Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Mark Bauerline. Mark is a senior editor of First Things Magazine

and an English professor at Emory University. He hosts the First Thoughts podcast, which First

Things runs. And he's the author of many books, including something brand new called The Dumbest

Generation Grows Up, from Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults. So Mark, thanks very much for

joining us. I'm very happy to join you there at City Journal. I've been reading it for a long

time. You've got such a great stable of writers. I mean, I'm going back to

the first stuff I was reading by Heather McDonald and Saul Stern and Fred Siegel. And actually,

I'll say Heather's book, The Burden of Bad Ideas, which really was a compilation, weren't most of those pieces

out of City Journal?

Yes, that's right.

That was her first book, and it was a compilation mostly.

But, you know, the essays were updated and turned into more of a straightforward narrative.

But yeah, they were all based on city journal pieces.

Well, that was actually an important book for me

because I was a very staunch liberal

in academic English department in the 90s.

And just reading some other things,

including Heather's book,

open things up for me.

And I started to drift a little to the right.

And one thing I find is, found it was that if you,

...