enterprise so i think that is one possible future for the gig economy that would follow problems of the corporate owned platforms and really make it work for workers in ways that take advantage of what this technology has to offer. >> to watch the rest of this program visitor website booktv.org, use the search box at the top of the page to look for juliet sure for the title of her book after the gig. .. we can talk about with this book and current events. lately we were just talk about them in the green room and there's a lot to say. we are also doing today from kate archer kent from wisconsin public radio you might know her for the host of the morning show. kate will be moderating today's conversation. before we get started i want

to thank thank you to the madison public library in the madison public foundation. there across wisconsin across the nation across the globe has been unwavering for the past eight years, but particularly during the pandemic. it was never a question of whether we were going to bring you great cultural events like this, it was just a matter of how. and so i always want to thank them for it also want to thank laila for being here today. we were going to bring laila here in may in person but obsolete that could not happen. as a donor event we are giving noise free copies of conditional citizens today. once i leave the screen i will put a link in a green box on your screen you can sign up in our bookselling partners in a room of their own and will send you a copy free of charge to your home but we hope you'll take advantage of that and read laila's book. i think i've said enough i

will step away and let the two of you have a wonderful conversation about laila's wonderful book i will see you at the end. thanks so much. direct thanks conor laila what a privilege to be able to talk with you. >> thanks so much kate i'm happy to be here. stuart i'm going to start slow introduction of you and read the introduction or the bio from the back of your book where with laila whose vote while born and brought which is the capital of morocco. laila spoke arabic as a child, educated morocco, great britain and the u.s. she's the author for novels including the moors account which won the american book award the hurston right legacy award and was a final for the pulitzer. her most recent work, the other americans was a finalist for the national book award. and her essays have appeared

all over the place. l.a. times, "washington post", harpers, the guardian, she is a recipient of fellowships from the british council, the fulbright program, and the guggenheim foundation. laila is a creative writing professor at the university of california at riverside. and she lives in los angeles where she is joining us. so laila, thank you again. it is such a privilege to be here and talk about your book which was really moving. and we're going to start with the opening because when you became a u.s. citizen, this is a sweltering day in the year 2000. you talk about 3000 people packed into this fairgrounds type complex. and then soon after you got your american passport which you called your powerful artifacts. what did that american passport symbolize you? >> guest: a.

[laughter] i think that is an excellent question to start with because it gets the heart of how things can be interpreted in the moment and interpreted 20 years later in the middle of a pandemic. time we've seen the passport service tangible proof of u.s. citizenship because i don't have obviously a birth certificate. naturally citizen the passport is essentially your proof of citizenship. you don't walk around in fact you're not supposed to take your nationalization certificate. you can't copy to its very precious you have to save it. so passport is your proof of citizenship. also the reason is that it was a powerful artifact is at the time, it allows you to travel to more than one had 50 countries without having to go to the of applying for a visa. now americans may be unfamiliar with how complicated and tedious, and at times really infuriating the procedure is for applying

for visas to visit other countries. and that is something i'd gone through all my moroccan passport so i'm familiar with that. having a u.s. passport meant i could travels i said to two and 50 countries without having to bother doing that. so the first thing i did was at the time i was working for a computer startup, a software startup company which in my training, there was a conference taking place in hong kong. and so i traveled to hong kong. my husband came with me. my husband is american. so coming back to the u.s., we for the first time got to go in the same line, the liners are for u.s. citizens. that was my first time actually having an encounter with a border agent as a citizen.

and as i described in the book the question he asked me was, he enlivens peak to mean spoke to my husband which is a whole patriarchal thing going on. he said to my husband how many camels that you traded for her? i was flabbergasted. just rendered speechless really. and then he just laughed he thought his being funny and he stamps our passports and let us through. to me, since that was my very first encounter with an agent of the state as a u.s. citizen it carried a great deal of meaning about the difference between me and let say for example my husband has a native born citizen. he's a manager does not get asked these questions. so in the book that is basically how i start the discussion of u.s. citizenship. in the experience of u.s. citizenship. >> host: it didn't happen once it happened twice.

