David is a journalist and novelist. He’s been at the Washington Post since 1986, serving as editor of the Sunday Outlook section, foreign editor, assistant managing editor for business, and now a foreign affairs columnist. He’s also written 12 espionage thrillers — including Body of Lies, which became an A-list movie.
For two clips of our convo — on the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean, and calling out the Biden coverup — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: his dad a WWII vet who became Secretary of the Navy; leaving Harvard to live in Haight Ashbury; covering steel workers for the WSJ; covering the Mideast in the early ‘80s; witnessing the bombing in Beirut; espionage; his first novel turned down by every US publisher; Graham Greene a mentor as writer; his long friendship with Tom Friedman; the US as a unipolar power; the Clinton decade of coasting; the trauma of 9/11; Saddam’s torture regime; the Iraq invasion; US torture and black sites; international law waning today; personality cults on the rise; Erdoğan; Trump’s “emergencies”; going to war with Venezuela; Hegseth vs. the rules of engagement; the execrable Eddie Gallagher; IDF strikes and AI; Europe reclaiming its security; Putin’s covert war against NATO; China and the tariff war; the abdication of Congress; Vought; when democracies become dictatorships; razing the East Wing; the media bubble; Dems unable to call out their failures; lawfare under Biden and Trump; and watching Slow Horses and The Diplomat.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Cory Clark on feminized culture, Mark Halperin on US politics, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, Fiona Hill on Putin’s war, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
From a fan of last week’s pod:
Great episode with Karen Hao on AI. I hadn’t heard of her before, but her grasp and nuance of AI was impressive. She confirms what I have always sensed about the downsides of AI but with cogent reasons.
I think your observation that her book was a little lefty made me chuckle, especially when you recognize the potential for this as an existential issue. Your “conservatism” is really what has contributed to and even fostered all these issues: lack of regulation, rise of crony capitalism, worship of tech and financial leaders, a crooked hands-off SCOTUS, a focus on the individual vs. the community, the rise of religious political movements and hypocrisy, etc.
My “conservatism” is not about crony capitalism, cult worship of leaders, or an allegedly corrupt court. By all means blame the GOP, but not my political philosophy. Another writes:
Being especially concerned about the development of AI, I listened to your conversation with Karen Hao with interest. I felt like the really pertinent issues were left to the end with insufficient time to really explore the existential concerns. May I make a recommendation? Are you familiar with Paul Kingsnorth? I highly recommend his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It isn’t exclusively about AI (not at all), but it puts the technology in context. And once you see his argument, it’s hard to unsee it.
Great idea! From a listener who liked our pod with Katie Herzog on alcoholism:
Great episode with Katie.
You both noted sadness about a lack of birds and, separately, you noted RFK Jr.’s warped posture against Big Pharma. There is an overlap among environmentalists and those with a deep suspicion of Big Pharma. RFK comes from an environmentalist background, and his reflexive anti-Pharma actions are quite familiar amongst my environmentalist friends, some of whom support him. This is the ethos of the environmentalist, and it’s frustrating for me as an environmentalist that so many have embraced such a deep degree of cynicism about the industry.
In 1962, while dying of cancer and tending a nine-year-old orphan, Rachel Carson wrote a series of articles for The Atlantic that she made into a book. It had no protagonist and no plot, and despite being thick with science, it had no charts, graphs, or data tables. Yet it became an instant bestseller and one of the most influential books of the 20th Century. The title, Silent Spring, evoked a springtime without birds (the title references a John Keats poem: “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing”).
Carson spoke directly to your brief comments about the collapse of bird population, and her related concern about failing to take a hard look at contaminants. Environmentalists are often derided as reflexively opposing everything, but I don’t think that’s so. Carson cautioned the world about the disruptive and uncertain effects of new products and byproducts into the environment, but she didn’t seek to block progress, just to carefully calculate the corresponding consequences. She wrote, “Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships [in the natural world], but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.”
This approach of “look before you leap” may explain the hesitancy to embrace new manufactured shortcuts like Naltrexone and Ozempic. In a country where we are bombarded with ads for lawsuits of yesterday’s magic pill that didn’t pan out, how sure are you that someday there won’t be a bunch of lawyer ads about Naltrexone and Ozempic?
There might be. But the data seem pretty strong about their safety.
Our pod with Charles Murray prompted a listener to write:
What wonderful and calming episode you provided. Too many of even the podcasts one could describe as thoughtful have become clamorous and stressful.
