use of pronouns. Dormant dormitory bathrooms were named genderneutral which was fine but we can help remember the unisex dormitory bathrooms back in our time when men and women thought nothing of showering in adjacent stalls. Why the big production . And why, by the way, so much racial discord . We knew it was time for a National Reckoning with structural racism. We read tallahassee code, we supported black lives matters, or at least said so on facebook but now from what were hearing, the entire western canada part, literature and philosophy was being written off as white supremacy. How had this happened pee dee what was wrong with these kids . Or was there something wrong with us . It was like we could taste her 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 will were in full bloom. The tulips were holding onto the last breath of spring. Wearing sandals and clutching bags as souvenirs from the bookstore the alums strolled along the bridge counts 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 culture cultural center. Those demands of time seem so radical. Today they seem so reasonable as to be a matter of course. All the irrelevance, the obsolescence. The creak of aging out before you even get old. The phantom of time haunted me as i drove back to the city and my 17yearold volvo station wagon. It followed 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 became a near Constant Companion it clouded my vision like the membrane on the iowa lizard. Shielding me from what i couldnt comprehend, sparing me the mortification of my own cluelessness. It had been both 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. There are always tomorrows problems to look forward to. Tomorrow the young people now nipping at my heels will be walking brickbats at their own school reunions. Feeling combination of embarrassment and pride in how they used to be. The day after tomorrow their kids might be colonizing mars. In the end, i think ive come to realize that the problem with everything isnt meant to be solved, its meant to feed us, its meant to pump oxygen through our lungs, its meant to give us something to talk about, its meant to fuel comedy and inspire great art foot, 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 . They are on. Thank you, im going to open a piece of paper to scare you all. A lot of questions. I just write them down so that i can ignore them. Always be prepared. Thank you. Thats my favorite passage of the book. Is not a spoiler. You still have to read the book. Its allinclusive theres no ending. But you do fortunately lead me into my first question which is about the generation gap which is what your book is mostly about i think. Largely about. I was skeptical when i started reading the book because i was skeptical about five years ago about generation gaps because i dont believe in generations i think generally generations are about generalizations. There really about whoever has grabbed the media microphone and managed to define the group. And theyre not borne out by any sort of demographic or cultural analysis just sort of a pile up of memes but about five years ago 10 years ago i started noticing the phenomenon you talk about and so there really is a gap between our generation, you say you take it back at the end but somewhere in book you say our generation was all about being tough and their generation is all about being fair, which once again give every generation statement is abi was a quivering mass of jelly when i was young so tough wasnt in my vocabulary but definitely i felt a lot of pressure to be positive. That was a thing our generation was all about. I dont know if the upandcoming generation is necessarily all about being fair in the sense of being evenhanded or following due process or any of that but they are certainly about being just about changing frameworks or changing norms and policing the changing of norms. And definitely there is a gap where i feel like the discourse of trauma has gone too far and daughter feels like my 16yearold daughter feels like, why did you put out that . Why do you think thats okay . So my question for you is, how did that happen . What happened between our generation gen x and millennial amgen z, assuming we can use those terms putting the monastic, 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 it was going to be called, you are not a bad ass and it was good to be called you are probably not a bad ass. I assumed Hillary Clinton was a would be present. That didnt happen and the conversation around social justice issues and the culture wars brought it out into inner sexuality whatever that means, we can get into that. The topic had to go beyond women but i will say 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 and sitting at the Kitchen Table with my mother listening to npr, not cspan, 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 Phyllis Schlafly and how can anyone be like that . The leading opponent equal rights amendment. Famous antifeminist who worked outside the home great deal. I remember having these conversations and i remember at the same time, growing up in this decade 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 by school. By the time i got to college there were more women and men then college. Fast forward a couple decades, suddenly the premise around the conversation around women is that we are this underclass. That somehow we live under the thumb of this patriarchy we are constantly fighting against. I wondered, my first instinct was to say, thats wrong and stupid and i wrote a lot of pages saying that. Then i had to think okay, i know a lot of people even my own age to think thats true. So where this book really lives is that conflict. I didnt know if i was right or not. The book more than anything is a self interrogation, its not a polemic and im trying to sort that do. To answer your question specifically, i think there are certain conditions that we enjoyed as gen x people that later generations did not have the benefit of. I think if you grew up in the 70s as a kid, there was sort of in androgyny to being a child at that time. 