Margaret Atwood – The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid – Think Again Podcast #70

Hi there! I'm Jason Guts, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Fink podcast. Since the early days of the public Internet, Big Fink has curated more than 10,000 surprising, brain-bending, significant ideas and shared them through video, text, and social media. The Think Again podcast remixes this formula, surprising me and my guests with conversation topics we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

Today, I am about to die of literary fan nerd-dom because I'm sitting here with novelist, essayist, poet, and, as of late—note not as of late for many years apparently—a comic book writer, but only recently with an illustrator other than herself: Margaret Atwood. She's also got some really funny mini-comics on her website about bad interviews, so I'm hoping not to be the subject of one of those in the future. She's the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale, and about 40 other beloved books. Her latest, Hag-Seed, is a complete reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Welcome to Think Again, Margaret.

"Thank you!"

So, Bob Dylan, Nobel laureate. What do you think of that? Should it have been Leonard Cohen? Should it have been a writer of books?

"Well, I think right now, at this moment in time, it is a little love letter sent by Sweden to America in America's hour of need. There are a lot of people in Europe looking at America, and they’re saying, 'What are you doing in this election thing? What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you tearing yourselves apart? Why are you dragging yourselves down into the mud in this way?' Right? And we are just reminding you through Bob Dylan that you can be better. Now, this is a person who, in the day, was singing about more optimism, more empathy, more different points of view, right? So, I think what this message is saying is, we still have faith in you, America. Go back to your better selves."

Because the Swedes love to sing—they're all very musical. They learned in school, and at the end of a dinner party, they will all burst into song. Is this actually true?

"Swedes love to sing."

Okay, I love to sing too! I have a number of friends who are griping strangely about and sort of getting into musical arguments about what is literature and what is not—taking the broad view. One of the most widely known and beloved figures in Sweden was a singer-songwriter called Bellman.

"Bellman? Yeah, look him up."

So, everybody knows this, and for a Swedish person, it would not be hugely controversial to say such a person made a big contribution to the national literature.

"Gotcha. Through the singing-songwriting."

Yes, it's not a big stretch. There’s a bardic tradition going back very far in which absolutely that is literature, you know, in literature? Sure, yeah. Now then, you can argue about the details, but I would say the overview is those two things: America, you can be better. We, in Sweden, have a tradition in which this is a very important figure; she's a singer-songwriter—a very important figure.

Let's move on to your book, your new book Hag-Seed, which is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which writers known for other work are rewriting Shakespeare plays in a way. Yours is based on The Tempest, which is a strange play, isn't it?

"It's a very strange play, yes."

How did you—you know, like—I mean, maybe you could say a bit more about what that means to you. It's a story where supernatural beings, other than ghosts, are figured. One of them is A Midsummer Night's Dream, which uses Oberon, Titania, and Puck as part of their strangeness, but they're mostly doing comic things and messing up people's heads.

"Right, and then messing them up at the end, right? Because it's a comedy. They're like trolls from—you know, they're not very... well, I mean, trolls in the sense of the Internet. They're just kind of—oh, they're people, you know?"

Yeah, trolls. Oh, and sometimes by mistake, so Puck puts his magic juice in the wrong people's eyes, and then they're all messed up. So yes, and the other one is The Tempest, right? In late Shakespeare, he takes motifs that he carried through to a logical conclusion, such as the revenge motif.

"Well, I mean, that's a revenge play. It ends with a big pile of dead bodies, including Hamlet's, right? It doesn't work out so well. He does them over again but has them come out happily or better. So, The Tempest is a revenge play that stops its revenge about three-quarters of the way through when he could easily have killed all of his enemies or rendered them permanently mad. He changes his mind through the underbid intervention of a non-human character called Ariel, right?"

So basically, Ariel says, "You should really feel sorry for these people. They're suffering so much," and Shakespeare kind of pops out of his revenge trance and says, "Oh, you think so? Oh, well, yeah, maybe I should forgive them." Yeah, and he forgives them.

"That's interesting."

