On this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion writers David Wallace-Wells and Michelle Cottle join the columnist David French to discuss why this “especially messy” war of choice could reshape the global economy and why the biggest effects may still be ahead. “I don’t think that anyone in the Trump administration adequately game-planned for that, which is a huge indictment of them,” argues Wallace-Wells. Plus, amid the turmoil, there may be one unexpected silver lining: an acceleration of the transition to green energy.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion, and I am here today with the fabulous columnist David French and the equally fabulous Times Opinion science writer David Wallace-Wells, who writes a lot about climate change, technology and, generally, the future of the planet. Guys, welcome. How’s everybody?
David French: Michelle, great to see ya.
David Wallace-Wells: Good to be here.
Cottle: All right. So, it’s going to be complicated because I’ve got two Davids today, so you’re just going to have to pay attention. Bear with me. Today, we’re going to talk about the state of the war in Iran, the price of oil — David Wallace-Wells even has a silver lining for us. So we’ve got a lot to cover. Let’s get to it.
Donald Trump recently referred to the Iran war as a “skirmish,” which sounds to me a little bit like something that happens at a soccer match. But also this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Operation Epic Fury has concluded. So, David French, what word would you use to talk about the war right now? Where do things stand? With the usual caveat that we are taping this on a Thursday morning.
French: So, I’m going to cheat and go with two words: confusing mess. I don’t think that anybody really can definitively say right now, maybe even people in the government, what’s the status of the negotiations. What are the true sticking points on the deal? What are the actual red lines that the parties have? There’s just an enormous amount of confusion, and at the end of the day, I don’t know — I don’t think anybody really knows where we’re going to end up.
I mean, I’ve heard everything from, “Well, we’re going to reach an agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz” — which just restores status quo antebellum — “but we’re going to table everything else for now.” Which then leads us into this question of, what did we really, truly accomplish of lasting value, on the multiple items that the administration has put forward: ending the nuclear program, ending support for proxies, destroying the missile capacity, sinking the navy, etc.? They seem to have accomplished one of those things — sinking the navy — but everything else has not been accomplished. All I can think to say is “confusing mess,” as of today.
Cottle: David Wallace-Wells?
Wallace-Wells: One lasting impact that we do seem to have achieved is to have put much of the global economy in a chokehold. Now, that wasn’t the intent at the outset, but I think that might be as lasting an impact as anything that was undertaken by the military directly. And we’re a little bit short of seeing the ultimate impacts of that around the world.
And in the U.S., most analysts and experts think that the effects of the closure of the strait have yet to really hit Americans in particular, but to some lesser extent Europe and other parts of the world. And so, it may well be that we haven’t even really seen the main story of this war quite yet, and that the economic impacts that do arrive over the next month or several months, may loom a lot larger than the hot war that we fought a few weeks ago.
Cottle: OK. David Wallace-Wells, I want you to dig into that, because you recently wrote that this is not going to be a forever war like earlier wars in the Middle East: it’s going to be an “everything war.” So, let’s just go hard on that. Tell me what this means.
Wallace-Wells: Well, I think that at the outset of the war, someone who was a skeptic would have said that the worst-case scenario was something like the conflicts that we got involved in, in Iraq and Afghanistan; that something that we thought was going to be a relatively easy campaign, in which American forces just overwhelmed the other side, but then we got tangled up into the political complications of a real mess around the world.
That was sort of the worst-case scenario. And that hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s going to happen. But something else happened, which is that Iran very quickly demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. And the result of that is really quite large and significant.
I also think it’s kind of profound, in the sense that we spent much of the last decade telling ourselves that the era of globalization was over. Covid-19 was supposedly pushing us toward more supply chain resilience. And here we find ourselves — as a planet, as a global economy — held hostage by one particular conflict in one particular part of the world. And I don’t think that anyone in the Trump administration adequately game-planned for that, which is a huge indictment of them.
But I also think they’re still acting as though many of those impacts aren’t quite real, because when they look on their Bloomberg terminal, the price of oil is up but not up that dramatically. The effect on the stock market on some days is visible, on some days it’s not visible. And they really do think that those sort of secondary indicators represent the ultimate economic impact of the war, rather than the on-the-ground real-life effects that we’ve already seen in Asia and Southeast Asia and that we are going to increasingly be seeing in Europe and the Americas.
Cottle: So, because I like to have very specific things to panic about, do you want to just give me some of the lagging downstream things that I should be freaking out about, please?
