The Ezra Klein Show - Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising permeating more and more of our lives.We originally released this episode back in March 2022. But just like Atwood’s work, it somehow only got more relevant with time. Atwood is the author of at least 17 novels, including the classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as 20 books of poetry and nine collections of short fiction. When we spoke, she’d just published an essay collection, “Burning Questions.” And she has a new book coming out this fall, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.”Mentioned:Art & Energy by Barry LordBook recommendations:War by Margaret MacMillanBiased by Jennifer L. EberhardtSecrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza ReidCharlotte’s Web by E. B. WhiteLord of the Rings by J. R. R. TolkienThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Coral Ann Howells and Brooks Bouson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

So, thank you for watching. Today, we're re-airing an episode from the archive. My interview with the author, the legend, Margaret Atwood. We first taped this episode back in February 2022, and I wasn't sure we'd ever really get to air it. Because after we taped it, Russia invaded Ukraine, and we held it, and we held it, and we held it, and I was worried it would feel too out of date, given how much had happened in the world. But somehow it didn't age at all. And three years later, that's still true. This episode in weird ways feels more relevant today

than it does when we taped it. And I think that's one of Atwood's great gifts, this eerie prescience, which is one reason her work has proven so long lived. When we spoke, she just published an essay collection, Burning Questions, and she has a new book coming out in the fall, Book of Lives, a Memoir of sorts. Mark Goodatwood, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. So let's begin with this. Why do human beings think in stories? Well, people have had a lot of theories about that. So let's say that once we had a language that included a past and a present and a future, once we could think about what had happened and

transfer information to people about what might therefore happen, we were going to be telling stories. So I think the stories, if you go way back, the stories that start being told are partly about how to do stuff, like how to hunt the gazelle, and precautions that you might take around that. So I think stories were originally, or the reason they persisted, because of course there must have been a positive for stories, was to teach people so they didn't have to do it by trial and error. So Uncle Alf got eaten by a crocodile right there. Maybe better not go swimming there. So you don't have to try for yourself to see if there might be a crocodile there. I'm telling you this story. And it didn't end well, so don't do that. The other thing we did

when we started with the complicated language was we started believing in things that might not necessarily be visible. And I think we did that partly to, um, make us feel we were getting a little help here. So it's raining too much. What can we do about that? Let's, let's talk to the rain God. What do you think the disadvantage is of being a species of things and stories where information is more persuasive and a good story? Oh yeah, you can make up really destructive things and use them in an instigated and malicious

way for your own ends. And that's the other thing that we really know about stories and going back as far as we can with the written record, among other things, those are the kinds of stories we find. So So why were people so horrified by Odysseus? He made up these lies. He made up stories. He made up ruses. He made up deceptions. He's tricky. So we are a species that deceives. other species deceive too, but we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories. Other animals go in for camouflage and deception, but we were able to go in for camouflage and deception using words. And we can, for instance, make up false stories about

our enemies to get other people to dislike them and turn against them. And if you go into the history of propaganda and wartime, you will find a lot of clever inventions about stuff that wasn't true done for the purposes of deceiving. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive too, but we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories. CB What makes a story believable? EG Oh, well, now, let me see what kind of thing you might like. I think you might like a story about what a good person you are. You're a good person, Ezra. Do you want to do the right thing? Sure you do, I can tell. Well, you can really help out humankind. So all you have to do is sacrifice 17 children

at the full of the moon. And you're gonna do that, aren't you, Ezra? Because you're a good person and you want to help. I think most people want to be good and they want to help. I think most people want to be good and they want to help. I don't take a really cynical view of human nature that way. I think we do want to be good, we do want to help. And so a really conniving person will pitch to that side of us rather than saying just, let's rob a bank and make a million dollars. I think you would say no to the bank robbery, Ezra, because it's not helpful.

You might say yes to it if we said, let's rob a bank and use the million dollars to help humankind and advance equality. You might do that, yeah? I mean, I worry my bank high skills are weak, so I might have practical objections to the plan. Supposing it was a foolproof plan, you might do it then, but only if it were for the greater good.

So I think we're more likely to be sucked into doing stuff by people manipulating our good side than by people appealing to our greed and power hungriness, although there are enough of us who are interested in the greed and power hungriness, so it's a motif. I buy the thought that our good side is more potent to manipulate than other parts of us. But the other thing I think you're getting at there

that always feels true to me is that part of the power of a story is a degree to which it makes us a person simply of consequence that we are or can see ourselves as the actor living in a moment in human history where we matter. We're not just one of the many. Well, stories by their very nature have central characters unless they're history stories dealing just with statistics. But we know unless they're history stories dealing just with statistics. But we know that we're much more likely to be able to remember a story that is about a person or people, not one that is just about numbers unless we make the numbers themselves into actors in the story. I'm going to tell you a story

about the number nine, a very heroic number. I watch a lot of Sesame Street these days. I can relate. Yeah, so you make the numbers into entities and then we can be interested in them. But if they're just numbers, not so much. We didn't develop math until pretty late in our human history, whereas we developed language and music very, very early. So stories come naturally to small kids. You know this yourself. So this happens, then this happens, and then this happens. They understand that there's a plot and that there are actors in the plot like their teddy