So there are a lot of questions about that moment too because one of the people he forgives says nothing for the rest of the play. He doesn't say, "I'm sorry." Antonio doesn't say, "I'm your brother." He doesn't say anything; he doesn't utter a syllable. So what do we think he's thinking at that moment? I'll get you back later? Or I'm really... this is the end of me? Or what is he thinking? We don't know.

"I mean, I think for me, what was also so strange about The Tempest, and then let's segue maybe into how you've transformed that in Hag-Seed, is that you're calling it a revenge play, and I get that. But at the same time, there are so many other significant plot lines going on. And in Shakespeare, a lot of things go on at once. But compared to something like Macbeth or Hamlet, where I feel like the through line is pretty clean, here it seems like you have multiple—"

"Oh, well, absolutely important. It's revenge plus, but it's also three different levels of power struggle and control, right? So Prospero has been deposed from power, but now he's got power over the island. His enemies have assumed power back in the non-island world, and now they lack power. And there’s quite a lot of talk amongst them about how they would run this island differently if it were theirs, right?"

Right, so it is that Machiavellian to Durian conversation that goes on—how should a ruler rule? And Prospero has gotten into the trouble he's gotten into because he wasn't good as a ruler. He was the Duke, but he delegated, and he delegated to Antonio. Antonio then usurped the power. And at the third level is Caliban and his two cronies, and they are intent on seizing power by murdering Prospero, after which they're going to rape Miranda, right? And that is played as a kind of... how shall we say... bungling level because they don't carry it off, right? They're very distracted—they're drunk.

"Well, let us add that they are quite low, and Trinculo and Stefano and Caliban are much afflicted by their results as druggists because they have found this big vat of liquor on the shore, and they’re heavily into it. So they are a parody of the power struggle that's going on in the higher levels of society, right? So it is about power, but it's also about revenge. So Prospero wants his revenge; Caliban wants his revenge. And in the middle, the enemies of Prospero are now planning to murder the king of Naples, who helped Antonio get rid of Prospero, right?"

So that is sort of betrayal at the next level. So he's betrayed his brother; now he's going to betray his ally, and therefore that part is going to be a revenge on the King of Naples for having participated in the plot against Prospero in the first place. But Prospero wants to become better than that. He wants Miranda to marry the son of the king who tossed him over, right? And if that happens, then all will be well because Naples and Milan will be friends, Prospero will be back in his proper place as Duke, Miranda's future will be assured, and Antonio will be... question mark.

"So I think that's about as succinctly—I wasn't going to ask you to sum up that plot because it's a very good time up."

You know, he does not want the help of a special effects guy Ariel, right? And along the way, there are some of the best speeches in Shakespeare, of course, which is one reason people love it. Yeah, and the other big question mark is this, and I put it to you as a person who lives in New York in the 21st century: Here you are about to get back on the boat with the guy who tried to murder you and hasn't said a word after you have forgiven him, right? And you have some weapons, and your weapons are your magic books and your magic stuff and your magic garment and your magic helper called Ariel. And without those things, you could never pull any of this off. In fact, without these things, you would have been murdered some time ago by Caliban.

"You're about to get back on the boat; you throw away all of those things. Would you do that?"

Well, I'm not Prospero, so Prospero does it. So the question is why?

"And for that, we'd have to look to Prospero, I guess."

I threw the question: tell me if you would have done it!

"I suppose not. I suppose not."

I certainly wouldn't think I would have either!

"Yeah, I would not have done it."

Yeah, so why doesn’t Prospero do it? He must feel that his new alliance with the King of Naples is going to keep him safe. That's what he must think.

"Mm-hmm. Either that or, less likely, he's as naive as Antonio thought he was in the first place."

Yeah, one or the other, right? So in your retelling, you opted for the first option, in a sense. You basically make it such that the Prospero, who is named Felix...

"Felix, right."

Luck—it means happiness, yeah? It means the same thing as Prospero, right? That he has enough on his enemies that there's really no way that they can get to him—he has the dirt on them.

