What It Means to Be American

26:04Fareed Zakaria:So in this sense, I'm sort of a Burkean about it. And I think if the United States created at the end of World War II this world, which slowly allowed countries from the Spains and the Portugals of the world, which people forget were fascist dictatorships until the 1970s, to the East Asian countries of the world, Taiwan, South Korea, also, by the way, very tough right-wing dictatorships to evolve into democracies, if it then pressured the Soviet Union so much that it cracked and crumbled 45 years later and liberated Eastern Europe, you know, this is achievement enough. You don't need to, you know, to go and invade every country where you think there's a dictator and install a democracy.

26:47Fareed Zakaria:It won't hold. And it doesn't, it risks rupturing the whole system. So for that reason, I'm very strongly in favor of helping Ukraine because that was a, it It was a fledgling democracy that wanted to be democratic itself, that is struggling and fighting mightily and losing enormous numbers of people in order to do that. All it's asking us to do is help it with arms and money. But I look at the Iran thing and I think to myself, the way you're going to get democracy in Iran is not likely to be on the back of American tanks and troops. These are much more complicated processes. You might be reinforcing nationalism.

27:28Fareed Zakaria:Look, every now and then it works. I don't dispute that. There are cases you can look at where things have worked out. But in general, I think it's much more important that the United States devote its power to that general systemic system building approach rather than somewhat idiosyncratically go into countries that it happens to feel at that moment are kind of bad countries and reform them. And the track record on that is not particularly good, whether you look at Vietnam, whether you look at Afghanistan, you know, ironically, and we might get to this, Iraq doesn't look so bad in that sense, where Iraq is now a democracy.

28:12Fareed Zakaria:It's had something like nine changes of government. It is, without any question, a better regime than Saddam Hussein's, both internally and externally. but the cost was catastrophically high. And so I come out feeling like I am being a kind of idealist, but a kind of Franklin Roosevelt idealist, not a George W. Bush idealist, because Roosevelt set this whole system up, but he was realistic about the fact that he couldn't do much about Eastern Europe. Stalin had his army there, and he acquiesced in that destruction of liberty. You know, that's life. But I now watch the United States become, in international affairs, a kind of gangster predatory country where it overthrows dictator number one in Venezuela to install dictator number two.

29:03Well, we've seen that before. But then it pillages the country. It takes oil. We're told, this may or may not be true, that it's taken physical gold from Venezuela. I find that a little hard to believe, but the Trump people say it. Not everything they say is untrue. That seems to be Trump's plan for Iran, again, to not just break the country's military power, but to bring dictator number two, or at this point, maybe number 42, in line to replace dictator number one and pillage the country. And watching this kind of gangsterism, that is a shock to my system, because I did have a very different idea of what America was supposed to be in the world.

29:38And this has now been going on for a decade. And when a country does something for a decade under two presidencies separated by an interval of not very strong correction, you think, well, maybe that's at least as much a part of who America is as the America that I used to see.

29:55Fareed Zakaria:Yeah, this is probably one of the greatest disappointments for me because you put it exactly right. The United States is acting like a 19th century European imperialist power, which is shocking because the United States, of course, came into being, in a sense, in rebellion against an 18th century imperialist power. And to be watching the United States behave like a rogue superpower, breaking the rules-based system that it had put into place, not even bothering to try to claim that there was some kind of broader justification, broader rule of law violation that, you know, is why we've gone after Iran.

30:36Fareed Zakaria:which, by the way, you could construct and you could have brought some countries on board and you could have taken all this to the UN. But it almost seems that the point of the way Trump is doing this is to say, I reject all that. I have absolutely no desire to appear to be behaving in a lawful, legitimate, rule-based way. I want to make the point that this is arbitrary. This is unilateral. This is self-interested. This is rapacious. And that, for the leading power in the world, and for the power that built this system to be behaving like this, is absolutely shocking. It is also frittering away 80 years of order, of ordered liberty that we have helped create in the world, of trust that we built among so many countries.

31:24Fareed Zakaria:We have 59 treaty allies in the world. China has one, North Korea. We're giving up all of this. For what? For nothing. This is, to my mind, Trump 2.0 has been the worst foreign policy in my lifetime, without any question, because it is system wrecking. And it is destroying trust that took eight decades to build, and I don't think can be rebuilt, can be regained. I find myself thinking a lot in the second Trump term about a poem written in the 1890s by Roger Kipling called Recessional. And Kipling, of course, was the great poet of British imperialism. But 1897 was the year of Queen Victoria's 60th anniversary on the throne.