>> guest: yes it happened years later get yes. >> guest: the day that all of a sudden certain age remember where we were with 911, how did everything change for american muslims when the planes hit the twin towers? and in subsequent months and years? >> for american muzzles as a defining event as much as it was for other americans in the sense there was a feeling of being under attack by people that you did not see. you did not know who it was our what their reasoning was, what the reasons behind it was. there is the initial reaction of course, the shock and horror. and just sort of sorrow for the victims of the crime. and then immediately after that there is a feeling of

fear. because of the backlash that happened against people in the u.s. and people that appeared to be muslim. so see keyword turbines but are not muslims, there's a backlash against anyone who appeared muslim. >> and that backlash of course took the form of hate crimes which has been documented by the fbi. you can go to the fbi website and look at the statistics for 2001 and after, you can see the spike. is not just hate crimes that are random results driven by individuals having their own sort of views about others and seeking to formalize them in a crime. there is also a government sanctioned reaction which included things like special

registration with immigration and naturalization service for airbag and muslim men who originated from 26 countries all had to registered as a group. that was called the inferior program. then there was spying, which by the way began before 911. there's actually a great documentary about surveillance prior to 911 which is called the ceiling of being watched. it airs on pbs. and so surveillance of muslims which is something that happened in new york. in new york, there was a new office that was started within the nypd called the demographics unit. so of course she would never know if it's called demographics unit it's actually spy program. its sole purpose was to infiltrate mosques. infiltrate muslim businesses. student unions even at

different colleges in the area. if you have student groups there is an informant somewhere in there. and even gaining access to private homes in order to spy on the people who lived there. all of that data was collected in these massive databases for number of years. never leading to. >> host: or nothing. >> guest: a single terrorism that people did not know it existed until the associated press, two reporters from the associated press and winning the pulitzer prize for the reporting basically expose that. and then, after it was exposed and written about, then it was dismantled. so this happened during the mayor ship of michael bloomberg in new york. so i am mentioning these because these are government sanctioned actions taken

against american muslims that go beyond sin there were hate crimes which of course there were. >> there was a period of time i would say that was in my memory it's something that was unprecedented because i hadn't experienced some thing like that before. before 911, often times when i would meet people say i was born and raised in morocco, they would then start talking to me about the arab world. it was an idea that morocco was connected to the arab world and we were arab. >> host: and uris must have all the answers about isis. [laughter] >> that too. but after, before 911 people would treat people like me as arabs. after 911 we became muslim. that was the only identity even over both, i am both. there is a sort of perception

that everyone was lumped into the same group. and so in my mind it is really a period of time that both have this sort of like an environment of fear. but also on a personal level it is something i experienced in various ways, comes in the workplace, comes during job interviews, different things that happened. but of course i don't cover, there is nothing necessarily about me says i am muslim or anything, that a lot of times i hear these comments more than i see you then. and then of course, later, just as things were kind of calming down, along comes isis. that is a whole other set of questions. >> you feel like you could talk openly about questioning the war in iraq? or the war in afghanistan?

stomach i think after 911, i think there's a great deal of awareness on the part of the american muslims everything that came out of their mouth would be scrutinized for any sign of disloyalty. for any sign of sympathy for anything that was not american. so i think a number of people were very, very careful when they spoke. what happened after 911 is that among muslim voices that supported wars, those were elevated. i think at the time was working at newsweek. and who supported both the afghanistan war and the iraq war. obviously had no shortage of airtime, people like him and so on and so forth but the scholar like edward even though he's very

well-respected at the time, the late edward was not getting invited to speak on primetime television about his positions on these issues. i think that the muslims who supported the wars were listened to and elevated. the people expressed dissent were considered to be, just sort of like rabble-rousers. and potentially even traders. there wasn't a sense that expressing the sense was welcom welcome. this is something that was restricted to muslims. a member there's a peace in the new yorker a week after the attacks. because she expressed worry about what might happen in a country in which everybody is exposed to the same three or four slogans and talking

points. and that essentially indicated your hurling towards a massive war. she was expressing concern about that. she was attacked in the press for weeks on it. it was a time when just expressing disagreement with u.s. foreign policy could cost people their careers really. >> look at self identity a little bit. your whole life you have lived in between languages, multiple languages and between multiple countries. you have talked about kind of buffering yourself from these painful inequalities fight operating and a kind of gray zone, gray area. can you explain a little more with this in gray areas like? how it relates to a conditional citizen? >> yes.