bear. So it's really built in. And I think what kids do before the age of two is pretty indicative of what comes with the toolkit. They already are doing little dances, they have a sense of rhythm, they're very interested in music, and they're very interested in words and facial expressions. But they're not interested in nine times nine at that age, if ever. To my father's enduring disappointment, he's a mathematician, and I was never that interested in nine times nine. One thing I noticed reading your book of essays is that there are certain

stories or groups of stories that you circle, and you come back and back particularly to the stories of the Bible. How do you think about or how do you explain from a secular perspective because obviously there's another explanation from the spiritual perspective, but how do you explain the potency, the stickiness of the stories in the Bible because they're not easily accessed and many of them are not easy. I mean there's a lot of sex, death, blood, and violence in there, which is one of the reasons it's remained such a popular book. These are dramatic stories. When you get into the begets and the begats, maybe not so much, but what we would call

these sort of key stories are very dramatic. And they often feature something that we really like, which is underdogs making good. So a number of the key stories are like that. And some of them are about really cataclysmic events. And some of them that we didn't get in high school are about very bad behavior. So the one that I put into the testaments, which is the concubine cut into 12 pieces, for some reason they didn't parade that in front of the eight-year-olds. I don't know why. So what's a concubine, mom? One kid writing a Sunday school essay said King Solomon Solomon had 12 wives and 82 porcupines. Maybe he just didn't know. So yeah, it's very interesting to see what kind of bad behavior

is actually condoned and permitted, but there isn't a lot of papering over in the Bible. If people are bad, they're bad, like it's right out there on the page. And even people who are favored quite frequently behave badly and get called on it. I want to talk a bit about the way that stories function in politics. You're Canadian, but you've spent a fair amount of time living in the United States as well. What's your view of the difference between the stories Americans tell about themselves, about their country,

and the stories that Canadians tell about their country? Well, these stories are in flux, as you probably have noticed. There used to be a kind of shared mythology in the United States, and Canadians used to lament that they didn't have such a thing. And it would in fact be quite difficult to have a totally shared mythology in Canada because it was already made up of some diverse groups of people. But Americans had a kind of unifying story and unifying ceremonies that involved a lot of marching around on the 4th of

July. The French also have been quite conflicted about their stories, but they managed to make it stick for a while. So was Bastille Day good or bad? I think they're still thinking it's good, but there was a lot of adjustment before that became the accepted story. They had the revolution, then they had Napoleon, then they had the restoration of the monarchy, and then they had another republic, and then they had another monarchy, and then they had another republic. In order to hold any sort of nation-state together, there has to be a story that most of the people agree on. And every once in a while those stories fall apart, and if they're not replaced with another one, fragmentation is the result. So, one of the things that stories do is they give members of a group a kind of unifying imaginary thing that they can believe in. When I say

imaginary, I'm not saying it's necessarily false. I'm saying it is the thing of the imagination, like money. It's also a thing of the imagination. It's a human thing that we make up because it works and it's convenient for us. But if we suddenly stop believing in a currency, that's it. You have to revert to the black market and bartering. So yeah, the American story used to be liberty, democracy, freedom, equality, land of light, and it was that way all during the Cold War. Okay, because the Cold War was the Iron Curtain, Land of Darkness. Don't know whether you remember that pop song, They Don't Have a God Behind the Iron Curtain. I do not. No? Before my time. Oh, they don't have God behind the Iron Curtain. To Satan they have given something crown.

Catchy. Catchy. Yeah. So the story about America was that's where you wanted to be. That's where you didn't have all the things that were going on behind the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain then comes down in 1989. That story loses some of its grip. So if you're going to be land of virtuous light, who is the foil to that, you know, who gets to play the penguin to your Batman or even worse, the Joker to your Batman. And that was a problem.

I remember the nineties, which is probably when you were born. I'm a little older than that. No, no, no, you can't possibly be. It was going to be the end of history. Capitalism had triumphed, shopping was the future, it was just all going to be great. That ended in 9-11. That was the end of that particular phase. And there was another potential penguin joker to America's Batman, but it was kind of hard

to coalesce that, especially if you were really rather dependent on Saudi Arabia. So we're now shaping up to another one, which appears to be Putin about to invade Ukraine. And who knows what is going to happen there. But America, meanwhile, has been examining the underside of the myth, if you like. So equality for whom exactly was the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Were those going to be for everybody? Apparently not, not at the beginning. But once you've started with that idea, it's kind of hard to stop it. And despite the setbacks, I think you have seen the franchise extending further and further. What you're seeing right now is an attempt to roll some of that back with the discouraging of voting

for certain groups and a certain amount of historical revisionism. Well, we never actually meant equality. We meant something more like the Roman Republic in which it was only men and not slaves, women, or children that were supposed to be citizens. CB I think you're right about America groping for another foil in the long post-Cold War period. One story I sometimes tell myself about where we are is that there was an attempt to make it the Islamic world that didn't hold together. That wasn't big enough. It was too al-Qaeda. We're too dependent on Saudi Arabia. So we found it here. I don't really think it's going to be Putin. I don't even really think it's going to be China. It's each other. Well, that would be tragic because the result would be another civil war. And there are no wars worse than civil wars. They're actually the worst wars. And that has been a motif actually throughout American history that there were righteous people and that there were not righteous

