Happy holidays, Matter of Opinion listeners.

It's Carlos here.

I wanted to share a special year-end conversation

that I just had with my fellow opinion columnist Pamela Paul.

Now, you all know my fondness for books,

and since Pamela is a former editor of the Times book review,

we thought we'd get together and each share a book

that best helps us understand this

cultural and political moment. I hope you enjoy. And thanks, as always, for listening.

I'm Pamela Paul, an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

And I'm Carlos Lozada, also an opinion columnist at the Times.

So both of us have had long roles in the book world.

I was the editor of the New York Times Book Review for almost a decade, and you, of course, were the longtime nonfiction critic for the Washington Post. So the two of us

tend to see things through the lens of books. And I thought this would be a good time for us to

look at our current moment, whether that's political, economic, historical, and think about a book that in some way captures or crystallizes or

helps us understand this moment. The book, the book. The book. The book of all times. That's a

high bar. Yes, but you have a book. What did you pick? I do. I have a book. So I should mention, you know, in my prior incarnation as a book critic at the Washington Post and now as a columnist at the Times, I spent a lot of my time reading political books and thinking about this question, books that help explain the moment. So I've read my fill of, you know, books that explain the Trump era, right?

You've written a whole book about books that explain the Trump era.

Yes, yes, yeah, to get meta.

And, you know, a lot of these are books that have come out in recent years.

But the book that I keep turning to that helps me think about what is going on now is a much older book.

It was published when I was in elementary school in 1981. I did not read it then,

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