You're going to go. We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jersinski

Culture Editor here at the Federalist as always you can email the show at radio at the Federalist. Follow us on X at FDR LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts and of course to the premium version of our website the Federalist.com as well.

I always love being joined as I am today by Inez Stepman.

She's a senior policy analyst of course at the Independent Women's Forum with our friends over there and she has a wonderful new essay out that's called ambitious nihilism. It's in first things. It's in the February edition of first things. You can read it online now, but

Anez, this is the combination of years of sort of thinking through your experience

growing up in the Palo Alto area as the tech industry was exploding.

Is that a fair description of how this piece sort of came into existence.

Yeah, no, it's definitely a fair description,

although I would add, and I write about it,

and this was sort of well known at the time.

There was an Atlantic article about it.

The CDC recognized it, but there was a string of suicides.

They kind of became known as the Palo Alto Suicide.

There was a what they call a suicide cluster where you had an extraordinarily high

suicide rate copycat.

I mean, very intense actually method of committing suicide jumping in front of the train

to the extent that there were many many years starting I think when I was either middle school or early high school and then going all the way through well after I left there were

either one or two suicides that way almost every single year of basically high schoolers. So in a relatively

small community that was very very high and so I have been thinking about that

for a long time because obviously it did touch me and I knew people who ended their lives that way but also because it's so

strange and the community how it tried to respond to that tragedy and all the ways in which it tried to explain that I think revealed a lot about Palo Alto.

So that part I've been thinking about since I've been in high school,

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