← Cannonball with Wesley Morris
Cannonball with Wesley Morris
Nikole Hannah-Jones Knows Why History Feels Dangerous
01:11:13
Six years ago, with the publication of The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that slavery was a foundational institution upon which the United States was built. President Trump called the project a crusade against American history — ideological poison that, “if not removed,” would “dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” Now, his administration is making a similar argument to attack diversity programs, historical discussions of slavery, civil rights and more as he pressures museums, schools, government agencies, national parks and other civic institutions to de-emphasize race. Wesley contributed to The 1619 Project, and he sits down with Nikole to trace the project’s journey from publication to this moment — when Trump has returned to power on a message that explicitly rejected its premise.
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Wesley
Hey, this is Wesley of Cannonball. I'm talking to Nicole Hannah Jones this week. Say hi, Nicole.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
Hey, Wes.
- [00:59]
Wesley
When something big happens in this country, something that feels important in terms of who we are, I always, I don't know, I need some time to sit with it and to think about how it fits into the larger story of this country, but also its history. And right now, what's happening is, is a battle over the story itself, our story. Since January, there's been this effort underway to dismantle the thorny, complicated version of that story, to sanitize it. Basically, our government prefers a brighter, cleaner, more glorious story. And so I've needed some time to understand what that's all about is this wide scale dismantling of the messier, more, more uncomfortable version has been playing out and, you know, basically a lot of it around our cultural institutions. And what I keep thinking about is this one afternoon six years ago. It was a gray day in February. I definitely remember that. And we were on the third floor of the New York Times building and an all star group of journalists, scholars, New York Times magazine staff folks had had come together to brainstorm about an idea that our colleague Nicole Hannah Jones had to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on what is now North American soil. I can't remember if the 1619 project was an official name, but there must have been about 40 of us in that room. And the exercise that day was to identify practices and ideas that exist in the present whose roots go back to American enslavement. It was astonishing seeing the ideas fly up on that whiteboard. Was sugar, an even cashier crop? And cotton? Did somebody just mention traffic and urban sprawl? Democracy? Jesus. It was, I mean, it was depressing, but it was also exhilarating. This brilliant group of thinkers coming together around this shared project, making these connections, these vital connections between our lives today, right here in the present, and our country's origins. Laying it all out. Six months later, the 1619 Project entered the world and readers seemed shocked to have it, gratified for all this journalism, scholarship, art history, feeling the project's timing seemed pretty perfect too. It dropped at this moment when Americans were really newly interested in the ideas around race in their pop music, race in horror movies, race in blockbusters. Get out finally found permanent metaphors for northern white liberal racism. They said it couldn't be done, but Jordan Peele did it. Black Panther. Imagine this magnanimous African kingdom that vowed to do better by Oakland than California had. Both were best picture nominees. That is not nothing. Atlanta. That was the coolest show on tv. This is America. Not the coolest song on the radio, but it did debut at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and win Childress Gambino the Grammys for record and song of the year. And now I've been thinking back to that moment a lot in the last few months. We're basically living in a backlash to that period. The National Museum of African American History and Culture. Man, that place would be so much better, for instance, if it just didn't have so much damn slavery in it. The Kennedy center would be a lot more legit if it banned the drag queens among us from performing there. Any policy or program that involves just about any non white, non hetero, non CIS identity has now been rebranded as Woke. At our museums, yeah, but also at our workplaces, at our colleges and universities, at our public school systems, at our national parks, wherever. There's an argument to be made that what started in that room six years ago, what I experienced as a simple but profound procedure of laying out ruminating on American history, this work of explanatory journalism helped bring about this backlash, helped bring Donald Trump and the Magaverse back into power. And so I wanted to sit down with Nikole Hannah Jones and find out if she even thinks this is true and how she's been feeling about this moment. Nicole, welcome to Cannonball. Um, does my recollection of that afternoon in February 2019 sound right to you?
- [06:25]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Truncated. Yes.
- [06:27]
Wesley
What's the long version?
- [06:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
We don't need to hear the long version, but yes. I mean, it wasn't called the 1619 Project originally. My idea was to call it the 400, but yeah, it was a colossal nerd fest. It was like.
- [06:42]
Wesley
It was. That was the thing. It was really nerdy.
- [06:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
It was my blurred, my black nerd dream in that all of these scholars whose work I had read through the years, I brought them into this Space at the Times, along with so many of the amazing writers who worked with us at the magazine and at the newspaper. And we just had a big brainstorming session. And so many of the ideas that ultimately made the project came out of that session. And the prompt, if you remember, was very simple, that on the 400th anniversary of American slavery, we. We wanted to come up with a collection of essays that were arguing not about the past, but about today and saying that so much of our society was based in slavery and yet we didn't know it. And so kind of the key was the connections had to be surprising. So that's how you get an idea like Traffic.
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Wesley
Right.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
Because we didn't want to tell the story of the legacy of slavery that everyone knew. We wanted to show that almost anything that you could see in our society, I could trace back the slavery in some way. And I have played that as a parlor game. And I actually can trace anything.
- [07:56]
Wesley
Anything. I mean, you and I have not played this. I mean, I do remember trying to imagine what people were gonna think. Right. Like, my bank, the place where my money is currently right now, the place I do investments, was also involved in the slave trade. Well, of course it was. If it was there then and it's here now, then the answer is yes. But I also remember that, you know, you and I have talked about this, not infrequently, but there was that day that we closed the issue. And I remember I had to catch a train. And you stayed later. You stayed till the bitter end. And I left at about 2pm and. And we hugged each other. And it was. I don't know, I felt like that hug was about a lot of things, but one of them was I felt like something was gonna change. And I don't know what that really was gonna be. What was that about for you, do you think? Because we got really emotional.
- [09:13]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yes.
- [09:15]
Wesley
And I don't think it was stress. I mean, it wasn't for me. It was definitely, I mean, part of.
- [09:19]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
It, a little bit partially stress for me, because. Well, one, I'm curious about whether you really felt at that time something was going to change or if now that's how you think you felt looking back. So I want to come back to that.
- [09:33]
Wesley
Okay. Because I've been thinking about what I meant by that too.