this term of gray zone is a term that i came across a few years ago because i was researching a peace for the near times magazine. it is actually a term that was coined by the pr department. there is such a thing at isis. and they put out, back in the day back when they are still operating in syria, they put out a magazine. their comments on current event events. one of the things they put out after the attack on france is an article basically calling on muslims to pick a side. you either chose the side of isis, or you chose the side of the unbelievers. and anyone who was in the gray zone, meaning had wanted to coexist with others rather than to just go to the quote

unquote for seders, if you did not pick aside any chose a side of coexistence that meant you were living in the gray zone. in the gray zone according to isis is a terrible thing because they view the world in black and white. and that is the kind of view that i thought reminded me very much of what george w. bush said in his address to the nation after 911 when he said you are either with us or against us. there is the sort of way at looking at the world in black and whites. that has always struck me as a very sort of dangerous way of looking at the world around us. in fact the world is composed of grays. even in terms of identity. none of us are one thing or another prettier not just a woman. you are a woman, you are a citizen, you are a mother, i don't know you are part of multiple identities. you can't just be one thing or

another. and to approach a whirl as complicated as ours, you need very simplistic ways comets externally poisonous and dangerous. >> and so in that acacia i kind of talk about my realization that all my life i have lived in the gray zone. i grew up in an arab and muslim country. but a number of my earliest acquaintances, my teachers, had a number of french teachers. all of these people were christians or atheists. and that was ordinary to me because that was my life. and then it came to the u.s., moved to l.a. which is a massive city of people from all over. nearly 40% of people who live in l.a. are foreign born. all of these different language languages, they

coexist and nobody thanks about it because every is going about their business. and so really, most of us live and gray areas. and are used to it. so this idea that there is something bad about that, when that is a fundamental part of our lives is extremely distressing. and so i was writing about actually wanting to be in the gray zone. actually not wanting to give up this idea of coexisting with others. >> coexisting with others. you also write about assimilation, and the dangers of that. that this notion we are all in a great melting pot. but that is not exactly the reality of it. you talk about the approach is more of a salad bowl that we are keeping our coal background and culture. and being able to celebrate that and live that. what does that look like? and at the idea integration and simulation.

>> i think that is a really good question. i think the question of integration simulation has never been entirely settled in american society. i think the foundational myth of the united states is its a nation of immigrants for it how often do hear a nation of immigrants. it is a source of pride for many americans. even if in reality the nation's immigration laws were really extremely tight and favored immigrants from western europe and excluded a number of immigrants from all over the world beginning with the chinese exclusion act of 1882. chinese people were not allowed to immigrate to the u.s. until 1943. and there were all kinds of other laws that were passed to exclude people of asian dissents. if they were here comets exclude them from citizenship, living in white neighborhoods

neighborhood so on so forth. and of course you know the quote in the nation of immigrants also does not take into account their people before in this nation, indigenous people. people were brought here who were not immigrants meaning enslaved people. it's kind of a slogan that really relies on a great deal of erasure. the source of pride for americans i think that they have a nation that is so diverse were there kind of a binding national identity based on a shared set of principles. and that also depends on figuring out how everyone is going to live together that comes from different cultures. and the model that the nation really used for a long time, was assimilation. in the case of indigenous people it was a forcible dissemination, their children were taken from them and put in boarding schools, forced to

speak english and soldierly acculturated to be assimilated into white society. over the years that model really has changed. and so there is the introduction of the model of integration. you can start seeing emphasis on integration during the civil rights movements, right? where people are fighting for the right to desegregate places and integrate them. it doesn't mean adopting holy the habits of the society around them. and now, and the modern era, it is still a situation of ongoing debate. anytime there's any kind of attention that involves a particular religious group or cultural group, the idea of the simulation comes back up. you hear accusations of

assimilation parts of the sai rights, what i write about assimilation is actually traveling to a book event in reno. and i sat next to a gentleman who said he was from gardena. i used to live in torrance it's very close to our and i know the area and he said oh you know it is change. we have all those koreans now. [laughter] and then he started complaining that they don't assimilate. i said what you mean? he said will they send their children to sunday school. and it bothered him. i could not understand why it bothered him that other people were sending their children to sunday school to learn korean, just did not understand what that did to him what other people were. and that view of assimilation which demands other people give up their cultures and languages is actually on the ascendant. so you have somebody like

president trump who complained in interviews that there's just no assimilation there that is the quotes. and so assimilation is really used as a way to say these people do not belong here. and the only way to the law is to give up everything that has been different. and that is not possible, first of all just on a basic level. our identities have components that are cultural and linguistic street you cannot ask people to give that up. next on that linguistic point, you spoke arabic as a child. there is a pointer you are chatting in the airport with your sister, on the phone in arabic and getting stairs from someone right across from you until you switch to english. and then the person goes back to reading their magazine.

