Opinion | Is It Time to Negotiate With Putin?

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

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So Michelle is out this week —

Miss you, Michelle.

Miss you, Michelle — which means she’s going to miss our conversation about Putin and the war in Ukraine. And we’ll get into the war itself in a moment, the situation on the front, how the war is going — maybe not so well — and how it might actually end. But I want to start with someone who to me has always been one of the most interesting characters in this whole conflict.

That’s the head of the Wagner Group, which is the Russian mercenary outfit that’s played a big role in the fighting throughout the conflict — Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died last week in what I think it’s fair to call an extremely suspicious plane crash.

The guy who tried to overthrow Putin dies in a plane crash two months later?

Who could have foreseen it?

Who could have foreseen it?

Entirely coincidental.

Yes, the guy who launched a weird maybe sort of coup against Putin dies in an unexpected accident. But look, with the caveat that everything we say here about Prigozhin’s death comes with a big allegedly, is there any good reason to think that his death was not the work of Vladimir Putin?

The only thing that would give me any doubt is that it seems like a pretty quick way to go for someone who committed what seems like the greatest crime in Putin’s books, which is a crime of betrayal. We’re used to Putin being someone who likes to use nerve agents and slow acting poisons and things like that to go after his enemies —

Allegedly.

— the only surprise to me was just how quick and painless this probably was for Prigozhin.

There’s nothing more important to Putin than staying in power. And here’s a guy who attempted to challenge openly, dramatically that hold on power. So you know, Occam’s razor meets Putin’s knife, whatever you want to call it. What I find really interesting about this, if it was an assassination — of course, the Kremlin has denied that — it came after there seemed to have been a sort of understanding or a deal in place between them. Prigozhin went off to Belarus, no charges for mutiny. He even visited the Kremlin in late June.

So the message that Prigozhin’s death sends, even two months later, is that you never really know where you stand with Putin, that you’re not safe even when you think you might be.

I mean, how could Prigozhin have possibly imagined that he was safe? I mean, to all those of us trying to parse the literal Kremlinology of what was going on in this bizarre —

It’s not a metaphor.

It’s not a metaphor. It’s literal, right?

No, it’s really literal.

It’s like if there was another scandal in the Watergate or something, right? Like, it’s in the Kremlin. To me at the time, it just seemed so baffling that you would have a coup that went literally halfway to Moscow. You know, you’re driving to Moscow. And you’re like, no, we’re going to make a deal. And Prigozhin is not a figure who you would associate with political naivety or anything like that. If he had made a deal with Putin and vanished to a tropical island somewhere, you might have said, OK, this guy thinks he can get away.

But hanging out in Belarus, going back to Moscow, it’s — in a certain way, the only reason to doubt that it was Moscow is that it was — it’s so obvious that it was Moscow. How could Prigozhin have possibly put himself in this position?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m the only among the three of us who has actually been to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, unless you guys want to surprise me with your travels.

No, Lydia. No, you win again.

Oh, sorry —

You’re the most worldly among us.

— humble brag.

Just a little humble brag.

Lydia Polgreen, as always.

I actually ate a meal of python on the riverside there, on the beautiful river in Bangui. The reason that I mentioned Bangui is that one of my closest kind of Russia watching friends, who’s an economist — when I asked him, this is someone who lived in Moscow for a long time, you know, what he thought was going to happen to Prigozhin, he said to me, I think Prigozhin is going to go and live in a villa in Bangui.

And I imagined a future for Prigozhin as a kind of Africa based warlord because they have so many different things going on there.

The Wagner Group, right?

The Wagner Group, yes.

Russia’s increasing activity in Africa has largely been sort of mediated through, or washed through Wagner Group activities.

Exactly, and so you have them helping out governments in Mali and other different places, helping out being a real euphemism for —

Just your friendly neighborhood Russian mercenary.

Russian mercenary. And so one of the big mysteries for me is, why not just let him go off and live that life? That speaks to, I think, a lot of questions about what’s actually going on in Russia, and what are the sort of political dynamics there?

That would also reduce his chances of falling into martyrdom. You know, like, if he’s just kind of off far away, the way the Brits would send their criminals to Australia, just send them far away.

