Thomas Chatterton Williams: But what’s so insidious about that, Mark, is that many of the people making these arguments were on behalf of the oppressed under the white power structure, were themselves not black, were themselves allies. White liberals who would never ever accept that for their own kids. They would never want their kids to not take seriously preparing for standardized exams because what should happen is that there should be no admission standards. They would always make sure that their kids could meet the standards. So what they’re advocating for in terms of how other people raise their children is actually on the level of child abuse.

Mark Oppenheimer: Hey friends, this is Mark Oppenheimer, and I’m back with you for another episode of Arc: The Podcast. We are the audio version of the magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et cetera, which is online at arcmag.org. And all of this is a production of the John Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU in St. Louis. It’s so good to be back with you if you are one of our loyal listeners, and there’s a growing number of you.

You probably noticed that we didn’t give you an episode two weeks ago. We tried to be biweekly, we had been biweekly, and then we failed to be biweekly. The fault is all mine. It’s summertime, and I got distracted by swimming and parenting, being a dad, and being a dad, not just to kids, but to dogs and to a cat. Actually, since I like leveling with my listeners, I’ll tell you that about three weeks ago, one of our dogs, our beloved Minnie, Minerva McGonagall Oppenheimer was her full name, but she was Minnie, was hit by a car, and it was sort of my fault.

There was a workman in our backyard doing some stuff and at the end of the day, he left, and he left one of the gates to our backyard fence open, and I didn’t think to close it. I mean, easy oversight, right? You don’t think when a workman leaves at the end of the day that gates are left open at the far back end of your backyard, but they can be. And then in the middle of the night, one of our dogs wanted to get out to go pee, and I let them both out and then I noticed that 10 minutes later they hadn’t come back in, which was weird. And so then I walked out into the yard using my phone flashlight and found that the back gate was open. Both of the dogs had wandered off. The older one, Archie, who’s almost 14 years old and quite decrepit, had not gone far and soon wandered back in, but Minnie was gone and I drove around the neighborhood, it was pitch black, I couldn’t find her.

I went to bed thinking maybe she’ll find her way home in the morning, which she does. She’s escaped before and always finds her way home. And in the morning she wasn’t back. And this was scary, in part because there’d been a lot of chatter in our local neighborhood about a family of coyotes that has taken up residence in Edgewood Park near our house, and so I had these fears of her being torn apart in the middle of the night by coyotes.

As it happened, later in the morning a neighbor texted me and said that he thought that he saw Minnie at the side of the road having been hit by a car. And I walked around and sure enough, that’s what I found around the block. She had a good life. She was about seven years old. We got her to try to placate our children when they were mad at us because we were having another baby. And so we said, look, will you forgive us for having another child if we get you a puppy? And they said yes.

And this of course was kind of a win. We liked babies and puppies, so we got a new baby and a new dog, and Minnie was just the best. He especially liked sitting with our daughter, Anna, on the big chair, the double wide chair. It’s like a chair and a half, not quite a loveseat. And Anna would read and she’d hold a book in one hand and she would have her other hand on Minnie’s head, and it was very sweet. And I miss it.

That’s not why we didn’t do a podcast two weeks ago. It’s just another explanation of all that’s going on. Anyway, it’s good to be back with you, good to be in your ears wherever you are driving, or at the gym, or at the pool, or just taking a walk, hopefully with your dog.

This week on the podcast, we have my old, I wouldn’t say friend, people drop that word too much. I mean, we’ve only been in person together twice and we email once or twice a year. But my very friendly acquaintance Thomas Chatterton Williams, he’s the author of one of my favorite memoirs called “Losing My Cool.” You should absolutely go read it. It’s one of the great books on how literature can change your life. It’s about his discovering books and ideas as an interracial teenager. And then college student, he has a new book out called “The Summer of Our Discontent,” which we’re going to talk about.

But before we get to that, I want to say something about eccentricity, which is kind of an obsession of mine. I’m not very eccentric, I’m kind of the definition of a normie almost. I think I’m pretty bland. I might take squareness to extremes, but I do have a soft spot for eccentrics. And I think that one of the great things about America is that historically we’ve been a safe space for eccentrics, probably more so than England, or contemporary Hungary, or communist Russia. America is a place where you can to, greater and lesser extents, let your freak flag fly.

When I was in college, there was a student, a girl maybe two years behind me, maybe three, who wore these dresses that had bouse. I want to say that they’re somehow renaissance oriented and they had a lot of klin and a lot of material. And on hot days, you thought, oh my God, she must be sweltering. And she also had a little plushy octopus, a little stuffed stuffy animal, not real, but like a teddy bear, but an octopus that was somehow on a rope that hung down from her waist and it was her octopus and whatever she wore. She also had the octopus with her. And anyone who was at Yale in, say the late nineties or mid- to late-nineties, I think she actually was an undergrad when I was a grad student there, so call it late nineties. We’ll, remember this girl, I don’t know her name. She was, as I say, a few years behind me, I don’t think we ever talked, but she was a campus figure.

And I always think about her when I think about eccentric and how the thing about eccentricity is that it’s sort of delightful to see or sometimes off-putting. And then when you get to know the person, it recedes into the background and you realize, especially if it’s just their authentic self and they’re not being pretentious or performative, you realize it’s just them being them. And isn’t it a beautiful thing that we have the freedom to be ourselves, whoever that might be. And isn’t that one of the things that liberation movements fight for?

So one of my concerns about contemporary society is, that as a teacher, I feel that my students gave themselves less freedom to be eccentric over the years that there were fewer and fewer people who were obviously different in terms of how they dressed or in terms of their political beliefs, or in terms of their artistic, or literary, or cultural tastes, or any of it. People just seemed a little bit more cookie cutter. And I think that has something to do with the job market.

I think it has something to do with social media and not wanting to be seen as eccentric in videos that will follow you throughout your life, so you’re less willing to try out different stuff. But anyway, and then of course in politics, there’s a kind of hostility toward people who think differently from us. We are in an age of polarization, and so people tend to find a camp and stay within it rather than be eccentrically off the grid With no discernible camp, people want to say, I’m of the left, or I’m of the right. They want to have a school, they want to have a posse around them. It seems scarier than ever to just be out on your own as a weirdo.

This is a kind of roundabout way of saying that one of the things I love about today’s guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams, is, like some other writers I’ve admired, like a Camille Poglia or Christopher Hitchens, he just seems not to give a damn what people think. The consistent throughline of his thinking in his writing over the past 15 years or so has been that he just says what’s on his mind and seems not to give a damn whether it wins him or loses him friends. So like the girl with the plushy octopus, and anyone who is radically in touch with themselves, there’s a whiff of eccentricity about him. And I hope that in listening to this conversation, you’ll get a sense of what I mean. So here’s my conversation last week with Thomas Catterton Williams.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, nice to see you.