an another point to comments when you're trying to encourage her daughter to speak arabic in really trying to encourage that as a toddler to get that fluency. shoot always gravitate to english. and so how is arabic viewed in your family? and the perception from the outside world? >> i think the perception from the outside world is exactly what you described, acacia perception of suspicion. there's a great story about edward the scholar who years and years ago had tried to interest u.s. publishers in translating the works of the nobel prize-winning model is from egypt. the response of u.s. publishers was we can't do that because arabic is a controversial language. [laughter] i mean can you imagine thinking about a language it's just a language.

[laughter] >> so think there is this kind of like the perception that if you speak arabic or somehow suspicious is definitely something you will encounter few speak arabic in places like airports or places that involve government surveillance of some kind. like any space that is essentially a government space. >> you see something, say something type of thing. >> rights. there is a heightened perception to anything that is different. in speaking arabic is the height of difference. so people really do get nervous which is kind of amusing to me every once in a while. [laughter] >> but in terms of its role, it is obviously something i've tried to pass onto my daughter

daughter. it has been an uphill battle. even though she spoke it, by the time she was in preschool and kindergarten, the seven-year priest on on kindergarten, she refused to. she felt that it made her different which is an impulse think there is that pressure something for example castor ran for the democratic nomination spoke because he

spoke spanish in the home pretty 70 started school there were not encouraged to speak spanish. not as proficient there is a pressure central to how to switch gears and talk about border walls such a prominent peace of discussion in your book and thoughtfulness in your book. what struck me was was a day union husband just wanted to go watch the world cup soccer. >> just crossing over the border, no problem and coming back was this major ordeal.

and felt very threatening to you. you are scared. you see was the contrast there? it's something that i noticed, i really crossed the land border into mexico a couple of times. and what you describe was a few years ago. it is a world cup match. i said wouldn't it be fun to watch this in a café with a bunch of other people who also care about soccer as much as we do. let's cross and go there. and so we did. and crossing i was stunned that nobody was asking us for id crossing the border into mexico i guess it's because of the border tell me a lot of traffic back and forth. the thing coming back in was a different thing altogether.

it was a lot more, the lines were longer, it was a lot more questions but in welch across the border, a lot of questioning. it was just a different experience. and i think of the border really reminded meet so similar to the experience of morocco and spain, it really reminded me of how the border physically changed over my lifetime. i think the people who live in the southwest border in the u.s. will testify to the fact the border does not look the way it looks now. there was no law prior to 1994 for example. and people could come in and out. and so it was a little bit a situation even for example seasonal workers would come and return. but with the border that, and they stay. it just actually make things even for me pure elite labor

it makes things a lot more complicated than they have to b be. and just this view of the border has become more demilitarized and mantis manifestation something i observed with morocco and spain. when i was little my parents are packets in the car, spain has a couple of land borders with morocco. i was on the post. the border post was just a cinderblock building. you kind of wait for the guard you got when you go back out. isn't what is today. which is this insanely militarized border post with defenses 20 feet high motes, cameras, guard dogs, motion detectors, it's just a

different situation. so the border really had become this literal lies expression of differences between countries. and it is something people should really think about it that's what they really want. >> something i learned, that i was not even that aware of is if i was aware at all are these checkpoints pretty take us to make checkpoint between el paso and marcella. these inland checkpoints that are like a 1 miles from any external border, why do we have these border patrol checkpoints so far inland in our country? >> that is an excellent question. that is a question the department of justice and the department of homeland security really to address. i did not even know that the

united states had these checkpoints. i discovered them completely by chance. i was going to an artist registry and in the middle of interstate ten, between elk paso and marcella we were stopped at a checkpoint. these guys, they were wearing military. they are not but it was like these green uniforms but essentially law-enforcement uniforms. they had like guard dogs, these huge guns. and so very serious. they stopped you and asked if you are a u.s. citizen. until we each said yes. at that point the border patrol agent has the discretionary power to decide whether they believe you. in which case you were on your way. or, they actually don't believe that you are u.s. citizen. in now you have to prove it. and most people don't go around carrying a birth certificate or u.s. passport on them. if that happened today, how would you prove that you are