"Yeah, you know, in my renditions, Prospero has the dirt on Antonio and the brother of the King of Naples. He says, 'At this time, I will tell no tales.' In other words, I could if I wanted to, and if I do, you're going to get your head chopped off, right? Which seems to me also a risky thing, but at that moment of forgiveness, that probably would be counterindicated to say, 'And by the way, your brother was trying to kill you.'"

So in your story, and I won’t—I don't want to retell the whole plot. I don't want to give too much away, but basically, Felix is the artistic director of a regional theater in what is the name of that town?

"Queshogen, Eric Fox."

And it is not geographically far from an actual festival called the Stratford Festival in Ontario, which does not yet have a pub called the IMP and Pignut, although it has a lot of similarly named pubs.

"Well, I prophesy that soon it will have a pub—the party ought to have, hopefully, some enterprising souls."

Felix basically is the victim of a kind of power which—he gets suddenly kicked out in the way that people are these days.

"Your personal belongings are in a cardboard box by your car, and they give me your security pass. Yeah, they kick him really unceremoniously out. That seems to me what happens these days when people get fired."

I prove it, turn over everything, and you're just out on the street like—bang! Oh, pretty inhuman.

"Well, they don't want people in the age of computers messing with corporate brightness from inside while downloading all their emails, taking an axe to their computer—that would, of course, immediately occur to a person in that position."

So basically, he's out. "Oh, yeah, he's a stud," and then basically a revenge plot unfolds which involves Shakespeare as an educational tool in prisons.

"Yes! He becomes a director-teacher in a prison, and when he gets a chance, then he gets a chance. And in The Tempest, there's a character who never appears on stage but is very important for the action, and that is 'auspicious star.' Hmm. Because in Shakespeare, it’s through the actions of 'post-special star.' And 'auspicious star' has brought his enemies within his reach, right? And benevolent fortune, which they thought of as a goddess—benevolent fortune is helping out."

So "auspicious star" and "benevolent fortune" I telescoped into one character in my book, and her name is Estelle.

"Okay."

She is a person who has influence, that was helping Felix behind the scenes because she loves the literacy-through-literature program, right?

"Right."

So she's raining rays of benevolent influence upon him, and she's wearing twinkly earrings.

"I hadn't picked that up—that that was a synthesis of them there. Well, I give her all of the symbols of those jars, those resonance. She has a—the—there were a couple of symbols of fortune, the goddess, and one was the cornucopia, and the other was a wheel—like Wheel of Fortune. So if you look at her jewelry, you'll see it's all represented. It's not very subtle; I think it’s kind of...kind of... anyway, it’s all there."

Because he wouldn't feel like some cell knows Prospero says, "You know, if it weren't for the auspicious star, now is the time when I have to do all that's—because the auspicious star has brought my enemies within my reach." Right? His magic is limited in space; it can only get out these people if they're close enough to him.

"So there's one moment—I mean, there are a couple of moments that I found really interesting in the book. There was one moment I wanted to ask you about; it's a moment when the play, which is the revenge plot, is about to happen. It's Felix's production of The Tempest, which is done as a video, right? And also an interactive—"

"Yeah, well, they've made the video and the dignitaries think that everybody's watching this video, but his particular enemies have been delegated to go and spend time watching it with the actual inmates, and that's when it becomes unbeknownst to them and much to their disliking an interactive Tempest in which, despite themselves, they are forced to take part."

So in this moment, Felix is having significant doubts and there's a very important subplot, which I won't go too deep into, about his lost daughter and him sort of not necessarily being sure of the boundaries between reality and fiction there. But he says he starts to doubt whether in the play—and his own sanity—and he says, "Prospero is not crazy." He thinks this, I guess, or says it out loud. "Prospero is not crazy; Ariel exists. People other than Prospero see him and hear him; the enchantments are real. Hold on to that. Trust the play...but is the play trustworthy?"

"I found that that moment really interesting and mysterious, and rather than kind of—I mean, I could probably sit and try to write an essay on what I think that means, but I’m curious as to what you were getting at there with 'but is the play trustworthy?'"

