Viet Thanh Nguyen
speaker
1,011 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 7 May
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's a part of the Bible.
It's also a part of our American mythology.
And so we have to understand that these two impulses have always existed within human societies and American society.
We're never going to get past xenophobia itself.
It will always be with us.
But we have to understand why it happens and how we can solve it.
And I'm a believer in this idea that it's not simply hospitality that we need to extend, but that so many of the problems we face as Americans, it's about dividing and conquering.
It's like we think we have too little and we have to separate some people out and deport them or put them into prison and so on.
And I think if American society is as great as we think it is, it has enough for everybody.
It has enough to grow, room enough to grow so that everybody can have it, have things that they need.
But we're led by people, Democrats and Republicans, who show just a paucity of imagination and willpower and daring to make this country as beneficial as it could be for everybody.
Your wife is a poet, yes?
Yes.
And she's beautiful.
Well, I literally met my wife on a dark and stormy night at a poetry meeting that I organized.
And she showed up for the open mic as this beautiful poet.
And the rest is history.
But
We have a shared conviction for so many things, shared passion for so many things, including the truth of language and the truth of art.
So she's always been my first reader, which is a terrible job to have because first drafts are terrible, and she read them for 20 years, and so she knows how bad of a writer I can be.
Showing 861–880 of 1,011 · page 44 of 51
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