u.s. citizen? you see in a situation like that with the border agent is going to make a determination based on how you look, how you sound. something about your affect. when that comes into making a decision, that means it's going to get used unequally depending on the race, the language and the accent of the person. you can be a u.s. citizen, but the border patrol does not believe you, then you are basically stuck there. and you can be put into immigration detention until such time as you provide proof of your citizenship. so each year, some people get caught at these border checkpoints. and so when i discovered, when i got stopped at one of these, by the time i got there he started researching these border checkpoints. it turns out there are quite a few of them, the website of customs and border protection list 134. but they are also roving

checkpoints. so when you add up all the checkpoints you might well be looking at something like 200. and they are positioned within a 100 miles of both land borders, so the land border between mexico and canada, but also see borders of "the atlantic" and the pacific. and also the lakes, the great lakes. they are everywhere in the u.s. and a majority of the u.s. population lives in what is technically the border zone. which means that any point border patrol could be setting up a checkpoint and saying are you a u.s. citizen? are you a u.s. citizen in making these determinations. it's really a massive amount of power. it goes back to a regulation that is set in 1952 that basically extended the power of border patrol from just the border to looking 25 miles within the border in case and people had gone through without showing their papers. not power was extended to

100 miles a year later. and that has just been on the books. no one is ever challenged it. no one has run on getting rid of it. it's just one of those things that is folded into the duties of border patrol. and what happens, at least that is my experience, the more funding we give to particular agencies, the more we are going to find regions to justify the funding. so border patrol for examples had a budget has ballooned over the last 30 years. and so that money is going to having these checkpoints. so it is something that people really should consider. if you have never come across a checkpoint it's probably not a problem in your life. but if you live near one, it can be a tremendously disruptive force. because if you are driving to the grocery store. are you are driving to go to

school, or anywhere that involves being on the road where the checkpoint is, you were going to get stopped and asked that question. and so it can really turn into a form of harassment if you are constantly told where is your paper? where is your paper? and you happen to be for example non- white person. then you are getting stopped more often. and so it can really turn into a form of harassment. >> host: i want to turn to the trouble began. shortly after president trump took office, he issued the executive band, banning nationals from seven muslim countries. you viewed the muslim ban is what you call a racing muslim from america's collective path. what does this effectively do to american muslims in our country? and in this travel ban?

[inaudible] one of the things i want to say is that we are supposed to call the travel ban because the initial countries that were put on it but in the form that survived legal challenges which is the residential proclamation. the supreme court upheld in 2018 is a list of at least five muslim countries. the first thing i want to say is we ended up with the term travel ban after a great deal of back and forth within the administration to try to make sure it survived constitutional challenges. and that in reality, what it is and already presents its citizens from leaving their countries. you can't ban people from entering that are banned from

leaving their own country. and venezuela, the dip band does not apply at a place the government officials. you talk about like 40 people every year. but the other five countries combined to something like 80000 we get every year. forty from another how can you have a muslim ban just inclusion of that tiny number to say it was neutral towards religion and to let it become law. the muslim ban is part and my view of a long series the chinese immigration act of

1882. the most serious of which is immigration act of 19204. to everyone except people from western europe. and they did this again, without getting into too many details the census on 30 or 40 years earlier to do this. and establish quotas. by doing that they were able to essentially restrict immigration from everywhere. it was a way to ensure that whites immigrants survive but not asians africans south americans and so on. you need a muslim ban. really were not abolished fully until 1965. we have only had essentially 50 years of immigration being

open to anybody who wants to apply. doesn't mean everybody comes just anybody can apply to come. but with this muslim ban we are going right back to those old restrictions. we are saying people from these countries cannot apply to come to the u.s. it doesn't matter what they have done. it does not matter what they might contribute. it does not matter what family they might have who they are trying to join. they are simply knowledgeable to come, end of story. it is xena phobic band but again as part of that history. so we are seeing with immigration uc periods of expansion, and periods of contraction pride right now it's begetting the major period of contraction. beginning with the muslim bank those followed your saloon with another bailment targeted mostly asian countries. my expectation honestly if there is a trump reelection of

trumpets reelected were going to see new bands. in fact, the administration is already proposed rules on student visas that essentially will ban many african and asian students from coming to the u.s. and again, the way they do that is not saying people from africa or asia can't come. it's by writing laws that looked like they are racially neutral. but get to the same results as if they are not racially mutual. the final point i want to make about the muslim ban, this ties in, muslims have been in america since long before there's a colony at jamestown. the earliest muslims that landed here came with spanish expedition that explored the north american continent. even before you arrived is really kind of tiling.

