by Daniel Goulden

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Daniel Goulden, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Steve Coll about his book Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Penguin Press), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the story of a seemingly endless war. A month after the September 11th attacks a shaken United States invaded Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban government that had been providing Osama
Bin Laden safe harbor. 18 years later, the war is still going. Many soldiers currently serving there have no memory of 9/11 attacks. Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former Managing Editor of the Washington Post, and the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School,
began his career as the Post’s South Asia correspondent, long before the September 11th attacks would put the region at the center of international affairs. Directorate S is a follow up to Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, which recounts the events leading up to 9/11, ending on September 10th. Directorate S begins on September 11th. Initially the United States saw
Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, as an ally in the war on terror. However, the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) was secretly funding the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, through its directorate tasked with supporting these organizations, Directorate S. On the American side, the CIA, caught off guard by the September 11th attacks, desperately scrambled to identify future threats, resorting to torture to
do so. Directorate S is the sobering account of how the Afghan War turned into the longest war in American history. It recounts the mistakes and missteps that led to the situation today. It is a definitive account of the war and essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the tragedy of the war unfolded. I interviewed Steve Coll about his work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your prologue you describe watching the attacks on the World Trades Center and the Pentagon and realizing that Al Qaeda, an organization you had been covering for years was behind them. You must have been one of the first civilians to know what was going on. What was it like coming to that realization?

It was a strange day. I drove downtown and the sense that the city was under attack was familiar to me from war coverage, but for so many Americas it was a new experience. It wasn’t until noon that it was clear there would be no more planes coming down. The main thing that I was focused on was trying to get our coverage at the Washington Postright. It did help to have some confidence that it was Al Qaeda. We could get our reporters to see if there was information in the intelligence system, cargo manifests and so forth, that would lead us in that direction. By the end of day it was clear [that it was Al Qaeda], because of the two guys on the plane that struck the pentagon were well known Al Qaeda people under surveillance before. 

Directorate is a truly massive book, nearly 700 pages with 50 pages of notes. Your sources included interviews, diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, and your own reporting. What was the process like of taking so much information and turning it into a cohesive narrative?

I’m afraid its the only way I know how to do things. I keep thinking of ways to make my work a little bit smaller in its ambitions, but I think for this book, the challenge was to achieve my own goals for what level of original material I was trying to deliver. I have to spend the first couple of years of a project in just pure discovery mode. I’m just thrashing around trying to dig out insights that will feel fresh even to people who know the material pretty well, as well as thinking about the scope and the range of material that the general reader is going to want if I’m going to deliver this as a fairly comprehensive volume. In this case I was sort of burdened by the first of the two books. Its kind of strange to write a second volume of a two part history when you didn’t intend the first volume to be the first of two. That meant I had to understand what the scope of the book was, then pick that up and lay it onto a very different history that had a lot more conventional war.  And so, I was kind of working on that in my head for the first couple of years and at the same time trying to break through as a reporter, so I could deliver something original. The other big challenge of this book compared to Ghost Warswas that in the case of Ghost WarsI had accidentally been assigned to this part of the world and I had worked on it for a long time, then 9/11 came along and made it relevant. I wrote that book to try to help Americans and Afghans and Pakistanis to an extent, understand what the backstory was to 9/11, to separate rumor from truth and deliver it in a readable way. There wasn’t much competition for that project. This time it was completely different. There was tons of stuff written about what happened since 9/11. So I had to figure out how to get underneath the surface even more than in Ghost Wars, in order to deliver something original.  And then the challenge is once you’ve broken through and finally gotten to the material that you think is worthy, then you have a geometry problem. You have to write a narrative that works with that material. You can’t just start with what would make for the best story, you have to start with the deep reporting you’ve got. So early on I think about the outline and the character selection and the motion of the narrative, the sections. I knew the history pretty well, but I had to find the new material that would drive the book and that took a while. 

What was the process like of capturing a narrative from this? It sounds like you had to let the material determine the narrative?

I had some principles that I knew I would follow and reported into those. I wanted to work in the triangle formed by Washington, Islamabad, and Kabul and I like intervals so I wanted to go back and forth. Not too much time in Washington, then Pakistan, then Kabul, then back to Washington. I knew I wanted to narrate as much of the book through the three intelligence services as I could and that would be my way of avoiding a kind of pure military history of the Afghan war. So then it was a question of how do I sustain deep reporting and certain characters across that outline and what else needs to be in there besides that. There are certain things you just can’t ignore. I couldn’t write a book that intended to be definitive about this period if I didn’t treat heroine and opium. That doesn’t really fit anywhere. It’s not a CIA story, it’s not an ISI story. So I came across arguments in the intelligence community about measuring what the significance of the opiate economy was for the Taliban and I built a chapter around that. 

