Podcast appearances and mentions of Bob Garfield

An absolute honour and privilege to welcome today's guest on our Podcast, "The Billion Dreams," a luminary whose talents traverse the realms of advertising, poetry, and cinema with remarkable fluidity and finesse. With a spark in his heart, hailing from a small city Almora in Uttarakhand, India, our guest - Prasoon Joshi's journey from a poet to a celebrated lyricist and scriptwriter is inspiring, to say the least. A poet at heart, he started writing early on and published his first book at the tender age of 17, titled 'Main Aur Woh,' a 'conversation with himself'. Two more books Dard So Raha Hai and Samadhan followed thereafter establishing him as an author. The CEO of McCann Worldgroup India and the Chairman (Asia Pacific), he has revolutionized the advertising industry, crafting campaigns like Coca-Cola's "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola" that resonated deeply with the Indian ethos while achieving global acclaim. His Happydent television commercial not only received personal accolades from Bob Garfield of AdvertisingAge but was also heralded as one of the 21st century's best ads by a Gunn Report poll. In the cinematic universe, Prasoon's debut as a lyricist with "Lajja" marked the beginning of an illustrious career. His lyrics and scripts are celebrated for their poetic depth, emotional intensity, and cultural richness, giving us unforgettable treasures for films like "Rang De Basanti," "Taare Zameen Par," and "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag," among many others. His work has not only won hearts but garnered him multiple awards, including two National Awards and the Filmfare Best Lyricist Award for songs in "Fanaa" and "Taare Zameen Par" solidifying his status as a visionary storyteller. His contributions have been recognized with prestigious accolades, including the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, showcasing his impact on India's cultural landscape. An advocate for social change, Joshi uses his craft to address crucial issues, from environmental consciousness to national pride, making him a voice of both, beauty and conscience. His leadership roles, including serving as the Chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification in India, reflect his commitment to nurturing a responsible and vibrant creative industry. Transforming India's creative landscape through groundbreaking advertising, inspiring lyrics, and his role in shaping public discourse, Prasoon Joshi's legacy is not just in the beauty of his words but in the breadth of his impact, making him an icon of the modern era.In this episode, Ashish Vidyarthi & Prasoon Joshi delve into the nuances of life, discussing both, of its beauty and challenges: What it takes to come from a small town and make your mark in a big city; Working on one's shortcomings to learning the ability to fail gracefully, Adapting to the world of AI to discovering one's own authentic voice, this and much more. Tune in for an insightful dialogue as they dig into powerful themes of self-discovery and navigating the complexities of the modern world. If you like what you have heard, please give a like.Remember to engage with our content by sharing, and subscribing to our channel for more motivating tales. With 'The Billion Dreams,' we are on a mission to bring you a Billion stories that will ignite and inspire your life.Until next time, let's keep surprising ourselves and embracing the infinite possibilities within us. Alshukran Bandhu, Alshukran Zindagi.------Follow Prasoon Joshi on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/prasoonjoshilivehttps://www.instagram.com/prasoonjoshi_-------Topics: 0:46 Jab Ashish Met Prasoon 1:23 Is this really our WEAKNESS?1:51 India's Evolution of Strength2:45 AI Aur Main3:42 Democratisation of Intelligence5:28 Meeting Sam Altman & Philosophy of Advaita 6:16 Poet To Advertising: Changing with Times7:50 Challenges of Coming from Small Cities 10:47 The Art that will make your LIFE EASIER11:25 Choosing to do the RIGHT THING11:52 Story of David that will change the way you think12:20 Discover your authentic voice

In this installment of Best Of The Gist, we are featuring two questions asked of Alec Baldwin (the movie star) by our guest host Bob Garfield (non-movie star), which had originally been left on the cutting room floor, but hey, that's what weekend shows are for, right? After Alec, we dig into The Gist archives and listen back to Mike's 2017 interview with Bob Garfield about his one-man show, Ruggedly Jewish. Yeah, that one-man show. Guest host week is now officially over. Produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com To advertise on the show, visit: https://advertisecast.com/TheGist  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As of 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, the day's two biggest news stories remain nail-biters. Kevin McCarthy, who, once upon a time, seemed as though he would sail into the role of Speaker of the House of Representatives without so much as a speed bump, has instead run into a wall of opposition, stranding him in DC's version of limbo. The other story we are watching with knots in our stomachs is that of Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills safety who collapsed last night during Monday Night Football and remains in critical condition nearly a day later. Our guest host, Bob Garfield explores these developing stories, with varying degrees of concern. Also, Mike's interview with former United States Comptroller General David M. Walker about the House Speakership and who, with McCarthy on the ropes, could throw their hat into the arena. Produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com To advertise on the show, visit: https://advertisecast.com/TheGist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, TikTok is in the cross hairs of the Federal Government, but Taylor Lorenz says, they're missing the target. Then, Teens - increasingly frustrated with social media, go full flip-phone, or worse. And we've got a gift list like no other, because Bob is just in the holiday spirit. I'm Steve Rosenbaum and this is future Forward, along with my podcasting partner in crime Bob Garfield.

TODAY. If your feed is a mess, you're not alone. Content moderation is hard, and getting harder. Then, let's take a look at Roblox, don't know what it is, ask a pre-teen kid. And final. AI explodes in the avatar world, what the hell is Lensa anyway.

Today, there's some crazy nexus of the rising tide of Hunter Biden, the random internal twitter emails, and matt Tibia. Then, as republicans look for reason to cut ties with the former Donald, his dinner with YE seems to be gift wrapped. And then, drones. Because well - drones are great. I'm Steven Rosenbuam and […]

Today. There's a crazy squeeze on to get some legislation passed before the end of the year. And the big buzz is around section 230 and Child Privacy laws. What does that really mean? Then, all these lay offs. Is it a trend, or a safe excuse to cut some headcount? And finally - with the new congress comes a raft of INVESTIGATIONS. What's in store? I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, here with my podcasting partner in Crime Bob Garfield.

Today, as we shake off the fiction that was the Red Wave, a look at the youth vote, the state of Mitch McConnel, and Bob Garfield's take on WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Then, a look at the ongoing disaster that is Elon. Maybe we're not going to Mars after all? And finally the FTX meltdown, and what that means for Crypto.

Today. We've got a barnburner of a pod. Election Tech - a look inside the state of voting in America. Then Crime Stats. Are they bad, or good, or both. And finally - the Curation Team at twitter gets the ax. What is Elon Up to? I'm Steven Rosenbaum and this is Future Forward, here with my podcasting partner in Crime Bob Garfield.

Today: A pod in 3 parts. Part 1, regretfully, we must - must - talk Twitter. Because the various version of social media Armageddon is just too good - red meat - to feed to Bob Garfield. Then, NYC and guns, a solution, or a bad idea? And finally, top tech fails of the past 20 years. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is future forward, here with my podcasting partner in crime, Bob Garfield.

Robots. Are they coming to take your jobs? Today, we have a show that has creatives cowering behind their keyboards. Has AI really arrived, and will it take our jobs? Is Robot Garfield likely to replace Human Garfield - and how soon.

Today. Can tech stem the tide of misinformation as the elections approach? YouTube claims to have a plan. Then: Turkey's Erdogan has a plan for people who publish ‘misinformation' - put them in jail. The only problem is who defines misinformation. And, Biden takes on China. But it's complicated. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward. Here with my podcasting partner in crime - Bob Garfield.

Today. Elon Musk unveils a robot, another step toward his IronMan efforts. Yet at the same time, Musks emails reveal a shocking billionaire bro culture. It's kinda gross. Then, out of London, a UK Coroner lists Instagram algorithm as contributing cause of UK teen's death - whose father accuses Instagram of Monetizing Misery. It's hard to disagree. And, is TikTok's charm offensive working in Washington? Maybe yes. That's what's in store for today's Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, along with my partner in Podcast Crime Bob Garfield.

We start with the complicated nexus of the slow-moving judicial system, and the ‘flood the zone with crap' former president. Together, we'll declassify some stuff. Then, Google was the darling of the Danish public schools, until it wasn't. And, the German efforts to control hate speech. It's a hard line to draw, and a harder one to cross. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, here with my podcast partner in crime, Bob Garfield. Hey Bob - have you switched to pumpkin spice latte yet?

Today. California passes sweeping child protection legislation aimed a the big tech platforms, but is that really the problem? Then - TikTok goes to congress and gets grilled. So - maybe the clock is Ticking on TikTok. And - two state governors create a made for TV show, and the TV camera's happily obliged. But is shipping asylum seekers to democratic vacation spots even legal? This is Future forward, I'm Steven Rosenbaum, here with my podcast partner in crime Bob Garfield.

A Personal Journey - Untold Until Now.

We've got lots of tech this week, and as you might expect, it overlaps with politics - as it increasingly does. Google and folks are going to protect us from misinformation during the coming midterms. Hour GOP folks - 30 of them are holding Zuckerberg accountable for Hunter Bidden. Ok, sure. And Twitter gets an edit button, if you'r willing to pay 60 dollars.

Niche internet micro-celebrities are taking over the internethttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/24/nimcel-influencers-tiktok-youtube/How micro-influencers and mummy bloggers with VERY small followings are earning up to $200,000 a year with sponsored postshttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11148333/How-micro-influencers-earning-big-bucks.htmlINSIDE THE LUCRATIVE WORLD OF PET INFLUENCERShttps://www.mic.com/life/what-its-like-pet-influencer-moneyMeet the Lobbyist Next Doorhttps://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-lobbyist-next-door/

Today - a pod in two chapters. Chapter 1. CNN is getting out of the media criticism business - after THIRTY years. How does the the termination of both Reliable Sources and Host Brian Stelter portend a less introspective time for media prognostication? Or was it just Brian? We'll dig in. Then Chapter 2 - Adam Neumann's staggering melt down at We Work doesn't seem to have tarnish his brand in Silicon Valley. So, what's the real story about his new startup FLOW. Is is the HBO Drama all you need to know about Nueman, or is there more to the story? I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and his is Future Forward - and Bob Garfield is back to help pilot the Pod. He Bob, Welcome.

Today - A pod in two acts. Act 1, you've heard plenty about Mara Lago, the FBI search, and the unspooling drama about the security issues and nuclear secrets. But friend of the Pod Bob Garfield says there's more to the story. And he sees the unspooling conspiracy theories being tweeted out by democrats as part of a troubling trend. Then, as a growing chorus of voices says that social media is addictive to teens, California was poised to write some ground breaking legislation. Now it's dead, so what happened? Finally, Snap Chat puts in place some parental controls that seem promising. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, let's launch.

Today on Future Forward - Since the horrific murders in Sandy Hook 10 years ago Alex Jones has been trading in misinformation and fictionalized hateful rhetoric. Hiding behind the veil of ‘free speech, he's profited mightily selling snake oil. But now it seems the slow wheels of justice have at a conclusion that's hard to ignore. Jones is a liar, the families were deeply injured, and they were must be paid. What does this mean in particular to the January 6 investigation now that his text messages have been revealed. Media Critic and Author Bob Garfield has been following the Jones case carefully and joins us to talk about case and its outcome. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, welcome Bob to the Pod.

Today, a pod in 3 chapters. Chapter 1: Facebook's on again, off again love affair with News Publishers. Why it's treating Australian publishers so much better than the media makers in the US? Then Chapter 2 - who is Lina Khan? Why does the newly minted FTC chair seems poised to upend decades of anti trust law. Can she pull it off? And finally Chapter 3 - Content discovery. It used to be that you searched, and discovered new things to watch, read, and listen to. But as the volume of choices has grown from a drip to a flood to a tsunami, is human curation destined to be eaten by voracious and profit-driven algorithms? So, that's the menu, and joining us at the feast of content conversations is friend and content curmudgeon Bob Garfield. Brilliant media provocateur, and friend of media makers big and small. Let's the Facebook feast commence!

Today, we unpack the odd, funny, scary, maybe brilliant January six -th PrimeTime spectacular. And who better to do the poking, than political prognosticator Bob Garfield. He says he's not an expert - but he does enjoy a good Josh Hawely joke now and again. Welcome Bob to Future Forward.

Hi Valley residents! It's Bob Garfield, former LV host, begging asking you to subscribe to my Bully Pulpit column at bullypulpit.substack.com. It's free, unless you wish to be a paid subscriber, for which you receive not a single extra bonus but the satisfaction of helping to keep my work going and my voice in the world. Either way, I'd be honored and delighted to have you aboard. Meanwhile, check out my most recent installment, in which I share Some Personal News and announce my retirement from radio/podcasting.And now, back to the Valley …The letters C and K can both represent what we might call a Hard C — as in Cosmo Kramer or Calvin Klein. Not to mention Q, which usually indicates that same sound. Why does the English alphabet have this confusing redundancy? John explains. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com/subscribe

In the second half of their conversation about the origins of tyrants, Bob and Before Evil author Brandon Gauthier consider the immense power of ideas.Bully Pulpit with Bob Garfield is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Related Episode:You May Also Be Interested In: Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Historian Brandon Gauthier looks at the lives of six murderous dictators to assess the role of childhood trauma on their adult barbarity. But he finds other, surprising influences.Bully Pulpit with Bob Garfield is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.You may also be interested in: Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

So much of what we do here at Booksmart Studios comes down to the power of speech. Lexicon Valley examines the words and phrases we use to convey ideas. Banished explores what happens when speech runs afoul of current orthodoxy. And on Bully Pulpit, Bob Garfield uses his megaphone to expose the hypocrisy and machinations of those who care more about insulating the entrenched power of the few than about safeguarding the fragile welfare of the many.We're proud to announce our newest offering, focusing on the very source of our freedom of speech. Unprecedented tells the raw and emotional stories of ordinary people who, as they pursued justice all the way to the Supreme Court, pushed the limits of our First Amendment rights.In each episode, you'll meet the accidental guardians of perhaps our most cherished liberty. They are war protesters and religious zealots, Ku Klux Klan members and internet trolls. They are Americans who, regardless of their social or political views — or even an awareness of the stakes — have helped us fill in the Constitutional gaps that our Founding Fathers left open to interpretation.Through captivating interviews with the plaintiffs of precedent-setting cases — many of whom have never been interviewed before — you will learn about your right to be mean, to threaten others or to simply not say anything at all.Hosted by Booksmart Studios executive producers Matthew Schwartz and Michael Vuolo, with special appearances by NPR's Nina Totenberg, Unprecedented originally aired on Washington, DC's NPR station in 2019.Unprecedented begins with the story of a man who, nearly a half-century ago, committed a minor act of civil disobedience when he covered up the state motto on his license plate. George Maynard battled New Hampshire over the slogan Live Free or Die, which he found personally and religiously repugnant. His beliefs would land him in jail, cost him his job and carry him all the way to the Supreme Court. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unprecedented.substack.com

Bob Garfield sits down with private equity tycoon and author David Rubenstein to discuss his latest book, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, consisting of interviews with scholars and other notable Americans.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield, with Episode 23… “The Botched Experiment.”In his day job, David Rubenstein is a private equity tycoon who made his fortune buying undervalued companies, restructuring them into profitability for his investors and earning huge management fees as a steward of their stakes. The Carlyle Group, which he founded, has enriched him to the tune of $4.5 billion. Rubenstein also has many side hustles, from philanthropy to amateur historian to T.V. interviewer of the rich and powerful. In these excerpts from Bloomberg T.V. we hear George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.RUBENSTEIN: Over much of the past three decades I've been an investor, the highest calling of mankind, I've often thought, was private equity, and then I started interviewing. GEORGE W. BUSH: (laughs)RUBENSTEIN: When I watch your interviews I know how to do some interviewing. OPRAH: (laughs)His conversations with cultural, political and business icons have been edited into two books, the latest being The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. Collected within are conversations with the likes of Madeline Albright, Ken Burns, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wynton Marsalis and Billie Jean King.While acknowledging inequities and fault lines in our society, these conversations are in all a celebration of the so-called “American experiment,” which Rubenstein compares to the unique assortment of genes that determine the nature of the societal organism. Had they not converged, he says, “we would not be who we are, we would not be who we are. Rubenstein joins me now. David, welcome to Bully Pulpit.RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.GARFIELD: Your book takes these 13 genes and kind of divides them up among various scholars and cultural icons. What's on the list? RUBENSTEIN:Well, the genes are ones like the belief in the democracy, the belief in the importance of voting rights, the importance of of things like the military should not be in control of the civilian government, the civilians should control the military, the belief in the importance of diversity and importance of the belief in and then having elections and the right to vote. Those are the kind of things I think are parts of our culture; now, increasingly, the belief in diversity is a very important part of our culture, and the belief in the American dream is an important part of our culture. GARFIELD: I want to begin, as you do in the book with the Democracy Gene and your conversation with Harvard professor Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, author of the staggering 900 page survey of American democracy, titled These Truths. She has two insights which blew me away. One was the democratizing role of permitting personal bankruptcies, non-corporate bankruptcies — which was unknown to the world — and which played out as a safety net for entrepreneurial risk. Right in your wheelhouse, that one.RUBENSTEIN:Yes, her point is that when individuals couldn't pay their debts before they were put in jail as opposed to be allowed to be bankrupt, and that the fact that that was changed was an incentive for people to try to take greater risks than they might have taken before. So, yes, it's a very good point that she made. GARFIELD: Yeah, freedom of religion it ain't, but has taken an outsized role in the development of the democracy, but also the American form of capitalism. RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. You know, remember in our country we started, which started for religious freedom, but only to make sure that people could worship the way that those people wanted to worship. The Puritans and pilgrims didn't really want people to worship any way other than theirs. Now we have a system where people can worship the way they want it. But our Founding Fathers honestly didn't believe so much in the idea that you could worship any religion you wanted.GARFIELD: Yeah. Hold that thought because we will return to it. Lepore's second poignant observation was the grotesque collateral damage of the victorious American Revolution and that damage being the perpetuation of slavery, which the British had vowed to abolish. Instead, slavery and its associated injustices have been with us now for 400 years. You used the term original sin. Now, at least in Catholic doctrine, that is something inherent that permanently corrupts our nature, and it has sure done that, slavery has. Now you are in the valuation racket. Was the independence from Britain worth the incalculable human cost? RUBENSTEIN: Well, counterfactuals and history are always difficult to come up with and give definitive answers. I think they — if we had not won the Revolutionary War, I suspect we would have become like Canada, a member of the Commonwealth of Britain, and basically had pretty much the country we've had. But I think that the British probably would have ended slavery quicker than we did, though, because Britain had ended slavery in its country before. But I don't know that it was going to be that easy to end slavery that quickly in the 1700s; the economy of the South increasingly depended on it.GARFIELD All right. So if the slave trade was, as you put it, our original sin, after 150 years came the the bloodbath of the Civil War and after that, the reconstruction of the South, brief, as it was. You spoke to Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the ruinous backlash to reconstruction from the infamous compromise of 1877 that effectively obliterated reconstruction and laid the foundation for Jim Crow and white supremacy to the retrograde Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision. Gates also told you something I'd never heard of that, the newly restored white power structure called itself “Redemption” — that was how they described the the end of reconstruction. It occurs to me that maybe this foreshadows today's Christian Right using biblical text to whitewash what to my eyes are obscene ideas. With redemption like that, who needs sin? RUBENSTEIN: Well, the redemption that he was referring to was basically the belief that they had restored the white order that had existed before the Civil War. Their so-called lost cause of those in the South was what they believed in, that they had a cause — not to preserve slavery, that was what they were saying they weren't fighting for as much as preserving the southern way of life. But in the end, it was really to preserve slavery. But they believed that they were restoring the original sin or restoring the Southern Order was what redemption was all about. GARFIELD: Now, since the end of World War Two, there have been acts of legislation and judicial decisions now enshrined in law — the principles of the founding documents codified: women's suffrage, desegregation, the Miranda decision about the rights of the accused criminals, removing prayer from public schools, marriage equality and so on, as the United States followed a general Western path towards liberal democracy. These very advances have infuriated conservatives for 60, 70 years, because they believe that their values and their hegemony are under attack. Make America Great Again seems to share a viewpoint with Redemption. Which country are we, do you think? Are we open hearts or are we closed minds? RUBENSTEIN: Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I would say that the beginning, the rhetoric, of the Founding Fathers was wonderful: all men are created equal. But as we all know, we had slavery; we didn't allow women to have certain rights, including the right to vote; so we've been trying to live up to the rhetoric over the 250 years, and we still have a long way to go. Many people in this country, as you suggest, are not happy with the idea that minorities have the same rights that majorities have, that women have the same rights as men have, that people of different skin color are to be treated the same as whites. There are many people who think that that's not necessarily the way the country should be. In my view, that's a mistake, but that's the way that many people look at the situation.GARFIELD: A mistake? I would say a nightmare — an ongoing nightmare. To what extent do you believe that what we haven't done as a nation to fulfill our founding promises has corrupted the American experiment?RUBENSTEIN:  The American experiment has been evolving over 250 years. It still has a long way to go. We still are a country that more people want to come to than any other country. Forty-seven million people in this country are immigrants. Very few people leave this country voluntarily, so it's still the best country on the face of the Earth. But we have these challenges that are just endemic. One of the challenges is income inequality, racial discrimination, also homelessness and illiteracy. We have an enormous amount of illiteracy in this country. It's hard to believe that such a wealthy country can have 14 percent of its population being functionally illiterate. But anyway, that's the case. So I would say that we are a country of — it's a tale of two cities, as Charles Dickens might say. We have the wealthy people, the internet-connected people, the people that are well-educated, and then we have the underclass. And I think the gap between those two is getting wider and wider. GARFIELD:  Well, we shall return to this. And in fact, let's turn now to the subject of capitalism, which you discussed with author Bhu Srinivasan. He says that the notion, and we discussed this earlier, the notion of religious pilgrims fleeing persecution and putting down roots in the new world is at best exaggerated, such as in this educational video.NARRATOR: About 400 years ago, 13 years after the first English settlement in America called Jamestown, there was another group of travelers who came to America in search of religious freedom. They wanted to worship God in their own way and separate from the Church of England.That America was a capitalist endeavor, an explicitly capitalist endeavor from the get-go, supercharged by the industrial revolution, the invention of the cotton gin, the Louisiana purchase and, of course, slavery. And we know it has all yielded a superpower of unimaginable wealth and influence in the world. Yet you have these regrets about inequity and you regret those who, in your terms, have been left behind. How so? RUBENSTEIN: Well, many people in this country have believed in the American dream and have lived the American dream. I feel I have lived the American Dream coming from very modest roots and to be more successful in life than my parents ever dreamed possible. But many people have given up on the American dream, and they think that they can't catch up to where they should be or where they'd like to be. And therefore, we have lots of poverty, lots of inequities, and it's a real challenge. GARFIELD: Yeah, Kristin Lems's song comes to mind.LEM: (singing) It's $1200 a month before the SSI and tax, the take-home pay is 900 and a half, and the rent takes half of that leaving $475, and a hundred for the groceries to keep us all alive…RUBENSTEIN: Overall, I think the American experiment has worked reasonably well, but not perfectly well. And I think right now the country is assessing whether we can move forward together or whether we're just going to move forward in a divided way if move forward is the right verb. Because right now the Congress is divided. We have a very difficult time getting anything through Congress, and social progress is made very, very sparingly right now and it's been hurt a lot by COVID because a lot of people have been left further and further behind than they were before COVID.GARFIELD: [00:11:48] Yeah, well, more details on the collateral damage: In the past 50 years, as the inflation-adjusted GDP has grown 400 percent, real wages have grown 10 percent. Now, you've just enumerated some of the reasons that society has failed its citizens. You say “regrettable,” I'd say “s**t show.” But turning it to you, not as an author or interviewer or a businessman, but to you as a citizen: I've gone through your writings and I don't see you advocating for more regulation of banks, or high marginal tax rates or higher minimum wages, or a far more robust social welfare system to provide for working parents or universal preschool or free higher education or other entitlements such as Europe largely provides. I mean, if we were to accept your DNA analogy — and it's a pretty good one — must we not also recognize the fact of genetic mutations, changes or errors in the DNA that can make the organism adapt or just go completely haywire? As a video from HealthTree University explains:MAN: Every once in a while a mistake occurs in a gene, in which one of those bases, one of those coding segments, gets altered and if it gets altered in a gene that causes more cells to more rapidly divide, that's a mutation we want to know about.”GARFIELD: Such as: campaign finance, systemic racism, gerrymandering, deregulation, vilification of the free press, stripped away voting rights and what I see as the broken founding promise to promote the general welfare. In short, David, you've achieved the American dream, but what the hell has happened to so many others? RUBENSTEIN: Well, obviously, the American dream hasn't worked for everybody, and we have lots of social challenges here. We are not likely to go to the European style of social capitalism or socialism that many European countries take great pride in; it's just not endemic to our American system. Capitalism has been ingrained in our system, and capitalism leaves a lot of people behind. So I just don't think we're going to change it dramatically. I haven't written on all these issues because that's not my role in life, probably, to address every social issue as possible. And I, you know, my basic mission in life has been to kind of move forward my career. I'm now giving away all my money, but giving away all my money is not going to solve our social problems, I don't have enough money to solve those problems. So I'm trying to point out some of the challenges, but I don't claim to be a great reformer and I don't claim to be a politician. If I had the answers to all these problems, I would have been in Iowa and New Hampshire a long time ago.GARFIELD: All right. We will continue momentarily, but please let me remind you what we are trying to achieve here with Bully Pulpit and the other BooksmartStudios.org podcasts. We are here to coalesce a community of listeners who value complexity over glibness, argument over doctrine, curiosity over certainty.  It's a community, in other words, built around both skepticism and  intellectual honesty. But as our friends in public broadcasting also incessantly remind you, it is a costly enterprise. Our content is largely free of charge, but our future hinges on your willingness  to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription, which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is a really, really good MRI of my tortured soul. Eighty-four bucks a year — less than a preowned 1985 Cabbage Patch doll on eBay. Please consider investing in BooksmartStudios.org, and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now then, I was about to ask David Rubenstein my next question.You say that you don't see us going towards the European model of —RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. GARFIELD: — socialist capitalism or capitalist socialism, where there's greater entitlements, the welfare state is much more robust. Now, apart from our particular political problems of the moment, why do you think we'll not veer in that direction?RUBENSTEIN: Because I think the country is not, in its DNA, a socialist country. We've experimented with things that are maybe not as capitalist-oriented as we currently have and during the Great Depression, there was a view that maybe socialism would be the better system, but we've rejected that in the country by and large and I would say right now, it's hard to see any interest in the kind of socialist capitalist system that they have in Europe. If anything, we're probably retrogressing and providing fewer social benefits in some ways than we provided in the past. GARFIELD: Although, It was never great. Here's an excerpt from the Phil Donahue Show in 1979, where an audience member challenged economist Milton Friedman — the high priest of trickle-down economics. I'm cutting off his answer; it's the questions that still resonate:WOMAN: Why is it we have so many millionaires and everything in the United States and we still have so many impoverished people who try to get up into the world. Why is it we have this lack of money where people who can't support themselves decently and get a decent job, where all these big men are up on top making oodles and oodles of money — they don't need it, they can only eat that much. FRIEDMAN: And what do you suppose they do, if they don't need it and don't use it —WOMAN: They hoard it.GARFIELD: And what about business regulation and soaking the rich? Well, at least at the highest marginal tax rates.RUBENSTEIN: Congress clearly reflects the fact that it doesn't want to do that. All the efforts to increase marginal tax rates don't seem to be getting very far. And I suspect that Congress is just not going to get there. Remember, the Congress is dividing pretty much 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and it's generally thought that the Republicans will win Congress for the midterm elections, so I don't see any of those kinds of changes that you're talking about likely to happen. GARFIELD: This conversation on Bully Pulpit will follow a two-part series with Anne Nelson, who has written about the Council for National Policy, which I guess is an anodyne-sounding name for the great right-wing conspiracy. They have stuck to their knitting and put their shoulders to the wheel for 60 years to kind of hack the democratic system, to take advantage of gerrymandering and the Electoral College to create a kind of permanent majority in legislatures for what is, by the numbers, clearly a minority party. Does it concern you that these archaic structures of democracy are subverting democracy?RUBENSTEIN: Well, it's interesting. We believe in democracy, but actually, when the Founding Fathers created it, they didn't let American citizens vote for senators; the state legislatures did that. And we created the Electoral College, which is anti-democratic, you could argue. In fact, I think of the last seven presidential elections the person who got the most majority — the most votes — didn't necessarily become President. George W. Bush didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President, and obviously Donald Trump didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President. And so we've got a system where people who are minority, in terms of popular vote, often get elected President. It's not a perfect system, but it's not going to change. To change the system of electing presidents requires a constitutional amendment which requires two thirds of each house and three quarters of the states. And it's inconceivable that you're going to do that.GARFIELD: Such as in this educational video:MAN: “Of the nearly 7000 amendments proposed in the centuries since, only 27 have succeeded.”GARFIELD: There's a chapter in your book that is particularly dear to my heart: your conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the subject of civics education. RUBENSTEIN: Right.GARFIELD: I myself am a co-founder of an organization called the Purple Project for Democracy, which seeks to address the plummeting faith and trust in American democracy and an accompanying appetite for extreme politics, including violence. It's my belief, and Sotomayor's, that a big problem is that Americans have lots and lots of opinions about government, but vanishingly little knowledge of even the most basic facts of how it all is meant to work and how it does work. Is that fixable? RUBENSTEIN: It's fixable, but we have to remember a couple of things. One, it has been a problem for some time. It's not like all of a sudden people don't know much about government. If you go back to surveys 50 years ago, it was a similar problem. Secondly, you're pointing out the reality that ninety one percent of people who take the citizenship test to become citizens who are foreigners pass, whereas a majority of Americans cannot pass these tests, whereas given by an organization recently in 49 out of 50 states, a majority of Americans couldn't pass the basic citizenship test that foreigners have to pass. So it's a sad situation. We don't teach civics very much anymore, as you know, in school and people know very little about the way our government works and operates.GARFIELD: And so there's ignorance; I don't mean that pejoratively, there's just a lack of basic knowledge. And there is the tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation, which competes very well against no information. Any thoughts about —RUBENSTEIN:Well, yes. Yes, look, I'm involved with a lot of civic education efforts and will announce some more projects that I'm going to support to do that. But right now, we have not only misinformation and disinformation, but we have I-don't-care information, which is to say some people put information out, they don't really care whether it's true or not, they just think it's politically helpful to them. And so we have another factor where a lot of people aren't really checking whether these facts are true when they say something and people are being misled, in my view, dramatically.GARFIELD: All of what we've discussed has made me look at America's future with a sense of doom. You don't see it that way.RUBENSTEIN: I don't think doom; I would say we've always had challenges. The Civil War was a big challenge, we got through that; the World War II was a big challenge, in many ways, we got through that. But clearly, the most recent stress-test of the election and the January 6th event is not a cause for optimism. So I think we have to address it, but I think we can't put our head in the sand and just say, “woe is me, the country is falling apart”; we have to try to do the best we can as you're doing and others are doing to educate Americans and basically inform them on the theory that the best informed democracy will be a better democracy. So we want to make our citizens well-informed. But it's not going to happen overnight. GARFIELD: Would you go long in American democracy? Would you short it? What?RUBENSTEIN: It depends on what period of time, of course, but I think generally nobody betting against American democracy has generally made a lot of money. America is going to be a strong country and a very powerful country for quite some time. Our democracy is not quite as beautiful as many people would like it to be, and many people around the world question whether our democracy is as good as we say it is. We say to people around the world, “Follow our system,” but many people say, “Well, your system isn't working so well, look what's going on in your country.”GARFIELD: One last thing, David. Over Thanksgiving, you hosted the President and the First Lady for a few days at your bungalow, is it Martha's Vineyard? I don't remember where your summer place is. But before they left, did they strip the beds? I mean, were there wet towels all over the place? Was Biden blasting his Motown playlist all night?RUBENSTEIN: Well, actually they used the place that I owned. They used it before, when he was vice-president. I was not there, so I can't talk about the issues that you're asking me about. But, you know, I did see him since then. I saw him at the Kennedy Center Honors over the weekend, he said he had a very good time. And he does listen to Motown a lot, as he said in his remarks at the White House recently.GARFIELD: Uh huh… So you don't know if he's a good houseguest. He didn't burn it down. RUBENSTEIN: I never heard any complaints from any of the people that have been working there. So I think he's a very good houseguest and I'm sure you know you'll be enjoying having him as your house guest at some point if you invited him.GARFIELD: Uh, well, it's a thought. It's a thought. Let's see. What can I say that would be even remotely funny? (Mumbles in Bob.) You know, I don't think it's possible. I don't think — I use 2% milk and I don't; I think he's a whole milk kind of guy. David, I want to thank you so much.RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you very much.GARFIELD: Private equity billionaire David Rubenstein is author of The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