- [09:36]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah. Because I. I mean, it's been five years of beyond anything, obviously, any of us could have imagined the project would become. And so sometimes I catch myself remembering a feeling that I don't think I had back then. But that the experience now causes me to place upon that moment. I was exhausted. I was the one who conceived of the project, literally did nothing else. From the moment I pitched the project until it published. Read every word multiple times.
- [10:10]
Wesley
I was gonna say you were involved in every.
- [10:12]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Every image multiple times. And what I'm remembering is Dean Baquet, who was the first black editor of the Times, is the one who hired me as well as you. We bring him in. We've put up all the pages of the magazine on that conference room wall, and we bring him in to look at it. And I come and get you before that.
- [10:34]
Wesley
Yeah. This is what I always remember.
- [10:36]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
This is what you're remembering. And I bring you into that room where we have all the images, all the words. And I remember we hug each other, and we just are sobbing. Like, both of us are literally sobbing. And for me, in that moment, it was like we fucking did it. Like this thing, which I always say is the blackest thing the New York Times has ever, ever published, which is just true. But this thing that was, like, unflinching. And we had, you know, at this most elite white journalism organization had managed to produce this thing that felt so true. So to see it all there just felt emotional. Like, I felt I was called, like, I was here to do this thing and had somehow managed with this amazing. To bring it into the world. So that it was both exhaustion, gratitude, disbelief, like we had made this thing and now it was gonna go out into the world. And once you release it, you have no idea what happens to it once it goes out into the world. So it's also this amazingly, like, pure moment of, like, hope and anticipation of this thing, and then everything happens after that.
- [11:59]
Wesley
I think part of that day for me was, you're right. I probably was. I'm probably displacing something onto that moment. But I also had the sense that I just really felt like this was gonna matter in some way. I just couldn't have said how. I definitely felt that on some level. Like, do you remember when you felt like you could see something happening?
- [12:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah. I mean, I didn't have to wait long. So it published online, I think, that Wednesday. And then there were a bunch of people who knew just online social was different back then. So that it was coming out that Sunday and the day of publication. You know, I couldn't sleep. I was, like, anxious mess, mostly because I was like, my God, like, all of these resources that have gone into this thing, and it's so hard to keep anyone's attention I just didn't know if anyone, you know, would people read it. Would people. Would it be anything? And so I'm like, on social. I really haven't slept. And I just start seeing these stories of people who are talking about, oh, I went to, like, five stores trying to find the issue, and people were starting to post like, like, videos. Like, I finally got one, and I was like, it's a magazine. Like, that's amazing. It's a newspaper. And then people were getting mad because people had stolen the magazine out of their paper that was on their steps. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, this is a print publication about slavery. And people are excitedly trying to find it and, like, traveling out of town to grab a copy. And people were wanting to buy multiple copies. So that first edition, like, sold out. They did, like, an extra run of the copies of the magazine. And then you started seeing people were holding events. Like, even the day it came out, I was dropping by People's party where they were like, I was like, oh, oh, you're doing something down in lower Manhattan. I'll be there. I made, like, five stops into, like, People's events around. Like, there are organic events around this piece. And people talked about who didn't know it was coming. Like, going in their newspaper that day and seeing this thing that they never, ever thought that they would see in the New York Times. And then it just went wild. Like, people were baking 16, 19 cookies. Classroom teachers were decorating their classrooms with the images from the newspaper, the pullout. People wanted to teach it briefly. It was an amazing moment where you realized you could produce something that was really hard, really challenging, lots of words, and people wanted to engage with it. And it was this period, I think I remember at that time. So this is the end of Trump's first term, and people were wanting to really try to grapple with, you know, how did the country that elects Obama twice elect Donald Trump? And I think the power of it was. I do think timing mattered. I think had the project come out under Obama, when people wanted to believe we were post racial, there wouldn't have been that same sort of searching. And this is before we see George Floyd. This is before COVID It's those few brief months, and there is. Is like this sense that, like, black creative culture was the center of the universe. It felt like a renaissance. I remember us talking about, like, everybody dressed up and went to see Black Panther, Black Panther, right? And it felt like this moment of possibility of creative power. But damn, it was brief.
- [16:08]
Wesley
When did it feel like things had changed or were changing.
- [16:14]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So when the project first came out, there was kind of your normal conservative outrage. I think Newt Gingrich called it trash or something like that. And that was expected. And then it sort of went away, and the project became, as you know, this cultural phenomenon that you dream of as a journalist that you can produce. You never even dream I was gonna dream. You don't dream that big. You don't dream that big. You know, you hope that something has legs for a week would be, like, amazing in our media ecosystem. But then I remember this little group interviewed these historians, and some of them very, very eminent historians, and they were upset that this project talked so much about race. When they think the primary obstacle in the United States is class, then it kind of caught wind. Okay, now we're rehashing my scab. Let's not go there.
- [17:20]
Wesley
I don't want to. You don't have to get into all of this. But I'm actually really just curious about what the complaint was like, just writ large, that the project had missed the point of what America was actually about. That it was about this one thing, in this case being class versus what it meant to enslave.
- [17:38]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So, look, it was provocative, right? Like we're saying, what if we told you the origin of the United states is not 1776, that if you want to understand America, you can't begin with ideas of liberty. You have to begin with the practice of slavery. Of course, it no longer treated our founding as divine and our founders as demigods, but actually says slavery was a big deal. And as much as you want to act like it was an asterisk, it was actually central to everything about our country. Now, I think it's provocative, but also true.
- [18:13]
Wesley
I think it's true enough to seem not as provocative as the people who received it as provocative received it as right.
- [18:20]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And it actually wasn't really provocative. Historian Edmund Morgan. In America, slavery and freedom begin at the same time. Except what was provocative was it was in the New York Times, and it had gotten so popular. So if we think about the way most people learn history and American mythology, it is through popular culture. And so you could have these same arguments in these dry history books on a shelf, and no one cares. But when it is in the New York Times and suddenly all of these regular people are talking about it, there were people who didn't like that. I mean, it was certainly this sense of, like, gatekeeping. Like, who are they to try to tell us the story of America? And if we think about that period. It was a warning sign.
- [19:09]
Wesley
This is what I was gonna ask you.