it tells us that you perceive yourself to have the power to decide who belongs in this country and who doesn't. and so i think because that history of earliest muslims did not talk in schools it's kind of american collective history. it makes these bands seemed like they are just targeted at foreigners. when in reality these bands often times are targeting americans like you and me. if you are a yemeni american, you have now lost the ability -- if you are born here but of dissension of the lost the ability to sponsor a grandmother or an uncle, or a cousin or anybody was born in yemen. you don't have that. you are a german you have that right. so it is actually taking away

rights from people from yemen. their nativeborn americans. it is really stripping away at the constitutional rights of people here. but it looks like it's only targeted at immigrants abroad. >> the president has also used rhetoric against muslims. he has made tweet blasting radical islamic terrorism calling countries on the muslim ban as dangerous. what do the tweets and the rhetoric do, not only for the muslim community but for our country as a whole? stomach i think it is easy with somebody as vulgar and blunt as the president to seem as though he is unique. but he isn't. he is somebody that got to his

position by writing a wave of popular support. people had to agree with him or they would not voted for him. i think he is very much part of a long tradition of xena phobic tradition in the u.s. it's something that is maybe not pleasant to think about. but this is something that long predates him. it is nonetheless true. and i think that just the constant stream of tweets, personally i find exhausting. i do not follow him. i do not retweet him. i do not propagate what he has to say. i think that i understand what it is he is trying to communicate, just by reading it in the newspapers, headlines, and so on. i don't feel the need to validate it by retreating it or giving it space on my own social media.

i do think that he is very much a victim. and even if he doesn't win reelection his supporters are still going to be around. there is going have to be some sort of resolution to this debate that we really are having about what kind of a country we want to live in. that is really what it comes down to. we want to live in a country that's diverse where everybody as i said is bound by a set of shared principles? or do we want to live in a country in which some people, mainly white people have more rights than everybody else. that is ultimately what donald trump's promising people. and if not him, somebody will come after him to make that promise a bit more elegantly then he has. because he has this ability to speak and as i said vulgar terms. that is what makes him i think

so divisive. i think that in fact if there was another candidate who basically proposes same policy but was more elegant, and more polished in a way that they presented them it would actually be a lot scarier. and a lot more effective. >> i want to look at gender for a moment. they were a citizen of the u.s. that neither structure afforded you opportunities to be on equal footing as men. and enjoy the same rights and privileges. the reaction you get here to feeling that way is just a belief and really? can you explain why you haven't felt free either country. >> i think it has a do with the fact that patriarchy is the global system. and yes, you can feel better

about the fact that there are certain rights that we have in the u.s. that people in other countries do not have. before the moments, women in the united states have the right to make medical decisions about their body up to and including abortion, right? i live in california where you have access to reproductive care. but it other states, that is not necessarily the case. there've been so may closures of abortion clinics. so you can tell yourself okay we have these rights. and therefore it is better to live here than live in another country. but rights are never, or should never be considered entirely taken for granted. for example right now we are going through, we just finished two weeks of hearings

the supreme court justice whose track record indicates no not support abortion as a rights. it's entirely possible that within the next few years that right will be taken away, that is what i mean. you can tell yourself you have more rights but that is it effort at consolation. i think tracking is very much a global problem. i think women do face a lot of challenges with integrity and to live and lives of dignity in which they can make their own medical decisions. and they can also be taken seriously. with respect to things like sexual harassment or sexual assault. the president himself has a dozen or so allegations of sexual assault against him. and none of those have led to any kind of legal sort of.