SPECIAL WAR BULLETIN24 DEC 2021Not since Edward R. Murrow has a reporter so bravely brought home the terrible soundscape of war.Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we're offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You'll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you'll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.* TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 22: Live from the War on Christmas.[RADIO STATIC]ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you a special report. Bully Pulpit's Bob Garfield is on the battle lines of a terrible conflict, which is setting the world afire. In the midst of the mad fray, without care for his own safety, Mr. Garfield recounts the sights and sounds of war. We now take you to the North Pole.[THE SOUNDS OF WAR]GARFIELD: This is the North Pole. Last night, some young reindeer fetched me here. These heroes, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid and — with grim and  fantastic irony — Donner and Blitzen, describing the very scene that in this benighted duchy now unfolds. The pilot on our journey was called Rudolph, his caribou nose casting light through the smoke and darkness. The team was determined, for here resides the greatest center of holiday production. The shooting of cannon and ack-ack guns, the shrill roar of a diving airship, fills the night with a deathly din.A reporter cannot help but cower in the ruins. The secular humanists, in league with communists and cosmopolitans, are upon us. These are the sounds of the war on Christmas.From my icy shelter (the frozen remnants of a leveled doll factory) the fury seems fantastical. The insurgency began only 13 years ago, in what seemed to be flailing propaganda against a dubious oppression. This is when America first heard from the defenders of Jesus Christ about the godless machinations of the Macy's department store.BILL O'REILLY: This year they are touting Santa Claus who will help you “with your holiday wishlist.” So here's my question to Macy's: What holiday is Santa celebrating? The winter solstice? The birthday of a reindeer? What?GARFIELD: That lowly broadcaster, whose name is now lost to history, used his bully pulpit to speak of conspiracy against not just a persecuted religious minority, but a way of life.O'REILLY: Everything was swell up until about 10 years ago when creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday. They demanded, demanded the word “Christmas” be removed from advertising and public displays, and many people caved into that. GARFIELD: It all began in a series of small partisan skirmishesO'REILLY: I'm like a guerilla fighter in the war on Christmas. You know what I do? I put little shepherds right in front of city hall in my town. Or if I know that there's a secular person in my town or the town neighboring me, I'll put a little baby Jesus on their windshield. GARFIELD: For years he would strike small blows against the Godless conspiracy, then melt away to his sacred country club. But like all guerilla fighters, armed with little but his half wits and audience of seething nativists 5 million strong, he incited rage against the false prophets of basic respect. In time, he would all but vanish from the fight. Smeared by the secularists for merely trying to spill his heroic seed wantonly among the faithful, he retired to a life of falafel and shame. Still the movement grew and grew, gathering the momentum history rewards for the zeal of the righteous. From fellow broadcasters…GRETCHEN CARLSON: I am tolerant! I'm all for free speech and free rights, just not on December 25th!GARFIELD: …to more fellow broadcasters…SEAN HANNITY: Welcome to Hannity. The War on Christmas is upon us again.GARFIELD: …to the emotionally-disturbed imbecile aspiring-dictator community.TRUMP: And speaking of Christmas, you're gonna be saying “Merry Christmas” again, okay? You're gonna say “Merry Christmas.”GARFIELD: Suddenly the dirty gray clouds turn white and the advance grows merciless. The Jews and Muslims and Satanists pour through the outer searchlight defenses. Aloft, a flying machine tumbles toward the pole, ablaze. It is a great, golden, slow-moving meteor slanting earthward. Yellow flares shoot up in bright relief, revealing the airship to be a sleigh, whose desperate escape has been foiled in a hail of flak. The pilot, intrepid Rudolph, with his shiny nose, lights the spiraling path to oblivion. What I am witnessing is a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction. Now the little men, brave bantams one and all, are ragged and shivering in the final battle wondering what is it all for. They are but elves, laboring amid the chaos to meet quota. Moments ago, just as a projectile burst in the sky, I witnessed a little gnome utter his last words. In the strange argot of these industrious pixies, and in a squeaky impish voice, he declaimed: “FML. We have product to turn around.” And then he fell, his slippered toes curled toward the blazing heavens.  [RADIO STATIC]ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to Bob Garfield in an eyewitness report of his experiences at the North Pole. Now I see we have received a telegraphed dispatch from Mr. Garfield. I quote directly from his wire:“The North Pole has not fallen. Repeat: not fallen. [stop]“The advancing cosmopolitans were not waging war against Christmas. [stop]“It appears to have been some sort of celebration, with fireworks, in the spirit of seasonal good tidings that grace the world. The war on Christmas, it must now be reported, is a figment, neither waged nor declared. [stop]“Perhaps I was feverish with Omicron, or brainwashed, but assessing the aftermath what I have discovered is evidence only of a very big party. [stop]“No elves have died. The casualties were limited to an Amazon warehouse, where some workers simply collapsed from exhaustion. [stop]“Christmas is alive and unmolested the world over. The birth of Jesus Christ is on the lips of billions.[CHURCH BELLS]“I can hear the bells. I can hear the bells. [stop]”GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan.  Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I'm Bob Garfield. Merry Christmas.TRUMP: They are saying “Merry Christmas” again, we got that. That was a big part of what I was doing. I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say “Merry Christmas,” don't shop at stores that don't say “Merry Christmas,” and I'll tell you what, we brought it back very quickly. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Part 2 of Bob's conversation with author Anne Nelson about the Council for National Policy, which has spent decades exploiting bugs in the system to gain minority control of our politics — and our future.* TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. With Episode 21, “The 60 Year Coup: Part Two.” DONALD TRUMP: Together, we're committed to protecting the American people, preserving American values, defending America's heritage, and keeping America safe, strong, prosperous, and free.GARFIELD: That was Donald Trump, hat in tiny hand, singing for his supper before the Council for Domestic Policy, the umbrella group of evangelical Christians and big energy interests, that for decades has been the patient and ruthless architect of the great right wing conspiracy. In last week's episode I spoke to Anne Nelson, research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and author of Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. In part two of our conversation, we'll consider the powerful synergy of CNP and a pathological demagog and the destruction that that synergy wrought. Anne, welcome back.NELSON: Thank you.GARFIELD: All right. Let's now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump's ascent?NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn't one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn't reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem - which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton's presidency, which was unacceptable to them.GARFIELD: Oh, I - I'm sorry, I just - I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don't have a war chest, you don't have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don't have a strategy. And all indications are you're going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return -GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it's basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon's wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that's how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump's deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing - well, so then he was elected, more or less - and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump's 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory. Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.” So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person - when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID - she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They've added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.JAKE TAPPER: Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma because some Americans are trying to use an anti parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus. What would you tell someone who is considering taking that drug?FAUCI: Don't do it.NELSON: There's no evidence that it helps against COVID and, in fact, there are several cases of deaths. Not just from COVID and the failed approach of ivermectin, but people taking overdoses of ivermectin. At the same time, they're discouraging vaccination, and the purpose that lies behind this is, I believe, to discredit any federal agency, to discredit the CDC and the NIH, and to have their followers distrust any kind of fact based authority. Whether it's science, whether it's professional journalism, whether it's federal agencies, and work them into this stoked anger and frustration that is then politically mobilized, and so is chaos.GARFIELD: And not just because they're elites and look down at the silent majority, as Nixon called Middle America, but because there is a vast conspiracy to make money for Bill Gates or to turn children against their country, or to put right wing political dissidents into concentration camps or, you know, whatever the crazy talk is. It wasn't enough just to make people suspicious of - of expertise and authority, but to brainwash them that they were actually active enemies of the people.NELSON: I would say that the strength of the Council for National Policy is to figure out what I call the raw nerves of our culture and to further inflame them. So right now, parents - with kids in public schools - are stressed on so many levels. Are the schools open or are they not open? Are there mandates? Are there not mandates? Can working mothers go to work if their kids aren't in school? Right? These are real, real issues. And then you put on top of that our very difficult conversation nationally about race. When the Black Lives Matter protests happened, the way that the CNP's media and other media systems played it was, “these are violent riots,” and they cherry picked photos of buildings and flame and violence in the streets and amplified it and exaggerated it. These were not invented or doctored photos, these things happened, it's just that they happened as very, very few cases and very small percentage of the peaceful protests. But that's not what their audience saw.TUCKER CARLSON: This may be a lot of things this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.NELSON: Their audience saw these violent images repeated across multiple media platforms. Then they saw it repeated on Fox News and Sinclair stations. They heard it referred to on the fundamentalist radio stations. That makes all of these appeals for advancing racial justice sound to them like condoning violence.MAN: The black thugs are burning our cities down.NELSON: So we have a real problem in this country with these parallel media systems that don't reflect the same reality. And I really do fault a lot of the more prestigious media organizations and companies and corporations that have allowed the local news media in the middle of the country to die off. And all too often, the answer is, “Oh well, The New York Times and The Washington Post are national news organizations and they've increased their circulations.” That does not fulfill the need for the trust and the hometown newspaper that reflects the local interests and values. And that's something that urgently needs to be addressed.GARFIELD: All right. Indulge me once again, please, in a brief pause to remind you what's happening here. Bully pulpit and the other Booksmart studio shows are here for you, specifically for an audience of listeners who value curiosity, skepticism, dimension, rigor, scope, and an honest argument about things that matter. God knows if you crave doctrinaire or simplistic rhetoric, you have a zillion options for validating your worldview. Many fewer programs tackle complexity, but like public broadcasting, our future hinges on a community of people willing to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is sometimes about horse vending machines, sometimes about political insanity, and sometimes about life and death. And what a gift for your loved ones, or for your Secret Santa partners, or for your employees. Eighty four bucks a year, less than the cost of a HP 414, a black ink toner cartridge. Please consider investing in Booksmartstudios.org and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now, I was about to ask Anne Nelson my next question. We were ticking off the list of CNC successes: abortion rights and marriage equality. Tell me what they accomplished there.NELSON: Well, abortion has been a particular interest of theirs. And ironically, as of the 1970s, southern Protestants were not that far away from everyone else in terms of opinions on abortion policy. And I would say that there's been consistently general agreement that abortion in the first trimester for various reasons is regrettable, but acceptable. Abortion in the third trimester should be only under the most extreme circumstances. That reflects the reality. But what happened in the years following Roe vs. Wade, people connected to the Leadership Institute and other Council for National Policy partners realized that there was a way to play this and again to mobilize these Protestants in a new way. They found a term, partial birth abortion, which does not exist in medicine. You know, it's an invented term, but it is a term that evokes a very visceral response. And they found that if they told their audiences that Democrats supported partial birth abortion, they could use this as a wedge issue. Then they built on that, and this is all about emotion. This is not about medicine. This is not about scientific fact. They created these videos, which I've seen, which show animated drawings of so-called abortions. And of course, they had to use animated drawings because they were not based in reality, of the abortionist reaching into the womb and tearing the fetus apart limb by limb. And they showed these in church sanctuaries as part of their organizing activities.GARFIELD: And who is the “they” in this “they”?NELSON: So the Council for National Policy works with various groups connected to religious organizations. One of them is the Family Research Council. The Family Research Council has what they call a ministry of pastors that is a national organization that claims tens of thousands of pastors across the country. And this group is called Watchman on the Wall. They have an entire film and video production enterprise, as well as voter guides that are placed in the church bulletins. These churches, these Protestant churches, they may be fundamentalist, they may be Pentecostal, et cetera, have been an untapped voting block. And this is how they've tried to mobilize them, and they've done so with a great deal of success. They've accessed church directories through this organization, compared it to voting rosters, organized Get Out the Vote drives in these churches and even driven the Republican voters to the polls from the church. And the most recent development of this has been the language, “birth day abortion on demand.” And they claim that Democrats approve the execution of newborn healthy babies.JACKIE WALORSKI: That's why we need to be able to vote on H.R. 962, the Born Alive Abortion Survivor Protection Act. I've long fought to defend the unborn. I'm shocked that we are now defending the right to life of newborn infants, and it's something that we have to stand together. This is extreme.GARFIELD: That was Republican Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski.NELSON: So the idea of birth day abortion is that a woman has her full term child healthy nine month pregnancy, and she changes her mind and can go into an abortion clinic and say, “Terminate it now.” And that's just not - that doesn't exist. But, “birth day abortion on demand” is the slogan they're selling and people buy it.GARFIELD: And the president of the Family Research Council?NELSON: Tony Perkins, and by the way, “birth day abortion” is a phrase that's been used not only by Ted Cruz, but by Donald Trump as well.GARFIELD: Well, you can knock me over with a feather. NELSON: And by the way, as part of my research I get mailings from the Family Research Council that shows the rosy cheeked little newborn baby saying,”Democrats want to kill this baby.”GARFIELD: And as Roe v. Wade stands very much in jeopardy before the court, Trump appointees Barrett, and Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are certainly not expected to be abortion rights warriors in the judicial debate.NELSON: Well, let's remember that all three of the Trump appointed judges were chosen from the list provided by Council for National Policy Affiliates. So there was definitely a litmus test involved there. The challenge to the Texas law is whether individual citizens can serve as vigilantes in enforcing the law. And so, it's not clear how abortion rights will be determined on a legal basis moving forward, but I would say that they are certainly more under threat than they've been since Roe vs. Wade.GARFIELD: All right, let's get now to the apotheosis of right wing conspiracy, and that is Stop the Steal and the insurrection that flowed from it. It all began with attempts by the council to suppress minority votes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and eventually mutated into creating suspicion and rage over a supposedly rigged election. As I understand it, there is smoking gun evidence that this pivot to questioning the election results was planned at the CNP before the election ever took place.NELSON: The way I describe it is that a year in advance of the elections, when the CNP realized that Trump's reelection was not a done deal, they over time develop Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, Plan E. Plan A was he wins the popular vote in the Electoral College. Great. Plan B was he loses the popular vote, as he did in 2016, but he wins the Electoral College. And his majority in the Electoral College was a matter of some seventy seven thousand votes in three states, the equivalent of a not very big town, (laughs) right? He won by a narrow margin, in terms of the Electoral College, against losing three million votes in the popular vote. Plan B was a repeat of 2016, but then the Electoral College started to come into question and they were losing certain critical states. So they said, “Well, how do we keep him in power if he loses the popular vote and the Electoral College?” That's when they began to explore ways that they could challenge fraud in the election, get Republican legislatures to substitute their own electors, as opposed to those that resulted from the state election -GARFIELD: To literally subvert the election process.NELSON: Well, it would counteract the electoral process, but it turns out that in our constitution, our elderly constitution, there is a clause that involves the independent state legislature doctrine, where the founders said, “maybe you can't trust the voters and the state legislature needs to step in when there are charges of fraud.” So there were these moments of tension after the election and pressures on state officials, including Republican state officials, but they just were not able to implement it soon enough. Then the next step in our electoral process was the certification of the Electoral College votes, January 6th. In the weeks leading up to this date, Ali Alexander was starting the Stop the Steal movement; he had been on the roster of the Council for National Policy. Ginni Thomas, who is in a leadership position, wife of Clarence Thomas, tweeted her support for the January 6th protest. Charlie Kirk tweeted that his organization would be sending protesters to Washington on January 6th. I believe that the House Investigatory Committee will be coming out with a lot more details on this, but what is obvious is that the CNP was actively supporting the events of January 6th. We don't know how many of them, and how far they were going, but I will say that Jenny Beth Martin, the Tea Party Patriots co-founder and a - and a very active leader in the CNP, was on the program for January 6th. And Simone Gold, the doctor leading the hydroxychloroquine hoax, made the incursion into the Capitol, and she has recently been named a member of the CNP and has been leading anti-vaccination rallies in critical states. So they're all over the event.GARFIELD: And then there was Cleta Mitchell, who was a former Oklahoma politician, who was in the thick of Trump's attempts to get state officials, notably in Georgia, to audit their elections and dig up the votes that would be required to overturn the Biden victory.NELSON: Yeah. Dig up or create, (laughs) or -GARFIELD: Here Mitchell is infamously on the phone with Trump and Georgia state officials. TRUMP: You have all these different people that - that voted, but they don't live in Georgia anymore. Uh, that was that number, Cleta, it was a pretty good number too. MITCHELL: Well, the - the number that - the number who had registered out of state after they moved from Georgia. Um, and so they - they had a date when they moved from Georgia. They registered to vote out of state, and then they - it's like forty five hundred. I don't have that right in front of me, but it's something like that - TRUMP: And then they came back in and they voted!GARFIELD: And Mitchell has CNP ties, no?NELSON: Oh yes, she's a longtime member and she's an astute lawyer who knows a lot about election law, which makes her especially adept at subverting it. She's been a specialist in terms of their strategy, and she's still going strong.GARFIELD: All right, so here we are. At this critical juncture for the future of American democracy. And, you know, we can draw a straight line back to the late 70s, early 80s and the convergence of fossil fuel interests like the Koch brothers, and the then nascent religious right. Does that alliance still represent the core of CNP?NELSON: The religious right and the fossil fuel interests are very, very powerful in the CNP, and I think that what's really happened is that they have converted the religious right into basically a political organization. The longer they go, there's less recognizable religion, and some of the trappings of some sects of Christianity are used as recruitment measures. But (laughs), I would say it's far more political than spiritual in nature, and in some ways it's ferociously intolerant.GARFIELD: It is now increasingly understood that Christian nationalists are way more nationalists than they are Christian, that they're - they're nativists and they're often explicitly white supremacist, and that the Christian part is just sort of a - a way to get their foot in the door for really ugly nationalism.NELSON: I have esteemed colleagues who use the term Christian nationalist. I don't favor it because ultimately a lot of the people we're talking about are voters, and there are a lot of people who are being misled and lied to and don't have a clear ideology. They might be working class people, they might be rural people, and farmers who are in information starved environments. So assuming they are operating from an ideology when they're actually acting from a deeply flawed information environment, it may mean that you - you lose the chance to connect with them and to engage and talk to them.GARFIELD: Well, I hear you, and certainly the news desert that has formed in many communities that hitherto were well-served by local newspapers and other outlets has contributed to the dominance of right wing media and social media in feeding misinformation and disinformation to the - the civically and politically undereducated, right? On the other hand, you know, cops, bunco squad cops, people who investigate frauds on individuals. Historically, they don't show a whole lot of sympathy for the people who get conned because they think that they were predisposed to try to get something for nothing.EDDIE JONES: Grifters got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothing to whippin a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped.GARFIELD: Don't you think that these fascist emotions reside deep in the nerve roots of the society, and some people are just predisposed to be propagandized to and to be demagogued?NELSON: Hmm, interesting question. I think every society has aberrations in many of its pockets. And if somebody is a true psychopath, you don't want to put them in a position of power (laughs), you know? And when you have violent dictatorships, that's often what happens - is psychopaths and their allies achieve positions of power and have their way with the population. But otherwise, I do believe in the incredible power of propaganda, and one thing that breaks my heart is that these people are preyed upon from their better instincts. They want those little babies - those little newborn babies to live. That's a kindness. And if they're being told, I mean, if I were told that Democrats wanted to execute all the newborn babies, I would abhor that as well. It's just not true.GARFIELD: No, they only want to execute a relatively small percentage of the newborn babies.NELSON: (laughs) But when they're being blanketed by their media systems with this and surrounded by people who are repeating these things, you know, it's all confirmation bias, right? GARFIELD: Yes. NELSON: Then they don't have much of a shot at the correction. And as you said, the news deserts are a huge part of this.JOHN OLIVER: The newspaper industry today is in big trouble. Papers have been closing and downsizing for years, and that affects all of us. Even if you only get your news from Facebook, Google, Twitter or Arianna Huffington's block quote junction and book excerpt clearinghouse, those places are often just repackaging the work of newspapers. And it is not just websites.NELSON: When I was growing up in Oklahoma, our newspaper had, in our small town, had a substantial circulation percentage wise, and the front pages carried stories from The Associated Press, and the New York Times Syndicate, and people were more or less working from the same page of facts and reporting. Now that newspaper is struggling to survive and many of the other newspapers in the state have gone under. And what has rushed in to fill that breach are these right wing radio talk shows, Sinclair, Fox, all of these organizations that are not working according to basic journalistic principles. I see it as a huge part of the problem.GARFIELD: I think it's fair to say the various tentacles of the Council for National Policy, arm in arm with Trump, have entirely taken over the Republican Party, or nearly entirely. There are a few so-called moderates remaining. I don't know how moderate they are, but I guess they're not Trumpistas. Now, with the understanding that you can't fight napalm with rhetoric, I ask you this very basic question: Where the f**k have the Democrats been for four decades while this has been going on? Why haven't they built machines to fight, you know, Koch brothers dark money to win in legislatures, to play the long game the way these right wingers have? Why aren't they using software so cleverly? Why aren't they finding new ways to educate and inspire voters? Where the hell have they been?NELSON: I think following the triumphs of the Democrats, you know, with the New Deal, they thought they'd identified their MO's and they were relying on trade unions, and they were relying on the major media to tell their story correctly. And they also became complacent regarding demographics. They could point to the numbers and say it's clear that the United States is becoming younger, more diverse, both racially and religiously, and all of that works in our favor. That was true. It left them playing defense, and on the other side, they said, “All right, so in order to snatch victory away from the demographics, we have to work twice as hard, be twice as smart, and have a plan that truly understands the actual mechanics of our government, not the aspirational ones.” A lot of people in the United States still think that we've got a democracy that rests on the popular vote. That is simply not the case. Our system is a patchwork. Much of it's obsolete. The role of the state legislatures and the differentials in the election law from state to state, oh my goodness, it takes years of study to even understand how it works, and it doesn't work the way you were told it worked in your civics class. It's much more complex and manipulable than certainly I thought in the past. So I see signs that Democrats are starting to take data more seriously. The Koch brothers funded this massive data operation called i360 that's been a major help to the Republicans, and the Democrats are just now coming up to speed on the use of data. The other thing is that the Democrats have donors and strategists, they certainly do. They don't have the same kind of nonpolitical party ground troops, and their dependency on the trade unions has been a problem because trade union membership in this country has plummeted over the last few decades, including in industrial states, which is why Democrats start having trouble in places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.GARFIELD: And the political sympathies of the rank and file, the working class rank and file, have also drifted towards Republicans.NELSON: Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. They see Democratic policies, trade policies and others, even environmental policies, right, as taking something away from them. For example, in my home state of Oklahoma something like a quarter to a third of people are employed in various capacities at the oil industry. And if you say, all right, we're doing away with fossil fuels now for the sake of the environment, they say, well, what will happen to us? And I don't hear a lot of answers to that question and that questions legitimate. I mean, I'm all in favor of great policies on climate change, but you need to talk to the affected population and show them that they are in the picture, that they're looking out for them, they're going to have a life in the future, or they're not going to vote for you. I also feel that a lot of the conversation about white nationalism sounds alienating to many voters who don't consider themselves racist.MAN: I don't have a racist tone in my body, I never have.MAN: You know, giving me a fair shake, I'm not a racist. You know, I don't have a racist bone in my body. I never have.WOMAN: President Trump today declared, “I don't have a racist bone in my body.” NELSON: They think they're not racist, but they're told that they're racist, whether they think they are or not. And then they feel that there's this adversarial dynamic going on and then, “vote for us, even though we've just been calling you a racist.” And - and that formula doesn't doesn't work very well.GARFIELD: (laughs)NELSON: Engagement and inclusive language may take longer to accomplish in reforms, but they may be more effective in the long run.GARFIELD: All right, so there's this question I sometimes ask at the end of conversations like this. I ask it for two reasons: One, I just have no other way to conclude because I'm not that good at my job. NELSON: (Laughs) GARFIELD: But the other is that I believe I know the answer and I despair of it. And the question is: Anne, what's going to happen?NELSON: Well, over the next 11 months, I believe this country is going to have the greatest moment of truth it's had, certainly, in my lifetime. I think of it as a battle royale. The radical right realizes that this is perhaps their last chance to seize power and, if they succeed, they will change enough more laws in terms of gerrymandering and voter suppression that they will consolidate their hold on power for the foreseeable future. They'll have more time to prepare the way to substitute electors in 2024 if they need to. And at that point, if they can secure Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary, they can institute the equivalent of a one party state. Will that happen? It depends on what everybody else does in the meantime. If everybody else goes into a non-strategic approach to the elections, where they think that acting out anger on the streets in protest is going to win votes in swing states, then it's playing into their hands. If people who want to defend democracy look at the electoral map and figure out what needs to be done, in which districts, with which parts of the electorate then there is a chance of a reprieve, which would be long enough to enact some of the reforms that would need to happen in order to forestall a virtual dictatorship in the future.GARFIELD: There were two rulings early in the Roberts court which seem to have gotten the GOP about 80 percent towards their goal. One was to regard political money as political speech and, therefore, pretty much out of the purview of Congress to limit it, which was a big, fat gift on a platinum platter to the Koch brothers and others of their ilk. And the other was to say the federal government no longer was needed to police voting rights in certain southern states, which after the Voting Rights Act of, I believe, 1960 were required to pass federal scrutiny so as not to systematically keep mostly black people from the polls. Those are now the law of the land. Is there any way to recover from such fundamental aberrations in the administration of government?NELSON: Not without winning some elections and making some compromises in states that we're not used to talking to. There's a project called Issue One that I recommend, and it's made up of many former congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, who are concerned with saving democracy. And I think that it is very important to frame it like that, and not devolve into this animosity and labeling and name calling, but saying, you know, what is democracy? What is the biggest tent we can manage where we don't have to agree on specific policies, we never have in our history. But we have to agree on the process of negotiation. That is our political system. And if we lose that and have religious dominionists who want to exert dominion over the rest of the population without that kind of process, then we've - we've lost a lot. So I think it's important for people to really rethink how they approach our national conversation and reach across state lines or political lines and engage and listen to each other. If that can happen, there might be some hope.GARFIELD: (Sighs) From your lips to God's ears. And thank you so much.NELSON: Hope he's listening! GARFIELD: I hope she is. NELSON: (laughs) GARFIELD: Anne Nelson is a research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and author of the newly updated, and couldn't be more zeitgeist book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Once upon a time, Bully Pulpit's Bob Garfield played the role of amateur linguist on a delightful show called Lexicon Valley. Today, to celebrate the re-release of ten vintage Lexicon Valley episodes — remastered and ad-free — Bob and Mike Vuolo bring you a special reunion episode filled with banter, history, poignant father-son moments and quite a number of words. Are you happy now?This week only, you can get a subscription to Booksmart Studios for just $4.90/month, or $49/year. As a subscriber you'll get extra content, including bonus segments, access to full written columns, and all the remastered Lexicon Valley originals. Become a supporter today. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