Wallace-Wells: The thing that’s most distressing, I think, is the fertilizer stuff. I just saw some recent survey that said that, basically, 70 percent of American farmers can’t afford fertilizer this planting season. Now, I tend to think that surveys like that usually overstate the panic.
But then elsewhere in the world, where farmers don’t have nearly the buffer capacity that American farmers do — say, across Africa — there are going to be real huge consequences to price spikes for fertilizer. And the effects of this war — the downstream effects of this war — are really quite grim. We could be talking about tens of millions of additional people suffering extreme hunger or being forced into, or close to, famine as a result of this fertilizer consequence, which again, isn’t even on the Trump administration’s radar, as far as I can tell.
But there are also a lot more trivial consequences. The world’s biggest condom makers are raising the price of condoms —
Cottle: This is not trivial. No, no.
Wallace-Wells: Well, in a certain way it isn’t trivial. The condom maker that most famously raised the price is also one that donates a huge amount of condoms for the prevention of S.T.D.s in the developing world.
Cottle: Exactly.
Wallace-Wells: So, there may be genuine public health catastrophes that come out of this.
I mean, there’s almost no product that you look at and think that this is completely unaffected by the supply of any of the things that are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz. And that means that, to some degree, everything is going to get at least more expensive and maybe somewhat short of supply. Exactly how we manage that is an open question. But the experts are really ringing the alarm and telling us that quite a lot of stuff is going to be quite bad. At the very least, we know that the Gulf countries — almost all of them, maybe all of them — are going to be experiencing a recession this year as a result of this war.
So, Donald Trump launched a war of choice, basically unprompted by, or unprovoked by — in my view — an adversary, and with very little understanding or appreciation for the fact that war is messy. And this war, in this place, against this adversary, would get especially messy.
Cottle: David French, did you want to throw in with that?
French: Yeah, a couple things here. It’s really important to note that we are plunging, potentially plunging, part of the world — if not much of the world over time — into recession, on a war of our choice that we did not consult with our allies on.
And what’s compounding it is that we did this to them, and right now cannot turn around and look at those same allies and say, “Well, ultimately, you’ll thank us,” or “Ultimately, we did you a favor.” It would be one situation if the global economy was cracking, and there were strains and you’d have a new regime in Iran, or total assurance that there was no nuclear program, or absolute assurance that Iran was not going to be regionally destabilizing the Middle East anymore. But we’ve got the instability from the war, but without the victory in the war.
And so, you’ll notice that the language from the administration is really narrowing. They’re really narrowing down to the nuclear program. It’s nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. Well, rhetorically, that’s a very clever strategy on two fronts: One, nobody wants a nuclear Iran.
But then, number two, nuclear Iran has been the Lucy with the football. For year after year, after year, after year we’ve heard the same thing: Iran is two weeks away, Iran is three months away, Iran is four months away. Nobody knows what’s true about Iran and the nuclear program. Because remember: We were just told a little bit ago that this same nuclear program had been obliterated.
And there’s one last thing on this I would say — and I’ve long been a hawk on Iran. If you brought the right case to me with the right plan, the right exit strategy, and I was a senator, there are definitely circumstances I would have voted “yes.”
But you can want something done to Iran and realize that this team, this leadership, is not up to it, right? That you can take something that’s a defensible idea in the abstract — with the right plans, the right leadership, etc. — and you put the wrong plans and the wrong leadership, and you’ve just rendered it a disaster. Just a total disaster.
Cottle: Thank you, because I think we’ve talked about this a little bit before. I was of that mind way back during the Iraq war, when the George W. Bush administration did not seem to be making the best possible case for it. And who’s doing the work matters. It’s not just whether the philosophical concept or —
French: Yeah, exactly.
Cottle: Or the argument is great. Who’s actually going to execute is a huge chunk of the game. Come on.
French: Imagine a battle where there is an attack on a flank that is necessary, and you’re a subordinate, you’re proposing it to your commander, and you say, “We need to attack the right flank.” OK, who’s going to lead the charge? May I introduce you to Bozo the Clown? No, no. Not that plan.
Cottle: No, I’m good. Yeah.
French: We’re not doing that. Who’s executing matters. It really matters.
Cottle: David Wallace-Wells?
