It's the Brian Laris show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, on a Monday kind of Tuesday, right?

Hope you had a good or good enough Memorial Day weekend, despite the buzzkill weather we had in the tri-state area for most of it.

And I hope you stop to give some meaningful thought to the sacrifice of those who have died in wars,

even if you haven't been personally touched by that kind of tragic and, I'd say so often tragically preventable loss.

We're happy to have as our first guest for this week, Senator Chris Murphy, who comes on to

speak both through his Connecticut constituents locally and to our national politics podcast

audience, often mentioned as a potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate.

Senator Murphy has a very thought-provoking new book.

He is also one of three Democratic co-sponsors who have forced to vote every week since March

on a resolution to stop the war in Iran. And last week, for the first time, this barely cracked the news cycle, but a preliminary vote on that

got enough Republican support to pass. So we'll talk about that. Also the widely panned

DNC autopsy report released last week on why they did so badly in 2024 and what they should

change. And the book, which is called Crisis of the Common

Good, the fight for meaning and connection in America. And I'll just say as a little bit of an

introduction to the book before we bring on Senator Murphy, it includes his framing of six cults.

He uses the word cults that he thinks Americans have fallen prey to. A cult of profit, a cult of everywhere, meaning rootlessness and globalization, a cult of technology, a cult of consumption, a cult of credentialism, and a cult of corruption. And he's got solutions to propose for each one that he

hopes can restore some of that meaning and connection that the subtitle references and who knows,

maybe fight political polarization and the threats to democracy that we face in the bargain.

Senator, always good to have you on here. Welcome back to WNYC and our national politics

podcast. Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. And listeners, we have Senator Murphy

for 25 minutes, so we will have time for some calls and texts, but this is shorter than some of our

other lead segments. So please remember to ask questions, not make speeches. We will keep you concise today.

...