Why did you pick ISI and the CIA to be the center of the story?

Well partly its an extension of the history that’s in the first volume, but partly it was because the book is really about why the United States failed in Afghanistan from an American perspective. The biggest single reason was that the Taliban and Al Qaeda enjoyed geographical sanctuary in Pakistan and the reason they enjoyed sanctuary was ISI’s role in defining what Pakistani regional security needs were, which included keeping these militias alive to counter India. The US was blind to that for a while. Eventually they realized what was going on and it was almost too late to recover because the guerrilla war had acquired such a momentum inside Afghanistan. There were no good answers. Pakistan was not an easy problem, but the fact that they didn’t solve it, and that it kept on going on despite all their pleadings to the Pakistanis to do something different, just embittered people as the years went on. There is still so much bitterness in the system about the reason the war failed, even though the war failed for many reasons, not just ISI. But that’s the one that’s at the heart of it, sort of the Moby Dickproblem of the war.

A lot of what we find so controversial about the Middle Eastern wars, particularly the “enhanced interrogations,” or torture, and the drone strikes originated in the CIA. How did the history and culture of the CIA lead to the birth of these practices? 

The CIA has a long history of abusive interrogations going back to the 50s, experiments, weird experiments in coercive interrogations, some of them even worse than waterboarding. The agency was in an existential crisis after the September 11^thattacks. The whole purpose of an intelligence service is to give strategic warning of attacks and when you miss one on that scale everything is at issue. The leaders felt like they could lose their whole place at the table in the American system if there was another one. They really were in a panic for about 2 or 3 years and they didn’t have any good information. The main thing after 9/11 was that they told every intelligence service in the world: “If there’s anyone who’s ever been on your radar as a radical extremist, arrest them on anything you can get them on and interrogate them.” So you get all this really bad information. You’re basically asking people to tell you about made-up threats. 

Or sell out their neighbors.

            Yeah. Or sell out their neighbors. And so it was a mess. When they finally caught a couple of people who they thought would know what was coming next, they decided they had to proceed this way. There was a core in the middle of the agency that just felt like they couldn’t afford to miss something, particularly when they had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They thought that he was the one who could, prevent an attack. 

            I think the drone strikes were a different beast. Those were fully authorized by President Obama. It was basically a secret air war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There’s something unsettling about the hovering tech, the fact that they’re like dragons circling the sky, but their basic function against these militias and cells was no different than the air forces bombing. And the fact that it was carried out by the CIA made people uneasy and it was done in secret. Obama was trying to figure out how to transfer authority for these strikes to the military so it could be handled in a normal, accountable way, but it wouldn’t have changed the experiences of civilians on the ground. 

President Trump has recently declared that he will withdraw troops from Afghanistan, which his critics say is a rash decision. What do you think about his decision and is there a right way to withdraw from this war? 

The right way to withdraw is to attempt to find a negotiated path forward that doesn’t leave behind a civil war that causes a massive humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and destabilizes the region and then creates the potential for more radical groups to carry out violence. That’s what Zalmay Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, is trying to do, but the situation is very difficult partially because the president keeps undermining the project by randomly tweeting stuff that is hard to evaluate. And the funny thing is the main leverage that the US has in this negotiation is Trump’s unreliability because everyone involved realizes they could wake up one day and he could be tweeting something like “we’re all done its over.”It’s not in anybody’s interest to have another civil war. Not in Pakistan’s interest, not in China’s interest, not in Russia’s interest. We’ve seen that movie in the 90s and the instability and the violence and the migration of refugees just spills across borders. It would be like Syria in the region. But trying to prevent it is complicated, In a perfect world you would take two or three years to work on this, but there’s a clock ticking, which is trumps thumbs. 

The Afghan government under Ashraf Ghani have has felt boxed out of the negotiations with the Taliban. This sounds a lot like Obama’s earlier attempts to reach a peace deal with the Taliban, when then President Karzai felt excluded. Is history repeating itself?

