President Trump’s call to de-escalate tensions in Minneapolis was short lived, but anger over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti continues to grow. At this week’s round table, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle and the columnists David French and Jamelle Bouie look at how bipartisan criticism of ICE’s aggression could fuel the demand for accountability and debate the best path forward for the Democratic Party.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 this week I am joined by the usual suspects, the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French. Guys, good to see you. I trust you’re staying warm in all of this?
David French: Well, I am in New Hampshire, where, as we record right now, it is a balmy six degrees.
Cottle: Oh, dear God.
French: Which, believe it or not, is warmer than it was in parts of the time when I was in Nashville, and warmer than it’s been in parts of Chicago. So I’m enjoying the weather.
Cottle: Jamelle, what about you? How’s Virginia?
Jamelle Bouie: It’s like 20 degrees. It’s a little warmer, but it’s icy.
Cottle: You should be in short sleeves, outside.
Bouie: You know, even in the summer, I don’t wear short sleeves. I spent two hours yesterday with an ice pick trying to get the ice off my driveway, so very exciting.
Cottle: Oh, well done.
Today we are going to look at the icy confrontation in Minnesota, where we’re looking at the wake of the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and we’re going to talk about specifically how the Trump administration is scrambling to do some damage control.
Now, of course, we are recording this on Thursday morning. Some things are almost certain to have changed or gone sideways, flipped, inverted, by the time you hear this. The last week has been especially fraught in the country, and folks are feeling like there’s a tipping point coming for the Trump administration’s maximalist immigration plans. So first I want to know: What do you guys think? Is there actually change in the air?
Bouie: I think you have to look at this two ways. First, on the ground, it’s clear that the administration isn’t really pulling back. There’s been this talk of a new tone, of a new approach, but they’re still snatching people off the street. They’re still using intimidating tactics; they’re still doing this stuff. They’re still using ICE less as immigration enforcement and more as a secret police harassing people. So that hasn’t changed.
But the other kind of perspective to look at is just the larger political perspective, and looking at things in Washington. I think it is quite clear that the administration is on the back foot. That the response — especially to the killing of Alex Pretti, but really both Good and Pretti, and them happening so close together — I think really surprised the administration. I don’t think they quite understood the level of discontent and anger there is in the public. And I think that we’re witnessing an administration trying to recover its ground politically; and it has lost real ground politically.
You have a handful of Republican senators talking about how Kristi Noem has to resign. There’s a real push to get some accountability from the administration that I don’t think they were anticipating, and I think represents a real political defeat and the failure of this operation in Minnesota, even if they’re still doing what they’ve been doing.
French: I’m going to take a little bit of a bleak and cynical approach to what we’re witnessing.
Cottle: How unusual for you.
French: Well, this isn’t my first rodeo. We’ve been watching these guys for 10 years now, so when I think about what’s happening, I think of the Trumpist authoritarianism as a big stream or current of water. And what happens is that water always finds a way; it always finds the weak point. But if you erect a dam or if you erect a barrier, it will back up in one area but then it flows where it’s weak. And so I think what you’re seeing is that you have this big, authoritarian river of Trumpism, and at different places and at different times, different people can throw up a barrier.
They throw up a dam, and I think the people of Minnesota have responded in a way that I think is heroically peaceful. And when you do that, it creates a dynamic that puts the administration, temporarily, on a bit of a back foot. So what you see in some ways is a cosmetic tactical retreat. Why do I say cosmetic? Because, as Jamelle was saying, on the ground, not a whole lot has changed. But sort of in the air, in the public, there’s this sense that he took a blow. When Gregory Bovino is reassigned or maybe about to retire, depending on the reporting, that’s largely cosmetic. If Kristi Noem comes in for a two-hour scolding in the Oval Office, that’s mainly cosmetic.
But so long as Stephen Miller is the man behind the curtain, so to speak, and he and Trump are simpatico, you’re going to be dealing with that authoritarian wave. And in Minnesota, they put up a little bit of a dam there. It was able to sort of rechannel Trump. But what I’m concerned about is that we keep looking at these things — what happened in Minnesota, what happened here, what happened here — and then view them too discretely on occasion. When they’re really all part of a larger whole.
