And the Welcome back to Conversations. Our guest today is Yevol Levin,

Policy analyst, policy practitioner, former White House staffer, and among other things now,

editor of the very fine journal, National Affairs. What is National Affairs and

why National Affairs?

Well, thank you. National Affairs is a quarterly journal of essays on domestic

policy and political thought, political ideas. It tries to sit at the intersection

of policy, concrete policy, and political theory and political

thought.

It exists really because in the wake of the 2008 elections after a series of conversations among people on the right, including you and others.

We came to the view that one of the things that were missing on the right was a venue for people to think out loud in a serious way

both about policy ideas where the the policy agenda seemed to be a little empty and about political ideas about how about what conservatism should mean in the 21st century and how that might apply to people's lives and we had a clear model. The model really was the public interest, which had run for 40 years and which had shut down about five years before that.

And so, you know, one of the things that kept coming up in conversations was sort of,

gee, I wish there was something like the P.I. for us to think this through,

whether it be health care education or to understand Obama's approach to public policy.

And so it sort of became obvious sitting around those tables.

Well, if we need something like that, we kind of know what that looks like and how it works.

And so we started in the fall of 2009 and it's published quarterly.

We've just published our 20th issue.

So the fall of this year will be our fifth anniversary and the magazine has tried to open up a

space for policy conversation on the right in general but also to advance a way of

thinking about public policy that's directed to contemporary problems

that tries to be engaged with 21st century issues and to apply conservative ideas to them,

...