In this unholy amalgamation of interview and free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC, Bob Garfield and Alec Baldwin discuss life, acting, and the great Stockton Briggle. Plus, find out more about Bob's split with “On the Media.”TRANSCRIPT:TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 12: Alec Baldwin Is Everywhere (Including Here, Right Now).ALEC BALDWIN: I'm a game show host. I'm a podcast host. I'm a father of seven children. I'm out of my mind....GARFIELD: ..and see what I mean? That's him, star of stage, screen, Page 6, iHeart Radio, and, in this case, Instagram Live, where he appears once a week for his 2.1 million followers in conversation with actors, musicians, and at least one dashing, elderly podcaster. Why? Because he graciously wanted to call attention to this show. It was something of an interview, something of a promo appearance, and something of a free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC radio in New York City. I warn you, like other friendly conversations you've overheard, it comes with a lot of random digressions.BALDWIN: I'm here with the one and the only Bob Garfield to talk about his new show, Bully Pulpit, to talk about his career in journalism (his long and wonderful career as a journalist), to talk about the fate of journalism. We might talk about that for like 60 seconds, because what's the point? But first of all, Bob, tell me, you left public radio--you were on public radio for quite a while. On the Media, wonderful show. Of course, I'm obviously a fan of yours, a huge fan of yours. But when you left there, talk about the genesis of Bully Pulpit, how did that come together? GARFIELD: Well, first of all, I left there the way an artillery shell leaves a cannon. I was fired. And you know, we can get into that a little bit. The lawyers prevent me from being, you know, too candid. But yeah, we can talk about that. Can we just observe one thing, since this conversation is taking place the day after the Facebook shut down and the Instagram shut down and two days after this blockbuster interview on 60 Minutes with the whistleblower? We are on Instagram, which we now well understand triggers self-loathing in kids, right? Because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, if we're talking like evil, he makes Vladimir Putin look like Mr. Rogers. So I guess what I'm saying is, kids, please love yourself and we love you too. That's where I want to start. I apologize for talking to you, Alec, on this particular platform because evil. BALDWIN: [coughing] I'm choking. GARFIELD:  I know, it was poignant. I understand.BALDWIN: It's very moving. [coughing]GARFIELD: You know, if that were in a movie (that little episode), in 12 minutes, you would die of consumption.BALDWIN: Well, someone wrote “Trump 2024,” so I immediately started convulsing. GARFIELD: [laughs]BALDWIN: Well, listen, I am someone who Instagram is my primary, if not sole social media source. I have a Twitter account which I keep open just as a placeholder for my name. Facebook--I have a Facebook page for myself, for my foundation. My wife and I have a charitable foundation. We have a Facebook page for that. But Instagram is it for me. And I guess Instagram is owned by Facebook, correct?GARFIELD: It is. And you know, obviously it's a fantastic utility, but it is both utopian and dystopian, and the dystopian side is really dystopian. I mean that because Mark Zuckerberg and company know exactly what the deleterious effects are of the social dynamic on these platforms, and they will not do anything to remediate them because it screws up their business model. So they are constantly apologizing and explaining and being on the defensive, but they never actually fix what's broke. So, nonetheless, like I said, really good utility, and I'm delighted, de-freaking-lighted, to be talking to you on this or anywhere because I'm always delighted talking to you. BALDWIN: Well, thank you. Now a guy who shall remain nameless contacted me quite a while ago, probably last year in the heart of the first waves of the COVID (probably more than a year ago), to talk about a more user friendly platform. Like this with more integrity. Everybody'd have to register. You'd have to give all your real information. You'd have to give a photograph. You'd have to be completely transparent. It's you as you, being you, doing you, posting as you. The question, of course, is how many people really, really want that? Or do most people really kind of like the way it is, where you can hide and you can conceal yourself and say just hateful things?GARFIELD: Well, it's a playground for the id, right? And it, you know, it empowers you to have power, even if it's only the power to intimidate or to terrorize or to bad mouth. And, you know, it taps into something that unfortunately is all too human.BALDWIN: Yeah.GARFIELD: Can I say one other thing, Alec? This is so weird. I'm sitting here looking at your face because Instagram, right? So, last night I was watching the Jerry Lewis documentary, which popped up on Amazon Prime, and there you were. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching the John DeLorean docu-drama--FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN CLIP: I'm gonna try to be DeLorean.GARFIELD: --and there you were, not only as DeLorean, but as yourself commenting on the DeLorean saga. I just watched you in the mini-series, (I think on Peacock), Dr. Death--DR. DEATH CLIP: Duntsch is never going to stop on his own.GARFIELD: --which is a really, really, really perverse story. And I watch you every week on the Match Game.MATCH GAME CLIP: We're looking for….penis. GARFIELD: Well, OK, that's actually not true, I don't watch the Match Game. But Alec, I'm afraid to open the f*****g fridge because I think you're going to be in there like drinking my orange juice from the carton. BALDWIN: There I am on the missing — I'm missing on the carton.GARFIELD: I don't understand. You've got between like 6 and 47 kids. How do you have the time to be everywhere all at once? I don't understand this.BALDWIN: I wish that were true. But Peacock--we started Dr. Death in March of last year. They shut down. They came back and were rebooted and ready to go with all of their protocols by mid-October. We shot from mid-October to the end of like, I think middle or end of February, you know, because we have the holidays. It was like a almost five month shoot to do eight episodes because of all the shutdowns and protocols. But it was a group of people--what you see very often in the business now is how hard people are working to keep everything going. They don't want to be the one that shuts down the production. They don't want to be the one that brings the COVID on the set. They're working really, really hard--like my kids' school. When you go to my kids' school and we drop them off at school, everyone's working really hard, masking, gloves, spraying things down, and distancing. And everybody on the staff is vaccinated. Everybody on the faculty is vaccinated. And I would imagine most of the parents are vaccinated as well, and we're assiduous about all of this because the kids can't be vaccinated yet. So we're always trying to protect unvaccinated children. So the job I did with Peacock (and my part was rather small. I mean, the real star of it was Joshua Jackson--played the eponymous character, if you will.)GARFIELD: Very well. He does a sociopath very, very well, that guy. BALDWIN: Wonderful performance. And so, everybody worked really hard to protect everything COVID-wise. I'm leaving to go to New Mexico in a little while to go shoot a film very quickly, and that's the same thing. Everyone just busting their back to keep everything safe for everybody. GARFIELD: A Western, by the way. BALDWIN: Yes, I'm going to do a Western. GARFIELD: Is this your first Western? BALDWIN: I actually did--the producer was a dear friend of mine. I love this guy. And his name was Stockton Briggle. And we did a--for CBS TV back in the 80s, we did a remake of The Alamo with James Arness and Brian Keith.THE ALAMO: THIRTEEN DAYS TO GLORY CLIP: News is that Santa Anna has crossed the Rio Grand. [crowd noise]What about Fannin and the boys from Goliad? Same with Houston, what about him?Both Fannin and Houston are on the march to come to our aidWhen do they get here, Jim?As of this moment..How about it Jim?As of this moment, we are on a battle alert. BALDWIN: ...and the Alamo Historical Society picketed the sets because they said that the two other men were old enough to play the fathers of their character. They were both long in the tooth for their role. So, I did a Western once. I did The Alamo for CBS, and it was memorable, but not for the right reasons.GARFIELD: I'm sorry. What was the name of the producer?BALDWIN: Stockton Briggle.GARFIELD: Right, of course, the Stockton Briggle. I once did a piece, that involved the director of the McLean Symphony Orchestra, whose name, as you know, is Dingwall Fleary, and that was a career highlight. BALDWIN: Well I'm always looking for names to stay in hotels under. And my favorite, one of my favorites was the great Mozart biographer who wrote the great books on Mozart. His name was Cuthbert Girdlestone.GARFIELD: Yeah, you know what, his name was actually Shecky Cuddlestein. And you know, he changed it at Ellis Island.BALDWIN: Real name was Phil Cohen.GARFIELD: Yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: But I want to ask you--Bully Pulpit, how did that come about?GARFIELD: Well, it came about because I got fired...BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bob Garfield is out this week, and as many of you know by now, every week. GARFIELD: ...under the allegation that I had violated the WNYC'S anti-bullying policies. Not that I was a bully, per se, not that that nicety ever came through. As far as the world is concerned, I'm a bully, and, you know, to some degree canceled, but I'm certainly fired. And it was catastrophic in many, many ways: financially, reputationally. I am fighting it, and I probably will prevail, although there's no such thing as a slam dunk in this kind of law. But in the meantime, I still want to journalize. So a friend of mine, who was my co-host on a podcast that Slate did called Lexicon Valley...LEXICON VALLEY: From Washington, DC, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Vuolo.GARFIELD: It was a wonderful podcast...LEXICON VALLEY: Today, Episode 64, titled “Yada Yada Yada: Europeans Don't Get Seinfeld,” wherein we discuss why the classic American sitcom doesn't translate. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing, buddy?Splendid, thank you. And your own self?I am great...GARFIELD: ...which we both--we left. He went and did one thing about Supreme Court decisions. I went to do another thing about MacArthur Genius laureates. And then it was handed over to a Columbia professor, a linguistics professor, named John McWhorter. Anyway, Mike Vuolo his name is, came to me and said, Look, I'm starting this company with my friend, Matt Schwartz, from NPR, and it's called Booksmart Studios, and we would like you to consider doing your thing for us. And I said, Yes! Yes! This is the best part about getting my ass fired and being humiliated and everything else that comes with my fate, now I can do exactly what I want--the same kind of social and political media criticism that I wanted to do, (I don't want to mischaracterize this), but without having to deal with, let's say, the internal politics of an organization, without having any kind of sort of received ideology that has to be at the bottom of it. I'm free to be me, you know, asking the kind of questions and making the kind of observations that I want to make. And that has been very liberating. You know, I wish I hadn't been fired, but I could not be more delighted to be doing this particular show because it's just been a fantastic experience and very well received among the 11 people who listen to it. BALDWIN: I had a show for quite a while. I was several years at NYC.HERE'S THE THING WITH ALEC BALDWIN: My first clip is from an interview with the legendary Barbra Streisand who talks here about how she wanted control of her films in a way that...BALDWIN: When the show ended, when I left NYC to go to iHeart and go from public radio to commercial radio, it was difficult because I was sad to leave behind, figuratively, the public radio audience. I like the public radio audience. And I was always getting--people would tell me how much they liked my podcast in New York more than anything else I was working on. It was kind of funny. But NYC was a place where--I'm a fan of public radio, but not all public radio stations are created equally. And NYC, which has a huge nut, they are, in the COVID era, I would imagine, obsessed with raising money. But NYC, of course, got into the kind of firing jag: Lopate had to go, Jonathan Schwartz had to go, and Hockenberry.I was given a mandatory set of questions that I had to ask Woody Allen. And I said to them, I said, now Woody Allen told me in my conversation with him--we had one conversation, and I said, you know, they're coming after me to ask unanswered questions. And I just find asking those questions--again, not that there's anything wrong with them, but it doesn't mean a good show. He's already been over this a thousand times. And they said, well, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. I mean, I found the chuck. This is public radio. They said, if you don't ask the questions--the guy, whatever his name was. What was that guy who was in charge of content there?GARFIELD: I just, I see no need to bandy about names, Alec. Let's just leave them anonymous. BALDWIN: I'd love to put his name right up on the screen, but he was the one that said, yeah, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. So in my mind, that was it, I was going to quit. I was out of there. And so, I said to Woody, they're demanding that I ask these questions. I apologize. This isn't at all what I had in mind. He said, listen, he said, don't worry about it. So we do the show. He was great. I mean, he was great, great, great.WOODY ALLEN: I was coming from a position--people were thinking, my god, this older person has seduced this young girl, and he's taking advantage of her. You know, it looked awful. I understood that. I mean, I can understand that. BALDWIN: And then we finished and I called my lawyer and I said, I'm out of here. They didn't care. So I just kind of took a deep breath and I said, you know something, I mean, just about anywhere has got to be better than here. Do I like being on commercial radio? There's benefits to it. Now, you're on commercial radio now as well. GARFIELD: I wish there were more commerce. it's an interesting model. We are on Substack, which is a platform for independent creators of content who are not in the employ of media companies to fend for themselves. You know, put their content out there and be paid by subscriptions by their followers. And Bully Pulpit is, in effect, a Substack talent. And at the moment, we are three shows. There's Bully Pulpit. There is Lexicon Valley, which Mike and I started, and McWhorter now does for us.MCWHORTER: Having a pronoun to mark nonbinary identity could be seen as pretty basic. It could be seen as something that a critical mass of people could agree is a moral advance if you think about history, if you think about what seems to be the case in all cultures.GARFIELD: Then there's Banished by an academic, a professor named Amna Khalid, which looks at what loosely is called “cancel culture” and looks at its implications for the society and so forth.KHALID: To what extent is this just kind of generating frankly b******t work and legislation to make a political point and just to kind of grind down the machinery and keep the conversation going around these issues? And to what extent do they genuinely think that they are going to be able to control the space that is higher education?GARFIELD: She really asks smart questions, and, you know, listens carefully to the answers. And it's something. I mean, when you listen to an episode, when you're done, your jaw aches because of the tension of this moment in our society. And yes, of course, in answer to your question, yes, you can subscribe to all of them for free at Booksmart Studios. BooksmartStudios.org. And if you ask me later, I'll also plug the shows.BALDWIN: [laughs] What are the benefits of the show you're doing now as compared to where you were before? GARFIELD: Well, I get to be me. I don't have to worry about other people's ideology, about their their red zones, you know, I don't have to worry about their aesthetic. I mean, collaboration is great, and I worked with extremely, extremely, extremely talented producers. But they weren't me, and there were times when I was stymied in my wishes for a particular piece of subject matter (often subject matter) or an approach, a line on a piece or something like that. And now I am free to either soar or f**k up all by myself. I'm free to be me, if you call that freedom.BALDWIN: Now, you had on one of the episodes your friend who you've known for many years, who did the 911 Museum documentary. Correct?GARFIELD: Yeah. Steve Rosenbaum.BALDWIN: Rosenbaum--the director or the producer or both?GARFIELD: Both. BALDWIN: And Michael Shulman, I remember that clearly he was the kind of protagonist of the piece.ROSENBAUM: I mean, he's quite brilliant in the way that lots of thoughtful New Yorkers are about images and sound and picture. He's just not a museum person in that he doesn't play by the rules...BALDWIN: I liked the film a lot and I just couldn't get enough of Shulman. I wanted to see more of Shulman.GARFIELD: Shulan. Shulan. BALDWIN: Oh, Shulan? Yeah, Michael Shulan. Sorry. So, you know Rosenbaum from where?GARFIELD: I've known him for, you know, six or seven hundred years. I was a--believe it or not, this is going to sound ridiculous, but before I got into the media criticism racket, I was an advertising critic. I was a, believe it or not, world famous advertising critic because I worked for Advertising Age, which was the global publication for media and marketing industry. And I passed judgment on new commercials and campaigns and print ads and so forth. And as such was--[laughs] it's crazy. “BOB GARFIELD: EXCELLENT RADIO MAN”: Good, old Bob Garfield is the best man in the whole wide world. Good, old Bob Garfield is very intelligent. Good, old Bob Garfield is the nicest man who ever lived. GARFIELD: You know, you know what it's like to walk down the street in Cannes during the movie festival in May and people turning their heads and going, [whispering]. Well, that's what would happen to me when I walked down the Croisette in Cannes in June for the advertising festival.BALDWIN: I thought you were going to say that that was what it was like when you walked down Madison Avenue in the 70s and 80s. That was your Croisette.GARFIELD: As you well know, Alec, as a native New Yorker, nobody makes eye contact with you on Madison, so.CHARLI XCX: Why you looking at me? Why you looking at me? All these  b*****s looking at me.GARFIELD: You know, it's easy to be anonymous walking down at North to South Street. Anyway, so he called me once to book me for a speaking gig, and we became friends. BALDWIN: You were a person who was immersed in the world of advertising. I used to do voiceovers in the early days with the Young & Rubicam and of course, my favorite piece of  Madison Avenue trivia, my favorite anecdote, was when someone said that BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) was the sound made by what? What was the joke?GARFIELD: A trunk falling down the stairs. And it was Fred Allen, said it on his radio show back in 1644.BALDWIN: Batten, Barton...GARFIELD: Durstine and Osborn, yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: What's your media diet? I mean, I talked to a couple of people, all of them say the same thing, and I don't fault them for that. Their go to in the morning is The New York Times online. They're all reading The Times first and foremost. What's your media diet every day? What are you committed to listening to, reading every day? GARFIELD: Well, as we've discussed, the major thing that I consume it turns out, is Alec Baldwin movies, which is is getting to be a problem.GLENGARRY GLENN ROSS SPEECH: You see this watch? You see this watch?Yeah.That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. GARFIELD: You know, I read The New York Times. That's my first go. And then, because I'm always looking for story ideas, the other thing I read is everything. Now, one of the things I really miss, one of the things I really miss about On the Media is the producers in the aggregate had far more scope in their media diets than I did, and they would bring stuff that I otherwise would not have found. And, you know, sometimes it was from Atlantic or The New Republic or The Nation or some even less brand name publications, but far greater than I personally consumed. And now, because I have constantly to be on the lookout for ideas, for pieces and commentaries and essays, I just obsessively scroll everything. So the answer to your question changes hour by hour, but I'm just going to go with everything.BALDWIN: So again, the podcast is called Bully Pulpit. It can be found at Booksmart Studios? GARFIELD: BooksmartStudios.org. You can subscribe for free. You can pay $7 a month and get bonus content from Amna and John and from me. I write a weekly text column, which might be even funner for me than the audio pieces. You know, in my life, I've written 3 or 4,000 columns. That's really how I got started in this business. What we do, or at least what I do, is observe. I observe my ass off, try to look at what is happening in our society, and ask questions that for whatever reasons some are uncomfortable about asking. And I may sometimes seem polemical. But the key is I make an argument. I don't just say things as if they were received truth. I make an argument and the arguments are pretty strong and it's often kind of funny. Have you heard any of the pieces?BALDWIN: Yes. I listened to the one about the tortillas. I listened to one about the documentary. Yeah.GARFIELD: So, I mean, in two words and one of them being “transcendent,” how would you characterize Bully Pulpit from BooksmartStudios.org.BALDWIN: Almost transcendent. GARFIELD: [laughs]   BALDWIN: To get back to your media diet, no TV for you? You're not watching any TV news at all. That's hopeless to you. GARFIELD: Well, cable news is not news. It's just highly conflicted people arguing about the news, right? Fox News obviously is not news because it's just political propaganda and opposition research. And it's, you know, it's a cancer on the society. And the local news is, you know, people standing in front of police tape talking live from something that happened yesterday. So that's utterly useless. And unfortunately, local news reporting, it's all but disappeared. We are awash in national political reporting. But the collapse of the media industry has devastated, decimated, the journalism business everywhere in this country. In some places, there are vast deserts where there is no local news available. And you know who's behind that too? You know who is at the heart of that collapse? Well, the digital revolution in the first instance, because it bollixed up the advertising model and it created an endless glut of content and not enough advertising to support it. But then Facebook and Google snapped up everything. They own the advertising economy, and everybody else has to fight for scraps. So, on top of all of the other evils of Mark Zuckerberg that we began with, they have, more than any other institution including the Trump administration, eviscerated the news business here and around the world, and from this, I believe we shall never recover.BALDWIN:  You don't see any hope?GARFIELD: No, I mean, I'm in the despair industry, but there's not a lot I see. Let's just say the planet does not burn into a cinder, about which I'm also increasingly skeptical. I don't see the problems, the intractable problems, in the news business doing anything but getting worse and worse and worse. BALDWIN: The show is called Bully Pulpit. The site is BooksmartStudios.org. I'm especially interested in both the other podcasts--Banished, and what's the other one, Lexicon Valley?GARFIELD: Lexicon Valley. They both are transcendent. And also Alec, I should say I'll be at the Valley Forge Music Fair June 7th, 8th and 9th, and I'll be doing some summer stock in Meridian, Mississippi. I'm doing Music Man. It's long been a dream of mine. I will be playing the Shirley Jones character. BALDWIN: I'm so sorry to miss that. Let's record that. Anyway, my very best to you. I look forward to Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley, and Banished on BooksmartStudios.org.GARFIELD: Thanks, man. It's always a pleasure. BALDWIN: My pleasure. We'll talk to you down the road.GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. You now know what my conversations with Alec Baldwin tend to sound like and you also know more about the origins of this show. In due course, you will learn more about my WNYC ordeal. It is as frustrating, I promise you, to be muzzled as it was to be smeared in the first place, but I promise you in time the truth will emerge.Meantime, we encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley and Banished. The big Bully Pulpit bonus is my weekly text column, which some have described as “like Bully Pulpit but you don't need earbuds.”Also, I can't emphasize this enough, if you like what you hear from our shows, please share with your peeps and go to iTunes to rate us. Those ratings to date are phenomenal across the board but scale matters a lot. So, please please weigh in. And I, of course, thank you very much.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bob stumbles on a controversy about a media personality's enchilada recipe — and learns about truth, celebrity and Mexican food.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 11: The Tortilla Scandal.Gotta tell you, this one is hard. Look, I think it's fair to say that in 44 years of journalism, I haven't shied away from difficult subjects — because that's what we do, right? That's why we are here, to shine light into some dark corners. Sometimes dark and damp. The kind of fetid hiding places where bad things happen out of public view. Unseen crevices, shadowy and, you know, moist.But journalism is all about venturing there, risks be damned, to protect the public's right to know. I'm looking at you, Armando Tinoco of Showbiz Cheat Sheet. He is the author of the blockbuster story headlined “‘Magnolia Table': Joanna Gaines Makes ‘Controversial' Substitute in Mexican Enchilada Recipe.”JOANNA GAINES: So I've got my 9x13 pan, and I'm going to put about half a cup of the enchilada sauce at the bottom.GARFIELD: The Magnolia Table episode starts out normally. As the old saying goes, “You can't make enchiladas if you're not willing to make enchilada sauce.” And the host, Joanna Gaines, for a while says and does nothing that would suggest controversy.GAINES: So, I'm going to add the shredded rotisserie chicken and then I like to add some mozzarella cheese. It's a nice go-to, safe recipe that everyone will love.GARFIELD: OK, trigger warning. I'm not going to show you this, because we have some technical problems with our video, but it turns out not to matter what Gaines says about “safe” and “everyone will love,” because pictures don't lie. She is wrapping her enchiladas in wheat-flour tortillas. It's like watching police body-cam video. And there were some in the audience who were all, like, am I really seeing this?MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY: Holy...f*****g s**t.GARFIELD: You can say that again, Matthew McConaughey, maybe even slower. Because Gaines totally courts the inevitable backlash, openly declaring, and I quote: “I grabbed a handful of fresh tortillas from Jesse's today. In traditional enchiladas, sometimes it's corn tortillas, but I like to use flour tortillas and it's quite controversial.”“Controversial,” she says. No wonder she got the attention of Showbiz Cheat Sheet, which zeroed right in (I mean, if we're to credit the headline) on this potential crime against humanity — like genocide, or cinnamon-raisin bagels. Is God okay with tortillas not made with corn? YEAH YEAH YEAHS: (Music) It's sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say… It's sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say…GARFIELD: This is precisely the matter explored by food vlogger Adam Ragusea, who painstakingly documented the relationship between white flour and white people.ADAM RAGUSEA: The soft-shell corn tortilla is the original tortilla, originating in pre-Columbian America. Wheat didn't even grow in this hemisphere until European colonialists brought it over.GARFIELD: I'll return to Adam in a moment. Because in media, controversy is a commodity and you really, really need to inspect the goods. For now though, let's focus on another important question: Joanna Gaines, the enchilada lover — who is she again? Well, here's who: a famous American. A cable-TV-famous, unthreateningly attractive, very white-teethed American, who, with her even more white-teethed husband Chip, were for five years hosts of HGTV's super popular home-renovation-porn show Fixer Upper.SNEAK PEEK OF FIXER UPPER EXCERPTS: “Lucas and Laney, today is the big day. Are you ready to see your fixer upper?”“Absolutely.”“Let's do it!”“OH MY!”“This kitchen…”“How did you do this?”“Ta-da!”GARFIELD: The show was a blockbuster, but is just ending a three-year hiatus while Joanna and Chip spent more time with their five kids, their lawyers, and their very own fledgling cable channel Magnolia Network, where, at the moment, Jo doesn't renovate old farm houses but cooks meals on TV. Yes, she is now a DIY celebrity chef, and as such, what she does with an enchilada matters.Ok, not “matters,” as in having any relevance to anyone's real life in this particular solar system. “Matters” as in feeding the industry built on the passing interest of many, many TV consumers who may or may not be up to speed on, say, the systematic erosion of voting rights for Black Americans or atrocities in Myanmar or the burning of our planet to a cinder, but definitely do feel a kinship with Jo and Chip, becausetelevision.In that universe, not only can Armando Tinoco gain employment writing about the tortilla ingredients of the rich and famous, but everything Joanna Gaines does (with the possible exception of her autonomic nervous system) is also newsworthy. I commend you, for example, to Rachel Askinasi's scoop for Insider headlined: “I Tried Joanna Gaines' Restaurant-worthy, Cereal-coated French Toast and It's Perfect for Family Brunch.”Pulitzer committee, take note. But the journalistic interest extends beyond Joanna herself to those with whom she shares DNA. Credit Nathalie Kirby of House Beautiful for ferreting out the story headlined: “Joanna Gaines's Younger Sister Just Opened a Plant Shop Called ‘Ferny's' and We Can't Wait to Shop There!”These exposés don't just land in a reporter's lap. Breaking this news required Kirby to roll up her sleeves and read Joanna Gaines's Instagram, which gushed about both Ferny's and sister Mary Kay — approximately like the Pentagon papers, if the Pentagon Papers had included an address and store hours.It is journalistic enterprise like this that keeps you and me free. Because We. Must. Know. More. I mean, Chip and Joanna's infidelity issues, don't even get me started. Access Live was all over Chip, and we are the better for it.INTERVIEWER: I'm thinking about your 18th wedding anniversary, the five kids, all the success, all the fame that's come. Has there ever been a moment for the two of you where you thought you were going to throw in the towel or that you couldn't do it?CHIP GAINES: You know, that crisis, Jo and I had multiple opportunities to quit and throw in the towel, and that was just not in our DNA. So now I think we've taken that and realized that, you know, it's like you can't ever lose if you don't quit. And Jo and I keep showing up day after day and sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not, but we keep putting one foot in front of the other.INTERVIEWER: Joanna, tell me about the engagement ring. GARFIELD: Now, amid all of this repertorial heroism, there is one small nitpick. When Showbiz Cheat Sheet caught Joanna Gaines preparing enchiladas with flour tortillas, it was possibly not exactly cultural desecration. It was more like what Mexicans call: “cooking.” YouTuber Adam Ragusea pressed the question with LA Times reporter Gustavo Arellano, author of the book Taco USA.GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Go talk to the people in Sonora. Go talk to the people in Nuevo Leon and Chihuahua--the borderlands. Go talk to the Tex Mex folks who have been right there on the border for generations, and for them, flour tortillas is what they grew up on. They totally speak Spanish. They look like you and I. Flour tortillas--our tradition. GARFIELD: Oh, so, no controversy after all. As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The moral of this story, I suppose, is that true journalistic courage comes in not caring if it's “right” or “wrong.” Or “significant.” We should all maybe beware of trading in pompous pieties when the sacred appetites of the audience hang in the balance. On the other hand, I suppose credibility does matter, right? For instance, that cereal-coated French toast. Is it really perfect for family brunch? How do we know? For the love of God, how do we know?Ok, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content — including my weekly text column — from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley, and Banished.Meantime, please please please share our podcasts with friends, colleagues, relatives and your social networks: Twitter, Insta, Facebook. And also, rate us on iTunes, that is invaluable. We are trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas, and we simply cannot do that without you. So please help, and, of course, thank you in advance.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

