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1:22 The Coates debate continues

3:18 John: Coates is a beautiful writer, but …

5:44 John: … The Message is suffused with incuriosity and simplistic thinking

13:45 Glenn: Coates is talking about humanism and power, not race

18:11 Ground News ad

20:25 Is it “all about whitey”?

22:11 Glenn: Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this book. What am I doing?

27:40 What kind of historical imagination is at work in The Message?

34:11 Moral clarity or abdication of responsibility?

36:30 Pro-Palestinian writers John considers acceptable

41:54 The next entries in Glenn and John’s book club

42:04 Coates’s now notorious interview on CBS Mornings

48:45 What is the black intellectual’s role today?

52:16 The counterexample of South Africa

Recorded October 19, 2024

Links and Readings

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Glenn and John’s previous conversation

John’s NYT column, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility”

Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Jeffrey Sachs on YouTube

Judge Andrew Napolitano on YouTube

Trevor Noah’s conversation with Coates

Ezra Klein’s conversation with Coates

Peter Beinart’s conversation with Coates

David Greenberg’s new book, John Lewis: A Life

Karen and Barbara Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

James Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”

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