A brief but significant and touching moment you offered was your story of wandering lonely as a cloud at Oxford. It revealed how we far too seldom recognize how art and literature reveal life itself. Wordsworth gave us not only verses on a page but an experience we can share. As I pictured your host of golden daffodils, I thought of the ones I see growing wild near my home as spring returns and was reminded how our hearts can with pleasure fill with nature’s transcendent moments.
Along those lines, I hope you were able to catch David Frum’s conversation (and it was very much a conversation and not an interview) with Thatcher biographer Charles Moore. Two wise gentlemen simply and gracefully discussing topics of importance to them. What are the chances of landing Lord Moore for a Dishcast?
Another good pod was Arthur Brooks on Freakonomics discussing turning down the heat. (You said you’ll have Brooks on the Dishcast soon — looking forward to that.)
Lord Moore! Well I won’t be able to call him that.
On the question of whether I should take a break from the Dish column for a few months to write my faith memoir, a reader writes:
I, for one, would stay subscribed to the Dish, although I would miss the weekly column a lot. Opening it every Saturday morning, Australian time, is a highlight of my weekly routine. But for me, the podcast would be more than enough by itself to justify my continued subscription.
In my mind, this isn’t just a question about value for money. It’s a wider question about how all of us — writers and readers — should want the subscription model of content-creation to work and evolve. The very fact that you’ve asked your subscribers for input on your decision about the book is a mark of how seriously you take your relationship with us. So I’ll do my best to give you a serious answer.
I subscribed to your Substack straight after the New York magazine thing blew up. I did so because I admired the way that you had insisted — even at the cost of being fired — on staying true to the dictates of your conscience, instead of shackling yourself to the narrow ideology of the wokesters who policed the limits of what could be said at that publication.
That being the case, I wouldn’t want the Dish to become, even in the smallest way, a new kind of shackle for you. I wouldn’t want one of my favourite writers to feel obliged, for my sake, to keep producing a weekly column, if what he really wants to do is step back, just for a while, to tackle a subject that can only be tackled in the form of a book. We all want Substack to be a place where civilized values are supported, and since books have always been central to civilization, and since writers need breathing space to produce them, that breathing space somehow has to be integrated into the model.
Besides, even if you did formally step away from the column for a while, you would still be free to write the occasional piece now and then, if any event of earth-shaking significance were to happen while you’re “away”. This platform is, or should be, all about freedom. If you can step away from it for a while, you can also jump straight back on it whenever the mood strikes you. The prospect that you might intermittently do so would be another good reason for people to stay subscribed!
There’s one more factor to mention here: Trump. Let’s face it: if you were to put your book on ice, in order to keep writing the weekly column, what you would mainly find yourself having to write about, over the next five months, is the gross shenanigans of Donald J. Trump. I know you always make an effort to write about other things besides him, but still, we all know that there’s no getting away from him. He’s the elephant in all our heads. Even for those of us who don’t live in America, there’s no getting away from the sordid monotony of his daily offences against decency and democracy.
So anyone writing a weekly political column will have no choice but to keep responding to the man’s provocations. This is another kind of shackle: not just for writers, but for anyone trying to stay sane in the age of Trump. He, I suspect, would quite like it if the rest of us talked, and thought, about nothing else but him for the next three years. That seems as good a reason as any to insist on thinking and talking about things less base than him: things that mattered long before he came on the scene, and will continue to matter long after he’s gone.
I lost my own religious faith many years ago. For a while I didn’t miss it, but the older I get, the more sorely I wish I could somehow rediscover it. If I could snap my fingers and make it come back, I absolutely would. But of course that isn’t how these things work. Maybe your book will help me.
Anyway, that’s my two cents — or rather, my five bucks!
What a lovely email. I think we’ll figure out some kind of compromise — maybe a Dish like today’s with two shorter posts that don’t require the lengthy research of a big column.
Another two cents come from the following reader (who also sends a black-and-white photo of me she saw at the Oxford Union):
I started reading you in 2016, trying to break out of my liberal bubble and better understand the conservative point-of-view. You have offered me so much insight into the world and human nature, and you changed how I think about a lot of things.
When the pandemic started in 2020, you said it would lead to major and unexpected changes. I scoffed a bit at that, thinking it a bit dramatic. Well, you were right. The pandemic was a turning point for me; I was red-pilled during the policy response. ...
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