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 out lesbians. Everybody wanted to be that. The. They were not out at the time. They were not out at the time, but come on they were. 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 Disney Princess phenomenon. We did not have pink toy aisle and blue toy aisle in the toy store. I think we had the benefit of an agency around our gender expression that for a variety of reasons started to go away later on. I think that makes us a little cavalier about how we move through the world. I had to check myself in that regard. What is driving this gender differentiation . Would you say social media that reinforces the stereotypes . Pornography . We did not grow up with ubiquitous online pornography or any online pornography and that really changes the game in terms of sexual negotiation. I think we have to recognize that and cut them some slack with that. I have to say, this is kind of like a crackpot theory but im getting 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 this started to change. I think parents subconsciously internalized gender stereotypes and it may have affected how the children were raised. You come home to a nursery decked out in pink taffeta versus camo or whatever it would be, maybe that makes a difference. a my room was like a closet. I feel like that was all of our parents. Let me throw out a quote 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 a persecuted group. This is of course referring to the notorious sensitivity that the generation we are talking markets criticize for safe spaces, trigger warnings, the trauma of having your ass grabbed. Whatever it is. What are they stand to gain by reinforcing the narrative that their persecuted group . You dont give an answer but i dont believe that you dont have an answer. Because you are meghan daum and you have an opinion on everything i have couple different answers to that but one of the answers come off what do you stand to gain from identifying as a persecuted group . Group affiliation. I think we are really lonely. I think this manifests in all areas previous areas but ideology people are really lonely theyre not having inperson interactions, theyre not having extended dynamic frenzied arguments with their friends over drinks. Its taking place online. Its easier to silo your cell. But i have to say, with any of these identitybased discussions and i particularly around women there is a set of approved messages. There is a set of assumptions around women it might just be for instance like women on College Campuses are in grave danger of sexual assault. The gender wage gap is the result largely or almost entirely of systemic discrimination. Women are being prevented from entering stem fields because of his misogyny in those fields. Those ideas get connected to slogans and statistics we got one in five raped 0. 79 on the dollar. That kind of thing. Are saying those things are legitimate or not . They are not exactly correct. They become articles of faith and then social media comes in and takes those articles of faith and turns them into vehicle of style. So you where your bad ass tshirts and it then results in this rhetoric that becomes this vocabulary that we swim in. Theres a warm awar on women, hollywood uses it, corporations use it. What bothers me about it is that it results in this paradoxical dynamic were being a strong woman means constantly emphasizing your weakness. That to me is really backwards. Let me disentangle this a little bit. Im aware of the debates about the one in five statistic on campus and am aware that the main critique as they are based on two unbelievably unrepresented studies of commuter campuses giant commuter campuses that are nothing like the kinds of campuses that the people who cite them. And rape is defined very broadly and their statistical relevance is way overblown. I know about that. I agree with that. 0. 79 on the dollar a i think it is true but the question is whats causing it. The problem is to even ask that question is to roam into a territory that has become so taboo that no one can even have a conversation and therefore we cant identify whats a fact and take steps to remedy the problem. Claire cain miller identifies i dont know if you read her follow her, shes the sort of sex and economics reporter for the times. Sex and economics reporter. I making that phrase up. Theres been a whole discourse about the fact that its really motherhood penalty. If youre young and single, you get about 0. 97 on the dollar. As soon as you get married it drops and as soon as you have a child it goes way down. Its only the younger women who are driving it back up to the 0. 79 because for others its a well below 0. 