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

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

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

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits

that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. The strong do what they can, but the weak must. Twenty five hundred years ago, Thucydides laid it down as a law of geopolitics and unfortunately of life.

The strong do what they can, he said, while the weak struggle as they must. It is this reality that explains why great powers exert their will on the world, often without consequences, and why victims, so often are stuck, the consequences. While we often focus on the fatalism of the first half of this proverb, the Stoic's would point us to the second half, for there is agency and inspiration Encourage in it was that not the role picked up by Kato and the rest of the Stoke opposition in Rome as they fought against tyranny Outvoted and out gunned and out of time was that not the fate of Stockdale in the prison camp in Vietnam Struggling valiantly against his captors. It is this not now what we see coming out of Ukraine, a sovereign nation brutally and capriciously invaded

by a fading great power, and yet resisting with their fists and teeth? A Spartan warrior was once spoken to of surrender by some timid countrymen. He picked up a mouse by the tail and watched it claw and bite at him. When the tiniest creature defends himself like this against aggressors, what ought men do, do you reckon?"

He said. And so too must we resist and fight, that the strong and evil will do what they do, but we can struggle against it. We can make them pay for every inch and dollar of it. We can do what we will. We can do what we must. And as that mouse might attest, no species

survives long without a will to do so, without a will to protect itself. I don't know about you, but I've been inspired. I've been both horrified and also inspired by the events in Ukraine. And I got an email from someone that I know in Ukraine that I've worked with before. And they asked what I might do with my platform. And so I wrote this email today, but I also took the step you might have seen and I posted it on Instagram.

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

I very much agree with that. And since 2014, comeback alive has been the largest foundation providing support to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They've raised more than $20 million from 50 countries, and they provide assistance to around 100 combat units of the Ukrainian armed forces. There's total transparency and reporting about where that money goes. You can check that out. I hope you can make a donation as well, or just support the people of Ukraine by speaking

out, by reaching out to representatives in your country or your state or your city. I think they're right. What happens anywhere is a threat to all of us everywhere. Freedom is not just a thing that happens. It's something we defend. It's something that we insist on. It's something that has to be protected and I think you see there in the leadership not just from President Zelensky, but from the everyday Ukrainian citizens who are acting like I hope we might all act if such a thing happened to us who can support Comeback Alive at ComebackAlive.ion.U.A. One of the best books I read while I was writing my book Trust Me Online was called Being Wrong by the wonderful Catherine Schultz. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker.

She's won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize. You may have read this piece. We talk about it in today's interview about the potential catastrophic tsunami slash earthquake that could hit the Pacific Northwest at any time. So when I found out that she had a new book coming out lost and found a memoir that grew out of her piece, Losing Streak in The New Yorker, which was later enthologized in the best American

essay. It's just an incredible piece of writing. It's about the loss of her father and then the new relationship and ultimately marriage that she has. And then having her first kid, this's a beautiful piece of writing. I was just so excited to have her on. And I always love talking to someone whose work isn't just something that just came out that I like, but actually influenced me and shapes my writing and being wrong adventures in the margin of error

was definitely that. And so we ended up having a great conversation. I was really excited to talk to her. You've almost certainly read things that she's written before. She's in a million anthologies of the best American writing. And just a fascinating thinker and human being. I was really excited to have this. I'm excited to bring it to you. Here is my interview with Catherine Schultz. You can check out her new book Lost and Found, which was published this year. And of course, your other book being wrong. The adventure is the margin of error. She's a native of Ohio. She lives in the eastern shore of Maryland. I think you're really going to like this interview.

You can go to her website at cathartonsholtz.com or follow her on Twitter at cathartonsholtz. Enjoy. I was reading your New York Times piece about book tour in this new world we're in. It is a bit anti-climactic. It's also so much better because you don't have to leave your house. I know it really is kind of all of the things that once,

you know, so much of life is, yeah, I mean, for me, in particular, I mentioned that in this piece, but I've got this amazing little five-month-old daughter. And I was stealing myself, you know, back in December to get on the plane and just leave her behind. But I admit that it's delightful. Most I miss like 10 minutes of bedtime or something. So I do feel lucky about a lot of it.

I was going to talk about that at the end, but I know now that I haven't left my kids for as much as I haven't left them over the last two years. I'm like, how did I do this all the time? And why did I do this all the time? And why did I do it all the time? I think it's like my old life is so incomprehensible to me, which is what I kind of think you were talking about in that piece a little bit.

Yeah, how old are your kids? I have a five year old and almost three year old. Oh gosh, fun. It's been crazy. Which is actually... Fun, chaotic. Yeah. That was what I was going to start with because I read your piece several years ago about the potential tsunami slash earthquake in Portland or in Oregon.

And all I feel like existential dread is something that you have thought about a lot as a result of that. And that's one of the feelings I think people have certainly experienced over the last two years. Because like when you when I read that piece, I mean, I took two lessons from it. One, don't live in Oregon as beautiful as it might be. But there are these massive sort of deliberately unexplored or under-considered existential risks to us as human beings, perhaps us as a species, climate change, pandemics, et cetera, that if one thinks too much about, you become paralyzed, but if you don't think about it all, you're incredibly

vulnerable to. So how do you think about that? Boy, that's a good question. I mean, it's kind of the big question. You know, in some ways, being a journalist is helpful because on the one hand, there's like an absolute mandate that you do think about it. You know, if you're going to write about this kind of stuff and it gives you at least the illusion of feeling like you're doing something useful with your thoughts, you know, they're

not just keeping you up at 3 a.m. They're keeping you up at 3 a.m. But then you're putting them on the page and hopefully maybe someone somewhere, you know, bolster house to the foundation and their family survives an earthquake or what have you. I have no illusions that we are nearly as powerful as we wish we were as journalists, but it's nice to feel like you're doing something. And you know, at the same time, I think it does kind of wards off despair not only because you feel like you're actively working towards some ends, but also because on some practical

level, you do have to go read and learn and think about something else. You guess I could have spent my life after that just working on seismic safety issues and I admire those who do. But for me, since that's not what I do, there is always something else to go think about. And life in the world are busy in full of things. So it's fun to go think about other things. But I am also, to be honest, just predisposed towards existential dread. So I think the deep answer is I'm just used to it. Right. Yeah, I think the pandemic brought for this phenomenon, which clearly existed before,

