Today I’m bringing you a conversation I’ve been trying to have for some time.

My friend Billy Peard lives in South Tucson, Arizona, where his law practice serves some of the most vulnerable members of our society. When I met him back in 2014, his main legal focus was on the rights of workers — farm workers, especially — and the rights of immigrants. When it comes to immigration law, Billy is the most knowledgeable person I know, having spent years as a staff attorney for Community Legal Aid in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then as an immigration lawyer for the ACLU in Arizona.

I reached out to Billy because I hoped he could help me understand how we’ve arrived at this moment.

I think we can all agree—no matter your personal feelings about ICE or a policy of mass deportation—that something feels fundamentally different in our country today. We’re not used to this. We’re not used to stories about ICE agents detaining five-year-old kids. We’re not used to reports of ICE agents harassing local police officers. We’re not used to seeing our fellow citizens mobilizing to alert their neighbors to the presence of ICE agents in the community. We’re certainly not used to seeing an American citizen shot and killed by an ICE agent while trying to drive away.

How do we account for this? Is the second Trump administration doing anything that’s actually all that different from what came before? Or are we just getting swept up in a media-induced hysteria?

I asked Billy about all this and more. As you listen, you may notice that the word “unprecedented” is used more than once. Billy believes that ICE’s conduct under this current administration is indeed unprecedented—and very likely unconstitutional. But to understand exactly how this moment is unprecedented, it’s important to understand how we got here, and Billy very generously helps us do that. Some topics we cover:

* Billy’s journey into immigration law

* SB 1070, the Arizona “show your papers” law, passed in 2010, which galvanized the left and inspired Billy to get involved

* Immigration law during Trump’s first term

* Biden immigration policy: Was it an open border?

* America’s complicated—and often contradictory—relationship to immigration

* Immigration enforcement under Trump 2.0

* Is ICE only targeting serious criminals? If not, is this what people thought they were voting for?

* What is due process and why should Americans care about it?

* The effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience

A note on the recording: Billy did the whole interview while watching his two-year-old daughter Milena. If you notice an occasional awkward cut, it’s because Billy got up to go get her a snack or find another coloring book for her. You’ll also have the privilege of hearing from the kiddo directly. Big thanks to Billy—and to Milena for letting me borrow her dad’s attention for a little while.

Happy new year.

One highlight from 2025 was getting to interview Peter Ames Carlin about his new book, Tonight in Jungleland, which details the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

An edited transcript of that interview was published on my friend Kevin Koczwara’s substack, A Fan’s Notes. I love his substack, and I think you should subscribe to it. He interviews a lot of authors and every once in a while publishes his own long-form pieces, as he did recently with a deep dive into his love of Denis Johnson.

To kick off the new year, I’ve decided to share the full audio of my Peter Ames Carlin interview. Some of you have asked about it, so here you go. Peter’s a really nice guy, and I greatly appreciated his time. You can see my original write-up about the book below.

Among Bruce Springsteen diehards, the story of his third album is familiar—an essential part of the legend.

In his tiny corner of the universe, the scrawny kid from Jersey had earned a reputation as a magnetic, must-be-seen-to-be-believed frontman and guitar player. On the strength of his songwriting, he’d signed with Columbia Records and was hailed as the next big thing. Maybe even the next Bob Dylan! (The real Bob Dylan was still in his 30s at the time.)

But the first two albums didn’t sell. Changes were made uptown. Clive Davis, one of Bruce’s biggest backers at Columbia, left the label. The executives who remained weren’t really interested. They agreed to give him the money to record one song, and if that song was good enough to be a single, then they’d let him and the band back in the studio for a third album. But that was a big “if.”

The song he wrote would also give the album its name: “Born to Run.”

Cast in the light of the fifty years that followed—fifty years that have included life-changing concerts, culture-defining albums, presidential audiences, twenty-one Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, a Golden Globe—it can be hard to really grasp how close it all came to not happening.

With his new book, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run, Peter Ames Carlin sets out to show us. But beneath the riveting human drama—managers making frantic calls, executives only half-listening to the music, skeptics becoming converts, and Springsteen himself, upon hearing the finished record, threatening to scrap the whole damn thing—Carlin tries to answer the question at the heart of the story: How did it all get so great?

There’s no denying that Born to Run represented a giant leap forward in Springsteen’s writing. But how? Was it the pressure? A natural progression in his songwriting? The partnership of the writer-turned-producer-and-confidant Jon Landau? The doggedness of his manager Mike Appel? The engineering of Jimmy Iovine? For Carlin, it’s all of these answers and more. But it also ultimately comes down to one man’s vision and his determination, bordering on madness, to realize it.

