Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal, hooligans.

I love the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government.

Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.

I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael Baranowski.

My guest today is Anon, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

He's the author of Something Between Us, the Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to

Take Them Down, which we'll be discussing today.

Anan Patian, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

It's great to be here. You know, I've, I've read, I don't know how many books about

polarization at this point. There are a lot of them, right? You could practically fill a whole

bookstore. But what I like about yours, I think it's, I felt like it's at least somewhat

unique and valuable for that reason because I think it's, I felt like it's at least somewhat unique and valuable for that reason

because I think it looks at polarization in a way that most of these books out there don't.

I mean, not just in terms of our media consumption, but in terms of our built environment, our

homes, our vehicles, even our bodies. And so I guess my first

question is, wow, that's a really different structure. How did you come up with that?

It's a great question. Thank you so much for asking it and honestly more generally for your

interest in the project. I am not a political scientist. I am an anthropologist. I'm a

cultural anthropologist. And though this is very much a book about our contemporary social and

political situation here in the United States, I come at it from the specific standpoint of my

discipline, which is an academic discipline that focuses

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