32:07There was a lot of boastfulness in the air. And somehow in his artistic sensibility, this hit him amiss. He didn't like it. And he wrote a poem against the kind of heavy boasting that he was hearing everywhere about the greatness and power of Britain and wrote a poem in which he had this vision of British power melting away despite the boastfulness of the day. And I think of this poem a lot and when he talks about um in which he sort of begs god's pardon for the boasting that he's hearing and it makes me think very much of pete hegseth and here's the thing when you talk about the realism versus liberalism and foreign policy i think one of the things that we're discovering in this trump years is american generosity was not just a good to do thing it was actually a necessary thing it was it was it was smart politics too when america emerged in the Second World War, and for most of the time after, America was the strongest country in the world, and probably it still is.

32:59But the world has seen strongest countries in the world before, at least in the Western world. It's Habsburg, Spain, Bourbon, France. But what always happened in the past was the strongest country in the world was never stronger than all the other countries put together. And one country would emerge as the strongest, the others would combine against it and rip it down. And the United States, as strong as it is, is not stronger than everybody else put together. But cunningly in the years since 1945, and responsibly and rightly too, the United States put together a system where most of the other strong countries were also friends.

33:31And so it was not just the strongest single country, but the head of the strongest possible coalition, no one could rip it down. And when you jettison all of that, that I'm beginning to hear, and I think the comments recently from the president about letting the Strait of Hormuz police itself, I think like Kipling hearing the melting away of power, I'm hearing the gathering of the anti-American coalition of the second half of the 21st century. And it just fills me with foreboding that as America becomes less attractive, it also becomes more vulnerable.

33:58Fareed Zakaria:Yeah, no, I think you've put it exactly right. And maybe we have gotten to that point in our power that we were ripe for somebody to abuse it the way that Trump is. But you're absolutely right. This was Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's genius. This was Harry Truman's genius. It was Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower really collectively put in place this system you're describing. And you're absolutely right. It defies the logic of balance of power throughout at least modern history, since the fall of the Roman Empire. The basic story has been the one you described, the rise of the great power, and then what we always call the balance of power, the balancing against that power, whether it was the Habsburgs, the French, you know, whomever, the British.

34:46Fareed Zakaria:In the U.S. case, not only did it not happen, but the richest countries in the world said something extraordinary. So if you looked at the world in 1970, you'd say, who was the richest country in the world? The United States. Who was the second richest country in the world? Germany. Who was the third richest country in the world? Japan. The second and third richest countries in the world for most of the post-war period had subcontracted their foreign and defense policy to the richest country in the world, the United States. This has never happened in history before. The idea that, you know, if you read Paul Kennedy's rise and fall of great powers, when a country becomes rich economically, as the night follows the day, it becomes powerful militarily.

35:31Fareed Zakaria:It builds a huge army. It struts around. It wants to spread its influence around the world. The Germans and the Japanese say, no, the US can take care of that. Now, some of that was war guilt, but a lot of it was that the United States treated them well. It said to them, we will take care of your security concerns. We promise you that if there is an attack on you, we will respond as if it were an attack on New York. And that sense of solidarity created this extraordinary Western alliance, which even today, If you add in countries like Japan and Australia, you're talking about 60 % of global GDP.

36:08Fareed Zakaria:You're talking about 80 % maybe of global military spending. And the idea that that's all anchored together and not divided because countries are suspicious of America is entirely because of what you say, because America acted with this kind of enlightened self-interest and broad generosity. Steve. So at some level, I am proud as an American that we're the richest country in the world. And for most of the last eight decades until this February, we were the most generous country in the world. We were the country that really invented foreign aid. We've given that up. And, you know, as you know, it costs a pittance as 1 % of the federal budget.

36:49Fareed Zakaria:And we've given that up. And that, That was all part of the soft power that covered our hard power that made us seem much less threatening and much more attractive to a country like Canada, to a country like Singapore, to a country like Australia, and of course, to the countries of Europe. And Trump is actively shedding that. He's forcing these countries, maybe not to ally against the United States, they won't do that, but to hedge. Look at what Mark Carney is doing in Canada. He's saying, I have to reduce my dependence on the U.S. Look at what Modi is doing in India. He's saying, I have to reduce my dependence on the U.S.

