[inaudible] its a very good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And tonight Sam Tanenhaus has agreed to interview randy and call out for him aspects of the biography, so its my pleasure to welcome them bothful thank you. [applause] am i good here . I can shout, so i probably dont need one of these. So Randy Boyagoda youre a novelist, and youre writing about Richard John Neuhaus. How did we get to this topic, first of all and why . Right. I started i started working on this book in some ways without even realizing it in 2009, so shortly after neuhaus died. I wrote a profile for a torontobased magazine called the walrus. Im from toronto, and it was basically an essay that argued heres the most influential canadianborn intellectual in the past 50 years that none of you have ever heard of. So i wrote this interview and i kind of left it at that. At that point i was in the midst of a terribly unreadable second academic monograph and as a rescue from that sort of project, i realized that here rea