There are really close similarities and partially its because both Karzai and Ghani are in a relatively weak position as presidents. There constituency is largely the international community, they don’t have a solid power-base inside of Afghanistan, Ghani even less so than Karzai and Karzai was a weak figure. And so they feel especially vulnerable when they cant control whats going on because they don’t have their own base to rely on to protect them. And a second reason why its happening the same way is because the Taliban have not shifted their negotiating position which is “we’ll talk go the Americans about leaving and we’re not going to talk to this puppet government, maybe ever, but certainly not first.” It sounds like Khalilzad has in principle gotten the Taliban to agree to a framework in which they would talk to the Afghanistan government, but they have to agree to a bunch of things that are onerous to the Taliban. Not just that, but also a long term ceasefire. To make it even more complicated there’s a presidential election coming in Afghanistan this year and the whole politics of what to do about the Taliban is part of that contest. 

You describe in your introduction the tragedy of Afghanistan wasted potential. What do you see for the future of the country? What would an Afghanistan at its full potential look like?

You can see it there today in the cities. There’s a young generation that grew up in Afghanistan after 2001 that is very nationalistic and determined to hold onto their the gains they have had. That country was absolutely shattered in 2001. You wouldn’t even call it a third world country. You would call it fourth world. It was at the very bottom of all of the tables. And today the country is connected, it has a multi-ethnic urban culture that includes, what are those talent contest that we have on Fox?

Americas got talent?

Yeah. And there’s women in the workplace and a lot of people in school. There’s a real national feeling. One thing that Pakistan has done for Afghanistan, apart from foment war, is to strengthen Afghanistan national identity in opposition to Pakistan. And the neighborhood has changed a lot.  You have China and India, these huge economies. they’re looking to influence the region and build alliances. India’s relationship with Afghanistan was there before 9/11, but now India is a much different country. It has got real wealth and it’s the fastest growing economy in the world. China has a long alliance with Pakistan, but it wants a stable economically integrated central Asia it can prosper from. So there is opportunity there for a gradually transition to a more natural regional state, where Afghanistan is more of what its always been, a bridge country in between great powers. It’s at least possible. 

Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of seven other books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, and Directorate S.

Daniel Goulden is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been featured in Asymptote Journal, Europe Now, and elsewhere. He is working on a novel loosely based off of the life of Zeppo Marx that examines Jewish life in America throughout the 20th century. 

By Carrie Sun

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Carrie Sun, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt about their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure (Penguin Random House), which is among the final five selections in the category of Nonfiction for the 2019 NBCC Awards.

The bright red dust jacket serves as a warning: something’s wrong, on today’s college campuses. In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt investigate the new problems emerging in American childhood and education — from the rise of safetyism to the deleterious effects of call-out culture. They also provide explanatory threads for why this is happening. Ultimately, they give us hope: a series of actionable steps to improve the situation so that the long arc of history may, hopefully, continue its bend toward progress.

Carrie Sun: Can you speak about how this book came to be? Why now?

Greg Lukianoff: It's actually a personal story. The first part is that First Amendment law was my passion for most of my life. When I started at FIRE back in 2001, students were great on free speech. That all changed around 2013 to 2014, seemingly overnight. A big part of the book is trying to get to the bottom of why this change happened.

The second part is that I had a dangerous depression back in 2007 for which I ended up hospitalized. During recovery, what helped me the most was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While I was studying these cognitive distortions, I was working on campuses watching administrators teach what looked like the bad intellectual habits of catastrophizing and fortune-telling, by example. These are the very kinds of behaviors that CBT teaches you not to do if you want to overcome anxiety and depression. Then, around 2013 - 2014, we started seeing this sudden uptick in student demands for censorship. That's not unheard of in history: in the late 80s, early 90s, you had the first age of political correctness on campus, in which students pushed for new “speech codes” to curtail offensive, bigoted, or sexist speech. What made this current era different was how heavily the reasons for censorship relied on medicalized rationales. I discussed this with my friend Jonathan Haidt and together we wrote an article about it in The Atlantic, which came out August 2015. After we published the article, unfortunately, the problem on campuses relating to tolerance for freedom of speech and to issues of mental health got much more — so we decided to write a book.

I've never liked the title, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” My original title for the article was "Arguing for its Misery.”

CS: What was it like working on a book together? What was your process for research and for writing?

GL: We did a very good job of splitting it up. My research team and I worked on the front-end; Jon took over as we were getting closer to handing it in. It was perfect, because Jon has an unusual ability to understand entirely what I was trying to say, and make it shorter, simpler, and clearer.

