michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, is Joe Biden what the Democratic Party needs right now, or should he step aside?

ross douthat

I’m Joe Biden, and, yes, I am out of step with where a lot of leaders in the Democratic Party are going.

david leonhardt

Then, America’s sexual recession— what is causing it?

michelle goldberg

Young men need to step up.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

He was Stephen King, baby.

david leonhardt

Joe Biden did not have a good week—

news clip Former Vice President Joe Biden is now accused of inappropriate touching.

david leonhardt

—which then led to a big discussion about whether Biden was a relic from another era. Away from the media scrum, though, Biden still looks like the strongest Democrat in the 2020 field. Huge numbers of voters say they like him, especially Democrats. He still hasn’t announced whether he’s running, but he seems likely to do so in coming weeks. In previous episodes on this show, we focused on other candidates— Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren. Today, we are going to talk about Biden. Michelle, you should go first. You were already negative about him before last week’s events. So tell us why you’re so down on Joe Biden.

michelle goldberg

I don’t think it’s fair to say that I’m down on Joe Biden. I’m down on him as a candidate, not as a person, right? I have a lot of residual affection for Joe Biden. I think, unlike a lot of other feminist writers I know, he was a great vice president to Obama. He pushed that administration in good directions. He’s a charming figure. I think that there are a lot of reasons why I hope that he doesn’t run for president. And this handsy thing that is now becoming an issue, in some ways, is the least of it, although I think it’s a symbol of just that he’s out of step with the mores of the progressive movement. So this thing that’s going on now with Lucy Flores and Amy Lappos is playing out in a way that I think is pretty painful. Because I feel like the two sides are really misunderstanding each other. On the one hand, you have Joe Biden’s defenders, who see this as an example of absurd #MeToo overkill, and are we really trying to outlaw platonic gestures of affection? And to them, this looks like a coordinated hit and the weaponization of this movement. And then, on the other side, you have people who are trying to say, no, nobody’s saying that Joe Biden sniffing your hair or nuzzling your hair or kissing the back of your head or rubbing your nose against his— nobody’s saying that’s sexual assault. Nobody’s even saying that’s sexual harassment. They’re just saying that it makes them really uncomfortable and feels like an invasion of their personal space in a way that— women are now increasingly articulating how that makes them uncomfortable and self-conscious, and they don’t want to put up with it anymore. And so, to me, the problem is that we’re fighting about whether Joe Biden is a good candidate on this issue of how we feel about these sort of ambiguous accusations by Lucy Flores when the problem is really that his entire record is just not right for this moment.

ross douthat

Yeah, I think that’s right. And I wrote a column this week that I think is kind of a complement to the argument Michelle is making. And I’m curious what you guys think of the argument that, basically, if Biden wanted to run for the nomination and win— and in order to win, he would need to give people a real reason to vote for him in a crowded, divided field where there are lots of likeable candidates. I think you could make a case that he would need to lean in to the very problem Michelle is identifying, right, and basically say, hi. Yeah, I’m Joe Biden, and yes, I am out of step with where a lot of activists and leaders in the Democratic Party are going. I do have a record that’s a little more moderate, or centrist, in ways that liberals on the left don’t like. And I’m going to own it. And I’m going to try and basically rally the part of the Democratic Party— and there is still a part of the Democratic Party that isn’t all the way to where Bernie Sanders is on economics, isn’t all the way to where a lot of the party is on race and sexual harassment and these kind of things. And I think if Biden did that, he would be able to assemble not a majority coalition but this kind of plurality coalition. He would be doing, in a way, a version of what Trump did in the Republican primary, where you say, look, I’m going to get 30 percent.

michelle goldberg

So part of the reason I think he couldn’t do that— not that he shouldn’t do that but that he couldn’t do that— is because so many parts of that record are really things that can’t be defended on their merits, right? He can’t go out there and defend his vote for the Iraq war. He can’t go out there and defend his vote for Glass-Steagall, which rolled back some regulations on banking in a way that a lot of people believe set the table for the financial crisis in 2008 and that Biden has called one of his greatest-ever regrets. He can’t go back and defend his treatment of Anita Hill when he himself has said that it was really unfair how she was treated.