TCW: Good to see you too, Mark.

MO: I have very fond memories of bringing you to Yale to give a talk. You give a lot of talk, so I don’t expect you to remember that. But we had a really nice lunch outside. And what’s funny is I was later accused of, I brought you and a few other totally milk toast center-left, classical liberal types to campus. And somebody, one of my colleagues, accused me in a Facebook post of somehow promoting white supremacy by bringing you, and by the way, I think another one of them, I won’t say who it was, was a Muslim British-American journalist. All the people I brought who were colluding in my white supremacist plans were actually people of color.

TCW: That’s how it usually goes. I think you were the first podcast I was ever on, at Tablet.

MO: We had you on Unorthodox. Yeah, that was really fun. Well, what happened was I had read, am I even going to get the name of your first book right? Was it “Losing My Cool”?

TCW: Yeah.

MO: And I’d read that. I think I picked it up in a Barnes and Noble in Enfield, Connecticut. I was home visiting my parents in western Massachusetts, and my brother Dan and I always had this thing when we’re home—

TCW: Shout out to Dan.

MO: Shout out to Dan, who’s a great, great guy, and we always had this thing when we were home. Maybe you too have this thing when you’re home visiting your parents and you’re under their roof and it’s wonderful. And then sometimes you need to get away, and there’s probably a place you go in your old neighborhood, “I want to go get a burger there,” or “I want to go check out that bookstore.” So Dan and I in high school, I guess this Barnes and Noble had opened, and people give Barnes and Noble a lot of guff but I guess in the days of Amazon, Barnes and Noble’s the good guy. But Dan and I loved it because all of a sudden there were books near Springfield, Massachusetts. And so we would get in the car when we were 15 and 17 or 16, 18, just go there and just browse for a few hours. We kept doing that into our twenties whenever we were home, let’s say for Thanksgiving, or whatever. I think I saw your book. I think I just saw the jacket and then read the flap copy.

TCW: Oh man, that’s cool.

MO: And thought that’s a great, this looks good. And then I bought it and gave it to my brother, gave it to my dad. We all shared the copy and dogeared it. So the point is, I’m an old fan. I didn’t jump on your bandwagon late.

TCW: It’s good to be back in touch with you on the ones and twos over here.
MO: Yeah, exactly. And then of course we connected over the Harper’s letter, but for those people who don’t know you, can you give your somewhat self-aggrandizing, potted biography or autobiography if you could? Where’d you grow up? What’s your work? How do you make a living? Who are you?

TCW: I’m an elder millennial, born in the early eighties, in 1981, in suburban New Jersey. In that era, I was very much a product of that time, that pre-Obama era where having one white parent and one black parent, as I do, meant that you followed the logic of the one drop rule, and that you were identified most of the time, in most places simply as black, and a kind of multiracial identity hadn’t become mainstreamed the way it would become once I got college. So I had a white mother, but the black kids I grew up around with, they perceived me and treated me as black, and the white kids didn’t perceive me as white. So I didn’t have a very complicated understanding of racial identity until I was really at college at Georgetown. And I started meeting other people with my background who started identifying themselves as biracial or multiracial, which were terms that I had never really thought of.

So my upbringing was very influenced by idea of black authenticity and black masculinity that I really imbibed through hip hop culture more than through the figure of my father who had grown up in the segregated south and had a very different kind of understanding of blackness, I think, than I had at the time. So I had this kind of relationship with race that I thought was uncomplicated, but the older I got, it got more and more complicated. And that became the basis of the two memoirs that I wrote starting with “Losing My Cool,” which was a coming of age memo about getting to Georgetown, studying philosophy, realizing that there was a much more complex way of being from a community or participating in an identity and rejecting some of the kind constraints I think that I had ingested by trying to live up to a kind of street authenticity that was very part of the hip hop culture that I grew up in. And let’s see, I got you to Georgetown with that.

MO: You got me to Georgetown. Before we go beyond Georgetown, your book, your first book, “Losing My Cool” was so moving on the topic of code switching, and sort of the black street authenticity, and then books kind of take you to a different place. Were you good at performing that authenticity? I mean, did you feel you were inhabiting it?

Well, cause I think, I mean we all inhabit different roles, especially in our teenage years. We try on these identities. I remember there was about a month where I thought I should be a Deadhead and I got some tie-dye, or something, which tells you the kind of high school I went to, but that is what it is to be a teenager is try on these persona. And then some of them fit and some of them are really uncomfortable, and I should really go back and reread your book, but I guess even when I was reading it, I was curious how comfortable did it feel? Like, had you not been liberated by your reading, in the way that I think we all get liberated if we’re readers, part of what it does is liberate us, take us away from our childhood and into other places, and take us past our parents and our upbringing and whatever.

But had you not, what would’ve felt comfortable as a persona?

TCW: That’s a really good question. I mean, like many people probably now that I’m middle aged and I realize that I was describing one experience, but many people pass through a similar experience of trying on different identities. But I really, in those years I think I was living a kind of dual life that was slightly more extreme than a lot of people do because really inside my house I had a very, very strict upbringing with my father where I had to study after school every day on the weekends, every weekend on vacations, and a full-time job with Fridays off every summer. So I had this kind of, it didn’t matter how I wanted to behave in the exterior world in that house. I was, my father’s live-in pupil at all times, but outside of the house, I couldn’t admit that, or share that with anybody except for one other boy who became one of my lifelong best friends and actually was from a more disadvantaged background. I mean very loved, but he had less resources than my family had.

And he started coming every day after school with me in high school to study with my dad, and he ended up graduating from Harvard Law and studying abroad at Oxford and stuff. So that kind of transformed his own life, just coming over and making that effort with me, which kind of made it easier for me. And so we had this thing between us. He was truly one of the real popular kids in school and he didn’t code switch so much as that was really how he grew up to be authentic in the external environment, but he adapted to my household and I think my friendship with him really allowed me to make much more plausible my effort to fit into the world of our social environment at school. But neither of us ever shared or felt comfortable really discussing all the things that we were doing to prepare for the SATs, or to think about where we were applying to college, or where we were dreaming of our lives going.

We didn’t share that with anybody. I couldn’t even really share that with my girlfriend. I felt very validated and my “street pose,” “cool pose” identity. as I guess a sociologist like Orlando Patterson would call it, I felt that that was authenticated and validated through the girl that I dated mostly through high school, who really was from that environment and was, I guess, she was sought after. And so, by proximity to her, I had a kind of plausibility that I might not have had otherwise.

I remember she would be one of the other closest people to me in that time, and I remember bringing her also home to meet my father, and he was that kind of neighborhood dad that really tried to, any kid that came in, no matter how troubled, he would try to stick a book in your hands and it wouldn’t just be some easy reading, it would be Maimonides or stuff, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” or something. Truly, he was like that dad, and he tried with her.