people. So the founding, going back to the original founding amongst the Puritans, that wasn't a democracy. It was a theocracy, and only those who'd seen God in a cornfield were full members of the Church to begin with. Then as usually happens with fervent utopian movements, which it was one, you have the first generation who were the fervent utopianists, let's say the original French revolutionaries, the original Bolsheviks, and then you win. And then what do you do when you win? What's supposed to happen is the Golden Age is supposed to appear, then it doesn't appear. Then what? Well, you've won and you've eliminated your enemies, your original enemies, but it's still not working. So it must be betrayal from within. It must be witches. It must be capitalist rotors. It must be somebody undermining it, secret monarchists in the case of the revolution, enemies of the revolution. It

must be them from within your own country. So what you're seeing now is a wrestling match for what is the real America. What is the authentic America? And you see people wrapping themselves in the flag both ways and saying that they are the real America. And you just saw that in Canada. So these people at the blockades wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag were standing up for the real Canada. Pretty fuzzy about what that is. But that's what they were doing. And their role model was what had been going on in the States, where we're overthrowing the government in the name of the real America, like that. Did you ever play arm wrestling?

So that's what you're seeing. It's an arm wrestle for the soul of America. You've talked a bit about beginning to compose the Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in 1984, so the year I was born, actually, and before the wall fell. So how did being there then influence the way you thought about the book? I'd actually started making notes on it in 1981, but it took me a while to actually work up to writing it because it was somewhat nutty or as such was the ambiance at the time. So there I was in West Berlin and because we weren't German, we could go to East Berlin more easily than Germans could. And we could also go to Czechoslovakia, which we did, and we went to Poland. We had experiences of three Iron Curtain countries at the time, and they were somewhat different. The East Germans, I think,

were sewed up the tightest of anybody. We now know from the Stasi files that indeed there were a lot of informants, so people were pretty careful about what they would say. In Czechoslovakia, we could talk to people but only in open spaces. So you couldn't have a frank conversation in a building or a car because people just assumed it was bugged. In Poland, it was already pretty wide open in 1984. So, Poland has had lots of experiences of people marching across them and occupying them. Some of those experiences for them were pretty recent. The general populace was not paying a lot of attention to what the rules were. So, a taxi driver drove up and he said, dollars?

And we said, zlotties? And he drove away. Once that starts happening, once you start preferring somebody else's currency, you know that the government is losing some authority. Anyway, very interesting to be there at that time. And I think some of the stuff that's been going on recently is that the people doing that stuff are too young to remember any of that. They don't know what a real totalitarianism is like, and they're not paying attention to the kinds of steps that lead to it. How you get one of these things going, how you get buy-in, what sort of propaganda is likely to be put out there

to begin with. And you never begin by saying, I'm going to be a tyrannist dictator and I'm going to ruin your life. You don't start out that way. You start out by saying, I'm going to be a tyrannous dictator and I'm going to ruin your life. You don't start out that way. You start out by saying, I'm going to make things so much better. And you want that to happen, don't you, Ezra? Because you're a good person. But first we have to get rid of those people because they're not good people. That makes me think of something I noticed when reading The Handmaid's Tale, which is how much of the book is occupied with how one communicates when they can't speak freely. And you get at this in this very embodied way, literally, how would you do it? Where would you meet? What words would you use? How would you hold your body in those moments? It's

very visceral. Well, this is one of the things from East Berlin. And after I'd written The Handmaid's Tale, I got made into a movie. And we launched that movie in Berlin just as the wall was coming down. And we launched it twice. We launched it in West Berlin. And the after party was talking about the acting, talking about the set design, talking about the usual things and talk about movies when there aren't any other considerations. You're talking about how good a movie is it, are you not? And then we went across to East Berlin and we launched it there and it was packed. People watched it very intently and threw bouquets up on the stage afterwards and said, this was our life. And they didn't mean the outfits, they meant you couldn't

talk to anybody because you didn't know if they were spying on you. So it was that sort of eerie feeling of things look normal, but who is really actually who? Prague was similar, similarly rather shut down and similarly you didn't know just who was listening in. But when we got checked into our room in the hotel, the bellman pointed to the chandelier and put his finger to his lips. In other words, that's bugged. Whenever we wanted anything in the hotel room, we would just stand under the chandelier and say, I wonder why they haven't changed that light bulb. Knock, knock, knock, there would be the light bulb. But after telling us about that, he then took us into the vestibule and said, want to change some dollars? Anyway, everything was sort of underneath. So we went in search of Kafka at that time in Prague, trying to find Kafka because I'm a big fan of Kafka and couldn't find any Kafka things.

Graham actually went to his addresses trying to find Kafka, knock on the door, Kafka. No, no, no, no, no, Kafka, no, goodbye, slam. So very verboten Kafka at that time. We then went back in 89 and already there were Kafka, handkerchiefs, Kafka playing cards, Kafka, Kafka chuchkas were already beginning to appear. And then I went back a little bit later and it was full blown Kafka. You couldn't, you sort of couldn't avoid Kafka.

