James Carville On Trump, Harris, Clinton

Who better to kick off our fall election coverage?

Carville needs no introduction, but he’s a legendary consultant, a former CNN contributor, and the author of a dozen books. He currently co-hosts the Politics War Room with Al Hunt, a podcast available on Substack, which you should definitely follow for the election season.

You can listen to the episode in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For four clips of the highly quotable Cajun — on Harris’ convention speech, Vance’s conversions, Bill Clinton’s “pussy business,” and woke condescension toward minorities — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in a poor town famous for its leprosy hospital; one of eight children in an “extremely” Catholic family; the vast majority of his peers were African-American; the woke left’s caricatured view of “the marginalized”; the flattening term “communities of color”; NPR; the misnomer “LGBTQIA”; the resilient old queens of the South; progressive orgs paralyzed by young woke staffers; the shocking strength of Harris’ acceptance speech; why masculine rhetoric is even more effective coming from a female pol; her immigrant background; her poor management of staff; how she needs to own up to her 2020 views and convey “growth”; the crime issue; the border crisis; Gaza; Starmer and “stability”; Carville leading Wofford to an incredible comeback in his Senate race; teaming up with Begala to guide Clinton to the White House; Bill’s profound charm and smarts; his Achilles heel; the sudden implosion of the Church in Ireland; the sex-abuse crisis; Spotlight; how the closet attracts predatory priests; Trump as the antithesis of a Christian; January 6; how Harris is focused on mockery rather than fear; how the race is now “fresh vs. stale”; how Biden was pushed out by big donors and Pelosi; how the timing turned out to be perfect for Harris; how she’s avoided the press longer than Palin did; how Walz is further left than Carville; Vance and “childless cat ladies”; common-good conservatism; the difference between cradle Catholics and converts; the Gospels; infallibility; Garry Wills’ influence; Trump thrilled by domination; the hatred of elites and foreign wars and offshoring; the snipes at Walz’s son; and Carville dealing with ADHD.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Eric Kaufmann on left-liberal excess, Michelle Goldberg on Harris, David Frum on Trump, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, and Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a fan of our latest episode with Jeffrey Toobin on the courts:

I was struck by your recent chat with Toobin, especially the parts about the conservative backlash after Nixon and the rebuilding of executive power. It was a fascinating discussion!

Another listener has a “qualified ‘mega-endorsement’ and a softcore dissent”:

First, the dissent: as a law professor, I find that a lot of Toobin’s complaints about recent SCOTUS case law (much of which I absolutely oppose, particularly on stare decisis grounds) to be suspicious, insofar as the judiciary always ends up supporting Toobin’s policy outcomes.

For instance, Chevron was a judge-made — not a constitutional or even statutory — doctrine that presumes that administrative agencies are experts in their fields and need to be given space in which to operate. Many agencies are experts, but many of them are filled with partisan hacks. A presumption that they are all experts who can make regulations that the judiciary — who are trained in interpreting statutes — must almost always uphold seems … odd, especially compared to legislators (who are accountable) and judges (who are trained in law).

Moreover, the end of Chevron does not end Skidmore, which holds that an agency’s interpretation of its enabling statute can be given weight (distinct from “space”) as the judiciary interprets the legislation. But most importantly, if Congress wants the agencies’ decisions deferred to, there are ways to achieve that, such as amending their enabling legislation without the Chevron presumption. Granted, there are stare decisis arguments to uphold Chevron, but the “sky is falling” mantra seems based in a romanticized notion of the administrative state — the least accountable branch of government in our constitutional order.

Turning to the mega-endorsement, I want to commend Toobin for summarizing the recent SCOTUS immunity decision in a way that was truly fair, neutral, and no defender would have objected to. (I say as a non-defender, so maybe take my view with a grain of salt.) If everyone was as good as steel-manning their opponents, indicating that he clearly understands them, I feel we’d be in a much better place as a society.

I’ve always admired Toobin’s fairness, even though he’s a pretty obviously conventional left-liberal on most things. Here’s another clip from the episode, on the Ken Starr saga:

Another listener dissents:

I was a Jeffrey Toobin fan. I used to read all his pieces in the New Yorker and own several of his books. Listening to him now, though, I can’t help but wonder: has he changed, or have I?