MO: Sorry, detour. But now that you’re a father of two and how old are your kids?

TCW: Seven and almost twelve.

MO: You must have this voice of your dad sitting on your shoulder saying, “Son, you’re not giving them enough homework when they come in from playing.”

TCW: Yeah, I do have that.
MO: That’s such an intense way to be raised. How do you negotiate that as a dad? Because who dads like that these days? I mean, not me.

TCW:
Well, I got anxiety. I just want to say one. So he tried to do that. He tried to dad like that with my high school girlfriend. I realized then I couldn’t share this with almost anybody that I was around except for my buddy Carlos, because it just was talking to a wall and she didn’t even end up, he spent all this time trying to help her and she didn’t even end up sitting for the SAT. She just didn’t bother to take the test. When I heard that, I realized, wow, who am I? What is this social world that I’ve spent so much effort belonging to? And that can’t actually be how I try to move through the world, but with my own kids, I feel like it’s harder for me to do that, to have that sense of urgency with them, even though I’m very concerned about their education.

Because my father, some of this was coming a of fear, he was really afraid, we had educational resources in the house, but we didn’t have what Glen Lowry would call “network capital.” He couldn’t get me a job at a corporate law firm or something by making a call to one of his buddies. He really feared that if he didn’t really get me to understand that the only way that I was going to be upwardly mobile was through the life of the mind, or through getting an education, that I would actually go the way that a lot of my classmates went, which is really into dead ends. Or even worse, some of my classmates and neighbors were incarcerated not for, they weren’t mega criminals, but they got in trouble with the criminal justice system and then your life is really different.

So he had this sense of, I have to make sure that my two black sons improve their condition by any means necessary. And so he was an immigrant dad in that way. He approached it like life and death, and I just don’t have that sense with my own children, for better and worse. I mean, I think it is probably in some ways an easier relation that we have because I don’t have to attack every hour as though if it’s misspent, I think their lives will go awry. But then I talked to one of your former colleagues like Amy Chua or somebody like that.

MO: Well, Amy’s parenting is a little nuts. She lives in my neighborhood. I see her jogging with her two Samoyeds. I dunno if she has them anymore, but for many years you knew it was Amy because she had these two enormous, white fluffy dogs jogging with her, perfectly behaved by the way. They had definitely been tiger parented, and I mean by all accounts, her kids like her and her husband a lot. There are many ways to parent, but I feel like you and I are probably more or less fair than your dad was, is my guess.

TCW: I’m ashamed. I think about it every day, Mark.

MO: It’s funny, the things we think about. I mean, I think in many ways I’m the parents that my parents were in terms, they were very fun and relaxed. They put no pressure on us. We didn’t have money, money. We were solidly middle class, but we had enormous social capital and we didn’t have network capital. I don’t dunno who my dad could have called because he hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone he’d gone to college with, or law school with, but he had gone to Yale and then Columbia Law and there was a sense, I mean my wife laughs about it, like the “Oppenheimer sense of entitlement.” We just figured it would all work out, which just comes from—

TCW: I wish. I’ve met kids like that in college for the first time.

MO: And it can be both ennobling and it lets you relax and it lets you backpack around Europe for the summer, which I never did, but it could because you figured it would all work out. And yet there are times I know when my presumption that it will all work out is stupid, especially in the current economy. And also maybe I think the question that sometimes comes up when I’m thinking about it, or talking with my wife, is to what extent do you want to pass that to kids because it can be tremendously freeing and liberating to have a sense that it’ll all work out regardless. And it’s also kind of Buddhist, it’s also sort of, I believe that ultimately if you can be content in many circumstances, but that sense of entitlement can also be crippling. If in fact what you need to do is put your ass in the chair, do the work, right?

TCW: Yeah. What’s the Yiddish word, sitzfleisch?

MO: Sitzfleisch, that’s right. You need the sitzfleisch. The chair flesh, the ass in the chair. Now as it happened, I had a lot of that, as you did. So it’s like, it’s one thing to be parented to higher, greater, and higher heights when you’re also a bookish person. And you turned out had a pretty bookish temperament. I mean, once you got going, you were going, and you were reading, which it sounds like wasn’t your girlfriend’s temperament anyway, it sounds like.

TCW: Yeah, and once I got to college, it’s a strange way that you need others to validate what was always in your home. Once I got, because I always felt like my dad was eccentric and he was black of course, but because he was so erudite and bookish, even my working class Italian-American white friends would be like, “Oh, your dad’s whiter than my dad.”

He doesn’t present as white. It’s just that he has a house covered in books, and that’s how they were racializing his identity. But I didn’t really understand until I got to Georgetown and then I was in the library and when I wasn’t studying, I was like, oh my God, they’ve got this archive of all these magazines every month you can read The Atlantic, or they’ve got the New Yorker. And I was just pouring through these magazines and I was like, these are the magazines that are just on my dad’s desk that I never looked at.

And it just struck me that all of my white friends that I was meeting who actually came from more privileged backgrounds who were reading these magazines, and I was like, oh, actually they have access to some things that I also can see myself wanting. And then I was like, wait a minute, they’re just doing some of the same stuff that my dad was doing habitually in the house. I dismissed because I didn’t think it was relevant for me, and that kind is sad, but to have that validated by the university world. Then I came home my first summer and I was like, oh my God, all these books that my professor was talking about, and I started pulling them off the shelf, and that summer after freshman year was like, it was such a reading experience for me. I think that’s the summer I read the “Brothers Karamazov” and all these things that were just in the house, but I rediscovered it and then it felt authentic.

MO: Your dad presumably was biting his tongue, not saying, “At last” and “I told you so,” but I mean it must’ve been the most exciting thing in the world for him, to see his son come home more in love with literature than when he left for college a year earlier.

TCW: I think that was a very good summer. That was, but I broke up with my girlfriend and it took a year. It took after freshman year, but I fully transitioned to the university world and left the local world that I came from behind, not all of my friends, but in a way that I think signaled something to my dad. He was very relieved, but he also always felt that he was very strict, but he also felt that you have to allow a certain amount of autonomy and pressure release, or you’re going to have backfiring results. So he bit his tongue, as you say, for a lot of my high school. But then he would quietly put a stack of books that he thought I was ready to now look at on the breakfast table by the time I woke up.

MO: I bet you agree with me that it’s important to actually that your children see you reading actual books rather than just on the phone, or the Kindle, because it’s like you and I had the same experience, which was seeing our parents, knowing what they were reading, and even if we weren’t reading it saying, oh, that’s what grownups do, or that’s something I could do or, I mean, I have friends who read on their phones and I think your kid doesn’t know you’re not playing Wordle all day. Not that there’s anything wrong with Wordle, but it just feels important that there be books around if what you’re trying to signal is that books are great, there have to be books.