There was a statue, there's an award, I've got the award. I've got the Kafka award, I was thrilled. And in the hotel where I was staying, they had a whole sort of display of sort of Kafka's pencil, Kafka's typewriter, Kafka's chewing gum, you know, just anything that they could collect was in there. So this is a story about two things. Number one, about how some literary figures get repressed under certain kinds of regimes. Why Kafka? Because he wrote stories about impenetrable bureaucracies, the justice of which could not be figured out.

And that was a bit too close to the bone, I suppose. And the other part of the story is how something can disappear, but then reappear. How you can be a villain for one regime and a hero for the next. And that can work both ways. Tell me a bit about the regime you construct in the Handmaid's Tale. What does Gilead believe?

Okay, so the answer to that question is what questions was I attempting to answer. Remember when I start writing it, the beginning of the 80s when there's already a backlash against a lot of the stuff that had been happening in the 60s and 70s. Things do tend to go that way. So you have 10 or 15 years of a certain period and then you have a push back against it by people who didn't like it when it was happening. So Joan Didion predicted it. She said, some of these people are not happy. This is not their idea of how things should go. And that also can work both ways because any group over 200 people is almost bound to have a schism. It's a good rule. Yeah. Well, it's not my rule. I didn't make it up. So, 1980, you start getting the pushback and you

start getting the political organization of the religious right. And they were already saying things like women should belong in the home. And I was wondering, okay, so they're not in the home. They're out there running around like mice and opening bank accounts and having jobs and all this uppity stuff that they're doing. How are you going to get them back into the home if you decide that's where they ought to be? Well, easy peasy, you cut off their funds. We had invented credit cards by that time. I would suggest that we retain the use of cash money. Not for everything, but just in case. Some negotiable currency that isn't controlled by other people might be a good idea. Oh yeah, so I started writing it then in answer to the question, if America were to have a totalitarian government, what kind would it be? And under what flag, as it were, would it fly? And my answer to that was go back to the founders, namely the

17th century Puritan theocrats who never went away. They took different forms, but they didn't vanish. So looking at what's happening in the 80s with the political organization of the religious right, that is who you see in league, trying to get rid of the voting rights and all the rest of it. Those are the folks. It's not everybody's interpretation of Christianity, by the way. Certainly not. But it always struck me that to our earlier conversation about the Bible, I think there's

a wisdom in suggesting that the way a totalitarian regime like that could emerge is that it connects itself to the core stories of a society. Absolutely. And not only that, if you make it into a religion, which of course, so many regimes throughout history have done, the divine right of kings, the Holy Roman Empire, if you connect it with a religion, then it becomes heresy to oppose it. It becomes a very powerful tool. You're not just against some prime minister, rather, you're against God. And that's a pretty serious minister, rather, you're against God. And that's a pretty serious thing in a believing community. And a lot of rulers have told a story about how they are there by divine fiat. In fact,

you find it on the English money to this day. When I was looking at the Handmaid's Tale this week, I was really struck by its modernity. Even offhand lines just felt very specific to the moment. And three of them really struck with me and I wanted to talk with you about them. One was this, you're right. We lived as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance. You have to work at it. Yeah, especially now. I think that's how we are to a certain extent as an entity on this planet. If you tried to pay attention to everything that's going on, especially now with this deluge of information that is available, your head would explode. And a lot of people have immediate lives that they have to tend to. So if you have a young family, you know what that's like. It's an immersive experience.

And you can't just say, oh, let's do that next week. It's now, and you are in the moment, whether you know all this meditation stuff, be in the moment. If you have young children, you cannot help but be in the moment. You are in that moment, and somebody is shitting on the floor right now, and you have to do something about it now. So people have their own lives. They have their immediate concerns. They have their own jobs and it now. So people have their own lives, they have their immediate concerns, they have their own jobs and financial problems, they have stuff they have to deal with. And to try to take any sort of a wide or long view

is quite hard for a lot of people because their own lives are so immediate, immersive and stressed. So that's part of the problem. And the other part of the problem is we would rather not look, especially if we feel powerless in the face of that which we are being asked to look at. Like, what do you expect me to do? So our really big problem and what is driving a lot of these other problems is what used to be called climate change and is now called the climate crisis. And that is going to be more weather catastrophes, more fires,

more droughts, more famines. And when you have famines and water shortages, you're going to have social unrest and you're going to have a great big refugee problem which we already have now. So what are you going to do? And for most people, what can they do? And therefore, I would rather not look. So it's like my friend who when she sees a squirrel run over in the streets, she says, I don't want to look at that. Well, you know, who does? I don't want to look at a squashed squirrel either, but it's there.

I've read enough interviews with you to know you kind of bat away questions of prescience, but it struck me reading that, that it's actually maybe one of the simple answers to why a number of your books have an extraordinary staying power and feel like they were a bit ahead of their time, which is simply that you seem pretty good at not ignoring, at simply asking, well, what if this is true? What if this continues? What if what I see is real? Yes, I wouldn't call it a gift. None of them are, right? Isn't that the thing about the gifts in stories at least? Well, gifts from the gods usually have a catch. Somebody asked me the other day, would you like to live forever? And I said, well, I've heard that story. Don't ask for

eternal life unless you also ask for eternal youth because it's not going to work out well. They have to be treated with care, gifts from the gods. So there are certain areas where I pay quite a lot of attention, but other areas where I probably just don't, like everybody else. There are certain things that I just don't know much about them. I don't. Like everybody else, there's certain things that I just, I don't know much about them. I don't know what goes on. Therefore, they're not my focus. There's another line that struck me as particularly potent in the book, which is this one. You write, quote, how did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? And you're talking about the before world, in a way, our world, now the consumer world.

