 Hi, good evening, everybody. We're going to get started. I'm sure people will be filtering in. I'm so glad to see all of you here tonight. My name is Bridget Scholti, and I am a writer and journalist. And right now, I'm the director of the Better Life Lab, which is the Work, Life, and Gender Equality Program at New America. We're delighted to have you all here today. A couple real brief points before we get started. We are recording and live streaming tonight's conversation. So we will have a period for questions and answers. So just be aware that when you get up and ask a question, that's sort of a tacit approval that you're OK with being on camera. We also will be selling Andrew's book after the event. So you can save your questions if you don't want to be on film. You can save them then, and please buy this wonderful book. And he will sign it for you. So I'm going to briefly introduce Andrew and Lydia and then get started on the conversation here tonight. So Andrew is the professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center. He's president of the Penn American Center. He's a regular contributor to many publications, including the New Yorker, NPR, and The New York Times. And you might know him best from his books, Far from the Tree, Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. I'm never going to get one. And he also wrote Nunday Diemann, which was also a National Book Award winner. Joining him in the conversation tonight is Lydia Polgreen. She is the editorial director of New York Times Global. And so she serves as the lead architect for the Times effort to expand their global presence. And before moving into that role, she was an international editor, a foreign correspondent in Johannesburg, where she was bureau chief. She worked in South Asia, West Africa, all for the Times. She's won a number of awards, including the George Polk Award for reporting. And it was just amazing hearing Andrew and Lydia talking about their far-flung travels. We're in for a really great discussion. Andrew, he writes in his book. Got my cheat sheet here, because, of course, I can't remember this. Alexander von Humboldt, a German philosopher, he says, the most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world. So Andrew writes about this. And I happen to see it on his Facebook page, where it has a picture of him parasailing. So far and away, the book that we're going to be talking about tonight, it has tons of these wonderful stories, compelling essays and narratives, not just parasailing, but Andrew in Moscow with artists in the Glass Noss era, dog sledding in Greenland, in Antarctica, in Senegal, in a really wild tribal exorcism covered in the blood of a ram. One of the ones that I found most terrifying, Floating Alone in the Great Pacific Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef. They certainly are tales of wonder and adventure. But more than that, they are stories of people and places driven by a larger purpose or a moral imperative, as Andrew writes, to conquer our fears of difference and otherness, to get up out of our easy chairs and comfortable isolated bubbles, to go out in the world in order to understand ourselves, others, and to connect to that strange and wonderful awful world and our shared humanity. But his message comes at a critical time, and that's why I'm so glad we're having this conversation. We're in a political season, it's vicious talks of deportations and vilifying immigrants and building walls, ID cards for people of a certain religious persuasion. The State Department here in the United States reports that about one third of all US citizens have a valid US passport. About one in five actually traveled overseas in a given year, which hasn't changed much in the past decade. And the countries that we go to most, the majority of us go to Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain. So we do not travel far and away. The Washington Post reviewer called this a noble book. It's an important book at a critical time, and so I'm delighted to introduce Andrew and Lydia for this noble conversation. Andrew, welcome. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. I thought I'd start, I was really struck by the opening of your book, because we talk about driving with your father and him telling you about the Holocaust. Tell us that story, because it seemed like a remarkable beginning to a traveling life. And in some ways, kind of an impetus to everything that followed. Well, I was a fairly little kid. I think I was probably about six. And we were driving back from something or other in Westchester. And I said to him something, I think we were talking about the landscape. And for some reason, and I don't remember what it was, I was six a long time ago, the subject of the Holocaust came up. And my father thought I knew about the Holocaust, and he made some passing reference to it. And I had no idea what he was talking about. No one had told me anything of this before. And so I asked him to explain it. And he explained it, and it didn't really make any sense to me. And he finished, and I said, but I didn't understand. And then he explained it again. And then he explained it again. And then he said, I said to him, but what was it? He said it was pure evil. And the idea was that that would close down the conversation. But I had one more question. I said, but why didn't those Jews leave when everything got so bad? And my father said they had nowhere to go. And I remember thinking when I was six, that I was terrified by what he had just described to me, that I understood that we were Jewish and would have been targeted under those circumstances. And I decided I was always going to have some place to go. I was going to venture into the world. I was going to meet the broadest possible range of people. I was going to be someone who was at home anywhere and who had people to welcome him anywhere. I remember having that feeling. And partly, I had already always been interested in the world and abroad and in the capacious ways there were of experiencing life. And I was curious about places. But at that point, it took on a new urgency. And I thought, this really matters. And I am never going to be in the situation of those people who had no place to go when the Nazis came