Bouie: I don’t think I am looking at them discretely. I think I’m trying to make a larger sense. You mentioned a tactical retreat. I’m asking myself: What are the strategic goals for both the opposition to Trump and for the administration itself?
For the administration itself, the strategic goal, the reason why they’re doing these operations, the reason why they’ve taken such a draconian and harsh and violent line against the opposition is that they want to get rid of dissent. They want to pacify the public. They want to make sure that there’s no meaningful opposition to their authoritarian designs.
And then for the opposition, obviously, for the people of Minnesota, the strategic goal is quite narrow: Get ICE and Customs and Border Protection out of Minnesota. But broadly speaking, for the opposition of Trump, it’s to neutralize, as much as possible, Trump’s ability to achieve his authoritarian designs.
If you look at this from a strategic perspective, I actually think this is a real defeat. Authoritarian states are quite brittle. That’s part of the consequence of them not having any kind of pressure release for public discontent. And authoritarian regimes are actually quite reliant on maintaining their standing with the entire public and not just small segments of it.
When you look at it from that larger picture, the result of the Alex Pretti killing has been broad public discontent with the administration. People who aren’t ordinarily involved in politics, be it their platforms or whatever, they’re giving clear statements about what their political views of the administration are. And I think that the extent to which Pretti’s killing in particular has basically both revealed for large portions of the public what the administration’s designs are and hardened opposition to the administration, that even if they still have these authoritarian designs, even if they still want to create the perception of a wave, I think the fact of the matter is that they’ve suffered a serious setback in terms of accomplishing their strategic goal.
French: I agree. I do think that they have suffered a setback. I don’t think there’s much question. I will tell you that I’m haunted by the fact that after Jan. 6, if you surveyed an awful lot of people, they would have said: Look, right there in front of all of our eyes is the true nature of MAGA aggression revealed to the extent that they have invaded our Capitol to try to overturn an election. Many Republicans broke ranks on that day. There was this sense — and Mitch McConnell’s fateful mistake is rooted in this — that the work had been done, that Trump himself had sort of shown his true colors. And now the process of politics was going to run its course against him.
I think what we’ve realized is that it doesn’t work with him. In hindsight, if you’re looking from that 30,000-foot view, what so many people got wrong on Jan. 7, 8, 9 and 10 was thinking he had absorbed this really tremendous defeat — that his true colors had been displayed to the whole world. And instead of pouring unto the breach in the MAGA lines, so to speak, and moving with extreme ferocity to exploit the weakness that was so obvious in the Trump administration at that point, a lot of the reaction was more like: Aha, now politics is going to work.
And I’m still upset that, for example, when the momentum was there, the impeachment drive was still not pushed with the necessary speed and vigor. The criminal investigations were slow — slow, slow, slow. A lot of that was because people thought: Well, now we see. Now we know. I just don’t want to get into that mind-set in Minnesota, where we think: Now we see, now we know. It’s much more like: There’s a weakness here. They’ve overreached. They’ve overstretched. And now is the time to redouble efforts.
Cottle: Let me jump in and ask if there is a difference this time because of the political landscape right now. So, post-Jan. 6, Trump was out of office. The Republicans were feeling like, well, maybe we just humor him right now. And then he goes away. Nobody thinks that anymore. And for the longest time Republicans have been operating on the assumption that their only risk politically to their fortunes is if they don’t back Trump enough.
In this case, they are seeing from this public reaction the potential downsides to having hitched their wagon to this authoritarian nightmare. And so you do see people in Congress pushing back. So I’m just wondering if, because the kind of landscape is so different this time, people are kind of approaching it more cautiously, but with more seriousness?
Bouie: I think that is the question. I agree with David very much that there was this moment of opportunity after Jan. 6 to put the stake in the heart of MAGA, to really knock out Trump as a viable political figure, but it required a quick, aggressive action. And they didn’t do it, I think, for exactly the reasons that David described. There was this sense that, oh, well, this is so egregious that we know how American politics works. And so egregious that he’ll just fade away.