"Oh, directors are always saying, 'Trust the play,' but in a play is ambiguous and is full of open doors, otherwise known as holes in the plot, right? This is The Tempest. When you say 'trust the play,' what sort of quicksand are you actually standing on, right? Because the character of Prospero is quite ambiguous in the text as we have it. People have either done him as an all-benevolent Gandalf figure on the side of good, or they've done him as a sort of a really angry, crabby old man, right? Then he gets turned around about at the Ariel moment. There are a number of ways of playing him. As Caliban has become more important in our consciousness, he’s sometimes played as quite a despot. Although, what choice does he have if he lets Caliban out from under the enchantments of goblins? Caliban is going to murder him, so you could say it's self-defense. So how do you play that character?"

"How innocent and unknowing is Miranda? People have edited the play to make her more so, but to do that you've got to take out a couple of her speeches in which she seems to be quite aware of wombs and such like. She seems to have had sex education in school. This is her homeschooling, and Prospero says, 'I've taught you a lot of things that girls aren't usually taught.' So what kinds of things?"

And with Shakespeare, you sometimes think "boy, he's deep!" You know, he's really deep—there’re so many layers, it's so ambiguous. But you could equally say he didn't have a continuity editor, would you?

"Well, would you allow this in a sitcom?"

Let me think into that a little bit. I mean, this is, you know, it's arguably one of his last plays that he wrote by himself. Some people say it is the last one, right? You know, you are someone who has written over 40 books. This is your— we're in speculative territory here, but I'm just wondering, like, in terms of what’s happened to the way you think about plotting and character and putting together a story over all those years—can you speculate about where Shakespeare was at?

"I mean, dude, where is he losing it? Or is he?"

You know, it's something you'll find this throughout his plays: you think, "okay, we buy this because we just see it enacted before us," but if it had to go through six layers of editors, they would probably have pushed him on it?

"You think so?"

"There's not some hidden wisdom we don't know. Yeah, actually, we do not know. And one of the things about Shakespeare is you'll never get him on a talk show—he'll never be able to ask him those questions. And that means that he's infinitely interpretable because the author will not step out and say, 'That isn't what I meant at all, and I just—I hate this production done in an abattoir. You know? I just think this is the worst possible taste. I do not want it done that way, and I forbid you to do it.'"

As an author, would you prefer to be in that situation or having to explain what you prefer?

"Yeah, the situation. There's a price to be paid for being like Shakespeare: you have to be dead. I could be like Thomas Pynchon, but I didn’t start it soon enough."

Mmm, you know, if you're going to be like Thomas Pynchon—nobody actually knows who he is or where he's living, what he looks like, right? You have to start from the beginning; that's right! Because otherwise, especially in this day and age of ferreting out people's secret identities, you will have left enough clues that they will find you quite quickly. Or you turn into sand—everyone has an opinion about what a kook he must be for having disappeared at the height of his powers or something.

"Yeah, and then we get people to him at the time writing a book about what a kooky he was because they actually got into the inner sanctum, right? You know, he was a kook."

What can I say? We all grow up on Salinger; we loved Salinger. And in a way, it kind of doesn't matter what a kook a person is, right? Unless their kookiness has been fully embodied in their work. And if it's malevolent kookiness, then we don't like it, right?

"In the case of Salinger, I don’t think that’s—"

No, it wasn’t! I think he was probably quite depressed.

So we let’s move on to the second part of the show now where we have, as we have sadly limited time, we go into these surprise clips that I have no idea what they are.

"I don’t see the surprise clip."

Alright, so I'll start at the bottom—submitted by readers—these are chosen by our video team who know the archives really well. So this first one: Michael Schatz, computational biologist and computer scientist.

"My interest in cloud computing relates to kind of this data analysis, data discovery problem of being able to scan through very large volumes of DNA sequences. A lot of the technologies that were developed for cloud computing were actually entirely invented in other disciplines. So in particular, large-scale Internet companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter have developed these technologies out of necessity. Storing data in the cloud opens up a lot of other challenges; in particular, a lot of privacy concerns about making sure that that data is really well guarded."