79. You are saying, when people talk about structural or systemic discrimination its like two baggie and elephant and doesnt actually mean anything. The ideas are so constantly reinforced we dont know what were actually talking about. My concern is its not allowing us to take the steps necessary to actually do anything about it. By the way, i dont even talk about the gender wage gap in this book. Its a side issue. Spoiler alert. Im happy to come to your house and talk to you about it in person. Is there feminism we dont we know what you dont like. You dont like twitter feminism. You dont like slogan feminism. Censorious feminism. Im trying to think of other things you dont like theres a lot of feminism you dont like. I share most of your abbut what kind of feminism is out there right now that you do like . I like a feminism that does not advertise itself. I like the idea of being a person. A lot of this is semantic. What is feminism even mean . Its interesting, i was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times for over 10 years for 2005 to 2015 a16. I was writing about a lot of these issues during that time. Lets not forget that was when nobody would use the word feminist. They would interview celebrities and they would say, im not a feminist, but a or member when sarah palin came along in 2008 and everyone was like, who is this . She used the word feminists, she called herself a feminist and everyone was like no thats not what we meant. Hillary clinton wasnt calling herself a feminist. My feeling was, guess what, if youre not can use the word, somebody else is going to take it from you. Start using work. Now weve corrected to the point where its a troll. Its a trend. Its a style thing. Its beyoncc. ab2013 . The turning point for you . This was all bothering me. This was starting to bother me leading up to them. Reconstruct the beyoncc moment. I cant because i was so out of it in terms of pop culture, i did not see it. The beyoncc moment she steps in front of this giant lit up sign that says feminist at the video music awards, meanwhile shes twerking. Thats sex positive, she chose her choice to twerk. Go ahead. I love that you cite ab because ive always driven me crazy that antifeminist to believe women should go back into the home have macro careers travel all over the country. She had like six kids she shouldve written a parenting book i would welcome that. Let me just ask another question. I want to put you between a rock and a hard place now. I asked you to do this. [multiple speakers] i dont think im going at you but i want to put you in a difficult situation. Christine blasey ford, britt a abrett kavanaugh, i think you tiptoe around this a little bit and i dont blame you because it is the third rail completely the third rail right now. You say, comes from the context of the discussion of campus rape, it comes in the context of discussion about due process. And the failure to provide due process to the accused that goes on in campus. I think its segues from matt or segues to that. You say kavanaugh should have been confirmed because one thing we know that kavanaugh shouldnt have been confirmed because he lied about having a drinking problem under oath. That much has been established. But i dont get the feeling ab i want to pin you down now, i dont get the feeling that you think that if absent that, lying about a drinking problem, that he should have not been confirmed. I think i will come up with the triple negative. He should have not been confirmed because that another one of her testimony being uncorroborated should not have been disqualifying for due process reasons. Unfortunately her claim does not rise to the necessary evidentiary area standard. Im sorry to say that but now im talking to people who think that it was all staged in which case, okay fine its a great actor we should put him on the supreme court. Mark judge should have been subpoenaed and he was a witness. The whole thing was handled very shabbily on all fronts. Unfortunately given the system we have i dont think theres anything they could have done. I believe her, i absolutely believe her but what i noticed about that situation and what started to give me the willies is that she became a cultural meme before she even left the stand. Shes raising her hand we have the image and i get that its powerful projected on the side of the building but i just think, is this what its come to . Why cant we have these discussions absent the iconography. Let me take this from another angle. Brett kavanaugh, ass hole. Can i say that on book tv . You can bleat me. Youre getting up thumbs up from cspan. Brett kavanaugh, teenage ass hole, alcoholic, we all knew guys like this. Did a lot of really crappy stuff. Then went on to lead a very upright life, was apparently an unbelievably fair boss two women, promoted women, made sure his office was 50 women when he was abhis clerks were 50 women. Is there a statute of limitation . Should we have said, brett kavanaugh, teenage ass hole, how many of us were teenage ass holes . Should we have said okay, enough. A lot of these cases that go back 2030, 40 years, should we decide statute of limitation, enough . I think we should definitely consider it. Im not trying to dodge, i dont know the answers to these questions. I wrote the book to try to figure out why we have such a hard time talking about this. For a lot of this stuff, especially when it comes to things people said in the past. We need to set a date and say whatever happened at this point, it might be 2017, this stuff is really new. Whatever you do after this point, you are on the record, you will be accountable but going back lets just please move on. That would be one option. If i can answer that question i would be doing things other than talking about my strange memoir of the intellectual moment. If you go work for betsy devos or Something Like that. Well. [multiple speakers] she was right