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So before we get into today’s episode, and stick around because it is a good one, I wanted to let you know about this amazing new app. It’s New York Times Audio, a new iOS app with exclusive shows, narrated articles. And it’s available for New York Times news subscribers. So why I love this app, I am all about having people curate cool stuff for me. Because I don’t have the time. This is a great, curated lineup for people who want to know about everything from the latest pop music, to the news headlines, to what to eat for dinner. And then, of course, our new show is on there. So this is like a one-stop shop app for everybody who has way too little time but has lots of interests. New York Times Audio, download it now at nytimes.com/audioapp.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is a “Matter of Opinion.”

So today, we’ll be talking about men and boys. There is lots of concern and debate right now about American males who are not doing well by most measures. They’re struggling in school. They’re struggling in the job market. Their health is suffering, including their mental health. And generally, they seem to lack a sense of purpose and identity. There have been lots of books about this recently. One of the more notable ones is called “Of Boys and Men” by Richard Reeves. Reeves actually came to “Times Opinion” recently to talk to us about his work. And Josh Hawley, the Republican Senator from Missouri, has just published a book called “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” So I’ve been reading these books. And I plan to write a column about them. And I want to know what you all think about it. How significant is the problem? Is it actually fixable? And if so, what do we do about it?

I’m just going to say, I think it actually is a very serious issue that we need to be dealing with thoughtfully and apolitically. But that has become almost impossible because of the way that it has been exploited in the big political arena. So that’s what makes me very nervous about all this whether you’re talking about Tucker Carlson tanning his testicles, or if you’re talking about Josh Hawley writing this book and Republican candidates obsessing about the feminization of America. It has become a topic that has been hijacked, and thus made almost impossible to discuss sensibly. And just bringing it up labels you in one way or the other.

I just want to say, I was in the New York Times office when Richard Reeves came in to speak. And I was really prepared to sort of have a strong, kind of political reaction to this. And one of the things he’s really trying to do with this book is get away from politics. He’s clearly done a lot of research and kind of unearthed a trove of data that really tell us and paint a pretty stark picture of what’s going on with men in America today. And I think he really identifies some of the core problems.

It’s fascinating to me that, at this time where this there’s a highly politicized conversation going on about all kinds of aspects of gender, that there is also, I feel, this need to really ground the conversation in data, in facts, and how we’re actually living, and have a really practical approach to it.

So some of those facts, I think, would be useful to run through. And Reeves brings up a lot of them. And he’s also very honest about places where there is not a lot of great data to explain what’s going on. But of the areas where there is information, he writes that young boys are generally far less prepared to start school than girls. They do worse in school. They’re far more likely to fail math and reading courses, less likely to graduate high school and college. Men’s participation in the labor force is falling, especially young men.

We’ve all heard about deaths of despair recently, these are the deaths due to suicide and drug overdose. Men account for three out of four of those deaths. There’s also the discussion of what some called the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. How 15 percent men have no close friendships at all, which is a vast increase since 1990. So this is the fact set that these discussions are taking place over and sometimes kind of shouting, shouting over.

So I think that it’s worth saying that woven into these trends is something fascinating and also, I think, quite sort of dangerous and underappreciated ways, which is that our politics is becoming polarized by sex in a really novel way. There’s always been some gap between how women vote and how men vote. And in the last 20 or 30 years, the gap has tended to be women vote more Democratic. Men vote more Republican.

But that gap has tended to widen markedly as some of the trends, Carlos, that you’re describing have sort of taken deeper route. And lately, it’s been particularly marked that you have women diverging from men more in the last 10 years or so, sort of measurements of ideology. Men have basically stayed about as conservative as they were in the Obama era. And women have become substantially more politically liberal. So you really have a strong ideological divergence between the sexes, which then is connected —

Part of this story too is, obviously, men and women don’t exist in isolation from one another. So the trends among men, the negative trends are connected, obviously, in some way, not just to political polarization, but to the fact that men and women just seem to be having trouble in general paring off. Marriage rates are down. Dating and sex itself both seem to be down. Obviously, birth rates are down everywhere. So there’s some sort of failure of, essentially, matchmaking.

So let me jump back in here, lest Ross accuse me of just going with a liberal criticism of conservatism, I do think one of the problems you’re looking at is — so I have a college-aged son who has roommates who are die hard Andrew Tate fans, the famous internet influencer who is all about muscles, and toxic masculinity, and guns, and has actually gotten himself into some legal trouble because there are questions about whether or not he was doing any kind of sex trafficking.