Your genome has a lot of information about who you are, what sort of diseases you're susceptible to, could say a lot about your family, about your children, about your ancestors. You know, it's precious information that we definitely don't want to expose without giving it some consideration.

"So the concern is, if all of this genetic information is in the cloud and you're not careful about how that data is protected, it could leak out. It could accidentally be exposed to other people. If big archives are made that have collected many thousands of people, this could suddenly become an attractive target."

"So today, we're a little bit guarded in the sense of this genetic information being decentralized in many different labs, so that if there's a breach at one lab, it's relatively localized. If everything gets aggregated together, it becomes a little bit riskier because it becomes a little bit more attractive as a target. I think these challenges can be overcome. Encryption technologies, authentication technologies, they exist, and there are companies that run with the highest level of security at Amazon Cloud and other cloud resources. It is certainly possible to do so but we just got to be so certain that we get it right on the first try."

Right! We don’t want to create this big database that has all the student and Ike information and then accidentally leave it vulnerable. We just have to be really careful about how that's engineered.

"We can come at this from any angle. Is there something in there that struck you that you’d want to begin with, or shall I?"

"I either way!"

Well, it’s the aggregation of genetic information—basically, in how you store it. Alright, so let's pretend there's a presidential election of the future going on, and that the contestants' DNA is stored. Someone hacks into it and says, you know, candidate X comes from a long line of crazy people and alcoholics. I mean, it could really be used against you.

"Although, actually, come to think of it, I wonder whether there might be some sort of egalitarian effect where everyone—if you have everyone's genome, and you're able to really understand, there are skeletons in everyone's closet."

Yeah, but if you're hiring somebody, for instance in a corporation, and you have the genetic information of everybody available, you're gonna be making your choices partly or not.

"Yeah, yeah, no, I guess what I’m saying is very unfair. If you look closely enough at any genome—and I wonder whether you find some horrors, you know, madness somewhere in the family attendance."

Maybe in the family, but maybe not in that particular person.

"Right, right."

So that would be one of the hazards. One of the pluses is—and they did a show like this in England, in which they got a bunch of people in the room and asked them where they were from. They all said they were from England, right? Or someone who said they were from France and that they had always been from France and that their families, and so forth, had always been from England or France. And then they ran their genomes and found that they were related to, you know, people that they had claimed to dislike—such as Muslims, or maybe they were related to an African.

"And there were some huggy-kissing scenes in which people in this study group found out that they were cousins which they had never known."

Wow! So it can be a very 'me, part of the human race' type of experience rather than "I’ve always been a white member of the clan."

"So it could have that kind of benefit—that kind of benefit. But I think like all of these, like any human technology we make, it's a double-edged tool. And that goes for—actually, if I say triple edge. Because there’s the good edge, the bad edge, and the stupid edge that you hadn't even anticipated.”

I think about that, you know, in terms of you—like you're an early adopter of some technologies. You have created that long pen thing and you have a scale up and running—oh no, you want to see it—you go to a website called syngraphy.com.

"So for the audience, that's a pen that you can use remotely. Like you can control it. 'Beam me up, Scotty' moment! Scotty made Captain Kirk turn into little pixels, and he disappeared from wherever he was. Remember that?"

Yes! It's like Tinkerbell! We actually—actually, William Shatner is on today’s episode—yes, pixelated, and then he reappeared in another place!

"Right, usually the Starship Enterprise, so this is what the long pen is. It’s the first 'beam me up, Scotty' moment in which a thing disappears at its moment of origin, whatever you're writing, and reappears in either physical or stored digital form somewhere else."

"We see the handwriting can do that, or you can store all of that and produce—if you need a physical form of it, you can have it later."

"And why would you need that? Because forensic document examiners cannot use digital handwriting. They cannot say whether it's authentic or not. They can do that with physical. And the physical thing that long pens and graphy system does is whatever you did at the originating end, it actually captures the fine motors—everything—in precisely everything."

