From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take.

I'm your host today, senior editor, Will Kayback. On today's episode, I'm really glad to be joined by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Thomas is a writer and a cultural critic.

You've probably read his work in places like the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic,

Harper's, or the New Yorker. He's also the author of three books, the newest of which is called

Summer of Our Discontent, which we had them on the show today to talk about. Broadly, though, for more

than a decade now, Thomas has been one of those writers and those thinkers who really doesn't

fit neatly into any political box or on either side of the political or partisan spectrum.

A lot of his work and his writing focuses on issues around race, identity, and belonging. A lot of

it comes from a deeply personal perspective.

And one of the things about him that's always stood out to me

is his willingness to question the dominant ideas

on either side of the political spectrum.

So summer of our discontent specifically is his attempt

to take a step back, take stock of the last 15 years or so

in the United States, starting from the optimism that followed the election of President Obama in

2008 through some of the upheavals we experienced in 2020 around the pandemic and George Floyd's

death and into the more anxious and polarized moment that

we're living in right now. The book raises uncomfortable questions, questions that I grappled a lot with

when I read it, about moral certainty, institutional behavior, and how liberal societies like the

ones we have here in the United States handle disagreement. So we're really excited to have

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