But it just struck me as such a clear way of putting something of the human condition, not just insatiability, but a talent for insatiability. Tell me about that. Tell me about that. So the talent for insatiability kicks off around 1950, the most recent wave of it. In the 30s, the virtue was not to waste things. And in the 40s, that became very much more accentuated because you didn't, not only did you not waste things, but you saved certain things up because it was the war effort. So you saved elastic bands, you saved fat in little tin cans. I don't know what they did with it.

You saved newspaper, you saved tin foil, you saved all of those things up. And then they had war salvage drives and you donated all of those things. You saved up your clothes, you donated them to Europe from. You saved up your clothes, you donated them to Europe from people that didn't have clothes. You never threw things out. And then in came the consumer society and that is pretty much driven too because everything is joined at the hip with the energy

force driving that civilization. And if you want to read about that, you can get a book called Art and Energy by Barry Lord. So every energy source produces a culture which is connected to that energy source. And what you saw between the 19th and the 20th centuries was the shift from coal, a very worker-intensive form of energy, gave us labor unions, gave us Karl Marx, thanks a lot, gave us this emphasis on jobs. So controlling the means of production was supposed to solve everything. I can tell you that it does not. When I was in Poland before the Iron Curtain came down, they had a big pile of overshoes because the workers controlled the means of production and they were producing overshoes, but nobody wanted to buy them. Oh, oh. So yeah, just making things doesn't necessarily

work in and of itself. So you had coal shipped over to oil. Oil is cheap. It's cheap to produce. It doesn't take a lot of workers compared to coal. And suddenly you had all of this cheap energy. And not only that, there are all these other things you could make out of it. So middle of the 1950s, in came nylon, those horrible nylon shirts, nevermind. We don't have them anymore. They really stack.

But new stuffs or hula hoops, plastic things, and they were really cheap. So a metal pail, a plastic pail, which are you gonna have? How many metal pails have you got? I have a lot of plastic pails in my home right now. Yeah, and no metal pails, right? None. Plastic pails are cheap. So cheap stuff, and therefore you had to have to keep all the wheels turning. You had to have people wanting to buy stuff. And you got the throwaway economy,

and you got a lot of plastic. And that's the big problem that we're dealing with now, or one of the big problems. Where is it all going? Well, it's going into your bloodstream ultimately. Going into the ocean, it's going into the water, it's going into the food, a lot of microplastic. One thing I like about that answer is that I think when I read that line myself, I thought about the talent for insatiability as a human condition, the inability to be happy, to always want a bit more. But something you're saying, which is

of course true, is that even if human beings have at many times been itchy, even if just sit and still can be hard, the kind of insatiability we have now is culturally different even in memory. JG Oh, yeah, I think so. That's large S, you know, just completely think of all the food that is thrown away every day on the North American continent. That would never, ever, ever have happened in times of scarcity. You would not do that. CB And I guess the other line I wanted to bring to you here, because it maybe relates well to that one. This comes in context of two characters, again, thinking back to before times and obsessing over the difficulties of their extramarital affair. But I just loved it,

which is, we thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy? AMT – Exactly. They are looking into happiness these days. They're looking into neurological happiness and they're looking into social happiness. One thing that they're thinking these days is that happiness and unhappiness are very tied to your perception of what other people have. And in a material world in which you're valued according to the stuff you've got, being poor isn't just being poor. Being poor is being undervalued and treated as negligible. The more equal people are from the point of view of what they've got, the happier they are likely to be. So it's not a question of what you've got, it's a question of whether what you've got is considered negligible, or whether what you've got is considered exceptional. We all feel a version of this,

and it's very hard to live as if you know it's true, even if you intellectually do that. The problems I have right now are wonderful problems to have. Does it mean on some level they're not problems? I mean, my son was up every hour on the hour overnight and you know, whatever. I have all the little difficulties of a life, but they are, it is hard to imagine how I will look at myself and my own lack of, not spoken, but felt gratitude at times. But it's hard to live as if you know how good your life truly is. It's just a strange thing about being human. Yeah, well, you can't do it every day, but you might take time off now and again. So back in the days when people did these things,

everybody said grace before a meal. Grace is of different kinds, but basically it was an acknowledgement that you were lucky to be eating. There was an old Scottish grace that said, let me see, what is it? Some have meat and cannot eat, something and lack it, but we have meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thanked.