His comments on Covid got my attention. He called out Fox News for misinforming the public and accused them of causing additional deaths. Talk about deflection. MSNBC and his own CNN were fountains of misinformation. They told us that the Covid vaccine prevented infection and stopped transmission. They parroted White House talking points — from lockdowns to outdoor masking. And as you said, they refused to acknowledge the possibility of a mishap by a lab that was experimenting with coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Either he is no longer the even-handed Jeffrey Toobin I remember, or I have completely lost tolerance for this kind of groupthink by media commentators.

It did strike me that he seemed very much more in the bubble than I expected. Another reader is wanting more balance with the Dishcast right now:

I listened to your episodes with Toobin and Applebaum. Can you have some conservatives on too? Partisan Dems are kind of boring at the moment.

We recently had on Erick Erickson (who just endorsed Trump); next week, we have Eric Kaufmann, one of the smartest of the conservative intelligentsia on race and immigration. But point taken. Here’s a guest rec:

It occurred to me you haven’t engaged with someone from the left in a while — not the Jeffrey Toobin Acela-corridor Dem establishment, but the actual socialist-leaning left. I liked your conversation with Briahna Joy Gray a while back, for example.

What about Jedediah Purdy, the legal scholar and public intellectual? He has ties to both Appalachia and Yale Law, so it would be interesting to hear his thoughts on J.D. Vance; and his 2022 book Two Cheers for Politics would be fascinating to discuss this election year. I recently read an essay he wrote in Dissent about the literary scholar Raymond Williams, and I would also be curious if/how you encountered those scholarship-boy British cultural leftists like Williams, Stuart Hall, et al.

Oh God. Stuart Hall. But that’s a great idea and we’ll invite Purdy. Another rec:

While I was listening to this interview with Andrew Doyle on YouTube, I kept telling myself that I should write to you and recommend him as a conversation partner on the Dishcast. The issue of how the gay rights movement has been coopted by trans philosophy is one you have covered, but Doyle really fleshes the issue out in this episode (and they mention you by name toward the end). I think both you and your Dishheads would profit from a discussion like this.

One more rec:

RFK Jr. Your audience needs to understand what Bobby just did and why. They’re not going to get this by reading the legacy media. It would be a Dishcast public service. You should talk to Bobby about his views on the political realignment taking place. The question for debate: where do the classical liberals go?

You might think some of the stuff he says is daffy. I sometimes do. But he is the most censored politician in America right now, so his thoughts on censorship’s fundamental incompatibility with democracy should be of utmost interest to all 15 of us who still believe in the core tenets of liberalism 🙂

Next up, a reader dissents over my take on Harris’ running mate:

I saw your reaction on Notes to the Tim Walz pick. Maybe give him a minute before labeling him a “fanatic”? He seems pretty down to earth to me, with a bio that got him elected repeatedly in a conservative district and then to governor. How many people responded to the initial BLM protests and riots in a way that they would stand by 100% today? Sure, it’s easy for me to criticize his position now, but he was at the epicenter of that incredibly chaotic moment, in the city where George Floyd died, in the midst of a very different political climate.

I like that he grew up in a small town in a farming community. I like that he’s a hunter and gun owner who supports logical gun control. I like that he was teacher and football coach who also offered to help guide the school’s gay/straight alliance group. I like that he is pro-labor. I like that he talks about minding your own business. I like that he has a sense of humor and what appear to be good political instincts.

I agree that it would be great to see more policy specifics. But the reaction right now is one of relief. You were right to push for Biden to step aside, and the energy and enthusiasm for Harris/Walz reflects that massive shift from resignation regarding a second Trump term to some hope for the upcoming election. Big picture, neither nominee has shared much in the way of tangible policy commitments. And we should pressure them to do so. But my hope is that Walz’s pragmatic and down-to-earth persona is a positive influence on Harris and her handlers.

Looking at the actual data of prior elections, Steve Kornacki throws cold water on the notion that Walz has crossover appeal. Then there’s this noxious comment on free speech:

And then there’s this kind of “equity” enthusiasm that condescends to and damages African Americans:

In May, Walz signed into law the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country. Inspired by activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system, the new law makes it harder to remove black or other “disproportionately represented” children from homes where they may have been neglected or abused. While supporters have argued that the law supports children’s welfare, in reality, it keeps black and minority kids in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity.