So to the bigger other point: here you are also an environmentalist. You care very much about nature; you care about animals. You write about the survival of our species because if all the human beings die, there won’t be any more Shakespeare.

"Yeah, and yet you are not like a romanticist in the clay—in the Bleakian sense—in that you're not rejecting, yeah, technology, no. In fact, some of our fixes are gonna have to come through technology. So, yes, we've made a mess. Yes, nature is inside you. You're breathing it in and out right now. And at a moment when we run out of clean air with enough oxygen in it, drinkable water, and non-toxic food, we're basically done, right?"

That's how it’s gone us!

"So what you really don’t want to have happen is to have the oceans die. I mean, there's a lot of other things you don't want to happen too, but if I had to make number one—a list with numbers—if we did triage... yeah—"

"Yeah, we have to do triage."

Yeah, they say, “Don’t kill the oceans because when you kill the oceans, you're killing the oxygen supply source for sixty to eighty percent of the oxygen we breathe. Gotcha. Should that disappear, you're gonna be like somebody on the top of Mount Everest without an oxygen supply system, and you will get very, very stupid and eventually die, right?"

"Or we'll have to rely on some guy from Silicon Valley to encase us all in a bubble. You know what? I don’t think we’re gonna get there fast enough! Doubtless some rich people are preparing little oxygen bubbles for the swamps, but the rest of us, I'm afraid, are gonna be out in the oxygen-deprived window!"

"It'll still blow around; it’ll just be full of methane."

"Right, right. As it was before those blue-green algae appeared and changed the atmosphere of the earth, which once upon a time did not have oxygen in it! Okay, look up the geology! Everything I tell you is true!"

Yeah, so I think in the interest of time let’s move to the second—quit season.

"I think we’ll wind it up with that one."

Um, there are three that they gave us, but one of them is about Trump, and I don't want to talk about it! I mean, we did that.

"Yeah, yeah, so let's see—this is Victoria Coates—who is—kicked a lot out of them."

"Um, yeah, some form of time; that's not a good answer. Art is the best unifying for us; we have that."

"So it's too contentious?"

"Well, let's see what it says. So yeah, we want to see the next one! What else have we got?"

We've got Trump. Is that it?

"We just got two more! Yeah, these are the other two options: narcissism and children. Oh, but it's Alison Gopnik, who is a very interesting person, so we can find an angle here."

"Yeah, yeah! Let's do this—Alison Gopnik was on this show; she's a developmental psychologist from—let's see what she has to say about Donald Trump, narcissism, and children.” It’s all about him, right?

"One of the things that we've discovered in the science is that children who already have moral intuitions from the time they’re extremely young—so even 14-month-olds will go out of their way to try to help someone else who's in trouble. And there's even some evidence that this is true for babies, for infants! So the old picture that we had about moral development was that children started out being these amoral egocentric creatures and then they had to be socialized into being moral or caring about other people, and that view is sort of exactly the opposite of the view that we have now.”

"There was a column in the New York Times that said, 'Oh, you know, someone like Donald Trump is like a two-year-old,' and I was extremely irritated. I thought about writing a letter to say that's a terrible insult to two-year-olds! Two-year-olds are not narcissistic and egocentric and only concerned with their own happiness; they have the potential for caring about other people, taking care of them. It's something that happens between being two and being grown up that makes the narcissists and the egotist of the world develop; that's a grown-up condition, not a condition of a two-year-old."

And as a parent, the challenge is to try to give children information and encouragement for those natural tendencies towards altruism.

"No, it has to be said that we have a lot of evidence that that natural tendency towards altruism, towards helping for others, being empathic to others, caring for others, seems to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to split people up into an in-group—the people that we're empathic for and take care of—and then an out-group—the others. And the others are the ones that we don't have to take care of, and those two things, from an evolutionary perspective, even from a physiological neuroscience perspective, seem to go hand-in-hand."