about one thing. She was right about a lot of title ix. Theres not a rule, do think there is no rule with the rule be we warned you the rules are established and you cant violate them. Or you should have known. This stuff is so new. I really think we have to put this in perspective. Its only been 60 years that the Birth Control pill has been available and its only been 60 years since anybody had any control over their reproductive life including men. The idea that women would be in the workplace deciding when and if to have children, deciding what kinds of careers and lives they want to have come to be working alongside men of the idea that that would happen and would propel itself forward at such a rapid rate in 60 years is a marvel. The idea we could figure this out in this time is absurd. These questions are really really difficult and i think they will take a lot longer then since 2017. Emily go with the same question in a different way, me too, on the one hand harvey weinstein, on the other hand abis a comedian there was an article you talk about it in your book and as toad about a really bad date in which they sat around with their clothes off he kept trying to have sex she kept saying no. It was a really bad date. Was it a me too moment or was it really bad date . I think those marked the outer edges but whats in the middle . Where does me too tip over if it tips over into a to me it tips over if its a criminal act. If something is between two consenting adults and nobody is in a situation where they cannot physically get out of the situation, nobodys in a situation where there is a quid pro quo there is a real such an extreme power differential that somebody has absolutely no choice, i think we have to grow up a little bit on that. Has anybody ever read about the sommelier on the front page of the times the situation. I sought a little bit. I did not read it personally either but i had my husband described it to me. Anyone in the audience who disagrees with my characterization feel free. Basically a sommelier sleeps with one or two young women in the profession. He does have direct oversight over them. But hes very powerful and his opinion could affect their careers so they said they felt pressure to sleep with him or to go back, not to sleep with him, 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 me too access may be even abmaybe we should start calling this something else. Maybe we should find a different category. A lot of people have felt pressure to have sex with people for any number of reasons. Thats not a crime. And you could be traumatized by it it can make you feel shady for the rest of your life. I wrote a piece on affirmative consent, it is against the law to require someone to have sex with you once you said you dont want to have sex. Even though you gone home to their apartment gotten really drunk. What is require them to have sex with you. Force themselves. I would agree. Yes. But the sommelier did not force himself but ab 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. Say you had a daughter who is my age who is 16 a member of the audience knows. What would you say to her about dating and sex . What would you say to her as shes going off to college what would your advice be . I would say take care of yourself, be aware of the situation. Read the room and read the room not just the room youre in but the culture of the campus. Theres nothing wrong with being an activist around this. I would also say, however you want to handle this issue with consent, thats your business. That is euro your cohorts business. I think its really easy for us who grew up without dating apps, who were not necessarily in sexual situations with people we met 45 seconds ago and we also had the benefit of learning how to negotiate in person interactions without screens. I think 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 that then translates into i feel i had no choice and i feel this is a violation. I really think we need some give and take because our way is not always right and there way is not either. I would also say, dont get completely blackout drunk in any circumstance. Dont be ship faced really, anywhere when youre in the privacy of your own home, in class, dont go to exam in a blackout, anything like that. Just dont get blackout drunk no matter where it is. Call me crazy. Whats wrong with the way we handle it . What was wrong with the way we handle that . Yes. Im not actually sure. I think we did okay. There are definitely things that went on that had been adjudicated and that we are framing differently today and we need to learn from that and figure out what of that we are going to get rid of and what we are going to keep but this is all just moving forward. If all of this stuff is a process of figuring out. This is 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 weve got some of this wrong. We thought we were doing this right. Lets try to figure out how to do it better. But were not completely wrong about it. I dont think we go back and just say we can handle this completely wrong we did what we did. Okay. 