to power. So skipping ahead, you became an anglophile. You decided that Britain was a place that you wanted to spend some time. And you became fascinated with art and artists. What took you on your first overseas assignment? Well, I had gone to live in England and to do a graduate degree there. And then I stayed on to work for a British magazine. But I think the first serious international assignment, I'd done some little stories about restaurants in France or something. But the first serious one was that I had become the arts correspondent for Harper's and Queen, which was a sort of Dippy British glossy magazine. And Sotheby's was having a sale of contemporary Soviet art. And I looked at the catalog for the sale. And I went to the editor of Harper's and Queen. And I said, this is the worst art I have ever seen. And they are hyping it in this ludicrous way. And they put together this fancy tour with unusual caviar last eaten by this arena the day before she was executed. And I said, they've gotten all of these sort of ritzy people to come along. And I'm going to do a kind of comical expose of this ludicrous enterprise. And so he gave me that assignment. Now, I was pretty excited. I'd always wanted to go to Russia. Someone was sending me someplace. And then I got there. And the day after I arrived, I was supposed to interview a group of artists. I had made an appointment to see them. And I was supposed to have a translator. And I was stood up by my translator. And I felt I couldn't just leave these artists waiting for me, not knowing what had happened. And so I made my way to their studios. And I got there. I spoke no Russian. And they spoke no English. But there I was in the studio. And they said, someone would come later who spoke some French, which I speak badly. And I sat there for the whole day and watched them interacting with one another. And what I quickly realized was that their work had been deliberately, or rather, gradually realized, was that their work had been constructed to look banal to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the KGB and security services, but that it was full of encoded meanings. And that the secret to decoding those meanings was in knowing the artists and knowing the dynamics among them, that this was a very, very tight community. And none of them had ever expected their work to be shown to a foreign audience. They expected it to be shown only to their friends and only, as one of them said, like a Masonic secret handshake among us. And once you saw the artists, because they would show one another these pictures, some of which were similar to the ones in the catalog, they would burst out laughing, or someone would start to cry, or someone would just look at the painting, go give someone a hug. And I thought, what's going on here? These are these sort of brown abstract things people are doing. And so I came to understand what that dynamic was. And while I was interested in and remain interested in art, I was also very much interested in artists and in what their experience was. And at that moment, they were going through a profound shift from living in total obscurity to suddenly becoming the sort of flavor of the month in the West and having huge exhibitions everywhere. And I happened to get there at a time when they wanted to understand this Western world they were being exposed to. And I wanted to understand this Soviet world that they inhabited. And our interests coincided in a lot of extraordinary friendships were built there. And I'll just tell the story of one of the artists that to me sort of sums up a little bit of the wit and complexity of their position, which is that there was an artist named Kostya Zvezdochotov. He had been sent in the early 1980s into punitive military service. Punitive military service was something the KGB often used when they didn't want someone to be sent to the gulag in a way that would attract attention from the West. But it was effectively the same thing. And he was in a battalion of thieves and murderers. And he was sent off. And when he was there, at first, he was working on excavating the foundation of the building that had been built on the ice in Kamchatka. And then later on, they discovered he drew well, and they had him do propaganda art, which he did for a while. And then he came back. There are many more stories from that time, but this one. He then, about two years after I met him, had his first exhibition in the West, which was in Grotz in Austria. And on the door of the room, he posted a little notice. And it said, in 1981, I was sent east, farther east, than I had ever dreamed of going or ever wanted to go. And when I got there, I was put in a room and given art supplies and told to make pictures. And I thought, I do not subscribe to the ideology these pictures represent, but so long as it will keep me from hard physical labor, I am happy to oblige. Now, I am in the West, farther west, than I ever dreamed of going or wanted to go. And once more, I have been put in a room. And once more, I have been given art supplies. And once more, I suspect they relate to an ideology I do not entirely endorse. But so long as they keep me from hard physical labor, I'm happy to oblige. It's interesting, because I think that you set out to write about objects, art. And you ended up writing about people. And I think that's, to call you a travel writer, I think, sort of cheapens your achievement. You're a person who travels and writes, I think. And when you write about places, you usually write about people. Why have you gravitated to artists as the sort of vessel for your, as the place that, sort of the protagonists of the work that you do? Well, I'll begin by saying that I read a lot about artists earlier in my career. And then I sort of shifted to writing more broadly about a lot of the places that I visited. The first thing that happened was that I had studied literature. And it made sense for me to write about literature in various places. There were two problems with that. The first is that I'm not very good at foreign languages. And most books written in faraway places are written in foreign languages. And the second is that if you want to write about a book from Myanmar, then you order it. And they send it to you. And you read