Wallace-Wells: I’m, I think, a little bit less of a hawk on this than you guys are. We’ve learned something, through this war, about what was possible six months ago or a year ago, or three years ago, about Iran. And that is to say, Iran has proven itself a much more capable adversary than almost anyone in the military community understood or was properly planning for. And that is not just about Iran itself. I think we’re learning something very fundamental about the changing nature of contemporary warfare, which we probably should have learned watching Russia and Ukraine, and with the failed American campaign against the Houthis last year, where, in a very similar situation, we went in with a billion-dollar military offensive and actually got our butts handed to us by a bunch of people flying low-cost drones into our incredibly high-priced military material.
And what we’re learning from all of these encounters is that the superiority which Americans used to assume gave them the power, if not the right, to inflict military damage on almost any country around the world, is not nearly as large. Our superiority is not nearly as clear in many of these conflicts as we assumed. I think the result of that, or what should be the result of that, is that we understand that there’s a shrinking superpower advantage around the world; that almost any country, with a relatively capable industrial base, can resist attacks from a major force like America.
And in this context, what that means is that whatever the state of the Iranian nuclear weapon, they actually had what the former Russian president called the Hormuz weapon, or the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal in the Strait of Hormuz. Because they’re able to fly low-cost drones into ships that cost hundreds of millions with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil on them, or as we’re learning more and more, against American airplanes, American bases. Over the last week, we’ve seen a bunch of news stories coming out about how much more damage the American military has suffered in this conflict than we were told. It’s kind of shocking.
But we’re learning that this fight was not a dominant military performance. And I think what that tells us is that even six months ago, even three months ago, if this plan had been implemented by much more thoughtful, careful planners, we may still have run into the same trouble that we ran into this time. I don’t think our geopolitics — has really reckoned with just how destabilizing that might be, to think that many more countries are capable of mounting much more successful counteroffensives against the countries that they used to be quite intimidated by.
Cottle: Well, looking at just the Hormuz situation, I get the feeling that maybe even Iran was surprised by how effective this was as a weapon. And I’m wondering, the idea of shutting down sea lanes in a global economy seems like something that you don’t want people to just start doing as a matter of course. And I’m very nervous about what lesson we’ve taught them about how effective this is.
French: To emphasize that — in the three, four weeks, or however long, of intensive combat operations, I don’t think Americans realized the extent that we were subject to Baghdad Bobbery from our own government. And if you remember, the Iraq war in 2003, Baghdad Bob — he was the spokesperson for the Saddam Hussein government. “Everything’s going great.”
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad al Sahaf: We are destroying tanks, personnel carriers, killing them and we will continue.
And he’s saying, “Americans are nowhere near us,” etc.
al Sahaf: They are not even a hundred miles or whatever. They are not in any place.
We’re not used to having a Baghdad Bob administration. It’s not that our governments have always been truthful toward us. They have lied. But the sort of comprehensive dishonesty — and this war began with an avalanche of comprehensive dishonesty — essentially calling this a giant rout. Why is the media not reporting more on the incredible success of American arms? When the media was reporting on Americans hitting targets, what we were not reporting on, what was being withheld from us — and is still being withheld from us, but it’s having to leak out, as David was saying, in other ways — is the serious damage that has been done to American facilities.
And this is a new thing. When I was in Iraq, we did worry an awful lot about rocket fire and mortar fire, say, into our bases. We didn’t worry about a comprehensive drone threat that could level our buildings.
And here’s another thing to keep in mind: Russia is looking at this, and looking at Iran’s drone technology, and saying, “That’s ‘Romper Room.’ That’s kindergarten compared to what we have.” Right now, Russia and Ukraine are, I would say, by far the two most advanced and evolved land armies in the world; to the point where I think if any other land army — and I’m putting an emphasis on that because Russia can’t match us in the air, can’t match us at sea — but if any other land army, that has not been engaged in this kind of drone warfare, were to take on Ukraine or Russia right now, it would be horrific what would happen.
And so, we’ve got these two adversaries, and — we had to call Ukraine to help. The Gulf countries had to call on Ukraine to help, and Russia’s looking at it and saying: “Ha, you need Ukraine’s help to face Iran? Imagine if you faced us.” And look, again, I’m not saying that Russia can match our Air Force, our Navy, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not ready, and we have demonstrated that we are not ready for this new warfare.
Wallace-Wells: And you’re talking about Russia, but when I speak to military analysts, they say, “This has really spooked us about China.” A lot of brainpower has been spent over the last half decade or decade, war gaming and planning for possible conflict over Taiwan. And they say, “How could we possibly pretend to be capable of defending Taiwan when we can’t even protect our ships from Iranian drones?”