- [19:10]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah. This wrestling over who gets to define who we are as Americans. What were we founded upon? What is our primary identity? That was an inkling of what was to come.
- [19:24]
Wesley
I think that this is a really fascinating period for not simply race, but the context of race in history. And we are talking about this thing coming out. The pandemic happens. You have that really surreal period in which Ahmaud Arbery is killed. We find out that Ahmaud Arbery had been killed. Breonna Taylor's been killed. George Floyd's been killed. And it just seemed like the ways in which the project was thinking about the present with respect to the past, people were ready to receive and enact. I don't know. What was 2020 like? Like, in your understanding of how your work functions independent of you, what was that period like? Why are you smiling?
- [20:20]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Well, I'm just thinking about what my Twitter account was like back then.
- [20:25]
Wesley
What was your Twitter account like?
- [20:27]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Very messy.
- [20:29]
Wesley
From you or to you?
- [20:31]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Both. Both. I mean, when I think about what happens in 2020, the end of 2019, before we're going into the pandemic, before we all, you know, because we are on lockdown, like, collect the murder of George Floyd on our televisions, what was happening was people were responding to the 1619 project, but also there were a lot of great work around this history's racial past that was coming out. And again, in popular culture in a way of having power of blockbuster narratives that we didn't have before. I'm thinking about, you know, the Obama portrait just so much. Right. That was.
- [21:16]
Wesley
That was Kehinde Wiley portrait of Obama. Yeah. Amy Sherrill and. And. And of doing Michelle Obama.
- [21:23]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Right.
- [21:24]
Wesley
Yeah.
- [21:24]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So I kept hearing from people in anger, like, how didn't we know this? Right. So people would be reading 1619 or listening to the podcast and just, like, angry that this whole history existed that seemed to explain America a lot more than the history that had been taught. And wanting to know, like, how didn't we know this? This again, we didn't create new history. Right. We just put it in a form for popular consumption and also made it relate to their lives today. And so when George Floyd happens, people are making those connections. You can hear them chanting. People are saying, why have we allowed these Confederate monuments to stand?
- [22:17]
Wesley
It has fallen. There it is. Let's go. Breaking news here on News 4.
- [22:21]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
We were right here.
- [22:22]
Wesley
They have taken down the Confederate statues.
- [22:26]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Albert pike, you're seeing people Spray painting 1619 on Confederate monuments and other, you know, monuments to people who were openly racist. And there's this moment. We briefly called that period the reckoning. And the reckoning was not just our collective witness of what happened, happened to George Floyd, but a larger reckoning about who we really are and what we owe to descendants of slavery and other marginalized people. But this is also happening in this moment of, like, profound demographic shift every day, you know, or not. Let me not be hyperbolic, but frequently enough, we would see, you know, news stories about how white people were going to become the minority by 2040.
- [23:11]
Wesley
Yes.
- [23:11]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Now, that's not actually true, but we're projecting this out, and Obama wins twice with a minority of the white vote. And so there's this sense that you can elect a black man to the presidency and most white people don't have to vote for him. And our country is becoming less and less white. And now we're also seeing black people at the New York Times who can create, you know, this project, take over entire issue of a magazine and take over the newspaper and do a podcast. And so I start to see this response that isn't just about what was created, you know, that this was a newspaper article or a newspaper project. It was a response that this was a war.
- [23:51]
Wesley
Well, what is happening is that a group of blacks have gotten together and they have hijacked the rich legacy of the civil rights movement.
- [23:59]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The basic premise of the 1619 project.
- [24:01]
Wesley
Was that American history was founded in evil.
- [24:04]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And basically that evil has infused the entire body politic in every aspect of American life.
- [24:08]
Wesley
It wants to wake you up to the fact that you're the entire America that you thought you knew was a lie. That bowl of cereal you ate this morning. Evil because it has sugar in it. Sugar was a slave crop. Lack of universal health care because of slavery, overcrowded prisons, low minimum wage, white artists stealing black music, traffic jams on freeways in Atlanta. I'm not kidding. All of it is because of slavery and segregation. The 1619 Project is a radical work of historical revisionism, aiming to indoctrinate our kids to hate America, to teach them right.
- [24:47]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell introduced the saving America History Act. They introduced actual legislation to keep the project from being taught in the classroom. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is talking about 1619. You know, that this could, like, collapse American Empire.
- [25:08]
Wesley
The 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy Our country.
- [25:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
I was like, damn, I'm bad B. If I can do that. But, you know, but. But there is serious now, cultural power on the other side trying to wrestle with this narrative. Donald Trump creates the 1776 Commission.
- [25:42]
Wesley
Today, I'm also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the 1776 Commission.
- [25:59]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So you start to see that there is this going to be this tremendous pushback against it. And for me personally, again, we're in Covid. It is.
- [26:10]
Wesley
So this is back to your Twitter feed.
- [26:12]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
We're at home, and now, you know, people smell blood, and so everyone is coming, not just at the project, but at me. And I. This was not just, you know, an assignment for me. Like, this work was deeply personal. We know everything that went into it, how much care was taken, and so I took it personally. And I have all the time in the world because it's the pandemic. So that was 2020, for many reasons, was the darkest year of my career.
- [26:46]
Wesley
I mean, I'm hearing you talk about the way people were coming for you, but I also wonder if, I mean, because you had to pull yourself out of it. And what did getting past that period look like? Like, I mean, it's a mess on your end is what you said, but how are you? How were you cleaning up the mess? Or, like, what did it mean to sit in that for a second?
- [27:18]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah, I had to. I mean, one, you're like, you have helped create something that is deemed so dangerous that all of this political power. I'm talking about, you know, the most powerful men in the world tweeting about 1619. Like, you realize that you have produced something that is shaken, like power itself. And that I don't, you know, I don't have to defend that. I had to understand. And let me be clear, there was certainly valid critique of the 1619 project. I've never written anything that was above critique, and I've never written anything or done anything that I thought was perfect. But I talk about how I had a very good friend of mine, a writer friend, who said, why are you out here street fighting with these people in these Twitter streets? Like, the fact that you have all of these people trying to discredit this work means it stands. It's not even yours anymore. And he said, you don't have the right to do anything that discredits this work because it doesn't even belong to you. And he tells me that I am the only one at this point who can discredit it that nothing that they're doing can. And that was the thing out of everything. You know, it was a lot of people telling me, put the phone down. Right. I mean, but that was the thing, because I realized it wasn't mine anymore. And he was right. And the best way to respond to what was coming was not to respond at all. Right.