it at home. But if you're writing about art in Myanmar, you have to go to Myanmar because that's where the art is. So there was that level at which it was just that seduction. But at a more profound level, I actually feel as though there is a tendency in the Western media for reports over and over again to be based on two kinds of interviews. Journalists go abroad and they interview government leaders and top brass military and people in business, all of whom have an agenda and are saying what they're saying for very specific reasons, largely vested in self-interest. And then they pepper that to make their work seem more inclusive with quotes from the guy who served breakfast at my hotel, the taxi driver who took me there, the barber from whom I got this amazing shave, et cetera, et cetera. And I believe that every society includes a large intelligentsia of people who are engaged with and interested in what is happening in their society. I would venture to guess that the people in this room all fall into that category. There are people in a similar category elsewhere. And so much of international reporting ignores that intelligentsia. I know a certain amount about art. I'd studied art history. I had an interest in art. But what I really felt was that the artists I met were living deeply and richly and expressively within their own culture, and that if their voices could be amplified, it would be possible to nuance some of the often reductive representations of foreign countries within our own. Well, and when you returned to Russia after your first book came out, you went there primarily for social reasons. You went to see your friends and interview them about, and not, I mean, in a context where you weren't interviewing them just to spend time. But you found yourself caught up in some rather extraordinary events. This was August 1991. Scholars of history will know that date as being particularly significant. So there I was, visiting my friends. My book was out. I thought, I'll just go and see them, and we'll have a nice, quiet time. I'd been there for about a week, and one morning the phone rang, and it was a photographer named Vika Ivlova. And I said, hello. I was kind of groggy. It was early. And she said, I am terribly sorry, but I am canceling dinner tonight. And I said, okay. And she said, yes, there has been coup, and Gorbachev is kidnapped. I cannot make dinner. I must go to Kremlin. And I said, Vika, I said, if you don't want to have dinner, just say you don't want to have dinner. And I hung up the phone. And I went back to bed. And when I got up a few hours later, I looked out the window and there was no one in the streets. And I went over to the studio, so some of the artists I'd been writing about. And they said that some of them had seen tanks in the morning and they said, what's going on? And then someone said, well, let's turn on the television and look. And we turned on the television and the only thing on every channel were Tchaikovsky ballets. And the Russians always said, that has not happened since Stalin died. This is really serious. So there was the push in which Gorbachev had been kidnapped. And I was with the artists over the three days that followed as various things unfolded. They were among the people, again, the kind of thinking engaged intelligentsia who went and built the barricades to try to hold back the forces of the right-wing extremists who had taken over the Kremlin. And it was a very intense experience. And I kept thinking, are we in danger? Are we not in danger? What are we doing? What's happening here? It was also often very comical. There was one woman, a sort of large and impressive Soviet-looking woman who had managed to jump-start a crane and was using it to help build these barricades that we were putting around the White House, which is the Russian Parliament building. And it was fashionable at that time in Russia for people to have t-shirts that said things in English on them, even if they didn't know what they said. And this woman was wearing a t-shirt that said, I'd rather be playing tennis. And on the third day of the push, I was with a group of friends and a couple of them said, there's nothing much happening here at the Parliament building. Let's go up to where those two people were killed last night up near the American Embassy in Smolenskaya. And so I went with those two people up to the American Embassy in an area. And we saw the area where these two people had died and there were flowers on the ground and there were Russian women speaking about tragedy and so on and so forth. And then this young man came running up who looked sort of like the student from a Chekhov play with a tweed cap and little wire rim glasses. And he said, you have to come defend the barricade. There are tanks approaching the barricade. Well, there'd been a lot of talk about tanks. None of them had really attacked any of the barricades. It all felt a little disheveled and confusing. We walked up and we ranged ourselves hand in hand in front of this barricade. It was raining. We were all wet. We were tired. And then to our astonishment, a column of tanks rolled up. And the soldier on the front tank said, we have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade. If you will get out of the way, there's no reason for us to harm you. But if you insist on standing there like that, we will have no choice but to run you down. And one of the artists I was with said, give us just one minute, just one minute to tell you why we're here. And the soldier on the front tank folded his arms. And the artists began talking about freedom and about democracy with the fluency that those of us who live in free democracies would be very hard pressed to muster. And they gave this kind of panagyric and they said, you say you are only following orders, but you choose to follow those orders. And they said, and if your side doesn't win and you have helped us, we will protect you. And they said all of these other things. And they finished. And the soldier on the front tank kept his arms crossed and he looked at them for a minute. And then he said, what you have said is true and we must bow to the will of the people. If you'll clear a little space for us, we'll make you turns and we'll leave you your barricade. And