TCW: You can be reading Wittgenstein on your phone, but to your kid, it looks like you’re just scrolling Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever. So yeah, it really does matter. I think how you model that. You sit without a screen engaged in actual concentrated effort with pages. One of the things that I really inherited from my dad is that I don’t think a room looks furnished without shelves of books. So we live in book filled rooms everywhere, and I think that matters.

I’m still waiting for them to start pulling them off the shelves themselves, but I’ve got some time, I know, but they do read, and one of the things that my dad had this kind of sense of urgency that he had when I was my brother and I, we had to memorize Invictus and poems like that. They were very affirming of a sense of self, but my kids are just in irregular public schools in central Paris, but you’re rather lucky when you live in a good neighborhood and a place like Paris and the public schools are free and they’re really of a pretty good quality. And I remember my daughter coming home in first grade, second grade, and able to recite Baudelaire and stuff like that, but I didn’t have to force her, entice her. It’s just like what they do in school. I was just like, it was such a shock.

MO: We’re not in New Jersey anymore.

TCW: Exactly.

MO: Do you talk to them in French or English or both?

TCW: Now it’s almost all in English with some French phrases peppered in, but when they were younger, I would just scream them to brush their teeth in French because I didn’t want there to be a misunderstanding, just wants you to do it. But no, they’re completely bilingual now, and my daughter’s in a public school that’s half in English and half in French, and so she’s falling in love, in love for the first time with the sense of herself as fully as an American. And then they come to New Jersey for a few months, a year in total, and they think going to Walgreens and Target is the height of living. They’re like, oh, I’m so glad not to be a Paris. It’s target crazy.

MO: It’s beautiful to see America through foreigners eyes. Okay, so you were at Georgetown and then take us from there to your writing career.

TCW: Yeah, so Georgetown was an amazing educational portal for me, and one of the things I think it did really well was it exposed me to a lot of students who valued living abroad or studying abroad or came from international backgrounds in a way that some of the other schools that I was looking at that were similar might not have emphasized. Maybe it’s the School of Foreign Service or there’s something about Georgetown that’s quite internationally focused. And I arrived there never even imagining that I’d want to consider the rest of the world, and I left there having studied abroad in France and fallen in love with this idea of the world being large and of travel being a way to access the largeness of the world and a French girlfriend. And I ended up spending the year after Georgetown teaching English for 10 hours a week in France and just getting by and reading Proust and always nurturing this idea that my college best friend Josh and I had, which is we wanted to be magazine writers, but nobody at Georgetown.

The drawback of Georgetown was very few people that we were around at Georgetown wanted to do things like that. It was a lot of management consulting, investment banking, school of foreign service or corporate law, things like that, PhDs. But very few people had this kind of literary ambition that I think you get at Yale or some of these Columbia or some of these other places where that’s more common. So we didn’t know anybody that was wanting to do that, and we just said to ourselves, we wanted to figure out a way to do it. So I came back from France a year after graduating, and the two of us just started a kind of website where we published ourselves because we didn’t know how to get published, and then we used those pieces to apply to grad school. And so it was really, I was a paralegal while applying to grad school and I got into N nyu, Josh got into Columbia, and that was kind of the turning point.

This is a long way of getting into it, but it’s really the only way that I can tell it because I had no idea how to become a working writer and really never met anybody until I got to grad school. And it just struck me that I could never make it work for me financially if I was freelance writer trying to be in New York. So I got this idea in my head that I had to have a book deal before I graduated NYU, and I attacked it with the kind of naivete that I could never have now knowing that it’s really unlikely. So I just committed myself to getting a book deal before I left, and I ended up just getting really lucky and studying with a writer. You might know Katie Roiphe.

MO: Yeah, when I was coming up in the nineties, she had written her book about campus sexual assault. I think that was super controversial.

TCW: Yes, “The Morning After.”

MO: I mean, she had a moment where the whole culture was talking in a way that the whole culture never is talking about one thing now back then with fewer channels and really slightly, they were all talking about Katie, so yeah. Yeah, I remember.

TCW: Yeah, that was like 93. Yeah, she was a huge thing. She’s a phenomenal writer and a great mentor, and so she just gave me that kind of push of confidence and introduced me to an agent and I actually, I was able to sell “Losing My Cool” before I graduated, so that I was able to find myself some time to figure out how to freelance and become a magazine writer that way.

And I think the thing that really helped, and Josh did it too, I moved to France right after losing my Cool came out and Josh moved to Russia and I think getting out of the Brooklyn neighborhoods that we were in where everybody was at the same cafe trying to pitch the same magazine, I was able to start writing for The New York Times magazine and Harper’s in some places, and Josh went on staff at The New Yorker. And so it was this kind of nice parallel where in high school I had this one friend who was committed to the same vision of moving forward, and we did it together. And then in college I had this one friend that was committed to the same vision of moving forward, and we did it together.

MO: I envy that. I mean, I have many writer friends, but none of my closest friends… Oh, I have my brother, who’s a very close friend and is a writer, my brother Dan, but he was two years behind me in school and I never had that classmate who was kind of my writer. Other half, I dunno. I mean, I have the best friends in the world, so I don’t regret a thing, but—

TCW: Yeah, we don’t want to throw you under the bus.

MO: But when I hear about people, I would’ve loved to have a Josh in college in particular where, I mean a few of my other classmates became writers. There’s a novelist, there’s actually my good friend Rachel Donadio is a great journalist and a France person.

TCW: Oh yeah.

MO: Yeah. So you probably know her in France.

TCW: Shout out to Rachel. Yeah.

MO: Oh my god. Rachel and I were in two classes together freshman year and go way back, and my daughter who has lived in France has stayed with her, so I did have, we became writers, but actually she and I, neither of us was very much in the literary scene in college. I kind of graduated into figuring out it’s what I wanted to do, but all the people who were super literary in college I think went to law school. I mean, it was funny that the people became writers.

TCW: That’s very true. That’s very true.

MO: The people who were editing all the publications or whatever for the most part are not writers now. It’s those of us who kept our heads down and maybe did the reading. I don’t know. So that was your first book and that was what was 15 years ago now I want to say.

TCW: That was 15 years ago now. Yeah.

MO: You’re on your third book and I want to get to the third book. I would say that in general, the pieces you write, and I actually think you’re really terrific not just writing about yourself, but when you write profiles of people, I think you’re a great stylist and a great writer no matter your subject, so I don’t want it to sound like what you do is memoir because that’s a piece of what you do, and the latest book is not that at all. But I would say that your vision, your cohering vision is a kind of anti identitarianism, a sort of universalism that through travel and reading, we can all understand each other. Is that a fair way to put it?