Dissents over my August 2 column on Harris continue from the main page:

She so clearly flailed in her 2020 campaign and ended up taking ridiculous positions to stand out in the cultural minefield that the left was then enmeshed in. Like any good pol since forever and a day, the astute ones appease their base to simply “live another day” — and then veer to the center to win the election. There’s nothing novel about this playbook.

I suspect the bit that’s tripping you up is that this pivot has happened over a four-year delayed election cycle! Yes, these are unusual times, but I think it’s pretty easy to see how this pattern-matches fairly well to a very normal and honestly boring campaign trajectory.

I don’t think any party has ever gone quite as far left as the Dems in 2020. And that requires some explanation, if you are really moving to the center. The lack of any plausible explanation suggests to me that Harris is puling one over on me.

Another reader looks at the upside of losing:

Being a traditional Democrat has its virtues: whenever members of our coalition veer too far left, as Harris did in 2020 (or too far right, as Joe Manchin did during the Biden presidency), they lose electoral competitiveness. That’s why losing is so important for politicians to go through. This traditional Democrat is happy to welcome candidate Harris back into our ranks, as well as any centrist or center-rightist whose views align with two-thirds of the American electorate.

Except she hasn’t actually moved to the center, except rhetorically. Another reader doesn’t trust Harris’ centrist pitch either:

As a conservative who decided to never support or vote for Trump (though I hate the term “Never Trumper”), I am right there with you on the choice before us in the election. I would love to be able to vote for Harris, but as someone who voted for Biden in 2020, I can’t shake the feeling that I was taken for a fool.

Everything about Biden’s campaign (such as it was) suggested unity, moderation, and a desire to reach across the aisle to heal the wounds of Trump’s first term. Instead, he has governed almost entirely as a far-left progressive and alienated the disaffected center-right voters who arguably put him in the White House. On policy, he supported trillions in spending on progressive wish-list items and has embraced every aspect of the DEI agenda.

He tried to give hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to educated, upwardly-mobile college grads in an attempt to buy their votes — and is still trying to do so, despite getting slapped down by SCOTUS. His parting gift to the country is an appalling court-packing plan that would destroy the independent judiciary and will surely become part of the Dem platform moving forward.

Rhetorically, it has been no better. Biden’s idea of “unity” apparently includes calling mild changes to voting procedures in red states “worse than Jim Crow.” His big pitch to voters before the midterm was the “Dark Brandon” speech wherein he labeled everyone to the right of Joe Manchin as a “MAGA Republican” and therefore a threat to democracy, all while speaking in front of a bizarrely authoritarian-looking backdrop. His now-defunct campaign didn’t even make an effort to win over center-right Haley supporters, instead telling us that it’s their way or the highway. Want to stop Trump? Hope you’re ok with abortion-on-demand and sex changes for pre-teens; that’s just the cost of saving democracy.

Do we really think that Harris’ recent flip-flops on immigration, policing, etc. are any different than Biden’s “unity” platitudes in 2020? Is it more likely that she will actually govern as an immigration hawk, or that she will immediately revert to her previous pro-illegal immigration positions the second that the election is over? I was fooled by Biden; I refuse to be fooled again.

Thanks for that. I needed it. How another reader puts it:

Assuming Harris “pivots” and becomes a moderate between now and November, the question then becomes: was she lying then, or is she lying now? I’m not a Trump fan, but I’d rather have the devil I know versus the devil I don’t.

But another believes the choice in November is a no-brainer:

Great stuff, Andrew, but I do worry a bit when you write about Trump not getting away with everything he (clearly) wanted to do in his first term. There were tons of adults in that administration who steered him away from some crazy shit, or stalled him, or talked him out of it. Towards the end of his term, he had fewer of those people around, so that’s when shit got crazier — namely January 6.

In a second term he will only have extreme loyalists who will do as he says, and no fear of losing a reelection to keep him sane. But regardless, there’s zero chance he leaves willingly in 2029; he will say he deserves an extra term because the 2020 election was stolen, etc.

I’m no fan of Harris. But I don’t see her as an ideologue. She’s more an opportunist, and in 2020 she said what people wanted to hear. I think she will follow the votes more than anything. I do worry about her staff turnover, but nothing is worse than Trump — full stop. Refusing to accept election results is permanently disqualifying, not to mention a million other ways he’s unfit.

