 My last question before we have a few audience questions. I was very struck by what I think is your latest New Yorker column, where you wrote about what is parallel and not parallel between the cases of Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case. And in my reading of the Pentagon Papers case, here's what really struck and astonished me. And I'd like your view on how it's changed. When the Pentagon Papers became public in, I think, 1971, first, they were incredibly boring. But when you did read them or read excerpts, one of the things that startled so many people is it came out that there were accords dating back to 1954, where it turned out America had broken the accords and not North Vietnam. And this shocked people and caused them to reassess their whole sense of the Vietnam War. And that's 1954, which was then from 1971, a long time ago. So there was a sense of history embedded in how people understood that episode that seems to me entirely lacking today to get someone to care that much about something done under other administrations. 17 years earlier, seems virtually impossible. And what is it about America that's changed so that history now doesn't matter the way it did then? So this is, you've touched on the thing about the Pentagon Papers controversy, which is, in retrospect, so unbelievable. Viewed it through a present-day lens, the whole thing is bananas. It makes no sense whatsoever. It's the most hilariously wonky, nerdy exercise. So even step back. What is the Pentagon Papers? It is Robert McNamara saying in, whatever, 69 or 68, whatever, what we really need is to get the smartest historians in the room to write me a 10-volume set on historical analysis going back 20 years on this conflict we're involved in. So right from the start, we're in a kind of rarefied academic realm. And he got us a bunch of PhDs who slave away on this thing and produced this massive turgid. And you have Ellsberg, who is the central player in this whole thing. And what is Ellsberg? He is the wonkist of the wonks. So he wrote a bit of it. And his great complaint as he takes, he gets a copy of the Pentagon Papers, he's trying to get everyone to read it. And by reading it, he means, I need you to go away for however many months it'll take you and work your way through all 10 volumes. And there's these hilarious conversations he has with Kissinger, where he's trying to get, Kissinger just wants a summary. He's like, no, you can't do a summary. You've got to read the whole thing. You've got to get a couple thousand words in before. Page is in before it makes any sense. And it's just like, there's no contemporary. I mean, it's like history, something. It's not just 2017 and 1971, viewed through the lens of the Pentagon Papers controversy. They belong on different planets. I mean, we're not even the whole. And when the New York Times gets the copies, I mean, remember, it takes them like a year or whatever to photocopy all of it, because it's enormous and the copies are really slow. And the great year, the great story, which is the woman who is now Linda Resnick, who's now a billionaire and lives in the great, you know, when you're driving down Wilshire in Beverly Hills, there's like those massive houses to your left, where you drive into Beverly Hills. She lives in one of those houses. She's the one who has the pomegranate juice, palm juice, anyway. She was the girlfriend of Ellsberg's best friend. And she ran an ad agency on Beverly Boulevard, and she had a Xerox machine, which is a huge deal in 1971. So he does it. He goes, she's the one who provides this, which I just think is up. I once ran into her at some event in LA. I was like, you had the Xerox machine. What a great role to play in history. But every part of it is all about people who took history so seriously that they were willing to spend all night photocopying for months on end. And then Ellsberg took copies. He went around the Capitol also trying to get senators to read it. And, you know, I mean, it's just as long and as big. And over and over again, the complaint that drove him to Lincoln to the New York Times was that no one's taking this seriously. And what does the New York Times do when they get the copies? They rent a room, two rooms, in the Hilton, like right next to the New York Times headquarters, put a guard out front, and then spend months reading it. Again, months reading it, months. Like, it's just this kind of thing that it's just, I mean, imagine today if this thing dropped. I didn't even know how we would, people would have to do takes that would come out within six hours. I mean, there isn't, they'd have to do an executive summary of the executive summary in order to be able to, like, yeah, the whole age doesn't, it belongs to a different era. I almost feel like it's the last, it feels like it is the final act in an intellectual era in American life when institutionalized government was expected to comport itself according to standards and norms that came from the academy, right? That's what's, the whole thing is about people who came out of elite schools and had a certain expectation about what it meant to be a public servant and what your intellectual responsibilities were as a public servant. And they carried those norms with them from graduate school to Washington, right? And that's the whole, and the fact that Ellsberg is a PhD in decision sciences and wrote papers with Thomas Schelling is not a peripheral fact, it's the core fact, right? That's who they were, right? So when you, we go fast forward and you have Edward Snowden, who is a community college dropout, which I don't say is a snobbish thing, I'm contrasting him to his predecessor who was a PhD from MIT, right? And Snowden's intellectual understanding of what he was engaged in is just, it is a fraction of, he used a search engine, just to pluck stuff at random from the NSA files and hand it over to people. That's not what Ellsberg was doing. And in the gap between those two figures is the story of the last 50 years of the changes of the last 50 years in American life.