In Romania, it should be said.

In Romania, yes. Because everything goes in Romania is his approach to this.

Turns out it doesn’t actually. Everything does not go in Romania.

As it turns out, you can get arrested even in Romania. But these boys, or young men as it is, their response to him, their kind of attraction to him stems from the idea that society has just decided men are a problem period. They just feel like that masculinity or men in general are looked at askance. And that there’s a no-win situation for them. And so he tells them that this is not their fault and that they should just kind of not worry about this. So obviously, Andrew Tate is a blight on society.

But the idea that we are looking at men as a problem is actually not that far off sometimes. I mean, especially in certain more progressive corners we are so eager to make sure that women aren’t left behind, that women aren’t being mistreated, almost as though it is a binary, like one has to kind of go along. If one is getting ahead, you have to kind of disadvantage the other.

Now, that message is very easy to kind of co-opt if you’re somebody like Andrew Tate or Tucker Carlson and just turn into kind of a rallying cry for ugly masculinity.

I mean, I think that’s right. And I think what’s striking to me, and this goes back to something that Ross was saying, is that there is this kind of cleaving between men and women. Like I think about my straight, female friends who are in their 20s and 30s. And they’re not interested in men like Andrew Tate. Their sort of ideal as Timothee Chalamet or Harry Styles, these sort of sensitive, I think what Andrew Tate and his ilk would call kind of girly men.

But it just sort of speaks to how wide this gap is between what professional women who are educated want and what a certain segment of alienated masculinity is aspiring to. And they’re just so fully disconnected from one another. It’s this profound separation I think is really fascinating to me.

So Lydia, since you brought up Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet, they were both referenced in what I think is one of the more interesting pieces about the Andrew Tate phenomenon, which is a big piece in “New York Magazine” a few months ago by Lisa Miller called “Tate Pilled” that is about Tate’s attraction, not just to young men in some sort of general way, but specifically to young men in liberal parts of America, well-educated, liberal households, and so on.

And I want to read a passage from that about these boys, the Lost Boys of liberal Brooklyn who are into Tate. And Miller writes, “They were growing up at a time when it was impossible to envision what kind of straight man to be. LeBron was amazing. But he was a one-off. And the other trending male idols were impossible to emulate like Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet with their quote, ‘politically correct,’ but also not a simp, but also attractive and manly, but also not crazy and misogynistic presentation. And then Tate came along.”

I’m still quoting, “and told the boys it was good to be men and to want the things men have traditionally wanted. When he said, for example, there are millions of young men out there who just want to grow up, go to the gym, get strong, be respected, have a beautiful girl and a sports car, many boys felt the relief of recognition and something like pride.” End quote.

So here’s a question, that last Tate quote stipulating that Tate, in general, is a deeply toxic figure and possibly a criminal, and so on, what do you guys think of that quote? Should young men want to grow up, go to the gym, get strong, be respected, have a beautiful girl and a sports car?

I don’t know why I don’t get a sports car. I want a sports car.

I was going to say, I personally do have a sports car. It was a convertible, not very fancy one, that I impulse bought during the pandemic. Because there was nothing else to do but drive around. So I think that this gets to, I think, a bigger point, which is that, as a person who really does not believe in kind of biological essentialism and that the gender has an expression that is a biological basis, I do think that you cannot look at the data set and not conclude that the sort of, quote-unquote, “traditional masculinity” is having a tremendously difficult time accommodating itself to a world in which women and girls are much better equipped to succeed.

Getting to Ross’s question about that kind of Andrew Tate lifestyle, if my 15-year-old son or my 10-year-old son would tell me that they want to get fit and work out more. And they love the idea of a fast car. And they’re thinking about girlfriends. Like, I would have no problem with any of that. My problem with that would be if that’s the sum total of what they aspire to. I would think it’s a very kind of blinkered, limited worldview.

And it’s important to note, I guess, on some level that we’re talking about this as though it’s the same across the board for all socioeconomic demographics. As these things tend to be, the crisis among boys and men, tend to be much harder on certain groups like minority communities or communities where the socioeconomic standards have dropped. This is not necessarily a crisis in the same way.