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 . Exactly my point is. So im not can ask you questions anymore. We are taking questions from the audience at this point. I want to make a speech about not making speeches. If you stand up and ask the 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 you are not going to do, it will actually cut you off. Having threatened you and intimidated you, please go ahead and ask some questions. I will be the man who asks the first question. You talk a lot about nuance and the important nuance, and lately ive been reading these pieces about deriding nuance which is really shocking to me. I hadnt heard that argument before it was really surprising. I wonder how you think that shane plays into all of this. I think people are afraid of nuance because theyre afraid of being shamed or made to feel ashamed. Ive seen on twitter a couple times another nuance take as if nuance dog whistle for some kind of opinion thats too complicated to sort through. Im glad you asked that we been talking a lot about me too, we been talking a lot about 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 and the need for nuance around that. Its really most of what i chew on in this book. I never thought about this. We have shame so we just organize our experience into one side or another and thats it. Thats true and i have to say, that is why he wrote this book. A lot of people told me not to write this book i think ridership, i think writers should read a book, every book you should write you should approach as if it might be the last book you write. I felt like if i didnt try to take on this moment and sort through everything going on in the conversation and what has become a dialogue and perception, i would be derelict in my duties as a writer. 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 are not only going to be ignored you could be penalized. He could say you are just saying, kids in cages. Like this is much more collocated. There is a reward system for saying things that are very productive and simplistic and there is a penalty for trying to become picketed. But i do think that is changing. If you are really really sick of this. I can tell you. The shame, we gotta get past that because its a smart thoughtful people dont stand up and try to take this on, the stupid thoughtless people are happy to do the job for us. Frank, my college professor, thank you. I was going to ask you something about writing in your life as a writer. Youve written novels and he write nonfiction and you also teach writing. What do you feel with your students today are some 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 always controversial. Every bit like the word provocateur because that implies being gratuitously provocative. I was always interested in looking at what was going on in the culture. Seeing the hypocrisies, seeing the goals between the conventional wisdom and what people were actually thinking and feeling and i would write essays and articles that made people angry and were published in major publications. Maybe i would see them six weeks later and beyond to the next thing. In fact, i would be hired to do another assignment like that because that was the job of a writer. That was the job of people thinking publicly. You 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. I have had people who are primarily poets come into my office and say, i cant even write the poem i want to write because im speaking from a perspective in this one line that is not my own and im appropriating and all this kind of stuff and its really, really sad and i find it quite troubling as a teacher but just as a person in the world and i hope we can get past this but also im aware that, again, people now are dealing with the set of conditions that we didnt have to deal with, i started off as a writer, there was no social media, there was no internet, i was not having anxiety with every paragraph that i wrote and people do now so its easy to say that twitter is stupid and look away, thats easy for you to say and its true, i need that perfect example of something that i need not to be cavalier about. I have been teaching essay writing, i asked him to write about something in their dorm, somebody or something in their dorm and i had one who came back with the story about a transgender kid that their pronoun would not be they but judy in honor judith butler. The mother of all of this. Along with katherine. The pronoun was judy, you know, judy stuff, that sort of thing, she wrote this really hilarious defense of the function in english language which i thought it was sort of brilliant whether i happened to like, my friends, my kids have a lot of transgender friends and i have learned to use the proper pronounce and not misgender people but i thought it was mill hilarious piece of grammar, i can get this published for you, i can place it in the times and a lot of places to you and she said, over my dead body. Lives in her computer. Anyone else . So i teach feminism to ninth graders and unique privilege but im wondering im sensing a lot of the tensions that you write in the book and im wondering as a teacher how do you navigate mind fills in a space thats educational, i just wondered how you do that . Well, its funny, i talk about this in the book, i was a visiting professor at university of iowa a couple of years ago, so right after the election, trump was in office, really hard time for everybody especially to be in a place like iowa even though it was eye io city, cultural criticism class and i it was like i couldnt get the material, i was teaching him essays that were meaningful, talking about day rape. One day i was joking and said, you guys are driving me crazy, one of the days i will teach the whole cross but nothing but problematic material, thats going to be the class, i was joking, oh, my god, that was a brilliant idea, i came back to colombia where i normally teach, its going to be called whats problematic, i teach this class, mast e master class usually 6 weeks, whats problematic and we look at