Yeah, and of course whatever is happening in Russia has a big impact on the war in Ukraine. And some people have been hoping from the start of this war for some kind of internal shakeup inside Russia to be the thing that ends the stalemate, delivers victory, delivers peace. And we have to be honest. Right now, post Prigozhin, that seems less likely to happen, with obviously the caveat that something different could come along tomorrow, which seems to make it a good time to talk about the question of, what kind of ending does this war actually have?

We seem to have moved from a period where there was a kind of war of maneuver with sweeping offensives and counteroffensives to a real war of attrition that looks like a kind of World War I scenario, except with obviously more drones than they had in 1915. And as with World War I, then the question becomes, once you’re in a war of attrition, how do you actually get out of it? And I’m curious for both of you, have your views on that question changed over the last six months? What do you guys think?

I mean, I think for me there’s — we’ve sort of moved well out of the kind of, I don’t know, fairy tale stage of this conflict, right? There was an early phase where the Russians seemed kind of awesome and all powerful. They were the evil villain that was unstoppable. Very quickly, that illusion was punctured by the amazing, extraordinary success, early success of the Ukrainian military. And now, I think we’ve kind of lost all of our illusions on both sides, right?

I mean, the Russian military is weak and ineffective, but the Ukrainians have not, despite their incredible performance, have not been able to push the Russians fully back. And we’re at this stage where you’re making a big to do out of reclaiming a relatively small town — strategic, but small town called Robotyne. So I think that just sort of underscores your point, Ross, that we’re entering a real, real grind, and that this is going to go on for a very, very long time, absent some sort of fundamental change in dynamic.

And both Prigozhin’s death and the kind of broader things on the global stage, in terms of arming Ukraine and the politics in various parts of the world around this conflict, I think are bearing down and creating more sort of muck for it to get stuck in.

I think it’s so hard to say where we are in a war when we’re in it. When it started, right, like you said, it seemed like it might be quick, like the Ukrainians could not withstand the overwhelming Russian assault. But a year and a half later, here we are. Does that mean we’re in the middle, in the late stages, early? I mean, the Soviets thought they’d be out of Afghanistan in a year, and it took them nine. We thought we’d be out of Afghanistan quickly and it took us 20.

So I never know what to say when I think kind of, like, where are we? Where do we stand in the war? There was a piece in Foreign Affairs recently, I think it was called the unwinnable war or something similarly dour. And it laid out that stalemate, that basically neither side is in a position to deliver a decisive military victory. But neither side seems to be anywhere near accepting the possibility of a negotiated solution.

Do you guys remember that big, controversial Rolling Stone magazine piece about Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General“?

Yeah, yeah.

They got they got McChrystal fired.

McChrystal was then the new US commander in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, yes.

Under Obama.

Well, of course, what got him fired was that he said all these kind of nasty, terrible — petty, mainly, things — he and his staff, not just McChrystal, about the administration. But there was one line in it that just really stuck with me. It had nothing to do with the controversy, and it was one of McChrystals’ top aides, who was talking about how the war in Afghanistan would end. And he said, it’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win, or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.

And I feel a little bit about this war in similar terms. It’s not going to be clean. It’s not going to be an overwhelming victory by one side or the other. It’s going to end in an argument.

Well, and also, there’s a lot of talk about negotiations and different characters on the global stage who are at the heart of them, and pushing them. So there’s the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, who’s trying to do his version of negotiations. You’ve also had China and President Xi pushing his plans. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, he’s got his own proposal. So there’s —

Pope Francis has a theoretical plan.

God bless.

Blessed by God, in fact.

Yes, indeed. Indeed, if anyone has an inside lock on that, it’s definitely Pope Francis. But you have a lot of different power centers, or emerging or aspiring power centers in the world seeing this conflict through lots of different lenses, you know, and jockeying for their own interests. And this kind of no negotiation at all position that the Ukrainians have is, I think, increasingly running up against this multiplicity of interests that are pressing on lots of different pressure points around the globe.

Right, I mean, and there’s been a whole range of hopes, from the idea that our unprecedented economic warfare was going to bring Russia to its knees, to the idea that some kind of Prigozhin style coup was going to replace Putin, a whole host of hopes that we aren’t going to actually have to do that kind of dirty deal in this case. And right now, that looks like a thin hope.

And it also raises the question of what brings Putin to the negotiating table. Among our little group here, I think you guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think all of us are sort of poised somewhere between full hawk and full dove in this war. You know, that we all sort of expect —

What else is there?

