Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in Chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Kyle Chaker. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the

author of the book we're here to talk about today, The Longing for Less, Living with Minimalism,

and perhaps most important about Kyle Chaker,

he once wrote an article in which the opening sentence was

Nathan Robinson is gesticulating,

which is one of my favorite things that has ever been written

about me before and is true, and I didn't notice how much I gesticulated until it was pointed

out in that article about Kerr Affairs and other left-wing publications for The Ringer in 2017.

Kyle Chekker, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

I'm glad we could reunite after all of these years.

Many, many, many years. You saw current affairs, and you very kindly covered current affairs

in our earliest days when we were an operation based out of my living room. Now we're

serious professional national magazine,

so it's nice to reconnect. We haven't seen each other since then. But we're here today to talk

about minimalism. Now, one of the blurbs on your book says that Carl J.G. in the longing for

less peels back the commodified husk of minimalism to reveal something surprising and thoroughly alive.

Before we get to the thing you reveal that is surprising and thoroughly alive, let's talk about the commodified husk.

What are they referring to there?

Yeah. I mean, I think the commodified husk at the time that I wrote the book, which was

circa 2018, 2019, was the specter of Mary Condo. Like, I was definitely responding to that moment

of her total media saturation, which was like the Netflix show, the books were everywhere.

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