“Critical Race Theory,” also known as CRT, is a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these anti-CRT bills aiming to accomplish, and how will they affect schooling in the US? Amna Khalid discusses the rise of anti-CRT bills with Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy; Acadia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs; and former president of the ACLU, Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen of New York Law School.SPEAKER 1: Critical race theory is teaching that white people are bad.SPEAKER 2: We’re demonizing white people for being born.SPEAKER 1: This theory was never meant to be brought into grade schools, high schools at all. It’s actually taught in the collegiate atmosphere.SPEAKER 2: These are systemic things. Ignoring it perpetuates the problem. By acknowledging it, we can find solutions and we can address the problems and the inequality that exists in our country. SPEAKER 3: You gonna deliberately teach kids: “This white kid right here got it better than you because he’s white”? You gonna purposely tell a white kid, “Oh, well, black people were all down and suppressed”? How do I have two medical degrees and I’m sitting here oppressed? [cheers] How did I get that? [cheers]AMNA KHALID: Most parents of young schoolchildren are familiar with the stories--third graders in California are given an assignment: rank yourselves by power and privilege based on your racial identity. Parents in North Carolina say middle schoolers are forced to apologize in class to their peers for their privilege. In an elementary school in Manhattan, children are sorted by race for mandatory training. In some Buffalo schools, students are taught that all white people are guilty of implicit racial bias. Sometime towards the end of last year, parents and politicians freaked out, mostly conservatives, who see all this as a kind of liberal indoctrination of our youth. In at least 26 states around the country, Republican legislators have introduced what are now called anti-CRT bills. CRT stands for critical race theory, a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these bills aiming to accomplish and how will they affect schooling in the US? I spoke to three experts about the rise of anti-CRT bills. First is Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, who says that although CRT was coined decades ago as a purely legal, academic term, it has now all but lost its original meaning. RANDALL KENNEDY: Now, if I'm in a seminar at my law school and we're talking about critical race theory, I'm thinking about a community of people, a community of thought that has its origins in the 1980s, that believes that liberal legalism was inadequate to get us to a state of racial justice. They’re people who believe that mere anti-discrimination would not suffice to redress the terrible injuries of racial oppression. Something much more activist, something much more deep-seated, had to be done to get us to where we needed to go. On the other hand, if we're just talking about on the street, if we're talking about television, if we're talking about radio today, for many people, especially for its most vocal critics, critical race theory is anything that they don't like that has to do with race. It's an open category and it's more of a slogan than anything else. KHALID: Let's move a little bit away from its origins and from the academic context and think about what it's come to mean today, particularly when we're referring to these anti-CRT bills. We've seen a rise in bills that have been drafted across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states, where there is an attempt to banish, if you will, what they call teaching of critical race theory, particularly at the K-12 level. Now, as someone who is a scholar, a legal scholar, can powers that be do that? Is it legally sanctioned to stipulate what K-12 curriculum should be or is it in contravention of the First Amendment? KENNEDY: It can be done. It's a well-known tenet of American practice that public primary and secondary schooling is largely under the control of local political forces. It's deemed to be perfectly proper for primary and secondary schools, for instance, to inculcate patriotism. You know, that's viewed as uncontroversial. Of course you're going to inculcate patriotism. Of course you're going to inculcate various attitudes that the ascendant political forces in your jurisdiction want to be taught in schools and nourished and lauded. We want our youngsters to know about the Founding Fathers and the greatness of American democracy, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you can do all of that, I mean, that's inculcation. This is another type of inculcation, or it's saying what we don't want taught. Well, you can do that. You can, for instance, have a school system in which you say, “We're going to banish the teaching of racist ideas.” And in fact, that's what some of these people, you know, are saying right now. They're terming critical race theory itself as a type of racism. And they're saying, “We don't want that taught.” Can that be done? Yeah, that can largely be done at the K-12 level. Yes. KHALID: There's nothing that prevents that kind of move from being undertaken.KENNEDY: That's right. It’s a political question. Basically from kindergarten to 12th grade, what you're taught in school is largely under the control of the local school board, the city school board, the county school board. It's a matter of local democratic politics. And so, it's a political struggle. KHALID:  OK, so, Randy, now I'm going to ask you to take off your legal scholar hat and put on your hat of an educator who is concerned with how we train our students to think. So with that hat on, I'd like you to tell us, are you in support of anti-CRT legislation? KENNEDY: I'm appalled by it. In my view, what's going on is the latest iteration of a phenomenon that we have seen over and over and over again. In my view, this is analogous to what happened in the 1950s: the panic over communism, the panic over socialism. You'll note that those two words often find themselves in close proximity to critical race theory. People say, you know, “Critical race theory is Marxism. Critical race theory is socialism.” There's a long history of stigmatizing ideas that are dissident, especially ideas that are critical of the status quo. There's a long history of stigmatizing such ideas as communistic or socialistic or Marxist. And that's what's going on today. The courts, I don't think, are going to be our salvation. I think our salvation is going to be public opinion. And you asked me, “Well, you know, what should people be thinking?” People should be thinking, “How do I want my children to be trained?” I would think that people would want children to be critical thinkers, would want children to be introduced to all sorts of ideas, including ideas that they don't like, trained in such a way that children can have a critical, skeptical stance toward a wide range of ideas. That, it seems to me, is what we should want in our public schools. And we cannot have that if certain ideas are banished. Let the teachers introduce things that are called critical race theory and let's talk about it: “What do you think of this? How should this be assessed?” The art of assessment is what we should be inculcating in our history and in our social studies and in our civics classes. And we can't do that if we are in a panic and banish ideas that we think we don't like. KHALID: According to Randall Kennedy, critical race theory in 2021 means something very different from what its original proponents intended. Nowadays, the term is loaded. It is political. It means everything and says almost nothing about what is actually being taught in schools. But it's the term that we're stuck with for the time being. The more immediate question then becomes, what are these anti-CRT bills trying to achieve? Jeffrey Sachs teaches Middle Eastern politics at Acadia University in Canada and has been closely following the various legislation.JEFFREY SACHS: These efforts focus their attention on preventing K-12, and in some cases, public universities and colleges from engaging in certain kinds of speech in the classroom, assigning certain kinds of materials, and also, in some instances, preventing the kinds of trainings that schools can require teachers or staff to undergo as part of their jobs. And really, the long and short of it is that this is an attempt to prevent teachers from being trained in or discussing certain ideas that conservatives really hate. KHALID: And what are those ideas? SACHS: The list fluctuates. They tend to focus on things like the idea that one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex, or the idea that somebody, by virtue of their race or sex, is guilty or should feel shame on that basis. I don't think there are many people out there--I certainly, I hope not--who think that a person should feel shame or guilt on account of their race or sex. So, the ideas that are being targeted for censorship by these laws, many of them, when they're presented, they sound like a reasonable law. But when you kind of really drill down into how these laws are being written, you discover very quickly that they're far more sweeping and in some cases, far more sloppily drafted than probably they should be. And they would inevitably sweep up and censor all kinds of speech or classroom content that we want to have included, that we want to have protected. This is really a case where the politics of the issue, I think, are so powerful and the momentum is so great that legislators aren't really thinking clearly or if they are thinking clearly, they have malign intent because the result is laws that really are going to do a lot of damage to both K-12 and higher ed. KHALID: It may be constitutional in the K-12 context, yet that doesn't make it okay, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a set of both anticipated and unanticipated consequences. There's nothing wrong in saying that teaching divisive concepts, which say things like, “If you're from a particular race you’re inherently superior or inferior,” is wrong, and we don't want that happening in our schools. Yet, the issue becomes very nebulous when we begin to think about definitions, what constitutes a divisive concept becomes contentious. SACHS: So, a good example is the law recently passed in Tennessee, which reads that a public school authority or public charter school shall not include or promote the following concepts as part of a course of instruction, and also that they may not use any supplemental instructional materials that include or promote the following concepts. And then it lists an array of concepts similar to the ones I described earlier. Now, the problem here is that there are all kinds of sound pedagogical reasons why a teacher might wish to include a concept in a course, even a very controversial concept. So an example might be that the teacher wishes to include a primary source written by an author who lived 100, 200, 300 years ago, at a time when certain kinds of divisive concepts were common currency. It might be useful, for instance, for the purposes of discussing historic discrimination or present-day discrimination for a teacher to cite a document that contains a divisive concept. If you pass a law, as Tennessee has, saying that teachers may not include such material in the course, then you are robbing students of their ability to confront and think intelligently about these ideas--ideas that they're bound to encounter at some point in their everyday lives. It should be the jobs of teachers to introduce concepts, no matter how divisive, so long as they do so in a responsible, neutral, and objective way. These laws, in many cases, do not draw that distinction. Instead, they ban any inclusion of these ideas. Tennessee’s is a good example. It bans the mere inclusion of these ideas, even if included objectively and discussed neutrally. That kind of sloppy drafting, if indeed it is sloppy and not intentional, is, I think, a real ticking time bomb. KHALID: The irony is that those who are pushing these laws are the ones who, until very recently, supported a president who was making precisely the kinds of speeches where certain groups were being seen as inferior and which would be very much part of your civics education if you were trying to engage in an educational discussion about democracy in America. SACHS: Absolutely. I mean, under this law, there's many Trump speeches that I'm sure would be ineligible for inclusion in a Tennessee classroom. Setting aside my own opinions about Donald Trump, I think that there is very valid pedagogical reasons for why a civics teacher might want to include a speech by the president of the United States. It's just a no brainer to me. Whether they mean to or not--and I always try to give legislators the benefit of the doubt, but whether they mean to or not, this law, which is currently on the books in Tennessee, would forbid the inclusion of a speech by the president. That seems to me to be insane.KHALID: But hang on, Jeff. People in favor of these bills often point out that teaching at the K-12 level is already highly regulated. Take creationism. You can't make that part of the science curriculum. And for the most part, people are okay with that. So what's wrong with banning CRT then, if that's something we want to keep out of the classroom? SACHS: There's a good reason why this is not a good analogy, because the fact of the matter is we do not ban creationism from public schools, right? We ban the promotion of creationism. We ban, under the Establishment Clause--jurisprudence--Teachers may not promote the idea that the earth or the cosmos was created by a deity. However, teachers are free to discuss that idea. And in fact, they have to if they're going to discuss things like Greek and Roman mythology or Dante's Divine Comedy. So there has to be room in our law and in our jurisprudence to allow people to discuss the idea of creationism so long as they do so in a neutral and objective way. We should extend that same basic courtesy and framework to critical race theory and its attendant ideas. So, people should be allowed in the classroom to discuss the idea that black people are inherently superior or inferior to white people, if only for the reason that that idea pops up in important documents and important conversations throughout history and in the present day. A teacher would be failing in his or her duty if they did not prepare students for the eventuality that they will encounter that idea outside the classroom. People should also be able to discuss the concepts of critical race theory without saying critical race theory is the truth. KHALID: Jeffrey, I'm going to actually move the conversation to discuss a different context, which might help elucidate some of the issues that we would face in the US. And it's one that I feel you're well-equipped to comment on. So, I come from Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very different society, one that has been looked upon in the US as a society that is backwards. And one of the key issues is we have blasphemy laws, which prevent the discussion of anything that insults Muhammad. Now, what constitutes a blasphemy is the issue over here. And in colleges and universities, I remember growing up not being able to ask genuinely inquisitive questions because they were being shut down because they were seen as blasphemous. So, for instance, Mohammad does X, Y, and Z and a single question like, “Well, why was this the best option?” or “Why did he choose to do this?” would be met with such irate censure from the teacher, who clearly did not want to go there for reasons that this could have implications should this be reported outside of class. And I feel like the US discussion about bills about CRT would benefit immensely--we could elucidate the ill effects of these if we just look a little beyond our shores to see what's going on in other countries. You study the Middle East. SACHS: That's such a fascinating comparison. And I think it really does kind of cast a bit of relief, what you're talking about. There's a famous case from the early 1990s in Egypt where something similar to what you're describing happened, where a university professor--of course, academic freedom is severely circumscribed in Egypt then and now. And in the early 1990s, this university professor described the Koran as a historical creation, that it reflected the events of its time and is not necessarily a universal and eternal document the way kind of orthodox Islamic theology presents it to be. For this, for engaging and considering this kind of critical view of the Koran, he was fired. He was prosecuted. He was declared by the courts to be an apostate, and his marriage to his wife, who, at least according to the courts, was still a Muslim in good standing, was annulled, and the two of them had to actually flee the country. Now, that's a very famous and thankfully, at least, a very extreme example, even in the context of Egypt, where these issues can be so sensitive. But it definitely highlights the idea that the moment you fail to draw a distinction between the discussion of an idea and its promotion, then you are robbing teachers and students of the opportunity to confront and critically consider certain ideas. So, while I don't think we in the United States or Canada or wherever face a similar kind of punishment if we run afoul of these anti-CRT laws, the threat is there and the self-censorship will be too. So, there we will definitely see in America teachers (and frankly, in many cases professors as well, because academic freedom is only as powerful under the law as the people who enforce it), at all levels, we will see a kind of self-censorship and a kind of terror in many cases of running afoul of these texts. KHALID: As Jeffrey Sachs suggests, many of these bills do not make a distinction between explaining an idea and endorsing it. But that's just one problem with how these bills are drafted. Nadine Strossen is professor emerita at New York Law School and former president of the ACLU. She takes issue with the way these bills invoke the concept of divisiveness. NADINE STROSSEN: The concept of divisiveness is being bandied about as if it is inherently negative. And that is very dangerous because divisiveness applies to ideas that people disagree with, right? Any time somebody says something controversial or provocative or unpopular, one of the stigmatizing accusations is, “Oh, you're engaging in divisiveness.” Or if you say something critical of government policy or, heaven forbid, of school policy--“Oh, don't be so divisive.” Well, what's the opposite of divisiveness? It's uniformity. It's homogeneity. It's conformity. And that's the opposite of the critical thinking toward which I think we should be striving if we are to educate our young citizens. And interestingly enough, in the Supreme Court's most recent student free speech case from the summer of 2021, the Mahanoy case, the Supreme Court actually said that the school itself has an interest in making sure that students have the right to engage in unpopular expression. That could be, in other words, divisive expression. And not only that the students have that right, but the school even has a duty to teach students the importance of exercising and defending unpopular speech in particular. And that would certainly apply to divisive speech. Now, I also want to go back to the 1969 Tinker case where Mary Beth Tinker and a number of other students wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, at a time when the war was still very popular, when critics of the war were very unpopular, were assumed to be traitors to the United States and unpatriotic. And it was very upsetting expression because many parents and siblings of these school kids and teachers were off fighting and dying in Vietnam. A recent alum of the school had recently been killed in Vietnam. So this was very divisive emotionally as well as politically. And the school cited those concerns in saying, “Well, that's disruption and we can't have that in the public schools.” And the Supreme Court said, “No, no, no, no, no. Freedom for ideas, especially about matters of public affairs”--That's true for CRT, deals with matters of public affairs--“is critically important. If we were to say that the mere fact that speech can be divisive or upsetting, either personally or politically, that that's not a basis for allowing it to be protected, then we are teaching the wrong lessons about citizenship to these future voters and future leaders of our country.”KHALID: I'm actually really glad that you brought that up, because I think one of the hallmarks of democracy is precisely to not just allow for or tolerate, but to actually foster dissent, to create spaces where dissent is possible. As an educator, what I see happening with these bills is that they reek of an authoritarianism which is trying to produce the kind of conformity that fundamentally hollows out democratic institutions. And it's terrifying. When the public school system is destroyed is when you begin to see the downfall of a society. And it troubles me deeply. STROSSEN: You know, without free thinking and critically thinking and debating and discussing citizens, our democracy is going to crumble because it depends on we, the people, to wield our sovereign power. We can't do that in an informed, meaningful way unless we have nurtured and respected dissent.KHALID: I want to end with Professor Randall Kennedy, who believes that there is a direct line between laws that stifle open inquiry and the very health of our civic society. KENNEDY: The quality of our education is intimately tied up with the quality of our democracy. All of the leading theorists of democracy have talked about the importance of public education. They are bound up with one another. K-12 is the foundation of our educational system. What happens in K-12, tremendously important. In a democracy, if the people rule, it's very important for the people to make decisions about our health, about the use of military force, about all of the things that are significant. Well, if you have a lot of ignorance out there, if you have, out there, people who have not been trained to make wise assessments, if you have, out there, masses of people who really don't have the ability to separate disinformation from good, useful information, the fanciful from the realistic, well, a society that's governed by a badly educated populace is a society on its way down, which is why, you know, the struggle over the schools is so important. KHALID: As a mother of two young boys, I, too, am deeply invested in how racism is addressed in our schools. I definitely don't want my kids coming home and saying things like, “Mama, we were told today that white people are oppressing us.” That's not what I would consider an education. But if legislation is not the answer, and I firmly believe that it's not, then what can parents do to protest indoctrination in schools? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue. You can leave a written comment on BooksmartStudios.org or email a voice memo to banished@booksmartstudios.org.If you like what you heard today and want more exclusive content, including access to my extended conversation with Nadine Strossen and an exclusive discussion with Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of FIRE and coauthor of Coddling of the American Mind, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get transcripts, extended interviews, and bonus segments. Also, check out my sister podcasts by Booksmart Studios: John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Bob Garfield's Bully Pulpit. Please comment and help us spread the word. The success of Booksmart and the impact of our work depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And as always, I am Amna Khalid. Cheerio. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In the ongoing drama surrounding the murder of Gabrielle Petito, Bob realized that the media are telling us everything under the sun, except for what matters most.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 10: Airing Dirty Laundrie. GABRIELLE PETITO: Hello, hello, and good morning. It is really nice and sunny today. It's only ten o'clock in the morning, but it rained all afternoon yesterday…oh, my God!GARFIELD: That's from a YouTube post a few weeks ago by wannabe travel vlogger Gabrielle Petito, documenting her cross-country van journey with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie. We see them hiking, taking in sunsets, eating camp-style, hugging and kissing and frolicking, doing cartwheels on Santa Monica beach — two attractive young people living the dream.That the dreamy footage obscured a gathering nightmare, of course, is by now, hardly news to you.FOX NEWS REPORTER: Yeah, good morning Todd and Gillian. Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito were on a cross-country trip they were documenting for their YouTube series, but on September 1st, Brian returned home alone and has been hiding out at his parents' house, right behind me.Yesterday, North Port police named him a person of interest in this case.GARFIELD: Now, people go missing all the time in this country. One this month was Gregory Martin, a 70-year-old Buford, Georgia man, afflicted with dementia, who strayed away from his optometrist's office. You did not see anything about him on the news before he turned up safe and sound. You probably haven't heard of Quawan Charles, who was 15 when he went missing last year from his rural Louisiana home. If you were to Google “missing teenagers 2020,” you wouldn't find his picture. A lot of white schoolgirls, not a lot of black male schoolboys. His disappearance did not captivate the nation, or even the local police.LOCAL TV REPORTER: The family called the Baldwin Police Department and St. Mary Parish Sheriff's office to report him missing. Although the family asked that an amber alert be issued, officers declined to do so. The family claims the police downplayed their concerns, including speculating Charles may simply be attending a football game and not answering his phone. Charles' body was found days later, on November 3rd, in a wooded area about thirty minutes from his hometown. GARFIELD: And incredibly, in 2019, more than 5,590 Native American women were reported missing. You cannot name a single one of them. But when I say Natalee Holloway, or Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy — all of whom were TV news fodder for weeks or months at a time over the past couple of decades — you can most likely tell their heartbreaking stories, most likely in intimate detail. This is called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term coined twenty years ago by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, and lately invoked by the New York Times and others in a “here-we-go-again” sort of way. This was Good Morning America: GOOD MORNING AMERICA REPORTER: Gabby Petito is one of so many reported missing each year. At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing persons cases. 45% of those cases: people of color. Petito's story has renewed debate about which cases get attention and the media's seeming infatuation with missing white women. GARFIELD: If anything about that surprises you — I mean, anything — I don't even know what to say. Lookit: by American TV-news standards, the fact that Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson were brunette was practically affirmative action. So, of coursethe fate of skinny, blonde Gabby Petito, unlike Quawon Charles, has gripped the country as an irresistible true-crime mystery played out in real time. Clue by clue. Revelation by revelation. Twist by twist. Newsbreak by newsbreak — tragedy as infotainment, costumed (with all the obligatory sobriety and furrowed anchor brows) as journalism.LOCAL TV REPORTER: That's right Keith, good evening to you. North Port police admitted this search warrant last week. The detective writes that Gabby Petito's phone had been shut off for at least fifteen days. The investigator also says...TRAVEL BLOGGER 1: This is most definitely Gabby Petito's Ford transit van. TRAVEL BLOGGER 2: And I slowed it down, so you can possibly see it a little bit better.ABC NEWS REPORTER: In the last 24 hours, we've gotten more information on the final days leading up to Gabby's disappearance. Police just released audio of a 911 call out of Utah, where the caller reported seeing a domestic fight between Gabby and Brian on August 12th...CLARK COUNTY 911 CALL: “We drove by and the gentleman was slapping the girl.”“He was slapping her?”“Yes. And then we stopped, they ran up and down the sidewalk, he proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car, and they drove off.”ABC NEWS REPORTER: Police in Utah pulled the couple over last month, after responding to calls of a domestic incident while they were road tripping across the country. Officers said Petito was crying...POLICE BODY CAM: “What's your guys' names?”“Gabby.”“I'm Brian.” “Gabby, Brian. Ok. What's going on? Why are you crying?” “I'm not crying. We've just been fighting this morning.”FBI PRESSER: Human remains were discovered consistent with the description of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito.CNN REPORTER: The news coming as the search is intensifying for Gabby Petito's fiance, Brian Laundrie, whose parents told police he disappeared a week ago today.LOCAL TV REPORTER: Yesterday, they, along with the FBI and several other agencies, spent the weekend scouring through the Carlton Reserve at the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park. They have not found anything yet. The search ended just after six pm last night. North Port police have yet to tell us if they plan to resume that search there today, but I can tell you it is a very large, dense place with lots of shrubs, so it will take some time to get through.LOCAL TV REPORTER: Detective work, DNA and digital foots prints. The FBI is fanning out and zeroing in. From a North Port family home to Wyoming.GARFIELD: Gabby's death is obviously an unspeakable tragedy for her, for her loved ones, and for the loved ones of Brian Laundrie. For almost everyone else on the planet, it's merely pulp non-fiction — undoubtedly destined to be formally Hollywoodized in a four-part streaming series. Which, wholly apart from the implicit racism, is tragic itself. There are deep problems in this world, politically and environmentally, and the media and audience both have invested their scarce time resources in a morbid drama that offers virtually no significance, no insight, no meaning to anyone but the principals. There is one flicker of possibility, about which more in a moment, but I need to remind you what all-Gabby-all-the-time has squeezed out of the news.VALERIE MASON: With further warming in the coming years, we expect to see new extremes that are unprecedented in magnitude, frequency, timing, or in regions that have never encountered those types of extremes.GARFIELD: That was climate scientist Valerie Mason-Delmotte, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a couple of weeks ago, joining the UN General Assembly in declaring Code Red for Humanity.ABC NEWS REPORTER: The report's authors are essentially sending the world's leaders a final wake-up call: Curb emissions and dramatically reduce consumption, or face a world that is fundamentally different.GARFIELD: Yeah, that lasted one news cycle. One. The end of life on Earth as we know it. One news cycle.Oh, we're awash in coverage of national politics and the latest on Trump's every utterance, including talking in his sleep, but the death spiral of the media business has meant vastly shrunken newsrooms, vanishing local coverage, empty statehouse bureaus — and the biggest stories in the history of the planet treated like wheat germ occasionally to be sprinkled on the Trump-ruptions.CNN REPORTER: Trump sent a letter riddled with lies to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to decertify the results in Georgia, citing all sorts of debunked claims. GARFIELD: Celebrity crap.REPORTER: The Crown's Emmy nominated actress, Emma Corrin, made a bizarre fashion statement in a strapless frock and bonnet, quite a different look from her Princess Diana role.GARFIELD: And anti-vaccination a******s disrupting school board meetings.ANTI-VAXXERS: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!GARFIELD: To which we can now add the story of Gabby Petito, who went on a travel adventure seeking fame, and achieved it, posthumously, like some sort of sick cosmic joke.But, as I said, a glimmer. A glimmer of something of value to be drawn from the morbid fascination with this mystery — namely, that it is not especially mysterious. Because as we comb through the endless clues and tidbits gathered by investigators, the press and random online civilians, we discover lurking within this saga a lesson.You'll recall the traffic stop, by Utah park police, who had seen the couple's van speeding erratically. The stop lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes, and the bodycam footage displays remarkably engaged and conscientious cops trying to get to the bottom of the couple's argument, in which Brian got scratched on the face and arms and Gabby had her face squeezed like a dog whose owner is trying to shut it up. What the police discovered, from both subjects, was that the two frequently triggered one another, leading to violent arguments that sometimes got physical. Brian said Gabby was very anxious and emotional and, you know, the girl crazy. And Gabby said, it's true. This led to a piece of advice from one officer to a crying Gabrielle. The relationship, he said, was toxic, and dangerous.POLICE OFFICER: It may be bad for your soul, just saying. I'm not telling you what to do with your life, but if you know you have anxiety, look at the situations you can get in, you know what I mean? Now, we're not here to be mean to you or anything but you know, there's a first time and then it usually...GARFIELD: And then, usually it gets worse. Because the pathology of domestic violence is a pathology of repeated episodes spiraling ever downward. If Brian was mishandling her in a speeding vehicle on unfamiliar mountain roads, the worst was surely yet to come. This is the lesson — the universal lesson — to be drawn from this horrifying saga. There are lovers' spats and there is battering and the difference, the fatal difference, is often on display. Every parent and every sibling and every friend of every woman — not to mention the cops who get called to the scene of a domestic — should be vigilant for these signs and be prepared to intervene before it is too late.But did that single salient issue dominate the news coverage? No. We have 24/7 on the search for Brian Laundrie. But to be reminded of the real stakes here, I had to happen upon a Facebook post, from an author named Julie Perkins Cantrell, who in a now viral message codified the thirty lessons of the Gabby Petito tragedy, culminating in this: “When we see someone at her emotional end during a domestic dispute, we shouldn't assume that she's crazy. We shouldn't buy into the false narrative given by the abuser. We shouldn't believe the cover-up story given by the target, who has been conditioned to carry all the blame and shame. And we shouldn't assume they're going to be okay.”All of America now knows Brian Laundrie is a suspect-- the only suspect -- in Gabby's murder. What we haven't been informed of by the media — but what we should internalize — is another Code Red for Humanity: the murderous ending of the online Van Life Journey was all too foreseeable before the couple even backed out of their Florida driveway.All right, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content — including my weekly text column — from Bully Pulpit, from Lexicon Valley, and from Banished.Meantime, please please please share our podcasts with friends, colleagues, relatives, total strangers, and your social networks: Twitter, Insta, Facebook. And then also please rate us on iTunes. That is invaluable. Look, we're trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas, and we simply can't do that without you. Thank you in advance.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bob speaks with “The Outsider” co-director Steve Rosenbaum about his film documenting the fraught creation of the National September 11 Memorial & MuseumTEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 8: The Outsider.It has been twenty years since the bloody horrors of September 11th, 2001 scarred lower Manhattan and the American psyche. Within three years of the terror acts that claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives, plans were underway to commemorate the fateful day and its events for posterity. The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum would be constructed on the hallowed footprint of the atrocity. A decade later, the half-billion dollar project would be opened to the public. Here was President Barack Obama at the dedication ceremony:OBAMA: A nation that stands tall and united and unafraid -- because no act of terror can match the strength or the character of our country. Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us; nothing can change who we are as Americans.GARFIELD: That was perhaps a fitting tribute to a new national shrine, the memorial part of the project that must necessarily dwell in the grief, the sacrifice, the heroism that so dominate the 9/11 narrative. But what Obama left out was the museum part and its role of exploration, illumination and inquiry, such as where do those acts of terror and their bloody toll fit into the broader sweep of history, into America's story, into our understanding of human events before and since? If the dedication ceremony was appropriately a moment for communion and remembrance and resolve, surely the ongoing work of the museum would go beyond the heroism and sacrifice to the complex history and geopolitics that led to 9/11 evil.SHULAN: One of the key meta narratives of this exhibition, one of the most important things about this exhibition, is to say to people, “Use your eyes, look around you, look at the world and understand what you're seeing.” And if we don't do that with the material that we're presenting to people, then how can we give them that message? How will that message ever get through?GARFIELD: A new documentary by husband and wife filmmakers Pam Yoder and Steve Rosenbaum offers an inside view of the creation of the 9/11 Museum. It tells the story of the storytellers as they labor for a decade, collecting artifacts, designing exhibits, and editing the narratives flowing from that fateful day. And its protagonist was a relatively minor character who was propelled by internal conflict among the museum's planners into a central role in this story. The film is called “The Outsider,” available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu, Facebook and other platforms. Steve Rosenbaum joins me now. Steve, welcome to Bully Pulpit.ROSENBAUM: I am so glad to be here, because I've always wanted to be on a bully pulpit.GARFIELD: Uh huh. Well, congratulations. You have achieved your dream, perhaps your destiny. OK, first, a whole lot of disclosure. You and I have been friends for most of our adult lives, so about 100 years, and I've been following your progress in getting this movie made for a long time. And furthermore, at more or less the last minute this summer, I stepped in to help write the narration and ended up voicing it in your movie. So I'm not exactly bringing critical distance into this conversation, but I still have a lot of questions. You ready?ROSENBAUM: I am ready indeed.GARFIELD: OK, so not only have you made a feature length movie about a process, it is a feature length movie about the process of museum curation with most of the action taking place around conference tables. So what I'm saying is Fast and Furious, it isn't.ROSENBAUM: You know, the Blue Room, which is the conference room you're referring to, was both the magical place where the magic happened and also a bit of our albatross because it is, in fact, a conference.GARFIELD: So in the end, though, you do manage to capture quite a bit of drama, quite a bit of drama, but there is no way you could have anticipated, when you got started, what would emerge over these years and -- how many hours of film?ROSENBAUM: 670. GARFIELD: Over how long a period of time?ROSENBAUM: Six and a half years.GARFIELD: How did you come to be a fly on the wall for six and a half years as they undertook this project?ROSENBAUM: So we negotiated with a then non-existent museum to trade them a very precious, valuable archive that my wife and I had lovingly gathered over many years in exchange for access to the construction, design, and development of the museum. And I think at the beginning, everyone thought it was fairly harmless. Like, what could go wrong? I mean, the museum will be fantastic and they'll record all of its fantasticalness, and that will be a film.GARFIELD: When you went in there for those six and a half years, it was purely as a matter of documentation, right? You didn't walk in with a premise or a hypothesis or a scenario or an angle, much less an agenda. But there must have been some sort of core interest, some focus when you undertook this project.ROSENBAUM: You have to remember that in the weeks after 9/11, particularly in New York, there was this extraordinary feeling of camaraderie and connectedness, both among New Yorkers and also around the world. And the sense that maybe what would come of this terrible day is some real goodness, that people would understand each other, that we'd be part of a global community. And so, we brought that, what now seems like naive optimism, to the museum. And they, at least in the early days, fueled that. I mean, they said to us, “We're going to build a different kind of museum. It's going to be open and participatory. It's going to be democratic.” And, you know, that worked for us as filmmakers. We thought a different kind of museum in a country that's gone through a terrible day and hopefully will come out of it stronger and wiser and, you know, more introspection--GARFIELD: But as of at least a year ago, you really didn't know what your film was going to be about. You didn't really have a movie scenario.ROSENBAUM: Well, you have to start with the problem that we had as a filmmaker, as filmmakers, which was a) No one gives a s**t about museums and how they're made. There's zero public interest in that. And then secondly, as it turned out, no one really gave a s**t about the museum. Nobody went to it other than tourists. Thoughtful people, historians, scholars, New Yorkers, media people didn't go there in droves. So, we're like, “How do we make a movie about a museum nobody cares about?” And in fact, the museum opened in 2014 and we spent three or four years fumfering around trying to get our arms around a movie we could make and pretty much gave up. And then Pam, my filmmaking partner and life partner and smarter person than I am, came to me one day and she said, “You know, I think there's a scene that might help.” And she came out with this little -- in her hand, this little Hi 8 tape, she handed it to me, said, “Put it in the deck.”And it was this exhibit in Soho. It was a photo exhibit, which I actually remember going to and some of your listeners may remember as well. It was called “Here is New York,” and it was literally the first crowdsourced photo exhibit in history. All of these people with little mini cameras made pictures of 9/11. And this character, a guy named Michael Shulan, who is a kind of a failed author, owned a little storefront gallery that had been essentially empty, put a picture on the window. And what exploded there was this spectacular collection of real person pictures. And so, the scene that Pam found was of this guy, who we had at that point never met -- one of our camera people had recorded him -- telling the story of why they gathered these pictures.SHULAN: We've asked basically that anyone bring us their pictures and we will display them. And to date we've probably had sixty or seventy people who've brought in pictures in the past two days.GARFIELD: So two things. One, this clip Pam found was from video you guys had shot twenty years ago for a previous movie about 9/11's aftermath called “Seven Days in September.” And you watch it and you're like, “Holy hell, that's Michael.” He is one of the guys who wound up on the museum planning staff, and you have been filming for six and a half years.ROSENBAUM: You know, we have 500 hours of the day of 9/11 and 670 hours shot at the museum construction. It is the definition, the filmmaking definition, of a needle in a haystack. We literally didn't know we had the Shulan scene until Pam magically pulled it out of -- the rabbit out of the hat. And Shulan was one of the five people we had chosen to follow for all six and a half years. And so, the combination of that -- and “Here is New York” is a wonderful kind of mile marker for where the film began because Michael talks about democracy and openness and sharing and letting people kind of find their own story in the photos. And that's exactly what the museum began as.GARFIELD: You say it was a needle in a haystack, finding this film of one of your characters surface. It was also very serendipitous because Shulan, who had the title of museum creative director and who is the “outsider” of the title -- of your title -- is not a professional museum executive or even a professional curator. He had this storefront where he crowdsourced this enormous collection of, you know, amateur images of the day and its aftermath.SHULAN: I live in this little building on Prince Street in Soho, which was inside of the World Trade Center. On the storefront of the empty shop, someone had taped up a copy of the 9/11 morning's newspaper and people were touching this thing and seeming to take some solace in this. And I suddenly remembered I had an old picture of the World Trade Center. So I ran upstairs and I got this picture and I taped it up. And as the day wore on, I noticed that people now came by and were starting to take pictures of the picture. And that was how the whole thing started.GARFIELD: And he was kind of thrust by events into the spotlight, which is how he got hired by the museum to begin with, right?ROSENBAUM: That's exactly correct. But I don't want to, you know, sell him short. I mean, he's quite brilliant in the way that lots of thoughtful New Yorkers are about images and sound and picture. He's just not a museum person in that he doesn't play by the rules. And I think it's important to foreshadow that because, you know, nobody who hired him could have had any confusion about what his behavior was going to be. I mean, he wore his heart on his sleeve.SHULAN: 9/11 was about seeing. 9/11 was about understanding that the world was a different place than you thought it was. It didn't start on the morning of 9/11. It started twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years before that, and we didn't see it.GARFIELD: You know, I've seen this movie now a number of times. He is clearly, as you say, a smart and interesting guy. He is a very thoughtful guy. He is a man of principle. What he isn't exactly, is a charmer.SPEAKER: Robert--SHULAN: Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you care what this project looks like?SPEAKER: Michael, I care very much what this project looks like, but we are in a process that makes decisions and moves forward.SHULAN: But the process makes the decision. You made a check, but is it the right decision?ROSENBAUM: No, he's abrasive. But, you know, I'm personally very fond of him, both as a character and as a human being, because I don't think 9/11 needs lots of people patting it on the head and telling it how heroic that day is. I think we need more of him, not less of him.GARFIELD: And this will ultimately coalesce into the thematic basis of the film, because Shulan was not only abrasive, but he's a man with a point of view. And his point of view was very specific. He believed that a museum documenting 9/11 should not be pedantic and definitive, it should be open ended and inquiring -- well, I'll let him say it:SHULAN: One of the conditions I laid down both explicitly to Alice and to myself when I took the job was that if we were going to make this museum, that we had to tell the history of what actually happened.GARFIELD: Which is not categorically a bad way of approaching museum curation, is it?ROSENBAUM: No. In fact, if you think about your journeys to museums and the ones that you remember, if you've ever gone to one -- I mean, you know, if you go to the Met or to MoMA or the Whitney, there'll be some art in those museums that you like very much and there'll be some other art that you'll look at and go, “Why in God's name did anybody put this thing in this building?” And museum curators don't do that accidentally. They want to challenge your comfort zone. They want to show you things you may not like, and then they want you to think about why you don't like them. So, I don't think museums succeed by being simplistic or pedantic.GARFIELD: Well, as we shall see, there were those who wished not to have this sacred space marred by uncomfortable questions. So you got this guy as your protagonist, a not particularly warm and fuzzy one. And from a dramatic perspective, I guess, the story requires a villain or at least a foil, someone whose philosophy of museuming is very different from Shulan's, providing you the conflict you need as a storyteller, right? And that role fell to the museum's big boss, the CEO, Alice Greenwald.GREENWALD: The politics are the terrain we're in. And it's the, you know -- the World Trade Center has always been a complicated site. You know, it's a bi-state agency that operates, you know, an entity that, an authority that deals with transportation, but it's also building commercial buildings and, you know, a transportation center. It's going to be complicated. It's just going to be complicated.ROSENBAUM: So, Alice is charming. She's warm. She's approachable. She answers questions. She doesn't get caught up in her knitting. And from the day that we met, you know, I remember this conversation like it was yesterday. I said to her, “You're going to be the magnetic north of this story. All people on the planet that want to come and explore it are going to come here.” And she said, “We understand that. We understand that's our responsibility.”GARFIELD: And yet, she is also clearly not as keen as Shulan is in exploring, let's just say, the geopolitical nuance of 9/11. And this has something to do with curatorial philosophy, but it also has to do with this museum being both a memorial and a museum and there being a lot of stakeholders, including the families of the 2,900 plus victims of the attacks. She was politically in an awkward position because there was no way that whatever decision she made, that everybody was going to be delighted.ROSENBAUM: Well, let's go back just half a step. She came from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. So that was the bulk of her career and that was her experience. And so, you know, she's used to demanding stakeholders and people who want the story told a certain way. But the Holocaust Museum is also quite open, and in fact, allows lots of different points of views, some of which they find abhorrent. And so, I don't think she -- I don't think she brought to the museum any sense of shutting down debate or dialogue. I think that happened in an evolutionary process over time.GARFIELD: But as we see the design and construction and planning and curatorial decisions play out, there did seem to be -- you know, I hesitate to use the word whitewash, but it was there seemed to be no great effort to do what Shulan wanted, which is to ask difficult questions, even if you could not come up with a definitive answer. When did it become clear to you as a filmmaker looking at the footage that you had found the conflict that I previously described?ROSENBAUM: So, you said it exactly right. I mean, you know, people say to me, “Well, you know, did you know when you were at the museum, there was a change? Did you feel like it was shift--?” The answer is no, we didn't. And it wasn't until Pam handed me that first tape and we then took the 14 hours of Michael Shulan and laid it out end to end and watched it, that you could feel the tone changing and his kind of quizzical nature become more frustrated and then more angry by about year three. And one of the things I think that's important to remember here is there were some things that Alice was facing that are now lost in history a little bit. So, you know, they began construction in 2005, 2006. By 2008, Wall Street had collapsed. And all these people that had committed donations to build this thing took their money back. And the mayor of the city of New York, who is also the museum's chairman at that point, was Michael Bloomberg. And, you know, Michael's got no shortage of cash, but I don't think there was ever an intention that this museum was going to be a perennial money suck for him or other donors. And so, part of the drumbeat that you start to feel is, “How do we make this private museum” -- not a public museum -- “without government funding, something that people will come and buy a ticket for?” And that's, I think, where some of the rub was.GARFIELD: A twenty three dollar ticket, if I recall correctly.ROSENBAUM: They raised the price. It's now twenty six.GARFIELD: So at that point, you know, apart from any political or philosophical considerations, there becomes the problem of needing, in order to meet expenses, to have not just a shrine and not just a museum, but an attraction which changes the calculus altogether. And what you were able to do when you were combing through your footage was find some pretty upsetting scenes of museum staff trying to figure out what would make the customers react.ROSENBAUM: Yes, there was definitely a series of debates about what would be impactful. And they were always careful to never say immersive. But there definitely became a bit of a schism on the team between people that wanted the museum to be welcoming and complicated and people who wanted the museum to be intense and dramatic. And there are some good examples of that, in particular, some particular scenes that I think the museum wasn't happy to see recorded. But, you know, we had them on tape.SPEAKER 1: Do you have any interest in developing ties? You can do whatever you want on it.SPEAKER 2: I think a tie is a really — you know what's nice to give away is a tie and a scarf.NEWS REPORTER: Just days away from the public opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, there's growing criticism of high admission fees. Twenty four dollars to get in and the sale of souvenirs at the gift shop. SPEAKER 3: I think it's a revenue generating tourist attraction. NEWS REPORTER: Jim Riches shares the same sentiment shown in this New York Post headline titled “Little Shop of Horror.” ROSENBAUM: But I also think it's important for your audience to understand people don't want to re-experience 9/11. Certainly New Yorkers don't, and probably Americans as a class.GARFIELD: There was the question, and this was a word you ended up not using in your film, of whether you going through that footage were witnessing the “Disneyfication” of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, yet you ended up pulling that punch up. Why? ROSENBAUM: It made people so staggeringly angry that -- I mean, I don't think it was inaccurate or untrue. It was just we were picking our battles a little bit at that point with the museum and like, they -- because we didn't have any of our characters raising the word “Disneyfication,” although we'd heard it, we decided it was harder to defend than some other challenges that we made that were on tape.GARFIELD: You got a lot of good press for this film, but you also ran into a couple of buzzsaws, notably The New York Times Review, which was pretty scathing. And, although the critic was kind enough to single out my performance as a narrator -- what word did he use?ROSENBAUM: I believe the word was “amateurish.”GARFIELD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that was unfortunately true because I did it for nothing. But his central complaint is why you and Pam, as filmmakers, would privilege the creative vision of this novice outsider, Shulan, over the consensus of the team and the museum that they together crafted. Why did you, in the end, apart for reasons of just dramatic conflict, focus on Shulan?ROSENBAUM: Well, let me answer that question. So a couple of things: in the review, his criticism is that we're somehow promoting Shulan's career as a museum curator. And, you know, I watched the film not objectively, but I don't think anyone's going to be hiring Michael as a result of this. I also don't think that that was his intention or ours. I think, you know, what we liked was that Michael said, “Let's make a museum that's open and democratic.” And that that was the same thing Alice told us on day one. And then, as we slipped away from that, we slipped to an institution that felt to us heavy-handed and pedantic. And so, you know, Michael certainly represents a point of view that the filmmakers share about the museum. But I also think that, you know, the questions he raised about the museum, he's not alone. I mean, Tom Hennes, who's the head of Exhibits, feels very much the same way. And, you know, Philip Kennicott from The Washington Post feels very much the same way. And the head architecture critic from The New York Times, oddly, feels very much the same way. But it wasn't meant to put Shulan on any kind of a pedestal. It was simply that he was a really good lens through which to focus the question.GARFIELD: Speaking of Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic at The Times, you have some tape of him commenting on a sign that is erected, you know, in the plaza area of the museum, the above ground portion of the museum. Most of the exhibit space is below ground, which was jaw dropping for him and for, I think, any viewer of the film.KIMMELMAN: The list of don'ts on the site is astonishing. You can't sing, much less stage a protest or a demonstration. And I think that does raise some very profound questions. You know, I have to keep coming back to say, I think the ability of New York, and by extension, America, to return again to life and return this place to life would have been a very remarkable and powerful statement.GARFIELD: If one bookmark of the movie was Michael Shulan, at his open source photo exhibit in Soho, this was the other bookend: the opposite of open source democratic anything, this closing down of protest or comment or debate on this site. I mean, it's not to be believed.ROSENBAUM: You have to think about where it sits in the arc of the last twenty years in American history. I mean, you know, you got the Patriot Act, you got renditions, you've got drone strikes, you've got police being heavily armored and turning into military units. The museum's fear of terrorism was the reason why they controlled the site so closely, but it also was part of this larger shift over the last twenty years toward a nationalistic heavy-handed kind of militaristic control. And I don't think that they were out on their own when they were limiting the fact that you couldn't sing or, you know, bring a guitar or read a piece of poetry on the site. I also think, by the way, it's worth remembering that the site is private property. So there's really nowhere else in New York -- I mean, if I want to go to Central Park and read a poem, no one, no cop is going to come up and say, “I'm sorry, sir, no poetry reading here.” The only place where that's going to happen is at the September 11th Museum.GARFIELD: Now, let me ask you this final thing. You have documented what I think could be characterized as the denaturing of the 9/11 Museum, the slowly evolving whitewashing of what we described in the very beginning of this thing, which was the search for meaning in the events of that day twenty years ago. As a museum goer, will I come away with the sense that something is being withheld, or does what they have come up with provide the raw material I need as a member of the society and a citizen to ask these questions myself?ROSENBAUM: You know, I've come to be able to answer that question after a couple of months of talking to other people. I think the best answer is, you know, that they're in a really tough box at this point because the thing about, you know, Afghanistan is it's not going to go away and it will be the bookend on this twenty years that will raise questions about, “Wait a minute, is the museum not going to talk about Afghanistan and the war, the twenty year failed -- our failed war in Afghanistan?” Well, of course they have to. And then the question is, what about the twenty years between the “never forget moment” that they hit like a drum beat and now? Because lots of things happened. And theoretically, at some point, the material about Saudi Arabia that has been hidden by the government will make its way into the light and then that will raise questions about, “Oh wait, who did 9/11?” So, when you really look at what the museum has chosen to put on a pedestal, it's essentially those two towers and they're falling down and all of the horrible human pain and suffering that comes from that. But I'm not sure that counts as the appropriate historic take on that day.GARFIELD: Steve, I want to thank you very much for doing this. I'm sorry Pam couldn't join us, but thank her for me as well. And I wish you all best of luck with the film.ROSENBAUM: We love people to watch it and send us, you know, notes, criticism, feedback. We think it's the beginning of a conversation, not the end.GARFIELD: Just as Michael Shulan would have preferred. Steve, thank you. ROSENBAUM: Thanks. GARFIELD: Steve Rosenbaum with his wife, Pam Yoder, directed the new documentary “The Outsider,” available now on Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu, Xbox, Facebook, and other digital platforms. All right, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios so you can get extra content, including my weekly text column from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley and Banished. Meantime, do please review Bully Pulpit on iTunes. Amid a cacophonous glut of podcasts, we depend on you to bring news of us to the world. We are trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas and we cannot do that without you. Thanks in advance. Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bob speaks with author and scholar Lawrence Weschler, who shares astonishment that The Machine Stops could — from very few data points — extrapolate our present, so paradoxically connected and detached.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. This is Episode 7: Back to the Future.It's a special episode, featuring not an essay or an interview exactly but a conversation — a literary conversation no less — with author Lawrence Weschler. The subject is a 12,000-word novella called The Machine Stops, and the occasion, for reasons that soon will be apparent, is the Venice Architecture Biennale. This is an abridged version of our back-and-forth for that audience.Now you may know Ren Weschler from his decades as a staff writer for the New Yorker, or for his dozen-some books on subjects as varied as Chilean torture, Polish liberation politics and his Boswell-ish engagements with such pioneering artists as David Hockney, Robert Irwin and the maker of hand-inked paper-money facsimiles, JSG Boggs. And so much more, because he is a journalist of astonishing scope and erudition, as you are about to ear-witness.At some points I may interrupt the Venice conversation for a clarifying point. Meantime, for reasons that will also soon be obvious, we will begin not with a description of The Machine Stops, but of Ren reading the first page or two.WESCHLER:Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits swaddled a lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.An electric bell rang.The woman touched a switch and the music went silent.“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importuningy.“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced considerably.But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: Very well. Let's talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture.She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.“Be quick!” She called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the world, and he could see her.“Kuno, how slow you are.”He smiled gravely.“I readily believe you enjoy dawdling.”“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. And I have something particular to say.”“What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?”“Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want  —”“Well?”“I want you to come and see me.”Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.“But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”“Oh, hush!” said the mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn't say anything against the Machine.”