Something exciting slouches your way.

The beauty is in the street.

Stephen, me, and friends. Paris, 1968 mai.

Friends,

I'm vibrating to reveal my new podcast with the peerless Stephen Metcalf. The show is called WHAT ROUGH BEAST.

(Stephen recently wrote about Leonard Cohen for The Atlantic, and every week he co-hosts Slate’s unmissable Culture Gabest.)

It asks a question. If Trump’s second term is as catastrophic as it seems poised to be, what can we save from the current world, and what can we build from the rubble?

Or rather, if American innocence is well and truly drowned, what will emerge from the deep?

WHAT ROUGH BEAST launches next week with the most extra intro music you can imagine, courtesy of literally John Jeremiah Sullivan. A foretaste of the vibe:

And then there’s Patrick Radden Keefe.

Patrick’s 2019 masterpiece Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland inspired the riveting series he executive-produced, which you might have caught recently on Hulu. I don't want to give too much away, but, on episode 2, Patrick and I dive deep into the parallels between Luigi Mangione, everyone’s favorite 2024 assassin, and the Price sisters, those startlingly young IRA recruits who bombed London on March 8, 1973.

Patrick addressed the magnetic pull of radical movements like the IRA—how they seduce bright young minds with promises of moral clarity and historical significance.

Here’s an excerpt:

“It was very important for me that you understand why, if you were 20, you would join an organization like the IRA and plant bombs. You needed to capture the kind of the glamour and the romance, because there was romance for them. And the sense of camaraderie and the sense of esprit de corps and all of the seductive things that pull you in.

That sort of charge of moral certainty and moral conviction and being on the right side of history. But then the only way to do that, without romanticizing it yourself, is to look in a pretty unblinking way at the victims and also just at the hangover. I had always thought of the structure of Say Anything as kind of—the night out with everything that entails, but the only way to tell that responsibly is to give the hangover with everything that entails.”

—

As a hangover follows a wild night, WHAT ROUGH BEAST is, I must admit, a spiritual successor to Trumpcast. But, with the new show, Stephen and I are shifting our gaze from a single politician toward something more ambitious. We're reaching for those bigger questions. If we could rebuild America from scratch, what would we preserve? What would we scrap? What new thing would and could we build?

WHAT ROUGH BEAST is devoted to imagining better futures, and I really want you along for the ride. Your ideas, your feedback, your vision, you skepticism, your imagination—they're all essential ingredients in this experiment we're cooking up.

See you next week.

Virginia