ross douthat

No, he can’t do that. But he could defend some elements of his record on, let’s say, race and crime and abortion. And he could basically say, I’m going to be the candidate who says it’s O.K. to be a Democrat who voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Act. I’m going to say it’s O.K. to be a Democrat who doesn’t agree with the idea of reparations. I’m going to be a Democrat who defends Bill Clinton’s record, right? He could defend Bill Clinton’s record on crime, which a lot of liberals really find appalling now, but not all Democrats do. I think there’s a story he could tell—

michelle goldberg

Even Bill Clinton, though, has renounced the crime bill, right? Even Bill Clinton isn’t defending that record anymore.

ross douthat

That’s true. No, this is why I don’t think Biden will do this. I expect that if he runs, he will run as a figure who doesn’t try to defend his record at all, or basically just reduces his record to his years as Obama’s vice president and says, I get it. I’m on board with the new progressive consensus. But I’m a kind of bridge to the future. This is why they’re talking about a one-term pledge and so on. And I think that kind of run will be a total disaster, and he will collapse Jeb Bush style. Because it doesn’t give anyone a reason to actively support him. But I think the kind of run I’m imagining has more potential to get him the nomination but at the cost of making him this incredibly divisive figure who’s hated by a big portion of the party. And I’m curious what David, as our moderate, thinks about that.

david leonhardt

I guess I think that politics are a little less literal than we journalists often treat it as. I don’t think most voters are out there toting up Joe Biden’s history of policy positions. And I think there are a huge number of voters who are medium- to low-information voters and who feel positively about Joe Biden. And I’m not super excited about his candidacy, but I really want him to run because I think in 2016 the Democratic Party got a lesson in the problem of essentially trying to decide the primary before it had even begun. And I do think there is a larger group of Democrats— Ross, you identified them as, basically, suburban moderates and culturally moderate African-Americans and Latinos and others— who are not exactly where a lot of the energy on the progressive left is right now. And I think it would be healthy for the party to find out, well, exactly how many voters like that are there? And the way I read the polling, Joe Biden is the most popular Democrat coming into the race. And so I guess, Michelle, my question for you is I get why you hope he’s not the nominee. But to me, that’s a little bit different from hoping he doesn’t run. Wouldn’t it be better if he ran and either won and showed that this really is where people are, or lost, and people like you, who don’t like him, would be able to say, see? Joe Biden’s not the answer.

michelle goldberg

Well, again, I would go back to the fact that I do like him. And honestly, part of it is that I don’t really want to see Joe Biden go out there and be humiliated, right? I don’t really want to see other candidates disassemble his record. And right now, he goes out as a popular vice president, elder statesman. I understand why he wants to risk all that, but I don’t think he should. And the reason I don’t want him to run is just I don’t really feel like it would be useful or healthy. I also didn’t want Bernie Sanders to run. I just feel like it’s not useful or healthy to go back and relitigate a lot of this stuff. I don’t want to relitigate the 2016 election, and I certainly don’t want to relitigate the ‘90s or the Iraq war. I just think that the debate could be much more forward-looking. And if there are moderate voters out there who just want some sort of nice, safe-seeming white guy, the Democratic Party has some of those. It doesn’t have to be someone who’s 76 and has a bunch of positions that he now wants to disavow.

david leonhardt

So to me, the candidates who had the best possibility of appealing to moderate voters, many of them are not running, or some of them are really struggling. So Deval Patrick, who’s African-American and the former governor of Massachusetts, not running. Mitch Landrieu— white, New Orleans mayor— not running. Sherrod Brown, whom we’ve talked about before, Ohio senator, not running. Amy Klobuchar is running but is struggling. I guess, Michelle, who do you see— I realize you don’t think this is how the Democrats should make the decision— but who besides Biden do you see as the figure in the race who has a natural appeal to those kind of swing voters?

michelle goldberg

Well, it looks like our boss’s brother’s going to get in, right? Michael Bennet, it looks like he’s going to get in. I think, potentially, Mayor Pete, even though there’s a lot of reasons why you don’t need a 37-year-old candidate who is the mayor of a minor city in Indiana. But I think that he probably really appeals to some of that constituency. And Kamala Harris, frankly, whose major issue has been improving teacher pay, which, I would imagine, is a really popular issue with suburban parents and is the rare issue that unites both the teachers unions and the charter school reform neoliberal sector of the Democratic Party.