37:27Fareed Zakaria:We were thinking we were going to be this close alliance. But no, I'm going to I'm going to buy more European defense equipment. I'm going to keep some of the Russian kit I have. Look at the Europeans. They're asking themselves. The German chancellor is saying it is absolutely clear. I cannot rely on on America's nuclear guarantee. And he's gone to the British and French and asked them to guarantee it. This is all terrible for America. This is the diminution of American power, the erosion of American power. And Trump is doing it willfully with no strategic idea in his head. I want to double back to where we began the conversation with the immigrant experience.

38:07And you and I shared an unusually, I think, easy and gentle path. We both spoke English, and we both came from some comfort in our native countries, and we both were able to go back and forth pretty easily. And so we spared the worst. And both of us, I think me more than you, have written critically about some aspects of American immigration policy. And at another time, I used to make the joke that thinking critically about immigration is one of those jobs that Americans won't do, so they have to import immigrants to do it. And George Borjas, the great Cuban-born economist, skeptical economist of immigration, so many others of the people who have been most skeptical of unrestricted immigration have been foreign-born.

38:46And that's not a contradiction that actually means you think more about this problem if you are foreign-born than those who are native-born. But I have to say, I do have this feeling, speaking of quoting poetry, that as I watch what has happened in the second Trump term, I feel like that line at T.S. Eliot, that's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all. Saying you can't let every car that wants to go on the Hollywood freeway all enter the Hollywood freeway at the same time does not mean you should be having death squads massacring motorists. You know, I wanted those little blinking lights to slow down the entry of cars on the Hollywood freeway.

39:21And now what we're doing, instead of restricting immigration in an orderly way, we have these mass roundups, these mass attentions, putting people in shackles as eyewitnesses. I feel like something horribly shameful is happening right in front of our eyes. And it's something that if there weren't so many other shameful things, we'd think about it every day, but it's not something we can forget either.

39:41Fareed Zakaria:Yeah, look, I, too, have been fairly clear in being in favor of legal immigration, obviously not being in favor of illegal immigration. But beyond that, being in favor of reducing the family based immigration, increasing skills based immigration, making it more a system that helps America in more direct ways. But even beyond that, David, and I know you've written about this and agree as well. Look, one of my mentors in life, in my intellectual life, was Sam Huntington, my dissertation advisor at Harvard. And Sam's last book, Who Are We?, is an argument for a kind of cultural assimilation that needs to take place in the United States, not just around political ideas, you know, where we all believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

40:33Fareed Zakaria:No, he argues that there is, you know, at base, American culture has a kind of high Protestant English DNA. And that should not be eroded. That should not be that should not be kind of turned into some multicultural soup. And I sort of agree with him. I think that it's a challenging question of how you do it as people come in from more and more different parts of the world and will naturally contribute something to that experience. You just think of, you know, the rise of Jewish Americans, and that means that Christmas is not the only holiday celebrated. There are other, you know, and then you have the rise of that whole process of living the reality of a multicultural nation and yet maintaining some core mainstream culture that defines your essence is a challenge.

41:25Fareed Zakaria:But I agree that for those people who want to come here and create a perfect replica of Mexico or India, I say to them, go back. Why did you come here? I mean, the whole point is you're entering a different world. And so I even agree with, you know, a very soft version of that kind of the kind of some of the things. But what the Trump administration seems to be doing, and you put it exactly right, is taking these ideas to an extreme, making them so coercive, nasty, aggressive, intolerant, that it kind of violates the American spirit about this. It's not only not solving the problem it's trying to solve, it's creating a country that is more disunified, more fragmented than the reality.

42:19Fareed Zakaria:I mean, the truth is the United States has always been doing pretty well on this cultural assimilation. You know this and I know this because we have children. The truth about being an immigrant parent is the hard thing is to make sure your children retain some modicum of the old country's culture. The assimilation machine works so well in this country. I look at my kids, the three, you know, three of them, they were half Indian, right? In the sense of ethnic origin. I mean, they've been to India, you know, I don't know. My son's 25, 26. He's been to India 27, 28 times. he doesn't for a second think of himself in any sense as Indian.