Another looks back at the GOP convention and the state of conservatism:

I appreciated your column about the quandary of the Never Trumper in the 2024 election. I, too, was dismayed at Trump’s ascendancy in 2016. The RNC this year was a strangely exuberant funerary affair for me. Even though I’ve not been a Republican in over 20 years, the GOP has been the major party whose candidates have received the lion’s share of my votes. Conservatism has been the animating force in the GOP until now. I may have said that the real loser of the 2016 presidential race was the conservative movement, but that didn’t fully manifest until the ’24 RNC. The spectacle of a face-tattooed OnlyFans star and the reptilian grifter representing the Teamsters Union was very dispiriting.

If one were to boil me down far enough, my primary priorities would have Second Amendment protections, deficit reductions, and national security. (I volunteered for a deployment in Afghanistan and extended it while I was there.) And if they were menu items at this convention, they were afterthoughts buried next to the caveat that extra ketchup packets cost five cents.

The only speakers who even mentioned anything about the fact that the world is on fire were Nikki Haley and, of all people, Donald Trump. JD Vance was an arrogant and foolish selection that reflects little more than Trump’s hubris. While I have no beef with the man — I more find him a disappointment than an affront — his paper-thin political resume and lack of discernible philosophical mooring (aside from persistent flirtatiousness with the NatCon constellation of nonsense) all add up to a damp squib during an event that was supposed to be a triumph.

And then there was Trump himself: 20 minutes of surprisingly decent public speaking followed by over an hour of meandering, I-feel-like-I’m-taking-crazy-pills surreality. His resurrected political campaign, the collapse of the legal cases against him, the incredible corruption and ineptitude of all of his opponents, and then the astonishing assassination attempt and his impossible-to-fake reaction had gradually made me wonder if maybe this time would be different. Maybe his Thanos-like inevitability was building to something.

But it wasn’t. He’s still just … Trump. He steps on rakes. He can’t help himself from stooping in a way that is just flatly aversive. He is still petty and disinterested. He’s still the president who illegally usurped lawmaking power to unilaterally ban bump stocks on a lark, opening a Pandora’s box that the Biden administration has been more than happy to plunder to stymie the Second Amendment. He’s still the guy who can’t rise to an occasion, even when failing to do so alienates entirely winnable voters. He’s still Trump, and not even getting shot in the ear can change him.

That said, the same can be said for Harris. Trump is venal and unserious and harbors no ideological attachment to conservative philosophy or policy positions, but Harris is actively committed to opposing those things. She has argued — with passionate, dismissive certainty — that she can confiscate tens of millions of commonly owned firearms via executive diktat. When famously anti-gun Biden opined in a 2020 debate that the Constitution would preclude such an act, Harris laughed in his face:

Even if it’s more the case that she is a totally unprincipled liar who opts to tack to the center — assuming that we memory-hole her entire political record, public statements, expressed preference, and inference about her guiding principles — the best case scenario for a hypothetical Harris administration is a continuation of the utter catastrophe that we have been experiencing under Biden.

There is nothing in her background, reputation, or record to indicate any firm attachment to the constitutional order of our republic. And, as you point out, her most consistent philosophical hew has been towards the postmodern critical theory-infused Marxoid racialism that is absolutely antithetical to the system of government that we enjoy in the United States. She won’t change. She can’t any more than Trump can.

So while Trump may be a nonstarter for you, I would implore you to consider that casting a vote for Harris is at least as dangerous and probably even more so. Trump’s worst impulses were hemmed in by checks and balances of both the explicit and unofficial varieties; Harris’ will be mainlined through the entirety of government at lightning speed. And while Trump is a crass, morally deficient, unserious vanity, Harris is a motivated proponent of both policies and principles that are anathema to anything remotely resembling classical liberalism.

This sentence: “Trump’s worst impulses were hemmed in by checks and balances of both the explicit and unofficial varieties; Harris’ will be mainlined through the entirety of government at lightning speed.” That’s my worry. Democrats control the administrative state; they control the core educational system; they believe in comprehensive, systemic race and sex discrimination; they control the bureaucracy; they actually have the power and know how to use it. Trump? Not so much.