Well, we’re —

Yes, we are. We are.

— grim, grim realists, right? We’re all sort of —

Yeah.

— there’s a tendency therefore, for me at least, to focus on the weakness of the hawks’ argument and to say, look, you know, yeah, in the end, there’s going to be — it’s going to end with an argument, like you said, Carlos, right? But the weakness of the doves’ argument from the beginning has been beyond just saying, OK, Vladimir, you win, which is not really a posture the US can take, what persuades him that it’s worth it to stop fighting and to make some concession? There has to be some concession from the Russian side to end the war.

Do you guys see it differently at all?

No, but I do think that there’s one factor that is shifting. And Wagner was playing a really critical role in this fight, tactically in terms of providing manpower, or cannon fodder if you prefer that term. According to US estimates, 120,000 Russian troops have died in this Ukraine fight so far. The same thing that made the Vietnam War ultimately lose support in the United States is something that could eventually happen in Russia. I don’t think we’re there yet.

There are a couple of more turns of conscription — you know, much broader conscription, that could cause significantly more unrest within Russia, even among the most ardent of Putin supporters. And that’s just underscored by the fact that Prigozhin was, like, a really quite popular right wing figure in Russia, right? His sort of makeshift memorial just off Red Square attracted a pretty steady stream of mourners. So this kind of Russian greatness figure who’s assassinated by — apparently, by the Russian state, although they deny it.

And then the need to go out and get more and more unwilling people to fight and die in this war, I think, is a factor that has not fully played out and will continue to play out.

When we’re trying to figure out if he’ll come to the table, you know, it reminds me of all these sort of magazine covers about, what does Putin want, inside the mind of Vladimir Putin, et cetera. And it’s very hard to tell what on Earth Putin really wants. In a basic sense, it seems like things are not going as expected for him, right? It’s — the war is lasting longer than folks anticipated. He’s helped revitalize NATO to a certain extent, giving it a post-Cold War reason for being.

He’s even calling it a war. You know, like, it got an upgrade after, like —

Special military operation.

I think it took 10 months — it took it 10 months to become a war and not a special military operation. But so you know, what I tried to do when the war started was go back and look at some of his own writings to try to get a sense of his mindset, to the extent that anything that he writes or says, being a KGB propagandist, should be taken at face value at all.

But there was a phrase that came up twice, 20 years apart. And so it seemed like it’s something that’s stuck in his head. And it’s the “paralysis of power.” In this book he wrote in 2000, he said that the USSR fell apart because of the paralysis of power. In the late ‘80s, the Soviets blinked. The cocky Americans took advantage and remade the world order. And he still resents that and laments it. He brought up the paralysis of power again on the eve of the war in Ukraine, when he said that the paralysis of power is the first step toward degradation and oblivion.

He’s obsessed about Russian decline. And in his mind, to avoid it, you have to wield power. It can’t be paralyzed anymore. When he writes about his enemies, he says to go on the offensive, hit them so hard they can’t rise to their feet. So just like in the way he likes to present himself, at least, in the way he talks about how he sees war, the notion of a negotiation seems kind of anathema to the worldview that he presents.

There was a great detail in that book, actually, in the 2000 book, that one of his colleagues in Saint Petersburg when he worked, like, in the mayor’s office or something, said that they would each have the standard Boris Yeltsin portrait. But Putin requested Peter the Great as the portrait in his office. You know, like, that’s the inspiration he wanted. That’s how he saw himself.

Well, and that helps you see why Putin has become such a kind of totem for people on the right, broadly, across the world. I mean, this kind of chest out posture that he has feels like, especially in this very confusing global moment, a posture that is very attractive to, for example, people in Europe who are, like, we want to stop these “invaders” who are coming from other places to come across our borders. And we want toughness. We want hard action. We want to have no quarter in dealing with threats.

And so yeah, it’s an interesting moment for us to be contemplating this strange man.

The interesting thing about this sort of Prigozhin scenario that we witnessed is that, for a brief moment, you saw a potential alternative to Putin. And it wasn’t great. The alternative to Putin is not —

A ruthless mercenary killer backed by maximalist Russian nationalists is not your ideal Putin replacement?