TCW: Yeah, that’s a nice way to put it. Thank you. I really do think that something Skip Gates once said, but he’s not the first to say it, but with real effort and honesty, anybody can really understand the human experience from any angle really. I think that we really do have to embrace universal values and whether the identitarianism is coming from the kind left progressivism or kind right reactionary populism, there’s something very limiting and dehumanizing about it in both cases. And so I really have, maybe it’s in anachronistic kind of view of this kind of liberal vision that’s not in style right now, but it’s really the thing that I believe in most, and it comes from a kind of, I think it’s rooted in the individualism that my father had growing up in Texas and the American Southwest even growing up then prior to civil rights.

It’s just this idea that the individual is the fundamental unit and that you can’t describe the kind complexity and unpredictability of any given human life by reducing it to an abstract identity category’s something very unfair about that when it happens and I out of a place of frustration with it, and that is the thing that ties back from losing my cool, which is a argument in favor of the liberating power of an education for the individual to create herself to my second book, which was called “Self Portrait in Black and White,” which was really about not just yourself from behave, but actually realizing that the very ways that we categorize ourselves are in themselves illusory, and then some of our discontent, which is the current book is really an argument against the political formations of groupings that don’t allow us to see each other fully and interact with each other on the liberal plane and push us towards more and more illiberal extremists, zero sum ways of thinking about our broiling politic.

MO: Hey friends, if you’re enjoying this episode, can I really implore you to go on whatever platform you’re using and subscribe and rate and leave a comment if we have dozens more comments and dozens more ratings? It actually does kick us higher up in the algorithm. It helps people find us and it really spreads the word. So please, please do that. You of course are already listening to us, so you are going to get to enjoy the guest we have coming down the pike.

I’m super excited to be talking to Gabrielle Nguyen, who is a woman in her early twenties, who has started “appstinence,” not abstinence, but appstinence, which is a movement to delete apps. She’s super cool. We’re going to have her on soon. We’re going to have what I’m calling the confession episode. I’m talking to two journalists, Maggie Phillips and Matthew Schmitz, about the rise and fall, or maybe rise again, of Catholic confession, and I just find it fascinating as a non-Catholic, I find it cool and fascinating.

Also, coming up down the pike, Oliver Burkeman, the author of “Four Thousand Weeks” and “Meditation for Mortals”; Leah Libresco Sargeant, the Catholic feminist; Paul Kingsnorth; the other Mark Oppenheimer, the one from South Africa; the interfaith activist Manu Meel; and so much more. If you navigate over to our web presence to our magazine, arcmag.org, we have some terrific stuff that’s gone up lately. We have an interview with the aforementioned Gabriela Nguyen about social media addiction. We have a review of a major new book about American religious history, which dates way back to the pre-Colombian religion in the Americas. It’s by Thomas Tweed, who’s a major dude in the field. We have an article about whatever happened to Pope Francis’ teachings on climate change. He had a major encyclical about that. Has it been ignored? And as I talked about confession earlier, we have actually one of those writers, Matthew Schmitz on our website with a review of a new book about the history of Catholic confession. And now back to my interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams.

I just turned down, I was supposed to go back and adjunct at a major university this fall. I’m not teaching at WashU this fall. I’m teaching there next spring. I had some time this fall. I was asked to teach a writing class at a major elite place we’ve heard of, and I said yes, and then I had a conversation with the administrator in charge of the course, who’s a wonderful human being and a true educator, someone I really revere. And we were talking about grade distribution. I said, the last time I taught on campus there was grade inflation. I gave about half As, half Bs, and then a straggling C or D to it was like that felt grade inflated, but okay. It was only half As. And then this person said to me, “Oh yeah, that’s right. You taught pre-COVID. Yeah, we don’t really, a B is for someone who stops showing up or cheats, but otherwise, I mean out 15 or 16 kids, you’re going to give 14 or 15 As now, or you’ll be really facing a lot of blowback.”

TCW: Oh my God.

MO: I pulled out of teaching the class for that and other reasons. But this isn’t a failure of leadership. I mean, if the presidents of these universities and the deans just kind of laid down the law and said, we’re going to be serious. Whatever we do, we’re going to be serious. We’re not going to play games here. Literature is wonderful and it’s beautiful and it’s joyful, but it’s also, it’s work it, we’re going to be honest with our students, so when they’re bad, we’re going to treat them like adults and say, this was bad work. It doesn’t strike me as that hard and the failure of nerve just, I don’t even understand why.

TCW: One of the ways in which someone like my dad would be out of sorts at a place like any of these schools now is that the idea that you demand and expect excellence, I find it makes me very strange to my students that I’ve encountered, and this is actually something I want to write about. I’ve been complaining about how in the past few years trying to get students to care and to actually realize that their voice is like their signature and that they can’t outsource that to technology. But getting all these papers that are by this kind of homogenous, fairly confident Chat GPT, not even voice, just getting papers that are by chatt is one of the most depressing things. And I talk to some other professor and they say, yeah, well, I give everyone a no matter what, and I’ve had this experience of hearing this from even some writers whose names you would know, and I can’t believe it.

And I either fail or give a D to anybody I catch using ai. And so that can be a third of the class every semester. And the students seem genuinely shocked. One of the things that happens at all of these schools is that students leave reviews of professors and it gets around on the internet and professors are terrified of having, and the competitiveness of trying to, if academia is your full-time job of trying to get tenure and what it means to have consistently low enrolled classes or to get poor reviews, it seems to, I think a lot of people that that’s not worth it, that the customer has to be happy. And so I think that sets up a terrible dynamic. I actually don’t think students should have review power over professors in that way. I mean, that seems to me to just tangle up incentives in a terrible way.

I feel somewhat fortunate because I don’t actually, I’m like a visiting professor, and that’s not my main identity professionally. So I don’t want to be there just trying to just give the whole class. I want to be there to really try to ignite the sense that reading the plague or reading up from slavery or something like that is a transformative, very worthwhile experience and should receive your full effort. That’s why I’m there. And every year, there are a few kids, a few young adults who really, you can see the spark of inspiration, that engagement with great thinking, you can’t help but Kindle, and that is why I’m there. But otherwise, that is the person that gets the a. And I think that it degrades everybody. If you just give everybody, if you just don’t have degrees of excellence, but this is, you’re right, the kind of eccentric, crazy inspired teacher who gets the best out of you, that’s like an endangered species in the post COVID world because of the kind sense of coddling that has really been normalized. I think that I’m just blown away by the amount of students who have an official note from the administration saying that they suffer from some type of anxiety or something, and so have to have laxer standards. It’s so common that actually we have to redefine what having a condition means if everybody has it.

MO: So the latest book is the “Summer of Our Discontent.” It comes out, we’re talking before it even comes out. It comes out in August, is that right?

TCW: August 5th, yeah.

MO: August 5th. Oh, my birthday. All right. Right on.