So the challenge for a parent is to say, give children a sense of encouraging that sense of belonging and caring about other people without also having a sense that you only do that for your group and you cannot care about the other group. Okay, so most people who go through being children do that in the context of a large group of people—a large, well—in my terms, a large group of people.

"They go to preschool; they go to kindergarten; they go to school; they have a large group of neighbors and relatives—they see a lot of people! And at school, they often encounter pushback—bullying, exclusion—all those things that we know happen at school."

Alright, I'm kind of a weird test case because I did grow up in the woods, so I didn't really have that much contact or hurt from family. Immediately, I had an older brother; that was kind of it, and my parents were, of course, in a very remote... No, it was a remote Ottawa!

"Yes! The city was—where Young Mr. Trudeau is situated."

Oh, it's the locus of Mr. Trudeau, which is situated very well by contrast to this, look on this picture then.

"So he explained quantum physics to the world, and well, I think he was explaining it..."

"Um, anyway, yes, I was born in Ottawa, but then we were up in the woods. So I actually didn't get a lot of the socialization that happens."

"And the in-group, out-group? I just—I wouldn't have known what an out-group was."

"Was it a cult? So what happened then, if—?"

"Well, what happened? That was a bit of a culture shock to say: Why are people behaving like this? Why are they like this? I was an overly protective, helpful child, huh? So I was the kind of child who would not eat their decorated Easter cookie because I didn’t want to make it go on!"

"Okay, so you had a lot of empathy."

"I had a nurturing—a lot of empathy. Yeah, I think probably too much—for my own good. But that got kicked out of me later on, so I'm hard as nails now. But I still have a lot of problems with in-groups and out-groups—you know, these people and those people."

I have problems understanding!

"And I do understand rationally why people do that. I don't quite grasp unless you were terrified out of your mind. I can see why you would—why you would do that—and I'm sure that that's why human beings develop that capacity: 'No, these people will be nice to you; those people won't.' Right?"

"So it's probably part of a survival thing."

"I grew up in the suburbs of DC and in Maryland—in a very affluent, upper-middle-class neighborhood and was basically brought up with the notion that three-quarters of DC was uninhabitable because it had black people in it! Yeah, you’d be shocked!"

"And as a young adult, I moved into DC, and I worked in DC, and I literally was amazed at age 20 or something to drive around certain notorious neighborhoods during the daytime and noticed that people were just going about their business and not being shot!"

"You know, and that was an eye-opener for me. I was like, really? Like, what was the purpose of all that myth-making, you know?!"

"Well, I think it comes out of people being genuinely scared, and doubtless their parents were telling you that because they were concerned for your situation. I think a lot of it comes out of that. We want our children to be protected. We don’t want them—when in our day, it was 'You can’t go down into the ravine because there are bad men down there!' Right? So we never quite knew what those bad men would do."

"But of course, we exist down to the ravine every chance!"

"We don’t run into those through the storm sewers! We ran, and German children will push the boundaries that way, but if children grow up in mixed communities, they don’t have these issues. They’re likely to have issues when they find themselves in a monolithic, homogeneous situation where everybody is of one ilk, and they're likely to look around and say, 'Where are the other people?'"

"It is breaking my heart that time means we need to end this because I could be talking to you for a lot longer on these subjects! But Margaret Atwood, thank you so much for being on Think Again today!"

"We have to draw a very abrupt line under it there. I'm sad; a pleasure—thank you!"

And that's it for another episode of Think Again. I hope that all of you are having a wonderful autumn, especially those unfortunate people who are not blessed/cursed with actual seasons like we are here in New York City and have to watch the leaves falling only on TV or in mega movies.

I had a random thought today as I was walking down Lexington Avenue that I wanted to share with you, which is that until somebody corners the market on objective truth, we should probably table this phrase: "Telling it like it is." He tells it like it is; she tells it like it is. It doesn't really mean anything, does it?

Anyway, we're back next week with New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb for a different angle and a different perspective on the kind of thing that I was talking about last week with Jody Pico, and a couple of other surprising conversations with Jelani. Hope to see you then!