Robert Siegel

I just want to take a moment before we continue discussing to tell you how important your work has been over those 22 years.

how I think you really expanded what a newspaper column might be about and what we have to expect whenever we read the same columnist.

It could be very different from day to day.

You've sampled the world of academe and found interesting sources for material without turning into an academic writer in the process.

I have the greatest respect for you, and I'm

Very proud of my association with you, as small as it may be.

You have done it very, very well.

Now, here's the question.

Ready?

Okay.

22 years.

Let's think about that span of time for a moment.

But when you think back on the days when you began writing the column and today, what's different?

What's most different about the work or the world that we live in, the country?

What would you say?

And then we had the pandemic.

One measure of change for me is that I remember covering first from Washington from a distance and then down New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina.

Mm-hmm.

And, of course, one of the great solutions to the problem of 9-11 was to create a single department, a single agency that would bring together virtually every disaster we could possibly experience as a country would be the work of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who was Mike Chertoff at that time.

And I remember wondering in New Orleans, was it really such a great idea to have every threat facing our country on one man's desk?