Episode 46: INTERVIEW with Stephen Marche – author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

This episode is going to be different. The usual dumb shit that happened in the last week, and there was plenty of that to go around, can keep until next week. It has always been my plan to incorporate interviews into The Dumbest Story of the Week, and I am very happy to say that this week I was fortunate enough to talk with an accomplished journalist and author about a topic that ties directly into some of the themes of this podcast. Stephen Marche is the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Esquire, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and other many other publications. Stephen is also a weekly contributor to CBC Radio. He has collaborated with artificial intelligence on the first AI-generated novel reviewed in The New York Times, Death of an Author. The reason I wanted to talk with Stephen is because of a book he released in 2022 called The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. I am all too aware that I am a longtime fan of apocalyptic fiction, with Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell books being among some of my favorites. But Stephen Marche crossed the United States several times to prepare for writing The Next Civil War, researching and conducting interviews across the political spectrum, in and out of governance and the military, and spanning the social divides in order to write what is a very much real assessment of the powder keg of American divisiveness and what it might look like when the bonds that hold Americans together inevitably give way. The story he is trying to tell we Americans is a sobering one. I hope you like this interview. I am proud to share it with you.