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Wesley
Cause you were going to account. To account. To account.
- [29:04]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
You could have five followers to asking.
- [29:06]
Wesley
I had time asking these people to account for themselves.
- [29:09]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yes.
- [29:11]
Wesley
I mean, look, okay.
- [29:13]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
You know this, though. It's like, I have been studying this history since I was 15 years old.
- [29:17]
Wesley
This is. Yes. Mm.
- [29:18]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And so it is the hardest thing in the world that you have spent your lifetime studying something. I was the face of the project, but most of the people who wrote the project were not me. So they're not coming after any of these historians. They're not coming after these other writers. Just me.
- [29:33]
Wesley
No, it was you.
- [29:35]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
But it's also someone who hasn't spent five seconds on this, who feels that they can tell you, you got this wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. And so that restraint I didn't have. I'm an Aries. I'm an Aries. I don't have restraint. I had to learn this in my maturity over the past five years. That's why I said I've grown, but also just realizing my reacting to people who were clearly just trying to bait me into reacting, where when I responded, they got attention. But I don't need to respond because the project is what it is. That's what I learned over that summer. And it was transformative in how I understood both what the project was and what it meant to the world, but also how to move in silence.
- [30:25]
Wesley
I also felt like, in addition to how hard that period was, personally, there was just upheaval everywhere. And I remember during 2020, feeling like this really unprecedented thing was happening. Right. We're talking about the ways in which this project got so much bigger than you, in many ways, bigger than the institution that releases it. But this was also this wild period in which, I mean, we start capitalizing black.
- [30:59]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah.
- [31:01]
Wesley
Every corporation in America is doing some version of a kind of atonement. It's not reparative, but it's like reparations flavored. Right. Like, it's really light, but it's interesting to hear language put to something that had never been put to absolutely put before. You know, the monuments being challenged and collapsed. I mean, these were things by the way that. I mean, I don't know about you. Nobody caught me and asked, like, these were changes and decisions that were being made, that the institutions, including this one where we work at the New York Times, were just deciding it was time to make these changes. And I felt like a simultaneous participant in that moment and a bystander to a history that involved me in some way. And some of it was great. I think that some of it was a kind of overcorrection. And I'm curious, like, on the other side of this Twitter mess that you, you know, at what you would say is one of your low moments. There's also. There's some aspect in which the work you've been doing is seeing this new light of day. And what does that feel like, man?
- [32:22]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So on the one hand, it was like, 1619. The 1619 project provided the lexicon for that summer of protest, that it gave people a basis, like an ability to push back against this narrative that so often came from. You know, white Americans tend to view, for instance, a George Floyd moment as like, a bad apple incident. Of course, black people see it as part of this long history and part of a system. And you saw large numbers of white Americans who are now making a structural critique. So I've, of course, obsessed over the summer 2020, and I spent a lot of time looking at polling data, and that was the first time that a majority of white Americans supported Black Lives Matter. They had never seen a majority of them supporting. And so you were seeing, like, these connections being made. You know, I wrote about this. Like, NASCAR was like, oh, maybe we shouldn't fly the Confederate flag. Right. So it was this period where people were putting together an understanding of their America and these systems in a way that we hadn't seen before. Now, of course, you said overcorrection. I wouldn't use that word.
- [33:45]
Wesley
Okay. But there are, like, these zones in which I feel like I think there might have been a better solution than what was supposed to come up with. Well, of course.
- [33:55]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Of course. That's all. I mean, because it is necessarily was going to be messy. That people who had felt. And I feel this around the issue of trans Americans as well, Right. That people who had been completely silenced or felt silenced or felt that they had to stuff down how they felt in that moment. When you've been silenced, maybe you get a little too loud or your voice is louder than you would have wanted it to. Right. So I think we, all those of us who work in this area and study history, we all know that the normative state of America is regression. Our mythology tells us the normative state of America is progress. So I talk about this, like, with the Supreme Court. We all pretend the Warren Court. Right.
- [34:46]
Wesley
Is the apotheosis of the court.
- [34:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
It's not.
- [34:49]
Wesley
Right, Right.
- [34:49]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Warren Court was a blip.
- [34:50]
Wesley
Right.
- [34:50]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Most of the court is the court that we have now or the court of Plessy v. Fergus. Right. Like, that was the court, and this is normative America. So we all knew the backlash was coming. And so people consider that to be an overcorrection. But I think it really was a moment of people who have had to be suppressed finally having a moment where they felt they could push and just feeling, we better push really hard.
- [35:16]
Wesley
Push as hard as you can.
- [35:17]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
There's not going to be a long time of this. And most of what happened in 2020 was performative, right?
- [35:25]
Wesley
Yes.
- [35:25]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
There was no reparations, like none of those kind of societal or structural things that people were asking for. We got symbolic victories, and now we're being met with structural resistance.
- [35:38]
Wesley
I am always struck. I mean, I was struck by what happened in 2020 in response to the project. I'm thinking about it right now, which is that there is a real fear of what happens when people find out it's the education that scares people.
- [36:01]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, listen, these are the folks who said they were free thinkers, who said that people were being oppressed on college campuses for their ideological viewpoint, that we needed an intervention to allow free speech. That that was the issue, was the illiberal left was suppressing speech. And now we are in a moment of tremendous state power that is literally taking books off the shelves, telling historic sites and history museums what they can include and what they can't, asking everyday Americans through a QR code to report if they go to a historic site. And it doesn't venerate Americans. And by Americans, we know they mean white Americans. But I think that that's what makes this period so tremendously dangerous. Is that a truly free society? And too often, even our colleagues in the industry kind of treated college students who might protest a speaker who they thought was repugnant as equivalent to the state using its power to dictate and make illegal discussing certain things, certain topics. I mean, the DEI infrastructure did arise out of 2020, right? It proliferated out of 2020. And I have been a critic of it because I always felt it was performative and now I have to defend it, because they are.
