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Available on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Forgo, so welcome to the show.

Today I'm writer Tanahasi Coates.

He's the author of The Beautiful Struggle.

We were eight years in power, the water dancer, and Between the World and Me,

for which he won the National Book Award in 2015.

He's also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and is currently the Sterling Brown

Endowed Chair in English at Howard University.

But Coates first came to prominence as a national correspondent for the Atlantic, where he

published seminal pieces on mass incarceration, the false promise of the Obama era,

and most notably the case for reparations. His latest book is called The Message, a triptych

of essays set across various sites of conflict. There's the Carr, Senegal, where he makes his first

trip to Africa, then Columbia, South Carolina,

reporting on the attempted banning of one of his books on race, and then finally Palestine,

where he bears witness to the current conflict firsthand. That last chapter in the Middle East

...