Yes. In the Reeves book, there’s a lot of talk about how there’s this huge gap between Black women and Black men. I mean, Black women are on the march and moving towards tremendous gains that are really remarkable whereas Black men now, I think, earn income on average less than white women. So it’s a fascinating stew.

And I think you could say, reasonably, like 20 years ago, you could tell a story that said, look, you have a large population of working-class men who have used to work in heavy industry. Those industries have left the US. The economy has become more service based. Their skill sets, the benefits of their greater upper-body strength, and so on are no longer as economically useful. And so they’re in a crisis that sort of, yeah, an intersection of their sex and their class.

I think what is notable about trends since then is not just that reality, but how the problems for men have climbed up the socioeconomic ladder to the point where on the college front, for instance, one of the, maybe, not-so-secret secrets of college admissions now is that there is effectively affirmative action for men. Because schools, high end colleges want to advertise a 50/50, a vaguely 50/50 gender balance. And there just really are many fewer strong male candidates for let’s say, a small liberal arts college, than there are female candidates. So it varies. There are different sort of economic matrices at work depending on the landscape.

But I think there’s, to go to your point, Lydia, again, you can’t quite get away from the gender essentialism question. Because there’s two quite different stories you would tell. If male-female differences are deeply rooted in biology, then you have a story here where the socioeconomic landscape has shifted. And men essentially have a kind of physical condition that makes them poorly suited for the sort of service-based economy, office jobs, all of these kinds of things, to say nothing of changes in social life. Right?

And that’s quite different from saying we used to socialize men in order to make them ready to go to war and work in factories. And now, we need to socialize them a different way for the more gender egalitarian society. And I think those two analyses take you in quite different directions potentially about the depth of the challenge really facing men under modern conditions.

So in the “Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan called the despair of midcentury American women the problem that has no name. The thing we’re talking about now, the plight of men is the problem that has too many names. It’s toxic masculinity. Or it’s deaths of despair. Or it’s the epidemic of fatherlessness. It’s the end of men. And each of those carries so much political baggage. If you’re concerned about toxic masculinity or you’re concerned about the feminization of America, you may think you’re talking about the same thing. But you’re talking about two radically different things.

And I think that’s a problem because it feeds into any kind of debate over prescriptions, over policy that we could have surrounding these questions. And it becomes one more trench in the culture war, which doesn’t lead to a very productive place.

I would argue that the narrative of toxic masculinity, the narrative of feminization, all of these narratives reflect an underlying question, which is basically what are men for in a society where it is understood that single women are perfectly capable of raising children? Like, what is the point of men in the 21st century world?

It’s not even just what are men for but what are men, period? What makes a man? Which is, I think —

Now, that’s getting so —

— underlying a lot of the debate in these books. Without, again, without getting too much into kind of a reductionist sort of gender essentialism, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat, something that comes up in these books is that there are rites of passage for womanhood in a sense. They don’t exist. They are more contrived when it comes to manhood. There is a moment, whether it’s puberty, where girls, in some way, become capable of reproducing, take a step toward a kind of adult version of themselves, toward womanhood. For men, you kind of have to construct that. And those rites have sort of gone away. This is the subject of Robert Bly’s “Iron John” from 1990. Let it not be said, we’ve not had these conversations before.

But just because they go away, the need for them doesn’t. So you either get it from going out into the woods, in Robert Bly’s worldview, and encountering the wild man as mentor. Or you get it from Andrew Tate. But you’re going to get it somewhere.

I want to see Ross go out in the woods and kill a deer with his bare hands.

I have thought that perhaps, perhaps post-Times I have a future as a masculinity guru.

This is going to have to be unpacked.

Bottomless, bottomless market for it. Bottomless market for it.

So we have covered the stats, and the politics, and the class, and the race of this debate over manhood. When we come back, let’s try to figure out what we’re supposed to do about it all.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re back. So we’ve been talking about what is happening with men and boys, how serious this crisis of manhood really is. So now, let’s try to figure out what to do about it. Ross, since you volunteered as a masculinity guru, you should go first. What do we do?

Basically, I think that there is a kind of modified form of social conservatism that remains the best, and most reasonable, and most compelling life script to offer to young men. I probably align to a great degree with Josh Hawley in the sense that I think that young men should be taught from an early age that the point of a healthy masculinity is to provide protection, and support, and defense for a spouse and a family.