we all stepped aside and these tanks turned around which is quite a production number for a tank. And they drove off in the other direction. And at the end of that day, the push failed not because of that episode, but in part I think because of the spirit that that episode represented. And I had always been an idealist and I had always dreamed of the idea that if you could speak of something clearly enough you could change it. But by describing history, you could perhaps shift it a little bit. And it was in that moment that I suddenly thought it really, really is possible. And when I saw one of those orders for dinner recently in New York, we were talking about that time and I said, we've got Putin's Russia now. All of that has gone so horribly wrong. I said, do you regret what we felt in that moment? And he said, even if every one of those hopes was entirely frustrated, the fact that we felt that hope, even for that instant, has powered the rest of my life. And the experience of hope has enormous value even when the hopes themselves are frustrated. Wow. That is, I mean that's remarkable because I think we're living in a time right now where it feels like all of our hopes are frustrated. I mean, you wrote in your introduction, you say you can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are. You fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is preferable in any way to theirs. But we're living in a very different age now. There's ISIS beheading journalists. There are Trump supporters and Lynch, Obama. Eastern Europe is, well, all of Europe is overrun by rampant nationalism and the dream of the old Europe seems to be faltering. The banile yues are full of people who have given up on the dream of France and are drawn to ISIS. Brexit, your second home. Surveying this landscape, where does your mind take you? How does that idealism stay alive? Well, I mean that idealism is being very sorely tested, not just my idealism, but I think the idealism of all of the people who have been part of the essential social movement of the last few decades toward unity and cooperation and interaction and trust. There are certainly people who don't warrant trust and we have enemies and enemies who wish us ill. All countries have enemies. But in this time of Brexit, there is a rise in a sense of nationalism which is based in a dis-identification with the interests of other people and on a very narrow tribalism. I mean, the idea that the people who voted in favor of Brexit feel they have more in common with the members of the British powerful classes who rule them than they do with bureaucrats in Brussels or indeed with other disenfranchised people in other parts of Europe is very misguided. The life experience of those people and the people who will lead them is negligible in the same way that I think many of the people who look at Donald Trump think we want Donald Trump in because we are white men who are losing our power and our position in the world. And you think, okay, you are a white man and Donald Trump is a white man but the similarities end there. And the notion that you can watch that man on the campaign trail and think, oh, he really cares about my interests most of all, streams credulity. So I think there's a lot of very troubling tribalism that is emerging. The history of mankind is a history of tribalism but I sort of like to think when you look at how war-torn Europe was, 1945 is not that long ago and you look at how Europe functions as a unit today. And it seems as though this upsurge of nationalism is that people don't appreciate how dangerous that upsurge of nationalism is because in my wide travels and my somewhat less wide reading of history, I have never seen an era in which nationalism was on the upsurge in many places that didn't end in tragedy and disaster. So I don't have an idea about how we should constrain ISIS but I do have an idea that this circling of the wagons will achieve nothing. And I was very struck when I was in Libya I'm in the late Gaddafi period and interviewed a lot of people in the Libyan government that all of the people in government who supported rapprochement with the West had traveled in the West and had mostly studied in the US or in Europe. And that almost all of the people who favored isolationist policies had spent very little time in other countries. So on the one hand, if we block people from the countries we perceive as enemies from coming in here, we may not have somebody come in who would upon arriving have tried to set a bomb off somewhere or to shoot someone and there is an authentic security issue to be considered there. But we create a situation of so much danger for ourselves when we don't expose our society to otherness and we don't expose people elsewhere to us because as Carl Jung observed, anyone you do not know is likely to strike you as a fool. And when countries begin to see one another as fools there is only grim stuff ahead. You seem to have a knack for arriving in countries at magical moments. You were, I mean, you just told us the, as to the point of the August push and you were in Libya as you said before the fall of, at a moment where it did seem as though there was some real hope for Libya's future when Saif Islam was a Qaddafi son seemed to be a great modernizing figure although you seem to see through him pretty well. Well, yes, I mean, Saif Qaddafi is the only person I would like to say with whom I have eaten breakfast who is now wanted for crimes against humanity. There are one or two other family members who could be added to that list. For the moment, he's the only one and he had unbelievably polished manners. He had very elegant self-assured presentation. He had exquisite several row tailoring and if you met him outside of Libya, he described all of what he was gonna do and it made perfect sense. But if you met him inside of Libya or indeed if you met him outside of Libya as I did and then went to Libya, you saw that none of what he was talking about not only was it not being fully realized, there was not even the slightest movement toward any aspect of it. It was all a complete and ludicrous fiction and when he came here and spoke at an international organization that I won't name, there was a sort of meeting, a breakfast in fact