- [37:46]
Wesley
Nicole, you're like, in my brain, right.
- [37:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Using it to dismantle not just, you know, poor, poor diversity training or mandated diversity training, but to dismantle civil rights and to dismantle a common belief that multiculturalism is good, that we should try to make a society more equitable, that it's actually not beneficial in a democracy to have people of color excluded from entire professions and not able to go to elite colleges. And they have actually been able to dismantle even our collective belief that these are things that a democracy should have, or even that we should have a democracy, really.
- [38:33]
Wesley
Can I complicate the possibility within the pessimism that you're identifying, or just like the realism.
- [38:43]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Well, the practice.
- [38:45]
Wesley
Practicality, I would say it's practical.
- [38:49]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The practicalities it is.
- [38:52]
Wesley
The way the country has worked thus far is that you get these moments of what we can identify in hindsight as being these moments of progress. Right.
- [39:06]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yes.
- [39:07]
Wesley
The Civil war ends in 1865. You get three amendments, 13, 14, 15 in their wake. You have. I mean, I don't know when you would say reconstruction begins and ends, but you have about 10 to a dozen years of this moment of possibility that, you know, in order to get it underway and to have some buy in from the former Confederate states, you know, poor people, poor white people have to be brought along.
- [39:41]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Mm.
- [39:42]
Wesley
It seems to me like every moment and 2020 felt this way too. Once there's a moment of white people, black people, poor people, poor black people, poor white people, poor black people coming together, once they're getting educated alongside each other, once there is this, like a kind of equality at the bottom. You know, Martin Luther King, one of his last events before his assassination was the poor people's campaign. And that was for everybody, for all poor people. And I don't know what it looks like on the other side of this moment, but I definitely think that one of the powers of 2020, in part because of the work of the project, was, was it brought people newly together and gave them new knowledge. And there's something about learning alongside each other that is just really, you know, white people and black people learning alongside each other that is really terrifying.
- [40:50]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
1. Let me just start by saying elite white people don't care too much about poor white people either.
- [40:58]
Wesley
Sure.
- [40:59]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Okay.
- [41:00]
Wesley
Sure.
- [41:01]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And we know this because one, we know, again, historically, if you go all the way back to the Bacon Rebellion. Bacon's Rebellion, Right. When unfree white people who were indentured, working in deplorable conditions aligned with enslaved black people because they were all poor, unfree laborers, and they rose up in Rebellion against the landed white gentry. And the landed white gentry's response to that understanding the sheer numeric power of people who were unfree, no matter their race, and that their common cause was their economic and political status. They gave poor white people something that money could not buy, and they gave them whiteness. And so they literally created different political rules for white people. They gave the vote to some white men who didn't own land. And they created laws that, you know, no matter how poor you were, you had certain innate rights over anybody who was black, no matter what slave or free. And that sense has been used again and again and again to crush any hope of a class based movement in the United States. So during reconstruction, as you say, the only way we can get the freedmen's bureau and an attempt to try to help people who had just been enslaved yesterday was to say, well, what about poor white people? Fine. But what happens? Black people start schools. There's freedom Freedmen's bureau schools. And those schools are integrated because poor white people in the south also did not have education.
- [42:48]
Wesley
Right.
- [42:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
There were no public schools in the south except for North Carolina. And black folks coming out of slavery want to build public schools for all children. And so you have small numbers of white children attending these freedmen bureau schools. And you know what happens? The poor white people are like, we're too good to be going to school with these black folks. They did not have any schools, but now they wanted segregated schools. And so we see this again and again. You see this in the end of Reconstruction where there are white sharecroppers. Most of the land and wealth is held in the hand of a very small number of rich landed white people. And yet who are the alliances between? Right. White people are abandoning their class interests for their racial interest. When Dr. King decides to do the poor people's march, that is strategy.
- [43:38]
Wesley
Well, yeah, he knows.
- [43:39]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
He realizes he has gone as far as he can go with getting white support for black people simply obtaining their rights, that he has to try to build this class based movement. And so when we look now, what were people asking for out of 2020? Yes, they were asking for racial equity, but they were also asking for a livable wage. Right. They were also asking for the end of mass incarceration, which wraps up, you know, the majority of people in prison are not black. Black people are disproportionately incarcerated. But we are not the majority of people who are in prison. Universal health care. Most people who don't have insurance are not black. Right. Most people who use Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, not black. And yet you have people voting, the majority of white Americans voting for a political party that is denying those things that they actually benefit from. And they.
- [44:34]
Wesley
Right now.
- [44:35]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Right now, Right. And so we have to understand that when we say all the time, oh, white Americans, poor white Americans are voting against their own interests, that's because we don't understand the interests.
- [44:46]
Wesley
Right.
- [44:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Whiteness is its own wage. Right. So I might not have anything else, but I have this. So even now when we're talking about cuts to Medicaid, cuts to, you know, this life saving health care program, you have people saying, well, we need to make sure they know it's not just black people on it. Yeah, yeah, but the problem with that, with that sentiment is we act like we don't understand that the folks in power don't actually care about poor white people that much either. So simply pointing out that it's also poor white people who are gonna be hurt is not gonna move the needle. I have read reports from, you know, during the time of desegregation, after Brown v. Board, and the rich white elite said, we're gonna shut down the high schools, we're gonna shut down all the schools instead of letting two black kids coming to this white school. Now, the poor white kids didn't have another option. Right. And you know what they said? They said, now we know it's gonna hurt a significant number of our poor white population not to have a public school, but it's okay, cuz it's gonna hurt all the black people. Yeah, they literally wrote that down. So this is that class solidarity, that cross racial class solidarity does not exist for long. And you have a political party that is able to exploit that even now. So when we look at, you know, apparently Trump won because of his economic agenda. Right?
- [46:24]
Wesley
That's what they said.
- [46:24]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
That's what they said. And yet what does he roll out as soon as he gets in office? He rolls out a racial agenda. That's what he rolls out. Doesn't come out with a single economic policy to help low income people at all. And yet support remains the same.