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

that could wipe out a good part of the northern Pacific or, yeah, climate change or whatever, we have this tendency to just sort of fixate on these massive dangers over which we have very little control. And it's almost like a form of torture slash entertainment. Yeah, I mean, I have tried really hard over the last several years to make a habit of not lying awake, worrying or sitting around and midday worrying without just getting up and doing something. This is not actually entirely practical all the time and I'm certainly not good at it all

the time, but at some point, you know, in 2016 when I did sort of, my father had just died, the world in general seemed like it was careening off and terrifying directions. And my propensity to lie awake worrying was also careening off in terrifying directions. And my propensity to lie awake worrying was also creating off and terrifying directions. And I just thought, I can't do this to myself. It's useless to the world. It's destructive to me. This is a silly way of coping.

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

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

it just accused them of making it up. I haven't quite figured that out either. Yeah, I mean, you and me both. I wish I had the novelistic abilities ascribed to the quote mainstream media. I wish I had this vast complicated web of conspiracies to control the world, but I'm not that creative. And like most of us, I just look around and try to learn from experts and figure out what's really going on. But yeah, I mean, denial is a really interesting thing, right? And it's obviously a very deep psychological response. And it obviously operates at every level from the personal to the collective and the political.

And it is a little shocking to live in an era where I feel like it is taking on incredibly broad-scale, communal and political shape. Not that it doesn't always exist there, to some extent. But I think if you'd asked me 15 years ago to talk about denial, I would have thought about primarily the kind of personal experiences of it, a reaction to grief, sort of sudden bad news, or just unwillingness. Maybe the Holocaust denial.

That was like the whole thing. Maybe the Holocaust, yes. Yes, sure. And yes, I do feel like sense then. We just, I mean, the Sandy Hook denial undid me, and we live in an era of so much right now, people who don't believe in the vaccines, people who don't believe in the vaccines, people who don't believe in climate change,

people who believe the election was stolen. I mean, it could go on and on. There's kind of no baseline empirical fact that someone isn't prepared to stand up and say, that's not true. And it's very difficult to live in a world that looks like that. And it's hard to extend charity towards others, which I do try very

hard to do when you feel like, are we on the same planet here? Yeah. No, it's weird too, because the ones you just mentioned, and I'm not sure if this was true in the past, but it's handy to be there was a handful of disparate conspiracy theories, you know, maybe you have someone who's a Holocaust denier, then you have someone over a year who doesn't believe the moon landing or whatever. But like the ones you just mentioned, they seem to all be the same percentage of, like, that, that, that is like a through line.

Like I, I just read a piece and it was sort of, it was specifically about the anti-vax movement, but it was basically that it's, it's too big to fail at this point. Like it, it's, it's not such a fringe group that it can be written off. It's having to be absorbed. Like when there's that many people who are into it, inevitably politically, culturally, et cetera, people will have to start to cater to it because it almost has a gravitational pull

because there's so many people. And it is strange how that denialism has become just almost a subculture of just like people who just reject information that is uncomfortable or in some way in dieting of the status quo. You know what I mean? I think that's what they all have in common is that to like if you accept them,

it creates some either the need for moral outrage or lifestyle change or political change, but if you reject them, then you just get to keep being who you are and you don't have to do anything. Yeah, which I'm terrified by the notion that suddenly, you know, we will start to see more and more people cater to what should by rights be fringe beliefs. I mean, to start to, we're obviously already seeing it, right? I mean, plenty of people who know better are endorsing absolutely wrong-headed and dangerous notions about, you know, the last presidential election about the vaccines, et cetera. And yeah, it's hard to see, it's hard to say the good way out of that, you know, because I don't think we can just

seed reality or seed our moral responsibility toward one another in the kind of craving name of, well, there's so many of them, you know, we can't just confront them, confront them head on or we'll lose their money or we'll lose their votes or we'll lose their respect or what have you. And I sort of feel like, well, we have none of those right now. You know, what is it you think you have to lose? That should not be the starting position. The starting position should be, we should be, you know, we actively advocate for what we believe in. Yeah, right. And that having to state and restate basic facts, that this is somehow a transgressive or even political act.

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

right, like it feels, because again, because by writing about it, you're essentially prompting people to do a thing. Like the conclusion is so obvious based on the information you're providing. And yet people really seem to just reject the idea of being prodded or that like it be implied that they should have to do or change or accept anything. Well, I'm very pleased to say I have not yet encountered, you know, a large battalion

of like tsunami truth or two don't believe this is going to happen. But I certainly take the broader point, which is it is, it's very, very hard to get people to change their mind. And I think actually one of the difficult jobs that all of us should be confronting is figuring out how to do a better job of that, because I don't really see the way of choice at this point. No, and I loved, I have your first book in hardcover, which I read when it came out. I loved it so much. I pulled it off the shelf and I could see all the notes that I took when I read it. I thought it was so great because it's a tricky thing, right? Even what we're talking about, the idea of doubt or asking questions is so essential. And yet,

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

I mean, believe me, Ryan, I have thought often and hard about what this book would look like if I had written it 10 years later. And I think the short answer is I probably wouldn't. You wouldn't have written it at all you think because it's too unstable aground. I mean, it, who knows, right? But I certainly, on the one hand, look, I absolutely stand by what I wrote in that book and I believe very deeply in epistemological humility, right? And endowed as a very healthy kind of posture towards the world and for that matter of the cosmos. And I believe, as I said a moment ago, I believe in trying to extend charity to people with

whom I disagree. So the kind of courtendants of this book still feel right to me and they still feel like me. On the other hand, you're absolutely right that I watched them get weaponized, you know, and I watched the position of that kind of humility and of extending charity start to feel, I think in the culture at large, but certainly within me, a little less and less tenable, if not intellectually, then certainly politically. There is a larger list today of things I'm confident that I'm right about, and other people

are wrong about, then there was, you know, when I wrote that book. And I don't think that's because I've become more arrogant over that time. I think it's because of what you and I were just describing, this increasing disconnect between reality and rhetoric, the increasing number of people who have been persuaded to abandon actually all the other tools I have to cater for in this book, you know, research, reason, science, empiricism, the deep humility, not the shallow one of like, well, I'm just wondering about things,

the deep doubt of, is this really how the world works? Not just the kind of doubt, kind of cynically student-by-politicians. And I, yeah, I don't know that I could advocate for, I'm sure I could, but I don't know that I would have spent four years of my life, let's say the last four years of my life, thinking about how to make peace with my own fallibility and the likelihood that I'm wrong in an atmosphere.