43:00Fareed Zakaria:He thinks of himself as a regular American kid who's been to India a lot and likes it because his dad came from there. That's it. I would say, you know, almost impossible to teach the language, almost impossible to get them, you know, a bit of love for them to know some of the language and the poetry and the music I grew up with. Impossible. The machine here is so, so powerful that you, you know, and this is Hector St. John de Cravochory wrote about this in the 18th century, when he talked about this new American who has been transformed from a Frenchman, a German, a Dutchman, to something new called an American.

43:37Fareed Zakaria:And it's still happening 250 years later. And you remind me of a reminiscence. Shortly after I left the Bush administration in 2003, 2004, I gave a lecture somewhere at a university. And I was met at the train station by a much fancier car than the university would normally send for a university talker, a big gleaming car. And I discovered that the reason I had such a fancy car was they placed a call to the local limousine company and for the usual kind of beaten up academic vehicle. And the owner of the company who was Egyptian born, who had vaguely heard of me, had come out with his best car because he had a question he wanted to ask me.

44:11He was an Egyptian. He'd migrated to the United States. He'd done very well for himself, built this successful limousine company. And he had two sons. And he wanted my advice of how they could best contribute to the defense of the United States against global terrorism. And I said, well, there are a lot of options here. Let me ask you, your sons, do they speak Arabic? And he replied, full of pride, not one word.

44:33Fareed Zakaria:Exactly. And, you know, I was once, speaking of our, you know, the tried and true journalistic habit of talking to cab drivers and thinking of it as data. I was in Oslo in Norway, taking a cab. And I remember this vividly, because you see, the cab driver was of Moroccan origin. And we were chatting. And he said, where do you live? I said, oh, I live in New York. And he said, oh, you know, I have a brother in New York. I came to Norway. He went to New York. And I said, oh, I'm thinking to myself as a social scientist, here we have a good experiment. I said, exactly, a controlled experiment. I said, so tell me a little bit about your experience compared to his.

45:13Fareed Zakaria:He said, oh, there's nothing to tell you. It's very simple. No matter how long I stay in this country, I'll always be Moroccan. He's already a New Yorker. His kids don't even think of being anything else. And that is the difference still. But when we think about this and this Huntington point, and it's important and I agree with you about it and I've written a lot about it over the time is, have you? But I find now the thing I am really struck by is we are building for millions of people, maybe tens of million people who live on American soil, mostly not causing any problems for anyone, a kind of fear-based society where every time they encounter a representative of the law who may be masked and unidentified, which is pretty shocking, they have to feel something terrible could happen to them, something so disproportionate to anything they've done.

46:00They may have broken a rule, but they're not a danger to anybody. And they could end up in a cage, in shackles, in a torture dungeon somewhere else, and that it changes the nature of the relationship that residents of the territory have with the authorities of the territory. One of the things that makes a free country a free country, I think, is that you can be a little negligent in the presence of the police. You don't have to have a shudder of apprehension every time you meet a uniform. And yet millions and maybe tens of millions of people who live on this soil do have to have that feeling.

46:30Fareed Zakaria:You know, this is a very important point, and this is what I was trying to get at when I talked initially about that, you know, that sense of freedom when I came to America. To me, coming from India, probably the most striking difference about America was the relationship people had to the state. There was a sense in which when you came to America, that nobody cared what the government was, what it was doing. Businessmen couldn't give a damn who was in power. They were going about building their businesses. Whereas in India, you were constantly aware of the government. If you wanted a phone line, you had to have a connection to the government.

47:05Fareed Zakaria:If you were a businessman, you had to be careful to be on the right side of the government. You know, everything was determined, shaped. The government was the central actor in shaping civil society. In the America I came to, it was almost the opposite. The government was sort of irrelevant. And, you know, you could just go about your business. What the Trump administration is doing through immigration, but not just through immigration, through this very activist policy in the economic sphere, where, you know, it's punishing certain companies, it's rewarding others, based on, honestly, how much Trump likes the CEO, or maybe the industry they're in.

47:47Fareed Zakaria:It's investing in certain companies. It's relaxing the rules. So if Dave Ellison wants to buy Warner Brothers, well, that's okay. If Netflix wants to buy it, we're going to make that impossible. All of this is changing the nature of the individual's relationship to the state in America. Businessmen have to care now who is in power. They have to curry favor. You can see it. And a company like NVIDIA pointed out that until a year ago, they didn't have a lobbyist in Washington. They now have an army of lobbyists in Washington. That is to me, it's almost, I hate to say, you know, that there is some essence of America, but America is, you know, was in its DNA, a country that was founded against a powerful state.