- [46:43]
Wesley
Okay, I'm listening to you talk and I'm thinking back to the essay, the essay that welcomes us to the 1619 Project in the magazine issue itself. And I remember it vividly, in part because it opens with the story of your father. And he was born into this family of Mississippi sharecroppers, raised you in a redline neighborhood in Iowa. And you write about how he was also proudly, the kind of Person who'd fly an American flag and how, as a young person, you did not understand why. You just couldn't fathom why somebody who had been denied the opportunities that your dad had faced, the racism he experienced, had been treated so badly by his country, by his government, you know, had fought for this country. Why would this man be so attached to this symbol? But the thing that you're working through in this essay is that you have come to also believe what your father did in some way, or you at least understand why he would fly that flag. Because he was trying to hold this place accountable, to realize its founding ideas someday. And it might be the most optimistic.
- [48:23]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Thing that I've ever written. Yeah, absolutely.
- [48:28]
Wesley
And I think your identification of an optimistic.
- [48:32]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
I would not write that essay today.
- [48:33]
Wesley
Well, yeah, I mean, that is what I'm wondering about. Like, how do you think about that essay now?
- [48:41]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So when I think about the original essay and what I was trying to do in both, it's opening, talking about my father with this flag and the way black people have always tried to use this American flag and laying claim to a lineage. And it shouldn't feel radical, but just to be able, as a black person, to say, this is my country. I have a right to fly this flag. I would want, not me personally to fly the flag, but that just people who have literally no other country to claim, being able to have some pride in claiming that country was wildly optimistic. And I think, you know. And you know this as writers, not just simply as reporters. We're writers. You are rhetorically trying to bring people to a certain place, and you're very conscious rhetorically of where you're trying to bring people. And I was trying to call us into possibility, black Americans into possibility. To say, you know, you are American. Your ancestors did build this, and not just with their brute labor. This country could not exist without us. And you can take pride in that, and it's okay. But also call white people into possibility to say, this country can be better than what it is that we were founded on, these majestic ideas. Even if those men who wrote them didn't necessarily believe they applied to everyone, they did write them. And they gave us the ability then to take those words and say those words can be manifested. And now it's like, I feel like, to some degree, what it must have felt like. Okay, this is gonna sound absolutely crazy, so don't take it literally.
- [50:37]
Wesley
You know me, though.
- [50:38]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
No, I'm talking about to the listening public, Thurgood Marshall. Okay, I am not comparing myself to Thurgood Marshall. But one of the things that I obsess over and I have obsessed over for probably two decades is what it must have felt like to be Thurgood Marshall serving on the Supreme Court. So Thurgood Marshall is as much an architect of our democracy as anyone can be. Right. And you go before the Supreme Court and you brain the case that dismantles, ultimately dismantles racial apartheid in the United States, Brown v. Board of Education. And then within a few years of helping end racial apartheid in the United States, you go on to that very court, and you will spend your entire career writing dissents against a court that is erasing your legacy. Right. You know, we have two justices now that are historic justices who are also writing descendants, but they weren't coming from actually having created the legal possibility, like.
- [51:47]
Wesley
Watching the legacy be dismantled by your.
- [51:50]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Peers, like your own court cases. Right. Your own. Right. And so I feel like I wrote this thing and I helped bring this thing into the world that was really about possibility of saying, if we can finally be truthful about who we are and if we actually believe in these creeds, owning up means we can then create this country. Now, I'm not saying I ever thought we were going to, but I was trying to call us into possibility. Like, that flag my dad, with that American flag, was disarming also for many white people. And I understand that rhetorically, as I'm writing it, that I'm messaging on two levels here. I'm messaging the black people, but I'm definitely messaging the white people who can see themselves and their love of country and patriotism in my dad. Right. In this black man flying this flag. And that flag allows them to do that. And now we are in this moment where everything has been placed back in this rightful place. And I don't even think it's the MAGA aesthetic. I think those folks were just waiting for a moment, and that moment is now. I think it's all the quiet people.
- [53:11]
Wesley
Yeah.
- [53:11]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Who aren't signaling anything aesthetically, politically. They're just quiet. And they're quiet because really, they agree not to the extremes. Right. But it's the people who were like, we did believe Black lives matter, but you know what? You made me sit into one too many trainings. And I'm tired of you talking about race all the time. Like, I thought you were gonna talk about it for a few months. We gave you dei, now you keep talking about it. And it's not just that we can't talk about these things.
- [53:41]
Wesley
Like, this is A good point.
- [53:42]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Where socially it's not acceptable. It's that we have a president who is issuing executive orders saying, you cannot talk about these things, saying, you cannot have multicultural centers. You cannot have diversity and inclusion officers on campus. You cannot say, we actually want to make something racially diverse because that is discriminatory against white people. It's that we literally are being told legally that we can't. And there has not been a pushback to that. There have not been people who said, actually, diversity is our value. That willing abandonment.
- [54:16]
Wesley
But see, this to me. All right, we gotta take a break.
- [54:18]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Okay.
- [54:18]
Wesley
But I will just say this is.
- [54:20]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Exactly why I'm in dissent writing mode. That's all I'm saying. Okay, that's fine. I fear, sadly, the rest of my career is going to be in dissent writing mode.
- [54:35]
Wesley
All right, we're gonna take a break.
- [54:36]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Okay.
- [54:36]
Wesley
And I actually, when we come back, I do want to sort of spend a second reading between the lines of what it means for you to be in dissent writing mode. Mm.
- [54:55]
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- [55:30]
Wesley
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- [55:41]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Perfect.
- [55:42]
Wesley
The mountains are impressive.
- [55:44]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
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- [55:49]
Wesley
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
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Wesley
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- [56:00]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
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Wesley
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- [56:36]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Okay.
- [56:36]
Wesley
We'Re back talking to the one and only Nicole Hannah Jones, who you really are.
- [56:42]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Cannonball.
- [56:46]
Wesley
Wow. I think that is a compliment.
- [56:48]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
You are the dynamic force. Anyway, go ahead.