There was a real lack of understanding. I think that that’s actually not how American politics works; that’s not how it’s ever worked. If you want to defeat someone, you actually have to defeat them in a proactive way. And the question I think for this moment is whether or not Trump’s opponents — and especially Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party — understand this.
I think that there are prominent and important voices in the Democratic Party, especially in Congress, who are still wedded to this old model of what they think American politics is, where something terrible happens and everyone agrees that the other side is bad or is in the wrong. And that’s just not the case. So that’s the big question of the political moment: Do people actually understand what David is describing in terms of what needs to be done?
Cottle: So let’s talk about the Democrats’ reaction in Congress, which is where they have a little bit of leverage right now. The immediate plan seems to be to block D.H.S. funding if necessary, even forcing a partial shutdown, unless and until some guardrails are put on ICE. Do you guys think this is practical, sensible, ridiculous? What?
French: I think if the Democrats don’t take strong action, it’s a big problem for them. It needs to be strong, but it also needs to be something that can really reach and persuade the normie voters who are tuning in right now and not liking what they’re seeing. Something very direct: no masks, no immunities, no home invasions. In other words, you look at all of these things — the real hallmarks of what’s tyrannizing our communities — and you say no to each one of them.
And you make the Republican Party go out there and defend masked police. Make the Republican Party go out there and defend administrative warrants that are not ——
Cottle: Well, shooting somebody because they show up at a protest with a gun? Come on!
French: But the right’s going to defend that even though they might say: Oh, well, I don’t defend that shooting, but I want ICE to have full freedom. No, no. Make them defend all of these things that are grossly unconstitutional. Make them defend, for example, shackling and detaining lawful refugees who have done nothing wrong at all, and sending them down for detention in Texas for a re-examination of their case.
I think it’s: You have your list of the most reasonable demands, which in any constitutional republic should be completely acceptable. And then make the Republicans defend the indefensible.
Bouie: I agree completely. I think the political task is to make Republicans defend masked agents — masked paramilitaries, really. Make them defend the roving bands and the use of administrative warrants, which I’m glad you pointed that out, David. Forcing ICE or C.B.P. to get actual judicial warrants to conduct arrests may seem minor, but first of all, it puts a real limit on what they can do, because that takes time. And second, it helps ordinary Americans defend their rights.
On the left, there’s real ridicule of the idea that you should impose any new training requirements. But I think you can actually use training requirements to, again, reduce the speed at which ICE can operate.
French: Oh yeah.
Bouie: If you require them to double the length of training, make it like 180 days, you need half a year to get properly trained to do this work. Then you can just reduce their manpower and reduce the rate at which they can deploy new people.
I think those things would be popular, and they would serve to at least reduce the amount of harm being done. From my perspective, from my politics, they’re not a solution to the basic problem. I think the basic problem is having this kind of agency at all; I don’t think this kind of agency should exist. But given the political situation, these are achievable things you can do that can weaken the agency until it can be dealt with in a more appropriate manner.
Cottle: In the interest of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, I do think that the training should not be pooh-poohed. Because if you watch these things, these ICE agents look like they’ve been sent out in the field with — like they’ve been jacked up to believe they’re going into some incredibly dangerous war zone. They look like they’re on a hair trigger. They would do well to spend more time, and you’d have to, of course, make sure the training was appropriate. But I think that part of the problem is these guys are just not equipped for this.
French: I’m so with you on this training point, and the other thing I want to say, just for those listeners who might be saying: Oh, these three New York Times elitists sitting in their comfy chairs, opining about street tactics — guys, I’ve been in far more dangerous situations when I was in Iraq than what has happened on the streets of Minneapolis. I know what it’s like when young, very disciplined Americans are exposed to extreme violence, and we didn’t act like that. So this sort of idea that ICE has no choice but to be so aggressive when all of these people are blowing whistles and blocking them in the road and — spare me, spare me.
