Episode 84 [PATREON EXCLUSIVE] -- Andrew Sullivan (Part 1) (Patreon)

As our summer project, we at In Bed with the Right decided to finally knock out our "white whale"-episodes, i.e. eps that we've been mulling (and researching) for ages (in some cases since the podcast first started). Schlafly! Tár! Buckley! Aquinas! Psychiatry!

As our first white whale, we're harpooning none other than Andrew Sullivan -- editor, blogger, Iraq War hawk, and noted gender conservative! And since we recorded three hours of material already, you're getting the episode in two parts. Our apologies, we (especially Moira) kind of don't like doing two-parters. But we felt Sullivan -- who is, as Moira put it, sort of "gender conservatism's Forrest Gump" -- was worth spending time with. He intersects with so many strands and trends, so many institutions and pathologies of the last forty years. Specifically, we're going through his complicated work by focusing on specific texts, by situating them in their moment and explaining their legacy. This first episode covers Sullivan's early years, 1980 - 1996: Oxford, Harvard, The New Republic, The Bell Curve, and Virtually Normal.