material that does this very thing, that makes people uncomfortable and selfselecting group, they know they are taking the class, they are not going to have to go to the emergency room like my my iowa students did. Now lets do it, sergeant of like an elevated version of a trigger warning in a way. Yeah, yeah. Are we out of time . Its like i cant emphasize this enough. Theres such a resistance for something that requires more than one idea, two ideas at the same time people can no longer do it and the media is just not amenable to it, there was a piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago in the opinion section, did anyone see this, it was by a mother the headline was like, watch out for your white teenage boys because the allright is coming after them. A mother talking about her son had been joking about trigger warnings, and that bothered her, she noticed he was going on youtube, watching George Peterson videos, the piece was really the tone of it was very hysterical, i dare say. It was pretty over the top and people were kind of making fun of it and i went on twitter and i said Something Like, oh, you know, the tone of this is its feeling a little remember the satanic preschool era, the idea that your children were not safe and day care and, you know, coincidently happened to be the same time that all the uppermiddle class white mothers were working back to work and leaving their children so we had to create a thing that these mothers shouldnt be doing that as an aside. The tone of this piece really reminds me of the tone of the time, social panic and i got a lot of likes on my tweet and everything. At least 3 different people messaged me directly, people i really respect and they said, megan, youre right about that, i saw your tweet and youre wrong and i have teenage son and this is a real phenomena, this is really happening. We talked about it some more and what became evident in discussing with them that what was happening the kids in the school were being taught this that was coming out of intersectionalty and a lot of the boys that they needed to sit down and be quiet and oppressor and they were interpreting that way and that was making them vulnerable to this youtube, i dont know, altright, adjacent, whatever. That was actually the dynamic. What was happening is misapplied intersectional theory was enabling White National influence. That was the story. It was like a horseshoe theory. I dont think that theres the bandwidth for that kind of argument, at least not like in a it would be another nuance. Thats the sort of thing that really worries me. What are your feelings on the way feminism is developing. But i think the movement, if you want to call it a movement me too, you know, shining a light in places where it hasnt previously been shun, just a bit more about feminism has veered too far off course and whats your feelings on the way its developed . Has it gone too far, of course. I feel like at the moment its having style, light on substance, so much of the book is like i said me wondering what im missing here. Probably great deal. You know, i think theres a valid, theres a valid observation here that i sort of use my own experience. I think that is true. Unfortunately we are in in a mot where you cannot really represent someone elses experience. 2 options. I could not say anything or talk about my own personal view of this and so to answer that question in a way, i would say for me as someone who is just sort of like allergic to performative expressions of political ideas, it feels a little bit theatrical. Thats my take. Im really not im less interested in what i actually what my experiences and why we cant actually talk about different experiences. The book is really about thought and conversation and how to square those things. Can i offer a thought about that too, ashley, i do have a theory that a lot of what we think of is feminism, its just what people who grab the mic say is feminism. Its definitely the case that this is real focus on these personal interactions and sort of monitoring them and make sure they happen in a certain way, theres a 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, you know, indefensible devaluation of Household Labor to take an example. Organization of Domestic Work workers. Battle against guns and partner abuse. Women in america are more at risk of being killed than other countries which probably is a questionable statistic but people dont know. Theyre more at risk than any other countries . You made fun of the statistic i can find the passage and quote it to you. Theres a really good and important battle being fought right now against murder of women really good book out. Women being murdered by their partners enabled by our gun culture and women are fighting that fight. Economic feminism, antigun feminism. Not just this kind of, you know, what i call twitter feminism. I would push back a little bit, to your point, i worry about that because we are we are so much safer than in other countries. Are you suggesting that women are murdered by their partners in this country than others . I think yes because of availability of guns. I was reading this book by Rachel Louis Snyder who i cant remember on partnermurder, murder by your partner. She did have a quite shocking figure and its not because american men are more violent, its because american men and in some cases, theres actually right, right, they have access to guns in the way they have in very few other countries. There was a Thompson Reuters poll where they listed the 10 most dangerous countries in the world