I have seen younger Americans in far more dangerous situations, infinitely more dangerous situations, exercise far more restraint and compassion and discipline than we’re seeing. So this is not just, oh, pundits, divorced from reality. No, no, no, no. I want everyone to realize you can deal with far more dangerous situations with far less force than we’re seeing. I know this. I’ve seen this with my own eyes, and when you see these videos and you have experience dealing with more dangerous situations, trust me, it’s more shocking.
Bouie: I want to say one more thing about the training thing to clarify my position here, which is that I actually do not think it is possible to do any kind of training that will change the character of this agency. ICE has always had this kind of reputation for brutality. ICE has always been the subject of real criticism about its operations. I think that when you look at what Miller and Trump want out of the agency, even with new training requirements, they’re still going to be looking for goon-ish men to participate in these processes.
So for me, I think that the goal here, the end point, looking five years down the road, is that ICE doesn’t exist anymore. That we find some other way to do immigration enforcement that does not rely on paramilitaries, that does not rely on these staged raids, that does not rely on this construct of undocumented immigrants as an existential threat to the United States. And so any force we use to get rid of them is acceptable. No, none of that. So for me, all of this stuff is really — it’s like a holding maneuver while you try to get the political power necessary to, again, do something fundamental about this agency, fundamental about the Department of Homeland Security, fundamental about Customs and Border Protection.
Cottle: But I think we’re all in agreement we’re not going to come out in support of the whole “abolish ICE” as a mantra. That just seems like it’s a disaster politically because it lacks the nuance.
Bouie: Are we all in agreement?
Cottle: You think that’s great? I mean, even if you ——
French: I don’t love that. I don’t love the “abolish ICE.”
Cottle: Even if you want to remake the agency, the idea of that being anything other than catnip for the right, who is then going to pitch it as: Well, they don’t want any kind of enforcement ——
French: No borders.
Cottle: No borders, no nothing.
Bouie: So two things. First is that I’m not a political strategist. I don’t have a sense of how effective a slogan “abolish ICE” is. If a Democrat says that they don’t want to say it, whatever, they don’t want to say it. But I think that if you are following public sentiment, if you are looking at where the public is and if the public — if ordinary people — are embracing this slogan as something to represent their feelings about the agency, then that’s something to take very seriously. That’s something to take extremely seriously.
And if Republicans want to say, oh, look, they want to get rid of border security, I think you can reject this idea that Republicans are the prime movers of American politics and that they ——
Cottle: Well, Democrats certainly haven’t moved American politics in the last few elections.
Bouie: I reject this idea that Republicans are the prime movers of American politics, that their rhetorical strategies are the ones everyone needs to respond to. I think a part of the problem, honestly, is that Democrats all like to take a prone position. Republicans say, oh, they want to get rid of border security, and the response is, Oh, no, no, no, please, we don’t want to do that.
When the response ought to be: You want to defend an agency that’s killed two people, you go ahead and do that. You defend this behavior. We’re listening to people who want to see some fundamental changes. You defend the secret police. I think that’s the response to that.
Cottle: No, no. I totally get the whole “let’s overhaul the agency, rename the agency.” I’m just saying, when you found a slogan like “decriminalize border crossings” or “abolish ICE” or “defund the police,” that has a backlash — a political backlash in the country — then maybe you rethink the slogan, not the idea. But why go trolling for trouble like that?
Bouie: I don’t want to bog us down. I’ll say that the one time “defund the police” was present in American politics in any kind of significant way, which was the summer of 2020, Democrats didn’t lose that election.
Cottle: No, but when it was tried in — never mind. We’re not going to get into the details of how it failed in Minnesota when they tried to defund the police. But I’m just saying that as a mantra, “abolish ICE” has not been fantastic and could just be tweaked. That’s all I’m saying. Tweak the mantra.
OK, we are going to step back from the administration and look at the larger Republican conservative response to this. When you are looking around, David, in your right wing corners and from the administration’s outside allies, what are you seeing?
