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Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.

I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things Magazine,

and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

I'd like to welcome Elizabeth Corey to the podcast.

We're going to talk about her February 26 essay for us on The Pleasure of Admiring. Welcome to the podcast, Elizabeth.

Thank you, Rusty.

It's nice to be here.

You're looking at kind of, I guess, what I would call eccentric forms of attention or patterns of life.

Is that fair?

This notion of admiration is a kind of going outside of oneself.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, the thing that prompted the piece was, well, I work at a university,

and my sense of what we're supposed, I work in a university, and my sense of what we're supposed

to be doing in a university is a kind of self-promotion, and unfortunately, that seems to make

itself known in every aspect of the university, from the places we publish to the kinds of things we do on social media. And I was a little bit

well, or maybe a lot repelled by that and wanted to try to think about, well, why, what are we

...