- [56:51]
Wesley
I'm sorry, I don't know. You said something before we took the break that I kind of want to sit in a little bit. Because you compared yourself to being in a situation that a Thurgood Marshall. Well, actually, literally only Thurgood Marshall could have experienced. Right. Which is essentially having gone to the court in 1954, gotten your verdict, that would result in Brown versus Board of Education ruling. The ruling. Sorry. And then having the most amazing thing happen. You get appointed to sit on the court, and you have to spend most of your time on the court objecting in dissent to the rulings of your.
- [57:46]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Colleagues that, by the way, are often citing Brown v. Board as they.
- [57:50]
Wesley
Yes.
- [57:51]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
As dismantle it.
- [57:53]
Wesley
I mean, but also, I mean, I'm experiencing as a reader the work you are doing now as dissent work. I don't think I needed you to crystallize it, but you did a much better job of it than I did or I could have.
- [58:12]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So, you know, I think about, you know, what is the role of dissent? Like, when you're reading any dissent or.
- [58:21]
Wesley
You'Re talking about the sort of the Supreme Court dissential dissents. Okay.
- [58:25]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yeah, okay. Right. What is, what is the purpose of that? When we look at Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Brown Jackson and on, you know, you're a 6:3 minority on the court, so their entire career going to be writing dissents as well. And I think about my own work and this feeling like I will, you know, go out, I will end my career writing dissent. That. That is my future. And you understand that you're writing for a future society that dissents, an archive are not about today. Dissents are writing for a future society that will take that dissent, that will be ready for that dissent and enact it. I mean, this is what overturns Plessy v. Ferguson in 1954 was dissent. John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy is ultimately used as the basis, the legal basis to overturn segregation in Brown. And so I think I'm also just in the bearing witness stage. I feel a mandate to bear witness, to not allow us, when we look back 20 years from now, 30 years from now, to pretend we didn't know, to pretend that we weren't actively making choices. I see what's happening now as a foreclosure of possibility. I think that is where we are. Like, I. I know I have been on the road constantly since 1619 published. Right. Talking about 1619 in every type of place. Urban areas with lots of black and brown people, multiracial audiences, and completely white places where people wanted to come out and grapple with something really hard. And now we're at a place where college campuses can't even invite me or others who are doing similar work. They can't even invite you on campus. You cannot even have that discussion on campus.
- [60:46]
Wesley
Is this a nationwide. I mean, is this like particular kinds of universities, or are you noticing there's just been a real change?
- [60:53]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Oh, no, it's. There is a fear. So no court and no law has ever said that DEI or Diversity Equity, Inclusion or working on diversity is illegal. It is not illegal. It doesn't have to be. Right. Because all you have to have is the threat that your university will be harmed, your organization will be targeted, you may be sued. You have the Justice Department, the Department of Education, and the President of the United States saying that this is illegal and discriminatory and in violation of civil rights law. The point of that is that you don't actually have to force compliance. Right, right.
- [61:40]
Wesley
It's chilling.
- [61:41]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
People comply in advance. So I have talked to a lot of writer friends and historians and just said, are people asking you to come talk to their students anymore? And many of them say no. I just got a call from a reporter in South Carolina because some staff at Fort Sumter and another historic site, Fort Sumter. Right. The first shot of the Civil War. My children's book has been flagged. Right. For removal. And so the very ideas that we were able to talk about and discuss and have exchange about are now considered illegal.
- [62:24]
Wesley
Samizdat. Essentially, yes. Yeah.
- [62:26]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
In a society that has prided itself on being open on freedom of speech, freedom, right of expression, freedom of assembly. And again, this is not happening because college students are using their freedom of speech to protest something, but because the most powerful people in the world have dictated and made it so. And all of these institutions who five years ago pretended that all of this was so important to them have capitulated.
- [63:00]
Wesley
Where would you say we are right now? Because I've been thinking a lot about what history is even good for right now, because what it does is it tricks you into looking for these compares and contrasts when really I actually think it might be more useful to do something that I think I'm hearing you say, which is to just be present. Right. And just see what is happening. Because history as a precedent, I mean, I don't know if it's Useful.
- [63:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Don't ever say you don't know if history is useful.
- [63:30]
Wesley
Well, I'm saying in terms of figuring out where we currently are, of course, there's a use of history. I think that's. There's no question.
- [63:37]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
I think it does, though. What I think. What I think maybe. Go ahead.
- [63:42]
Wesley
I think maybe talk about what a proper use of history is then.
- [63:47]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
I think, I mean, there's lots of them. But the two things I would focus on for helping us in this moment is, one, it helps us understand what we are capable of.
- [64:03]
Wesley
Okay.
- [64:03]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And I think that's really important. So, you know, in my latest piece for the magazine, I try to show us about historically where I feel like we are, which is where you go.
- [64:16]
Wesley
Through and you look at all the things that the Trump administration has essentially undone.
- [64:20]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yes.
- [64:20]
Wesley
And in form of executive orders and, you know, the destruction of these programs and. And rolling back these policies.
- [64:31]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Right. So it's like a policy feels very abstract. An executive order feels very abstract. And we suffer from historical naivete in this country and denialism, and that's because we really do believe in our mythology in a way. I mean, all countries have mythology, but we really do believe we're exceptional. And we really do treat all of these dark, extended periods where people don't have rights, where people are having their rights violently suppressed, where we don't have democracy, we treat them as these exceptional periods as opposed to the norm. And so I wanted to show, like, there was a time when there was an integrated university in the south where black and white children were attending this school together in Louisiana where we had black senators, like, a few years out of slavery, black men were serving in Congress, black people were serving in the federal government. And that progress was completely erased within 15 years. You have none of that. And I think because we don't know what we are capable of, we can't imagine what can happen in this period. So when I'm writing, it's not just abstract. All of these executive orders and all of this pressure that's being placed on the private sector, on public institutions, on universities to end dei, to open their books and show and justify every black person that's been hired or every black person who's been admitted, it's not abstract. Right. You can see a disappearance of us from these places because we have seen a disappearance before. And I think the other reason, you know, what history can do for us is it also can show us a roadmap out. So what I'm arguing is, like, our correlate now is about 1913, 1920s, where we had this period of forward progress. It collapses. What ends. Reconstruction is a deal between the northern industrialist titans and the white former Confederates. Now, whether those northern titans hated black people or not, some did. Some were irrelevant. It was irrelevant.