It’s worth recalling that Harris said she could ban assault weapons by presidential executive order on Day One of her presidency. That’s quite an authoritarian leap — and when you look at leftists in Europe and Canada, you see an illiberalism resurgent. Britain has effectively given up on defending free speech, and Keir Starmer is looking more like the radical I knew at school than than the moderate he ran as.

This next reader, though, has seen Harris up-close for a long time and isn’t worried:

I dissent from your Harris histrionics — not because I insist that you follow the mob and show proper Kamala worship, but because you don’t actually have any history with her and seem to have just read the oppo research, or came to her record looking for things to justify your thesis. I was a working journalist in San Francisco during her rise to DA, attorney general, and then US Senator. If you “knew her by their fruits and not by her words,” then you, like myself, would have observed a left-of-center prosecutor just as interested in putting gang members in jail as she was going after corporations. She was no SJW like Barbara Lee or Karen Bass.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with Harris. She seemed a pretty basic California moderate interested in advancing her career and getting some wins.

It’s well known that she and Gavin Newsom got together and decided not to compete directly. He went for the governor’s desk and she went for the Senate. It was no surprise to any of us following California politics that Newsom didn’t challenge her in this cycle. He is the guy who swings for the fences on social change, breaking open the same-sex marriage debate by just starting to perform marriages in San Francisco. Harris would never have done that, so painting her as an AOC-type character is risible. Her primary campaign failed because she tried to act as a far-left candidate to say the politically correct things to make her competitive with the Bernie Bros. It rang false.

If every Democrat who did social justice virtue-signaling during the racial reckoning was made too extreme, then Pelosi and Schumer would be on that list as well. They knew how to maneuver an elderly president off the stage for the good of the country. Don’t assume Harris is more interested in ideology than winning and, most importantly, governing.

I’m going to research more of Harris’ history. It matters and my reader’s judgment is quite common among many in California. Another reader can’t forgive the racial reckoning:

A theme I’m seeing in your latest newsletter is several of your left-wing readers admitting they went crazy in 2020 but insist that now “the fever has broken.” First, as a conservative, no: I don’t forgive the political excesses of the left in 2020, and I haven’t forgotten them. None of us should forget the lunatic idea of defunding — even disbanding! — the police. How much violence, how many deaths can be laid at the feet of city officials throughout the country who cut funding and told/forced police to disengage? And now we’re supposed to just forget all that because “we went a little crazy?”

Likewise with the lockdowns: we know now how damaging they were, especially for schoolchildren, and plenty of people said that at the time — but they were shouted down by the woke furies on the left. And now they would prefer to pretend that none of it ever happened, geez, can’t you talk about something else?

Freddie DeBoer has written about this phenomenon on several occasions. But the reason these people don’t deserve a pass is because they’ve proven that they are a little, let’s say, excitable when it comes to political matters, and may well be again (say, if Trump wins). So this becomes a matter of, “Baby I’m sorry I hit you; I don’t know what came over me; please forgive me; I promise never to do it again.”

Agreed. Those who were fired for not following the mob may feel particularly unforgiving. Another reader is also struggling to support Harris:

A recent subscriber, I always turn to your Friday mailings with interest, and I had rather high hopes for your post on Harris and Never Trumpers. I’m not a conservative myself, being instead an alienated leftist in the social-democratic mould who has found intelligent conservatives like Glenn Loury and yourself especially interesting, and helpful, as I wade through the righteous fog of progressive discourse.

Harris lost my respect when she played the race card on Biden during the Democratic primary debate. School busing is a controversial issue that can certainly be debated, but claiming that Biden’s stance was “hurtful,” not to mention launching a T-shirt with the phrase, “That little girl was me,” was cheap. Nothing about Harris’ tenure as veep inspired confidence or gave me reason to revise my estimation of her.

So in the face of what Ruy Teixeira brilliantly calls the “switcheroo,” as Harris smiles triumphantly from every front page, as momentum builds toward her apotheosis as savior of the country, I have been profoundly unhappy. I was in the “I’d vote for a potted plant rather than Trump” brigade. Why does the emergence of someone who might actually beat him not fill me with joy?

Trying to understand that stubborn unhappiness, I’ve investigated her record and policy positions as best I could, and I agree with your assessment of her essential “wokeness.” Other than for a drive to power, identity seems to be one of the few through-lines in her story. Her record as a prosecutor was less progressive than frequently stated, though consistent with an underlying commitment to the rights and safety of women. Her stances on BLM, reparations, equity in Covid policy: “woke.” The financial support she has recently been receiving from members of her social circle — mostly tech billionaires — add a level of concern for me. I can imagine a Harris who is both neoliberal in tech and economic policy, and “woke” in social policy and social control.