david leonhardt

But in a way, I think the way Kamala Harris has run shows why it would be good if Biden runs. So stick with me for just one second here, which is, I agree Kamala Harris could run as sort of a moderate, right? She could talk about her record as a prosecutor. She could talk about all the things you were just talking about. That’s not how she’s running. She’s running by talking about the joy that marijuana brings. She’s running very much by trying to appeal to this progressive energy. And it seems to me that it would be healthier for the Democratic Party to have top-tier candidates who both are trying to appeal to the progressive energy and are trying to appeal toward this large part of the Democratic primary electorate who are less political and more moderate. And my concern is that Biden is basically the giant among those potential candidates. And if he doesn’t run, the Democrats might be doing themselves a disservice.

ross douthat

Well, I think it’s pretty clear right now that if Biden doesn’t run, the competition for the moderate white guy lane is going to come down to probably Beto and Buttigieg, if I’m pronouncing Mayor Pete’s last name right. And I think you’ve got Beto O’Rourke, he’s out there doing vague uplift with very little policy. And Buttigieg is a sort of heartland technocrat, the sort of Mitch Daniels of the Democratic Party. And those are both brands that are more centrist, in some general way, than the brands that Harris and, certainly, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have. And I think that does make, in a sense, David’s case for him, in a way. Because whatever you think about Joe Biden, he probably has more business being president of the United States than Beto and Buttigieg. I just don’t think he’s going to want the kind of primary where he really runs as a moderate. And in the end, I think if he can’t do that, then those voters are going to defect to the excitement of Mayor Pete or the excitement of Beto or maybe the Minnesota fury of Amy Klobuchar. And he’s going to lose, anyway.

michelle goldberg

I worry about the poison of this debate about Biden that sort of borrows some of the moral force of #MeToo to talk about something that’s actually quite different than #MeToo, which is his chronic handsiness and kind of outsized physical affection. The debate itself, it makes me really sad for everybody involved. And I just don’t see what good can come of it. There’s so much bad faith and so much misunderstanding and so much personal embarrassment and personal destruction. I just really worry about where it’s going.

ross douthat

Yeah. I think Biden can’t get through that issue without making his own handsiness a kind of cause celébre for part of the party, right? The part of the party that thinks it’s fine, he needs that part of the party to mobilize around him in a way that would be a kind of #MeToo has gone too far coalition. And there, too, that’s divisive.

michelle goldberg

But he doesn’t want to be that guy. In part, look, one of his signature issues with Obama was campus sexual assault. He doesn’t want to be out there as the person being like, I’ll nuzzle whoever I want.

ross douthat

[LAUGHING] No, and that is, I think, in certain ways, the best counterargument is that Biden’s own choices under Obama make it clear that he doesn’t want to be the fighting moderate that he was for much of his career, that he wants to be seen as a progressive leader, even if his record doesn’t back it up historically. And to the extent that’s true, then you’re not going to get a guy to run a campaign he just doesn’t want to run.

david leonhardt

I still think he’s a stronger candidate than a lot of this discussion suggests when you look at the polling and you look at his numbers. And I’m just talking now about his numbers among Democrats. But he does have some big weaknesses, starting with his age. So what do you each think about a couple of the specific ideas about Biden? I think the idea that he would announce he would serve only one term is a terrible idea. I think it just focuses attention on his weaknesses. Do either of you like it more than I do?

michelle goldberg

No. Because it’s sort of acknowledging that he’s too old, right? And I don’t think the candidate should be in his 70s. My biggest reservation about Elizabeth Warren, who I love, is that she’s in her 60s. Look at all of the successful Democratic presidents of not just our generation but well before we were born, right? They are all insurgent young men. The one exception would be LBJ. But even he was 56, even though he looked like he was 70. Democrats have always, in the recent and not so recent past, done better as the party of youth and energy and change.

david leonhardt

Ross, if I’m right to assume that you also don’t like the one-term idea, what do you think about the idea of him announcing a vice presidential pick, specifically Stacey Abrams, the young, dynamic Georgian who came close to winning the governor’s race out of the gate? What do you think of that idea?

ross douthat

I think it’s also a bad idea. And Abrams has semi-taken herself out of consideration for that, right, which is understandable. Because if you’re Stacey Abrams, why do you want to lash yourself to a campaign that might collapse upon its first contact with political reality?

michelle goldberg

I also think, in terms of his out of touchness, this thing of kind of floating Stacey Abrams without actually talking to Stacey Abrams beforehand really infuriated a lot of people. And I feel like if you understand the dynamics of politicians of this generation, you would have understood that that would infuriate her and her allies.