Yeah, like, it’s not that — it’s not the alternative is like a democratic Russia, right, a pro-western, democratic Russia. The alternative might be a right wing nationalist harder right than Putin in possession of nukes. So in that sense, it was kind of an illuminating moment for those who kind of simplistically have been, like, we got to get rid of Putin, or do this or that.

Yes.

When I think about where it goes next, I just feel like we’re in this clash of just unthinkable scenarios depending on where you stand, right? The Ukrainians have shown that relinquishing their sense of nationhood is unthinkable to them. And even if they can’t fend off Russia forever, you could have a protracted kind of insurgency style conflict. The prospect of a wider war between NATO and a nuclear armed power seems similarly unthinkable, which is why Biden has always kept this kind of dance about not getting dragged into that.

And for Putin, backing down and puncturing the mythology of his own power is also unthinkable. That mythology is what keeps him in charge. So which unthinkable will become thinkable, I have no idea. I don’t know what to think.

On that cheery note, we’re going to take a break. And when we come back, we’ll talk about the implications of this war for American domestic politics in both the short and longer run, but especially as we head into 2024.

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And we’re back. And so I want to turn us, as promised, to the domestic American politics of the Ukraine war, where I think it’s fair to say that US backing for the Ukrainians had really strong bipartisan support at the outset of the war, and then over time, most of the critics of the Biden administration’s pro-Ukraine policy have come from the right. You get some anti-war voices on the left.

But mostly, you’ve got everything from the tacit pro-Putinism at the very online right wing extreme, to a kind of isolationist leaning view that treats the war as irrelevant to American interests, to a realist critique that increasingly argues the war is diverting American arms and energy from the more pressing threat of China, especially China’s designs on Taiwan. And of course, we’re headed into an election year. So I’m curious what you guys think, whether any of these critiques actually resonate with voters, right?

These are all sort of pundit, foreign policy magazine, Twitter fight arguments. Do they matter? Do they matter in the Republican primary? Will they matter when Biden’s foreign policy record is on the ballot? What do you think?

Has foreign policy ever been a pivotal issue in an American election where the United States is not directly at war?

So I think there are times when foreign policy has directly affected US presidential politics, or electoral politics, but I’m trying to keep in mind the distinction that you raise about times when the US forces are not directly involved. So like, LBJ didn’t run for re-election in part because he couldn’t bring the party together around Vietnam. A lot of top Democrats didn’t challenge George H.W. Bush in his reelection campaign because they thought he was unbeatable after the Gulf War.

His son, George W., won re-election in part, on the strength of his response to 9/11, then he got creamed in the midterms in 2006 when everything was going south in Iraq. And what else — Obama, in his 2008 campaign, got a lot of traction because unlike other Democrats he opposed Iraq as a “dumb war.” So there are moments when foreign policy intrudes very directly into electoral politics, but those are all cases where American forces were directly engaged.

I don’t have the history in my mind to recall moments when it was sort of a war we were supporting, as opposed to a war we were waging.

Right, well, and even with Biden, if you look at the history of Biden’s approval ratings, there did seem to be a big foreign policy effect, more than I would have anticipated, actually, in his withdrawal, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you go back and look at the charts, that’s when the honeymoon ended. Biden’s relatively strong approval ratings started to tumble, even though it seemed like Americans had been paying very little attention to Afghanistan and supported some kind of withdrawal.

The way that happened did seem to hurt Biden in a real way. But even there —

Will it affect him in the election? It affected his approval ratings in the moment. Will it still be that live an issue in 2024? I have no idea.

Right, and even there, you had American troops — we were withdrawing American troops. It was like the helicopters from the roof in Saigon. It was us losing a war in a very literal sense, in a way that even as involved as we are, a Ukrainian retreat right now probably doesn’t have the same effect. I don’t know. What do you think, Lydia?

I mean, I think Americans don’t like to see America looking weak on the global stage. It’s just not — it runs contrary, I think, to our myth of who we are and what we represent in the world. And so I do think that we are in this kind of might equals right moment, where there’s a real vibe in a certain part of the Republican Party that kind of grooves with what Putin’s doing and what he’s all about.

In the debate, we had candidates who wanted to send troops into Mexico to deal with the fentanyl problem, which just seems absolutely insane to me. And so I think we’re in this weird moment where, at least on the Republican side, there seems to be a lot of appetite for deploying American troops against invaders, people who are seen as invaders on our Southern border, and of course, to fighting China, which is the sort of big economic threat.

