Rand Abdel-Fattah

In this month's ThruLine Plus episode, our producers take us behind the scenes of making our episode on the first transatlantic cable.

To listen to these insider bonus episodes every month, sign up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine.

Hey, I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah.

It also shows how ideas reemerge in times when they seem most needed.

And actually, that's something we talk about a lot when we develop episodes.

Historical figures and their ideas.

They inspire us, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes push us to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked.

And what better way than to look at the philosophy of James Baldwin, a writer who used the power of his words to confront in order to connect, something we can relate to today.

Baldwin was a Black man, he was gay, and he was active from the 1940s to his death in 1987.

He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

His story is amazing, but that isn't what we're going to focus on in this episode.

We're going to meet someone who spent his career diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, of his ideas.

Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes.

So that maybe, just maybe, we can gather a little more strength to face the things that must be changed in ourselves and our culture.

In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin, but he was struggling.

So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out.

He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar.

Here's how he describes it in his book.

So just to establish, who was James Baldwin?

You know, those lies that, as you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially, like as a society, we tell ourselves.