ross douthat

And it’s making subtext text. Instead of implying that you, Joe Biden, will be a bridge to a different Democratic future, you’re showing up and saying, here: here’s my young African-American running mate, who will succeed me very soon so you can vote for me. I just feel like it invites the kind of ridicule and the sense of incipient weakness that did in Jeb Bush in a different context but a similar one, in certain ways, just a few years ago. I think if Biden is running, he needs to run as a front runner. He needs to go in and say, I’ve got the poll numbers. I’m going to have the money. Voters like me. I’m here. I’m playing to win. And all of these moves don’t seem like they’re made from that position at all.

david leonhardt

OK. We will leave it there. We’re going to keep going through the candidates. At this rate, it sounds like Mayor Pete may be the next one we talk about, but we are also happy to hear your suggestions. If there’s a candidate you want to hear us talk about, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. That’s 347-915-4324. And we will be right back. Americans are having less sex, and it’s not just because society is aging.

news clip Well, you know what’s really surprising in the data is that we’re seeing that sex is actually going down among adults in general and among young adults, in particular.

david leonhardt

Almost a quarter of people in their 20s say they had no sex last year. As for teenagers, here’s what The Atlantic magazine has reported. In the space of a generation, sex has gone from something that most high school students have experienced to something most haven’t. Why is this happening? Is it good, bad, or both? Ross, help us understand what’s going on here.

ross douthat

So there’s this old short story called “The Monkey’s Paw,” which is basically about a monkey’s paw, as the title suggests, that grants you wishes. But once you’re granted the wish, it ends up, of course, coming at some enormous cost that makes you wish you’d never made the wish in the first place. And I think for a lot of social conservatives, that’s sort of what has happened with youth sex over the last 20 years or so, and especially over the last 10 or 15, right? Because if you went back to the 1980s and 1990s and you asked cultural conservatives what had gone wrong in America, they would say, well, we have a crisis of promiscuity. And people are having sex before marriage too much with too many partners. They’re having too many children out of wedlock. Families are breaking down. Marriage is breaking down. And promiscuity is at the heart of it. And so you can imagine the social conservative of 1982 or 1995 rubbing the monkey’s paw and wishing for less promiscuity and getting it. But the way we’ve gotten it has not been this kind of remoralization of sexual life that conservatives imagined. It’s just been this straightforward decline of relationships and marriage. So the simplest reason why sex is declining among younger people— and this doesn’t, obviously, encompass teen sex— but it’s just the decline of marriage, or people postponing marriage, at least. So social conservatives have gotten their less sexually active before marriage society in a sense, but they’ve gotten it at the expense of the institution and the social bonds that they imagined that they— we, I should say— wanted reforged.

michelle goldberg

But it’s not just about marriage, right? It’s also true among high school students or among teenagers. And then, also the decline in marriage rates can’t explain the discrepancy between men who aren’t having sex, or young men who aren’t having sex, and young women who aren’t having sex, right, that it’s actually, you have this falloff among sex for a fairly large percentage of young men compared to young women.

ross douthat

Yes, although— so we have to be careful, right? So the reason we’re having this conversation is that there was a big new General Social Survey analysis that came out that showed this spike, particularly for young men, over the last five or 10 years, in sexlessness. That is just one data point. And the General Social Survey is a really good study, but it’s vulnerable to statistical errors, like everything else. And if you package that together with the kind of data that informed The Atlantic essay that David just quoted and so on, we should be skeptical for now that there’s a huge spike, right, that there’s a definite huge young male incel— involuntary celibate— phenomenon. What we can be certain about is there’s less sex and fewer marriages. And the fewer marriages are driving a substantial portion, but we don’t know how much.

david leonhardt

I find this depressing. I get that the decline in teen pregnancies is a good thing. But this overall decline, it just feels like part of a larger breakdown in the health of our social interactions. People are spending less time interacting with each other. They’re spending more time with machines. And with that Atlantic essay by Kate Julian, which appeared at the end of 2018, is really an excellent summary of this, I thought. And it just describes a kind of awkwardness around what, for a long time, were basic human interactions that really depressed me.