As important as I think that project is, in an atmosphere when a great number of people are telling me I'm wrong about things, I'm to be honest, quite confident, not wrong about. And nor are you. And nor are most of us, you know, who believe in ways of getting to the to the root of things. Well, that's what I think is interesting about it. Is it like you talking about there's more things you're certain about than you were in the past. It's almost as if because generally, let's say the over 10 windows was different or just like the stakes of the discussions were lower, it's like you didn't need to have an opinion on the thing, you didn't need to get to a place of certainty because generally reality had sort of coalesced around those things. And now that people are questioning the very fabric of the, it's like, it's like

how strong did your beliefs in liberal democracy need to be when everyone is more or less agreed that liberal democracy is a good thing? And then when people start to undermine the foundations of that thing, it forces you to go, hey, this is, this is, this is important, we can't take this for granted. So I wonder if part of it is just, we could be a little bit more epistemologically loose and flexible when we were all roughly on the same page. Now we're not even reading the same book. Sure, yeah, and I don't wanna pretend that there was some kind of harmonious past

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

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

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

know you could change your mind, right? And so, like what gaslighting does is exploit your very sort of good, good graces, right? And so, like, what gaslighting does is exploit your very sort of good, good graces, right? That's the really tricky part about it. I think about this like where people go on just asking questions, right? And it's like, yes, but are you asking questions because you want to get an answer or are you just asking questions because you're trying to so uncertainty? And so that trick, it's like, how do you respond to someone attempting to so uncertainty if not by becoming

a little bit more certain about the sort of first principles on which your life or society needs to be based. Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I guess listening to you, I'm realizing that actually my feelings about that book are slightly more complicated than I just suggested, because of course, the effect of feeling more certain about more things and more, like, more, more clear on the political and ethical importance of feeling certain about those things is that actually, of course, it means that there's a larger body of people than ever to whom I am inclined very strongly to recommend my book. I mean, obviously, I wish,

as ever, that people who disagreed with me were able to adopt these positions of sincerely questioning themselves, not the cynical, I'm just asking questions that you're referring to, but sincerely question why they believe what they do and the motives of people who are persuading them to do that and the company they're keeping and how they came to hold those beliefs. Of course, I wish that people held that and it feels of course deeply hypocritical

to feel that my own hold on that is loosening exactly at the moment that I want other people to embrace it further. And yet, to your point, I think that is kind of the plight of our current political moment because it does feel more important to me right now to stand up for what I believe than to question them. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a

superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. Well, in a way, I feel like it makes a book much more important and relevant, particularly if you're anyone with any sort of public platform or in some sort of knowledge business, because yeah, as a journalist, let's say, the stakes of what you're doing have never been higher. And so the tendency to see it as some sort of crusade or sort of moral act also makes you, you know, more likely to get it really wrong about certain things or to reject potentially disconfirming information. And so in a sense, like, you need that intellectual humility and self-awareness more than ever. So you know what to really be certain about and then what to question.

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

was the logistical constraint of like, what kind of masks use masks, and then there was the logistical constraint of what kind of masks were available, and then there was as the variants changed, the efficacy of them changes through time. And so how do you maintain a general consistent belief in something that the studies seem to largely support, but then also be flexible inside of it like as to what kind of mask works, how effective it is under this variant or that variant. This is like graduate level stuff

that we are asking people who maybe don't even have a high school education to wrap their heads around. Yeah, I think it's incredibly complex. And I certainly think you're right that actually it is a moment that calls on us to think a lot about even, I stand by this sense of actually right now we need to be standing up for our beliefs,

but those are, as you said, kind of the core tenets, the really indispensable things without which we kind of lose our moral ground floor. But obviously, above and beyond that, there's sort of we are confronted with endless information right now and this struggle to make sense of what's accurate and what's useful. And sometimes those things are kind of pitted against each other in unfortunate ways. And yeah, the mass situation is a great example. You know, I do think great example. I do think it's been a long, strange road to the pandemic. And I think part of, and again, here's a place where I really stand by the book, you know, as the

kind of illiberalism has cracked into our culture and our politics further and deeper. I do think there's been a kind of liberal closing of ranks, and there do become certain things you're not supposed to question, and certain things you just sort of obviously nod your head along with. I think that's dangerous as well, you know, and I think you're absolutely right to think that something political was happening when we were initially told not to wear masks. And I'm upset about it to this day.

I think it cost a lot of lives, to be honest. Totally. And I don't think it was done in sincerity. I think it was done in the face of very, you know, a very complicated moment in the pandemic. And I don't think anyone was out to kill anyone. But I certainly don't think it was science and public health at their finest. And it continues to be really complicated that way.