French: This is one of those areas where you really have to draw a distinction between MAGA and what you might call more normie conservatives. What I’m seeing right now — and I wrote about this — is that all of this is just radicalizing MAGA more. They don’t believe the polls. They don’t care about the polls. What they’re looking for, what they’re spoiling for, is an opportunity to impose further control. So the core folks are further radicalized, and then they use that ferocity to try to keep everybody else in line.
This is the old playbook. It’s the exact same playbook I’ve seen for 10 years: The Trump administration does something horrific that gives decent people an off-ramp, where you can say, look, I voted for him, but this is too much. And this happens with regularity.
The instant somebody puts on their blinker — they’re a quarter mile from the exit, they throw on that right-turn blinker, they just get swarmed. Swarmed in real time. And all of a sudden you’re faced with the loss of your community. You’re faced with the loss of your friends. You’re faced with kinds of attacks you’ve never experienced in your life, because you’re just a normal American who’s not involved in politics all the time. And you do the Homer Simpson GIF thing, where you slowly walk back into the bushes.
And so the question that I have for my friends, my more normal Republican friends who often express alarm at things that happen in the administration, is this: When are you going to stop responding to MAGA backlash with wide eyes and stop backing into the bushes? That’s the moment when I believe the fever will break, when you see more normie Republicans standing up against this in a way that’s not just one senator here or one member of Congress there or one pundit off in a corner, but something more unified and more persistent.
Cottle: Jamelle, you’ve written that there is no antidote for the Kool-Aid drinkers. But you said that you’ve seen some signs of infighting, finger-pointing. We’ve seen some fractures in Congress. Where do you think this is going?
Bouie: I think where this goes depends on the level of political pressure that’s being sustained in the administration. If there’s a real, serious effort to remove Noem, whether that’s an impeachment effort in the House or that’s continuing pressure, I think you’ll continue to see the beginning — more finger-pointing, like you’ve seen in the last couple of days.
Noem reportedly told Axios that she was just working on the command of Stephen Miller, which to me is sort of a sign that says: You want to go after that guy, not me. Stephen Miller has been saying, “I don’t think they were following protocol.” And that’s him pointing fingers at the leaders over ——
Cottle: Yeah, classlessly blaming the front-liners for this horrible development that he’s responsible for.
Bouie: They all recognize that this is something very serious for their political position. And I think that as long as there is increased pressure that is going to put them in a corner, and honestly, the extent to which they are continuing to operate the same on the ground, that’s going to continue putting pressure.
And if Democrats in Congress in particular can see and utilize this energy and follow where this energy is going and put more pressure on the administration, I expect to see basically more attempts to scramble and get ahead of it.
Cottle: I do think it’s worth pointing out that we have seen some concrete moves by the administration. For instance, they’re short-circuiting the anti-immigration operation in Maine.
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: They’ve said they’re going to pull out of Maine, which I didn’t understand that at all.
Bouie: That’s a Susan Collins thing, right?
Cottle: I know!
Bouie: She’s running for re-election. She’s potentially vulnerable, and they don’t want to give ——
Cottle: But why is he attacking?
Bouie: Oh, why is he going into Maine?
Cottle: Why is he sending them in there? Even if he’s ticked off at Susan Collins, and he’s always grumbling about that, they can’t risk Maine. He can attack Bill Cassidy in Louisiana because a Republican is going to win. You take down Susan Collins in Maine, he’s one step closer to a Democratic majority in the Senate.
Bouie: This is the tension between the politics and the ideological and policy desire. So Maine does have a substantial — not huge, but a meaningfully large Somali American population. If you go to Portland, Maine, you’ll see there’s Somali American neighborhoods. You’ll see Somali Americans; there was a home for refugees in the same way as Minnesota was. And so I think the thing that they want to do is — I’m going to use another inflammatory term, but I think it fits ——
Cottle: Oh, please do, please do.
Bouie: They want to ethnically cleanse the country of Somali Americans.
Cottle: Oh, you have to go there?
Bouie: Yes, I mean, listen, they are sending ICE agents to Springfield, Ohio, to round up Haitians. Haitians who are legal immigrants. They remove their temporary protected status and they’re sending ICE agents to round them up. That is ethnic cleansing. That’s all that is.
