Well, ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Hello, it is not Joanable Bird, but this is the remnant brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media, but I am Chris Dyerwald, so sorry, that's your unfortunate circumstance.

But I have brought Levin for this Goldbergless loaf. I have brought, well, maybe I'll put it to you this way, when I write history, I am doing a poor imitation of this person.

Because this person has the capacity to write history like a journalist, to write history rooted in the context of its time.

This person has written three very important, and I mean that in the complimentary sense of that, three very important books about 20th century American history.

She has written other books, but the three that are germane to our discussion today, and you'll know who it is as soon as I list them.

The Forgotten Man in 2007, which was a history of the Great Depression from an economist side, in 2013, Coolidge, the definitive biography of my favorite president of the 20th century, and in 2019, the Great Society, a new history.

Joining us is Amity Schles. She is the chairwoman of the Coolidge Foundation. She is the boss over there. You have read her at the Wall Street Journal, you have read her at Forbes, you have read her everywhere, and you are a very welcome guest. Thank you for being with us.

Well, I'm so glad to be with you, Chris.

You know, it's good to most books, like I wrote a book about populism because populists were thick on the ground, and a publisher said, hey, why don't you write something about all these populists that are climbing over the gates?

And so I did. It's even better if you can write the books before the things happen, and your timing has been pretty impeccable.

You wrote The Forgotten Man, The Forgotten Man came out in 2007, a year before the financial panic that led to all of the discussions about policy and the Great Depression and all of those things.

You wrote Coolidge before the sort of anti-coolidge movement took hold in the Republican Party, and you wrote The Great Society before the coronavirus pandemic.

I want people to think about this. We were certainly in a progressive and sort of nationalist populist vibe in American politics when you wrote that book.

But it was the pandemic that really tipped things over into this sort of grandiose, large-scale ideas about what kind of powers the government has to change things and reinvent the future and do all of that.

So I'm sure there's some luck involved, but good job. As we would say in West Virginia, you saw the seam in the rock.

The seam in the rock. Well, thank you. Yeah, I think the COVID reaction was as important as the reaction to 9-11.

And the reaction to 9-11, let's just start with domestic.

Yeah.

It was wonderful.

By and large, pulled together, even New York, which is so malign, showed its best spirit in reacting to 9-11.

There it was, ground zero. And, you know, to this day, I'm proud of New York's reaction to that catastrophe.

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