Should elementary school kids be wearing masks? Should we be closing schools? Should we be keeping kids out for 10 days at a time to figure out whether they're actually contagious or not? I mean, these are really, really hard questions. And it is interesting, you know, there's a lot of, as ever, there's a lot of passion on both sides of them, sometimes unward from what feels to me, like, both the facts of the matter

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

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

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

Yeah. And just because something is confusing, doesn't mean you can't make educated guesses or there aren't sort of safe enough assumptions you can make? And so I think that's really also what's tricky is, is it's like we're so confused, there's so much information, and then so many people acting in bad faith

to muddy the waters even further. People are just like, well, I don't know. So I'm just gonna go with whatever inconveniences me less. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess my feeling about this is I have an instinctive dislike of the throw up your hands response. And yet, and yet I have a lot of sympathy. And I do the that's the moment where I feel like actually the useful expenditure of time is not in trying to help, you know, 10 million separate people work their way through the zone of misinformation. It's in dealing with the bad actors, right? Dealing with the bad faith and trying to kind of write the civic ship, because you will never kind of person by person, I don't think, be able to solve this problem. I think it

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

And actually, as it happens, Upton Sinclair wrote this expose of journalism in the 1900s, right, like right after he wrote the jungle. And he was sort of talking about, you basically just information, just like the food system or the environment or whatever is a public good, right? It's owned by private companies, but it's a public sphere. And when you have people who are poisoning it

or abusing their rights to that parkland or idea or water or whatever it is, you have to stop that because it ruins it for everyone. And I do think we have people who are effectively poisoning the aquifer that we all drink from. And some of us have the education or just frankly the free time to figure things out, to do our own research in the actual sense of what that phrase means. And then other of us, because we're old, because we don't have, we don't even have a computer, we just read stuff on Facebook when we're, you know, working our hourly job at a cash register, you know, it's impossible for us to sort through that. And those are the people who I think

get poisoned the most by these bad actors. Yeah, I mean, I think that metaphor of poisoning the intellectual aquifer is exactly right. And obviously it's a really long, slow, often unsuccessful battle to go after even the people poisoning the literal aquifer. So it's not that I have high hopes of this turning around quickly,

but I think it's where we have to direct our collective attention. Yeah, that's right. And then I think, again, to go to your point, you look at the existential dread of tsunami, what do you do? You know, it's like, go help one person, right? Like, go help one, one, your aunt, who really was just asking questions or was confused, just call her up and go, look, here's, let me walk you through this because I'm going to stop

one person from propagating it. You know what I mean? I think all we can do is really start at that like super small level. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, sure, I'll qualify what I said. I think absolutely we have to figure out how to kind of stop the poisoners of the aquifer, but it doesn't mean that we should let people around us just keep drinking from it, willy nilly, you know. Yes.

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

Okay. So if you don't know anything about the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which there's no reason you would, I didn't before I moved down here. But, you know, it's the part of Maryland that really reminds you that all of Maryland is south of the Mason-Dixon line. It is, it's much more identified culturally and politically with the south and with the north.

It is part of it have become very, very affluent in the last two decades, but it's historically an agricultural and a kind of water-based economy. It's very rural and working class. And you know, it's, you're absolutely right about having the hard conversations. You know, we have, we have very dear family members, my partner and I, who we've had to just down and say, no, you know, the vaccines aren't a hose, hoax. You know, yes, the virus is real. Here's why you can't come meet our baby until or unless you,

you know, get vaccinated and wear a mask. And, and you're absolutely right. I mean, those feel important. And I've in some cases been persuasive and that's very heartening to me, you know. And I, I don't think we can abandon those kinds of one-on-one conversations at all. But they're tough.

And I admire, it's interesting, my I regard my partner as vastly kind of morally braver than I am. And she literally talked our neighbors into taking down the confederate flag in front of their house, which I thought was a fool's errand to be perfectly honest. And that's a great example. Like, I wrote off. I wrote off someone I shouldn't have written off, you know, and in fact, you know, they did. First, they just moved it to the back area, but that actually felt like an improvement. And then it came down entirely.

And it was a little reminder of, right, actually, we do have to have the hard conversations. And we do have to share our values aloud because how else are we ever going to make them compelling and help them just spread? Well, and that obligation, obviously, we're all neighbors, so we all have that, but it's commasured to what you, what you have access to as part of your profession. Like I was reading Michael Lewis's book on the pandemic, which is really good, the ammunition. And like, I didn't know that the Priscilla Zuckerberg, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute funded a lot

of the really early pandemic research that probably saved tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. So you're like, oh, this is great. Here they are. They're very wealthy. They're spending money on this thing to start this pandemic. And then you're like, but also this guy wakes up every day and goes to work at a place that could actively change the way this information is being spread.

But then sort of goes, of course, we have no ability to do that. So it's always interesting, I think, to how we decide to see what our obligations are. It's having the tough conversations with your neighbor. And then it's also like, well, what power or influence do you have in society? And do you take those steps there too, I think? Yeah, absolutely.

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

in the sense that some of the people I know who actually help their neighbors and families the most and actually have committed most to genuine social change actually have like, you know, very little and everything to lose. So I do think we're often a little prone to underestimating our power, which I get, right? You know, it's very hard to feel powerful in the face of these incredibly sweeping forces. On the other hand, and it's discouraging to feel powerful and then be reminded a million times a day that you aren't in all kinds of ways. On the other hand, it does actually seem ultimately better, not only practically, but also emotionally than feeling impotent.

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

about how like change and what are obligations to each other where that actually is. Yeah, so interesting. I mean, so I said I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and one really remarkable thing about the Eastern Shore of Maryland is that it gave us, I mean, so I said I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and one really remarkable thing about the Eastern Shore of Maryland is that it gave us, I think, two of the greatest American patriots of all time. It gave us Harriet, Tugman, and Frederick Douglass. So I thought a lot about the Underground Railroad.

I live near various kind of obviously early southern stops on it, but... Yeah, I mean, look, on the one hand, I think it's incredibly wonderful that we, as a culture, more and more identify with our best histories and our best stories and our bravest acts. And there's a part of me that takes heart in the desire of everyone to believe that, you know, Grandma's house was on the underground railroad or, you know, great grandpa participated in it or all this, you know, the kind of the kind of claiming of it. Because I think it's a beautiful thing, you know, it suggests we want to be on the side of the

angels, right? We want to be on the side of freedom and liberation. And we want to feel once history has shown us the way, we want to feel that we always would have known it. And I admire and want to nurture in all of us the impulse to be aligned with what we regard as good and right. What's very tricky, of course, is that, I mean, first of all, or just as a kind of practical matter, the underground railway was a, you know, a very small collection of extraordinarily brave individuals.