Cottle: It is notable that it’s not undocumented so much as specific populations that they’re targeting.
Bouie: Right. It’s specific populations of nonwhite immigrants. There are plenty of illegal Polish Americans, illegal Polish immigrants in New York, in Boston. No one cares about them. This is targeted, nonwhite Latino or African people. They’re sending militarized paramilitaries after them in specific places to remove them from the country, even if they’re legal. If they’re legal, they revoke the status. Then they send people out there to detain them in these horrible conditions before they try to remove them from the country. That’s the ideological goal.
French: Look, this is an administration that in many ways is run by Twitter influencers.
Cottle: Oh God.
French: And so you can watch this ——
Bouie: I’m going to let you continue, but I just want to adjust that and say Twitter Nazis. Please continue.
Cottle: Oh, because it’s that kind of podcast with Jamelle today. Whew!
French: This is a targeted political attack on a vulnerable community where they are using the language of open borders, et cetera, to disguise the motivation. And that’s just what this is. Because if you really care about immigration enforcement, if you really care about bringing down the number of undocumented immigrants who are in the United States and who you say are taking American jobs, Minneapolis is not target No. 1. I mean, what are you doing here? We know what you’re doing here.
You’re being led around by these influencers. And if you doubt it — I mean, we had some great reporting in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination. What was one of the big priorities of the F.B.I. team? Coordinating their tweets. Coordinating their tweets, because they have to curry favor in this community. It’s weird, but it’s real. And it’s driving American policy. It’s driving the administration’s brutality. And it’s deeply disturbing.
Cottle: Before we go on to recommendations, I feel like we have to take a minute to note that on Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen entered this fray.
French: The Boss.
Cottle: He dropped a new song about this whole horrible bloody mess called “Streets of Minneapolis.” It is an old-school protest song against ICE and in honor of Pretti and Good:
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
Cottle: Sitting here in my home studio, I can already hear the legions of Gen X and boomer men singing along. But what about you guys? Come on. Jamelle? Start us off.
Bouie: To start, Bruce is not for me. I’m not ——
Cottle: Doesn’t melt your butter?
Bouie: Not my cup of tea. I also — I’m also just not a big protest song guy. Any successful kind of political movement is going to be very cringe. That’s just how things go. But ——
Cottle: You’re going to get so much hate mail, Jamelle.
French: Oh man.
Bouie: My not-so-inner hipster is sort of like: I’d rather listen to something else.
French: Well, OK. I love the Boss. I’ve been listening to him forever. I’m a huge fan of the Boss. I just really have gotten back into the “Nebraska” album after the recent movie. Great, great album. I’ve never been a giant protest music guy. Maybe that’s sort of my inner conservative. I don’t know. Sometimes it feels more like virtue signaling than something real.
However, I will say this: The thing that I think I keep looking at is what’s breaking through into normie land, and I don’t use the term “normie” in a derogatory way at all. I just want to say that. We are the strange ones — the ones who are every day online.
Cottle: So true.
French: And so often we look at something and we say: Where’s the outrage in America? Do you remember the Bob Dole line, “Where’s the outrage?” And everyone’s looking around going: What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be angry about.
And so when I see things like this song from someone who is, of course, one of the classic American artists, I think these things are breaking through. Because, honestly, you don’t get more mainstream in American music than the Boss. I mean, he’s always been on the left, but he’s a super, super mainstream American artist. And to me, this shows that this stuff is resonating around the country. People know. People are aware.
Cottle: I completely agree that anything that takes these issues out of the realm of cable talk shows and — God save us — the Twitterati and puts it into more cultural, mainstream sites or discussions is a good thing. The way Trump gets away with what he does is that most people, they just tune a lot of this stuff out. I’m not going to go all music critic on this. I’ll just say that as somebody who’s constantly hectoring people to use their voice in whatever way they can to respond to what’s going on in the country, if Bruce wants to do this, good for him. He’s got a bigger platform and megaphone than most.
