Welcome to The Last Debate, a show for Political Eclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta, and in a second, I'll introduce our guest, a repeat guest, one of my favorites.

But before we get there, a couple things of my notebook.

One is that a book recommendation, Patrick Ragenkeef, the New Yorker writer, who's written great books like Say Nothing,

which was about The Troubles in Northern Ireland,

also an amazing book and now TV show. He came out with a book, I think it must have been

last week or the week before, called London Falling. And I read this book in like a day.

This book is amazing. So I recommend on this. And this is the premise that's laid out right

away. So I'm not

breaking anything here or spoiling, but essentially it's about this kid, a young man, I think in his

20s, who jumps from a balcony of an expensive apartment building in London into the, how do we say

the Thames River? Is that how we say that in London? Jumps it to the river,

dies. And the question is, why does this kid jump into the river? And it turns out, like, right away the parents realize this parents of this kid comes from a well-to-do family,

upper middle class family in, maybe not upper middle class, but like rich but not super rich

family in London. they discover that their son

has been pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. And that's what they learn immediately

when, even before they find out their son had died just when he was missing. And the book is really

about unraveling that mystery, but it's really about modern day London and the entrance of all these rich oligarchs and others into London and how it's changed their

culture. It's about reinvention and fraud and all these kinds of things. It's about parenting

and families. It is an amazing read. So I recommend we're going to try to get Patrick Raddenkief

on this podcast. Obviously, if you heard last week we had John Lee Anderson. We had some success with the New Yorker writers recently. So hopefully we'll get him on here at some point to talk about that book and his approach to journalism. Just an amazing, amazing book. A couple of other things that have been on my attention here. I'm not going

to do a full empty into the notebook here because we've got a pretty fruitful interview here

...