Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
20 published records
01 / commitment
“In particular, I will tell you that I was at Duke at the time, and I got to know your work through a great black conservative, Kenny Williams, who was on the faculty in the English department.”
02 / uncertainty
“” If anything, in a certain day, that should be allowed. I don’t know if I have the answer as to when that day would be.”
03 / belief
“Whenever I think of him, I think he made an awful lot of money, and he’s still making it, based on a thin talent.”
04 / observation
“Terminology can help move a debate along, but the problem is just that, if there were negative associations that you were trying to wave away by changing the terminology, the negative associations are just like gnats, and they will settle back down on whatever new term you come up with.”
05 / belief
“I think that anybody who comes up now is immersed in a set of assumptions where, if they’re going to go against them, they’re going against an orthodoxy to an extent that somebody 35 years ago would be less likely to feel. So, although there is always a diversity of opinions, I think that what was called the culture wars back then has been won by the left in terms of a certain orthodoxy, a certain set of ideas that you’re considered to at least have to grapple with.”
06 / belief
“I know where I would look for it, and I can come back to you with it, but I suspect it would follow the rest of the country.”
07 / belief
“Just briefly. I think the biggest issue for me is most people find it a little jarring.”
08 / belief
“I know a lot of people would feel differently, and I think the better question would be if it was, say, an opera company in Utah or Massachusetts.”
09 / belief
“There is, for better or for worse, a cult of authenticity, which can be good and bad. But people will listen to you more, and I think you would elicit more sympathy with the accent that you have.”
10 / belief
“I increasingly don’t know because I think we’re at a point where we’re just beginning to see .”
11 / evaluation
“I would say that we tend to suppose — and I’m not sure what the answer to this is; I really am not sure what the answer to this is — we tend to suppose the conditions in a certain post-industrial society — starting in the late 20th century after the death of Christ, that particular time, and then going into the early 21st century — that somehow conditions then made it uniquely impossible for a certain group, the descendants of several generations past, of African slaves, to succeed.”
12 / evaluation
“If you’re talking about having an utterly opaque writing system that doesn’t fit the language structure meaningfully at all, that’s going to exert a certain downward pressure on the ability of the masses to express themselves in writing, and therefore, you’re not going to have creativity from down below that anybody is going to record because nobody can write.”
13 / evaluation
“Oh, the New York subway — it gets worse and worse. It was worse two years ago, but just in terms of what the experience is like with the lateness, with the layers of obnoxiousness that you have to put up with.”
14 / evaluation
“” No, there was more to Weegee than that. And Bonanos’s biography last year of Weegee, and I’m not just pushing this because I happen to be on the National Book Critics Circle — that’s over, but that was a really good book that I suspect is going to get lost amidst some glossier biographies.”
15 / observation
“There are some women, and what’s interesting about the women is that, for a reason I don’t know, they never wind up on the list.”
16 / evaluation
“I think speech expresses our full range of humanity, and to the extent that any society — unless there are only three people — has some sort of status marking, some sense of hierarchy, at least the sense of what’s formal and what’s not.”
17 / evaluation
“Porgy and Bess, to me, is a human being. They’re times when, if life isn’t going well, I will put on the Houston Opera production of Porgy and Bess and lay down on a couch, and just sit there and listen and lose myself in somebody having created something where you wonder where it came from.”
18 / evaluation
“In the same way, if you’re thinking of being black as a burden, and I don’t know what your personal circumstances are, but often you’re taught that you’re working against all of this flak from the outside because people are leveling microaggressions at you, et cetera.”
19 / preference
“Even as nerdy, obsessive me, if I haven’t read it, or I haven’t read it in a while, I will openly admit that, especially with Shakespeare, after about his first 10 minutes, if I go and see a production live, even if the people are British, and even if I’ve had coffee, I don’t know what the hell any of those people are saying.”
20 / evaluation
“My answer is not going to be that each language is a window into the souls of its speakers because, frankly, that idea is surprisingly dangerous despite all of its attractions.”