[inaudible] what can the u.s. do to take strides toward equal citizenshi citizenship? what do you want to see, i mean what can this country do first to start moving in that direction and has the possibility of changing things greatly need of movement just like that to ensure

citizenship is equal among us. and is not this thing work some people have more rights than others. that is going to require each of us to take action. obviously in a very, very small way coding and taking part in the electoral process is a part of that. that is super important. because people who make decisions are not just presidents. i think there is just too much time and attention spent on presidential candidates and probably not enough on school board who's running for county sheriff. who's running for district attorneys and those are the races. as the biggest impact on day-to-day lives how criminal justice is enacted in our community, what textbooks our children read, all our decisions made in washington voting and being involved in this down ballot races is

important. outside electoral cycles there's an always an opportunity to be involved being involved number problems we have released stem from the fact there's so much inequality and so much of it takes place so early people's lives. to help children at school her disadvantage, who has apparently stays home that can really make a huge difference in peoples lives. like right now that we are in a pandemic, an entire generation of kids is being left behind simply because something is not having access to wi-fi at home or not having access to a space at home in which they can do their homework. even if the school provides

the devices does not necessarily mean wi-fi is available. so basically being involved in organizations that can address these early, early inequalities, that can make a huge difference for the future. see what i'm one and, maybe we can ended this way, do you feel some hope when you look around? will you ever be able to look at your gray zone in a different way? >> i sure hope so. it is something i dwell in for the rest of my life. i do feel hope when i look at our younger generation. i think they are so involved, for example my daughter's very much involved in it matters to her because of everything. so we live in california. we are trying but this in the green room we had wildfires the summer that have lasted so

long the air quality is so terrible you can't even go out and take a walk. today is not so bad. but this is the kind of world that we are leaving them. they very much feel that their future has been mortgaged. and has been risked. they are involved in trying to change that. so i do find hope in young people. and in so many others that actually being agents of change. so when i wake up in the being agent of change suspect that your daughter still want to be president? >> i just mention that can change. it was like ten or 12. no, no, she is a musician, an artist i think. >> that was really conflicted

for you. because of gender, of race, a lot of things. >> i hope things are better by the time she is old enough to be president. we've a few years ago. we have a lot of work to do. [laughter] >> well laila this has been such an honor, such a pleasure. i'm so grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you today pray >> thank you so much for having me kate, thank you all for listening. >> this is great. and everyone gets a free copy of the book, that is so amazing. that is wonderful. thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation laila, thank you for this book. kate think of your very questions of taking us through.

the latest nonfiction books and authors, put tv on cspan2, created by america's cable television company. today you brought to by these television companies, superb buying to our viewers. ♪ ♪ subject story on david reynolds discuss his biography of abraham lincoln during a virtual event with the leon center for biography, here's some of that conversation. >> is a marvelous, superb peace of lincoln. and what they do generally, is they follow his life, sometimes his political contacts there is a political biography, but there's kind of standard one volume just such a wonderful jo job. but there's the david donald classic biography, donald in

his preface, this is a biography from lincoln's point of view. because he did not have much connection to the society and culture of his era. he was self educated. he was the ultimate self-made man. and even says the invention of the presidency, the least prepared of any president that we have ever had. i guess i'm taken the opposite point of view. emerson said that of all of the great heroes in history, lincoln stands alone for embracing the entire realm of experience. and we mentioned it just now, on the very highest to the lowest until the very dogs believes in him. emerson had a certain way of writing that was like that. emerson taught the same way about shakespeare to he said

shakespeare uses all of these scraps of old plays in lousy dramas and everything he transforms them into something new. and lincoln early on popular humor sometimes rather dirty humor or whatever. he also memorized very long poems by shakespeare any did not do this to impress people at cocktail parties. and listen to my latest film or something like that that i had memorized. he did it just because these passages meant something to him. once he read a passage a couple of times he had it memorized rates are right in the middle of his presidency he would break out they soliloquy by hammer it or claudius one of the great shakespearean tragedies that kind of thing. and even on april 9, 1865 when lee was surrendering to grant

and lincoln was on a vote going from virginia to washington. he had been visiting gramps. everyone around him was cheering it was wonderful it was great. i think today we would've said it should accomplish with the big banner or something. lincoln said i would rather talk about shakespeare. i would rather talk about shakespeare i'd rather say what? you spend several hours discussing poetry from shakespeare and longfellow and others about death. : :

>> mark salter, our copies are still somewhere, we have them signed here. the book is "the luckiest man: life with john mccain".