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I'm Dorothy Wickendon. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remneck talks with New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright.

His new book looks at the political culture in Texas, where the Republican Party controls the state government, even as the population grows increasingly liberal.

My colleague Lawrence Wright has covered some particularly intimidating topics. He wrote a fantastic

book about Scientology, something the Scientologists themselves did everything they could to

prevent. And he spent some time in the Middle East and wrote about Al-Qaeda in a book called

The Looming Tower. And that won the Pulitzer Prize.

For his most recent work, though, he barely had to leave home.

We had what is very formally called an editorial conversation about, I don't know, a year,

a year and a half ago, and it went a little bit like this.

Why don't you write about Texas?

And I said, well, maybe I will.

And then no more

conversation. And a year later, you came back with a manuscript, essentially a book. And it'll be a

...