and at the end of it everyone was allowed to ask a question and my question was when I met you three years ago, you were saying all of these same things and none of them has even begun to happen. On what basis are we to think that they will happen now and other people there were very annoyed at me and felt it was a terribly rude question and he was our great hope for the future of Libya but I feel like it's easy to be, I think I said in the book, one should never be blinded by tailoring. I mean, but my own attempts in that direction not with Sambay. But I just felt like he seemed shiny and glossy and he said the right things and nobody was doing any due diligence about what was really happening. Well, but I mean that goes to your point about shall we say intercourse, right? I mean having a true exchange and having a true and meaningful connection with the place. I mean I think about these neighborhoods in Paris where you have huge numbers of Muslims who feel that they are not part of France. So yes they've gone to the West and yes they've had some exposure but I think we have a real problem in that there isn't that sense of exchange and that sense of belonging and when you meet people like Saif Islam, you think Qaddafi, you think this is someone who's had this kind of superficial exposure but it's a veneer rather than a real, what you describe which is this kind of deep empathy that comes from having a, so I'm not sure that mere exposure is enough. You have to somehow be open. Yes, mere exposure is a beginning and then a great deal of openness is required and there have to be, societies have to be welcoming. I mean I think that the issue of, the complex issue of nationalism and racism in France which is very pronounced has been very exclusionary and interestingly I was just at a conference at which someone spoke via sort of a computer link via Skype who was speaking from Syria and she was an architect and she talked about the fact that part of the crisis in Syria was the fault of architects and she said they destroyed neighborhoods in which everyone was integrated and they built neighborhoods with fortress-like buildings in which groups lived separately and in separating people out in that way they set the stage for much of what came since just not to say it was only architecture but that the architecture contributed and I think in France in particular that that segregation has been incredibly dangerous. I don't know how the French can address that or how the populations living within France who don't experience themselves as French can address it but I think it's terribly important. It's important to have economic integration too. That's why a functioning public education system seems to me absolutely central to any of these things working out. People who are immigrants, legal or otherwise to this country should have access to an education system not only because it's kind of nice for them but also because if we allow them to get an education and to have a body of knowledge in common with other Americans and to learn the aspects of history as they are understood here for them to accept or reject or attempt gradually to change if we do all of those things we will have greater peace within the country and we will have people who can forward the interest at the most class level of the economy rather than marginal people who represent in the language of the Rehoblican Convention nothing but a drain on us. Yeah, well I mean I think your remarks about architecture actually very true and city planning are very true here in the United States. Cities like Dallas where a horrific tragedy there is a very clear and bright line between where black people live and where white people live. Just to return to abroad again you had a remarkable journey to Afghanistan again at something of a hopeful time you were there not long after the Taliban fell and before the full cataclysm of the US war and occupation fell upon us. I was so moved by your story of your evening with the musicians could you tell us how you came how the scene came to be tell us about it and tell us how it came to be. I was in Afghanistan in February of 2002 so really just after the invasion and I was very fortunate to have a really wonderful translator and fixer who helped me to meet people and to get very quickly very deep into the society and I had gone there in connection with what I said earlier because I felt that the reporting showed that the country consisted of corrupted bureaucrats and war like peasants and I knew there had to be other people there and I went to look at the resurgence of the arts and I talked to poets and I talked to visual artists and I talked to musicians. Now almost all forms of art had been illegal under the Taliban. All representational art was illegal and music was illegal. There were stories of women being arrested for singing to their babies and so with the lifting of that Taliban rule there was a resurgence of music that came very suddenly and very joyfully. At that point there were no telephones for ordinary people in Afghanistan. There were certainly no internet. The only way that you could find people was to go and show up where they were and knock on the door. There was no way to communicate otherwise. So Farooq and I would go to these various places and someone said, oh, if you're interested in music there's a bunch of musicians and they practice in the basement of this such and such a building if you drop in there one afternoon you'll probably find them. So we went to this building and there were these five musicians and they were playing and playing and at the end of that half an hour they said, you seem genuinely interested in what we're doing. There are only five of us here today. There are eight of us in our group. We could get the whole group together for you if you want so you can hear us all play together. And I said, that would be great. They said, when should we do that? Well, maybe not tomorrow but okay that would be Friday. And then I said because the building they were in like most buildings in Kabul at that point had no heating and I said, would you like to come and play in the house where I'm staying? It's quite warm and it might be more comfortable for you. And they said, that would be great. It was an