TCW: Oh, nice.

MO: Thank you. I know that was intended for sure. I was playing poker last night with my poker buddies, and I was mentioning, someone said to me, who’s coming up on the podcast? I mentioned your name. He’s a fan. He said, oh, why? I said, there’s a new book coming out. He said, what’s it about? I said, it’s sort of about the last few years we were breaking up, we were cashing in our chips. I’d lost my money. I didn’t have more time to go into it. But the summary, the precis was, it’s sort of about the last few years, but how do you tell people what it’s about? What’s the argument of the new book?

TCW: Sure. It’s trying to make sense of this period from the early Obama, the ascent of Obama, the kind notion of post racialism as the kind of justice, the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice and America just being this multi-ethnic, soon to be post-racial society. And the kind of disillusionment from that era that combined with the kind of technological innovations in social media and the kind of activism that became the language of social media and influenced all of our most important cultural, academic, and media institutions. That led to the negative reaction of the Trump era, which is really a repudiation of the kind of post-racial vision of Barack Obama. And then, so I see this arc going from hope to disillusionment and this kind of idea that social justice activism is the most important endeavor that you can be engaged in and has to inflect all aspects of our public and even our private lives, which culminated in this hinge year of 2020 where I really see there was a beginning, there was a before and after 2020, I thought that that would be where the book ended.

So I thought I was telling the story of Obama to Trump to the kind of great awakening that climaxed in 2020. But then I turned the book in late, and I realized as I was getting more time that that was not the end of the story. In fact, the story continued. And I think now the way that it works with a kind of a book ending. You have the social justice movement that began around the second term of Barack Obama, Trayvon Martin, black Lives Matter, and that great awakening, and you have it really ending with a bookend around October 7th, 2023 with Hamas attack on Israel. And I would say that is the moment, that era of wokeness, that social justice movement that do our institutions really fell apart, and now we’re in this post woke reactionary period. And so the book concludes with the reelection of Donald Trump.

So that’s a very long way. I’m sorry that it’s not a more concise answer here. The blue sky left already saying that it’s too long of an answer, but the book kind of changed in the writing. So it really is trying to tell the story of a movement from Barack Obama to the redemption of Donald Trump and all of the madness that happened in between and really emphasizing the ways in which the reactionary populist right, that’s ascendant now didn’t just come out of a vacuum, that it really is in some ways not caused by, but it’s strengthened and in some ways able to justify itself by extraordinary accesses that were perpetrated by the identity obsessed, progressive left when they controlled all the levers of institutional power.

MO: You might’ve been one of the people who was saying this around the time of the Hamas attacks. I mean, I think I read it elsewhere as well that the reaction of some on the left of celebrating terrorism, really celebrating it in some cases was going to destroy the campus left. The way you just put it was it coincided with the end of that period of wokeness. However, six, eight months later, you had the encampments several months later. And so it didn’t immediately appear to defang the identitarian or campus left even as it made them look bad in the eyes of a lot of normies out there.

TCW: Yeah, I think, well, they lost truck with the important mainstream center of the country. I think if you look at the years from, say 20 12, 13, 14 through 20 21, 20 22, you really had the idea exemplified in these ethical bestsellers how to be an anti-racist and white fragility. You had the kind of common perception that anti-racism was the default setting of any kind of well-intentioned person, and that there’s a kind of passive acceptance that there’s a lot of work to do and don’t be an ass, and black lives matter, and all of these kind of things that people didn’t think very hard about. They just accepted a kind of, I hate the word woke, but it is the word that people understand. This kind of woke orthodoxy was just accepted. And a lot of the people with some influence and tradition of liberal activism who accepted it were left-leaning liberal Jews.

MO: Hey, man, it’s my tribe. Don’t pick on us. Just kidding. You better tread really carefully now, man.

TCW: Well, but no, I think that after October 7th, there was a turning point where a lot of people who had Jews and liberal allies of Jews saw that there was a celebration of a kind of atrocity against one group, and that group couldn’t be included under the umbrella of grievance or under the identity umbrella that extended to every other group seemingly. And so I think that actually Jews broke the kind of intersectional matrix of DEI and identity politics that had dominated all of these institutions up until that point. And then there was a need to justify why Jews didn’t deserve our sympathy in the aftermath of this horrific attack that was being celebrated by some of the same people in institutions that really policed any kind of language that could be potentially offensive to any other group. So I think the whole edifice fell apart at that point, but also I think mainstream Americans just, it was very unappealing, unattractive what was going on in these encampments and the kind of ways in which students were blocked from going to class. It just didn’t sell that message very well to most Americans.

MO: It didn’t feel liberatory to a lot of people, and I want to go back for a minute to the violence that was being celebrated, the real kind of blood lust you saw in some of the by no means all, but in some of the responses there is this blood lust that you see at political extremes, the left and the right where people are scratching this itch for retribution, for anger. I mean, I think they’re the people who, you see it a little bit on the right now, and the people who kind of celebrate the ice detentions and the detain centers, I mean, they want to get, want to hurt somebody. They want to get back at somebody. You dealt with this a little bit, this kind of dissent of violence in your book when you talked about visiting Portland where you saw all of this bizarre white people on white people just kind of anarchy and anime. Do you want to talk a little bit, why did you go to Portland? What did you see there?

TCW: I was interested in Portland because that actually–

MO: And I should say it’s Portland, Oregon. Portland, Maine is a banal, sedate place that I have visited many times in the past years.

TCW: It wasn’t burning for a hundred days straight.

MO: I’m referring to Portland, Oregon. New England would never have put up with that nonsense. This is Portland, Oregon. Anyway, go ahead.

TCW: Portland was fascinating to me because, two things principally, it experienced the most sustained and longest lasting violence of any major city in America. There was over a hundred days straight of violence, most nights concentrated around the Justice Center downtown, and it’s also the whitest major city, city of having more than 500,000 population of greater than 5,000. So it’s the whitest city in America at that size and it was by far the one most committed to tearing itself up post. And there are many reasons why Portland is the center of far left activism. Antifa is active there. So I just wanted to see if it was really as bad as it was being portrayed online and on TV. And I went over a year after George Floyd died, and it was extraordinary. I mean, downtown was boarded up around the Justice Center. There were barriers and plywood over the windows, still around the Apple store.

There was triple fencing, security guard, it looked like foreign countries. It looked like if you were in Belize and you were trying to go to a grocery store at night, and there’s a guy with an AK outside defending the grocery store. It was a city under siege. People no longer came downtown. And this was over a year after the incendiary event. And so I was just kind of amazed by the impact this had. And I observed people still marching, chanting black lives down the street from my hotel, and there wasn’t a single black person in the march, but there was one I marveled at the fact there was one, the only black person within sight was trying to get to work, was being blocked, trying to get down the sidewalk by these people marching for black lives. And there were more Black Lives Matter signs around the nice neighborhoods on lawns than there were by any stretch of the imagination, black neighbors.