- [67:07]
Wesley
Right, right.
- [67:08]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
There's this great book called Race and Reunion. It's David Blight.
- [67:12]
Wesley
David Blight. Okay. Yes, yes, yes.
- [67:13]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
And he talks about, you know, that weariness of white right after the Civil War, grappling with the race problem. They're tired of it, they're over it, and they just wanna be friends again. And they were fighting over race, and now they just wanna be friends again. And the way that they can reunite and be friends again is they gotta let black people go. Right. Do what you want to them. We're not even gonna fight about them anymore. There was a silence and an acquiescence. Dealing with that original sin is too hard. It's exhausting. It's draining. You're making me feel things that I don't want to feel. And I just want to think about how great America is. And I just want to be clean and have clean hands. So we just got to move on and let that race stuff go. And black people need to be quiet.
- [68:02]
Wesley
Well, with that in mind, I really. I mean, I think that there is something, I don't know, potentially confusing about what it means to have, as a descendant of slavery, the split screen of institutional narratives. And I'm thinking specifically about what it is like for me to walk around this city and go to all these museums and to have every single museum in New York City right now have some major show about some great. Like, featuring some great black artist. The Met right now has not only a Lorna Simpson show that is very good, but they have the superfine show that the Costume Institute is putting on about, you know, 350 years of black people in clothes. Amy Sherlot's at the Whitney. Jack Whitten was at moma. Rasheed Johnson basically has colonized the lobby at the Guggenheim.
- [69:14]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Can I just say something really quick, though? I do just think when we're commenting on how black all these exhibits are.
- [69:22]
Wesley
Oh, yes, please speak.
- [69:24]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
We just have to acknowledge exhibits are planned years in advance.
- [69:27]
Wesley
Okay. Yes, yes, yes.
- [69:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
So let's see what we see next year.
- [69:30]
Wesley
So I actually think this is a.
- [69:32]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Good point before we give too much credit.
- [69:33]
Wesley
I'm not giving. Well, the credit. This is not a question of credit. This is just a question of reality. Right? These shows are happening. These shows are in a response to this is George Floyd.
- [69:43]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
That's right.
- [69:44]
Wesley
These shows are George Floyd.
- [69:45]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
That's right.
- [69:45]
Wesley
I mean, I should have said that.
- [69:47]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The litmus test will be what.
- [69:48]
Wesley
What comes in its wake, what happens after.
- [69:51]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Yes.
- [69:52]
Wesley
But I mean, the reason to bring them up, though, is.
- [69:57]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Like, is this. Are we in the moment of the veil coming down? Right. And is this the moment where we. Mark, do y' all remember in 2025 when all the museums. And then. Right. That this is like, I think about. And I'm not gonna remember his name right now, but like the very last black representative of Congress, I think he gets booted in 1898 or something like that. Right. And he gives this amazing speech and he's like, I'm leaving. I'm the last one. But one day we will return. It would take almost a century. Right. So I almost feel like when we. I feel sad. I feel a deep sadness that what you are seeing and the ability to go to all these museums, that it's going to be some years before we see that again. Like that. That's the last little remnant of this brief moment of in time, that reef destruction of veil before that flavored moment.
- [70:59]
Wesley
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [71:00]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
That W.E.B. du Bois talked about. Down.
- [71:07]
Wesley
Nicole, thanks for hanging out and doing a little cannonballing with us. I appreciate it.
- [71:14]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Why is it called cannonball?
- [71:16]
Wesley
Because. Okay, it's a long story, but basically, just go with the energy. We did it.
- [71:21]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Okay. I'm scared of what? I don't know what the hell I said.
- [71:27]
Wesley
You said.
- [71:28]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Right, Exactly.
- [71:52]
Wesley
Mont Blanc invites you to use life's.
- [71:54]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Quiet moments to pause, reflect, and put pen to paper.
- [71:58]
Wesley
Chapter one. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Part one.
- [72:03]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Perfect.
- [72:03]
Wesley
The mountains are impressive.
- [72:06]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Oh, I wish you were here to see them. Dear Diary, meet my new writing companion, the Meisterstuck.
- [72:14]
Wesley
For every journey, the perfect companion awaits.
- [72:17]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Montblanc. Let's write.
- [72:19]
Wesley
Visit montblanc.com for exquisitely crafted writing instruments.
- [72:22]
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Leather goods and more.
- [72:25]
Wesley
From Joe Wright, director of Atonement and darkest hour, comes Mussolini. Son of the Century, an eight episode series streaming on mubi. Luca Marinelli delivers what critics call a towering performance of puffed up vanity, bringing Mussolini's rise to life with bold storytelling and an unforgettable score by Tom Rollins of the Chemical Brothers. Hailed as gripping and remarkable, this daring vision redefines historical drama. Son of the century, exclusively on MUBI@Mubi.com.
- [72:58]
Clinique Narrator
NYT throughout the Fort Myers area, life unfolds at your own speed here. Connecting to loved ones and yourself is an unhurried pleasure. Whether kayaking beneath mangroves, pausing to watch birds take flight, finding seashells along the shoreline, or walking the beach. Each moment invites reflection. Fort Myers is a place to experience fully at a pace that just feels right. Discover a slower, more intentional way of Living@VisitFort Myers.com.
- [73:39]
Wesley
This episode of Cannonball was produced by John White, Elissa Dudley, Austin Mitchell and Janelle Anderson, with production assistance from Caitlin Presti. It was edited by Lisa Tobin. This episode was engineered by Daniel Ramirez. It was recorded by Matty Masiello, Kyle Grandillo and Nick Kidman. It features original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wong. Our theme music, as always, is by Justin Ellington. Our video team is Brooke Minters and Felice Leon. This episode was filmed by Alfredo Chiarapa and Lauren Pruitt. It was edited by Jeremy Rockland, Mark Zemel and Eddie Costas. We're on YouTube, everybody. Watch and subscribe, please. Special thanks to Davon Darby and Erica L. Green. Girl, you're doing it. Thanks for listening, everybody. Really appreciate it. We'll be back next week and we're going down the south park and we're gonna have ourselves a time. Okay? Sam.