48:33Fareed Zakaria:That was the rebellion. It is in its DNA, a limited state. It is in its DNA, has a kind of libertarian feel to it. And the fact that we've lost that is, I think, tragic. And I wonder whether we'll, you know, once these powers that once the government takes these powers, it's very hard to imagine them shedding them. You and I have a mutual friend or a kind of mentor, Bill Buckley. And Buckley used to often say that his favorite country in the world was Switzerland. And I asked him why. And he said, because if you go to somebody in Switzerland and you ask them, who is the president of your country, there's a 95 % chance, maybe a 99 % chance that we'll have no idea.

49:11Fareed Zakaria:You know, because Switzerland has this very strange rotating presidency. And it's, you know, it's a very business friendly set. And I think that's true. The idea that, you know, you wouldn't even know who the president of your country is, that does speak to something. It would, of course, be Donald Trump's nightmare. You know, that Trump has such a different view. And in that sense, he's so fundamentally not a conservative and not somebody who believes in that conception of limited government. He wants to, you know, he wants to dominate everything. He wants to choose everything. He wants to build every building, cut every ribbon, be involved in every economic decision.

49:46Fareed Zakaria:This is terrible for liberty and for individual freedom. Let me finish with a personal question about the 250th anniversary. Have you given any thought to how you will mark the 4th of July? The only thing I've thought about is that, you know, I'd want to do it with my kids. I will probably spend it with my brother. You know, for me, family is very important, as it is for you. So I'm not going to go to some public thing. I'll just do something quietly, privately. I remember a few times in the past, I've done a barbecue where we've had somebody read the Declaration of Independence. The problem is it's very long.

50:26Fareed Zakaria:And as you know, the back half is a lot of kind of details about King George's malfeasances, which is not very interesting. But maybe something simple like that. But maybe it is worth doing something like that to just to say what, you know, in the end, what I began with. I still have faith. Look, I can tell you, you know, whenever we've had these conversations about Trump winning or not winning, and you've had these people talk about how they might leave America if Trump wins or, you know, go to Canada, go to Europe, I've never entertained that thought for a nanosecond. That's what I mean. I still believe, I still feel very strongly about this country.

51:10Fareed Zakaria:And, you know, I guess I feel like if the ship goes down, I'll be on the ship. Yeah. No, I share that feeling when people make that point about relocate. I always say the fight is here. If the fight is lost here, it's lost everywhere. If the fight is won here, it can be won everywhere given enough time. But it's still true that I'll spend this 4th of July, as I spend most 4th of July's, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, on roads and in towns named for the losers of the American Revolution, populated by descendants of refugees from the American Revolution, where the flag they fly is the British flag as it was in 1776, which is slightly different from the British flag of today.

51:50And the American Revolution remains alive because there are people for whom it's a live issue. And I think in the end, it was rightly decided and the country that was built was good and great. But there's a shadow over it now. And that shadow does chill me.

52:05Fareed Zakaria:It's a bad time to be somebody who believes in the ideals of the American Revolution, you know, individual rights, individual liberty, limited government, and that sense that they always had of being a city on a hill. I was reading the other day Perry Miller, the great Harvard historian's book, Errand into Wilderness. And the Errand into Wilderness phrase comes from one of the sermons of one of the great preachers of the time. I can't remember. And the whole idea was, you know, the pilgrims are making this errand into the wilderness to show the world. You know, there was always that sense that the American Revolution was about more than just this one place, this plot of land.

52:48Fareed Zakaria:It meant something to the world. Fareed Zakaria, thank you so much for joining me today. Such a pleasure. Bye-bye.

53:02This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

53:52and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Fareed Zakaria for joining me today. My book this week is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Now, Invisible Cities is an extremely strange book. It's published in 1972, translated into English from Italian in 1974, and it purports to be a kind of travelogue, a description of 55 cities as told by the venetian explorer marco polo to the chinese emperor kubla khan but that's just pretend marco polo and kubla khan are living in a world that has nothing to do with the actual world of marco polo and kubla khan they reference dirigibles roller coasters and petroleum refineries things that did not exist in the 1200s when the two men lived in the evening they smoked pipes together so china would not receive tobacco for another 300 years after the death of Kubla Khan.