“Why not?”“One just mustn't.”“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” he cried. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Man made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in the plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”And it goes on from there.GARFIELD: Well, thank you, Ren. As you in our audience have by now divined, The Machine Stops is a work of science fiction depicting a techno totalitarian state in which citizens from their hexagonal hive quarters conduct their lives almost entirely mediated by an internet called The Machine. And as we'll discuss, it really kind of nails some of the biggest issues we face as Earthlings in 2021, Ren so far so good. Fair description?WESCHLER: I think that's good. Keep going.GARFIELD: All right. The Machine Stops portrays a dystopian future society, denuded as will learn of trees and of real human contact, where physicality is not really déclassé, but bred out of the species all together. The inhabitants of this world are flaccid and lumpen and pale and depend on the Machine to the limit to deliver them, not just images on the screen, but through that network of tubes the food and oxygen they need to sustain them.WESCHLER: They're all living underground.GARFIELD: Oh, and they're living underground. Stop me if I'm getting any of this wrong, if there's any other additions.WESCHLER: Something appears to have happened on Earth, on the surface, and everybody's been moved underground and is living in a hive of hexagonal rooms.GARFIELD: Exactly. So here's the thing. To read The Machine Stops is to immediately think of other fictional techno dystopias from which such a scenario would seem to derive. George Orwell's 1984, written in 1949. and Aldous Huxley's Brave New Worldfrom the year 1932, each depicting authoritarian societies which controlled the population through centralized media and creature comforts to make individuals docile and compliant. But Ren, you stubbornly refuse to call this story derivative of either Orwell or Huxley. Why is that?WESCHLER: Because it was written in 1909, by E.M. Forster. And it's amazing because we don't think of E.M. Forster, who we associate with those of us who either read it in college or went to the movies, we associate it with A Room with a View, which is a book that came out just before he wrote this, or , which is a book that came out just after. He wrote it in 1909. And as we'll discuss as we go on, it is unbelievable how he nails the current moment. He nailed the current moment even three or four years ago, but after Covid, it completely nails the current moment. It's, it is absolutely amazing that he would have had this vision in 1909. A few thoughts on that and then we'll go back to the story itself. I've been doing some reading of his biography, in various biographies, and all of them quote this very seminal diary entry he had in January, 1908. So this is a year before he wrote the story. And he's all upset because that morning comes news. Well:Last Monday, a man named Farman flew a three quarter mile circuit in one and a half minutes.He's talking about planes, airplanes, the early airplanes.It's coming quickly. And if I live to be old, I shall see the sky as pestilential as the roads. It really is a new civilization coming. I have been born at the end of the age of peace and can't expect to feel anything but despair. Science, instead of freeing man — the Greeks nearly freed him by right feeling — is enslaving him to machines. Nationality will go, but the brotherhood of man will not come. No doubt the men of the past were mistaken in thinking dulce decorum est pro patria mori — it's beautiful to die for one's country — but the war of the future [this is 1909]  will make no pretense of beauty or of being the conflict of ideas. God, what a prospect. The little houses that I'm used to will be swept away. The fields will stink of petrol and the airships will shatter the stars. Man may get a new and perhaps a greater soul for the new conditions, but such a soul as mine will be crushed out.GARFIELD: He was a hell of an extrapolator.WESCHLER: Yeah, you can see it going from there. By the way, it reminds me of an amazing passage from Henry James writing to a friend in 1914. In August, 1914:Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that is gathering and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this, it's Grand Niagara. Yet what a blessing we didn't know it.GARFIELD: OK, as threatened, popping in here after the fact to point out what Ren and I failed to remind the audience — which is that Henry James was responding to the outbreak of World War I and the shattering realization that evolved societies can devolve in the worst way — which he simply did not see coming.WESCHLER: Interesting thing there is that in many ways Forster did. And for that matter, it was this fantasy that both Foster and James had that, this was a time of civility and so forth, completely occludes what was, for example, taking place in Africa and in imperialism all over the world and that wasn't going to lead directly to World War I. By the way, one other thing to say about 1909 before we go on is, 1909 is not just an average year. 1909 is the year that Cubism is invented. And in some ways, I would argue and we can go into this later on, that the Cubists, too, are having this sense of the limitations of things and how one needs to think differently, to think in new ways and how to evade the totalitarianism of one point perspective and so forth.GARFIELD: You could say that cubism is extrapolation itself, so they share that in common. You mentioned the air travel. I mean, this is just a couple of years after the Wright Flyer got a few feet off the ground at Kitty Hawk. And he's imagining transcontinental travel, which is just one element of just the jaw dropping list of prescient observations. You referred to the Covid lockdown. Everybody is in absolute isolation. They see other people only through that screen, that blue lighted screen in their hands, which is like a smartphone or an iPad.WESCHLER: They've all gone flaccid and flabby. There's an amazing passage, by the way. He does a flip on several things. He does a flip on eugenics, that in this society, any babies that are born that seem to be strong and athletic are immediately eliminated. This is just the opposite of the fantasy of eugenics at that time. And they're eliminated because, you know, what's the point? It would just make them uncomfortable and it would be embarrassing for everybody else. So they are killed at their very births.GARFIELD: Yeah, and that will become a plot point because they've culled physicality from the species. But the son who we're introduced to in the first passage will actually cultivate his muscles for what will be his escape to the surface.WESCHLER: Right.GARFIELD: Just a couple more things Ren. There's the environmental devastation that I don't know that others anticipated in 1909, but the air is despoiled, the trees are gone. We are forced as a species underground because it is uninhabitable above.WESCHLER: One point where he says that, for our comforts, we despoiled the entire planet and made it unlivable, some phrase, just because we wanted to be more comfortable. Amazing phrase in 1909.GARFIELD: There is also, and again, this was, this was long before globalism and the interconnectivity of the whole world. Distant places were distant and discrete. But what he somehow envisioned was this vast cultural homogeneity as a result of globalism. Every hexagonal hive around the world was the same and all of the media content was the same, and we all lived the same experience.WESCHLER: He has this great line. What's the point of going to Beijing, or Peking as it's called, when when you get there, it's going to look exactly like your own town. He has malls, he has FedEx. He has this great line where he says, we've solved the problem of people having to go places to get things. Things come to people. That solves that. No need to go outside. No need to leave your room. He has this very funny thing about why one of the reasons that the world was despoiled was because all the trees were cut down for pulp, for books.GARFIELD: And newspapers.WESCHLER: And he has a thing that's basically Kindle. And there are no books anymore. There's basically this plate. You can read any book you want on that plate. There is one book, which is the manual for the Machine basically, that's achieved kind of the role of the Bible almost.GARFIELD: Yeah. And there's this recurring theme in the book about the deification of the technology and the ongoing debate between the mother Vashti and the son Kuno about whether they have actually defaulted to the religion that they're nominally not permitted to have in this society. There's one thing about that  iPad or smartphone, the image that is at the very beginning of the story — it comes just about where you left off.WESCHLER: Right. Right.GARFIELD: And I wanted to read this because it's describing the low resolution of the screen.WESCHLER: And we are not unaware of how meta this whole conversation … GARFIELD: Yeah, especially if your Zoom feed is pixelating right now. But it said:She could not be sure, for the machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It gave only a general idea of people, an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse was rightly ignored by the machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something good enough had long since been accepted by our race.It's an astonishing observation. And you don't know whether he's talking about the Uncanny Valley, by which animated figures and robots can be seen not to be human because there's a certain light missing from their eyes. Or whether it's a society wide kind of Aspergers where you're blind to nuance of expression. Is it just technological, is it just that there aren't enough pixels on the screen. Or, and this is what I think, is the loss of resolution, the just good enough, a metaphor for the loss of rich experience and rich inquiry and the sense of mystery which the society has forsaken? What the hell is the imponderable bloom, Ren?WESCHLER: Well, I'm reminded of when you go to museums and you see those — using the example he himself uses — the paintings of still lifes, the Dutch still lifes. And they do have that incredible, that little powdery dust on the plum, for example.GARFIELD: Mm hmm.WESCHLER: That is the essence of a plum. And yet you don't — when you go to the store, the supermarket, all the plums have been polished — and so you don't see that at all. For that matter, I'm reminded of, in that context, John McPhee's book, Oranges, in which he asks the question one morning at his breakfast table, why does the orange juice, his packaged orange juice from Florida, taste the same every single time? And that became a whole book of the entire industry, the superstructure of creating oranges and everything that has to happen to make sure that they stay exactly the same. God forbid you should have a separate kind of taste one morning from the other morning. You would, of course, take it back to the supermarket and complain, you know, you would become like one of the satirical characters in this story. I mean, that's how you would respond to it.GARFIELD: I'm no longer surprised, now that you mention the orange thing, which I had been unaware of, that John McPhee also wrote 60,000 words on rice.WESCHLER: Yeah, yeah. Well, that was the good old days at The New Yorker.GARFIELD: Those were the days. And you were in the thick of The New Yorker.WESCHLER: I was in the thick of the rice.GARFIELD: Them days. I just wanna, if I had E.M. Forster here, I would say to him: I got news for you, dude — I grew up in the 50s and 60s and we had artificial grapes that were made of glass and they had some sort of, I don't know, latex around them. And they looked really, really foggy. You know, they had that misty look to them. So we solved that problem motherfucker. You know …WESCHLER: I'm sure the two of you would have gotten along great.GARFIELD: Oh, I have no doubt. So, Ren, obviously it's jaw dropping that he was so prescient in so many ways.WESCHLER: There's a few other ones that I wanted to point out. One of the things that's absolutely amazing is that Vashti's job is essentially she's an influencer. And when she's not influencing, she's a TED lecturer. She basically gives these lectures that everybody all over the world, because she has thousands of friends, that's basically what she has, tune in to her lectures and they are 10 minutes long. They are never more than 10 minutes long. And we were talking a bit about the standardization of the world. All beds are exactly the same size and are the same everywhere. It's basically the IKEA of the world. You realize that for him, this is dystopian and for you this is your life.GARFIELD: There's one big difference between like TED culture and The Machine Stops culture, and that is that these lectures, they mustn't, they mustn't contain new ideas.WESCHLER: Exactly.GARFIELD: It's a beehive. It's also a cow stomach, where you're allowed to digest in ...WESCHLER: Ruminate, as it were.GARFIELD: … different chambers, but you're not allowed to do anything new.WESCHLER: Right.GARFIELD: And again, early in the book, there's something I find astonishing. Can I read one more passage?WESCHLER: Yeah, yeah. Do, do.GARFIELD: In the very first pages, the son is talking to his mother, whose job is to lecture about stuff that people already know. And he talked about his experience when he was on one of these airships of seeing stars take a familiar shape. He says:Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong and hanging from these stars, three other stars?No, I do not, she says, I dislike the stars.But did they give you an idea?How interesting. Tell me.I had an idea they were like a man.I do not understand.The four big stars are the main shoulders and his knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword.A sword?Men carried swords about with them to kill animals and other men.He had reinvented the wheel called constellations.WESCHLER: Orion, in particular.GARFIELD: It had vanished from humankind, the notion of looking at the stars and marveling and imagining what images they conjured. This was, this was a revelation. This is how far the society had devolved, that they lost track of the very stars.WESCHLER: And there is the wonderful phrase at one point where Forster says that above them, night was turning to day, day was turning to night. They were completely unaware of the cycle, even that cycle. At one point she does, Vashti does decide to go and they have these airships they are called. They're like kind of like planes, kind of like balloons — it's not quite clear what they are. But they're traveling, and this description of what it is like being on the airship:It was night. For a moment she saw the coast of Sumatra, edged by phosphorescence of waves and crowned by lighthouses still sending forth their disregarded beams. These also vanish, and only the stars distracted her. They were not motionless, but swayed to and fro above her head, thronging out of one skylight into another, as if the universe, and not the airship, were careering. And as often happens on clear nights, they seemed now to be in perspective now on a plane now plied tear beyond tear into the infinite heavens, now concealing an infinity of roof limiting forever the visions of men. In either case, they seemed intolerable. Are we to travel in the dark?, called the passengers angrily. [In other words, in night? And what the hell is this? What are we doing?] And the attendant who had been careless generated the light and pulled down the blinds, a pliable metal. When the airships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows and the proportionate discomfort of those who are civilized and refined. Even in Vashti's cabin, one star peeped through a flaw in the blind, and after a few hours of uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by an unfamiliar glow, which was the dawn.She's furious that there's a rip in the curtain that is allowing this stuff through. Close it, close it. All ideas have to be, at very most, original secondhand and preferably third or fourth hand. And that's all the discourse that's going on.GARFIELD: Hold on. Now, on the subject of intolerable, dude, keep reading because something happens between her and the flight attendant.WESCHLER: Yeah, that's fantastic, too, yeah:People are almost exactly alike all over the world. But the attendant of the airship, perhaps owing to her exceptional duties, had grown a little out of the common. She had often to address passengers with direct speech, and this had given her a certain roughness and originality of manner [originality being a very bad word]. When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry, she behaved barbarically. She put her hand out to study her. “How dare you?,” exclaimed the passenger. “Vashti, you forget yourself.” The woman was confused and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.Welcome to Covidland.GARFIELD: Yeah, the 12:44 is coming in right on schedule.WESCHLER: Right, there it is, outside.GARFIELD: A society denuded not only of trees, but of touch, of human contact. So we've established clearly that Forster was prescient beyond beyond belief, right? But the other thing that's beyond belief is that the person who's writing this is E.M. Forster.WESCHLER: Right.GARFIELD: Because E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, Passage to India, where at least at first glance, the issues that he's concerning himself with are very, very different, in class division and so on. So my question for you is, are they really that different?WESCHLER: Well, there's that.GARFIELD: Is there a line between A Passage to India and The Machine, you know, styles?WESCHLER: Well, a couple of things. First of all, in terms of the immediate background, according to some of the biographies I've been reading, he wrote it, he said at the time, as a counter to some of H.G. Wells's most recent work at the time, which was utopian — where H.G. Wells was imagining actually a happy outcome, where the world, where all these machines were taking care of all these things and so forth, and he was not at all sure about that. So, he also, somebody said, he was writing an encounter to an Oscar Wilde line that he had quoted at one point, who in 1890 — so that would have been 20 years before this — had written this is Oscar Wilde, the Oscar Wilde of Art for Art's Sake, as:… we become more highly organized, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and the cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched.In other words, that is a different kind of utopianism, where you no longer have to deal directly with life and so forth.GARFIELD: Well, you just described Wilde's actual life because, you know, I think probably into the 20th century, well into the 20th century, art was the stuff of aristocrats.WESCHLER: Yeah, yeah. And so that in turn, of course, aristocrats and bohemians — that great line of Kurt Vonnegut's, that that art is a conspiracy between artists and rich people to make poor people feel stupidGARFIELD: (laughing)WESCHLER: But indeed, I think Forster is very, elsewhere, is very focused on partly the comforts of a certain layer of bourgeois life. But also the underpinnings and the way that there is beginning to be this growing polarization of wealth, you might say — we are in the Gilded Age after all — and the terrible way in which servants and so forth are being treated. He's quite sensitive to that. And oddly enough, one of the things that's interesting here is that the dystopian society has had a solution which is making everybody live in beehives, you know, and so that that class culture has disappeared, but in a kind of dystopian way. I think, though, that some of those passages, the passage of the dawn in Sumatra and the lighthouse, that's pure E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. I mean, this extraordinary sensitivity to the tactile quality of experience. Especially as opposed to the everydayness of most people's lives, his heroes have these moments, these epiphanies.GARFIELD: To the textures, to the smells, to the colors, right, of different cultures — the antithesis of the homogeneity.WESCHLER: You go to Beijing because Peking is different. You go to Delhi because Delhi is different. You go to that cave because, good Lord, is it different than something you would have experienced at home?GARFIELD: That's something else he nailed too, because, you know, increasingly Shanghai is Los Angeles or whatever.WESCHLER: Yeah. And by the way, Los Angeles is Shanghai.GARFIELD: Yes, that's right.WESCHLER: It's just this remarkable thing to come upon and to come upon it now. So part one is basically this, brings out this world. In part two, there's three parts, part two — in what in one sense is the climax of the story — is how Kuno not only is sacrilegious in that he doesn't honor, he says things that, Be quiet, don't say those things. The machine is listening. You know, the machine is our benefactor.GARFIELD: Popping in again, because I also failed to notice this when Ren raised it, but the idea of the Machine is listening. If this were Orwell, or Huxley, or Ray Bradbury, the machine would have been listening like an electronic Stasi, like an omniscient security state — which is not quite the case in Forster or even in our own surveillance society. It's not eavesdropping per se. Yes, in 2021, the Machine does know, because we surrender data willy nilly, and our every click and keystroke are recorded and we spill our guts on social media for eternity. Forster somehow knew that the machine would somehow know. And so Kuno tried to explain to his mom.WESCHLER: And he's saying, no, I want to get out. And she says, well, there's no way to get out. The only way to get out, you take the train to the air thing and then you can take airships but you can't go on land, you just can't go on the land. And he says no but I figured something out. And he has this amazing description of, he — well, as you say, he began exercising, which was like completely crazy. He turned off all the stuff and just would do pushups and so forth to get stronger and stronger because, and then he has this extraordinary line, by the way, let me see if I can find this, this amazing line about what we've lost: We have lost the sense of space. We say space is annihilated. That's from the phrase that the telegraph had annihilated space and time, that it used, when the telegraph and the telephone and eventually email come online, the feeling was that space and time — where it took a long time for a message to get from one place to another, you know, and so forth — had been annihilated by by this incredible thing. Initially, the telegraph or along with the telegraph, exactly along with the telegraph, is the train system because the trains need telegraphs to set up all the signals and so forth. And they were exulting at the annihilation of space and time. Which reminds me, by the way, some other time we should have a conversation, if you will, if you enjoy these conversations, about an amazing book by Wolfgang Schivelbusch called The Railway Journey, in which he goes back and looks at what people's experience of railway's was when it first happened. And he describes people are suddenly going six miles an hour, seven miles an hour. And universally, the letters that everybody's writing each other is about the G forces on their bodies. They're being hurled back into the seat. You know, this is, everybody has this same experience. GARFIELD: Not the soot in their teeth, but but that thrill ride of seven mph.WESCHLER: Right. Anyway, so he goes on:We say space is annihilated, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it. And I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room, up and down until I was tired and so did I recapture the meaning of near and far. Near is a place to which I get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly.He's walking, he walks farther and suddenly one day, he comes upon this little pile of rubble on the thing and he looks above and he realizes this must have been when they were building the hives. There must have been a tunnel that went through here up to the, up to a vertical tunnel. And this is left over from the building. And he kind of scratches away and he suddenly finds himself in a tunnel. And he's saying to his mother, there was a ladder. He opens it up and there's this little thing and it goes way straight up, and he says:There was a ladder made of some primeval metal. The light from the railway fell upon its lowest rungs. And I saw that it led straight upwards out of the rubble at the bottom of the shaft. Perhaps our ancestors ran up and down it a dozen times daily in their building. As I climbed the rough edges, cut through my gloves so that my hands bled, the light helped me for a little, and then came darkness and worse still silenced, which pierced my ears like a sword. The machine hums. Did you know it? Oh, that its hum penetrates our blood and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows. I was getting beyond its power then I thought the silence means that I am doing wrong. But I heard voices in the silence and again, that strengthened me. He laughed. I had need of them. The next moment I cracked my head up against something.And he's bumped up against the top and eventually gets out. And there's this amazing moment when he is hurled out of, the air pressure hurls him out into this bowl of grass and the sunshine and so forth. George Lucas and Walter Mirch in 1971 made a film called THX 1138 about an incredibly disposed dystopian world in which everybody is living underground.THX 1138 soundtrackThere has been some kind of calamity on the surface. Everybody is told they can't go on the surface. There is a machine that is in control of everything. And there is Donald Pleasence and Robert Duvall and so forth. And Robert Duvall suddenly decides that he wants to escape. And the climax of the film is his escape. And I just want to show this to you, because the climax of the story I'm going to tell you is that neither of them were aware of The Machine Stops when they wrote and they made this film.THX 1138 clipIt's absolutely staggering. Talk about a weird echoes, and in fact it was Walter Mirch who eventually first showed me The Machine Stops. He says, look at this thing. We didn't know about this. It occurs to me that it also has echoes of the great Chris Marker film from the French New Wave La Jetée, where society is underground. There it's not a tunnel that you go through, but there's some time travel stuff and they keep on sending the character back in time, and he is walking around Paris. And the wonderfulness of the life beforehand — again this is a theme that keeps coming up. But as far as I know, it first shows up in The Machine Stops, in its kind of purest form.GARFIELD: So in this film, the reward for escaping to the surface is kind of splendor. And going back to the extraordinary prescience of The Machine Stops, I think the reward is slightly different. We've all experienced, through Covid, isolation — I believe, a kind of loss of proprioception of time. We don't feel like we have purchase on our lives anymore. We can't quite get a grip on the past and we certainly have trouble envisioning what six months will be like or, you know, in some cases six days. And it's a distracting sensation of just not knowing where you are, which I think is more or less the definition of proprioception, having a sense of where your body parts are. But in this society, that Forster's talking about we, you know, we are completely atrophied. There is no human touch. Light and sound is all controlled by the machine. And we can't fix ourself based on the stars. All of humankind has lost its sense of place and time and self. And that was, I believe, the son's reward for getting to the surface. Maybe we should withhold the consequences of his decision.WESCHLER: Let's withhold that. But just note that there's a whole part three. And without going into too much detail, but it's absolutely fascinating. The machine begins to break down. And it is the most, it breaks down in absolutely the ways it breaks down for us, you know, but we can imagine it continuing to breakdown more and more. Suddenly the air begins to get staler, you know, and the food isn't so good. And there are moments where the iPhone's not working and and so forth, that it kind of climaxes.GARFIELD: I'd like to ask a question, and I'm doing this for a couple of reasons, one, out of genuine curiosity and another for having a natural ending to the podcast version of this. And that is Ren, what have we learned?WESCHLER: I guess this isn't so much a learning as an awakening. You know, I hope that this story wakes us up to the way we've been sleepwalking. I mean, in some sense, if the fantasy of Kuno climbing those stairs allows us — in the short term about Covid, to imagine what it might be to climb out of Covidland — but more importantly, to understand that Covid is just a metaphor in some sense, notwithstanding all the actual damage it's done of what's coming and what's coming more and more and more. And for God's sake, wake up. And engage or, in Forster's words, only connect. Break down the hive walls. And for an architecture biennial, break down the goddamn hive walls.GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. What you have just heard was an abridged version of my conversation with author Lawrence Weschler, as part of his Mr. Weschler's Cabinet of Wonders series for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. If you like what you've heard here, do please venture beyond our Great Paywall of Booksmart to be a paid subscriber to our offerings, including the works of professors John McWhorter and Amna Khalid in their respective podcasts Lexicon Valley and Banished. You'll get longer form interviews, access to our hosts and, in my case, my weekly text column — which is, let's just say, “uncompromising,” because that sounds better than “indelicate” or “brutal.” Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. We had technical help in Europe for this episode from Adrianos Efthymiadis. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. He discusses the tobacco industry's 20th-century campaign to make its addictive and deadly product somehow acceptable — and its 21st-century campaign to do it all again.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 6: Crime of the Century.OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body. If you eliminate the combustion, you actually can achieve a very, very significant reduction in exposure to the toxicants.GARFIELD: In our last episode, we heard from Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak as he boasted about Philip Morris's plan to convert half of its business to non-combustible tobacco products by the year 2025 — a strategy that impresses Wall Street and part of the public-health community, but to others is merely reminiscent of a century of Big Tobacco manipulation, cynicism and fatal lies. In that story we heard briefly from Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. This week, we return to the professor and the subject of the Cigarette Century, so deadly and corrupt.Allan, welcome to Bully Pulpit.BRANDT: Thanks so much for having me.GARFIELD: The tobacco industry has a long and dark history, going back at least to the early 50s when the evidence of smoking's dangers became an existential threat to cigarette sales. Can you tell me what the research was at that turning point?BRANDT: There'd been a lot of research going all the way back to the middle of the 19th century about the possible harms of smoking, but there wasn't fully substantiated knowledge, I would argue, til right around 1950. But then things changed quickly and radically because a group of early epidemiologists, both in England and the United States, began to study smokers and what happened to their health, and they began to study lung cancer patients and what their smoking behaviors had been. And they came up with incredibly robust and important findings that were published around 1950, '52 and three, more studies by 1954. And all of them reached one absolute conclusion, which was that smoking was actually a cause of lung cancer and likely other diseases that would be studied subsequently, especially heart disease, stroke and other cancers.GARFIELD: So of course, the industry said, oh my God, this is terrible news. We can see that we're merchants of death and we will henceforth get out of the cigarette business and into selling wintergreen candy. Right?BRANDT: That's not exactly what happened. Here you have a multi-million dollar industry confronted by scientific evidence that their product causes disease and death. And so the tobacco executives started to put their heads together and figure out, how do we respond to this? Do we say the science is bad? Do we just disregard it? Do we try to incriminate the scientist who produced this? And eventually what happens is that in December, 1953, the six major CEOs of the big tobacco companies get together at the Plaza Hotel in New York to consider the way forward because they knew that they were in a massive crisis in terms of their industry. And they called in probably the nation's most powerful and influential public relations executive, John Hill, to consult with them. And he listened to them for a while. And then he said, I don't think you understand how to do this. What you need to do is create uncertainty. Don't deny that these studies have appeared. Just say there's much more we need to learn. We need more science. And in a sense, one of the things that Hill told them is if you don't like the science that's coming out, begin to develop your own science. Find skeptics, find marginal scientific and medical people, give them grants and have them produce science that will serve the interest of your industry. What the tobacco industry really introduced in the early to mid 50s was the idea: How can we confuse science? How can we obscure what's coming out? How can we make people say, you know, there's a debate, we just don't know? A lot of physicians and scientists were coming out, 1952, 1953, saying we need to regulate cigarettes, we need to tell our patients to quit. A lot of doctors did quit and by the early 1960s, the industry's campaign — based on Hill's principles — really led to people saying we just don't have enough evidence yet.GARFIELD: Now, as you mentioned, 70 years ago the research showed the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer based on health outcomes and behaviors for large study populations. But it wasn't laboratory science on a cellular level. So this opens some space for creating doubt, circumstantial evidence, blah, blah, blah. You have identified the industry's three pronged strategy.BRANDT: Yes. The three points were essentially that the evidence of the harms of smoking were inconclusive, that cancers had many causes and what we would really need is much more intensive research to resolve a publicly important question and that no one was more committed to the idea of learning more, investigating more completely and resolving this question. And then, of course, if we ever do find anything in cigarettes that might be harmful, we will take the lead in fixing our product and assuring the health of the public.GARFIELD: Yeah, like this Chesterfield commercial from the late fifties. The interviewer was a familiar face to the audience of the day: George Fenneman.GEORGE: As you watch, an electronic miracle is taking place as a stream of electrons creates this television picture. Here tonight is another electronic miracle, destined to affect your lives even more than television. This new electronic miracle, AccuRay, means that everything from auto tires to ice cream, battleship steel to cigarettes, can be made better and safer for you. Now meet Mr. Bert Chope, brilliant young president of Industrial Nucleonics. Well Bert, exactly what is AccuRay?CHOPE: Well, George, it is a device by which a stream of electrons passes through and analyzes the product while it is actually being made. They transferred what they see to this electronic brain, which adjusts the production machinery for errors down to millionths of an inch.GEORGE: Well, I always ask the question so many people ask me. How does AccuRay make Chesterfield a better cigarette than was ever possible before?CHOPE: Every cigarette made with AccuRay control contains a more precise measure of perfectly packed tobaccos, so Chesterfield smokes smoother, without hotspots or a hard draw.GEORGE: That's why Chesterfield tastes better and is best for you. Bert, what's your cigarette?CHOPE: You see, I know what AccuRay can do.GARFIELD: “Better for you,” like Kent's micronite filter and Marlboro Lights were supposedly — but not actually — better for you. But apart from — excuse the expression “puffery” — they stacked the deck with putatively legitimate scientists.BRANDT: They found a group that was hostile to epidemiology, that was committed to the idea that cancers have to be genetic. They hired a lot of people who were highly sympathetic to eugenic notions of genetics and elitism. And then the other thing they did is they gave out a lot of money to scientists. So in my research, I found a young scientist — his grant from the government had run out and they were very good at identifying these folks who were not really fully succeeding and saying, well, we can give you a grant and here's what we want you to do. And then when they produced papers, they edited the papers, they turned them around. Whenever there was a paper that seemed to be hesitant about the connection between smoking and disease, they would make sure it appeared in the press. And they really said there are two sides to this story. The media, in a sense, supported the Hill principles because the media was very committed to the idea that every story has two sides.GARFIELD: The same kind of false balance in, let's say, climate coverage, where climate denialists are given, you know, equal time with global scientific consensus.BRANDT: What the climate science world is based on are the principles of what today are widely called the tobacco industry playbook. So you set up these, like, industry funded, so-called independent research agencies — you know, the Center for Indoor Air Research. And what it turns out is that they're funded by industry and they collect scientists and materials as if they were independent. And the tobacco industry worked very, very concertedly to produce this alternative. And one of the arguments I'm prepared to make is the tobacco industry invented disinformation at this scale.GARFIELD: You were talking about the the cult of false balance, which is a longstanding journalistic reflex. But there's something else, and that is that as a revenue source, tobacco advertising was one of the two or three largest sectors for television and newspapers and magazines. So while the harm of tobacco was reported, there were huge disincentives for the media into taking sides. Do you think that that disincentive was corrupting?BRANDT: I do. I think that one of the things that the tobacco industry also invented, in a sense, were these very powerful conflicts of interest and in the largesse of the companies and their deep pockets really corrupted a number of critical social institutions, to some degree journalism. But in many ways, I would emphasize how it corrupted our political processes. And today, we give a lot of attention to special interest lobbying and contributions to political campaigns that we understand have undermined our democratic processes, especially around issues of science. The first part of Hill's principles, and part of what became the tobacco industry playbook, was to invest in campaigns and invest in politicians and shape their views on legislation through these funds. So, the industry invented disinformation, but it also created the kind of special interest lobbying. So, I sort of go from tobacco. We could include guns. The beverage industry has done a lot of this. And, of course, most notably right now is that the big energy oil companies have utilized so many of these techniques that are familiar for me from investigating the history of tobacco.GARFIELD: When it came to influencing the public and manipulating behavior, it turns out that these were not inexperienced people. As you wrote in the previous half of the 20th century, the industry, quote, “took a product that had existed at the cultural periphery and remade it into one of the most popular, successful and widely used items of the early 20th century.” You know, it's hard to imagine that there was a time when cigarette smoking was relatively marginal. How did they engineer its path from marginal to ubiquitous?BRANDT: The rise of popular smoking is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of mass consumer culture. The industry, through some very brilliant marketing and thinking, was able to take a product — little used, on the margins of society; actually quite a stigmatized product, late 19th century — and absolutely turn it around. They were very aware of the power of mass media, and they focused on making it for youth and making it cool. They focused on making it sexy and they realized that they had a potential to manipulate the culture. There was sort of the notion that cigarettes and American culture didn't fit, that we emphasize productivity, individual responsibility, no idleness. A lot of our culture was hostile to pleasure. And they inverted this. There are many examples of people like Edward Bernays, who was a giant early 20th century thinker in advertising and public relations. And he hired women to march in the Easter Day parade smoking cigarettes because women, it had been thought, shouldn't smoke in public. There were a lot of issues about women taking up smoking, and he associated cigarettes with women's rights and suffrage. So there was a strategic approach to popularizing cigarettes that was incredibly effective. And of course, you have this added advantage with cigarettes that when you do get people to smoke, you also get them addicted. Bernays went to the Hollywood studios and asked them to portray characters that smoke and brought cigarettes into the movies in an intense way. It didn't just happen. It's just an unbelievable story. Almost no one smokes in 1900, especially not cigarettes, and by 1950, 1960, we're very close to a majority of all adults smoking. And the impact that that had on health and continues to have on health has just been devastating.GARFIELD: The Hollywood story is just extraordinary, because not only did the rise of motion pictures parallel the rise of tobacco usage in the world, actors were eager to embrace it because, as you mentioned, you know, it was sexy, but also, also — dude! — it gave them something to do with their hands.BRANDT: Absolutely, and it was like, this is a prop. I'm giving it to you. It's going to appeal to our consumers. They hired many major movie stars who smoked in their movies to then do advertisements for them.GARFIELD: From Ronald Reagan to Mary Tyler Moore to the rugged and macho John Wayne.JOHN WAYNE: Well, after you've been making a lot of strenuous scenes, you like to sit back and enjoy a cool, mild, good-tasting cigarette. And that's just what Camels are, mild and good-tasting pack after pack. I know, I've been smoking ‘em for 20 years. So why don't you try ‘em yourself. You'll see what I mean.GARFIELD: Frank Sinatra actually sang about his cigarette TV sponsor.FRANK SINATRA: Cheeeesterfield. You start with a Grade A tobacco, the best that you can get. It's the sound of big pleasure, the sound I'll be making for Chesterfield in this time spot every week. It'll be easy for me because Chesterfield is my brand. It has been for years.GARFIELD: And Winston brokered a truly historic celebrity deal — or, anyway, prehistoric.BARNEY RUBBLE: Winston packs rich tobaccos specially selected and specially processed for good flavor in filter smokin'.FRED FLINTSONE: Yeah, Barney, Winston tastes good, like a … cigarette should.GARFIELD: Yes, decades before before the cartoon Joe Camel outraged the public by targeting kids, R.J. Reynolds managed to co-opt the appeal of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble — neither of whom actually smoked Winstons, because they were animated characters from the Stone Age. The point being, though, that before anyone ever used the word “influencers,” Big Tobacco purchased endorsement from whomever conferred authority?BRANDT: Many sports figures, movie actors, famous people, doctors, and they helped create this sort of cult of influence and personality. GARFIELD: Doctors. DOCTORS.NARRATOR: Yes, folks, the pleasing mildness of a Camel is just as enjoyable to a doctor as it is to you or me. And according to this nationwide survey, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.GARFIELD: So before 1952, when the epidemiology started piling up, these guys were wizards at social engineering. And so now it came time to turn those skills on the problem of debunking legitimate science. And hence the playbook you've described. Now, 1953 was 1953, but over time the epidemiological smoking guns were being validated by lab research, cancer in mice and eventually a more fundamental understanding of the effects of tar, nicotine and other chemicals at a cellular level. But controversy was the industry story and they were sticking with it. BRANDT: Yes, it worked for a very long time until it began to erode, because of the concerns that began to arise in the late 1950s, but especially the 1960s, about negligence and responsibility for the tobacco companies through torts and suits.GARFIELD: Product liability.BRANDT: Yes. And so the lawyers kind of took over the strategy by 1960, certainly by 1964. And they said we don't have any choice, because otherwise the liabilities to the industry and information that we know it's harmful would undo the financial structure of the universe of the industries. And there are many ironies about this. Like, you sort of think, well, labeling cigarettes was a public health benefit. And at first the industry opposed labeling, but then the lawyers shift. They say, well, we actually need a label to protect us from liability. So, you know, the first label said: caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. Actually, its biggest implication was that it protected the companies from liability.GARFIELD: And if anyone said, well, how, you know, how could you have not warned us? They said, well, we did warn you.BRANDT: The companies would say, well, you were aware that there was a label on the package, weren't you? And the litigant would say, yes, I was. And then they say, well, how can you hold our company responsible? And that's the way it went for a long time, really, until the 90s. And then a variety of forces began to direct very damning evidence to the companies. And one is it became very clear that the companies had maintained high levels of nicotine to keep smokers addicted.GARFIELD: But in April 1994, at Congressman Henry Waxman's House hearing on tobacco, under questioning from Congressman Ron Wyden, seven CEOs of major tobacco companies lied under oath — not only about augmenting the effect of nicotine in their products, but that nicotine was the drug that hooked smokers to begin with. The Surgeon General, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and others were unanimous, but …REP. WYDEN: Lemme begin my questioning on the matter of whether or not nicotine is addictive. Lemme ask you first — and I'd like to just go down the row — whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I heard virtually all of you touch on it and just, yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive?CEO: I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.REP. WYDEN: Mr. Johnston?CEO JOHNSTON: Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.REP. WYDEN: Alright, we'll take that as a no. And again, time is short. If you could just, I think of each of you believe nicotine is not addictive. We just would like to have this for the record.CEO: I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive.CEO: I believe nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I believe that nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I believe that nicotine is not addictive.CEO: I, too, believe that nicotine is not addictive.REP. WYDEN: Dr. Campbell, I assume that you're aware that your testimony, and you've said in your testimony that nicotine is not addictive, is contradicted by an overwhelming number of authorities and associations. For example, in 1988 the surgeon general of the United States wrote an entire report on this topic. The surgeon general, of course, is the chief health advisor to our government. I assume you have reviewed that report.DOCTOR: Yes, I have sir.BRANDT: So that was one thing. The industry fought this tooth and nail, but the evidence really was rising all the time, that smokers could create risks for nonsmokers, especially indoors. And if Americans have a view that it's up to me and I'll take my risks, they're very sensitive to the idea of risks being imposed on them by others. And the change in indoor smoking bans, workplace smoking bans, getting smoking off of airplanes, all these things, I think, undermined the notion that this is a good and healthy product. And these were all elements of the decline of tobacco in the United States. The one other issue that I really wanted to raise here, though, is that the industry had always been focused on getting young smokers. They had to go get younger smokers if they were going to — the word they use — replace the smokers who were dying and the creation of the tobacco market was in the youth market. And often the youth market is an illegal market. For many years, you couldn't buy cigarettes til you were 16 or 18. The number kept going up. So in the 90s, and a lot of people remember this, you know, there was the famous Joe Camel comic book campaign.GARFIELD: Joe Camel was a cartoon.BRANDT: Yes, a cartoon character. Totally cool. Flying jets, getting women, hanging out in clubs. And a lot of the information from the development of that campaign is now fortunately in the archives because R.J. Reynolds was sued.BERNSTEIN: The commission's complaint alleges that this campaign was used to promote an addictive and dangerous product to children and adolescents under the age of 18, and that this practice is illegal.GARFIELD: That was Jodie Bernstein, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in May of 1997.BRANDT: And so I think these things together, you know, the idea that secondhand smoke was harmful to others, that the companies had manipulated cigarettes to be more highly addictive at a time that they said we're trying to protect the public, the appeal to kids. These are the things that led to the kind of crisis of the industry that in some ways it remains in and is looking for strategies to emerge from.GARFIELD: We discussed how the surgeon general warning actually turned out to have the ironic effect of creating legal impunity for the industry. But these smoking guns you're describing, like the marketing to kids, like the documentary evidence that they had added nicotine to tobacco and the science on second hand smoke, they ultimately would give power to litigation that was able to do what legislatures and regulators could not do. And that was to hold the industry accountable.BRANDT: Yes, there was a shift in litigation strategy, in the 90s, from smokers who had been harmed being the plaintiffs, to a very innovative strategy where the state said, well, we pay all these monies to take care of people who your companies have caused to be ill, and you need to compensate our states for the health care expenses that we have had associated with smokers. And it was in the many billions of dollars. And so this states' litigation, brought by attorneys general, turned out to be in many ways quite successful and resulted in what's called the master settlement agreement at the end of the 90s that agreed to pay the states 246 billion dollars to compensate them for the costs that they had had.GARFIELD: Again in 1997, this was Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore taking a victory lap before the assembled Washington press.MOORE: We wanted this industry to have to change the way they do business, and we have done that. We wanted the industry to stop marketing to their products to our kids, and we have come up with a comprehensive plan that will do that. We wanted to do something that would punish this industry for their past misconduct, and we have done that. And we wanted to make sure  that every single person, not only in America but this entire world, knows the truth about what the tobacco industry has done to the people of this world over the last 50 years, and we are satisfied that we have done that.GARFIELD: At approximately the same time as the master settlement was put into force — and this quarter of a trillion dollars penalty to the industry seemed to be a huge turning point, and tobacco usage has plummeted worldwide since then, so I guess it was a turning point — but it happened at the same time that Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History, which was predicting essentially that liberal democracy had taken hold the world over and that authoritarianism and the forces of reaction were just going to fade into oblivion. That turned out to be prematurely burying ultraconservative politics. And, equally it seems to me that the master agreement prematurely buried the notion that the tobacco industry was on the skids, on the way to oblivion. It did not play out that way.BRANDT: It didn't at all. And we have a notion here in the United States and many countries in Western Europe that we've seen this dramatic decline in smoking. It's no longer a favored cultural behavior. Many, many thousands, millions of people have quit smoking or died from smoking. But the industry had a long term strategy that said, smoking is on decline in wealthy, highly educated societies. So where can we effectively market cigarettes now?GARFIELD: So let's talk about that, because the industry now says: Yes, cigarettes cause cancer, heart disease, hypertension, emphysema and a host of other conditions. And it is our strategy to reduce our revenues associated with combustible cigarettes by 50 percent. And the elephant in the room is the other 50 percent of their revenues. So, on the one hand, they're acknowledging that they are selling a lethal product. And on the other hand, they're saying, and we will continue to do so to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives. One scarcely knows where to begin, but where does?BRANDT: And this is one of the most diabolical aspects of the changes in the United States and other similar countries — during the 80s and 90s and the early 2000s — is that going all the way back to the 1950s and 60s when the threats to tobacco began to arise, the companies were looking at markets in China, East Asia, Africa, Latin America. So most people think that — and these are the projections of the World Health Organization — that 100 million people died in the 20th century as a result of smoking and that in this century, one billion people will die, 10 times as many, because of the explosion of combustible cigarettes around the world. So I look at the move to e-cigarettes and vaping, as kind of the latest strategy that's really part of this wider history that I've been examining. We need to be very skeptical of these companies that claim that they've crossed over to legitimate health oriented products because they've made these claims since the 1950s. They told Americans, you know if you're worried about smoking, smoke filter cigarettes and that was the beginning of Marlboro. You know, you had a cowboy smoking a safe cigarette, which turned out not to be the case. So I'm very skeptical and worried about the current situation with vaping, e-cigarettes, other nicotine related products, and the idea that we're just a responsible company trying to mitigate the harms that our principal product has produced for over a century. Many of my colleagues, who have advocated with me for tobacco control, thought, well maybe this is the answer. There would be a harm reduction product that would vastly reduce the health impacts of combustible tobacco and lead to a radical change in the epidemiology of tobacco related deaths in the 21st century. They believe that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.GARFIELD: Not an uncompelling argument.BRANDT: But what they also realized is people don't start using nicotine products as adults. So, we created a remarkable human-made health crisis through the aggressive introduction of e-cigarettes and vaping without any scientific evidence that they actually served harm reduction, or only minimal and often industry sponsored evidence that they could do that. And so, the history of Juul and vaping as a company is very informative. Juul always claimed, all we want to do is produce a safe product for people who want to switch from tobacco to a vape. But, it now appears that was a big lie because the Juul executives and the company had to understand how much of their market was in underage use of the product. And they addicted thousands and thousands of this generation of young people to nicotine, many of whom are bearing those consequences now, some of whom switch to combustible tobacco. So, it's made me very skeptical of an industry that says: we learned our lesson and we have great products.GARFIELD: Now, I don't ask these questions for no reason. This is 2021, and the same industry that has so corrupted science and research for most of a century is now claiming that it's smoke-free strategy of noncombustible cigarettes is just following the science, that they are asking us to cleave to the science in making decisions personally and as a society. And, you know, how do you feel about that?BRANDT: Well, I just think this is consistent with the strategies that they invented and utilized for a very long time, and as you probably know, just in the last month it was reported that a journal, the American Journal of Health and Behavior, published a entire issue on harm reduction and Juul vaping. It became clear and it was widely reported in the press that the issue of this journal was completely paid for by Juul and the work was done in Juul labs. And so, they return to this strategy of, we can produce the science. And it has muddied the waters and diluted the authority that science really needs to have positive public health impacts. And we really need science. And science has to speak with expertise and authority and validity and clear and aggressive peer review. And we need to know the difference between something that you know is a fact and something that obscures facts. It's a challenge to the planet right now when we think about climate change and its regulation and the intense capital that's involved.GARFIELD: The scorpion stings the frog to death and says, it is my nature.BRANDT: Yes, and in these instances, profits and more profits obscured the consequences. And, we see that honestly with Purdue Pharma. We see it at Juul. We see it in many of the major energy companies. And these strategies of, we can control this space, has really been incredibly harmful to all of our human health.GARFIELD: I already asked this question in a different way, but I'm gonna offer this one up as well. Just putting aside the unknown effect of noncombustibles, even if it achieves its smoke-free goal, half of Philip Morris's revenue will still come from cigarettes people set fire to and inhale, which means millions and millions more deaths around the world. The estimate I saw was six to seven million souls per year around the world, which is a Holocaust per year. If Philip Morris is suddenly so enlightened, by what moral calculus can it continue to kill millions of human beings with their products?BRANDT: It's been a question for the industry since the middle of the 20th century. They have a product that's highly addictive and incredibly harmful and it's incredibly profitable. It involves a lot of powerful people losing a lot of money and they just can't give it up. That's a gigantic problem in relationship to capitalism and health.GARFIELD: We talked about the playbook, how the strategy forged in January, 1953, in the Plaza Hotel has not only dictated Big Tobacco's moves, but also those of the gun lobby and the fossil fuels industry. I don't know, Big Sugar.BRANDT: Yes.GARFIELD: And other industries that cause direct harm to the people who legally use their products. And those initiatives, in those other industries, have us on the brink of planetary destruction. I mean, I don't think I'm hyperventilating here. The techniques that we have described have created and fostered so many existential harms that one wonders what chance have we? Can we make the case that we're discussing crimes against humanity here and the tobacco industry is accountable not only for the deaths from its products, but from the toll of these other industries who embraced tobacco's game plan?BRANDT: Well, I think these are massive crimes and I'm not without hope, but I do think the kinds of crises that we're becoming more aware of have the potential to motivate changes in our politics, our policy, our regulation. So, the combination that we've seen this year of Covid-19, of radical changes in the climate that are changing our weather and threatening health in that way, have to be taken seriously, immediately. I think it's going to take changes in our political strategies and orientations to do that. But the revelations of how these companies behave is an important element to that and understanding what they're doing, how they're doing it, exposing the playbook when it's being used so successfully, is a critical element to building the will to really take this on.GARFIELD: Allan, with a little bit of trepidation, I'd like to one more time revisit the infamous Plaza Hotel conference and offer a historical analogy. In early 1942, the Nazi High Command held a secret conference in a villa in the Berlin suburb, Wannsee, to forge the Final Solution for the so-called Jewish question, namely the destruction of the Jews in Europe. So that was fateful in the worst way. Now, the meeting you're describing, that took place not quite 12 years later, has the tobacco industry convened at the Plaza to forge a strategy for the so-called, these were their words, tobacco question — in this case, by destroying scientific consensus through disinformation and doubt. Now, I'll get flak for this, along Godwin's Law lines, because the Holocaust claimed six million Jewish lives. But in the balance of the 20th century, tobacco claimed on the order of 350 million human lives, which I guess until the advent of the climate crisis, may have been history's most lethal crime against humanity. What took place at this conference?BRANDT: Well, I think what Hill was able to do was to appeal to a kind of psychological rationalization on people who had spent their whole careers in this tobacco industry culture. They said, well, we've always had a controversial product. There have always been people against us. They'd convinced themselves, I think at least at first, that there really was some ambiguity and that there really was some uncertainty. But rather than that being marginal to the way we understand science, Hill's strategy gave it a bullhorn, and so when Congress would have hearings about are cigarettes harmful or not, there was always a kind of notion, the tobacco control people and the epidemiologists will come in and then the industry scientists will come in. And I think publicly we were quite naive about how that worked, and now we can look back and see into it that this is the origins of industrial disinformation, misuse of science at the tremendous costs of public health and global health that you just mentioned.GARFIELD: So, going back to my analogy, that grim analogy, is it overheated? Is it unhelpful? Is it irresponsible?BRANDT: I wouldn't say it's unhelpful, but I do think that it's probably good to look at this kind of industrial impact on death and disease in a slightly different context than the Holocaust and Nazi decision making. They both do reflect a fundamental disregard for human life and a series of psychological rationalizations that are sold to the public and are based in fundamental misconceptions about what we know and how we know it. But as you say, it's a politically fraught analogy. The notion of these people were evil and they did something horrendous, it sometimes can obstruct our ability to see the mechanisms of work at how industries have exploited public health for incredible financial gain and greed.GARFIELD: Allan, thank you very much.BRANDT: It's really been great to talk to you.GARFIELD: Allan Brandt is professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America.(THEME MUSIC)GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

