Best Of: Status Games, Polyamory and the Merits of Meritocracy

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For years, Agnes Callard has been on a mission to take ethical philosophy out of the ivory tower. She examines everyday human experiences — jockeying for status, navigating jealousy, marriage — with dazzling detail, publishing regularly in mainstream publications. And she tries to live by her philosophy, too, even if it violates social conventions, as many discovered when The New Yorker published a provocative profile of Callard last year. We recorded this conversation in May 2021, before the New Yorker article drew attention to the details of her home life. (She lives with both her husband and her ex-husband.) But after our episode with Rhaina Cohen about imagining relationships more expansively, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Callard, who has spent so much time dissecting the dynamics and ethics of different relationships and their possibilities. Mentioned: “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?” by Agnes Callard, The Point “Against Advice,” by Agnes Callard, The Point “The Other Woman,” by Agnes Callard, The Point “Parenting and Panic,” by Agnes Callard, The Point "Aspiration" by Agnes Callard Book Recommendations: "Tolstoy: A Russian Life" by Rosamund Bartlett "Pessoa: A Biography" by Richard Zenith "Augustine of Hippo" by Peter Brown “Real Death” by Mount Eerie Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey it is Ezra. Before I begin today, we've gotten some questions about our
0:04.8	release schedule and whether that has changed and the answer is sort of. For a
0:09.1	long time we've done in practice five six seven episodes a month and that has shifted
0:15.6	month to month depending on whether they're holidays whether my kids got me sick
0:19.7	that kind of thing we have fixed that now at six episodes to make it possible for us to
0:24.9	plan and we're not using as many rears and crossover to fill the gaps. So from
0:29.3	here on out you'll really have something like two weeks a month with two
0:32.2	episodes, two weeks a month with two episodes two weeks a
0:34.0	month with one episode things could shift a bit depending on news cycles and
0:37.5	and other things but that should be where things sit at least for the
0:40.9	foreseeable future but today we are doing a rear, a conversation I enjoyed very much when it happened a few years back and that I think speaks to some issues in the news lately with a little bit more force. So please enjoy my talk with Agnes Callard.
0:59.2	I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Clancho. Right now, if I were to list my top five regular column writers Agnes
1:17.2	Callard would definitely be on that list.
1:19.3	Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago she She's the author of the book Aspiration and she writes
1:25.8	this wonderful public philosophy column for the magazine The Point. And I love that column. Every one of them
1:31.6	is just dense with insight on all kinds of different topics. that live with, right? It's a problem in the news that you don't really have a news peg
1:43.4	every day to write about what it means to be angry or what it means to be jealous, but
1:47.6	those are topics that all of us are dealing with every single day. So her column I find is just a real model of how clear, precise
1:55.1	philosophical thinking can illuminate topics we already think we know well. I just really
2:00.0	get a lot out of it. So it's a joy to get to have her on the show. And this is one of those ones, I know it's a
2:04.7	cliche in podcasting or interviews. We cover a lot of ground, but she writes about so many things
2:08.7	that there's just vast territory that we range over in this conversation.
	...

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