But it’s not in the spirit of giving counsel. I’m not saying you do it—

No, I take that point. I don’t see myself in those conversations as a counsellor.

Because, you know, there is a tradition of this—Walter Lippmann giving counsel to this one or that one.

And doing secret diplomatic missions. The lines were blurry back then.

So you keep it pretty on the up and up.

I try to.

Would you ever go into politics?

No.

Absolutely not? You’re making a Sherman statement.

I’m making a Sherman statement. I think you have to know what you’re good at doing. I think I’m good at doing this.

What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster, as a writer?

My sense of mission is simple: I have values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better, and I try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way. I do this because I care about where things are going. I’m not dispassionately observing from the sidelines. I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved.

But what I’m doing, and the way I’m doing it, has changed a lot over the years. In ways that I can follow more through intuition than through some framework. The version of me that was writing “Wonkblog,” and telling everybody about health care and aging in one chart, is not what I’m doing on my podcast now. My podcast is a forum in which I’m not primarily trying to be persuasive. Over time I think it has persuasive elements, but it’s mostly other people talking. I have a lot of people on the show whom I disagree with. And I think it acts as a space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had and then can be put into conversation with each other. And that matters.

In my column, I’m more prescriptive. What goes into, eventually, the book “Abundance,” comes more from the column, and that’s me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving. I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working.

You are an important figure at what I think is still, today, the most important news-gathering organization on earth, the New York Times, but it’s also one that everybody has opinions about. And recently Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including the Times. James Bennett fired. Bari Weiss left and created The Free Press. What’s your opinion about Bari Weiss’s increasing influence? It looks like she’s about to be a very important figure at CBS News.

Yeah, it seems like she’s about to take over CBS.

What do you think?

My thing about Bari—and I’ve been on her show—I have a lot of admiration for how good she is at what she does. My disagreements with Bari are that I think she’s asymmetric in sympathy and generosity.

Tell me what that means.

I’ve thought The Free Press’ work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad.

Spell it out.

It’s done this whole thing, like, Well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been reported on, well, they had secondary conditions. And, yes, when you starve a population the people who die first will be the most vulnerable. But that’s not exculpatory. There was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza. I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.

I think Bari, though, is an insane talent spotter. If you look at what she’s built at The Free Press, she’s very, very good at finding people, at pulling them in, at networking with them. She’s sort of an impresario. Bringing in Tyler Cowen to be a columnist was a very good idea for them.

The economist.

I’m somebody who’s edited a site, Vox, right? I know how hard this is to do. And Bari has an incredibly sensitive feel for the political moment. It is not my feel for the moment, and her politics are not mine.

What are her politics? How would you describe them?

What I see her trying to do is something that used to be somewhat more common, which is to self-consciously be what she would define as the center. And I see The Free Press tacking back and forth around that. It was much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he was running and the Democrats were in power. But now that he’s in it’s, like, Oh, no, they’re the vandals. The publication is a little bit, to me, like the old New Republic, doing things they used to do. . . . Actually, it’s funny. When I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time. All of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device—

That it was a dodge.

No, it wasn’t a dodge—it was navigational. They weren’t dodging. They were just kind of . . . there were a lot of politicians and a lot of players who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center, as opposed to a very consistent set of views and principles. And, as media has become polarized, many fewer places are doing that. I think Bari saw a market opportunity in that. Is her center what I think is the center? No. But I recognize a lot of editorial skill there.