The Chinese are much more capable than Iran is, and we’d be exposed in a much more obvious way through any kind of military support we are giving to Taiwan.
Now, I don’t know how long this dynamic will last. I expect that the American military is learning these lessons, these hard lessons, pretty quickly, and that we will be doing a lot more in low-cost — they call it “attritable” — drone technology; having weapons that we’re comfortable losing as opposed to needing to fly home because they cost tens of millions of dollars or more. But that’s still probably a few years away. And in the meantime, I think we’re in a situation where not just the United States, but all of the world’s superpowers are looking around thinking that the landscape of warfare really has changed.
Some new land has been broken in the Ukraine conflict, and we’re all just playing catch-up.
French: And you have this war between Russia and Ukraine — the first war in this very modern era between two advanced countries, and what is one of the first things you learn? You just need a whole bunch of stuff, like a lot of artillery shells, a lot of drones, a lot of missiles.
And, and I would question, honestly, if China’s looking at what’s happening and asking themselves, “Do we have enough stuff?” And I think what you’re going to be seeing is a lot of powers in the world putting their foot on the gas. You’re already seeing it on one of the largest peacetime expansions in military spending that we’ve seen, proportionally, since, say, before World War II.
And I’m just wondering, Michelle and David, as all these world powers are pressing the gas militarily, as we’ve had aggressive warfare in Ukraine, as we’ve seen this war in Iran — who’s tapping the brakes? Is anyone not named Pope Leo tapping the brakes? Is anyone tapping the brakes here? And that’s what really alarms me.
We’re in an arms race around the world. If you’re going to say there are three powers that stand above the rest — Russia, China, United States — each one of them is led by a pretty aggressive, bellicose individual. So far the most peaceful seems to be Xi from China at the moment. He hasn’t attacked anybody, but unquestionably he has his goals, he has his ambitions. And this worries me in an August of 1914 sense. I’m not saying we’re headed in that direction, but one of the dynamics that we had, leading up to World War I, was all of these great powers that were pressing the gas and nobody was pressing the brakes. And that’s what the geopolitical situation seems like today.
Cottle: So, is there a way, domestically, for the brakes to get tapped? I mean, David French, you follow Trump world and MAGA. What is the political fallout, if any, that the administration is looking at? Is it anything that they care about? We’ve talked about all these affordability issues, gas prices — are they suffering any real blowback?
French: You know, it’s interesting. If people are economically insecure, they get ticked off by everything. So, if you’re feeling pessimistic about your personal finances, then all of a sudden you get more worried about what’s happening in the Middle East, or you’re more alarmed by corruption. If you’re feeling really great about yourself financially, you have a much higher tolerance for the corruption of your leaders, etc. This is a sad reality that we’ve seen.
And so, what I would say is the level of accountability that Trump will face for his foreign policy misadventures is going to be very much related to the level of satisfaction that Americans feel about domestic policy. And so, it’s all linked. It’s all related. So, I think that one of the disadvantages and problems that the Trump administration has right now is that this is one of those foreign issues that — as David has written about so well — is going to impact that domestic situation in a way that even the Iraq war in 2003, or the Afghan war in 2001, would not. And so, this could be, politically, a perfect storm for him — a strategic error that results in economic blowback at home, and he’ll be held accountable for all of it.
Cottle: I want to do one stab at finding a silver lining in this before we move on, which is, David Wallace-Wells, you’ve written that one of the potential positives of the war is a boost, an acceleration in the shift to green energy globally, including in the U.S. Are we seeing concrete changes? I mean, do we really attribute those to what’s going on with the war?
Wallace-Wells: Well, I would start where we were before the war, because I think a lot of Americans, and probably a lot of listeners, think that the Trump victory marked a big retreat on the green transition, especially in the U.S., but to a lesser extent around the world — that this marked a turn away from solar and wind, and back toward an embrace of fossil fuels.
Cottle: Well, that’s because he’s paying them not to do wind farms, right? He’s, like, sending all these signals.
Wallace-Wells: I think he’s paying the wind companies more to abandon their projects than we invest in renewable research and development in total. Donald Trump is not a fan of the green transition; his administration has not been friendly in general. Although, I will say, I think the vibe shift here suggested that we had been through a period of climate alarm, climate action, and now we were turning against that and retreating back into a fossil fuel past.