And then they got silly about it and said things like, good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat. things like, good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat. So that was a normal thing that people did in their life at one time. It used to be a daily but often hypocritical thing that people did. However, any form of social convention is going to be hypocritical at times. And just so we realize how lucky we are, wouldn't it be awful if we always had to tell the truth on social occasions? Yes, that would not be great. I think there's something to be being grateful there. Oh, I'm so glad you're here having dinner with us. When are they leaving? with us? When are they leaving? I think it's easily enough to conceive how in 84, you're looking at totalitarianism at East Germany and also thinking about trends in America. But something in the background is that you get Gilead in part because of environmental crisis. So tell me to you how you think about societies changing as their ecosystems degrade, their

environmental ecosystems. Things are going to get nastier. We can afford to be neighborly and tolerant when there's basically enough to go around. When that starts diminishing, then people get angry and defensive. So if you go to Ireland, there's a time when people start building defensive towers. And that can be keyed pretty closely to a climate change that took place then. Things got wetter. And when things got wetter, you knew that the food supply was going to be diminishing and people were going to be becoming more territorial and trying to protect

that which they had. Or that is one theory. So yeah, if you have enough for three squares a day, are you going to go out and steal food yourself? I'm just asking you, Ezra. No, probably not. Because you don't need it. You don't need to take the risk for that. But when you're starving, it's a different story. So sure, as I said, one of the effects of the climate crisis is going to be diminishing harvests. And another effect is going to be the moving around of invasive species and destructive plant diseases. I spent a lot of time over the past year looking at literature on how heat changes the individual and country level propensity for violence. And the short answer is it goes up. But I don't think people realize

how strong that relationship is. You can even find it in literature. Part of Romeo and Juliet takes place on a very hot day and they know they shouldn't go out because they're gonna go get into a fight in that kind of heat, but they do it anyway. But there are all these amazing individual experiments too. There's this one sadistic experiment I love

where it was in Phoenix, Arizona, and the researchers would get in their car and they would get to a light and when it turned green, they just wouldn't move. And then they would time how long it took the drivers behind them to honk and the hotter the day, the more the people behind them would honk the angrier they would get and they would get angry more quickly. Oh boy.

But then you can also find this at the macro level. There's a relationship between hotter weather and civil conflict. And I've often wondered if climate change will kill more people through the wars it indirectly makes likelier than directly through the hurricanes and fires it starts. I think there's no doubt about that. You know, when the French Revolution started, it was very hot. I was like, no, I don't. I didn't know that. So the French monarchy had put a lot of money into the American Revolution because they were pissed at the British for having taken new France. They wanted to get back at them, so they overspent on the American Revolution. And then they upped the taxes, never popular. And then the price of bread went up.

So perfect storm. People were angry enough to take the risk. CB This all gets to something people sometimes call climate authoritarianism. gets to something people sometimes call climate authoritarianism. The idea that climate crisis will change systems not towards cooperation, but towards authoritarianism, towards closing borders. Control, yep. You see some of it maybe even here. Yep. The follow-up book to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, is very much about how different people react to authoritarian incursions. So I'm curious what you've come to believe or learned about that. What makes people more open to authoritarianism?

What makes them not just socially, but individually less open to it. Okay, so we've had a lot of thinking along those lines. People interested in genetics say there's a genetic component. People interested in cultures say there's a cultural component. A very interesting book from years ago that I read was by a man who as a child being Jewish had been rescued and hidden in the Netherlands. And when he grew up, he was tortured by the question, what made those people do that? Why did they do that? They're risking their own lives. Why did they? And he went back and he interviewed a number of people who had rescued children under those circumstances. And he thought, is it religious? No, it was not religious. Some of them were religious, others were not. Was it political? No, it was not political. Some of

them were left, some of them were right, some of them didn't have politics particularly. So what was it? And he said the only thing that he could conclude was that two have done otherwise would have violated their idea of who they were. But where did they get that idea of who they were? That's another question which he didn't pursue. But where do you get that idea of who you are that you are not a person who when presented with a child that needed to be rescued, you are not a person who would say, go away and I'm telling them, yes, ask on you. So what is the difference there? I don't know the answer to that. It's unknown. CB It's also the reverse question is so interesting, too. How does going along not violate your sense of self? A couple

of years ago, I read this book called They Thought They Were Free, and it's just about ordinary Germans who joined the Nazi party. You know, one book can only tell you so much, but what really struck me from it is just the role of very petty resentments. You don't think too much about the global picture and you're just pissed at those condescending or richer than you people over there. And it's bit by bit and your idea of yourself is in relationship to the people you think have already wronged you or the ways in which you feel your life has been unfair. And I mean, where it all ends up going, of course,

with Nazi Germany, and I'm Jewish, is, it is what it is. But what was so chilling about that book was how many political movements, the incentives of these just ordinary members of the party could describe. AMT – Yeah, I think that's entirely right. And there's something that we always leave out of these kinds of conversations, which is it's fun. It's fun to sit at the guillotine and watch these people that you resent getting their heads chopped off. There were wild street dances over that, dancing the car manual and singing this song about

how, how, how got them back. So it is a street party in some way, banding together with like-minded people and feeling you've accomplished something, especially if people tell you that this thing that you're doing is basically good. It's very potent. And if it weren't fun on some level, people wouldn't do it. Isn't that a terrible thing to say that it's fun? But I don't know whether you read Bill Buford's essay on joining football hooligan gangs. The adrenaline, the exhilaration, the feeling that I haven't had this much fun since forever. I feel so alive hitting people in the nose, et cetera. People describe the battle energy that comes over them and there is a real adrenaline rush that happens. We can't leave that out. We cannot leave that out. You've written over the years a lot of very vivid dystopias. Why not utopias?