Bouie: Oh, I mean, to be clear, this is just an aesthetic thing for me. Music is a very important part of building social solidarity, building connection between people involved in movement. I’m currently reading this wonderful book, “Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement” by Thomas E. Ricks, and he observes that in training for sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, civil rights participants would sing together. And it was a very important part of building group cohesion.
Just in my own personal experience, doing stuff when I was a student, like student government stuff or whatnot, we would sing, do chants, sing songs on sports teams. That’s an important part of building connection. And so if music can do that, and I think music does do that, I’m all the more. Do it. Go ahead.
Cottle: Go for it.
Bouie: I’m just saying that for Jamelle Bouie, a guy who cares about aesthetics ——
Cottle: I understand. I understand.
Bouie: It’s not necessarily for me. I’ve sat down and listened to Springsteen records beginning to end. And this really is not for me. I don’t think it’s bad. I’m not saying it’s ——
Cottle: See, it’s this kind of polarization that is causing discord in the country, guys.
Bouie: I’m not saying it’s bad, just saying that it’s not for me.
French: I don’t know. The podcast hangs by a thread.
Cottle: Then let’s move to what is culturally in your sweet spot. It’s time for recommendations, guys. It’s been a cold and brutally snowy week everywhere that we live, come to think of it. So what do you have to keep our souls warm? Jamelle, what are you pitching?
Bouie: They released the best picture nominees for the Academy Awards, and so I’ve made note of the ones I’ve seen. I’m making my way through the ones I haven’t. And over the weekend I watched “F1,” and because the film is about F1 racing, the last 15 to 20 minutes are basically the final race of the movie. And it’s just so compellingly filmed — so thrilling, so exciting — that the preceding two hours, which are good, feel more like a typical sports movie. It can get a little silly.
And then you hit this final race, and you’re just sort of with the characters in this zen state. You’re in a zen state watching it. It’s incredible. So I highly recommend it. I highly recommend half-watching the movie and then really locking in for the last chunk of the film.
French: So, it’s one of those weeks where the world is grim, but in my nerd world, the future is so bright because ——
Cottle: What?
French: So two counts: One, Apple TV and Brandon Sanderson just announced that they’re going to be developing his “Mistborn” trilogy and “The Stormlight Archive,” a movie for “Mistborn” and a series for “The Stormlight Archive.” And I don’t have to tell you how exciting that is.
Cottle: That is all Greek to me, but I like your passion.
French: Two of the best fantasy series around. They have this really wonderful character quality; they’re far more Tolkien-esque than they are George R.R. Martin-esque. They’re not cynical. Good is good. Evil is evil. And they’re beautifully done. Just wonderfully done.
The other thing is I got an advance copy of the second book in the series from James S.A. Corey, “The Faith of Beasts.” And I’ll tell you, this actually happened to me: I was enjoying it so much that I intentionally stopped reading, just so I wouldn’t devour it too quickly.
Cottle: That is tremendous self-control, David.
French: So nerd me is just having the week of his life.
Cottle: I’m so happy.
French: Everything else about me, I’m looking at the world and going, man. But nerd me is very, very happy right now.
Cottle: You have this retreat. I love it.
French: I do, I do.
Cottle: So I’m going to recommend a novel, “The Morning Star” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, which has been out for a while. I think the English — it’s Norwegian — but they did an English translation in 2021. It’s kind of impossible to describe. I don’t even know what genre it counts as. But how it’s set up is that over the course of two days, a bright, huge star suddenly appears in the sky.
So you’ve got these weird biblical overtones already, and then each chapter is going through the very normal, everyday events of very normal people. It’s like this banal look at these slices of life. But at the end of every chapter, something weird happens. So it’s just a fun, gripping read, and it’s the first in a series, so I’m looking forward to this. But I just want to say, “Morning Star,” do it. It’ll keep you up at night, but you know, something’s going to.
And with that, guys, we are done. We have solved the world’s problems and, you know, we’re going to do it again next week, too. So thank you so much.
French: Thanks, Michelle.
Bouie: Always a pleasure.
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