Many of them, African-American, and not just the kind of white folks along the way, who I think of by and large gotten a lot more other than Harriet Tubman have gotten a lot more attention. But more than that, more than the kind of overblown sense of how large the phenomenon was and thus the sense that everyone could kind of claim a piece of it, which is universal, I should say. I mean, everyone in France thinks their relatives were part of the French resistance. I was just gonna mention that.

It's like less than five. It's like the country is literally overrun by the Nazis. And less than five percent of the population was like, I object, you know, like I'm gonna do something about this. Yeah, but you know, it's troubling to me because, right, so the exact same thing was true here, right, you know, I mean, slavery was not sustained in place for as long as it was by, you know, a handful of vicious individuals. It was an incredibly widespread and institutionalized system. And it was aided and abetted enormously by the North, which

often likes to take a moral pass for these days. And I guess what's troubling to me is, if you think that you would have been a part of the Underground Railroad, look around today and tell me, you know, what's the unbelievably brave, in fact, you know, livelihood-wisking, life-wisking thing you are doing on behalf of what you believe to be right. Because, you know, unless if you're not doing that, you would not have been a part of the Underground Railroad.

But one of the scariest things you possibly could have done, right? One of the most viscous things you possibly could have done. And as ever, very few people have that kind of moral courage. And I think it's a, again, I think on the good side, I think it's a beautiful thing to aspire to be our best selves. But I think it has to come hand in hand with a reckoning of like, well, it doesn't really matter who you think you would have been, what matters is who are you, you know, and what are you at? Today.

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

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

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

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

I think that's what's so interesting about these forces is that it's not even a defensive sort of conservative energy. I don't mean that in the political sense. I mean that in the preserving of the status quo, it's often an aggressive outward energy. Like, the myth we tell ourselves about the Civil War is that slavery was just this thing that always existed. No, slavery was an aggressive, expansive power that was attempting not just to be what it was, but to dominate everything. Like Lincoln doesn't even have

to campaign on Lincoln's transgressive act. Wasn't the eradication of slavery. It was just like no more. Like let's not let it be bigger than it is. And so I think so overwhelming, whether we're talking about some of the pandemic stuff or some of these civil rights issues is that you're not the mob. Is it just this thing resisting change, but often driving change. Or do you know what I mean? That it's this overwhelming force

that we get caught up in. And I think that dark energy is, it's ever-present and it moves from issue to issue. And you've got to ask yourself, are you in it or are you resisting? Yeah, I mean, believe me, it's interesting you bring up prop eight and gay marriage and gay rights in general.

I think about it all the time. I am gay married, you know? And I, and you know, it's funny like this new book of mine, part of it, a full third of it is basically a love story. It's about, it's about the families that basically a love story. It's about the families that make us, but it's also about the families that we make. I have thought a lot about how remarkable it is that I could write a book like this right now. And that in fact, it is in by and large and certainly in the kind of circles that are talking about books and

buying books, it's not even being received, somehow miraculously, it's no longer even being received, it's like a lesbian memoir, it's a love story, which it is. And a grief story and many other things, but I'm really mindful of how tenuous that situation is, how recently it was won. I mean, I'm shocked all the time and heartened in good ways by, when I despair about political change, I think about gay rights, right?

Because actually they happen with, with shocking speed, which is all more amazing because you're right to point out that it was never just a, you know, a kind of new right we carved out and gained. It was a, there was a, and remains, a very active, very of a tuperative in that case, and in most cases, very powerful force trying to oppose it. You know, and, and I've no illusions that that couldn't research at any point in time.

I mean, we're looking at a moment, obviously, when another very hard fought right, the right of a woman to control the most fundamental choices about her body and her future seems extraordinarily tenuous and very likely to be rolled back and to be fought all over again. So yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, for many of us, you know, these are not... For some people, you know, there is a kind of a move to these rights and we want to live

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

And, you know, it's a, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,. And, you know, it's a... Right, the idea that just a few years ago, like you might not have been able to be on the same healthcare plan, like how it comprehensively banal that is and outwardly evil at the same time. Or on the birth certificate, which, you know, is in some ways, in a kind of practical day to day,

or really like month by month considering how we pay the bills. Like it's less important in a certain sense to be on the birth certificate, but I can tell you, having been there in the hospital, it's not emotionally less important. It's not psychologically less important to feel like, from minute one, I was this baby's mother. And yeah, you know, these are these are hard fought rights and it is, you know, I guess I feel

so grateful I really do feel like I've lived at a very fortunate time in all kinds of ways and now that I feel a little bit less that way, it's galvanizing. I feel like I owe it to my daughter and to others to help them feel that they live in fortunate times as well. Well, maybe that, yeah, there's that sort of myth at the end of the Cold War that we were at the end of history. And then sort of everything was heading

in not in a progressive direction, again, politically, but that we were the sort of fundamental battles over right and wrong or rights inherent and alieable rights were sort of over. And then it's like, no, not even close, not even close, and that one has a sort of moral obligation to participate in that. Because yeah, if you've ever met a single person who these things affect, you realize these aren't just like abstract markers in a culture war, but things that affect like actual human beings. And you meet someone who, again, you can have whatever squeamish or, you know, thoughts you want to have about, say,

like pro-life or pro-choice. And then like meet someone who was not able to get an abortion that felt, you know, they need, like just feel the weight of that. And it suddenly not becomes not such a black and white thing. Yeah, I mean, I, we talked earlier about the importance of conversations with individuals. And I do think a deep and tragic disconnect in our culture is, is, is the way

we are, I think quite deliberately, separated from people of other backgrounds, people of other means, people of other life experiences and all kinds of ways. And it's a corrosive force. It's hard to understand poverty if you have never lived anywhere near poverty. It's hard to understand the exigencies of healthcare if you've never had to worry about whether you yourself or maybe you're frustrated by, you know, Blue Cross Blue Shield or whatever,

