Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth.

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How important is complexity? At The Gray Area, we value understanding the details. We revel in complexity. But does our desire to understand that complexity sometimes over-complicate an issue? Journalist and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks so. This week on The Gray Area, Sean talks to Coates about his new book The Message, a collection of essays about storytelling, moral clarity, and the dangers of hiding behind complexity. The Message covers a lot of ground, but the largest section of the book — and the focus of this week’s conversation — is about Coates’s trip to the Middle East and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Coates argues that the situation is not as complicated as most of us believe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from into the mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about Joy and Justice
0:06.2	produced with Vox Creative.
0:09.0	Along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, my old home.
0:13.7	There's a stretch of land nicknamed Cancer Alley because the cancer rate is more than seven times
0:18.6	higher than the national average, thanks to a high concentration of petrochemical plants.
0:24.0	Here, how one community is fighting against some of the top polluters in the country, in their own backyard.
0:30.0	Subscribe to Into the Mix of Ben and Jerry's podcast.
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1:06.2	As you know this show is called the gray area and when we created it in 2022 that name
1:11.9	felt right because it represented my instincts as a host. I really do believe that the world is complicated, far too complicated for any of our
1:30.2	ideologies to capture perfectly and our desire for simplicity is understandable but often any principles or a point of view. I do, and if you listen to this show, you know that.
1:52.0	But this temptation to oversimplify is something we try to
1:57.1	resist on the show and we'll keep doing that because I think it's essential.
2:04.0	But when does the impulse to embrace ambiguity become its own pathology?
	...

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