Robert Siegel

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?

Okay, on that note, our final question has been the same in every one of these, which is, what's been some source of joy that you've experienced?

E.J., we start with you.

My source of joy involved going to New York in part to celebrate our older daughter's 50th birthday.

I'm contacting the hospital asking for a recount.

I think there must be something wrong with that to be.

But we also saw our other daughter in something called Diaspora, an immersive dramatic experience of which she was a singer and the music director, Leah Siegel.