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I think that you have to see it in concert with all these statistics about rising mental health problems, rising anxiety, rising rates of suicide among young people, right? Probably lots of casual sex is not super healthy but potentially healthier than sitting in your room with pornography and video games all the time, if that’s what’s happening. And that might be a stereotype. And then, the other piece of this is that Ross, before, said that we don’t know that there’s this expanding population of incels. But inasmuch, there is a sort of mobilized population of incels, right, these extremely resentful young men who feel like they’ve been denied their share of sexual happiness and companionship. And it’s been politicized. I think it’s no accident that you see this cycle of radicalization that starts with video games and then goes into white nationalism and that white nationalists have been kind of deliberate in recruiting on some of these forums. And these men, they’ve both committed overt acts of terrorism. But they’re also, they are the alt-right, right? They are the natural constituency of Trumpian politics. And I think you see in every society— and it happens for lots of different reasons— that just having large cadres of unattached young men without much to do is extraordinarily socially destructive.

ross douthat

Yes, it’s not good. This is where the argument for a certain kind of cultural conservatism has always been that you want to structure society in such a way so that the male sex drive is linked to personal responsibility and getting ahead in life and becoming a plausible mate and a good partner and a good provider and all of these things. And I think one of the conservative critiques of where our culture has ended up is, basically, that, at a certain point, we said, well, this perspective is totally unfair to women. Because it makes women more passive figures. It assumes that the male sex drive is stronger than the female sex drive, and that’s not necessarily true, and all of these things. And it puts too many limits on people’s personal choices. And the difficulty is in removing all rules and structure from how people think about what you’re supposed to do in order to have a normal, healthy sexual relationship, you’ve created a dynamic where men seem to think that they’re entitled to the levels of sex that our culture says are necessary for the good life, while having no clear, structured way to get there. And maybe that’s just the price we pay.

michelle goldberg

Right. But that, in itself, is a function of social conservatism, right? The fact that they— I don’t want to use a buzzword like toxic masculinity— but I don’t think that progressives are out there saying you can ignore everything that makes a person a decent mate. They’re saying that you actually have to treat women with more respect and more egalitarianism. And in fact, that is what you have to do to successfully pair up in the society in which we are all actually living in, right? Tucker Carlson recently went off on my friend Chris Hayes and said, if progressives had their way, every man would be a bespectacled, apologetic man like Chris Hayes, right? And a lot of people responded, basically, like, inshallah. I think progressives are saying that if you want to be healthily married, if you want to have a family, the way to do it is to learn to treat women like equals. And that’s the lesson that the incels refuse to learn. And so to blame that on progressivism seems unfair to me.

ross douthat

Yeah. I think I would say that progressivism, or whatever we want to call current liberalized culture, has not come up with a effective integration of masculinity and, let’s say, gentlemanliness that works up and down the ladders of class and income and so on, right? Toxic masculinity’s a useful term because it describes something that’s a constant in human history, right? Men are violent and dangerous in ways that are specific to their bodies and their selves, and society has to find ways to discipline that. And it just seems like we haven’t come up with a consistent, effective means, even if there are segments of society in which men are successfully pairing off.

david leonhardt

Ross, my question for cultural conservatives is, what are you going to do about it? Meaning, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to aspects of the cultural conservative critique, the idea that two parents— I would say they can be of opposite sex or same sex— the idea that two parents are better for kids than one, the idea that families bring huge benefits. I’m sympathetic to a lot of this. But when I hear cultural conservatives talk, I’m often left asking at the end, O.K., but what do you want to do about it besides moral exhortations? Meaning, what kind of changes do you think, as a society, we could put in place that would actually make more likely the world you want to see?

ross douthat

I think high schools and colleges could essentially move away— especially colleges— move away from the idea that college life is supposed to just be a sexual free-for-all and move towards a world that— the crudest way to put it, and this is, of course, considered the most reactionary notion imaginable— but is to bring back single sex housing on college campuses and say, look, the sexes should relate to each other in a slightly more civilized and decorous way than they do in campus life right now. And this would create structures of courtship rather than hookup culture. Because hookup culture seems to lead, in the end, to less sex and less marriage— less of both. So that’s a reactionary structural suggestion.

david leonhardt

I’m a little skeptical that would have a big effect, given that—

ross douthat

Well, nothing—

david leonhardt

—campuses as a sexual free-for-all isn’t really the problem right now.

ross douthat

Well, but it’s not the problem, except the cultural expectation on college campuses is that it’s a sexual free-for-all, right? That’s the weird thing about this moment. It’s this incredibly permissive culture, in a way, that is then producing this sterile and uptight result, in a weird way.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s your solution?