Jonathan Haidt: Well, thank you, Greg. I would add that in producing anything, there's an expansive phase to creativity when you're generating novel ideas; then, the second half is the filtering and selection part where you're eliminating things. Greg is extremely good at the first part and, frankly, not as good at the second. And if you look at our personalities, at least intellectually, he's a bit more Oscar Madison and I'm more Felix Unger.

GL: I'm also very messy so it's apt.

CS: It sounds like a match made in heaven for this book. Moving on to the content: you set the stage for what's happening across college campuses by talking about three Great Untruths — fragility; emotional reasoning; and us-versus-them mentality. What are your biggest worries if these untruths continue to spread across American youth and the rest of society?

JH: Originally, we thought it was being generated on campuses. What became clear was that these problems were already being baked in to kids in Gen Z well before they got there. It was also happening in other English speaking countries — not so much on the continent, but in the UK, Canada, and to a lesser extent Australia. We saw a way of thinking and a way of being that would be extremely bad for mental health, productivity, cooperation, and diversity and inclusion — and it was spreading rapidly.

Two specific outcomes I'm most worried about are: The mental health crisis for teenagers, especially teenage girls. We are in danger of having a generation of girls that will have higher rates of fragility and, therefore, may accomplish less than the Millennial women. I think we will see Millennial women become extremely successful as #MeToo and other recent events and trends remove obstacles and make more room at the top. I think Millennial women and Gen X women — we're going to see them rising. It's possible that this progress may reverse for Gen Z women.

The other is that we're seeing a lot more email from people who work in business saying: "I have these students fresh out of college and I’m exhausted from mediating conflicts where somebody used a word that somebody else didn't like."

GL: So Jon, Carrie says she's been seeing that in her work. I wanted to ask her, can you elaborate on that?

CS: Yes, definitely. Jon, some of your work has come up before at a hedge fund I was working at before my MFA.

JH: That’s right! That's when we first heard it. There's been a lot since then.

CS: It's been a lot. What I've been seeing is: instead of solving the conflicts interpersonally, you go to HR. I’m seeing the creep of safetyism off campuses and into workplaces. We've jumped to my last question: Since the book went to print in May 2018, what updates do you have in terms of what you're seeing? Either on campuses, or elsewhere?

JH: One is that the situation on campus is changing a little bit. The spectacular shout-downs and disinvitations have gone down. There was a peak in 2016 and 2017 related to the presidential election. But, the real problem is the tens of thousands of cases of self-silencing — it's the call-out culture. I see no sign that’s abating. I've been speaking at some private high schools, and it's the same thing there.

GL: And on my end, some of the research that's come out since, particularly the hidden tribes survey, I thought was extremely interesting. A lot of these norms for what the survey dubs “progressive activists” comes from a group that is typically white, affluent, and surprisingly racially homogeneous. The only other group in that survey that was more racially homogeneous was the other end of the spectrum, the strict conservatives, which is remarkable given progressive activists’ focus on diversity.

JH: Adding to that, we presented a vision of far-right and far-left identity politics in the book. We described the polarization cycle. What we've seen, since then, is that the increase in race-based identity politics has been borne out.

CS: Speaking of call-out culture: is there a way to see this call-out culture as a response to previous ways, wherein bad behavior went unnoticed and was tolerated? How can we cultivate more of the positive side of call-out culture with less of the downside?

JH: Yes, we can definitely see it as part of the progress of increasing sensitivity. When there’s an improvement in sensitivity, there is progress. But the problem is the prestige economy of call-out culture. Any gain in sensitivity is counteracted by the gigantic loss of happiness, inclusion, trust, and well-being.

GL: One main theme in the book is this idea of “problems of progress,” that so much of this is the result of otherwise good trends. But any virtue taken to extremes can become a vice. We stress the idea of ancient wisdom. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to enjoy the fruits of progress, but also be able to learn from the wisdom of people who lived in much harder times?

JH: That's right. I think there is an important sense in which the 20th century was a century of extraordinary moral progress. But in the last few years, we're seeing a couple of important reversals of this progress. I would say that coming to judge people as individuals, not as members of groups, was progress — but that's reversing. Another is to have justice meted out by due process and not by mob action — that’s also progress, and it’s also reversing. The accusation is, for all intents and purposes, the conviction, and social media makes it all happen very fast. The loss of due process, the fact that the standard response to an accusation is that the person is fired — this is just stunning.

