Welcome to the First Things Editor's Desk podcast.

This is Rusty Lino, and I'm here in New York City at the editor's desk as the editor of First

Things magazine.

And before I introduce my guest, Russell Berman, I want to urge all listeners to really think about their spiritual destiny because if you're not

subscribing to First Things magazine, you have a lot to worry about. So I really want everybody

listening to this podcast, go online and subscribe to First Things magazine. Well, Russell,

now that I've gotten the advertising out of the way,

welcome to the podcast.

We're going to talk about your essay in the June-July issue state of emergency.

And for listeners, Russell Berman is a professor in the humanities at Stanford University

and an accomplished Germanist literary scholar and commentator on the

cultural and political scene throughout the West, the United States as well. Welcome to the

podcast. Thanks for having me, Rusty. Happy to speak with you. At the beginning of the piece, you evoke the ways in which our society is out of

controls or dysfunctional. And the implication there is that every society needs to be under

control. Is that fair?

Under somebody's control. Probably not.

It's probably not fair, but neither is life.

Where I proceed from is different descriptions of the current era. It's modern, it's postmodern, but the terminology is

less important than the issue, and that is that things have been changing. They've been

changing in social patterns, in family patterns, in educational

patterns. Certainly enormous changes in technology in past decades. And maybe that's where

I will zero in the sense that there's a very different media landscape than existed in the past,

...