old Al-Qaeda house that I had rented with some journalists in the Wasar-Aqbar Khan area, exactly. And it was really very commodious and very pleasant. And so they said they would come. And then I started thinking about it and I thought I have eight musicians who are gonna come and perform in the living room on Friday. And first I told the other journalists at the house and then I thought there's that guy from the UN who said he hadn't met any musicians even though that's supposedly what he's doing here and said he didn't think there were any and I should invite him because he can maybe help these people. And I really liked that painter we saw yesterday and maybe he'd like to come and bit by bit I began to gather a group of people to come and hear these musicians at the house. And then we had a chef who worked at the house and I said to him, look a bunch of people are gonna come over on Friday, could you make some snacks? And he said, well I could make them dinner. And I said, well it could be a lot of people, it'll be 40 or 50 people I think. And he said, well if there were gonna be 40 or 50 people I would need to get an assistant and I would need to buy some extra food which I could do but it would cost $20. And I thought, I'll just go for it. So catering parties in New York has never been so achieved. So anyway we ended up having all these people come. There were about 70 people in the end. We had all of this food for people to eat. The musician sat down and started to play at five o'clock in the afternoon. And from time to time one of them would get up to get something to eat or to go to the bathroom but they never stopped. And then it came close to the time of curfew because there's a curfew in Kabul. And I said, oh with the time of curfew is coming I guess you'll all have to go. And they said, oh no we live much too far away, we'd never get home in time for the curfew, we're here. And they stayed and they went on playing until five o'clock the following morning, 12 solid hours and they were so joyous at having people to listen to them play. And they were so overjoyed at the feeling of festivity and people were dancing and people were talking and people were going back and forth and I felt that every note of the music they played was suffused with the saved up yearning of those years of forcible silence. It was in its way the most beautiful music I've ever heard. No. Are you still in touch with any of these musicians or with your translator Farooq? Very much in touch with my translator Farooq, we are frequently in touch. And he was also Kim Barker's translator and there's a character based on him in that new whiskey Tango Foxtrot movie. But yes, I'm very much in touch with Farooq. I haven't been able to keep in touch with the musicians by and large because they don't have a lot of communication facilities. But Farooq has said that if there is a time when it's possible to return to Afghanistan that we could go and find them again, which I would like to do. And I've once or twice had news of them via friends of mine who've been in Afghanistan for one reason or another. It does seem that you are there in these countries at these moments of hope and possibility. How do you grapple with what's become of them? I mean, you look at Libya, you look at Russia, which you spoke of now, it's become Putin's Russia under the fist. Afghanistan is shattered. Well, there are a few important lessons that I've learned, which may seem obvious, but they weren't so obvious to me. The first is that there is no point knocking out a great evil unless you have a great good to take its place. Because many people presume, and I at one point presumed at some level, that if you got rid of something terrible, the natural human state would be something better. Life under Gaddafi was worse than any of you who weren't there can imagine. It was unbelievably difficult, and I thought we had to get rid of him and something better would have to come. But since his fall what has ensued is not the blossoming of a glorious democracy, but a level of chaos that has been terrifying. And most of the people I got to know in Libya who are able to have left the country, even though many of them love their country and would like to help it. So far as Afghanistan goes, I think if we had spent a 10th of the money that we spent on the invasion of Iraq, on rebuilding Afghanistan, I believe we would have a safe and solid ally in an area where we need one. The people I met in Afghanistan and I met a great many people, recognized the challenges, recognized the issues of tribalism, but they all believed that we were there to build roads and hospitals. And I thought, does no one notice that the Marshall Plan was the single most effective piece of modern diplomacy? How can we not undertake to do these things again as I say, not only because it's sort of generous to do, but also because it actually serves our interests. And what I've come away from these moments of hope with is the sense that often you have to have hope fail over and over and over again before it reaches an apotheosis in which something is realized. I've been in those places where things are terrible, but I have also been in South Africa under apartheid. And while there are many problems in South Africa now and you reported and lived there, so you know it much better than I do, it's better than it was when I went there. It is a better society, it is more whole, it is more just, it is more fair. What I originally saw there was horrific. And the transition has been really extraordinary, the smoothness, the relative smoothness of that transition. I reported from Myanmar, the issue now of the effectively genocide against Muslims in Myanmar is unbelievably terrible, but overall in the country the level of social justice is better than it was under the severe rule of the junta. So these places have problems, but it is possible to get better. What I've learned is that you have to experience the hope knowing that hope is very valuable and maybe it will happen. And I often think of the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci who said, pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. I think that's the message. Shall we take some questions? Yeah. Sure. Or the two of you? Thank you so