That question, the one that animates the book—How did it all get so great?—appears in the book’s prologue, spoken to Carlin by Charley Cross. Cross was a great chronicler of the life and work of Bruce Springsteen and the founder of the beloved Backstreets magazine, which covered all things Springsteen for more than four decades. Cross died just a week after posing this question. The book is dedicated to him.

This feels significant. Springsteen considers his career one long conversation with his audience, and that conversation has come to include all of us who have been graced with this connection to his work. We talk to each other; we compare notes. I know people who don’t get it, and I have a curse of recalling every critical word anyone has ever spoken about Springsteen in my presence. But for those of who do get it—who feel it and live it every day—Springsteen’s artistry reaches a very deep place. Carlin is such a person and such a writer. He is, before he is anything, a fan, a guy who knows what it means to learn more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school. Opening the book with a conversation with another person so graced is a fitting tribute, and appropriate to the book’s subject. Not to presume, but I believe Charley Cross would be proud of the result.

Sister Chris Clark of Holyoke, Massachusetts, has been a friend for years. When it comes to religious matters, religious questions, or anything spiritual, she’s one of my absolute favorite thinkers. She’s also one of my favorite human beings.

Chris made her vows as a member of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in February 2011. We met when I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid, and I had questions. She didn’t have answers, necessarily; or at least she didn’t claim to. But she did have a way of accompanying me in my questioning, in my seeking.

Looking back, it all feels providential. I was setting up an event at DeCicé Hall, a community center in Holyoke. Chris, who worked there, came in to help me set up. And then we sat and talked.

For me, Chris is someone who makes belief in God credible. Her practice of hospitality makes people feel more at home in themselves and better able to respond to the promptings of God, of life, or what Chris sometimes calls “the mysterious center of things,” in our lives. So, to mark this holiday season, and Advent in particular, I wanted to talk to her again. I figured it would help me, and I hoped it might help you, too. Some topics we cover:

* Chris’s spiritual journey

* Dysfunctional families and the healing possibilities of the ACA program

* The human desire to be seen, known, and understood

* The meaning of being a sister

* Advent as a time of active hope

* The Christmas story and its resonance today—in western MA and beyond

* Was the Holy Family a migrant family?

* Being surprised by grace

* Finding goodness in the mess of life

* Christmas memories from Chris’s marriage

* Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

I know the holidays can be a rough time for folks. I hope this conversation brings a little light into your season and draws you closer to that mysterious center. Let us prepare the way.

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The song that plays out the episode is “St. Christopher’s Inn,” written and performed by my friend Matt Butler. The song takes its name and inspiration from St. Christopher’s Inn, a residential treatment facility in Garrison, New York, and a ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement. At St. Christopher’s, no one is ever turned away because of race, religion, or ability to pay. Matt has spent a lot of time at St. Christopher’s, sharing the gift of his music with people in recovery. As I listened to this song the other night, I realized that it was a perfect song for Advent: a song of waiting and hoping, of preparing the way, of finding grace within the mess of our human condition. Big thanks to Matt for the song, and for so much else.

You can hear this song and the rest of Matt’s catalogue on Spotify and Apple Music. And if you’re interested in supporting the ministry at St. Christopher’s, you can make a donation here.

“But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you’re supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Right now, in my hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, there is a debate underway about the meaning of America. Or at least that’s how my friend Mimi Panitch, currently running for a seat on the Holyoke City Council, understands this moment.

At issue is an order proposed by Kevin Jourdain and Linda Vacon, two long-serving members of the council, that would officially declare Holyoke not to be a sanctuary city. Their rationale is simple enough: Holyoke relies on millions of dollars of federal funding, and the Trump administration has made very clear that it is willing to cut funding to communities that don’t comply with its ideological demands. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s DOGE operation cut over $100 million in federal grant money Holyoke was expecting. So, by making clear that Holyoke will comply with federal immigration law—making clear that Holyoke is not a sanctuary city—the city council can help ensure that Holyoke won’t lose out on any more funding.

Mimi released a lengthy, impassioned, and deeply moving statement in opposition to this order. (You can read it in full here.) It read, in part:

We cannot be worthy of the best parts of our collective past if we collaborate, or cooperate, or pretend we don’t see what’s happening lest we be called upon to do something about it. We cannot invite ICE and Homeland Security, in their present incarnation, into our city to prey on our neighbors and be a cancer at the heart of our community. We cannot do this and remain who we say we want to be, and who we’ve sometimes been able to pretend to be.