Well no. Now we're getting into it. Now we're getting into the problem. Okay. 19th century was a century of utopias. So many of them were written that Gilbert and Sullivan write an opera called Utopia Limited, which has a satire on it. But you only satirize something that's a thing, that's become a vogue. Why did they write so many utopias? Because they'd already made so many amazing discoveries that had changed things. So germs, who knew about them? We know about them now, and look what we can do now that we know about germs. Maybe now we'll wash our hands before delivering babies and giving everybody peripheral fever the way we had been doing before. Steam engines, wow, this is amazing. Steam machinery and factories, look at that. Sewing machines, wow. Before that was all hand sewing. And what might be coming? Jules Verne writing about submarines on the way, air travel around the

world in 80 days. So it was just going to get better. There were some problems like the woman problem, but the utopias usually solved those by giving the women a better deal and less clothing. And all different kinds and they solved overpopulation various ways. One of them was that future people just wouldn't be interested in sex. So I read a lot of those when I was a Victorianist, and then people stopped writing them in the 20th century. Why? Because too many of them were tried in real life on a grand scale. So, Soviet Union comes in as a utopia. Hitler's Germany comes in as a utopia, though only for certain people. Soviet Union tried to be more inclusive, but first you had to kill those people like the Cossacks and Kulaks and what have you, and Kulaks and what have you, but then you can have the utopia. And Mao's China comes in as a utopia and lots of others. And then it's not great. So instead, we get We by Evgeny Zemyatin,

we get 1984, we get Fahrenheit 451. It's not great. And it becomes very difficult to write a utopia because nobody believes it anymore. They'd seen the results. But I think we're getting back to, if not, let's have utopia, but first we have to kill all those people. I think we're getting to the point where we're saying saying unless we improve the way we're living, unless we change the way we're living, goodbye homo sapiens sapiens. You cannot continue on a planet as a mid-sized land-based oxygen breathing mammal if there isn't enough oxygen, which is what will happen if we kill the oceans and cut down all the trees. So we are looking into the barrel of a gun as a species. And the big debate now is, okay, how much, how soon can it be

done and will people even go for it? And meanwhile, you've got all of these other problems that the problem you're trying to solve is causing. So cascading series of events cannot be reversed. So some of the thinking is being directed towards yes, it can. Because unless you do yes, it can, you're going to do no, it can't. And if it's no it can't, goodbye us. So I am working with a platform called Disco to do an online practical utopias course in which people will, like Lego, like Minecraft basically, they will examine the components of our material way of living, like what house, what food, what clothing, what energy. Can we turn it around on the material level? And in order to do that, what will our social organization have to be like?

So what form of government do you propose for this utopia that you're going to build? So provide them with the tools that are now already available, different ways of building houses, different ways of making fabrics, different ways of providing clothing, etc., different energy forms. Let's see what you can put together out of that and who's going to run this thing. So some very fundamental questions. CB Have you ever constructed a utopia even just for yourself that you find convincing?

EG Not yet. I know there are pitfalls having read so many of them. You'll notice that I put one into Oryx and Crank and the Mad Adam trilogy, and that's an engineered species that lacks our drawback, shall we say. But they're also, for a human being like us, very boring. And it also seemed to me there, before we got into the planning for how it might be different, that the principle you were at least implying is that we're likely in a better society trying to avoid dystopias than create utopias. Maybe utopias create too much potential for

moral blackmail or something. They're joined at the hip. And let us say also that one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, which is a theme you often find in the writing of utopias dystopias. The other thing goes back to your initial queries about stories. What happens to stories once you have utopia? What are we going to tell stories about? Because surely there's no conflict anymore. We've eliminated that. I figure what stories do in utopias realize there's never such thing as utopia.

It's a problem. So the utopia in which everybody absolutely lives happily ever after forever and ever is very unlikely because we are who we are. So what people did in certain kinds of communist societies was it was fine to tell stories about how awful things were before communism. That was great. You could do that. So certain kinds of stories become more possible than others. So in the middle of a totalitarian dictatorship, you don't want to be telling stories about how awful totalitarian dictatorships are because off with your head. One reason I ask this is that something that I worry about sometimes is that what the right has for its side is an inspiring vision of the past and the left has lost an inspiring vision of the past. And the left has lost an inspiring vision of the future.