CS: That's really concerning. I’m wondering: you list six social trends or forces as having contributed to causing this problem. It seems to me like some of those factors might have a deeper, hidden factor having to do with capitalism and neoliberalism: bureaucracy of safetyism can be seen as the marketization of academia; anxiety and depression of both children and parents a result of increasingly precarious job situations. How might you address the idea that some of the factors you list might be symptoms of a larger issue?

GL: One thing we see as a potential seventh causal strand is the idea that, with such intense economic stratification, parents are so desperate to get their children into these top schools. There is a sense that those schools are life rafts you can take to get to the upper classes. This is not irrational, given stagnant wages and other bad outcomes for the middle and lower-middle classes in the United States right now. As long as colleges, particularly elite colleges, have this mentality that favors the products of helicopter parenting, it makes helicopter parenting not irrational, even though it's toxic.

JH: To give ourselves credit, we do point that out in our parenting chapter. The piece we did not say explicitly, that we should have, was the national rise in inequality. We did point to an increase in competition to get into college — we had half the story there. Some argue basically that it's neoliberalism and rising inequality contributing to this crisis. I think there's probably some truth to that. But on the other hand, rising inequality and social stressors, be it 9/11 or the financial crisis, should have affected the Millennials far more than Gen Z — and they didn't. So, of all the causes going on, my ranking is: one, the huge overprotection and the denial of childhood; and two, interacting with social media too early.

GL: I would probably just flip those. I think that social media is the whole reason why this got so bad, so fast.

JH: Absolutely. If we just had Internet 1.0, Google and Wikipedia and Khan Academy, it would have been great. But I do think it's social media, connecting us all in communities where you get prestige by calling out, that is what really hit us like a tidal wave.

GL: I realized a key part of the point I was trying to make earlier: since employers over-value you going to an elite college with a prominent name, that's one of the reasons why this has a real world effect on your life. And why parents, once again, have some rationality to helicoptering, unfortunately.

JH: The metaphor I've been thinking about recently is: some distance runners and cyclists train at high altitude because they want to train under adverse circumstances so that, when they are then in the realm of competition, they have an advantage. What we're doing to our elite kids is exactly the opposite.

CS: I completely agree. I went to MIT in the mid-aughts and the attitude was that you just kind of took it, and that that gave you a thick skin with which you could go into the world and do anything.

JH: Precisely. And that's why the Van Jones video that we put in the book is the best thing out there. Because he says: this is the gym. It’s the whole point of a gym, to train. If you get trained in these rarefied environments where there are no weights in the weight room, you're not hirable.

CS: Lastly, you mention green shoots for counter trends already underway: changing attitudes about social media, free range parenting bills, and more. Where do you think the momentum for these counter trends will come from? What’s next?

JH: Once businesses get involved and start saying, “We can't hire these kids because they destroy value in our company,” then what we're going to see, which would be fantastic, is more students shunning the Ivy Leagues for other schools who will not over-protect them. We’ll see businesses hiring more from non-elite schools, which will do wonders for inequality. Then the pressure is off the helicopter parents, too.

GL: Right, exactly. We're trying to spread the word that colleges listen to their alumni: they want their donations; they don't want to develop a bad reputation. Alumni see what higher education is doing is dysfunctional, and they're starting to push back in large numbers.

The other thing that's hopeful is the new organization, Let Grow. Clearly, it hit a nerve, because we have had the free range parenting law passed in Utah and a couple other places, and now potentially in Connecticut. That could definitely help change things as well.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He obtained his PhD in social psychology from University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and then taught at the University of Virginia for sixteen years. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.

Carrie Sun is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is at work on a narrative critique of capitalism, wealth, and the American dream.

By Morgan Cronin

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Morgan Cronin, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Lawrence Wright  about his book God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (Knopf), which is among the final six selections in the category of Nonfiction for the 2019 NBCC Awards.

With wit and the biting insight of a native, God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas. God Save Texas is an ongoing argument with the state by one who loves it but also worries about the direction in which it is headed. It is a meditation about politics, community, commitment, and legacy. God Save Texas is a profound portrait of a state that not only reflects America as it is, but as it may become.