for women, they polled 500 or so global experts in Womens Health and so the list, you know, somalia, afghanistan, pakistan, india, the usual suspects, number 10 on the list was the United States and when asked why that was the representatives from the poll said, well, in the wake of me too we just thought it was important to include the u. S. So people are aware that just because youre a rich country doesnt mean that youre immune to this kind of violence and i just think that sort of thing is horrid and diminishes real risk and real violence in the wake of me too, its important to be aware, so 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 this list because it makes for great social media, you go post that and get a million clicks and benefit the the publications that run with the story and it just, doesnt make any sense, you cant there are theres a lot of work to be done around women, we are going to raise reproductive rights, abortion rights are in jeopardy but not the same in living in a country where female genital mutilation and your brotherinlaw can tell you, thats something that we really have to stop pretending that im having a hard time to believe that Thompson Reuters will publish Something Like that. Anybody will get free link if you buy the book. [laughter] yeah. Is there anything that trump has done that you like or support . Anything that trump has done that i like . No. You know what, im so naive in the beginning i was like, i was totally naive because i didnt think he was going to win and so naive, i guess at least this would be interesting, like, as a columnist, great, im always looking for stuff and its so profoundly uninteresting, its so boring at this point, so no, i cannot think of one good thing, can you . No, but its not boring. I just dont agree that its boring. Like its tedious at this point. Yeah. When he was elected i wanted to start a website that would be about called dismantling the state which would track the regulatory rollbacks because every day, you know, we see impeachment show which is a good show and has to happen and important to happen but every day, you know, some form of administrative oversight is taken away from this country and its going to leave us in a very place, but, so i do not think its boring. Somebody else had a question. Adrian. I just wanted to know, sorry, after thinking about all of these things and the problem with everything, does your brain hurt, like are you going to like is it do you want to go off to some country like where i want to go to somalia. [laughter] yeah. I read the reviews and some of them like the new yorker review, i had to read like 3 times, it was so mindbogglingly to me and i read a lot, but do you want to do a deep dive into more of this or do you want to write satire because youre good at satire. Thank you. Are you ready for a break now or is it like full on like i dont know this book was really, really hard to write, i mean, its a short book, i probably wrote 3 times as many pages, youre trying to write about the current moment, its almost impossible, ive spent weeks writing about some bruja thats relevant and next week, who cares. Thats the trump effect. That is. Yeah, i dont think im going to write another book about culture wars immediately. I mean, it is really interesting. I mean, it is i feel like some of the media response, its entirely predictable and i feel like it could be epilogue to the book, the book is itself a critique of the very valued system of current opinion, so i would actually be dismayed if the critics were giving a wave, polite wave, how interesting. People say do you really think the left is the really problem, what we have this the white house is terrible, because the trump situation is so fraud and so pearlies, the more reason that the other side has to get act together and have a coherent approach. If we want to talk about preventing this from happening, we need to talk about gerrymandering and voter suppression. We dont need to talk about ban men. Bottle outrage and sell it as potion. [laughter] thats also for sale, by the way. Have you been asked to be a political consultant . No. Im a writer, this is an unusual book. Im not really submitting an argument. Its very personal, its about aging, its about the feeling of irrelevance, its about divorce, you know, about a whole bunch of things and so, yes, it was very, it was very hard to write and versions of it that were much less personal but ultimately seemed clear that the only way to pull it off would be to frame it in this more memoiristic way. Anyone else . Time for one last question, anyone would like to take it im just curious in your research, i mean, when did when, where, how did outrage as a narrative become so appealing to people . When did outrage become so appealing . I think its like a dopomin hit, i think we literally dont have as much time to get together in person. I was talking with somebody the other day. Even talking on the phone if you didnt go out with your friends you would call somebody, like you would sit there for hours talking to them and you didnt walk around with your phone. The phone was attached to the wall, okay, remember, and you would like sit there and focus and even like you started flipping through a magazine, im a terrible person, i have no attention span, you had focused conversations and you finish the phone call and you talked to the next person for an hour, thats not just young people, we all do that. Ive never, you know, talking the phone, driving your car, walking down the street and so i think that because we dont have