Hello everyone, I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this

is our podcast.

And for the next many months, we'll be highlighting great conversations from our Decade Plus

archive.

We're planning a new iteration of this podcast, and as a result, we're going to take

a while to figure out what that might sound like.

Until then, we hope you enjoy these trips down memory lane.

Here in New York City, at the public, one of the great non-broadway nonprofit theaters,

there's a new production from the experimental company Elevator Repair Service that dramatizes

the 1965 debate between James Baldwin and Willie Meph Buckley at the Cambridge Union.

In late 2019, former book review editor Pamela Paul spoke to Nicholas Buchola about his

book The Fire is Upon Us, which is in part about this famous debate.

Nicholas, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

I'm honored to be here.

All right, this is a change of subject for you.

Why this book?

This book emerged through Baldwin.

I was invited to write an essay about Baldwin, and I devoted a few months just reading everything

I could get my hands on.

And then I dug into the YouTube archives of all these videos of Baldwin, and I found the

debate with Buckley, and I became transfixed.

...