Morgan Cronin (MC): I want to talk about your book, God Save Texas. I am from Houston, so reading this was very nostalgic. It was cool to go through a lot of what you talk about as far as the political landscape, the culture, and what makes Texas, Texas. I’ve heard you say in other interviews that you spent a lot of time writing about Texas and that you didn’t want to be known as a regional writer. What made you go back to writing about Texas, specifically for this book?

Larry Wright (LW): Well, to begin with, my editor at the New Yorker asked me to explain Texas. It’s puzzling to a lot of my colleagues at the magazine why I live in Texas, and I’ve wondered about it myself.

Larry and Morgan Laugh

LW: Texas is a rich subject and when I left Texas Monthly, I thought, I will never write about Texas again. I didn’t want to be a regional writer and I had reasons since I stopped writing for Texas Monthly, but a lot of things about Texas had changed over that time and I wanted to try and understand it in a way that I hadn’t in the past.

MC: Absolutely, and you explore that in the book, which has been described as a road-trip, a travelogue, a memoir, an apologia, an indictment— how would you describe God Save Texas?

LW: Well, you know all of those things figure into it in some ways. Although it was maybe one of the most fun books I have ever written, it was also one of the most difficult in a technical sense because—as you observe—it moves around through a lot of different venues. It’s a travelogue, it’s a memoir, it’s a history, it’s a critique, and maybe it’s an indictment. All those things are features of it, but in order for it all to come together, the unifying element has to be the voice. So as a writer, I was very cautious about trying to get the voice right. And also, to be able to situate in the mind of the reader who is talking to me? Is it an offender? Is it an attacker? Is it a native? Is it an outsider? The thing is, it’s all of those things, but you have to be able to let the reader know whose voice is speaking, and that was the trickiest part, trying to keep the tone all the way through.

MC: The tone is very consistent throughout the book, how did you technically achieve that?

LW: One thing is, I had to let the reader know that I care, that I really care very deeply about the state. I also had to let the reader know that I get it. I get why people hate Texas. I get why they laugh at us. I understand all of that, because I’ve been as much an outsider, as an insider. I can represent the Texas Native, the defender, and the outsider who thinks that Texas is a dangerous entity that is leading the country in a bad direction.

MC: That is a big theme throughout the book. I wanted to talk to you about that. You mention how a billionaire in New York, who is now sitting in the oval office, has become the personification, or I guess the face of Texas without having direct ties to the state. What do you attribute to that?

LW: Well, he corresponds to the stereotype of Texas. Which is that we’re loud, we’re boastful. We care deeply about money. We’re careless with the truth, and we’re careless with our private lives. All of those things are stereotypes of Texas, but they are so fully embodied by Donald Trump. If he had on a cowboy hat, rather than a trucker hat, we’d never hear the end of it.

Laughs

LW: Just imagine what it would be like. You know the Texas-hating that would be going down right now would be almost impossible to bear, but who is holding New York responsible? I don’t hear a lot of that.

MC: No. Exactly. And I don’t think he would have gotten elected if he wore a cowboy hat.

Laughs

LW: Probably not.

MC: Going back to the technical and craft aspect of this book, you are so engrained in the different places. I know that you are from Dallas, and live in Austin now, but the parts about Houston felt so visceral, and then you mention San Antonio. How did you get such a full perspective of these cities without living there yourself?

LW: I have lived in Texas a long time, and I’ve traveled a great deal in Texas, so I had a familiarity, but in order to write about it, I had to go back and visit places that I’d been, and also explore parts of Texas that I’d never really gotten acquainted with, such as the oil business. Texas is of course the primary oil producer in the country and because of fracking—like it or hate it— it has had an amazing effect on world politics. I, for one, am not sorry to see the oil petrolarchies bleed a little bit from the money that would otherwise have gone into terrorism. This has been a difficult period where countries that are intensely anti-American and anti-western have had this lock on a good portion of the oil resources and I think that’s permanently changed. America now exports oil. It’s the world’s leading oil producer and all of that is because of fracking in Texas. It’s a bridge to a cleaner oil future. We also have more wind power than any other state by a considerable margin. It’s fascinating if you drive through the permian basin, which is the repository of all these great oil and gas reserves, you drive by what they call the Christmas trees, which are the gas pumps. You also see windmills all over the place. I think people condemn the use of fracking, and I totally understand that it’s a problem with greenhouse gases, but there is a pipeline that goes from Houston to New Jersey, which is why you have your lights on right now. The economy wouldn’t work very well without all that energy. It has allowed us to create a vibrant economy and we do need to change to become more renewable oriented, but having access to all this energy is a good thing.