And that just isn’t the case. Last year, 90 percent of new energy infrastructure in America was green. Ninety percent, which means that for every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we built, we built nine times as much green stuff. Around the world, the share is even larger. It’s like 93 percent, which means we’re building so much more green energy than we’re building any of the dirty stuff anywhere in the world. If this is a race measured year by year, green energy is absolutely obliterating fossil fuels. And I do think that the war is accelerating that. You see that when you look at the shipment of coal around the world — which was expected at the outset of the war to go up, because there’d be this shortage of oil and gas, and countries would need to rely more on coal.
In fact, it’s been the opposite. The shipment of coal has dropped since the war began. And especially when you look year on year, the drops are quite dramatic. The exports from China, of solar powers around the world, have seen a dramatic spike. All of these things — you know, we’re still working on the margins. The global energy system is still heavily fossil fuel-dependent. But if we told ourselves a story a year, or year and a half ago, that the progress that was being made in 2022, 2023, 2024 was now going to stop because of political considerations in the U.S. and around the world, I think basically the opposite has happened. And we’re seeing, I think most encouragingly, that this is happening not just in rich countries, that have a lot of cash to spare and indulge their own moralistic energy spending, but in parts of the world that are really pinched.
One of the most dramatic turnarounds in recent years was in Pakistan, which had suffered energy blackouts because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the way that this disrupted energy markets a few years ago. They responded to that not even through public policy, not through national policy, but at the level of individual consumers buying solar panel imports from China and throwing them on their roofs. And, as a result, they basically doubled the electricity capacity of the country.
Nepal! Seventy-six percent of the cars that were sold in Nepal last year were E.V.s. And that really breaks a paradigm that I think many of us in the Global North took for granted for a long time, that it’s going to be the rich countries of the world that really led the way, and if we brought the poor countries along, it would have to be us bringing the poor countries along. And as it turns out, we may be helping them, but we’re helping them by staging a war that makes it obvious and undeniably expensive to continue to depend on the old fossil fuel systems, and suggests, very clearly, that there are obvious cheap alternatives, which, in addition to being cleaner and healthier, also mean that your energy supply is actually domestic and domestically controlled.
You don’t have to rely on tankers coming in. You don’t have to rely on coal being shipped in. You can just turn your solar panel toward the sun, and the energy that comes from that is never going to end.
Cottle: OK, there’s my silver lining. David French, did you want to throw in anything there?
French: I just want to hold out some degree of hope that there will be some military success that matters here; that there will be a perhaps, you can never say permanent, but very long-term reduction in the ability of Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability. I think that’s the reasonable best-case scenario militarily, that we have in fact substantially degraded their ability to break out a nuclear weapon. But again, I don’t know. I don’t know that we have, and if Baghdad Bob tells us we have, I don’t know when to believe him, so.
Wallace-Wells: Also, there’s a perverse consequence here, which is that other countries around the world are thinking, “Wow, America really started laying off North Korea when they got their nukes.” You’ve heard talk from France, from Poland. There are countries that are restarting, or going to expand, their nuclear programs. I think one lesson that countries around the world may take from this is that it’s really useful, geopolitically, to get over that nuclear finish line and have the weapon as opposed to being in this limbo, where you’re constantly a threat from American attack and American pressure.
French: Look, if you are an advanced nation with a capacity to build a nuclear weapon, which is going to be a whole lot of countries, this is 1945 technology here. You’re looking at what has happened globally in the last five years. There is enormous incentive to pursue a nuclear weapon. And as David said, we’re already seeing, for example, France going to expand its nuclear arsenal for the first time in a very long time. We’ve seen videos, for example, of France commissioning a new nuclear-powered submarine.
These are their ballistic missile submarines, with the president of France there singing “La Marseillaise,” and it’s put out like a propaganda video. Like, “Look how great and powerful we are.” You know, clearly trying to send a message of French deterrence. But think about how different that is from everything that we’ve experienced since the end of the Cold War. This is what I’m talking about, people putting their foot on the gas rather than the brake. Western powers were not necessarily rolling out these big propaganda videos saying, “Look at the strength of our nuclear arsenal.” We were in a disarmament phase. We were hopefully rolling back from the brinksmanship that each one of us grew up in. Well, David, you may not have had the duck-and-cover kind of drills. You’re a little younger.
Wallace-Wells: I’m an end-of-the-Cold-War kid.
