Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am your host, Raphael Manguel.

And today is a very special day because we are joined by my brilliant colleague, Abigail Schreier.

Abigail, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to be talking to you today because I'm a massive fan of your work. And I think your background is super fascinating. I don't think a lot of people know this about you, but you're a lawyer by training. I am. So, I mean, walk us through that, right? I mean, Yale law, federal judicial clerkship, how did you end up as a public intellectual in the think-take world? Well, I left the law firm I was working at when I started to have kids in 2010 for a few

years. And actually, when the kids were little, I wasn't working for a number of years.

I was writing fiction, actually, a bunch of unpublishable novels.

And then I started to get back into journalism.

And I hadn't done journalism for a bunch of years, but I got back into it.

And one of my pieces I wrote for the local Jewish press, and one of my pieces, a Wall Street Journal editor saw,

and she reached out to me and said,

you should submit to us.

And then in 2018, I published, I think it was 13,

12 or 13 op-eds in the space of a year

for the Wall Street Journal.

So right away, they liked everything I was doing.

And one of those pieces became a

story that turned into my first book, Irreversible Damage. Awesome. I mean, it's an incredible

story. I've been reading you since you've been writing for the Wall Street Journal. So, I mean,

this is an incredible privilege for me. You know, going from the Wall Street Journal and the journalism world into the thing tank space is different.

I'm always curious about like how people view the differences, right?

...