The 174-year-old tobacco company spent much of its life blowing a cloud of deceit around the deadly effects of its signature product. Now eager for a do-over, PMI's highly advertised “Unsmoke the World” initiative seems strangely noble, until you start asking questions.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. This is episode five: Where There's No Smoke, There's Fire.It's been a hot and violent and infectious and altogether unsettling summer, in the midst of which — in the New York Times and all over the internet — emerged this: Philip-Morris International CEO Yatzick Olczak in an ad campaign speaking about the dangers of cigarettes.OLCZAK: The science exists today and there is no time to spare to solve the problem of smoking.The problem of smoking? From the maker of Marlboro's? There's an attention getter. A bona fide Merchant of Death vowing to phase out cigarettes in favor of so-called smoke-free products, like his company's non-combustible IQOS.TUTORIAL: Say hello to new IQOS heat control technology. Using it couldn't be easier. Remove the IQOS holder from the pocket charger, insert the tobacco stick tobacco side down in the holder and up to the silver line. Turn on, and when the LED turns solid green you can start to experience the true taste of real tobacco by heating, not burning it.The goal, Philip Morris says, is for smoke-free products to represent half of the company's revenue within four years. “Unsmoke the world,” is the slogan.OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body.Olczak says this as if it's a fresh revelation, but it's still jarring to hear Phillip Morris, of all institutions, speak of smoking as a scourge. And to bet the corporate future on a gizmo that aims to obsolete its core product. Listen to the man's frustration that there are skeptics who are not immediately accepting IQOS as a triumph of science and technology.OLCZAK: I do recognize that there is still a group of people who don't believe us. That's fine. So, it's perfectly okay to disagree with us, but it is not perfectly okay to deprive yourself from the ability to have a dialogue with us, to listen, to have a conversation, to read our science. We know that our vision is right, because of the impact PMI has on the society to solve the problem of smoking and the faster we recognize this whole thing and start working on a strategy, the better we all together will be.Oh, OK, now he's playing more to type — informing us that it is unacceptable to ignore Big Tobacco on the question of reducing tobacco's harm. Oh, is it now? Those of us of a certain age can vaguely remember — whaddayacallit? —  the 20th century, during the entirety of which Big Tobacco denied, for example, any link to cancer.REP. WAXMAN: In a deposition last year, you were asked whether cigarette smoking causes cancer. Your answer was, quote, “I don't believe so.” Do you stand by that answer today?TISCH: I do, sir.REP. WAXMAN: Do you understand how isolated you are in that belief from the entire scientific community?TISCH: I do, sir.That was from a 1994 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, in which Congressman Henry Waxman famously confronted Lorillard CEO Andrew Tisch and six other tobacco bosses. But “isolated” wasn't the half of it. For decades, the industry denied links to heart and lung disease, denied the addictiveness of nicotine, denied chemically augmenting nicotine's effects, denied marketing to children — all the while actively undercutting scientific findings, actively producing junk science, falsely claiming filtered and so-called “light” cigarettes were safer and propping up a variety of sciency-sounding front groups — such as the Council for Tobacco Research — that seemed all distinguished and s**t but existed only to obscure the deadly truth about smoking. Which is why, by the way, when Philip Morris noisily pledged $80 million to help underwrite The Foundation for a Smoke Free World, both the World Health Organization and the UN General Assembly cited conflict of interest in telling Big Tobacco to butt out.Nonetheless, the promise of getting the deadly smoke out of smoking has captured many an imagination, including Wall Street's, which has rewarded Phillip Morris and other tobacco makers with bigger share prices and rosy outlooks from stock pickers. Because, the thinking goes, while it's counterintuitive to steer into a skid, that's the way to regain traction.PUNDIT: This is all kind of part of Philip Morris's general rebranding away from smoking products and cigarettes. And they're really seeing the writing on the wall here as cigarette sales in higher income countries continue to dwindle and they're coming under increasing pressure from many governments to curtail their cigarette sales. It's really become in their best interest to kind of make this general shift away from cigarettes and nicotine.That's from Britain's I24 business news. Lo and behold, analysts from Chase, Stiffel Nicklaus, UBS, JP Morgan, Morningstar Research and stock-predictor engine Trefis, have rated Philip Morris International a buy. At about 100 bucks a share, it's price has grown more than 40% in the past 10 months.Of course, while stock prices are historically a highly reliable measure of public sentiment, one thing the free market is notoriously free of is conscience. As a universe, investors are concerned with ongoing earnings growth and nothing else, which is why, as the planet burns to a cinder, Exxon Mobil's share price has doubled in the past year. What's surprising about the smoke-free strategy is that it also has been embraced by a significant cohort of the public health community. This is an excerpt of a video from Public Health England, in which doctors Lion Shahab and Rosemary Leonard show a dramatic experiment comparing the output of burning tobacco versus the nearly pristine vapor from smokeless cigarettes.SHAHAB: My research shows that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful than cigarettes. A big reason why is the tar, which you can see here, which is not produced by e-cigarettes but produced by cigarettes. The impact of using e-cigarettes in the long-term is very similar to using licensed nicotine products such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum, as you can see here when you compare the control jar with the vapor jar.LEONARD: So, this experiment shows that every cigarette you smoke causes tar to enter your body and it's the tar that contains the poisonous chemicals that spread through the bloodstream.SHAHAB: Which are linked to diseases such as heart disease, stroke and cancer.That's one view. There is also an opposite one, as voiced by Dr. Vinayak Prasad, head of the World Health Organization's tobacco control division.PRASAD: Switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is not quitting, number one. Number two, we don't see the smokers switch to e-cigarettes 100 percent. The dual use is again very harmful. What we are also seeing is that more and more younger people are taking to e-cigarettes and then later progressing to tobacco.As for Philip Morris, he told the UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism, quote:If they really want to be a part of the solution, they should go tobacco-free, not smoke-free. If they are genuine about a tobacco-free society, they will readily embrace anything to reduce the demand for all forms of tobacco products.Anything else, he says, is a “criminal act and a human rights violation.”In other words, within the tobacco-control universe, a schism — a polarizing debate hinging on the lesser of two evils. Ruth E. Malone is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor of the journal Tobacco Control.MALONE: We are adding all these new additional products and we are still sorting out what the overall public health impact of that is going to be. So is the impact going to be that, as some people say, it definitely is helpful for them in getting off cigarettes, but others revert back to smoking cigarettes and you just have a larger market of people using tobacco and nicotine products rather than actually reducing the damage from those products.The Public Health England tar experiment would seem to be a vivid and maybe even mic-drop argument for society gratefully accepting smoke-free technology. But to Malone, the whole schism-framing may itself be problematic. She worries that viewing the debate on stark, binary terms obscures a less obvious and highly dangerous element of Big Tobacco's strategy — namely, as Philip Morris's Olzcak insisted — claiming that its expertise has earned the industry a role in governmental decisions about tobacco regulations, treaties and laws. She posed a rhetorical question if ever there was one.MALONE: Should an industry that produces the single most deadly consumer product in history be involved in regulatory decisions about what to do about it and other products that are potentially supplanting or replacing or adding on to the damages caused by cigarettes?So, never mind “lesser of two evils.” How about “the fox guarding the henhouse.”MALONE: Part of the problem now is that, as they do periodically with some frequency, some tobacco companies are engaged in a big makeover, a part of which is aimed at undermining the tobacco control movement on a global level. We have to think not just about the United States, but also what's happening globally, where countries are trying to implement the world's first public health treaty, which is the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the WHO  treaty. And one of the provisions of that treaty is Article 5.3, and this is getting a little into the weeds, but basically it says don't let the tobacco companies interfere with your public health policies. They should not have a seat at the table because they have a conflict of interest. That seems pretty fundamental. And that is a real motivation right now for the tobacco companies, is to get back to the table where they can influence policies and prevent policies that might hurt their bottom line.Clearly, til now, the industry has engineered near impunity throughout the developing world. In 2020, the aforementioned Bureau of Investigative Journalism published an expose titled The ‘Unsmoke' screen: the truth behind PMI's cigarette-free future, a piece that looked beyond Phililp Morris's do-gooder narrative for evidence of the same old same old. For example, quote:Since it announced its aim to stop selling cigarettes, it has acquired a new cigarette company, launched a new brand, and added enticing new flavours such as Splash Mega Purple and Fusion Summer. It has also launched legal action against anti-smoking policies in countries like the Philippines, and has carried on advertising cigarettes in countries that permit it.COMMERCIAL: Wanna stand tall? Be true, be bold, be strong, be brave, be daring, be free, be heard, be inspired? You can say yes, or say no. Just never say maybe. Never say maybe. Be Marlboro.That's a Marlboro commercial aired in Indonesia, a country of 271 million people.  Furthermore, according to the BIJ story, quote: “Some pupils in Indonesia can see PMI's cigarette advertising mere steps from their schools' gates. Young people attending festivals in Buenos Aires are offered PMI cigarettes in promotions with beer. Children visiting corner shops in Mexico can see Marlboro's ‘fusion' cigarettes next to sweets.”BRANDT: We need to be very skeptical of these companies that claim that they've crossed over to legitimate health oriented products because they've made these claims, you know, since the 1950s.Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. In 2012, for the American Journal of Public Health, he wrote Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics.BRANDT: They told Americans, you know, if you're worried about smoking, smoke filter cigarettes and that was the beginning of Marlboro. You know, you had a cowboy smoking a safe cigarette, which turned out not to be the case. So I'm very skeptical and worried about the current situation with vaping, e-cigarettes, other nicotine related products, and the idea that we're just a responsible company trying to mitigate the harms that our principal product has produced for over a century.And as you probably know, just in the last month, it was reported that the American Journal of Health and Behavior published a entire issue on harm reduction and Juul vaping. And it turns out we're not quite as naive as we used to be. It became clear and it was widely reported in the press that the issue of this journal was completely paid for by Juul and the work was done in Juul labs. They return to this strategy of: we can produce the science. And it has muddied the waters and diluted the authority that science really needs to have positive public health impacts. And we really need science. And science has to speak with expertise and authority and validity and clear and aggressive peer review. And we need to know the difference between something that is a fact and something that obscures facts.GILCHRIST: There's no doubt that misinformation and conflicting information is confusing adults who smoke.That was Moira Gilchrist, who holds a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences, back in June. She was not speaking of Big Tobacco's century of disinformation and its toll. In a video about Philip Morris's smoke-free initiative, she was addressing current conflict about smoke-free.GILCHRIST: One day they hear good things about smoke-free alternatives and the next they hear scare stories, and as a scientist I find that really, really upsetting. Because the science is very clear.It's a corporate video. Gilchrist is PMI's Vice President for Strategic & Scientific Communications, whom I spoke to this week. I asked her if she was struck at all by the irony of her complaint, what with Philip Morris's own sorry history of obfuscation and all.GILCHRIST: Well, look, I think I'm not going to speak to, you know, the past history of any company or an industry. What I'm focused on is today and what we know today, and we've made a real deliberate effort to make all of the science publicly available so that people don't have to trust us. They don't have to take our word for it. They can look at what the data says. And we've gone really, really strongly to ensure that we're using open science principles, sharing not just our own conclusions, but also the source data on which we've based those conclusions, so people can feel cynical and feel skeptical. That's fine, but they cannot ignore the data. And that's all I ask, is that independent scientists look at what we've done and look at it with an open mind in order that we can get the facts straight and make sure that adult smokers have the right information to make the right decisions.GARFIELD: We've heard from scientists who do embrace the benefits of a smoke free world, and we have heard a great deal of skepticism about Philip Morris's motives. We've heard both those things. One accusation, though, is that you are creating, excuse the expression, a smokescreen for influencing governmental tobacco control authorities around the world. Indeed, Olczak said that very thing, that authorities cannot not listen to your science.GILCHRIST: So that, again, we've made the science openly available. We've submitted it to regulatory authorities like the US FDA, who spent three and a half years poring through more than a million pages of evidence in order to make a decision to authorize our product. And so this is what we're asking governments to do, because governments can play a really important role in ensuring that adults who smoke have the right information, ensuring that they have access to these products that are a better choice than continuing to smoke. So I think that's what we're asking governments to do. And many of them are doing so. And I think that's really encouraging for the more than a billion smokers all around the world.GARFIELD: I just want to make sure that we agree on some basic facts. Philip Morris does now buy by legal agreement and in its public statements acknowledge that, that smoking burning tobacco does cause cancer, does cause heart disease, does cause emphysema and and so on.GILCHRIST: We have been clear about that for many, many years, and in fact, before I joined the company. We've been very clear that cigarette smoking is extremely unwise because of the diseases that it causes and premature death that it causes. And that's why we set on this path of creating alternatives so that people who don't quit can have another choice that they can go to. The best thing they can do is to quit because these products are not risk free. But if they're not going to quit, they should really consider switching to a smoke-free alternative.GARFIELD: So I believe the follow up question, and this is not a question you've not heard before, is why the f**k is Philip Morris still selling combustible cigarettes anywhere? Something like 800 billion coffin nails a year are being sold and consumed worldwide. Why not just shut that part of the business down today?GILCHRIST: So Bob the key word is transformation. This cannot happen overnight. By 2025, we want to be a majority smoke-free company. So I think we're making tremendous progress. We still have a long way to go. And that's why we're calling on governments to help, because regulation can really help to encourage adults who don't quit to switch to better alternatives.GARFIELD: Who says that the solution is transformation and not cessation? Along this path that you've described, there are, according to the World Health Organization, eight million people a year around the world who will die of smoking related illnesses. Why transform instead of just stop?GILCHRIST: So here's the thing. If we, Philip Morris International, chose to stop selling cigarettes altogether, that would not solve the problem of smoking because most adult smokers would simply switch to our competitors' product and there would be absolutely no impact on public health. So the approach that we've taken is to encourage those people who don't quit to instead switch. And in this way, we can reduce the number of people who are smoking combustible cigarettes and at the same time still make a profit for us as a business. So I think transformation is the way that we can have not just a long term future for the company, but also make a positive impact on public health.GARFIELD: Til now, we've been speaking of science and technology and business. I want to ask you about just fundamental morality. If I, for example, choose not to go into a Walmart with an AR-15 and shoot up the place, gun violence in America will not disappear. But I myself won't be a murderer. I will have not contributed to gun deaths. Isn't that reason enough for me to stand down?GILCHRIST: Look, again, we made a very deliberate decision that the best and quickest way we can get to a smoke free future is by developing, scientifically assessing and commercializing products that are a better choice than continuing to smoke. And if we were to stop selling cigarettes tomorrow, unilaterally, it would not have an impact on public health.GARFIELD: Perhaps I'm naive, but what I'm actually asking about now is a better outcome for the corporate conscience. Is it not better if you are not participating in what has been called the Golden Holocaust?GILCHRIST: So, look, I joined the company to do exactly what we're doing, and that's to provide better outcomes for each individual adult smoker and also better outcomes for our company as well. And I think that's what we're doing.Gilchrist chose not to address the question of conscience further, but rather just reiterated the smoke-free strategy. So I asked Tobacco Control's Ruth Malone approximately the same question.MALONE: I'm old enough to remember one time when a juice company had some salmonella — some contamination of their products — they pulled all their products off the market until they could be, in fact, made safe and they instituted new procedures to make them that way. The tobacco companies have repeatedly said they would do that if it was ever found that their products were unsafe. But in fact, they have never done that. I just think it's time to call their bluff on all this and say, you know, don't just talk about this. If you're really serious about this, then change the nature of your corporation. Become a B corporation. Be working on behalf of the public good. Get rid of the combustibles altogether. Quit selling them.GARFIELD: Yeah, yeah, when pigs fly.MALONE: Yeah, I'm afraid so.GARFIELD: I just wonder if you were in a lake and you were drowning, and the chairman of Philip Morris came running to you and threw you a rope. What would you do?MALONE: I don't know if there's anything at the other end of that rope, so I'd look and see if anybody else had a life preserver. And I'd probably swim. I'd try to swim.All right, we're done here. Next week, Part 2: Crime Against Humanity.Before I sign off though, let me repeat what I said a week ago. If you enjoy a Booksmart Studios show, please please please share it with your world. That's what those little buttons are for, and we depend on our listeners to get the word out. Also, if you become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios you'll get extended interviews, additional content, access to the hosts and — in my case — continued access to my weekly column, which is for the moment free to sample. At last count, there were 94 fucktillion podcasts out there, but nothing quite like what Booksmart is up to. Please help us make an impact.Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? Lexicon Valley’s John McWhorter talks to Amna Khalid about the fraught vocabulary of modern censorship. * FULL TRANSCRIPT *AMNA KHALID: From Booksmart Studios, this is Banished. And I’m Amna Khalid.NEWSCASTER: Republicans are always denouncing so-called “cancel culture.”BBC GUEST 1: I think that nobody should lose their job because of what they believe in. I think that’s the issue—BBC GUEST 2: —but that’s what “cancel culture” is!POLITICIAN: “Cancel culture” is eroding the very foundation of who we are as an American people.NEWSCASTER 1: He’s woke.NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke.NEWSCASTER 3: Now you’re woke but you’re like me woke!NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke to the woke.FOX NEWS GUEST: So we’re woke, and we have to say woke.NEWSCASTER: Wait, so we’re both woke? You and I are both woke?FOX NEWS GUEST: Yeah, I think we’re woke!NEWSCASTER: Who’s the woker of the two, would you say?AK: “Woke” and “cancel culture” are now two terms that are now so much a part of our consciousness, that it feels like they’ve been around forever. But the reality is that they exploded only a few years ago. Like many of our most fraught cultural terms, they evolved over time, jumping from one community to another, shifting slightly in meaning or nuance. Along the way, they get weaponized, fall in and out of favor and even get canceled themselves — in other words, they are linguistically fascinating.Who better to dig into the lexicon of Banished, than John McWhorter, the host of Lexicon Valley here on Booksmart Studios, and an esteemed professor of linguistics at Columbia University. If you’ve never heard his show, it’s an endlessly entertaining deep-dive into everything that makes language so enthralling. I started our conversation by asking him about the word woke, which I first heard in hip-hop lyrics. JOHN McWHORTER: Well, woke actually goes back further than many people would think. It's actually first documented in the early 60s and it was a Black slang. What it meant was politically aware of certain realities that operate largely below the surface, but have a determinative effect on, for example, the Black American condition. And so you might think, if you were you or me, that woke is about 10 years old. But actually people were saying it on the Black street long before that. It did not leave the Black street. Then, in roughly the 2000-teens, it jumped the rails and started being used by a certain kind of politically aware white person on the left. And what it meant at first in the general culture was somebody who understands certain basic leftist analysises of the world. What it really was, was a substitute for a term that had worn out. It replaced politically correct, which, if you're just old enough now, you can remember was used without irony back in the late 70s and early 80s. And what it meant was that you have a basic understanding of liberal/leftist realities. Then it became PC. PCstarted being used as a slur to ridicule the kind of person who used that kind of ideology as a bludgeon in a smug kind of way. And so you couldn't say politically correct without making somebody laugh by, say, 2010. Really, you couldn't do it by about 1990. And so woke replaced that. As recently as 2018, I was on a TV show—STEPHEN COLBERT (crowd cheering): My next guest tonight is a professor at Columbia University, who hosts one of my favorite podcasts.JM: —talking about how woke was taking on a certain pejorative flavor.JM ON COLBERT: When I learned it, it was still just the coolest thing: You are woke to the complexities of society and how injustice really happens. It was cool — it smelled like, roughly, marijuana and lavender. It was that kind of word. And about two seconds later, a certain kind of person started sneering: Oh, is that person woke?People from a certain side of the political spectrum are throwing at other people the idea being that you’re a smug person who thinks that your views are the ones that come from on high. That has happened during the time, roughly, that a certain person has become president, and about six months before that. I’ve found it fascinating. Woke will be all but unusable in ten years.JM: Now, I would say that it has it. It's 2021, woke is now a word that is very much in quotation marks. Nobody would use woke in common parlance to mean that you understand the politics of Ta-Nahisi Coates. Now woke is used to make fun of people of a certain kind of leftist political persuasion who are beyond reasonable address. And so what's happened is that it has become a pejorative word, which happens to words all over the language, all over languages all the time. And so random example, reduce. Reduce used to mean to lead back to, and it could lead back to something good, something bad, something large, something small. You could reduce something to its former glory 500 years ago. That meant just take it back. Now, you could also reduce something to its former misery. It's the misery meaning that ended up taking over, that pejorative meaning. That happens a lot in language, more than what's called amelioration for reasons that we need not get into. But words tend to putrefy, essentially, and that is what happened with woke very quickly in this decade and the last one, partly because the internet makes these things come around and go around faster.AK: If I'm hearing this right, you're saying woke was part of the Black vernacular and it had a particular political valence which has been taken over and turned around, and now it's become a derogatory term almost to call someone woke.JM: Exactly.AK: Nobody would say I am woke as a matter of pride. Do you see a movement to reclaim it as a positive?JM: I can imagine doing kind of linguistic science fiction and writing about the reclaiming of the word, because that does happen with slurs. There's an example that I could give that I don't even need to. We all know. So pretend I talked about that for five minutes — but the term woke, I don't see that happening. For example, you didn't see people saying, yes, I'm a PC and I'm proud of it. People ran away from it and created something new. In 2021, it's too early to say what the new term is going to be, but I can guarantee you that by 2030 there'll be something else which starts meaning something very specific. It may emerge from Black culture and it will be generalized to mean that you've got the proper The Nation politics. I don't think it's going to happen with woke, partly because it's so imprinted now as a way of making fun of somebody. It's just at the point where if somebody said Yes, I am woke, it sounds trivial, it sounds like you don't have your own ideas and you're just looking for something to put on a T-shirt. So I think what we need to do is start listening for what the new term is going to be. These things emerge spontaneously. Nobody's going to create it on Madison Avenue, but it will certainly happen.AK: Is there a particular moment you can point to when you think woke started taking on a pejorative valence? Was it a very purposeful appropriation by the right to discredit a particular kind of social justice awareness or social consciousness, or did it emerge out of an organic movement?JM: Of course, the right started making fun of wokeness, and to me that's 2017, 2018. Where woke became a joke, and that was an unintentional rhyme, was last summer when even people on the left started ridiculing a particular kind of person. Wokebecame a joke in roughly June 2020. It was in the wake of the protests about George Floyd, during the quarantine at its worst, when a lot of people had very little to do and were very angry about it. It tended to focus these sorts of things. So yeah, I think we've seen that transition just over about the past year and change that woke is now unusable outside of quotation marks, just like a word like perky. You can't really say perky, you can only say perky in quotes.AK: There are words that are used by the Black community, if I can use that for a moment and make it a monolith, to communicate in ways that remains separate from and distinct from the use of language by white people. Of course, there's a history to this. There's the history of enslaved people using particular language to communicate, words to communicate, so that their masters, quote unquote, could not understand what was being said. To what extent do you think the fact that woke will not be reclaimed is actually a continuation of that trend where words that come from the Black vernacular, become mainstream, like cool, then subsequently get dropped by the Black community that almost prides itself on coming up with a new term that is exclusive.JM: We're not always aware of how subconscious the use of language generally is, especially when you're talking about at the level of a community. It's one thing to say that Black English represents the creativity of Black people and that when a term gets worn out, Black people make up a new term. That doesn't actually refer to a process that's been observed among human beings. The truth is that these terms tend to emerge spontaneously based on probabilistic processes. It isn't that, say, the teens are making up new slang to confuse their parents. I'm going to give you a term: diglossia. Most people in the world have two levels that they speak on, the high and the low. In America, it can be hard to quite imagine that unless you think about Black people. We’re a very boring country linguistically in many ways. But Black people have the high, the standard, the low, quote unquote, although there's nothing low about it, which is Black English. If something jumps from the low to the high, it's not that Black people think, well, now we must create something new. It's that the word no longer feels L, low, and all language is eternally creative in its own right. You need terms for things. And so next thing you know, a new term will be spontaneously invented because the old one wore out or it stopped being part of the L. It stopped feeling like us. And it's usually below the radar. Nobody could know that these things were going to happen. And then you wake up and you have some white guy playing hacky sack and using the term woke, who knew? But that means that it's no longer the guy in Chicago living in a Black neighborhood who uses that. He's going to have some other word he's using after a while.AK: So talk to me about cancel. Where does the term cancel come from and how has the meaning of that changed over time?JM: Well, cancel culture is a really messy term because it starts with the idea that a celebrity who produces some sort of product, writings or performance, recorded performance, is in bad odor and therefore they're going to be canceled like a TV show. And so that person's work is no longer going to be seen. They're no longer going to get hired. I think that the paradigm example would be Bill Cosby. He was cancellable. You can't hire him. You're no longer going to show the sitcom. It's no longer going to stream. I was at a store around when he was cancelled where they were literally giving away DVDs of the TV show for free. And I thought, wow, yeah, he's been canceled. And so that takes care of that. But terms are always generalizing in some way. They're ameliorating. They are pejorating. Something's going to happen to almost any term that's worth its salt. So now cancel culture is not so much about eliminating somebody from the public presence as just deciding that they are no longer fit for polite society, that we don't like them anymore. And so it's not that these people are going to go away. Our technology makes it so that it's pretty hard to cancel anybody completely anyway, but it just means that that person is a persona non grata, they are ostracized. So I think these days we're at this intermediate stage where somebody is determined as non grata, and spontaneously people say we're not trying to cancel you. And the question is, if they're not trying to cancel you, what are they doing? Because the cancelling no longer means that you don't exist. I'm not going to get specific, but about a year ago, it happened to me. I was canceled by a certain august body for, you know, reasons that people can guess. And I was told by the very nice person, we're not cancelling you. Well, of course not. You know, I've got all these writings out there, and it's not like I'm not going to be able to go to conferences and things like that. What I was subjected to was being told that I am unsavory in a very public way. That's the cancellation. So it no longer means what it means. But that's true of so much of language. Nobody’s being cancelled, but it just means that you are having a scarlet letter put upon you.AK: How is it different from censorship or censoring someone?JM: It's not. It's the same thing. Cancel culture is just a more vivid term. Censorship, you think more of the printed page. It doesn't sound as societal. So we say cancel culture because that sounds one, newer; two, meaner; three, less specific than censorship. I would call them different terms for the exact same thing.AK: So I’d push back over here a little bit and to my ear and from the way it's being used, I think about censorship as something that is associated — and I'm getting into the politics of these words now — it's associated with something that the right does.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: Whereas cancel culture is seen as something that is a product of this wokeperformative way of saying I adhere to certain social justice values. Am I correct in kind of thinking about it in this way? People ask me what Banished is about. They immediately assume it's about cancel culture and it is. But to my mind, I always jump in, then say and censorship, because it's not just about the kinds of eliminations that are coming from this left side of the spectrum. I'm interested in things that are being cut out left, right and center.JM: You're quite right. I hadn't thought about that. The person on the left who's accused of censorship is insulted. They feel like they're being accused of something that they're used to hurling at the other side. They often don't realize they're doing the same thing or they think that it's OK if the left does it because the left is right, correct basically. Yes, cancel culture is censorship from the left. Talk about subconscious. I never thought about this, and yet I've been using it in that way for a year.AK: Another term that I grew up in graduate school using quite regularly and without thinking of it as a “problem” is the term problematic. In fact, one of the ways in which you recognized someone was a graduate student over lunch was when they said I'd like to problematize that. So this is another term that has kind of migrated from a different area or different field into mainstream conversation and has come to mean something again politically. When did you first encounter the word, let's start there? And then when did you start noticing that it's beginning to take on a different meaning?JM: Problematic to me is exactly what you said. It's a graduate student in 1993 drinking their latte and talking about something that probably wouldn't interest most people who are not academics. It's the aughts where problematic becomes something someone's doing that the educated person is supposed to morally disapprove of. It seems to me that there's a certain euphemism in the word problematic, because what it usually is is a prelude to something being racist or sexist or fat shaming or something like that. But you start out calling it problematic with the implication that it's difficult, it's tricky, that you have to break something down — avoiding coming right out and being what used to be called a knee jerk liberal. Instead of just yelling it's racist, it’s sexist, I don't like it, you say, well, actually, it's kind of problematic because. I don't know who that person is, but I do, actually. And then, you know, the racism and the sexism is coming. Problematic now means blasphemous. Problematic means that you have sinned, that you're a heretic, that you should not have any Chardonnay and brie. But nobody wants to come right out and say that. We're too sophisticated to call people heretics. And so now often the way you call somebody a heretic is to say isn't he problematic? — that means that he's a witch.AK: OK, so now we're getting into really interesting territory where I'm beginning to think of the word blasphemy. I come from a country where blasphemy means what it literally means and has always meant and has consequences. Over here, blasphemy has taken on a different meaning. It's a way of ostracizing someone from any community and what the rules are specific to that community. What does that word mean today?JM: Well, to the extent that you have a certain kind of hyper woke person who has a religion, it's no longer an Abrahamic religion. It's not Christianity, it's not Judaism, it's not Islam. It's Electism. They have a sense that certain people are not to be tolerated for the same reason that a Christian or someone else would ban the heretic. That is what they call problematic, but really it's blasphemy. Today's blasphemy is not about God. Nobody thinks of it is taking the Lord's name in vain to say, oh, my God, anymore. That was old school blasphemy. But now I find the Middle Ages much easier to understand than I used to just, you know, going online and watching what happens to nice people all the time. That is today's blasphemy. I would almost teach a child blasphemy based on the sort of things that happened to Donald McNeil, Alison Roman, etc., as opposed to Galileo.AK: You've coined the term “the Elect” and we just referred to it. Who are you referring to as the Elect and how exactly are you, are you using that phrase?JM: The Elect is a term that I used to refer to a certain kind of person who has hard leftist views about the way things are supposed to go and feels that being mean to people is justifiable in the name of making the world safe for those views. And so it's not the woke, it's not the hyper woke, it's woke people who are mean, who are The Elect. It's the evangelical, prosecutorial woke. And so by The Elect, I mean the kinds of people who seek to get people fired, who support policies for Black people that hurt Black people but qualify as goodly because they are quote unquote anti-racist. For example, it is Elect to say if Black kids aren't good at standardized tests, then let's eliminate the test because it's racist rather than helping Black kids get better at tests, and that particular kind of thinking. The term is not original to me, but I find it very useful and I hope it settles in. The Elect.AK: I come from a society where freedom of expression is, doesn't exist. There are very strict parameters to what you can and cannot say.JM: You mean academia?AK (laughs): That is the society I inhabit now. That was good. I mean Pakistan. In fact, that's part of my disillusionment with academia. I didn't expect it, especially not in the West and not in the US where freedom of expression is supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. Censorship from the right is something that I'm familiar with. I can even understand those tendencies within the U.S. coming from a more authoritarian mindset, from the political right. To some degree I can get that. What I find troubling, deeply troubling, is that I'm finding that kind of censorship coming from the left. So, talk about cancel culture. And I've been playing around a lot with the notion of why this is the case. And I'm going to present to you a hypothesis and ask you to tell me what you think. After much contemplation, I thought, well, maybe it's a society that has had a lot of freedom, precisely because freedom of expression is enshrined as a constitutional right. When there is so much freedom, it must necessarily produce its own unfreedom to rail against. A concept cannot exist, similarly a practice cannot exist, if it doesn't have its antithesis or antichrist. I'm beginning to wrap my head around what I'm seeing happening, particularly in academia, as this is just freedom coming full circle.JM: Hm. I like that. I am inclined to think that there's something else involved and it's social media. I think if — it's impossible to imagine a world without it now — but if we really did go back to that time when there was just email and the whole world could not talk to itself, I think we wouldn't have this happening on the left because what it is, is a reign of terror. A lot of what goes on on the left in terms of these cancellations is based not on consensus, but on fear. People are really afraid of being called a dirty name. And so you don't speak against the minority of people who are coming over the hill with pitchforks. I think that has a lot to do with it. And what people are so afraid of really is being called a dirty thing on Twitter. It is mostly Twitter. It is mostly being called a racist. Nobody wants to be called a racist on Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, but mostly Twitter. Fifteen years ago, if somebody didn't like something that I wrote or something that I said, they would write a letter and they would send it to my mailbox, or they would write an email to me. That's what people did, and you got used to it. Now that almost never happens. Almost nobody emails me and it's very easy to find my Columbia email. It barely ever happens because those same people, they feel the same way, they put it on Twitter where everybody can see it. That change happened in about 2012 and there's no going back from that. You can see that the impulse of a certain kind of person used to be: I wish I could tell the world that I hate this person, but instead I'm just going to send it to their email because that's the best I can do. That person now can write it in the sky and we're never going to be rid of that kind of person. So, yeah, you have a new era that started in the early 2000-teens.AK: OK, I'm going to turn the camera upon us as academics for a moment and say one of the problems that I have right now is the erosion of academic freedom on college campuses. And I think the people who are responsible for it at the end of the day are us. It's tenured professors. And I know you don't have tenure, but you're a person with enough authority.JM: Close enough.AK: Close enough, so forgive me for lumping you with us, but it's tenured professors who are not speaking up, both in terms of the excesses of the administration, which is increasingly bureaucratized and corporatized, and also in terms of the kind of wider trends of the adjunctification of the faculty itself, which is a deep threat to academic freedom. So I hold tenured academics responsible for that. And it's easy to bash social media for giving fillip to nasty trends. There are nasty people out there. There is a nastiness in all of us and perhaps we feel more comfortable airing it when we're not talking to someone face to face and we can put it out.JM: Exactly.AK: But there is also a niceness to all of us, or at least I desperately want to believe that, right? I really do, because if we don't, I feel like I begin to lose the will to live. What's the point, right? So why do we not use social media in a way that fights against the kind of natural tendencies that it brings out? To what degree can we repurpose that and fight cancel culture and fight this tendency to shut people up by actually reclaiming that space? Maybe we can't, but I'm interested in hearing what your thoughts are.JM: We have a moral duty as thinking people in this culture now. Fifty years ago, that duty was to understand that racism is not just calling dirty names, that sexism is not just calling dirty names, that you have to look inside of yourself. And I think practically everybody in this country learned how to do that through the 1970s to a degree that was stunning. And many people today would say that it wasn't important, but I think they either lack historical imagination or they're just not old enough to remember what things were like before. If you walked around in 1950 and talked to educated Americans about how they felt about women and how they felt about Black people, I think many people would be utterly stunned at the difference. Something happened between 1970 and 1980. Now, we have a similar thing that we need to do, which is to learn to not be so damned afraid of being called names on social media. A lot of people are clearly frightened to their socks of somebody saying something nasty to them and then being retweeted. And the truth is, it happens, it flares for a while and it goes away. And Twitter is not the world. Now, of course, some people feel that they don't want to risk their jobs, but I think for most people, it's just that they don't want to be called a dirty name and a dirty name today is you racist. And so they just hold back. And that means that the nasty guys in the schoolyard end up taking over. Even if you try to be nice on Twitter, there are some people — and they're not crazy, they're not trolls, they're not under a bridge; unfortunately, they're ordinary people who are probably very nice in real life — but people will be mean to you for being nice. You know, how dare you praise this? How dare you excuse that? That kind of person cannot be allowed to determine what Twitter is like, though. You just have to let them, you have to let them yell. And I really hope that part of the pendulum shift is that a critical mass of people will learn that you can be called a dirty name on social media, and you know the planet will keep spinning, your friends will keep liking you. It's hard to be yelled at. You get used to it. But I think we need to start learning how to get used to it more.AK: Where do you think the fear comes from? I understand the fear when it's coming from a threat to your livelihood.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: What is it? I'm trying to dig to the deep roots of what are we so bloody afraid of? I've been called many things in my life, sometimes been proud of the fact that I’ve been called many things in my life, which are not necessarily nice things. Being a — aterm that I absolutely detest, but I'll use at the moment — you know, a person of color, I say things that people don't expect a person of color to say. And so then I get labeled as someone who has false onsciousness or someone who's drunk the Kool-Aid and all kinds of things. What is it what is it that we're so scared of?JM: In a different world, you didn't want it to be said that you were godless. In this world, you don't want it to be said that you are a racist or that you are a sexist because that questions your very legitimacy as a human being. And I think you or me as people of color, we can say things about race and get called certain things. But there isn't as much of a sting, especially because, frankly, the charges are often so absurd. You know, like somebody telling me that I don't like myself. Frankly, yes, I do and everybody knows. You can tell. And I'm sure that you feel the same way. Whatever you're being called, it has nothing to do with you. But I will openly admit, I could not bear — and watch it happen now that I say this — I could not bear it getting around that I was a sexist. That's too much. If it got around that I had some sort of woman problem, that I didn't think women were men's equals, it would make me want to curl up in a corner and die. That would be more than I could risk, and I'm quite sure that I don't have that issue. But if somebody decided to start a campaign on Twitter and call me all sorts of things and distort things that I wrote, I would not be up for that. And so I can put myself in other people's place. They feel that way about race. They feel I just couldn't tolerate that. But, you know, if there were an epidemic of people being called sexist for no good reason, I would have to buck up, you know, if I had some skin in that game. And I think that's what has to happen with the racist charge within reason. You don't want to take advantage, but you can't let the people who spend their lives saying mean things on Twitter determine that entire forum because it could be used for such good. You're right. But everybody needs to get some, you see I want to say balls, but that's no good.THEME MUSIC UPAK: Well, I think this entire segment has to be edited out because otherwise you're going to be branded as sexist and we are going to have a campaign. And then you use the term balls, so you just gave …JM: Yeah, I’m, I’m gone.AK: You’re gone. (laughing)JM: Yeah.AK: Thank you John McWhorter for being with us today. This was a delightful conversation. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.JM: Thank you for having me Amna.AK: If you liked what you heard today, and want more exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get access to transcripts, extended interviews, and bonus segments.Before I sign off, I must remind you — I must implore you — to comment, rate, share what you've heard here today. And not just Banished, but the other Booksmart Studios shows like John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Bob Garfield’s Bully Pulpit. Both programs are stimulating and incisive in their analysis.So please share! The success of Booksmart, the impact of our work, depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. I am Amna Khalid. So long. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Bob talks with Princeton scholar Orestis Papakyriakopoulos about the social media titan's latest assault on transparency, and the all-too-familiar blame-shifting that followed it. That has become standard operating procedure from a company Bob describes as “amoral, except when it's immoral.”TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 4: It Wasn't Me, It Was My Dog. Last week, Facebook abruptly shut down a research program by scholars, at New York University's Ad Observatory, who had been monitoring the company's political advertising inventory.NEWSCASTER: Now, this whole battle started on Tuesday when Facebook disabled the accounts of researchers at the NYU Ad Observatory, Facebook explaining, quote, “NYU's Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook in violation of our terms of service. We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people's privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order.”BG: Yes, Facebook's product management director, Mike Clark, claimed in a blog post that the company's hands were tied by the government. You know, just like Son of Sam claimed it was his dog who ordered him to kill.Within 24 hours, Wired magazine and others revealed that the FTC consent order provided no such thing. Even the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection weighed in, with acting director Samuel Levine writing to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying, quote, “I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter.”Please note that Levine didn't say surprised, just disappointed, because the history of Facebook is the history of Facebook conducting itself in disappointing ways, voicing shame and regret from the bottom of its heart, and then returning to deceptive and greedy business as usual.MARK ZUCKERBERG (MONTAGE): We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake. This was a major breach of trust and, and I'm really sorry that this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data. And if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.NEWSCASTER: In 2003, Zuckerberg apologized in the Harvard Crimson for any harm done after his website FaceMash asked users to rate people's hotness. Three years later, Zuckerberg said Facebook, quote, “really messed this one up,” following user complaints that the newly launched news feed invaded their privacy.NEWSCASTER: Zuckerberg apologized once again in 2007 for an uproar over the company's Beacon advertising system, saying, “I know we can do better.”BG: That last part courtesy of CBS News. So the FTC wasn't surprised about the latest phony excuse for systematic opacity, and neither was Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a postdoctoral research director at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He's speaking to me from Athens, Greece. Orestis, welcome to Bully Pulpit.ORESTIS PAPAKYRIAKOPOULOS: Glad to be here, Bob.BG: All right, we'll get to your work shortly. But I want to begin with the NYU project. What were they studying?OP: So, the NYU researchers had an Ad Observatory project. They were trying to monitor what ads are placed on Facebook and who sees them, like which demographics are targeted and so on — in order to provide additional transparency on how online advertising takes place.BG: And what was the method? Were they, in fact, scraping content or metadata from the site in some clandestine fashion, as Facebook alleged?OP: No, actually, they've developed a plugin that you put on your browser, the Ad Observer, and they asked users all over the world to use their plugin, and practically the plugin was recording what the users saw. So in this way, they could see which ads a user was targeted.BG: Wait, so when Facebook invoked protecting user privacy, all of the users had proactively downloaded the browser extension and were giving explicit permission to the NYU people to see what ads they were being served.OP: Exactly, but when Facebook uses the term users, they mean the advertisers who placed the ads. The advertisers did not give their permission to NYU to collect the information about the targeted ads.BG: [chuckling]OP: Yeah, exactly.BG: I see, so the advertisers who pay money to have their ads seen we're skittish about having their ads seen.OP: Exactly.BG: Now, the whole point of the Facebook algorithm is that consumers get more and more content they have demonstrated interest in by clicking on it or commenting or sharing. That very same algorithm, though, takes the same user behavior data and allows advertisers to micro target to exactly the consumer profile they're most interested in, whether to buy a car or toothpaste or a political worldview.OP: Yeah, so Facebook's business model until today is to use this data they collect to place personalized advertisements and they sell the space and they sell the tool they've developed so advertisers can place their ads.BG: Selling the tools they've developed. This gets to the next sensitive area of privacy, because the FTC order that the company invoked last week came with a five billion dollar fine for violating an earlier 2012 consent decree after Facebook was caught not only being careless, but mercenary with users personal data. Can you remind me what the specifics were of the original complaint?OP: Sure. So back in 2012, the FTC claimed that Facebook was violating numerous privacy rules. And more specifically, for example, users believed that they had put their accounts to private settings or some information that they had on their profile were not public, but advertisers still had the opportunity to collect this data. Another example of what was violated back then is that although users were deleting their profiles or saying that taking their information down, third party entities were still able to collect this data, although the users had removed their consent access on the platform.BG: So then came the new order in 2019, in which the FTC said Facebook was found to be, quote, “deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.” Can you summarize the 2019 case?OP: Sure. So going back to 2012, because Facebook violated specific rules, the FTC said that Facebook needs to change how it functions to make more clearer representations of what holds in privacy terms and what not, to inform users as well as to switch off all these back doors that gave data about users to third party individuals. And although Facebook started doing that, for example, what happened is that although new apps were not able to get this data, if you had an older up, you still were able to collect information. And this is the window that was exploited also by Cambridge Analytica, that the company used an app that was created in the past for a different purpose and started collecting data about users, and these data the users have not given their consent to give the data to the company.BG: And this wasn't like, oops, careless of me. This had to have been done with malice aforethought.OP: Yeah. So definitely Cambridge Analytica did it because they found an opportunity there to collect all this data. I don't know if Facebook knew about the backdoor or not, but definitely they did not do their job right.BG: And then sat on the information for two years before the story finally blew up in the media.OP: And going back to now to 2019, the FTC said, hey, Facebook did not conform to our claims. There are still issues with data privacy and Facebook need to conform to the older rules. Plus, there were some new issues that appeared. For example, Facebook need to make more transparency in how they use their face recognition technology and their platform. The FTC implemented stronger accountability mechanisms in cases that Facebook violates against the norm, and so on.BG: So once again, disappointing but unsurprising. And just ,as is was the case with Cambridge Analytica, simply astonishing indifference to the abuse of its targeting algorithm. And this is whether permitting Trump friendly or Boris Johnson friendly foreign agents to spread toxic lies in a political campaign, or the Myanmar Buddhist military to incite pogroms with false accusations against the Muslim Rohingya minority. I've often described the company as amoral, except when it is immoral. Would you care to argue against that proposition?OP: So definitely Facebook as every company, they look at their self-interest. This is what they were doing in the past and they are keep doing now. Their model is to collect as much data they can and find ways to sell it to get the most profit out of it. That also means that not disclosing a lot of things that are going on on the platform because these might make them accountable and also make them impose restrictions on their business model.BG: And in fact, in the Cambridge Analytica affair, there were a number of universities and the United States Senate trying to look into how it could have all taken place. Facebook vowed transparency, but instead actually tried to stymie some researchers by failing to make its API fully available and so on. How cooperative were they even when they were most in the crucible following Cambridge Analytica?OP: Generally, Facebook I think that transparency efforts of Facebook belong more to the marketing part of the company rather than an actual effort of the company to be more open with scientists and policy makers and so on. So they always try to give minimal data under rules that protect them 100 percent. And also the quality of the data information they provide usually is not able to answer key questions about the nature of the platform, how does it affect the society, the democracy and so on.BG: All right. Let's talk about your work at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. According to your center's website, your research, quote “provides ideas, frameworks and practical solutions towards just, inclusive and participatory socioalgorithmic ecosystems through the application of data intensive algorithms and social theories.” So what, what do you do?OP: So, for example, in the case of Facebook and online platforms in general, we try to understand how the tools and the algorithms they deploy are used politically, to place political ads to influence the public opinion. And as part of it, we look at Facebook, Google and YouTube, which belongs to Google, for example — or other platforms like TikTok, which are used a lot for political communication — and we ask who has access to the tools of the platforms, how do the tools of the platforms function and what effects they might have in the society. Like, who sees an ad, why, why they don't see an ad, is there probably a potential from discrimination, to are there other issues that may come as a side effect of seeing specific ads, and other further research questions.BG: Now, I want to go back very briefly to the NYU people. Facebook claimed they had offered those researchers an alternative method with its very own FORT researcher platform, which in the name of science and transparency and societal good, it beneficently makes available to scholars. In fact, FORT stands for Facebook Open Research and Transparency. But you read that Mike Clark blog post about NYU and you were like, yeah, right, because you and your team tried to take the FORT and found it heavily defended.OP: Exactly, and they said first they have a political ads library that is open to the public and they also provide the FORT data set where researchers can get access. And to start with the minor thing, the political ads library's too general and does not actually provide information about who placed an ad to whom. You can also more or less see some general statistics about ads, like general demographics and location, who saw it, as well as the content of the ad.BG: It seems to me as if someone was being investigated for murder and the person of interest says to the cops, here is the evidence you may choose from. I will provide this. You can use this and only this for making your case.OP: Exactly, that's the one thing, and they also claim that they have the FORT data set. And it's interesting because back in February, the group I am in, we tried to get access to that data set and they provided us with a contract which we had to sign in order to get the data set without telling us what the data set includes. And this agreement that Facebook gave us said that actually Facebook possesses the power to decide if our research can get published or not. So we could do some research. They could review it then and they would say, OK, this is publishable or this is not, otherwise you need to remove that or that and so on. Which we found really problematic. Research need to be free, otherwise it becomes censored. And we asked them first, OK, can you tell us more? We cannot sign a contract without knowing what data we are getting, of course. And second, are we going to have the freedom to answer our research question? And the first answers of Facebook was we are not able to negotiate the terms we are proposing because this is mandated by the FTC and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Which of course did not hold. The FTC decrees don't say anything about how researchers can access Facebook data.BG: When Facebook played the FTC card last week, you were you were like, oh, I've seen this movie before. They're invoking government regulation that in fact, doesn't regulate the thing that they're trying to hide.OP: Exactly. And because we saw how they treated the NYU researchers, and we were frustrated that they used again the FTC argument, we said, OK, we need to speak up and talk about our own experience because this cannot go on.BG: So just to reiterate, it's a mystery package that you don't get to unwrap until you've signed an onerous contract, which specifies, among other things, that if Facebook doesn't like what you want to publish based on your access to FORT, then it just censors you. I want to return to the letter that the FTC official wrote to Mark Zuckerberg after the NYU controversy erupted last week. He addressed the subject of Facebook's trustworthiness to keep its word, not only only the long haul, but like in any time period whatsoever. He observes, quote, “Only last week, Facebook's general counsel, Jennifer Newstead, committed the company to ‘timely, transparent communication to Bureau of Consumer Protection staff about significant developments.' Yet the FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week. Had you honored your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out to you that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest.” They broke their promise and they did it absolutely immediately. How is anybody supposed to, in academia or elsewhere, supposed to deal with a company that appears to be out of control?OP: I think that the answer is not company specific, but more general, like there need to be regulations that define what data online platforms and tech companies should provide to researchers, as well as how, because it's not only about the data that Facebook holds, it's also the data that Google holds and all the other platforms. And although focus is usually on Facebook, the other platforms also have a very high degree of opacity. So I do believe that policymakers and politicians need to step up and say, we need to bring regulation that forces Facebook and the other platforms to change how they function, to change what they disclose and what they not.BG: All right, so there was a 2012 consent decree in which Facebook promised to make corrections to how it does business. It violated that consent decree, leading to the 2019 update, which expanded the government regulation and also fined them five billion dollars. Now, I know you're a data scientist and an engineer, but I'm going to ask you now to be a lawyer, too, because in the 2019 decree, the FTC said, quote, “It is ordered that respondent (that's Facebook) in connection with any product or service, shall not misrepresent in any manner, expressly or by implication, the extent to which the respondent maintains the privacy or security of covered information” — including, and this skips a few lines, “the extent to which the respondent makes or has made covered information accessible to third parties.” Now, I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems to me that what happened last week with NYU is explicitly a violation of that clause. They misrepresented the way they treat covered information, data that is, under the pretext of privacy or security. Is there going to be a 2021 update to the 2019 update to the 2012 order?OP: I'm not a lawyer, but Facebook tries to exploit ambiguity in ways that conforms to their interests. And for example, that is to say that we are protecting users privacy in order to not allow the NYU researchers to understand how their tools are used.BG: All right. You say ambiguity. This looks pretty expressly stated to me, but I guess this isn't your table. I will ask you what this all means. What are the implications of this dust-up involving a, you know, relatively small research project? What are the implications for the rest of us?OP: It is an issue for the academic community because we as academics struggle to understand technological tools and how they affect the society with very little help in general. And really, this tool has also been invaluable for a lot of researchers and was a useful resource to understand Facebook ads, but generally it also shows how much power we have as academics. And we we need to make calls to policymakers to change things, because the research and the knowledge we can extract will be useful for them and the rest of the society.BG: And concerning your work at Princeton, I know you haven't published yet, but I wonder if there's a sneak preview that you can offer of, if not your absolute finding some interesting tidbits along the way.OP: First, we find limitations, strong limitations, what the data the provided can actually say, like we find unexplainable moderation practices like why ads were removed or not removed, although they define specific guidelines about how ads should be. We also find that a lot of ads are related to protected groups. And there are questions to understand how these protected groups were targeted and make political statements about it. But also, it's not also about our research. Like we are able to access only the data that Facebook gives through their political ads library. So there are thousands or even millions of ads that are placed and researchers cannot get access to them at all. And that's why NYU's project was such a great resource, because there was no other way to get information about these advertisements. I find it personally troubling that there is so much opacity about online ads, but on other ads, like on TV or on radio, you get so much information. And they know there are legal and historical reasons why they are treated differently, but they should not.BG: I want to ask you one final thing, Orestis. Like the wildfires that right now are ravaging Greece and California and elsewhere around the world, authoritarianism is raging. Disinformation has become not just an art, but a science. Millions and millions of people are foolishly swallowing lies and disinformation fed them by cynical politicians. The world is literally in flames. Why do companies like Facebook not rush to provide whatever data they can in support of better academic understanding of what is happening on our screens and in our psyches?OP: I think they followed the idea of the less we provide, the safer we are. I do believe that if we had access to data, we could find positive effects of social media as well. So I don't believe that everything is bad. It's not black and white, but I think they believe that the less they give, the more protected they are because they are afraid that if a very strong regulation is passed, they will lose the ability to, to keep having the same business model they have until today with the same profits.BG: Orestis, thank you so much for joining me.OP: Thanks for having me Bob.BG: Orestis Papakyriakopoulos is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. Papakyriakopoulos was perhaps admirably circumspect in casting doubt more on capitalist self-interest than Facebook per se. But whenever these blowups occur, I think back to the first scene of the 2010 movie The Social Network, in which Zuckerberg, played by actor Jesse Eisenberg, is getting dumped by his girlfriend.GIRLFRIEND: You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. You're gonna go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an a*****e.BG: OK, we're done here. Before I sign off, though, I must remind you, I must implore you to comment, rate, share what you've heard here today. And not just Bully Pulpit, but the other Booksmart Studios shows like John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Amna Khalid's Banished, both of which programs are like, whoa — tell friends, neighbors, family members, stop strangers on the street. The success of Booksmart, the impact of our work depends as much on you as on us. So please spread the word.Also, if you become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios, you will get extended interviews, additional content of other kinds, access to the hosts and in my case, continued access to my weekly column, which is, for the moment, free to sample. Now then, Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Chris Mandra and N'Dinga Gaba are our audio engineers. Bully Pulpit is a production of Bookmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Owned by half the human race yet often shrouded in shame, secrets and lies, the (mostly) female sexual anatomy finally gets the scrutiny and plain talk it deserves. Author Zoe Mendelson discusses the heroic, misunderstood pussy.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Once there was the encyclopedia. The digital age gave us Wikipedia and a whole mess of other online information repositories from Investopedia, to Baby Names Pedia, to Pancreapedia, for one stop shopping on all things pancreas, to Conservapedia, for evangelical Christians sick of being brainwashed with science and facts.MAN: Wikipedia has become unsuitable because it's become very biased. It's become very anti-American. It's become very anti-Christian.GARFIELD: After four years of online collaboration by 200-some contributors on three continents, we now have a hardcover book titled Pussypedia, about the anatomy, physiology, culture and fraught history of the mostly female organs and structures for reproduction, urology and pleasure. The book is learned, informative, poignant, often infuriating, and often also very funny. But what most distinguishes Pussypedia is that it's an FAQ for questions that have been answered incorrectly suppressed, deemed taboo, gone bizarrely uninvestigated and/or steeped in shame off and on for most of human history. Just for one meager example, this 1969 educational film strip from a right-wing organization agitating against sex education.NARRATOR: Every emotional and psychological aspect of sex is presented. But without the introduction of any moral concepts of right and wrong. Sexual intercourse between unmarried young people is presented as acceptable. Masturbation is not only acceptable, but a desirable means of relieving tension. Having an illegitimate baby is nothing to be ashamed of. Youths are instructed in use of every manner of contraceptive device and may obtain them without cost. But moral concepts of right and wrong rejected.GARFIELD: To my knowledge, there is no comparable screed associated with pancreas information. Into this environment enters Pussypedia, illustrated by Maria Conejo and written by Zoe Mendelson, who joins me now. Zoe, welcome to Bully Pulpit.ZOE MENDELSON: Thank you. Thanks for having me.GARFIELD: OK, let's start with the title. It isn't Vaginapedia, although that is the body part most associated with the slang word pussy. Isn't that like calling every Baltic state Lithuania?MENDELSON: Yes, it is. Yes, totally. The vagina is only the tube that connects the, the uterus to the outside. It's only the vaginal canal. So when we call the whole thing a vagina, leaving out a lot of really important parts. Also it means swordholder. So we're really calling our vaginas like that thing that's made to hold a penis.GARFIELD: It only exists in relationship to male equipment.MENDELSON: Right. And it's not an object of service to the penis.GARFIELD: The book itself is part sex manual, part comprehensive Mendelson's anatomy of XX plumbing and part history of suppression. You cite just absolutely infuriating examples of misogynistic superstition, religious orthodoxy, sexual repression and a sort of moral fascism that has come in waves over the centuries to inflict shame and to propound ignorance. Can you give me just some lowlights?MENDELSON: I think that the best example is the history of the erasure of the clitoris, and that can mean erasure conceptually, it can mean clitoridectomies becoming popular. As late as in the 20th century, people were performing clitoridectomies because masturbation was being blamed for all sorts of health ailments.GARFIELD: And you're talking about in the West, you're not talking about sub-Saharan Africa.MENDELSON: In Europe and in the United States. I mean, the clitoris has been known about since ancient times. And there was many times throughout the history of medicine where people said, well, what's this thing? And authorities in anatomy said, nothing, nothing. Don't ask about it. For a long time it was because the clitoris didn't fit into this model that we, that we had, which was that the vagina was just an inside out penis. When a fetus is growing, the genital clump either becomes a penis or a clitoris and they're made of the exact same parts. A clitoris is about nine centimeters flaccid on average, which is the same for a penis. But they thought that the vagina was an inside out kind of messed up penis gone wrong. So it didn't fit into that model, which is why for a long time they didn't want to acknowledge its existence even though they knew it was there.GARFIELD: Who's they?MENDELSON: Authorities on anatomy and biology. One of my favorite texts from a guy that dug it up — in 17-something — he wrote that he was really surprised that it hadn't been priorly documented since it was so perceptible to sight and touch. Kind of saying: This thing, it's right there. Nobody ever noticed this big organ? What?GARFIELD: Now, when you say text, you're not talking about SMS. You're talking about medical literature, medical clitoriture. See what I did there?MENDELSON: Clitoriture. Exactly. And then it was taken out of Gray's Anatomy like 1948. Which was like what? They just took it out, you know, and I suppose that's because it was profane. It is back in a lot of medical textbooks. But for example, when little kids learn about the reproductive system in school, little girls are shown images of the quote unquote female reproductive system and it has no clitoris. It's just this like, this huge organ missing. And it's like, well, God forbid little kids with pussies should know that their bodies are capable of producing pleasure. Like, what's going to happen? Is society going to implode? I remember in school learning about boys having wet dreams as part of puberty and stuff, but nothing was ever mentioned about pleasure in the pussy at all.GARFIELD: This is a thought to which will return. But meantime, I want to play you a clip from a movie around the time where there was no clitoris in Gray's Anatomy. It's The Night of the Hunter from 1955. It's set, though, in the 30s, somewhere in the Ohio River Valley. And in this scene, an older married woman is talking about marital sex.OLDER WOMAN: That wasn't love. That was just flapdoodle. Have some fudge lambs. When you've been married to a man 40 years, you know, all that don't amount to a hill of beans. I've been married to my Walt that long and I swear in all that time, I just lie there thinking about my canning.GARFIELD: Now, Zoe, that is pretty much the definition of low expectations.MENDELSON: It's no expectations because her pleasure's not even part of the equation at all. It's not implied that she should be enjoying it.GARFIELD: And this goes to the heart of what you're battling. You didn't undertake Pussypedia to be ironic or snarky or transgressive, but out of meaning and purpose. Which purpose begins with the little girl Zoe Mendelson? Can you tell me about her?MENDELSON: The book starts by saying I was a horny kid. I was, and I remember really clearly, slowly learning to be ashamed of that. I remember eventually becoming very embarrassed about those feelings and thinking that there was something wrong with me. And I'm not alone in that. I think that a lot of people with pussies are taught to be very ashamed of their sexual desire, that their sexual desire is profane, that it's immoral, that it's gross, that it's slutty, taught not to masturbate. You know not my parents. They didn't teach me not to masturbate. They said that's something you do when you're alone in your room, which was pretty reasonable of them to say.GARFIELD: Well, unless you write for The New Yorker.MENDELSON: Exactly. But a lot of people with pussies are taught that masturbating is wrong implicitly. Even if it's not something that they're taught, they somehow end up thinking that.GARFIELD: Conquering shame is an admirable mission. But I do want to ask you about your journey. Watergate began when Carl Bernstein had to cover a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The Pentagon Papers were published after a government contractor decided to leak a classified report on the history of American intervention in Vietnam. And Pussypedia began how?MENDELSON: I was Googling whether or not all women can squirt. I was in a relationship with an a*****e who was really, really intent on making me squirt and insisted that every woman that he'd been with could squirt, that every woman could squirt. And so I just Googled it and everything I found was crap. It was geared towards cis men: How to make a woman squirt! And I thought that was really sad. And so I started reading these medical journal articles and I have no science background at all. And so it's really hard to understand. And I had to look up the definitions of a lot of words. And I just thought this is a huge problem, that this content is so inaccessible. That quality information about our bodies in general is inaccessible because even sort of the good sources were contradictory. And so I thought I should tackle the pussy.GARFIELD: What did you discover about female ejaculation, which is a staple of porn and I believe every issue of Cosmopolitan since about 1979?MENDELSON: Well, first of all, there's two kinds of female ejaculation, and squirting is not considered by the scientists who record, first recorded female ejaculation and established it as a real thing, as ejaculation. I consider it ejaculation because it's shooting liquid out of you when you're aroused or orgasming. To me, that's ejaculation. But the truest form of female ejaculation is what is created by the periurethral glands. And it's just like a small amount of milky liquid, just a very small amount usually. And squirting is clear and it comes out of the urethra and it's different. It's also not pee. People are really kind of obsessed with whether or not it's pee, it's not pee. But you can't answer the question, can all women squirt? Because it's very hard to prove the negative cases. It's very hard to prove that somebody cannot and never will squirt.GARFIELD: All right. So ejaculation has been trending the past couple of decades, let's say. But the most debated question about women's sexual response has to be orgasm. Sigmund Freud claimed there was clitoral orgasm and the far superior vaginal orgasm, which was enjoyed, he said, only by psychologically mature women, whatever that was supposed to mean. And then a century later, we learned of the supposed G spot, another Cosmo staple. So is it real or some sort of fanciful myth like the Loch Ness Monster or bipartisanship?MENDELSON: (laughing) Bipartisanship. So, a vaginal orgasm is a clitoral orgasm. It's still stimulating the clit through the vagina. Also, it's usually the same thing as a G-spot orgasm. The G spot is how the clitoris gets stimulated through the vagina. And it is real. Cosmo ran this horrible article last April saying that it doesn't exist, and they're really sorry for saying that it existed all these years. The G spot definitely exists. First of all, like less than a third of people with pussies can reliably orgasm through only vaginal stimulation. So it's very important that people understand that you don't have to be able to do that. You may never be able to do that. And that's incredibly normal. But the G spot is where the urethral sponge presses up against the front wall of the vagina. And the urethral sponge is erectile tissue, just like around the urethra in a penis, like a sweater. And inside that tissue are the periurethral glands I just mentioned that create the ejaculate. It's also called the female prostate. I don't like calling it the female prostate, because we don't say like the female liver, the female kidneys. Also, it sort of assumes the gender of the person whose body it's in. But yeah, it is the prostate, just like the prostate in the male body. Air quotes when I say male and female body. But just like that prostate, it produces the ejaculate. And it's also why people with pussies, if you've ever tried to pee after you have an orgasm and it's really hard, it's because that sponge is squeezing your urethra closed. It's very intricately connected to the clitoris through blood vessels and nerves. They share nerves and it's all connected with the bulbs of the clitoris that go around the vagina, the front wall of the vagina. And so it presses up against the front of the vagina and stimulates the clitoris.GARFIELD: All right. You just said a whole bunch of, you know, words. But I just want to make sure I understand this right. This tiny piece of flesh that we think of as the clitoris is just the nerve rich glands, like the glands of a penis, connected to tissues and structures lurking unseen below, actually on the outer wall of the vagina. Right? Not the inner one. So it's like a tip of the iceberg kind of deal.MENDELSON: Yeah, it's the tip of the iceberg. The vagina is surrounded on either side by the clitoral bulbs, which are also erectile tissue, sort of like a penguin with these fat legs. It's hard to describe. (laughing) It's very hard to describe, but there's many diagrams of it in the book.GARFIELD: I'm just, I guess probably will have the penguin image in my head forever now. The penguin with cankles, I guess I don't I just.MENDELSON: Penguin with cankles, that's it! So what happened in the aftermath of Freud saying that it was a pathology if you couldn't have a vaginal orgasm, that you were frigid — and there was really no clitoral stimulation certainly happening — and so all of these women in droves started showing up to … you can read these kind of funny papers from conferences, psychoanalysis conferences, about why do we have a national epidemic of frigidity? Why are so many women frigid? One person who wrote about this in a very funny way is Ernst Grafenberg, who the G spot is named after. He didn't name it after himself. A team of scientists named it after him, but much later he wrote it's because they hate their husbands. It took a very long time, 'til almost the end of the decade, for somebody to say perhaps Freud was wrong.GARFIELD: All right. We've been disdainful of Freud and kind of ridiculed women's magazines, not kind of ridiculed, explicitly ridiculed women's magazines. But at least they were talking about this stuff. As you mentioned, a lot of the literature over the centuries seems to erase the clitoris altogether and with it any acknowledgment, let alone endorsement, of female sexual gratification. Information was the exception, abnegation the rule. Why?MENDELSON: Okay, so this is the question that most gets me into talking and sounding like I think the patriarchy is this like table of old white men plotting about how to keep women oppressed, which I do not think. But sometimes it's really hard to believe that it's not that because I think keeping pleasure away from people with pussies is such an effective tool for oppressing them.GARFIELD: Is it a strategy or is it just a symptom?MENDELSON: That's a very good question. And I think it's sort of both. An empowered person with a pussy who owns their sexuality and is vocal about that will be met with a lot of backlash. And so in that context, it's a strategy because people see that empowered state and they want to crush it. That's gross. You're a slut. Put that away. Cross your legs. Nobody wants to hear about that. There's so much online sexual harassment toward people with pussies who aren't even talking about sex. And it's very easy to get flooded with, "I'm going to rape you. You're a w***e." I think that's a symptom, and a strategy.GARFIELD: On that subject, I just want to play you another excerpt from that same movie, The Night of the Hunter. This is later in the film when the scoundrel preacher Robert Mitchum shames his new bride, the widow woman Shelley Winters, on their wedding night.MITCHUM: Look at yourself. What do you see, girl? You see the body of a woman, the temple of creation and motherhood, you see the flesh of Eve that man since Adam has profaned. That body was meant for begetting children. It was not meant for the lust of men.MENDELSON: Right, it's made for making babies and it's like: Wait, the lust — what about her lust? Her lust, it's like it couldn't even possibly exist in his mind. You know, it's like, "don't let men f**k you." Not even saying, "don't f**k men."GARFIELD: It's taking away all of your sexual agency and your humanity along with it.MENDELSON: Exactly.GARFIELD: All right. So he's a preacher, which is obviously not a coincidence. Whether it's power or religion or financial incentive, the notion of female sexual shame does seem to be woven into the entire social fabric. The idea that women's bodies are too unclean even to be spoken of plainly. This is from an educational film in the early 60s.MOLLY: Hello. Oh, hi, Peggy. Sure, just a minute, I'll ask. Mom, can I go swimming with Peggy tomorrow after school?MOTHER: I don't think I would Molly.MOLLY: But I'd be home by 5:30.MOTHER: No, it's not a good idea the first two or three days of your period. You might get chills and catch cold.MOLLY: Oh, that's right. Peggy, of course, I can't go swimming. You know I've got the curse.GARFIELD: Poor little Molly. On one hand, she's battling puberty. On the other, the moral collapse of American society.NARRATOR: Here's a place where I want to make a brief comment about the influence about the advertising world in stimulating sexuality. Sales pitches for titillating devices such as perfumes, clothes, makeup are designed to lure the young girl or her overanxious parent into accepting this exaggerated emphasis on sexuality or sex appeal as the standard, and the use of these devices as essential for competing sexually.GARFIELD: That film, Zoe, like many others of the era, did a pretty good job — and I think you referred to this earlier discussing reproductive physiology — but it defaulted to the prevailing Victorian disdain of human sexuality as being inherently perverse. And the question is, what the f**k?MENDELSON: (laughing) I don't have an answer to that. I just spent five years trying to answer it, and I really just at the end of the whole thing, feel like it's all very silly. You know? She doesn't use even a euphemism, a neutral euphemism. Like she doesn't say it's that time of the month. She says it's a curse.GARFIELD: Yeah, "Charlie's visiting" you can sort of live with, although it's weird.MENDELSON: I would prefer that we didn't use any euphemisms because why should humans feel shame about anything that we can't stop our bodies from doing? You know, if you are going to the bathroom and you have to walk across your office, you shouldn't hide your tampons in your hand. So many menstrual products have been marketed saying it's so discreet, nobody will notice. Why are you so concerned with being so discreet that your body is functioning properly?GARFIELD: Zoe, I now, having read your book, know so much about you. You are not shy about sharing your own sexual experience in pretty granular detail. I have been married to people I know less about, and as an author myself, I've been imagining a scene from your writing life. So at some point in the past few months, you tell your mom that you're almost done with your book and she says: Oh, so you must let me read it. And you say: I'm still not ready. I'm still working on it. And she says, Just read me the beginning. And you say, Come on, Mom, I don't know. It's a work in progress. And and she says, No, you come on, Zoe, just the first paragraph, just the first sentence. And you say, fine: Chapter one. I have a hairy ass crack. Are you really ready for this level of intimacy with your readers?MENDELSON: I am. It's a political decision. Look, I did a lot of scholarship here. I did a lot of very serious scholarship too. And I don't want it to go to waste. I don't want people not to read it. So first of all, it's about fighting shame. I don't f*****g care. This is my body. This is how it was made. I love it. It moves me through the world. It does its job. I refuse to live with a kind of shame about my body that just disempowers me in a more general way in my life. And I hope that I can impart that to others, this feeling of freedom. And on the other hand, I did a literature review about all of these topics. So the bibliography of the book is enormous and it's the part that I'm most proud of. And I shared so much personally because it's fun. That's what people want to read.GARFIELD: That's a very eloquent response. But what did Mom say?MENDELSON: Oh, nobody in my family was surprised by this whatsoever. I actually just read that chapter to my grandparents and they laughed. But there was not an ounce of surprise. Our whole family is very kind of, you know, it's either poop and sex or serious intellectual debate and nothing else is really worthwhile.GARFIELD: Zoe, thank you so much.MENDELSON: Thank you, Bob. Thanks for having me on.GARFIELD: Zoe Mendelson is a journalist and author of Pussypedia, published by Hachette and on sale now. Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

