Sam Tannenhaus

And now it's, you know, it sort of competes with the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

It's like one of the, you know, three.

But yeah, I mean, Beatty deserved it.

And I just remember that.

And when he started writing fiction, it came right out of the gate.

I mean, it reflected, you know, American appetites, you know, the way we've expanded what American food means over the last 20 years in a way that's just been extraordinary to see.

And her book captured that.

If you want to care about this stuff, he will tell you why this stuff might matter to your life and why food matters.

might be a gateway into aesthetics in general, you know, to reading, to art, to literature.

And somehow the years, these past 20 years, it's hard sometimes to, I don't know if you guys feel the same way.

I thought for a second it sounded like Meryl Streep, but she has not done this, and it's not her.

Okay.

When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country.

And the narrator is so famous, and I know it, and my kids know it, and my wife knows it.

I can't remember his name.

The Underground Railroad?

Yeah, well, he was also, Steve, their mentor.

You know, I remember when I was getting to know Bill Buckley around the time I was writing about Whitaker Chambers and then moved over to Bill Buckley.

And I said, so how did you get involved with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan?

And I'll never forget the way he said this, because, you know, I had that patrician voice.