michelle goldberg

I think part of the difficulty is just that young men need to step up. And I don’t think it’s the job of young women to make men better or tame and civilize men. So personally, I think that young women shouldn’t settle for extremely cold and brutal sexual culture that seems to prevail, thanks to hookup culture and apps and all the rest. I think that women should demand more kindness and consideration and feel empowered to demand more from the men that they have sex with. There’s, I think, a lot of evidence that the sexual culture that we have right now is making young women pretty unhappy. And there are elements of the #MeToo movement that’s kind of a sublimated way to deal with that. And I think that if women feel empowered to expect more of men, maybe at least some men will rise to the occasion.

david leonhardt

To me, this is a sign that some fundamental things for our society aren’t working for either women or for men, which I think is why I find it so depressing. And it’s a sign of the scale of the challenges that American society has right now. And on that depressing note, we are going to leave the segment and come back in a minute with our weekly recommendation, which is designed to lift you up a little bit. It’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we try to take your mind off of politics. Ross, you get to go this week. What do you have?

ross douthat

Well, so we’re still a week out, but the last season of Game of Thrones is coming out on HBO next week. And of course, rather famously, the series is finishing, even though the series of books that it’s based on hasn’t been finished. So I want to recommend a fantasy series for anyone who enjoyed Game of Thrones, either the shows or the books, called “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” by Tad Williams that came out, I think, in the 1990s. And it has many virtues. But among those virtues is the fact that it was actually finished. It was a long, sprawling, but ultimately cohesive, trilogy of fantasy novels that has a lot of the virtues of the genre— not quite as bloody and sexually minded as George R. R. Martin, but also not just a J.R.R. Tolkien retread. And again, it was finished. And so much of fantasy has ended up— not just Martin, there are other novelists who failed to finish their huge, sprawling sagas. So I think it’s good to recommend a series that’s both good and complete, as all great series should try to be.

michelle goldberg

Is there going to be a movie?

ross douthat

Well, maybe after my recommendation. [GOLDBERG LAUGHS] To people who’ve worked in the movie business, I’ve suggested this as a fantasy series that could be adapted because it is complete.

david leonhardt

Ross, is there a reason that fantasy novels don’t get finished? Is there something that distinguishes them from other series?

ross douthat

Two things, right? One, you sort of get lost in your world. A big part of fantasy is worldbuilding. You’re creating this universe. And this has clearly happened to Martin, that once he got rich and famous, it was like, well, I want my characters to explore this region of Westeros and that region and introduce this, and I can’t get my character out of this city that I’ve gotten them stuck in, and so on. So then, that is just linked to the problem of success, right? Often, you’ll start out writing a series, and you’ll write three books. And by the third book, you’ll have gone from a struggling novelist to an insanely successful novelist, and it gets tougher and tougher to discipline yourself, I think, to finish. This even happened— you saw this with the Harry Potter novels, which were finished. But if you compare the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, to the last book, the tightness of the original book is amazing. And by the end, it’s clear that nobody’s editing J.K. Rowling. Nobody’s touching her prose. However much she wants to write she’s going to write. So really, the best sagas are the ones that are finished before the writer becomes incredibly famous, probably.

david leonhardt

There’s a good example of that involving Stephen King. The original version of “The Stand” was long. But then, he republished it after he got really famous. And he said in the preface, now I’m Stephen King. I can publish anything I want. And so I’m now publishing the whatever it was— 1,100- or 1,200-word version.

ross douthat

That’s actually the only version of “The Stand” I’ve ever read, so I guess I’m sort of partial to it. But yeah, he was Stephen King, baby.

david leonhardt

OK. What’s the recommendation again?

ross douthat

It is “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.” The first novel is called “The Dragonbone Chair,” and the author is Tad Williams.

david leonhardt

Thank you very much. [MUSIC PLAYING] Listeners, we’re going to devote another segment soon to your voicemails and our responses to them. So we want you to call in and give us some thoughts and questions. What do you think is the most undercovered story in America right now? What are you arguing with your friends about? What is one piece of good news amidst all the depressing news in politics? Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. That’s 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. That’s our show for this week. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Alex Laughlin and Wynton Wong for Transmitter Media and edited by Lacy Roberts. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. Special thanks to Kaiser Health News. We recommend their podcast, What the Health. We are taking a one-week break next week. We’ll be back in your podcast feeds on Thursday, April 18. See you then.

ross douthat

For the record, I have enjoyed both the company of Chris Hayes and Tucker Carlson.

michelle goldberg

And which one is more butch? [ALL LAUGHING]

ross douthat