During moments of rhetorical generosity, politicians will give lip-service to bipartisanship or working across the aisle. Another favored metaphor of both Democrats and Republicans is “bridging the divide,” which, once upon a time, would actually happen on major legislation. With the Biden administration now calling for cooperation on infrastructure and other bills, Bob reflects on the fact that not all bridges are well built. Sometimes they collapse.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 2: Bridging the Divide.MAN1: My talk today is gonna be about how to bridge political divides.WOMAN: President-Elect Biden has made it very clear that he wants to reach across the aisle.MAN2: And then that's gonna be us turning towards each other and seeing  a common humanity that we struggle to see now.MAN3: We need to stop talking about them so much and start talking with each other and about our shared condition, and our shared condition is one of  deep divides.Well, gosh, who can argue about that? Who doesn't want two adversarial sides to come together, like warring tribes on opposite shores, connected at last by a bridge of understanding? That's the premise, for example, of Nathan Borney's new book, Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age. And also for the Listen First Project, aimed at healing America by quote, “building relationships and bridging divides.” It's just so eminently reasonable.NARRATOR: The magic of a bridge is that in a way it allows you to walk on air. Bridges provide pathways through the sky so that you can get from here to there sort of flying over, without going through the river or down into the valley or across those railroad tracks.OK, that's from a documentary about actual bridges, many of them now crumbling from decades of neglect. But, yes, in the political context, too, imagine: walking on air, having all obstacles magically averted — not with trusses or girders or cables — but common interest and goodwill.Crowd noiseBecause I suppose there is no dispute too thorny that opposing sides can't, with courage and foresight, broker a deal.CheeringYep, in 1939, evidently people actually shouted “hooray.” The cheers were for British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain, returning to London from Munich, where he had bridged the divide between Great Britain and Nazi Germany.CHAMBERLAIN: This morning I had another talk with the German chancellor Herr Hitler, and here is the paper, which bears his name upon it as well as mine.Also, for all the folks hunching over their radio sets, politicians of the day spoke very, very, haltingly — especially when they were walking on air and wanting every syllable understood. Chamberlain believed history would reward him for “peace in our time.” But what history heard was Britain bartering the freedom of three million Czechs for Hitler's promise to end European aggression, which is sort of not how it played out, Third Reich-wise. Chamberlain's craven devil's bargain is now virtually synonymous with appeasement.There are less notorious, but nonetheless catastrophic examples in more recent history.CLINTON: We must be bound together by a faith more powerful than any doctrine that divides us — by our belief in progress, our love of liberty, and our relentless search for common ground.Fresh off a failed impeachment in 1998, Bill Clinton desperately needed to broaden his support, reaching across the House aisle to Newt Gingrich's brand new Republican majority.CLINTON: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. … For too long our welfare system has undermined the values of family and work, instead of … I challenge every state to match federal policy to assure that serious violent criminals serve at least 85 percent of their sentence. … Criminal gang members and drug dealers are destroying the lives of decent tenants. From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be one strike and you're out.Spending cuts, paring welfare rolls, ruinous Wall Street deregulation, mandatory sentencing — it was the strategy called triangulation. They now call it neoliberalism. In terms of social and economic justice, it should have been labeled Czechoslovakia.When Clinton spoke to the nation, his political nemesis Gingrich sat behind him, grinning and madly applauding. When a bridge is built without understanding of the forces at play, calamity follows. White flight. Poverty. The subprime disaster. The incarceration state. Until finally collapse.NARRATOR: Tacoma Bridge Washington, opened only a few months ago, was built at a cost of over six million dollars. But misfortune overtakes the great structure. These are some of the most amazing pictures ever recorded by a newsreel — the actual collapse of the world's third largest suspension bridge.Bill Clinton's Chamberlain moment at least happened in the good old days, when the adversary was merely fixated on small government, deregulation and the creation of a prison industrial complex. Now the Republican Party has turned into the QAnon Klux Klan, a cult governing —and inciting and fundraising — by Big Lies and their countless corollaries. Here's Sen. Rand Paul responding to ABC's George Stephanopoulous, who had referred to the rulings of 85 courts, 50 state secretaries of state and Trump's handmaiden Attorney General William Barr that the presidential election was not influenced by fraud.SEN. PAUL: But at the same time, I'm not willing just to sit here and say, Oh everybody on the Republican side's a liar and there is no fraud. No, there were lots of problems and there were secretaries of state who illegally changed the law and that needs to be fixed and I'm gonna work hard to fix it and I won't be cowed by people saying, Oh, you're a liar. That's the problem with the media today is they say all Republicans are liars and everything we say is a lie.This is what comes of tying your party's fortunes to the killer clown, Dr. Clorox.TRUMP: It's gonna go way … this is gonna go away … it's gonna go, it's gonna leave, it's gonna be gone … well, I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests, this is gonna go away without a vaccine … it'll go away at some point, it'll go away … at some point this stuff goes away.Same guy who told the Proud Boys to stand by, and whose cabin boy Sen. Lindsey Graham has just had it with the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.SEN. GRAHAM: So, our systems are not racist. America is not a racist country.And then there is the January 6 insurrection.REP. CLYDE: There was an undisciplined mob, there were some rioters and some who committed acts of vandalism, but let me be clear. There was no insurrection and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a boldfaced lie.Are you going to believe Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia, or your lying ears?NEWSCASTER: Then, sheer terror (screams). An officer crushed against a door frame, pleading for help (screams).They've spent decades denying climate calamity. They trade in lunatic conspiracy theories about Democratic pedophiles. They deny Covid's death toll and the need for vaccines and masks. They tell their base that the media and the left want to enslave them. They use the Big Steal lie to pass racist laws suppressing the Black vote in red states. And now they try to gaslight the world about the Capitol insurrection we all saw live on TV.Tell  me again, why do we want to be civil with these people? As the Tacoma Narrows Bridge proved, civil engineering can lead to disaster.And by no means is the politics of going it alone a novel approach. Each episode we begin Bully Pulpit with a clip of Teddy Roosevelt. This episode, let's end with Teddy, as well.ROOSEVELT: I would prefer to work with moderate, with rational, conservatives, provided only that they do in good faith strive forward toward the light. But when they halt and turn their backs to the light, and sit with the scorners on the seats of reaction, then I must part company with them. We the people cannot turn back.Or, put another way:MUSIC: Bridge to Nowhere by Sam RobertsOk, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Here we are. After all kinds of Sturm und Drang, my new foray into the interview/commentary form is here. Bully Pulpit is a podcast about politics, media, culture and society based on four simple principles: observation, argument, narrative and honesty. It should also go without saying that the interviews, essays and pieces will hinge on evidence — as opposed to the asinine and dangerous political currents that favor sentiments and full-on delusions over facts. Indeed, I don't invoke Sturm und Drang lightly, because that was the name of the intellectual and artistic movement of the late 1700s that privileged sentiment over reason, rejecting Rationalist rigor in favor of human emotion. (Thanks for nothing Jean-Jacques Rousseau.) And as long as we're doing historical shoutouts, let me also offer a Rough Rider-hat tip to Theodore Roosevelt, the pioneer of Progressivism, who is my spirit guide in this enterprise. Not only did TR lend me the title, his voice of resistance to reactionary forces will literally grace every episode of Bully Pulpit. The century-old audio rides a little rough, but listen hard. It matters.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield.This is sort of Episode 1. Also, sort of a teaser. Or let's just say an “artist's statement” about the exhibit displayed in this space. I got no wine and cheese for you, so this will have to do.Every week, Bully Pulpit will feature essays or interviews on media, politics, society and the culture. Maybe some business and sports, from time to time. Possibly even weather and traffic on the 1s. What I'm saying is: eclectic. The organizing principle is: It depends. But the thrust, the throughline, the raison d'etre is to figure out, in the words of the poet, what the f**k is going on? Because our other current methods of divining the world around us just aren't working very well.STEVE HARVEY: Kaylee, what's the first question somebody asks when they wake up from a coma?KATIE: What's, like, new on the radio?STEVE HARVEY: What's on the radio?!BG: New on the radio? That was a poor answer, but not that surprising an answer, because as a species we're just not all that great at paying attention. Even if you were to accept that Family Feud is somehow a legitimate arbiter of the zeitgeist, you'd discover how lousy many humans are at noticing things. I mean, to borrow Steve Harvey's own method. Families, we're looking for Things That Fall.CONTESTANT 1: Toddlers!CONTESTANT 2: The stock market!CONTESTANT 3: Rain and snow!BG: See what I mean? “Rain and snow.” Hellooooo! What about Chinese rockets?NEWSCASTER: Remnants of a 20-ton Chinese rocket rained down on the Indian Ocean somewhere southwest of India and Sri Lanka Sunday morning local time.NEWS GUEST: Nine tons we estimate will survive, and that's kind of equivalent to dropping three pickup trucks on somebody's head.BG: Never mind what “the survey” says; a hail of pickup trucks is the world we actually live in. In just the few weeks, since I signed on for Bully Pulpit, the evidence has piled up: some people are playing by a different set of rules — like the Chinese government, the second least accountable political entity in the world after the House Republican Caucus, just crossing its fingers that the oceans would swallow up nine tons of the not-quite incinerated Long March rocket. The Chinese just happened to catch a break when the Long March missed the Maldives and splashed harmlessly into the Indian Ocean.You know who did not catch a break?NEWSCASTER: Tragic scene overnight in the East Village as a woman was killed by a man who jumped from a parking structure. The woman was walking with a man, and the pair had just left a restaurant. Medics …BG: So, yeah, also unexpected. I mean, women walk down the street ever vigilant to threats. Police advise them to step briskly, to avoid eye contact and to be prepared to fight back with groin kicks, pepper spray or grasping their keys like Edward Scissorhands.INSTRUCTOR: Drive into that carotid artery. Again, push in, turn, pull out. You'll kill the crap out of him.BG: Be prepared, authorities say, because every man is a potential attacker. What the cops don't tell women is to scan the sky for threatening men, because that is not where people come from. Until they do.Somehow the world has gone topsy-turvy. You know how people set mouse traps along baseboards, because that's where rodents tend to skitter? It's primitive, but effective. The reason the world hasn't needed a better mousetrap is that nature abides and mice stick to their game plan. Usually.NEWSCASTER: It's raining mice in Australia, literally, and I'm not making this up or reading it out from a Murakami. Millions of mice have infested Australia and they're everywhere — houses, garages, water tanks, under the beds. Mice are also crawling into beds and biting people.BG: The infestation has lasted for months, millions of not-Mickeys, not-Minnies, not-Jerrys and not-Mightys feasting on crops, biting humans and invading homes.That sound, from a viral video titled “Mice Raining in Australia,” is the melody of thousands of rodents shooting through the air out of a gigantic hose meant to vacuum grain from a silo, but, with the infestation, instead of disgorging wheat has become like a ski-resort snow machine of your worst nightmares. What fell was a mouse blizzard. Cloudy with a chance of vermin. Like I said, everything is upside down.DR. VENKMAN: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!BG: Dr. Peter Venkman was most eloquent, but so was that certain famous oracle, that feathered Cassandra, that Paul Revere of poultry: Chicken Little.CHICKEN LITTLE: The sky must be falling!BG: In so many ways: mice, rocket ships, plummeting humans. Furthermore, wherever you look, it is just raining stupid. This was an actual witness, called by Republicans to testify about Covid-vaccine side effects, before the Ohio State Legislature.WITNESS: I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the internet of people who've had these shots and now they're magnetized. They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick. Because now we think that there's a metal piece to that.BG: Oy vey. The stock market may slide now and then, but what's really falling is the bar for what we will accept as normal. Every single day we encounter astonishing and highly dispiriting examples of cultural and political freefall that put the democracy, the planet and our own besieged psyches at risk. It's as if the whole world had awakened from a coma asking, “What's new on the radio?”One answer, of course, could be Bully Pulpit, because this is sort of the radio. But what I'm getting at is: THAT'S THE WRONG QUESTION. We need to be asking the right ones. And someone needs to be paying very close attention — a mission for which I hereby volunteer — even if only to carry some of the burden for you. If the endless bombardment of idiocy tries your nerves and unsteadies your soul, stay with me for the next forever or so. Bully Pulpit is a forum, yes, but also a shelter from all that befalls us. Come on in. We've got plenty of room.Ok, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bully Pulpit is a wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has earned him many prestigious journalism awards, as well as praise such as “very brave” and “national treasure.”For more than 20 years, Bob Garfield was co-host of public radio's weekly, Peabody Award-winning On the Media, following 12 years as a roving correspondent for NPR's All Things Considered. He currently hosts The Influencer video series at RealGarfield.com and recently performed a national tour of his one-man show, “Ruggedly Jewish.”A heroic multimediocrity, Garfield has been a columnist or contributing editor for the Washington Post Magazine, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Mediapost, Folio, Civilization and the op-ed page of USA Today. He has also written for The New York Times, Playboy, Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, Wired and the Mainichi Shimbun, and been employed variously by ABC, CBS, CNBC and the defunct FNN as an on-air analyst. A lecturer and panelist, he has appeared in 37 countries on six continents. He wrote a dreadful episode of the short-lived NBC sitcom Sweet Surrender, and co-wrote a song recorded by Willie Nelson (long story). He is a six-time New York Times worst-selling author. His latest book, American Manifesto, explains how our society came to insurrection.If you haven't yet, please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It's only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you'll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Bully Pulpit is just one of at least three shows that we'll launch this summer. Others include:Banished: An earnest and thought-provoking show about our reassessment of the many people, ideas, objects and even works of art that conflict with modern sensibilities. What can we learn about our present obsession with cancel culture by examining history, and what might it mean for freedom of expression?Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Bully Pulpit, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply respond to this e-mail, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Until about a year or so ago, most of us felt understandably smug when measuring our modern selves next to our ancient ancestors. We are manifestly more advanced — scientifically, morally and, it can be said, rather literally, since we now know that the universe is expanding. We’ve clearly taken considerable steps along the misty path of improvement. Just look around!This rosy view of humanity as carried along by a steady current of progress is known among those in my profession as "whig history," after those who cast their lot with Britain's parliament, as opposed to its monarchy. And though it has long been ridiculed by historians, this whig view continues to inform a popular understanding of the passage of time.The past 18 months, however, have frustrated that reckoning. The pandemic, how little we knew about the virus and how poorly we managed its global spread, shook us out of our complacency. And the brutal murder of George Floyd made us question triumphalist narratives of American history that rely on giant leaps forward from our original sins. Painfully and conspicuously, we were reminded, history is not a linear jaunt toward enlightenment.In addition to the defiant dismissal of scientific consensus and the devaluing of Black lives, both with devastating consequences, there's another danger now lurking: We claim to have disavowed the vigilante justice of the posse and the lynch mob, only to embrace it on social media, in what many on the right decry as cancel culture. Never mind that the dreaded word — C-A-N-C-E-L-L-E-D — is wielded up and down the ideological spectrum with the thoughtfulness of a rubber stamp.What is most notable to me, as an historian, is the apparent tribalism that undergirds cancel culture and what it says about the fragility of our social fabric. We are living through an age of public denunciation in which people, objects, art and ideas are under knee-jerk attack. Calls to cancel — and the inevitable dog-piles that form as a result — are not based on careful consideration of evidence or context. They seem motivated by a desire to “perform” belonging, to zealously adopt the approved posture of a group and to be seen to be doing the “right” thing by others of your tribe. Resorting to a predetermined playbook is an indication of just how resistant we’ve become to the arduous, if ultimately rewarding, work of thinking. As the literary critic Alan Jacobs put it:[W]e suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?How, then, do we see our way past this scorched-earth policy to scrub out anything that conflicts with our own current orthodoxy? Or is it too late? Subscribe to Banished and join us as we attempt to answer these questions — with nuance, complexity and, yes, thinking.Please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It’s only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you’ll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Banished is just one of at least three shows that we’ll launch during July and August. Others include:Bully Pulpit: A wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has been called “absolutely necessary” and “very brave.”Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Banished, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply comment below, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Banished is about our reassessment of the many people, ideas, objects and even works of art that conflict with modern sensibilities. What can we learn about our present obsession with cancel culture by examining history, and what might it mean for freedom of expression?Amna Khalid is professor of history at Carleton College. Born in Pakistan, Amna earned an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University. Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Amna has a strong interest in issues relating to censorship and free expression. She speaks frequently on academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities. Her essays and commentaries on these same issues have appeared in outlets such as the Conversation, Inside Higher Ed and the New Republic.Banished is coming this July!If you haven’t yet, please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It’s only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you’ll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Banished is just one of at least three shows that we’ll launch this summer. Others include:Bully Pulpit: A wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has been called “absolutely necessary” and “very brave.”Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Banished, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply comment below, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the 4th podcast episode of this side series, the Podcast Spotlight. In this episode, we talk with freelance writer and local podcaster, Davelle Lee, as she introduces the following 2 podcasts: Podcast 1: Reply All Reply All is a tech-themed podcast from Gimlet Media. It is presented by co-hosts Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt, and presents a journalistic look into the wacky and weird world of internet culture. Episodes include an in-house phising experiment, tracing phantom phone calls, and an ad for the worst day of your life. Generally speaking, the shows are very well-produced, well-researched, and all around entertaining. And with the co-host format, the topics are presented in a relatively candid manner. Listen to this if you love casual shows and internet culture. Podcast 2: On the Media On the Media (OTM) is an hour-long weekly radio program, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, covering journalism, technology, and First Amendment issues. It is produced by WNYC in New York City. As defined by co-host Garfield, On the Media covers "...anything that reaches a large audience—either electronically or otherwise.... Plus, throw into that anything that covers First Amendment issues; anything that has to do with freedom of speech, privacy, is also in our portfolio."[3] The show explores how the media are changing, and their effects on America and the world. Many stories are centered on events of the previous week and how they were covered in the news. These often consist of interviews with reporters about the dilemmas they face in covering controversial issues. If you liked this episode, please do a big favor by sharing it amongst your friends or by subscribing to the Economical Rice Podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Stitcher. All the links and details to the shows discussed in this episode will be available in the show notes on the website www.economicalricepodcast.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/economicalricepodcast/message