French: But I remember — and Michelle, I don’t know if you remember — “The Day After,” the TV movie about nuclear war. I went to school the next day, and it was like a hushed tone in the halls. People were so stunned and shocked by what they’d seen on television. And rolling back into that world, where the great powers are beefing up nuclear arsenals, and other great powers are considering — we are seeing Japan re-arming, we’re seeing South Korea become a home of naval shipbuilding. It’s all over the globe.
Cottle: OK. Well, that is certainly uplifting. You want to throw anything else before we go?
Wallace-Wells: I did want to say one other thing: When David was talking about who’s going to step in and stand against militarization, and stand against geopolitical fragmentation — one of the things that worries me most, in that context, is that in 2017, in 2018, the Trump administration was doing a lot of similar damage to America’s allies and standing in the world. But those countries had a relatively copacetic attitude because they thought this was an anomaly, that this was going to end; if we wait this out, we can restore the old American-led order that we had been living in under Barack Obama. And, to some extent, that was achieved under Joe Biden. We could have a whole other conversation about that.
But I think the worrying thing now is that many of these countries are just not going to be interested in American leadership in the same way, even if a new American president devoted himself to cultivating it. And where that leads the world, I think, is a big open question. For some countries, it may be a happy, opportunistic moment, to not live so much under watch of American power. But overall, I think it’s going to be quite messy and hazardous, and I don’t see an easy way to put the pieces of the puzzle back together again.
Cottle: All right. That’s it. I’m calling it. No more. Before we lead our audience to just give up all hope, we are going to pivot to everybody’s favorite —
Wallace-Wells: I’m a famously hopeful person, yeah.
Cottle: I mean, you’re going to give David French a run for his money in the area of “let’s go dark.” Pivot! David Wallace-Wells, you’ve got to start. It’s recommendations — guest goes first. What do you have for us? Watch, eat, read, listen to? Talk to me.
Wallace-Wells: I’m going to make a somewhat more provincial recommendation, which is for a play that’s on in New York, which is called “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” by the playwright Wallace Shawn, who’s one of my favorite writers. He’s known to most Americans as the Vizzini character from “The Princess Bride,” as an actor. He was also in “Clueless.” I have little kids, and he seems to be the voice in, like, half of the kids’ shows on television. He was also the son of the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, and has had a fascinating downtown theater life. He writes a lot and talks a lot about his political awakening.
This new play is much more personal, and it is really about his childhood, which is to say growing up with a famous New York father, who was having a public affair and navigating all of the interpersonal complexities of that dynamic. I found it absolutely mesmerizing, pummeling, and I would extremely, highly recommend it, as I would everything that Wally has done.
Cottle: OK. David French.
French: I’m going with a comedy, Michelle, that’s a lot of fun. It’s called “Rooster” on HBO. And it’s Steve Carell, and he is a not-that-recently divorced writer, who is kind of coerced into becoming a visiting professor at a small college, where his daughter teaches. And it is really well done, and it does something that very few shows set on a college campus can achieve, which is to make the students not annoying. Because a lot of these college shows, all the students are just jammed into a box. You’ve got your frat guys, you’ve got your super woke student — they’re these one-dimensional figures, right?
Well, you’ve got your very political students, you’ve got your frat types, your partying type, but they’re richer, more complex human beings and more interesting to watch. And Steve Carell’s fantastic. The actress playing his daughter — I haven’t seen her in too many things — she’s really, really, really good. So, I highly recommend “Rooster,” on HBO. Really good.
Cottle: That’s on my list. I’ve been meaning to watch that.
So, I’m going with a book. Tana French is out with the last installment of what is known as the Cal Hooper trilogy. So, French writes these crime novels set in Ireland, and the last three of them have been set in this tiny little town, I think it’s Ardnakelty.
And she is a crime writer, a mystery writer, but really she’s just next level. These are studies, character studies. It’s like the fabric of life in this tiny little rural Irish enclave. This one starts with a missing girl who turns up dead, and then you have to figure out not just who did it or why, but also what the bigger implications are for the entire town.
She’s one of those writers who, when I start reading the book, I immediately get lost in the writing, but also immediately start casting for what I hope will be the Netflix miniseries. So, get out there, read these books, and then you can hit me with your recommendations for who should play the characters.
And with that, guys, we’re going to land this plane. We have covered as much of the Iran war as, I think, we can for one week. I want to thank you for coming in, David Wallace-Wells, and solving the world’s problems with us. Let’s do it again very soon.
French: Thanks, Michelle.
Wallace-Wells: Good to be with you, guys. Thanks again.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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