I say modified social conservatism because I think that this view is compatible with a sort of post -‘60s view of female opportunity and the equality of the sexes. I think it doesn’t mean that, as in some sort of Trad Bro circles, you should expect to have your wife barefoot and pregnant cooking you dinner when you come home.

I think it’s much more a model of personal sacrifice and a recognition that in any couple or marriage where you are hoping to have children, there’s going to be an extended period of intense sort of physical vulnerability for your wife while she’s having children, in which in that context, the male role is still sort of the archaic tradition where you may not be the primary breadwinner for the family for your whole life. But you’re going to have a sort of specialized role during your marriage’s reproductive years.

It’s interesting to see these places where, particularly among professional middle class, upper-middle class couples, this question of how you accommodate and manage the aspirations of two people, accommodate the realities of childbirth, and particularly very, very early childcare.

To me, what feels exciting and has more possibility than the vision that Ross outlined is the idea that we could, as a society, decide that these are shared burdens, shared obligations, think more broadly about who’s going to be responsible, and who’s going to take time away from work, and all of these kinds of things I think could push us in the direction of men having a much greater sense of possibility in the types of jobs that are actually growing, which are care jobs. Nursing, for example, I wrote about the nursing strike here in New York City. There’s a huge shortage of nurses. The wages for nurses have been skyrocketing. These are incredibly underrepresented by men. But perhaps if we rethink the roles within the family and the roles within the nucleus of where these ideas of gender roles are born, that it’ll actually be good for everyone. That men, in fact, will have greater opportunity in the world and greater ability to thrive in the modern world. And also, not have to sort of shackle their spouses to the home and hearth.

I would just, quickly before Carlos jumps in to speak for a different —

Shackling.

We’re gonna be pro-shackling.

To offer the Lozada Iron Carlos, right? To go part way in agreement with Lydia, I think that there is a shift in how men think about their role in the home that is sort of a fruit of the changes of the last 50 years. That for men who are in stable marriages with children, I think has been tremendously rewarding. Men spend much more time with their kids overall. Married men who are in the home with their kids, which unfortunately is not every man in a relationship with his kids, but men who are in those situations spend much more time with their kids than would have been the case for a father in 1957. And that, I think, is a very good thing.

I think that’s only possible though, to pivot back. We were talking about the Richard Reeves book. My biggest disagreement with Richard Reeves in his vision of a “Revived Masculinity” is he argues basically the norm of married childbearing probably isn’t coming back in a lot of communities. And we need to figure out how to make get men hyperinvolved as fathers even when they aren’t married to the mother of their kids. And obviously in situations where that’s the case, that’s what you want.

But in terms of figuring out a norm for the future, and again, something to sort of offer as a script to young men, there really is no substitute as a father for being in close physical proximity to your kids. And in fact, this, to be a biological essentialist, my wife wrote a book about the science of the maternal transformation called mom genes. And one of the things she talks about in that book is that there is a biological transformation that happens to both men and women when they become parents like hormonal changes, changes in the brain, all of these things. But it happens to the woman who bears a child more or less automatically.

It happens to the father if he’s there with the kid. And it happens more gradually. And I just think as a society, you have to have that as your goal, even or especially if you’re trying to get to a different model of male paternal involvement and burden sharing in the home, being in the home is the precondition for any successful model of fatherhood, marriage, and so on.

The pandemic, it was transformative for me in my relationship with my children. My 10-year-old son, I was talking to him last night about this, not because I was gathering material for the podcast, but I was just having a conversation with my son. And he just turned 10. And he has vague memories of a time when Daddy would go to work everyday. But he’s so used to having me around, having me here. And that’s been, personally, that’s had its frustrations. But it’s largely been wonderful.

And Reeves does I think, a very good job of laying out the scope of the problem. I found his recommendations so lacking in comparison to that scope, and not just in the way that Ross laid out his frustrations with it. But he wants boys to enter school one year later than girls do, basically an extra year of pre-K because their brains develop at a different rate. And that would kind of equalize or help eat away at the kind of development and achievement gap in school.

He wants, back to Lydia’s point, he wants more men to enter what he calls HEAL professions. It’s his way to strike back at STEM. HEAL is health, education, administration, and literacy.

As opposed to HEEL professions, which is what Andrew Tate has just cornered the market on, H-E-E-L.

