And it's so generous on your part.

Thank you.

Um, that, you know, that is a visceral poem because, I, I mean, there, as I acknowledge, you know, um, let's just take mass shootings for example, happen with such catastrophic repetition in this country that it's hard to remember.

But that poem I wrote, if you remember a few years ago, there was a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and, um, two things that stuck out to me about that shooting is like the shooting at the grocery store in, um, Buffalo, New York.

The shooter had dro- driven hours across Texas.

Like, he was not living in this community.

He drove, like, hours across the state of Texas, which you know is huge, um, specifically to target, um, a majority Latino community, and he targeted that Walmart because people were doing back to school shopping.

And that's why we are so grateful for poets.

[laughs]

... who is Regina Nadelson, and why is she behaving like Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how Black revolutionaries got that way? How Liza could get to the point of actually crossing the ice, or how Angela Davis got to the point of actually joining the Communist Party, was, quite naturally, that white intelligence informed them both.

And since Harriet was prey to the scientific racism of her day, she attributed Liza's feistiness to the genetic transference of information via white blood.

But Regina lives in the 20th century and is an enlightened racist who knows about cultural determinism, which is to say Angela got her courage not from white blood, but white culture, and her sublime militancy was spawned by white teachers, white boyfriends, white psychoanalysts, and a special brand of white terror perpetrated on some respectable colored folks, for how else could she dally with Black Panthers and fight Ronald Reagan and carry the card? For surely no Black folks influenced her except abstract victims and her middle-class, read white-oriented, family.

Which is why Miss Regina, who knew Angela at Elizabeth Irwin High School, didn't take the trouble to interview any Blacks as she went about collecting her data and rejecting eyeball-to-eyeball or flesh-to-flesh contact with any of the other Blacks with whom Angela tried to form a Black student union, or the adherents that were drawn into it, or the other Black groups she worked with before joining the Party, or those other irrelevant Black souls Angela knew all her life.

For, as Miss Regina's labels show, Angela's people were not worth talking to anyway.

Whenever she needed a Black view, all she had to do was quote Frazier, Du Bois, Baldwin, or some other Black with a real name.

How would you characterize this passage? [laughs]

And

actually I think it would be smart for the Academy from a marketing perspective.

If like, if we just knew like a month after the awards came, all of it would be released because it would get us talking about it all over again.

It only makes the Oscars more important and more fascinating.

And yeah, and I mean, you know, Tracy and I, you know, you and I have talked about judging book awards and that, as it turns out, there are many different frameworks that judges and juries, and of course the Academy, you're talking about like hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, bring to their decisions but I think what we saw with Sinners and One Battle After Another in particular um is that I think one battle after another works best for people who viewed it in a vacuum.

And people all jumped up and, I'd never seen a win so celebrated, right? It felt like the whole theater was like, what is going on here? And Saeed, you took the blue sky with swiftness.

I texted friends.

I'll do this about all kinds of things.