So it was a geographic representation of a point I was trying to make in the book, which was that a lot of this stuff really had very little to do with black people and had to do with the kind of intro white status jockeying and competition for the moral high and ground where white people took on a kind of allyship that was really, in many ways a form of therapy or narcissism, but really wasn’t actually necessarily about improving black lives. The ultimate example of this, of course, which I explore at a bit of length in the book, is the notion that it’s in black people’s interests to defund, or even in extreme cases abolish the police, a position that some black people certainly advocated for, but by every measure, most black people, especially the ones who are forced to live around violence rejected vehemently. And so this idea that there’s a black point of view and white allies are supposed to, especially more privileged white allies, are supposed to listen to that point of view and then help bring it to fruition. It was just one of the most absurd aspects of this moment.

MO: I wouldn’t say that there’s a solution in your book. As I got to the end, I didn’t feel there’s no program for how to get better, I don’t think. I mean, you say at one point that there is something deeply wrong in our society that’s in the introduction. And then at various points you also talk about returning to the family as the fundamental unit, and I get the sense that you’re arguing for a sort of depoliticization of our daily lives that we should be thinking less about the government and more about, I guess the neighborhood. I don’t know. At one point you write as we vy for influence, prestige, and recognition, we must also return to our fundamental political unit, which has always been the family. So many of our seemingly most intractable problems arise in no small part from having learned to see and understand ourselves as part of overwhelming monolithic abstraction. So what’s the germ of a solution for that in how to live better or get healthier as a society? What does that mean to return to the family and to see ourselves as less of a monolithic abstraction?

TCW: Yeah. The thing that I was really trying to emphasize there was that over the past decade and change, but really around 20 19, 20 20, 20 21, this idea of anti-racism that became ubiquitous was really that anywhere there’s any inequity, the most important thing that can be done is for that to be identified in, rooted out. The group parody is always something that we should always be concentrating on, and really there’s no limit to what you can do to counteract it. So if Stuyvesant High School or Jefferson High School in Virginia, or Lowell in San Francisco, if they’re showing that there is racial inequity in terms of admissions, then anything can be done to remedy that, including getting rid of admission standards because that will somehow improve the lives the disadvantage. And so the argument that I’m saying is that there’s just no amount of social engineering that can ever make everybody at all times equal to everyone else, especially when you’re looking at huge abstract categories that encompass differences of region and ancestry and culture and social class.

There’s just never going to be a way you can engineer complete parody. It would be much better to focus our time on cultivating the family and really focusing on what can be done at a smaller scale. And that this is a kind of conservative argument, but I don’t think it’s so absurd that if you take care of your brother, your mother, and your father, and then you become a stronger household and everybody in your neighborhood does that, and then you extend to the neighborhood and you stand up, that you’re actually going to make stronger communities. But so much of our political lives are extracted from the local and people are engaged in these kind of national arguments that are completely partisan red versus blue, and you see it completely on the right as well, have people who are advocating because they caught up in a nationwide culture war that don’t even have anything to do with their communities at home and might even be adverse to their interests. So I’m just saying that an emphasis on what can be accomplished on the most fundamental political unit would be probably more beneficial. How can you get your student, your child up to the level of being a student that can get into Lowell is more important than abolishing the admissions criteria for that school.

MO: I think about this all the time about the importance of localism. And interestingly, although I don’t think I support the recent abolition of funding for public radio, I think that’s a really unwieldy hammer being taken to small problems.

TCW: Oh yeah, I know.

MO: But I am a broken record on the topic of NPR in some ways being bad for localism because a lot of people used to subscribe to local newspapers. At some point when you and I were children, young adults canceled those subscriptions and said, well, I’m an educated, informed person because I listen to public radio. Public radio is principally a conveyor of national news. I mean, there’s a minute or two of local news on every hour, but it’s a story or two rather than the 30 or 40 stories who would’ve gotten from the old newspaper? And most people have no idea who their city council person is anymore, or certainly most elite people in elite culture. I wasn’t going to ask this, but just to turn it around on you, I always turn it around on myself and challenge myself. Do you feel like, are you sufficiently focused on the small boar stuff, your family, your neighborhood, your street, your town? I mean, you are in some ways a rootless cosmopolitan between Paris and Greater New York. Do you feel you’re grounded enough in the small stuff or is that a challenge for you?

TCW: I feel like I am very focused on the smallest of small things, which is how do I cultivate my children to be good citizens and to be able to compete at every stage of their development with their peers? How do I prepare? It’s on me to prepare them. And so in that way, I think the argument that I’m making about worrying about whether there’s complete parity with whatever identity group they can be slotted into is less important to me than making sure that they can handle themselves. And so in that way, I’m locally minded. But yeah, I mean, I’m a little bit of a cliche of a rootless cosmopolitan in that I wouldn’t be able to tell you that I’m fully invested in the politics of parents or that I’m the most involved parent at my children’s public school. I do think that it’s been detrimental to politics. I can speak much more informatively about American politics here than the French. I think the French might still have a firmer grasp on localism because they do have more local, regional, they read more local papers. They don’t have one New York Times, one doesn’t dominate everything the way that the New York Times does. And they don’t have the same kind of–actually, they don’t have the same type of radio.

MO: And I think England is more like the us everyone reads if they don’t read The Times of London and The Guardian, they get one of the London built tabloids. And I don’t have the sense, I could be wrong that Liverpudlians, or people from Cardiff, Wales, or whatever know their local news any better than elites in Boston, Hartford, Connecticut, or Trenton do. If France does, I mean, France, I know, is also a more rural country. I think it’s culturally different. But if France actually is held onto that in part because of the lack of domination of national media, that’s a super interesting thing to know.

TCW: It’s just been so detrimental in America to have people in communities where they’ve never so much as glimpse to trans person have that be such an important issue for them because the national debate over trans athletes somewhere far away in the country, some places far away as another country in Europe might be from where you’re living in France becomes one of their core issues or DEI in schools that don’t have DEI people voting based on national kind of culture war issues that have been thrust to the forefront when what they should be caring about is what’s happening to the laws that are allowing, that are becoming laxer and allowing companies to pollute their streams and air right there. And they’re being distracted by this single raging culture war debate that we have that doesn’t really mean much for their own lives. So I think that that’s been obviously not the first to comment on that politics becoming a national kind sport that we engage in has been really detrimental to the social fabric of the communities that we come from.

I just think that everybody cultivating their own backyard, it would be a step in the right direction. And then you can always think about things on two different levels, but the first and foremost concern has to be how do I prepare my kid to compete? I say that as a parent. And so what disturbed me so much about the era that I’m critiquing is that it seemed to be such a surrender of agency and this idea that everything is structural and nothing is ever micro, that everything is always larger kind of invisible forces. And until all of those forces are perfectly fixed, we’re powerless in the face of white supremacy.