MC: In your book you mention the three levels of culture. Do you want to describe what those are a little bit, and would you consider this book to be your own third level?

LW: Laughing—Well that’s very flattering of you.I don’t know how this paradigm works for other states and other entities, but it seems to work for me, and Texas, that there are these three levels of culture. Everybody knows level one Texas culture, which is BBQ, boots, hats, big belt buckles, blue bonnet paintings, the accent, the swagger; all of these things, everybody the world over knows that that’s Texas, and we can say that’s what level one is.

Level two is when money arrives and people start to look around at other cultures to see what they have, and what did they do with their money? I came on the scene in Texas about the time that level two started. Stanley Marcus opened Neiman Marcus in Dallas and started showing people what to do with money. Along with that: education, culture, the arts, vacationing in Europe, buying paintings, starting art museums, ballet companies, and operas. All of those arose, for the most part, in my lifetime in Texas. The cities began building; they were using, mainly, notable architects from somewhere else. They achieved, to my way of thinking, a kind of high level of sameness all over the country. It’s like a franchise city, and I prefer to have more of a native touch to it. But that’s level two, it’s a denial of level one. Ross Perot used to call it “world class,” we want something “world class.” That’s a real level two phrase. We have these great cities that could be substituted, in many respects, for great cities elsewhere.

Level three is when you’ve gone through all of that. You’ve been educated, you’ve traveled, and you understand how the world works. You’ve seen what other cultures have to offer, and then you return to Texas with an eye toward what is unique and valuable about our own culture. Then you apply all that knowledge, and learning, and artistry to making Texas more Texan. I think there are a lot of Texas artists who are working at that level three: Richard Linklater when he did Boyhood, that’s a classic example to me of a real Texas piece of art. It’s pure Texas, but it’s also adventurist and artistic on a high, high level. I thought the Beyoncé Lemonade album was another thing where she goes back and examines her roots and pulls it up into her sphere. She declares her own Texaness in there. I think Alvin Ailey’s Revelations dance is one of the greatest ballets ever, and it came from this little fly-spec town called Rogers; and the Baptist church and that choreography is all about growing up in that little church in central Texas. Each of these artists comes back to what they understand about the place that they grew up in, and they make a contribution to the state that it is now.

MC: You don’t think your book is doing that?

LW: Well, I aspire to. I don’t come to think of it that way.

MC: I would say so!

LW: Well, thank you! I did think when I was a young writer, there wasn’t much in the way of Texas literature, and I wrote a memoir called In The New World. It was about growing up in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination. When I wrote that book, there was scarcely any books about Dallas at all, and you could say pretty much the same thing about Houston. Houston was really notable for its murders. That was about the extent of literature about Houston and Texas itself.

MC: It is interesting to examine Texas literature and how it’s viewed, even in Hollywood, and you mention that in your book. I really enjoy the movie Reality Bites that takes place in Houston. It changed the perception of what it looks like to be Texan. You mention culture a lot: Beyoncé, Richard Linklater, but more than that what I think gives this book a whole overview is the mentioning of the pickup trucks: how one in four cars is a pickup truck. These silly things add to Texas culture. It’s so true and campy, but it is taking that and getting away from it to understand when you return.

LW: You can’t see it clearly until you’ve gone away. When you’re from Texas, everybody has a perception about what Texas is like.

MC: I remember people asking if I rode horses to school when I would tell them I’m from Texas. I was like absolutely not. That’s ridiculous.

LW: It is, but you know the mythology is still in people’s minds. Even though those movies aren’t being made anymore.

MC: So now that this book has been published, do you think your editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, has an understanding of Texas?

LW: Oh, I think so! He loves Austin, so I think he was very pleased. They’ve excerpted two parts of it.

MC: Closing out, I love that quip about Texas politicians using Dancing with the Stars as a redemption tour, and then pondering if Ted Cruz can dance. I thought that was fantastic. We’ll see. They have another season that they are looking to cast.

LW: Laughing—Well that would be perfect.

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of nine previous books of nonfiction, including In the New World, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, Thirteen Days in September, and The Terror Years, and one novel God’s Favorite. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower (now a series on Hulu). He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He is a longtime resident of Austin, Texas.

Morgan Cronin is an MFA creative writing candidate at The New School, studying creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Houston Press, The Culture Trip, ArtHouston Magazine and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.