Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show

QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish.

We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it It is called everything to play for. The most

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Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players.

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in all bookshops and online right now. Welcome to Beg to Differ. the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork.

I'm joined by our regulars Damon Linker of the Week and Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution

and the Wall Street Journal.

Sitting in for Linda Chavez this week is Boerke publisher

Sarah Longwell and our special guest is Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George

F Will. Thank you, one and all.

Our first topic this week is going to be a look back.

It's been just a little over a year since the pandemic really began, or at least since the pandemic really began or at least since the lockdown part of it began and it's a good moment

as people are getting vaccinated and things are beginning to look up, to look up, to look back at what went right and what went wrong.

So I'd like to begin with you Bill Galston.

One of the things that came up on this very podcast

was that a number of you all were saying

we needed to invoke the Defense Production Act and make respirators or ventilators

because it was thought that that was a desperate need. It turned out we didn't

...