Bob Garfield, co-host of WNYC's On The Media, joins Chris and Lex on The Wolf Den. Bob details the journey of his new podcast, The Genius Dialogues, from a Kickstarter campaign to its home on Audible Channels. The three also discuss podcasting business models, the advantage of host read ads, and the problem of maintaining editorial independence in an ad-driven environment.

Welcome to episode #524 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast. These days, you can't throw a business professional down a flight of stairs without the words "digital transformation" tumbling out of their mouths. Every business, in every space (small, medium and large) is faced with how digital is transforming the very landscape of business today. When I think of digital transformation and what it takes, I think about David Rogers. Recently, David published his latest book, The Digital Transformation Playbook. David is a Columbia Business School professor, brand strategist, and the founder of the Center on Global Brand Leadership's acclaimed BRITE conference on brands, innovation, and technology. Famed ad critic, Bob Garfield, said this about the book: "Seldom have the effects of digital media on legacy industries and innovators alike been so succinctly and scholarly-ly explained. I won't much detail the Playbook, except to say it breaks down the five main areas of business turned upside down by digital revolution: customers, competition, data, innovation and value. Not to put too fine a point on it, everything we learned about these fundamentals since the Industrial Revolution has ceased to be true. To be even blunter, take Jack Welch's triumphalist bestseller from the old analog days and set it on fire; it is worthless. Rogers uses case histories to illustrate how and why the times they are a changing'. And more importantly, exactly how to adapt." David is also the author of The Network Is Your Customer, The Handbook On Brand And Experience Management, There's No Business That's Not Show Business, and many other pieces of research. Have you been struggling with digital transformation? Enjoy the conversation...  Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #524 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 47:56. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter. Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT Delete is now available too! Here is my conversation with David Rogers. The Digital Transformation Playbook. BRITE conference. The Network Is Your Customer. The Handbook On Brand And Experience Management. There's No Business That's Not Show Business. Follow David on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Get David's song for free here: Artists For Amnesty. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #524 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising podcast audio blog blogging bob garfield brand brite conference business blog business book business podcast center on global brand leadership columbia business school columbia university david rogers david usher digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog digital transformation facebook google itunes j walter thompson jack welch jwt leadership podcast management podcast marketing marketing blog marketing podcast marketing research mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog social media the digital transformation playbook the handbook on brand and experience management the network is your customer theres no business thats not show business twitter wpp