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

Yes. Right. And I think to go back to your point about understanding history, I think to understand that picture of those people screaming at Ruby bridges or whatever. And then of course to realize that Ruby bridges is like 65 years old right now. Right. Right. Do you want to understand how recent it is? Sure. And then of course to realize that Ruby Bridges is like 65 years old right now. Right. Do you want to understand how recent it is? But like when you, when you get, like, like, I remember reading about the civil rights movement

that there was a Kennedy was, he's in the middle of arguing whether it's the, I forget which governor it is, but let's say Mississippi or Alabama. He goes, he suddenly understands the civil war from a different perspective. He's like, oh, this is that energy. He's like, obviously, we're not fighting about literal slavery anymore, but this is that energy that Lincoln was dealing with and that Grant was dealing, this is that energy. And I think, you know, my experience, you know, dealing with some of that sort of dark internet energy in the last couple years has then informed how I understand that picture

of those people screaming at that child, you go, oh, this makes sense to me, like not that it's right, but you're like, I see who I know, I have touched that energy, you know, in a modern context. And it's terrifying. It's terrifying. Yes. Yes, what it is. Yeah. modern context and it's terrifying. Yes, it's what it is.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very, it's very, very scary to confront what you're calling that dark energy, which to be honest, I think is often truly hatred in a way that's so uncomfortable to confront. And, you know, I said part of this new book is a love story. Part of it is also kind of an allergy to my father who died in 2016. And my dad was a refugee to this country. He was born in Tel Aviv back when he was still part of Palestine to a Polish mother, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, she had 12 siblings and 11 of the 12 of

them and her parents all died in Auschwitz. And my family on that side was kind of kicked around the globe by the combined forces of poverty and genocide and political instability into my dad's fund. They want to be Detroit as a very young teenager, 12, 13. And I grew up with a sense of this is real in the world, right? The desire to literally exterminate a people. This exists, you know, and it's terrible thing to have to confront as a child or as anyone. I mean, I think a lot about actually how unearthly I'm ever going to teach

my incredibly cheerful, precious, beautiful little daughter about truths like these because they're terrifying. About the darkness. About the darkness. And yet it's there and it's ultimately much scarier, certainly as a species, if not as individuals, if we fail to confront it. And it's shocking to me every time it incarnates itself in some new form or in some old form. I mean, anti-Semitism is obviously on the rise globally. I slightly optimistic, I don't generally believe that progress is irreversible and history always marches forward towards better times. But I thought slightly that the days of widespread, the tuperative anti-queer energy was largely behind us. And I've been proven wrong about that too.

Although, again, I feel grateful every day that it's not the kind of real animosity and violence that it once was. But yeah, in all of these forums, we are, the present reminds us every day that it's actually a part of history and that we're living through it. And it rattles. It's very terrifying. Chains in our faces all the time. And I think, you know, I guess, I guess we should embrace the part of ourselves that thinks we would be part of the underground railroad because God knows we need as many

people as we can to stand up and say, I want to be on the right side this time. Have you read Chromic McCarthy's The Road? Funny you should ask. So I have a policy with respect to Chromic McCarthy. I mean, one novel every 10 years because I swear to you that's like as much as I can take. I mean, you did my ear actually. I really take. I'm a huge admirer, actually. I think he's incredibly gifted and both

literally, I think he writes incredible sentences and also kind of as a visionary, although let's all hope his vision is not the only one. But no, I most recently read Bloodmoody and I'm only like two and a half years into my 10-year-stand, which I'm slightly exaggerating about, but somehow I'm the last person in America not to have read the road even though I understand exactly why I should. I think I read it, I reread it at the beginning of the pandemic, which was both a good and a terrible idea, because I read it before I had kids. It was much back in the lyrics, and it was at the beginning of the pandemic, yes. Yeah, and I remember I just,

I went into my son's room when he was asleep and I just sort of broke down weeping. But like, you know, in the book he talks about, and obviously that, we talk about dark energy, that's the culmination of the dark energy that sort of destroys the world. But the beautiful sort of theme in the book is they talk about carrying the fire.

The fire being like, are you one of the good guys, or are you one of the bad guys? And I suppose that the myth we tell ourselves about the underground railroad, if there's any productive part to it, it's the idea that like they were carrying the fire just as, you know,

the insert whatever heroic group from whatever generation that you wanna celebrate, you know, they insert whatever heroic group from whatever generation that you want to celebrate, they were carrying the fire, just as the freedom writers were carrying the fire, just as the gay rights activists were carrying the fire, just as the scientists who invent the vaccine are carrying the fire, that it's all sort of part of this,

procession of torches towards keeping that goodness alive despite the darkness. And there's something I do think there's something about having kids that reminds you not just of the necessity of that, but your obligation as a parent to light that within them or to not extinguish it within them, because that's the only hope for humanity. Yeah, I mean, it's been much on my mind, both because of my daughter and because

I really did try to wrestle in this new book with how we live with the inevitability of loss and grief and with suffering and devastation of all kinds on every scale, you know, tsunamis, genocides, pandemics, as well as the kind of private, the private devastations of losing people we love and kind of landed on the place of believing in the importance of caretaking, you know, of being the watchmen and the watch women of our communities and of our generations because it's all we can do, you know, is try to protect those around us and the world around us and kind of pass it along in the best condition we can. But it's, you know, it's painful. It's sad and scary at various times.

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

in a toxic way also. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, yes, I have spent a lot of the last, you know, call it five years now, thinking about grief. The book is called Lost and Found, and the whole first part, Lost, is very explicitly about grief and to be honest it then kind of runs continuously as a theme to the rest of it in various ways. And you know, it's interesting. I think you're diagnostically right. I think we are

we are grieving society right now. I think that's been wildly exacerbated and actually also made wildly tragically literal in the pandemic, but I think you're right that that was true beforehand. We have this language of deaths of despair, and I think there is a lot of despair in our culture right now. I think, yes, collapse of industries, yes, opioid crisis. I think also the unraveling of a lot of institutions that kept people supported and kept them in a community or at least under someone's watchful eye. And I don't want to suggest that was a paradisical time either. There were real problems to living under the close scrutiny of one another. And yet, I do think that we have we have fred apart in all kinds of ways and left ourselves exposed to terrible grief. And the thing about grief is it's very lonely.