And he wants more men as teachers in schools, because they present positive role models for boys. Because an overwhelming proportion of teachers in elementary and middle schools in particular are women. And boys tend to perform better, have better school outcomes when they’re taught by men.

But then he just kind of says, look, we need something between the greedy jobs that take all your time and are very unpredictable, and what used to be called the mommy-track jobs. We need normal-people track that allows for the flexibility of family responsibilities without losing out on major career opportunities. Just define it as awesome, we need a track that is awesome for everyone and that and that fulfills everything. But given the scope of what they outline, those just seem like barely hitting at symptoms and not causes.

Josh Hawley’s prescriptions are just we need to wake up American men. Man up, stop watching so much porn. And be like your fathers and grandfathers. Their fathers and grandfathers lived in a different world. There’s a lot, I think, to appreciate in Hawley’s book. But his prescriptions feel to me just kind of wishing for things to be different.

Hawley’s book reminds me of that scene in the first episode of “The Sopranos” where Tony is in Dr. Melfi’s office. And he’s bringing up Gary Cooper.

Part of the genius of The Sopranos, the depressing genius, right, is that on the one hand, it takes the liberal coded view, right, that traditional masculinity and toxic masculinity are bound up with one another. That Tony’s pining for Gary Cooper is fruitless nostalgia. But then at the same time, the whole show is an indictment of therapy culture, right? Because Tony goes to therapy. He gets very good at going to therapy.

All the people say, men will do 17,000 things before they go to therapy. Well, Tony goes to therapy. He does the work. And in the end, it just makes him a little bit better at being a mobster.

I mean, that’s a show that’s all about decline, right? The decline of organized crime. The decline of all of it. And certainly of masculinity. I think that the reality is that a lot of what we’re describing are problems with the nature of our political economy now, right? I mean, I’m not a person who likes to just blame everything on capitalism.

But the fact that we have a world in which outsized professional success comes to those who are able to get a certain kind of education and then devote themselves in an unbelievably unforgiving way from the ages of 25 to 40 to seeking that success, that that’s the key to all of the riches the kingdom can provide just runs directly into all the kinds of problems that we’re talking about here, right?

And so I think when you talk about solutions, I can understand in a certain sense why it is that Holly is going in one direction of this totalizing man up. And Reeves, on the other hand, is like, let’s have this set of minor technocratic solutions and hope for the best. I mean, in some ways, that feels like a perfect encapsulation of the weird asymmetric politics that we have right now.

Yeah, we’re talking about a huge identity crisis for half the population that is incredibly complicated. So it’s like asking someone, well, how do you cure poverty? It’s just there’s so many different pieces to it that there is no simple solution.

One thing I think we should talk about is what this all means for women. And Ross alluded to this at the beginning. And we are dealing with a real mental health crisis, particularly for young women and for girls and adolescent girls in particular. And some of the statistics that came out earlier this year are really, really striking. Close to 14 percent of the girls surveyed reported being coerced into sex. I mean, that’s just a staggering statistic.

6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad and hopeless that they stopped regular activities. And 1 in 3 girls had considered suicide, which is a 60 percent increase in the past decade. And I think it’s tempting to see this as two separate things. But I do wonder the extent to which they’re related to one another. And of course, social media is a factor. But where my mind goes to is that actually, the expectations contained within the gender roles and gender binary and the instability of those roles and all of the changes that we’ve seen, I don’t advocate in any way a return to traditional values or anything like that.

But I do think that this unsettled moment has actually been bad for girls, too, and the expectations that they experience. I mean, particularly those numbers on sexual violence, I think, speak to something gone horribly, horribly wrong in the way that boys and girls relate to one another. And I’m curious, what do we think needs to change about the way that boys behave in order to both solve the broader problem of this identity crisis that they’re having, but also solve what I think is creating a very unhealthy environment for girls?

I mean, I think one story you can tell is that after the sexual revolution, you had a sexual landscape that tended to be organized to a large extent around a certain aggressive male sexual desire, running from Hugh Hefner down to Maxim magazine and Girls Gone Wild and all of these things that some of us may remember from our youth.

And that was, in its own way, a toxic landscape for young women. And you can see, in part, the MeToo era as a reasonable rebellion against that saying, no, you don’t have to put up with — if equality means anything, it means you don’t have to put up with certain kinds of male misbehavior. But then since that rebellion, there’s a climate of despair. Where it’s like, well, we don’t like the Playboy philosophy vision of how men and women get together. But we can’t possibly imagine going back to pre-sexual revolution dating norms or courtship norms or anything like that.

