Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he says, you know, we only ever really pay attention to the places they perch, which in his mind is like, you know, the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives, like the really obvious things. Like Ezra Klein, you're a noun, you're a bird perched somewhere. We can talk about Ezra Klein or, you know, we can talk about a rainstorm or a word like red. It feels like it has content for us.
So there's all this stuff that happens when the birds are flying around, which is the and and the if and the or, these kind of subtle but absolutely crucial elements of our thought that we don't pay attention to and yet profoundly shape what we're able to think and what we think about and the way that we think.
He says, you know, there should be a feel of and just as much as we have a sense of a feel for blue or cold or Ezra Klein. And that was incredibly helpful to me because I thought, oh, yeah, that's kind of what I'm here to do. I'm here to try to figure out what's the feeling of and. Like, what is this idea? What is this word doing for us?
And what's the role that it plays in language, which is a different way of saying what's the role that it plays in how we think?
So a little bit in distinction from every other conjunction that the English language has, you know, but, if, or, all of those actually describe a kind of necessary relationship. If this, then that. That's a causal relationship. It actually tells us something about the two halves of the sentence we're creating. The beautiful thing about and is you can stick any two things together with it.
They can have absolutely no relationship to each other. I give you apples and oranges, right? Or they can have every relationship to each other, Romeo and Juliet. or none on earth, you know, crab apples and tuxedos.
And this morning, what we're dealing with is like, we have 30 minutes to get dressed and get to the library to do a podcast with Ezra Klein and our nephew who's at our house, who's two and a half, just vomited in the crib, which means there's nowhere for him to sleep. And also, whoops, I'm ignoring a note from my editor and I need to go to the grocery store. I mean, this is life, right?
And that's before we get to like... Oh, man. And like you open the New York Times and Joe Biden has cancer and people are being deported. I mean, the number of linked thoughts, experiences, demands in our days is infinite. So part of this feeling of and is the sense that everything is connected to everything else. Which I want to say can be a really beautiful thing.
I mean, the sense that everything is connected to everything else is also the sense that we can make a difference, right? Like if indeed we are all connected, then our actions matter. They matter to each other. They matter to people far away. They matter to people we will never meet because they're not even born yet. So it's overwhelming, but I think also kind of hopeful, kind of exciting.
But there's this other feeling that and has, which is the feeling that something is about to happen, right? Like, if you're telling me a story and you stop talking, what I'm going to say to you is and, meaning like, what happens next, right? Like, it's almost a feeling of suspense. And is this kind of little word that propels us into the future.
And in that sense, it's a kind of, it gestures towards this kind of temporal abundance too, right? Like that's the William James feeling like, well, there's always something else that we can reach beyond and connect to. There's always something more kind of coming down the line toward us. Yeah. I think it is a feeling of connection. It's a feeling of continuation. It is a feeling of abundance.
And all those to me are fundamentally and ultimately quite hopeful feelings.
I don't know if it's made it easier. It's certainly made me more aware of it. And I guess that is a kind of ease to feel peaceful about both the necessity and sometimes the impossibility of feeling all the things at the same time. It has given me a sense of well, this is life and it's actually okay to have mixed feelings, mixed experiences.
I adore my partner and I think she's brilliant and she fills my days with wisdom and humor and surprise and stability and... Also, we've been married for seven years and together for 10, and we have two kids, and sometimes we drive each other crazy or we're frustrated or we fight. And actually, I have a lot of peace around that, which I think is helpful.
Like, I just am like, well, that's not love. You know, that's part of the deal here. And we feel a lot of things at once, and we should. And sometimes it still stops me up short, you know, in good ways. And I said earlier, I think it's important to be... open to the surprising feeling because I think it can trouble us morally and that's probably a good thing. I'm a word nerd, of course.
I think about how and works and I actually do think it's interesting and I think it's philosophically interesting and profoundly related to the question of how we feel in these moments. But of course I feel it, right? I feel these tensions all the time.
It's impossible to be alive and fortunate in the world today and not feel like, which of these things am I actually supposed... It's not, which of these things am I supposed to be feeling? We feel them all. I think the real problem is, which of these feelings should I act on?
I was really surprised to learn that, too. I know. I mean, talk about scale, right, and space and time. This was true until quite recently, like all the way up to the end of the 19th century when children learned the alphabet. The procession started with A, B, C, and ended X, Y, Z. And that's literally how they were taught the alphabet.
It's incredible to me that that piece of knowledge instilled in generation upon generation of schoolchildren could degrade in the course of less than a century when I was coming up through school to the point that we had no idea that that had once been part of the alphabet. But indeed, it was.
Which, of course, I found both fascinating just because how funny that people used to learn that and now we don't.
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