And I know some, I should say, I know there's sci-fi writers working, working with utopias now. I know Becky Chambers just wrote a book, which I just read actually on that theme. But I think there's something to that nevertheless. Like the, sometimes I worry that the left has become about preventing disaster, but doesn't quite

have a vision of what it is trying to create. Yeah, they're going to have to do preventing disaster plus improving people's lives. Plus it'll be fun. Plus it'll be fun is I think an often missed piece. Well, there is a puritanical self-flagellating streak on the left as it is currently constituted that if it's fun, it can't be good. They miss a point. If it's not fun on some level, people aren't going to do it. So is it about how virtuous you are or is it about actually trying to better conditions? So if it's only about how virtuous you are, then you're probably an antinomian Puritan. And if it's actually about trying to improve conditions, you might be a William Morris

socialist. So William Morris thought that not only could you improve conditions, you might be a William Morris socialist. So William Morris thought that not only could you improve conditions, but you could make them more fun and more beautiful. Whereas a lot of puritanical antinomians think that beauty is beside the point, it's actually not. One of the questions I always wonder about for myself, as somebody who works in news in a particular period of human history is what are the things that when this era is looked

back on, the question would be why did people not take that more seriously? And I'll ask a sort of fun version of this, but then I want to ask a general version of this, which is what was your view of the spate of UFO news coming out of particularly the US government over the last year that got a ton of attention then everybody just sort of moved on after a report came out saying we don't know what to make of any of this. And if you then don't have more of the story, of course it's going to move on because if the story is, we don't know, there's not much to add to that. We don't know. Oh, and now it's Tuesday and we still don't know and Thursday, we also don't know on Thursday. So it isn't a story if it ends with we don't know and there's nothing else to add.

It's again the nature of the stories. If there is no next chapter, what can you say? We still don't know. Maybe that's a disadvantage of being a creature that thinks stories. There are many disadvantages, but there are many advantages. If there weren't many advantages, we wouldn't be doing it. What do you think are the stories that are obviously there, that will be things that shape our coming decades and that we're not paying attention to? And I want to put out here things that maybe we're not doing enough on, like climate crisis,

but we are paying more attention to, or authoritarianism. What are the things that really don't get discussed, even though they seem to you like they are fundamental? JG Oh, how about mushrooms? Let's talk about mushrooms. That's a really good story. I love the mushroom story. So Merlin Sheldrake is probably the person you want to be talking to. And we are now learning how to make all kinds of things out of mushrooms that we weren't even thinking about a little while ago. So you can get a mushroom coffin and you can make building

blocks out of mushrooms, you can make fabric out of mushrooms, and this is even a part for many food and medical uses that they may have. So I'd say keep your eye on the mushrooms. They may be entering your life sooner than you think. CB. I like that answer quite a bit. We always end the show on book recommendations. And because you've also done a wonderful number of children's books and even graphic novels, I'm going to ask you two a little bit different. What are-? LS. Don't do this to me. CB What are two books you'd recommend to the audience for adults and what are two children's books you'd recommend? DG Okay. So I did pick out, I was told three.

And I have three and I'm going to show them to you. So this is Margaret McMillan's book on war, pretty general reader book how conflict shaped us. One of the takeaways for mid is apparently we're not teaching military studies or military history in universities anymore. That's a mistake. So good read, war, how conflict shaped us, Margaret McMillan.

This one is by somebody who lives out near you called Jennifer Aberhart, and it's called Bias. And it's got the statistics. So for people who want to know, well, actually, how does this skew life in real time in the actual world. Here's the book that talks about that. It's racial bias, and she's done the work. It's not just anecdotal. And this one will And what is it about? It's about life in Iceland. You surprised? So Iceland, a small country where people tend to be related in some way to one another. And the fact that this land of the erstwhile Vikings, which always had pretty powerful, determined female figures, how women's equality, gender equality, and financial equality play out in Iceland. So is it possible to have a more equitable society? Yes, says Iceland. Not that they don't have problems, it's not a

utopia. I've been there several times, and what's always impressed me about it is the resources are fairly sparse. They don't have a lot of stuff to make stuff out of, but what they have, they use. So you can get baked seaweed jewelry there. Pretty interesting place. Maybe only work so well because it's not huge. CB Yeah, that often seems to be a secret of highly solidarity-oriented societies. DG It doesn't always work. So Scotland wasn't huge, but they're always having battles. CB That's true too. How about children's books? Are there two children's books that you've just loved over the years? DG Am I allowed to say Charlotte's Web?

CB Absolutely. DG Okay, I'm saying Charlotte's Web, about a spider who saves the life of a pig doomed for slaughter, interestingly enough through words. So the spider manages to tell a story about the pig that makes him exceptional. Isn't that? It's a good use of words. So that dare we delve into Lord of the Rings. Is that a children's book? It is if you say it is. If I say it is. It doesn't have sex in it, so maybe it's a children's book. Yeah, I got really interested in it because of my 19th century studies. So it uses a lot of memes that occur earlier in 19th century fantasy. And the supernatural female tomb-dwelling figure in Rider Hagger, she splits into two and becomes two supernatural female figures in Lord of the Rings. One is a

good supernatural figure called Galadriel. She has the very same forecasting water pool mirror that she has. And the other one becomes a carnivorous, evil, huge spider creature called Shelob. Anyway, a lot of the antecedents to Lord of the Rings are pretty interesting to me. CB Ranere Margaret Atwood, your new book is Burning Questions. What a pleasure. Thank you so much. Margaret Atwood And a pleasure to talk to you and good luck with everything that you're doing and also with the rest of your life. The Ezra Klancho is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roger Karma, Andy Galvin, and Jeff Geld. Fact check by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair, and Mary Marge Locker.

Original music is by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Christine Samuelski, Coral Anne Howells, and Brooks Bussen.