We have no scripts, right? And so there’s, yeah, there’s like — I feel like the possibilities of romance for both sexes seem pretty barren. I mean, there’s the porn question also matters here, right? That porn is sex education more for men than for women. But for a large share of the population, again, in a way that far exceeds what you got from looking at a Playboy 20 or 30 years ago. And that clearly has some kind of grim effect on how young people think about sex.

I mean, you do have interesting dynamics emerging, like among young adults. So one is that they’re having much less sex than they used to or they’re having it at a later age. They are finding their way. It’s just, it’s very complicated and vastly more complicated than it used to be, which is why I think these simplistic prescriptions of men need to be men and girls need to be girls are appealing to a lot of people, especially if they’re struggling within this new complicated environment.

The last thing I’ll say on the issue that Lydia raised is that of boys and girls is that it’s so — even in the way we talk about the data, it always feels zero sum, right? As if there’s a certain number of bachelor’s degrees and, what percentage are going to women, what percentage are going to boys or young men? Who does better in English class? Right? Who has higher graduation rates?

And I think that’s inevitable when you’re looking at the data and necessarily when you’re looking at the data. But I think it’s kind of a shame, because it sets up an antagonistic relationship in how we think about these issues. Reeves is very cognizant of it. But even he falls prey to it sometimes. He’s very upset because the Biden White House has set up a Gender Policy Council. And they released a national strategy on gender equality, and it’s all about the problems facing girls and women. Right? Nothing in the other direction. And that really pissed him off. That really bothered Reeves. I think it should bother him. But again, it creates this constant sense of a battle. If you’re looking at somebody else’s problems, then you’re not looking at mine. And I don’t think that’s productive for this conversation. You can talk about the crisis of boys and you can talk about the crisis of girls without having them compete.

Well, and acknowledge that they’re connected to one another, in fact.

Yeah. Well, I think we will leave it there. When we come back, in a totally different non-relationship kind of way, we’ll get hot and cold.

Woo-hoo.

[LAUGHS]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re back. And now it’s time for Hot and Cold, the moment of the week when one of us shares something that we’re into or totally over or somewhere sliding on the thermometer in between. What do you have, Carlos?

All right, so this hot cold, I apologize may seem a little navel gazing for me, for journalists. But I am warming on the feedback that I get from readers. I usually avoid it. I don’t read comments. But I had one experience that I want to share with you that will explain my change of heart with one particular reader.

So before coming to The New York Times last fall, I was a book critic at The Washington Post. And just about every week, I would get an email from the same person. I will only use his first name here, which is Joseph. And the subject line was always the same. “Here’s another book you won’t review because it doesn’t fit your narrative.” Now, they were invariably conservative writers and politicians and media personalities.

And it ticked me off, because I don’t like people telling me what to think or what to read. So I left The Post and the emails stopped. And that’s when I realized that I missed Joseph.

Aw.

[LAUGHS]

He cares about book criticism, which, believe me, is not super common. So after a couple of months at The Times, one day I checked my email. And there he is. And he says, I see you’re at NYT now. Maybe they’ll let you review these books, but I doubt it.

So I was so happy to hear from him. And just last week, he sent me a note telling me to review another book that doesn’t fit my narrative, which is “Manhood — The Masculine Virtues America Needs” by Josh Hawley.

Score one for Joseph.

So Joseph, if you’re listening, I read the book. And I personally dedicate this episode of Matter of Opinion to you.

That is beautiful, Carlos. Well done, Joseph.

Truly touching. Touching. Yeah, thank you, Joseph.

Well, I mean, the reality is, of course, that I am Joseph. And I just let — I let an appropriate amount of time go by before pretending that I had discovered Carlos’s email. And most of the emails I sent him were, why haven’t you written a long review essay about noted New York Times conservative Ross Douthat?

You don’t fit my narrative, Ross. It’s about time I told you. You don’t fit my narrative. All right.

All right, great talking to you guys.

See you next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks for joining our conversation. If you want to tell us what you think about the show, what we should be covering, send us an email. [email protected]. And be sure to follow “Matter of Opinion” wherever you listen to podcasts.

Matter of Opinion is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. The show is edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.