And it’s not lost on me that both of those groups of people are people who are not white, they’re not European. Whereas in the Ukraine conflict, there’s just this sort of — this is not our fight. Why are we involved? Why are we spending lots of American money there? That point of view seems to have a fairly wide berth in the Republican Party right now.

So I’m a little uncertain what’s going on in the Republican Party. I think first, if you look at Republicans in Congress, the Mike Pence, Nikki Haley position from the debate, that we’re right to be supporting Ukraine and so on, that’s still the position of the institutional Republican Party.

Correct.

And that has to reflect some sense that even if all of their voters aren’t fully on board with that position, Republican voters are not going to punish congressmen and senators much for voting for aid for Ukraine, right? What I don’t know is, do lots of Republicans think of China as a threat the way we thought about the USSR as a threat during the Cold War? I think it’s a lot more unsettled than that in terms of what the politics of confronting China militarily look like.

Economically confronting China is one thing, but yeah, I’m not sure there’s deep public buy in for Cold War 2.0 with China. I could be wrong.

No, I mean, I think it remains to be seen. The last time we fought a war in Asia, it didn’t go well politically, or from just a human perspective. So yeah, I could see why there would be significant reluctance.

In the debate, I’m trying to remember, it was really only Ramaswamy who had the full on, like, isolationist, you know, why are we supporting this fight worldview? Right?

Well, and even Ramaswamy is framing it. He’s saying, I’m going to be the new Nixon. I’m going to peel off Russia and make them our ally against China.

Which is, I’m sorry —

There’s no Ron Paul figure doing the full isolationist thing here.

No.

Even Ramaswamy thinks he’s Richard Nixon.

And even DeSantis, who’s sort of tried to glom on to that a little bit when they did, like, the raise your hand if you would increase aid to Ukraine or whatever, he did the whole, well, the Europeans need to pull their weight a little more. It was — I don’t know that there’s a wing of the party, maybe it’s like a feather of a wing, at least if we use the presidential candidates as a proxy for the range of views in the party, which may or may not be accurate —

The non-Trump candidates, right? I mean, the front runner for the Republican nomination, while he praises Putin less than he would, you can assume that he would come in looking to make a deal with Putin.

I think that’s right.

I think that would be a reasonable assumption.

I’m curious. What do you guys think of how Biden has handled this? It strikes me that he’s found a pretty good balance of really robust military support and diplomatic support without sort of crossing the red line of provoking direct conflict with Russia, which is a very, very tricky balance to strike. But I’m curious what you guys think.

I mean, every day that we don’t cross that line is a good day. That’s how I think of it. But what that also means to me is that I would imagine that for Biden, it’s more important to not cross into open conflict with Russia than it is to ensure the full territorial integrity of Ukraine. And that calculus, in the end, goes in Putin’s favor.

Yeah, I’m pro-Biden on this front overall. I think he’s struck, basically, the balance you suggest, Lydia. And I think it’s correct to prioritize not getting into a direct shooting war with Russia. I think that’s correct. I also think, though, that they have gone quite far further than people might have anticipated at the outset in terms of steps that go up to that line, and have correctly anticipated so far just how far they can go without getting into a conflict with Russia.

With all of that said, I think the legacy of this period for the Biden administration, whatever effect it has on the presidential election, will be determined by whether you can actually get to — you know, not like peace breaking out all over, but something other than the status quo for another 5 or 6 years, which is another way of saying the final test, or the full test is yet to come.

How much of the support in the United States, but maybe also in Europe for Ukraine, is about the way Zelenskyy as an individual has captured the kind of global imagination.

I mean, I think it’s not insignificant. But I think it’s not — also doesn’t last forever, right? One of the things that I’ve noticed is that he does seem to have this ability to fly in and make these kind of dramatic appearances. And they become less dramatic every time. And it’s one thing to show up in your khakis to address a joint session of Congress, but I think the more places you go — I mean, what’s next, Coachella — it starts to lose some of its power and its luster.

And I think that as things stalemate on the battlefield, that will become ever more so. And also, don’t forget, I mean, there have been these kind of like — they haven’t made huge headlines, but there have been these ripples in Ukraine, these firings of officials over corruption and other kinds of incidents that point to what are some of the underlying issues in terms of governance in Ukraine that I think also have the potential to kind of erode the image of Zelenskyy and his government as these fighters.