It's lonely even when you're lucky, like me, right? I mean, I was lucky in every way in the kind of grief I'm documenting in the book. I make a very strong point of making it clear that my father's death was not a tragedy. It was incredibly sad to me. He was an amazing person, but he was 74 years old. I had a remarkable life and died. I hope it peace and certainly surrounded by the people he loved. So it was, you know, basically a good death in so far as there is such a thing. But what's shocking, of course, is that even with all of that going for him and even with everything I have going for me, which is every imaginable kind of privilege and comfort, you know, a partner, a great job, financial resources, health care at your point, it was still unmooring and devastating. And it's tough to cope with grief and tougher with every single resource you take away,

assembling a partner, a way to pay your next bill. It becomes, it magnifies its force. It will take over any part of your life that you allow it to. And it is lonely, even if many other people are mourning in the same way you are. It's a very private experience and it's not shared. And I think that as a culture,

it's one thing to talk about what to about a private grief, you know, and there's a huge proliferation of books and podcasts and therapists and so on, that will help you navigate the loss of someone you love. Down to every level, especially if you lost the sibling, if you lost the partner, if you lost the parent. All of which I think is wonderful. And I'm not at all disverting it.

I think it's great that we're trying to support people in these ways. But just very little written about what to do about just the problem of loss in general, about an unward culture about what happens when you lose your father, but also your job, you know, or, you know, when your community is undone by some kind of mass event, you know, like an earthquake or like a tsunami. We don't have good means for dealing with that kind of grief. And you often see that see a kind of brief coming together

in the face of real crisis, which is a beautiful thing. We saw it when everyone in New York cheered first responders at seven o'clock every day, and there was this sense of kind of resurgent faith in humanity. We love each other, we support each other. And then here we are, two years into a pandemic, and our first responders are woefully underpaid,

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

I think that's right. Slightly more cheerful, though, as we wrap up. I was reading about your sister, who's a childhood development expert, right? How is having that in the family shaped your thinking about raising? Is it a son or daughter? How have you thought about raising your kid in light of the wealth of knowledge you have access to? Or do you just tune it out entirely? That is such a funny question. Yes, my sister is a professor of cognitive science at MIT. She's brilliant and incredible with kids. Actually coming to visit again pretty soon,

because you can't stay away from her in Lulise much to my delight. Do I think about it? I mean, I guess occasionally I've called my sister and said, like, can you explain why my daughter is like, absolutely obsessed with this like insane stuffed peacock. Someone gave us that I was about to donate, but now it's like, she loves it so much.

We joke that it's her babies that are coastal steried in for 20 hours. So I've occasionally reached out to her about things like that, but to be honest, mostly what I value in my sister is, and I think this is probably why she got into the field, not a consequence of her being into the field, not a consul going to for being in the field. She just loves kids and she's amazing with them. So mostly,

I think of her and her personal capacity as my sister and my baby's aunt more than I do as a as a in her scientific capacity, although I I also find the kind of unfurling of a consciousness and the unfurling of a self to be just the most fascinating thing to watch in the whole world. So I do have all kinds of questions about it and I'm sure that as my daughter gets older, I will test her my sister about them relentlessly. It does, it does feel you're talking in your New York Times piece about so we have the grief of what we've lost. But one of the, one of the things we can focus on is what we gain in what we go through and it struck me at some point.

I've traveled a little bit now for some stuff and then it seemed like it's closed again. Like you at all, it always seems like, right, there's a book is about to come out. That's when suddenly all the things get closed down again. But I realized that I did 500 consecutive bedtime like in person and realizing that I'll probably never get that again in my life. And probably had never, even before I had kids, I'd never gone 500 days without getting on an airplane, probably in my whole life, right?

And just, it's like inside the trauma and the loss of all of it, there is also the time that we've gotten that you ordinarily would be on a plane away from your kid not there, because work is also important. And now you've got to do it in a different way. Yeah, I mean, look, there's a reason I landed on this like very everyday title lost and found for this book. I, it's incredible what we discover. Sometimes without even knowing it was missing from our lives.

You said this beautiful thing before we got on that you can't even understand why you weren't doing this before. And it's true. I mean, yeah, the pandemic has been full of losses of every kind, including one that's pertaining to my daughter. I like parents everywhere. I have thought a lot about what isn't as know, to what extent she can, you know, go play at her aunt's house or, you know, is it safe for my elderly mother to get on an airplane and come visit? And how do I keep her safe and the baby safe? And, you know, there's been a lot of confusion and anxiety around it all,

but you're absolutely right, that also I just, I met her side all the time, and I put her to bed every night and and I'm there when she wakes up every morning and it does feel like a tremendous gift and you know for good or ill, I think a lot of what is very difficult in life is often conjoined to something incredibly beautiful or failing that incredibly meaningful and conversely much of what we love and cherish most in life reminds us of how fragile it is and how precious it is. So I do think we're always living with both at once. Yeah, that's what I found to be. As you said, it's a very simple title, but there is a profundity to it because yeah, what you lose presents often the opportunity to find something else. And, you know, or at the very least,

what did you learn from what you lost, whether it was gratitude or appreciation or whatever? Yeah, even just, like, okay, sure. We haven't been able to do these things. We also haven't gotten sick as a family in two years, which, as you know, is just like a reality of having kids. It's like, oh my god, this is so nice. I couldn't be like this all the time.

We got a cold a couple of months ago, and it was just like, this is terrible. We used to do this all the time like once a month. We all just collectively accepted that that the The the downside of working in an office or going to daycare was that we we all were debilitated with the flu once every 30 days. I mean this is madness Yeah, I mean, I am slightly starting to wonder how at what point does it become actually bad for my baby that she hasn't had a cold yet, but but I'm not quite motivated to go out and, you know, expose us to heaven knows what yet to, you know, put an end of that situation. But I hear you. of the mass thing was like, I remember a couple years ago, I got mono, probably on an airplane. And, you know, I would just come in from the disgusting airport around these disgusting strangers and just breathe all over these people without a thought to, you know, how one's

actions affect anyone else. And so I have thought about that. I do hope for some of us, clearly not all of us, but one of the, one of the upsides, one of the things we should find from this is a greater consideration for like how our choices affect other people, especially kids. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so complicated because on the one hand,

I mourn the era in which we all just mingle with one another on the subway, you know, at daycare, wherever it may be, without feeling like a danger to one another, you know, to me that's been another real cost of the pandemic, is the sense that other people are somehow impariling us because I think that's a very, that's a very grim and dangerous place to inherit. No, it's literally anti-social. It is literally anti-social, right? And yet, do I share your sense that there are lessons to be gleaned from how we've all

had to live these last couple of years? Yeah, absolutely. I think that it was fascinating to watch people make happen in three months, what allegedly just was impossible. It's been very snowy. I'm sure you heard it's like there's kind of a snow storm all up and down the east coast. My sister-in-law is a special ed teacher. And they had a snow day yesterday. No wait, today, sorry, it's this other pandemic problem. I've lost her attack of time in Terrily.