54:50It's an act of imagination. And it's a book without really a story or a plot. We are in no different place at the end of the book than we are at the beginning. We have toured 55 cities, but what we've really had is a series of word poems about those cities. So why do I bring it to your attention today? One of the things that I think about a lot, and that actually sparked the show, and sparked this segment of the show, is the decline of literacy in our society. It's just pretty obvious that it's apparent everywhere. It's measured in all kinds of ways, that people read less than they used to, and that literacy and text matters less to the culture of our time than it did a generation ago, never mind half a century ago.

55:29This book, Invisible Cities, helps us to understand what has been lost as we lose literacy. Invisible Cities is not, as I said, it's weak on story. What it's strong at is thinking about what things mean. The cities, again and again, the theme of the book is the connection between symbols and content, between contents and meaning. At one point, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan a description of an arch, and he describes stone by stone the arch, beginning with the central stone and then moving to the stones on either side. And the emperor Kublai Khan protests, why are you telling me about those stones?

56:04I want to know about the arch. And Marco Polo answers, without the stones, there is no arch. A culture that is based on literacy is a culture that teaches certain things that we're not even conscious of teaching. It teaches us to be skeptical, to understand that everything we hear is told by someone and for a reason and to question what we are hearing. Through invisible cities, we meet city after city where signs and meaning are in unstable relationships. There is Tamara, a city where signs symbolize unobtainable meanings. There is Fedora, a city that preserves in glass globes models of the city that might have been making enduring art of futures that were possible once, but are possible no longer.

56:44When Marco Polo first meets the Emperor Kublai Khan, they don't share a language and they have to communicate, says Calvino, through gestures, through making gestures or displaying objects. But the objects, what do they mean? Marco Polo shows Kublai Khan a quiver full of arrows. Does that mean that war is nearing? Does that mean there's an abundance of game nearby? Or is that just an indication that he visited an armorer shop and bought the quiver full of arrows there? We are invited to question again and again how we know what we know. And although this is a pretty radical confrontation in Invisible Cities, it's true in every novel that anybody has ever read.

57:22You always have to wonder, who's telling the story? Why? Can I trust them? And in the 19th century, when novels were often stacked as letters within letters, We would have one narrator who would tell us about another narrator who would tell us about a third narrator. I think there are three layers. In Frankenstein, I believe there are three layers of narrator. We're always forced to question, what are we hearing? What do we know? What do we think we know? By contrast, film and especially short-form video are much more literal mediums. The camera always lies, but the camera doesn't alert us to the fact that it may be lying in a way that text often alerts us.

57:58And the short form video invites us just to be naive, to consume very passively what we're seeing, to believe whatever we are shown, however it is created. And that may account for the susceptibility, the rising susceptibility of modern people to conspiracy theories. Because they are immersed in media that are designed to dull their critical faculties. And they have left behind the older medium of text that invites them to exercise their critical faculties. and you will never exercise your critical faculties harder than when reading or listening to, I read it the first time and more recently listened to it, Invisible Cities.

58:35I had seen it on bookshelves for many years. I didn't read it until quite late in life. It was the favorite book of a very dear friend of mine who died at a prematurely early age and his children read excerpts from the book at his funeral. And that sent me out of love for my friend to read the book that he had loved so well. And I was thinking about him the other day and I returned to the book. and listen to some of its sections now it was struck again and again by its its beautiful word poetry the way that he would that calvino would juxtapose things he described the city of isidora as a city where perfect telescopes and violins are made that doesn't make a lot of sense but it sounds very strange or he describes the city of dorothea four green canals span the city dividing it into nine quarters each with 300 houses and 700 chimneys where the inhabitants sell bergamot sturgeon robe, amethysts, and astrolabes.

59:28That just falls on the ear in a way that invites us to think magically about the world around us. I do love this book as much as my late friend loved it. But I also am inspired by this book to remember that symbols do not yield their meaning without a struggle. And in a world in which we are invited to trust more and believe more, we are deceived by symbols much more readily than when we lived in a world that invited us to test symbols, question their meaning. That's something we all ought to be doing more. That's why we all ought to be reading more. And this beautiful short book is a great place to recommit.

1:00:05That's it for this week's David Fromm Show. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for watching and for listening. As ever, if you're minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you will see my work and that of all of my colleagues. See you next week back here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

1:00:43This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grain. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology.

1:01:24And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.