much. Inspiring and lovely conversation. Going back to the very beginning, we're facing a period now that's very difficult. We are looking at what might become Germany. And I wonder, where do we go? Well, one of the lessons I think from the Brexit campaign is that the people who wanted to leave the European Union had a great deal of fiery rhetoric on their side. The people who wanted to stay in the European Union had a lot of technocratic language on their side. The technocrats don't win in emotional debates. I didn't think that Britain would exit the EU and I didn't think that Donald Trump would secure the Republican nomination and I don't think that he will be our next president but it is perfectly possible that he will be and if he is not to be, then we have to find passionate things to say about the freedom and democracy we enjoy rather than simply saying to everyone, you don't want Donald Trump as the next president. We don't but that isn't going to be enough to energize voters and so I think we're looking at a moment in this country of intense vulnerability to what I believe and I think I can safely say so on Fifth Avenue and 20th Street would be the worst disaster there has been in the history of the country, the possibility of that leadership. The behavior in the convention over these last few days in Cleveland has been so sickening and so horrifying and has so lowered the level of political discourse. I think the only way to fight back against it though is to be fighting not only against it but also for something and I hope that Mrs. Clinton will define what it is that we're fighting for but I hope that all of us will. Those who are journalists, those who are writers, those who are just talking to their friends to try to bring up the level of energy so that there's something to be ecstatically hopeful for rather than something to be terrified of and appalled by. Hi, I'm Bill Armbrester. I'm a retired journalist. You concluded your remarks before with some hopeful notes about South Africa and Myanmar. Another place where, which has definitely seen a turn for the better is Taiwan where I lived back in the 70s and began my journalism career and the announcement for this event began by mentioning that you were punched in the jaw in Taiwan so how did that happen and if you have any thoughts about Taiwan and also Korea is another place which has definitely improved tremendously South Korea. Who knew art was such a matter of conflict in Taiwan? Art and nationalism is a poisonous stew. I went to Taiwan on what I thought was the safest and most straightforward assignment of my life. The Metropolitan Museum had been after the Times Magazine to do a big feature. The Times Magazine was finally persuaded to do one on the loan exhibition of work coming from the Taiwan Palace Museum. It was gonna be the greatest exhibition ever mounted in the United States or indeed the west of Chinese art because the Taiwan Palace Museum contains the imperial collection which Chiang Hai-shek took when he fled the mainland and the imperial collection contains, there's no western museum that contains all the masterworks of western art. The imperial collection contained almost all of the masterworks of Chinese art. So this whole exhibition had been set up and I had studied Chinese painting when I was in college and I was quite interested in it and I went off to this very nice routine in Taiwan with people from the Met Museum and we were served lunch with the Prime Minister and it was all very glamorous and I was all set to write about it. And then I got back to New York and I was scribbling away and talking about sort of, how to interpret calligraphy and what the difference was between song, paint, anywhere, all of that. And then I got a phone call from someone I had met while I was in Taipei who said, are you aware that there are protests going on here about the exhibition? And I said, protests? And he said, yes. He said, some people feel that the art is too valuable and that it shouldn't be allowed to leave the country. And I said, and what are they doing about it? And he said, they're doing big marches on the government buildings and protesting outside the museum. So I called my editor and I said, I think we've got a story here. I said, how would you feel about my going to Taiwan? And he said, buy a ticket. And at 5.30 that afternoon, I was on a plane and I got to Taipei and there was this huge movement for many people in Taiwan, the collection represented not only the greatest collection of Chinese art, but also in many ways part of the claim of the legitimacy of the Kuomintang government. And therefore the removal of that material would be as though we took not only all of our art treasures but also the original of the constitution and the Declaration of Independence and shipped them off to another continent. Well, I got there and I was observing all of these fascinating things but one of the arguments that was being made was that people at the Metropolitan Museum were incompetent to do the conservation work that would be needed to ensure the right conditions for this work. And actually the Metropolitan Museum had a whole department of Chinese painting conservation led by Sandra Castile and many people from both China and Taiwan turned to her because she was so brilliant in this work. And I was in a bar discussing this with a friend of mine and someone just came up to me and said, you work for the Metropolitan Museum. And I said, well, no, I don't. He said, well, what were you saying? And I said, well, I was saying that the Met's Conservation Department is in some ways more qualified than the Palace Museum wanted and the guy socked me in the draw. And the friend with whom I was there said, I think we should get out of here now. And we turned and we ran. And I thought, I never got attacked in Afghanistan. I never got attacked in Rwanda. I never got attacked at Taiwan. There I was painting. There went the draw. What was that? That was 1996, I think or so. And it has been amazing to see the blossoming of greater democracy in Taiwan. I mean, I'm not gonna get into the complexities of history since then, but it is a remarkable, remarkable shift that's taken place there. There's someone who's had his hand up. Two people who've had their hands