They had a snow day today. But we've been through that. That's also having a five month old though. That's also having a five month old for sure. Actually, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's like parenthood and what's the pandemic. It is sometimes unclear. But you know, they had a story.

It wasn't safe to get into school. But you know what, they did not lose another day of instruction because this time they sent the kids home with the computers they'd been learning on anyway, which is it ideal? No. But do you want kids to lose more learning time after all this time? No. So, you know, there is, I do think there, there are kinds of modifications to society. Some of them for the worst, but some of them for the better. And I hope

the ones for the better do emerge and tack out of this. Yeah, a lot lost and found. It's beautiful how that works out. Yeah, you know, I, beautiful is, is where I hope we can kind of ultimately sit with it. I know it's, it's many more things than that. And, and I never want to diminish the kind of grief we've all been through these last couple of years, not to mention just the kind of grief life doles out in general. But I, I try to inhabit the posture of feeling profoundly lucky to be here, kind of no matter what's happening,

and to recognizing that the grief is actually connected to my abundant love of people, and of this planet, and of the cosmos, and the human experience with large. So, yeah, I like to think I land on beauty and joy at the end of the day. Well, then yeah, to go to your point about your relatives, obviously no one chooses to go through those terrible events. But then, because people are resilient, those events change and transform them in a way

that again, they would never have chosen and shouldn't have to go through, but you know, when you talk to, now when I would talk to relatives who fought in World War II, or lived through the Depression, it wasn't a, oh, it was the worst thing that ever happened. My life was never the same. Everything was meaningless and awful afterwards, right? These events shaped who they became and what they taught to their children and to their grandchildren and, you know, hopefully, hopefully, I think this idea that this was

like purely bad or purely a deprivation for children, strikes me as also the wrong way to think about it because it was also an opportunity to teach them so many things. Provided, you know, you didn't get sucked into the dark energy we were talking about, but your children can also emerge from this hopefully better and stronger and wiser and more connected just as we can hopefully emerge from it that way. Yeah, I mean, I tend lightly always with the notion

that our suffering will somehow be redeemed, which I think is, you know, partly from growing up with a grandmother who had endured the kind of suffering that is actually irredeemable and that in every possible respect impoverished her life rather than making it deeper or more meaningful. So I'm mindful it's easy to be glue-bonded that theme and yet it's a mistake to let go of that theme entirely because of that sort of that scale of tragedy. Obviously, we learn from our pain and our suffering and our loss. And it's right and beautiful. We want to try to make it something other than pain.

And that takes our own agency and our own work to make it matter to our lives and to acquire some kind of value or something that we can pass on or use to just kind of do better in whatever sense in our day to day life. So, yeah, I absolutely think that our losses do sometimes teach us incredibly valuable lessons. It's, you know, it's never not complicated. Certainly, I think the generation of school children who lost so much socially and intellectually these last couple of years, and especially those who were already in a precarious place with respect

to schooling, whether by how well supported their schools were or by whatever special learning needs they themselves had, it's not been pretty, you know, and they deserved better. But I know what you mean, you know, I, my, we all know people or know of people who were of the, the last generation of pandemic, you know, much has been written about the 1918 flu. I guess we don't really all know people from then, but or the greatest generation of this kind of thing, you know, obviously there is a narrative that is about strength and resilience and redemption. And as I said, it's easy to lean too hard on that or to kind of fastly decide like, oh,

well, it's all, what doesn't really make you stronger, right? Which I don't actually think is necessarily the case. Sometimes it just creeps you. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But, you know, there's a reason I got to just an exploring the category of loss, right? Because I do think that our, our large losses can teach us about our small ones and our small ones can teach us about our large ones and all of them in some ways can teach us, even when the lessons are painful and not strictly speaking redemptive, they, they can teach us a our large ones and all of them in some ways can teach us even when the lessons are painful and not strictly speaking redemptive. They can teach us a lot about what it means to be human because that is one of the very fundamental conditions of being human.

You're going to lose a lot of things including in the end your life and you do have to figure out how to live with that and how to live meaningfully with that. Well, yeah, it's like one of the inevitability of suffering in human life as created are uniquely human ability to, if not make that event meaningful, derive some meaning from those experiences. And in fact, that's kind of all we can do given how powerless we are over, you know,

most of what happens to us. Yeah, exactly. And also, loss, although inevitable, and I'm the present, is seldom, I should not say seldom, but it is certainly not always an unmixed experience or the dominant experience. I mean, there are, you know, from my last book right I wrote about I wrote about being wrong I'm drawn to these abstract categories of human experience, you know Yeah, what's it like to air? That's interesting. Well, I you know loss is an abstract category of human experience We all lose endless things of insane range of things car keys, you know elections fathers But we also find a really strange range of things also, you know, our

parties back again, you know, but also faith and a sense of self and a career and someone to love and me and joy, exactly. And I do like to think that these categories are really really intimately related to each other and that they do help us make sense of what it means to be alive and what it means to be mortal in a universe defined by entropy and by things falling apart and leaving us in all kinds of ways. So yeah, I think, I mean, you heard me say, I air when I can on the side of joy and on the side of meaning, even in these really grievous losses, because I think it's kind of the best and only thing we can do. Well, beautifully sad, it was an honor to talk, and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom in these books. Thank you so much for having me out,

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