Both because I’d like to see a political coalition of poor and middle-income people of all races, a coalition based on the realities of class, and because my father’s family has roots in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, I can’t deal with the progressive demonization of white working-class people. Because I was raised on family stories as well as the history and literature of this country, I can’t deal with the reduction of that history to a morality play in which my humble ancestors now feature as white, racist, imperialist oppressors. (Though I have come up with three ancestors who fought for the Union in the Civil War, in case anyone comes knocking on my door demanding reparations.)

I voted for Biden with some enthusiasm, because I believed he meant it when he said he wanted to be a unifier. I took his “Joe from Scranton” line as reflecting awareness of the realities of working-class life in areas of the country that Obama and Clinton dismissed. In some ways Biden came through, and in others, disappointed. But a neoliberal who sees poor people only if they are officially “oppressed?”

That captures many of my emotions. But this next reader argues that even if Harris is woke, her presidency would lead to less wokeness:

You wrote, “Maybe getting rid of Trump is worth a new wave of woke Kulturkampf.” It’s interesting: a few of my formerly liberal friends here in New York have gone full Trump. They see the election as a choice between what one hates more: wokeism or Trumpism. I’m further to the left than them, and yourself, and even though I’m no big fan of Harris, thought she was a terrible candidate in 2019/20, and have spent the last eight years bemoaning the Great Awokening, I actually think a Harris win would result in less woke than a Trump win.

Trump was the source of the Great Awokening. He was indisputable proof to the campus identitarians that America really was a cis-white-patriarchy — just look at the man the country put in the White House. Everything flowed from that: MeToo, equity, the George Floyd protests, etc. If Trump wins again, this time against a woman of color, they will have even more proof that the country is rigged and corrupt. That would result in the next wave of woke Kulturkampf. With a Harris win, I think it will continue to die down.

I’ve made that point before — and it’s a reason for greater comfort with her. Another reader argues that the GOP ticket is more preoccupied with identity than the Dem one:

I’m not in the same place as you politically, and I disagree with much of your criticism of Harris. But I appreciate that, right or wrong, your criticism was fair. I also appreciate your open-mindedness, since you left it at needing to see more before deciding whether to vote for her, as opposed to ruling it out altogether.

I’d like to know what you think of the GOP opposition to Harris thus far. My impression of it: in the first few days, most of the GOP attacks were substantive criticisms of Harris’ record (either her own past statements or making her own the Biden administration’s record), with a smattering of criticisms of her laugh mixed in. But since then, the GOP and online criticism has all seemed to pivot away from her record and towards her identity; she’s an unqualified diversity hire; she’s “Barack Obama in a skirt”; she’s not really black; she’s never given birth, etc. Why is the right more focused on who she is than on what she has done?

Because they are sick, and Trump has made it far worse.

A listener reminds us to take a break from politics:

I hope you’ve been able to disengage from the “deadliness of doing” this month and have had a few moments of reflection and joy. I just listened to, for the second time, your conversation with Christian Wiman, on a flight back to Minnesota from the West Coast. (The Dishcast is my go-to for air travel.) I think it’s one of your best episodes. The subject matter is so worthwhile: issues of the heart, faith, suffering, and the travails of the human soul.

Please continue these types of discussions whenever you are able. The world clamors for the noise of politics, culture, strife — the passions of the moment. So nice to pull back occasionally.

And lastly, among the countless emails of condolence we got over the break, a reader writes:

Please accept my deepest condolences on the loss of your mother and Chris’ stepfather. When I received your email today, I wept not only at the photographs, but out of understanding the primal need for time to digest the losses. There is a complexity of feelings that come with the loss of a parent.

It also happens that although my Mom died in November 2022, your email reminded me of a dream I had this morning. Right before I woke, I was crying inconsolably over the loss of my Mom. I had forgotten until I received your email.

I grieve with both of you.

We are very grateful. It was a tough month. I will write about it at some point. But, yes, we just needed to be with our families and to rest and absorb it all. Thanks for staying with us.

See you next week.

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