up just had the draw. I think there should be a mic right now. Oh, sorry. Hi, Kristen Kogler. I thought what you said about the connection between architecture and education was beautiful. And something as a public school teacher here in New York City I struggle with. I also love that you're positive in seeing the changes of the places you've been. So I'm curious to know if you've seen any change in either of those areas in more integration in any country, let alone our states itself, that you've seen it done successfully and that those changes are starting to happen in both of those areas. Well, I mean, I've seen a lot of countries in which public education has improved or has been sustained at very high levels. As I said, I mean, South Africa seems to me to be the most dramatic story and it's kind of unfair to South Africa to drag it out as the kind of poster child for change. But, you know, when I went to South Africa, I was breaking the law when I went to see people in the townships and I then would go back and be with people who had very liberal ideals, most of them, but who couldn't, you know, who lived in houses and areas where black people weren't allowed to visit. I'll tell you, just to give you a feeling for what that quality of merging was like, I'm gonna give you an anecdote instead of a catalog of countries, one from South Africa. There were two artists whom I happened to interview almost back to back in South Africa who were both included in a group exhibition that I was going to see. The first one was a black artist and I said to him, so how did you decide to become an artist? And he said, well, I always like to draw. And when I was 16, I met this guy, Daronce Lale, who said to me, you know, there are people who do nothing but make pictures for a living and they're called artists. And I decided if that was something that really existed, that was what I wanted to do. So this guy was 16 and he had never heard of art. Then I talked to the artist who was in the exhibition with him who was a white artist. And I said, how did you come to be an artist? And he said, you know, when I was 16, I sat next to Andy Warhol at lunch in London. And he said, I should really give it a go. And I thought, what the hell? And I thought it's great they're exhibiting together. It's great that they are trying to connect to each other. It's impossible to look at those two bodies of work and not consider what went into the artist's arrival at the medium and the mode of expression he is employing today. You got time for one more? Andrew, hi. My name is Bill McGowan. As a clinical psychologist and as somebody who's traveled the world and experienced various authoritarian regimes, I'm just kind of curious, what do you make of the Hitlerization of Trump? Do you find it emotionally or psychologically deranged? I mean, I'm reading Adam Gopnik. He's had at least four or five pieces. And are we to be worried for him? I mean, because he's just... Ready for Adam Gopnik? Yeah, ready for Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, it just sounds... I'm worried for both of them, frankly. It's one thing to sort of draw historical parallels, but some of these Hitler analogies are kind of literal. And you've had people like Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL and on the other side, Shmueli Botech, who's a very arch Zionist rabbi, have very publicly and vocally denounced those parallels. So I'm just kind of curious. I mean, if somebody came into you for therapy and started talking about this, how would you read it? I'd give them a big hug. But beyond that, I think that this election has seen an escalation of problematical rhetoric from both the right and the left. And I think that the demonization of Hillary Clinton and the call to put her in front of a firing squad will of necessity generate as hostility from one side always does a comparable hysteria on the other side. I don't think Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler. I think even if he is elected, we aren't going to see anything comparable to the Holocaust being realized in the United States. But I think that there has been, and you can argue about whether it began with Sarah Palin or whether it began a long time before, there has been a gradual debasing of the language in which these conversations take place. And I think it's very difficult, as I said before, if you have an emotional hysteria on one side and you match it only with cool, calm and collected on the other side. So Adam Gopnik, of course, is a brilliantly good writer, I think, is expressing the level of outrage and pain that he feels. I don't think that he actually anticipates the Holocaust either. I don't know what it is that has to be done to balance out the electoral process. The, as I said, in England, I think one of the grave errors was the lack of a powerful message from the remain side, that it was sort of, we are reasonable and this is ludicrous. We are reasonable, often doesn't win over, this is ludicrous. And at the moment, the stakes are very high. Does Adam Gopnik writing that way represent a distortion? Yes, it does. Is it a distortion that may ultimately lead to greater justice in the country? It's possible. I certainly don't know that that's the case, but it may serve a role there. All together, my greatest hope is that there will be a movement toward recognizing the value of dignity rather than the hurling of extreme insults from one side toward the other and from that other side toward the one. But I think some of the time, when people have described to me, I mean, to wade into really tricky waters, when people look at this question of freedom of speech on college campuses, which has come up so much, and the question of whether you can prevent people from saying racist and hateful things without closing down freedom of speech. That some of the tension that is going on in that argument comes out of this tension between Trump as Hitler, Hillary Clinton belongs in front of a firing squad, that what we need to do altogether is to pull the language in which we operate closer to the center, because the center, I mean, I'm left of center, but closer to the center is where authentic wisdom lies. Andrew Solomon, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you.