Steve Metcalf seems to shed urbanity and passion like I shed dandruff. His off-the-cuff manner of speech is as trenchant as his writing, and he is able to say wise things about any subject.

Here he discusses with me the topic that launched an episode of this podcast and my three-part essay “Best Behavior” (part three coming soon): the weird fact that we all changed our entire outlook on Woody Allen’s film Manhattan to fit our changing moral priorities—how we cannot just bracket out the lechery on display and heap praise on an indisputably brilliant and entertaining movie, even though that’s exactly what we did for decades! Steve and I chew over this terribly troubled—and terribly interesting—question before digging deeper into where our moral judgements hail from.

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