Yoni Appelbaum On Migration Within America
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yoni is a journalist and academic. He used to be a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard, and also taught at Babson College and Brandeis. He subsequently served in many editorial and writing roles at The Atlantic, where he’s currently a deputy executive editor. He just published his first book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It’s an engrossing account of how zoning in America — yes, zoning — evolved from the Puritans onward. I was unexpectedly fascinated.
For two clips of our convo — on the racist origins of zoning, and how progressivism is keeping poor people in place — see our YouTube page.
Other topics: raised as an orthodox Jew in the Boston area; spending a year at a yeshiva in Israel; interning for the Gore campaign in 1999; working for the Public Advocate in NYC; studying the Gilded Age in grad school; discovering Ta-Nehisi Coates as a Dish reader and getting hired at The Atlantic through TNC’s comments section; mobility as a core feature of early America; the Pilgrims; how the Puritans branched off; moving to construct one’s identity; Tocqueville; American Primeval; the “warning out” of early American towns; Lincoln’s mobility; the Moving Day of pre-war NYC; Chinese laundries; violence against immigrants; the Progressive drive for zoning; Yoni defending tenements; Hoover’s push for single-family homes; defaulting in the Depression; FDR’s push for long mortgages; the feds distorting the market; racial segregation; Jane Jacobs vs central planning; Thatcher and public housing; the rise of shitty architecture; cognitive sorting; Hillbilly Elegy; mass migration and rising costs in the UK; how leftist regulations stifle building; and the abundance movement.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Chris Caldwell on the political revolution in Europe, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Michael Lewis on government service, Ian Buruma on Spinoza, Michael Joseph Gross on bodybuilding, and the great and powerful Mike White, of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hello there. It's another discast episode. We're on a role lately. Some of the guests coming up, which we are excited to announce, |
| 0:39.6 | Evan Wolfson is coming to talk about the history of marriage equality. He's probably the most |
| 0:44.8 | important person who did it, who started it, who continued through the end, and then did the |
| 0:50.5 | amazing thing of shutting his organization down once he'd actually achieved the |
| 0:55.3 | objective. Who would have guessed it? We have Christopher Caldwell come in, my old friend, who's coming |
| 1:00.9 | to talk about Europe, the amazing, fascinating things going on there, the rise of the far right |
| 1:06.6 | in every single country. It's amazing to me at this point that the number one party in Britain |
| 1:13.3 | is no longer Tories or Labour or Liberals, but the Reform Party and anti-immigration party because |
| 1:19.7 | the Tories basically betrayed their base. Nick Denton is coming on to talk about his two very |
| 1:26.4 | favorite subjects right now, China and AI. |
| 1:30.8 | Francis Collins is coming on to talk about faith and science. Ian Baruma is coming on to talk |
| 1:35.2 | about, we're going a whole hour and a half on Spinoza. How about that? Just to get you all excited. |
| 1:42.5 | Then in case you're bored by Spinoza, we have Michael Joseph Gross coming on about muscles, |
| 1:47.7 | bodybuilding, the incredible boom in ripped big dudes and their relationship to our culture |
| 1:55.8 | and how that has changed, steroids and all the rest of it. |
| 1:59.1 | It's absolutely riveting. |
| 2:00.3 | The first piece I ever wrote that was published in America was about bodybuilding, published in the New |
| 2:06.1 | Republic when I was an intern called Muscleheads, and I was just obsessed with, for reasons that |
| 2:11.9 | are completely irrelevant to my sexual orientation, of course, by these amazing, beautiful, big, buff American men. |
| 2:20.6 | And then we also have the great and powerful Mike White of the White Lotus fan, but also a fascinating |
| 2:26.8 | person in his own right, independent of that. But today, we have a friend of the dish, I would say, an old friend of the dish, a friend of ours, |
| 2:37.5 | both Chris and I from the Atlantic, Yoni Applebaum, and he's a journalist and academic, |
... |
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