the opportunity to actually like vent our ideas and our emotions in the way we were designed to as humans, its all getting channeled into reactions online, outrage would get a good response, you register outrage and then you get a reaction and its like a dopemin hit and i see it all of the time and i dont know i want to end on a positive note actually, people say, oh, is there any solution to this, the fact that people are listening to podcast for 3 hours, thats indication that theres real appetite for more nuance and i think i dont think current level of just frenzy and reasoning is sustainable, i think people will get sick of it, they already are. I see it, its pretty remarkable, so anyway. Well, thanks. [applause] thanks, judith. And tonight on book tv and prime time, George Packer recounts life of richard, rich lowry makes his case with positive contributions of nationalism, new York Magazine williams considers race and identity, doug, look at trump white house, journalist design increasing the use of technology, all start tonight at 7 00 eastern on cspan2s book tv. For more information consult book guide or visit website cspan book tv. Org. I hasnt told my lawyers i was going to do it. My lawyers would have told me not to. If this is where justice in american has come down to, put me in prison for the rest of my life, go ahead and do it, i will not lie before god to save my hine or anything else. The highest standard will be judged by, im just not doing it. Well, they had ridiculed before they threw us out, ridiculed by religion, youre asking us to trip the italy god intervened and god said, saunders got podestas emails. And zelensky, you take a fact here and a fact there and another fact here and you weave them all together and your book is full of lies, he said i read your books, i listened to your live stream on the internet, ive researched for hours and months, your books are lies, i knew at the moment, i could see the whole thing was politically motivated, mueller was a political operation, they had convicted donald trump of treason, they just didnt have a crime. [laughter] okay, i wasnt going to give them the crime because the crime they wanted me to give them wasnt true. Their theory was wrong. I said, would you like to know the research ive done on Hillary Clinton, one of the people youre talking to me about, i worked on the foundation, of course, you were not interested in Hillary Clinton. Well, assange, i studied the democrats computer system, i dont think that the russians stole the emails. Assange said he didnt get the emails from russia and he suggested it was zeth rich, prosecutor said, we are not interested in your theories about who stole the emails, all they wanted all these hours was talking about me and assange, me and assange, me and stone, thats all they wanted to know and they questioned me on that until i thought i was going insane as after a while they ask you all the questions rapid fire and i said, you know, i cant remember my emails and phone calls from 2016, they werent at the time they were all passing, so ive done a lot of work and writing since that time. I didnt the emails were something i gave 20 seconds thought to, well, when they couldnt break me, they were determined, zelensky called, we will take it from here, i expected from that moment on they could come into my house andrade it like they did roger stones at 4 30 in the morning my wife and i wake up and look if to see if the fbi was out there, cnn parked a car outside the house for weeks hoping to be able to photograph me getting arrested. I decided when i said that i was not going to take their plea deal i decided two things, one i was going to go on the media and, 2, i was going to write a book. [laughter] [applause] now, i thought the fbi was pretty good on profiling, i wasnt going lie for them and i started to write a book on them and had been writing while they were going along. [laughter] when i went on the media, when i was telling the country what im telling you tonight and that is that we have an increasingly weponized Justice System and i believe as i said when i wrote killing the deep state that this was a by the cia, the fbi, the department of justice, department of irs was in on it, these were bureaucrats who had gone onto a global vision, they believe the United States was outmoted, in order, here in richmond they believe civil war, great crime in the United States because we had slavery not rewarding us as a country because we eliminated slavery at the end of the horrendous war. They believed the United States is, you know, Hillary Clinton advocates, they signed into that vision, they were so convinced they were right and they felt they could violate the law, create illusion of russian collusion and do anything they could to prevent donald trump and try to impeach him and they were dead set to follow the political agenda. I was a road block, i said no. That stopped all the gears stopped working. To hear the rest of jarome corsis website visit booktv. Org and search for his name and title of his book, silent no more using search box at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations] good evening, welcome and thank you all very much for being here tonight. We are delighted to have someone who has been here here meaning this store but our original location a good number of times for approaching 30 years now and for him coming to seattle, this for us, feels like having a member of the family back, he does have literal family here in seattle so that part of seattle visits and shes an author too, tony will give her