Well, and I think there, Zelenskyy was both a figure unto himself and a symbol of a kind of fighting liberal nationalism that enabled a lot of people in the West who felt besieged internationally and at home by populism, reaction, illiberalism in various forms to say, OK, you know, here’s where we draw the line. Here is where we fight the battle. And yes, our attempts to spread democracy around the world have not succeeded as one might have hoped.

But here, at least, we can defend the liberal West against its enemies. I think that’s still a very powerful spirit. It’s just hard to sustain that spirit through years of trench warfare, which is why that question of inflection points circles back. You know, where is the moment of either Ukrainian breakthrough or an opportunity for peace? And with that, I’m just going to give myself the last word. And we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll be hot or cold.

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And we’re back. And it’s time for Hot/Cold. Which of you two, my beloved podcast partners, has one for us this week?

So it’s me this week. I’m sure you have been hearing about all the kind of culture and political battles surrounding libraries and school libraries, and what books should or should not be available to students. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that in some future conversation on this podcast. But for now, I just want to say very simply that I am hot on libraries. I have always been hot on libraries.

When I was growing up in the Bay Area, in the early ‘80s, Thursdays were a special day, because on that day my mom got out of work early. And she would take us to do something special, us meaning me and my two older sisters, which usually involved, like, eating at Jack in the Box or something. But that meant that on Thursdays, instead of taking the city bus home, we would walk about a mile from our school to the Lafayette Public Library in Contra Costa County, where she would pick us up.

And we had, like, an hour or an hour and a half there before she could meet us there. And that became the most magical hour, an hour and a half of my week. I read all sorts of random books. I read world maps. But I mainly read, like, “Encyclopedia Brown” and the “Three Investigators” and other kind of mystery stories —

Jupiter Jones.

That’s right, Jupiter Jones. Thank you, Ross. I knew you would come through for me. Jupiter Jones and his junkyard, remember? Anyway —

The car.

— and that’s where I discovered, as I said, kind of what a magical place this could be. It was a safe place for us. I don’t mean in the safe space kind of sense. I mean, it was literally a safe place my mother trusted that we could wait for her. But it was also this kind of risky, exciting place where I could kind of encounter anything. And I thought the librarians there, like, were like these sorcerers who could find anything I needed. So I’m sure you have your library stories.

The libraries in my life have been a refuge. And it kind of kills me to see libraries becoming hyper politicized, and see that librarians are in any way feeling intimidated in their work.

I love libraries too. When I was in middle school, my brothers and I used to ride our bikes to the library. And my parents were very anti-TV, so — and very pro-books, so we had lots and lots of books at home. And I was a very, very big reader. But the great illicit pleasure of going to the library was actually being able to access their subscription to cable television. So like, my brothers and I would go and watch “Yo! MTV Raps” at the library, right?

That is wonderful.

I don’t know if you guys know the rap group De La Soul. They were, like, such a huge favorite of mine. And one of the performers of the three, Trugoy the Dove, recently passed away. And I immediately texted my little brother because that was such a touchstone for us. And he reminded me of when we, at the library, watched for the first time the video of “Me, Myself, and I.” And we were really nerdy, sort of, like, funnily dressed, unusual Black kids. And we’re like, oh, my gosh, these are other nerdy, funny dressed, unusual Black kids.

Like, it’s OK, we can be ourselves. And so like that’s — for me, that’s such a totemic library moment that actually has nothing to do with books.

Those are terrific stories. And they are filling me mostly with a deep shame that — I have the same kind of relationship to libraries as a child that you had, Carlos. I feel like I’ve failed to instill that in my children, that they’re much more sort of amazon.com dependent for books, like the spoiled children of privilege or something that they are. So in that spirit, I’m going to be taking them to the library this weekend and leaving them there for 17 hours, and seeing what comes of it.

The thing is, you could.

Enjoy your day off, Ross.

Yes, yes.

They will find so much. And also, your kids are young, Ross. You haven’t failed yet.

Well, that’s — I appreciate it, Carlos. And I’ll report back on how the experience goes when we reconvene next week.

See you, guys.

Thanks, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks so much for joining our conversation. Please give a Matter of Opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app. And if you want to tell us why you love libraries, or if you’re willing to make the argument for why we should be cold on libraries, email us at [email protected].

Matter of Opinion is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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