I know money’s important. But, so is our sacred honor, and so are the people who make up our community, to whom we owe mutual loyalty. There are some things you don’t sell: who are you afterward, if you do?

That’s the backdrop for this conversation. I wanted to hear more of Mimi’s thoughts on Holyoke, immigration, American history, and how local communities ought to respond to demands from Washington. Topics we discussed include:

* The sanctuary city order before the Holyoke City Council

* The Trump administration’s approach to immigration and whether it’s a departure from American traditions

* The question of whether local communities can and should resist

* The economic costs of mass deportation

* Pope Francis’s letter to the American bishops opposing mass deportation

* C.S. Lewis’s insights on evil

* Building a local civic culture that fosters cooperation and goodness

A little about Mimi: She grew up in Holyoke, and she’s a graduate of Holyoke High School and the University of Chicago Law School. After practicing law in New York City, where she specialized in financial institutions and tax matters, she returned to her beloved hometown. She was appointed to the Holyoke Planning Board by Mayor Elaine Pluta in 2011 and has been reappointed by every mayor since. Today she’s the board’s chair.

Our paths first crossed in 2014 as volunteers for the Don Berwick campaign for governor. That’s a recurring theme here. In any event, she is as morally passionate— as passionately moral—a thinker and citizen as you’ll ever encounter. Agree with her or not—and, to be clear, I typically do—we should all be so lucky to have people like Mimi in our lives and in our communities. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Chief William Feehan was seventy-one years old. He was a deputy commissioner of the FDNY. And he spent the last moments of his life the way he had spent the majority of his life up to that point: trying to keep people safe.

Feehan’s story serves as the centerpiece of Brian McDonald’s latest book, Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in the FDNY. The September 11 attack is the event around which the book is organized: it begins and ends there. Along the way, we learn about the history of the FDNY through the lens of the Feehan family. Chief Feehan may be the most famous Feehan to serve in the FDNY, but he wasn’t the first. He followed in his own father’s footsteps, just as his son, John, followed in his. Some people—some families—are drawn to this life.

In this book, McDonald sets out to understand why. And in the process, he lifts up stories that are too often overlooked—stories of hidden lives lived for others.

“For periods all too brief in our country,” McDonald writes, “selflessness and a reflexive desire to help others at any price have received the respect they deserve.”

To mark the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11, I talked to McDonald about, among other topics:

* His journey into journalism

* The process of writing this book

* Chief Feehan and the Feehan family

* The emotional impact of 9/11

* 9/11 as a unifying national event

* The title Five Floors Up and how it epitomizes the firefighting spirit

Big thanks to Jay Ungar and Molly Mason for granting the licensing to use “Ashokan Farewell” in this episode and for generously making a donation to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.

I’m excited share the inaugural episode, featuring a conversation with an old friend, Dave Marsh.

When, in January of this year, Dave Marsh left his post as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—a position he held in the Biden administration—he wrote the following message on his LinkedIn:

“Federal workers serve their country tirelessly without regard for their personal political views. They have for over 100 years and America is a better place because of it. This is a nonpartisan principle worth fighting to protect.”

Today, amidst the Trump administration’s heedless and mean-spirited assault on the federal workforce, Dave is figuring out ways to help the broader public understand what the federal workforce does—and why these mass firings are bad for ordinary Americans.

Over the past few years, and especially over the past eight months, whenever I’ve found myself in conversations with folks who think of the government as a malevolent “deep state” seeking to thwart the will of the people, I’ve thought: I wish these people could talk to Dave.

So, here he is. In this conversation, among other topics, we cover:

* Dave’s journey into politics

* The ordinary beauty of campaigns

* The difference between campaign life and actual governance

* The heroism of public servants on 9/11

* The meaningful work done far from public view

* The disconnect between public perception and the reality of government work

* Civic responsibility as necessary for a functioning democracy

For me, the lasting takeaway from this conversation—and Dave’s great gift to me—was the reminder that politics could feel different. That maybe, just maybe, we’re capable of more than what recent developments in our national life suggest. This is no small thing. To emerge from this moment of peril, we need to be able to see tomorrow—to imagine what a better tomorrow could look like. Dave helped me do that, and I’m grateful to him for spending some time with me.