Hi there, I'm Jason Gautz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

After four years and just over 200 conversations for this show, I'm feeling the need for a new kind of politics

that would champion uncertainty, fragility, emotional vulnerability against

the tyranny of opinions that push us one way or another. I used to think that art was sufficient

for this purpose. After all, it was books like J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoe or the brothers

Karamazov, bands like the Smiths and the Velvet Underground that gave a much younger me courage to embrace ambiguity as a great teacher.

Arts an open door, but you have to walk through it. And it's the politics and culture around you that shape your ability to do so.

We're hurting and hungry for connection, sick of misunderstanding and violence.

I think this is true all over the world.

I think it runs so deep it's like an underground river, one whose presence we can only guess at from the contours of the surface earth.

I'm very happy to be talking today with Turkish-born global citizen novelist and activist Elif Shafak. She's the author of Honor, the Flee

Palace, and Three Daughters of Eve, among many other books. In her writing and public speaking,

she's one of the most eloquent voices I know of this new politics that doesn't fit easily

on any flag. Welcome to think again, Elif. Thank you so much. I mean, let's start with

three daughters of Eve and let's start with the fact that it begins in a traffic jam,

something that I've experienced in Istanbul, a very long, terrible traffic jam, I guess, across

the Bosphorus. Yeah. And then with a kind of escape.

So your heroine or anti-heroine or somewhere in between Perry,

she ends up fleeing the traffic jam.

And in a sense, fleeing safety, fleeing security,

fleeing a kind of like bourgeois predictability into danger.

And it seems to me that that's kind of central to her and to what you're trying to get at in the book.

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