Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Your wife, Abigail Tucker, has published a famous book about cats. What’s the biggest disagreement you have with her about cats? [laughter] Well, I need to be a little careful here, because . . . Abby, when we met and got married, loved cats; and I always sort of admired cats from a — I was a cat person who admired their singular standoffishness, and so on. I think in certain ways writing the book about cats brought her around to something closer to my view. She started the book shortly after we started having children and one of the interesting things that she realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a displaced child reaction; that cats have these faces that look like infants’ faces and have the eyes and the wide faces, and they meow in this way that approximates an infant’s cry, and they essentially hijack the maternal instinct. So she had sort of maternal feelings towards cats, but in the process of having actual children and writing the book, I think she came to an appreciation of them more as these fascinating apex predators. That’s sort the theme of the book, which you should all read. It’s much more interesting than late 20th-century Catholic theology. [laughter] But the theme of the book is this idea that this sort of cuddly fur-baby in your room is an apex predator who has taken over the world through its relationship to human beings. And I think that was my view all along. [laughter] So really we’ve sort of smoothed out our fundamental disagreement by the process of having her learn more about cats than anyone could ever possibly imagine knowing. As you may know, we often in the middle have the segment “Overrated versus Underrated” —…

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