MO: It’s funny, what you said is something I’ve said in different ways, which is at the end of the day, as much as you believe in big structural forces, you still have to tell your kids, “Hey, you can make it.” You’re great. You’re great. You have agency. You can choose whether or not to do your homework. You can choose whether or not to drink. You can choose whether or not and how much. There’s no one forcing you to be a burnout or loser.

That’s not to say that it’s my place to judge other people’s children and what they went through, but what can I say to my own children? Except I think you can do it. And so I always wonder that people who are going out there with big structural arguments in society saying there is such a boot on the neck of certain oppressed peoples that they can’t possibly make it. Do they go home and tell their own children you can’t possibly make it. Or do they go home and say, do your homework, stay off drugs, limit your screen time. I mean, there is at the end of the question of, okay, what do you tell your own kids? You couldn’t possibly tell your own kids that life is as hopeless and overdetermined as you’re telling other people it is.

TCW: Right. I mean, that’s almost child abuse. Would you tell your own child that being punctual is a characteristic of white supremacy culture? Would you say you need to get to school on time? I would like to meet the parent that says that if you’re late, you tell your teacher that it’s part of your culture. I mean, it’s ludicrous. But the idea that—

MO: You just hand them “White Fragility,” you just hand them Robin DiAngelo to say read, you assign them, read it. You give them a syllabus.

TCW: But what’s so insidious about that, Mark, is that many of the people making these arguments were on behalf of the oppressed under the white power structure, were themselves not black, were themselves allies. White liberals who would never ever accept that for their own kids. They would never want their kids to not take seriously preparing for standardized exams because what should happen is that there should be no admission standards. They would always make sure that their kids could meet the standards. So what they’re advocating for in terms of how other people raise their children is actually on the abuse.

MO: God help us all from our allies.

Every episode I try to bring you a little calendar of upcoming religious holidays. I know that the summer is a really bad time for Jewish religious holidays. Right now we’re in the middle of the three weeks when there are no holidays. But other religions also are just bereft of good holidays during this time. I mean, there are always some Catholic Saints days and there’s always something going on in this faith or that, but the world religions, it’s a pretty dark time for celebrations or holidays of remembrance or anything. There’s not a lot going on in Catholicism, other Christianities, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, et cetera.
I will note that August 3rd is the holiday of Nag Panchami, which is a festival honoring the serpent deities, the nagas. It often involves ritual offerings to snake idols. This is a Hindu holiday on August 3rd. So that’s cool.

And the other thing I’ll say, and I once wrote about this, you can go find this article, is that Unitarian churches often go on vacation the summer. And there are theories as to why. Is it because so many early Unitarians were on an academic calendar because they were divinity professors or college students? Is it because the members of the churches are so wealthy that they’re all off at their summer houses? I mean, there are many theories floated out there, all of them probably bogus, but wherever you are, odds are that your UU church, your Unitarian Universal church, is either on hiatus for a couple months, or has a lot of guest sermons, a lot of guest pastors, and that the main preacher is on vacation. So happy vacation to the Unitarians.

Celebrity birthdays. July 29th. Geddy Lee, lead dude of Rush, is turning, I don’t know, something quite old. July 31st, J.K. Rowling turns 60. August 2nd, the auteur Kevin Smith, filmmaker of Clerks and others turns something or other on August 2nd. And on August 3rd in 1858, the hymn writer Maltby Davenport Babcock, author of the noteworthy hymn, “This is My Father’s World,” was born. Many, many years later, football legend Tom Brady was also born on August 3rd. Happy birthday to all of them.

Okay, I always conclude with a few different questions. My standard battery of questions to get to know you. This is a bit of a lightning round. Are you ready?
So do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

TCW: Not quite.

MO: All right on. So if you could have any other career within reason, so not like being a superhero, not being Aquaman or an Olympic sprinter or someone of extraordinary edge like talents, but something you might’ve been able to do, what would it be?

TCW: I would’ve loved to have been an architect. I think controlling and manipulating physical space and making rooms feel habitable and feel good and flow correctly is beautiful work. And also as a writer, you can acknowledge how a femur it feels sometimes when you’re just sitting at that Word document to actually create an edifice would be probably pretty gratifying.

MO: Totally. What’s a big regret you have?

TCW: Not getting a PhD. I think there was just not enough time in retrospect, but I would’ve liked to spend a few more years really studying and reading more philosophy.

MO: What’s a general piece of advice you give to young people if they ask? Let’s say your students a piece of advice on how to live.

TCW: I really tell them, I tell my students all the time that you should just try as hard as you can. Be completely present at every stage that you’re engaged in getting your education. Try as hard as you can, and that, the thing I’ve seen over and over again is that it really is not usually a matter of talent that separates people who go on to succeed. But it really is an amount of hard work and effort, and that’s a cliche for a reason, but people who have stick to itness and tenness tenacity, they do accomplish more than the merely gifted. To be gifted and to have tenacity is a superpower.

MO: It’s a superpower, right? It’s nice work if you can get it.

Can you name a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia?

TCW: Oh man, they’re so many, but I’ve been trying to get my daughter into Tupac and we listen to a lot of “If Only God Can Judge Me” and that whole era, that whole nineties era, I mean, everybody thinks that their adolescence is the best moment in music, but for me, Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z, Nas, the nineties, anything like that makes me deeply nostalgic for driving to the Menlo Park Mall.

MO: Can you recommend a TV show and a book, or it could be a movie and a book, something to watch and something to read?

TCW: Sure. I think anyone who hasn’t watched The Wire or must watch The Wire. I have to face that I’m just old. I had a student at Bard tell me that I discovered this really old show pretty good. It’s called the what. I still think of it as kind of recent.

MO: It’s like a season or two. It ended a few, three, four years ago it feels like.

TCW: It’s actually really old, apparently. So if anybody who hasn’t watched The Wire, I just think that that’s the best show. And then what was it? It was a book.

MO: A book, yeah.

TCW: I think that the writer who just shocked me most in the past decade who is still producing great work is Rachel Cusk. I just devour whatever she publishes. But the Outline trilogy, I think if anyone who hasn’t read that should read that read, it’s just crystalline. Just beautiful, sharp insights.

MO: So the book is The Summer of Our Discontent. It’s out August 5th, Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thanks for talking with me.

TCW: Thanks.

MO: Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer, and I love feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman, audio consulting by Robert Scaramuccia, intern help by Caroline Coffey. At the Danforth Center at WashU, we are so thrilled to have the support of Deborah Kenard and Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen and all the rest. Not to mention Sheri Peña, who is our finance director, and so important to all that we do. Our music is by Love Cannon. Web designed by Cause + Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.