Adam Gopnik

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.

Writers we think are all wrong and want to read anyway come in two kinds: those who are good writers and bad thinkers — Christopher Hitchens, Norman Podhoretz, and Gore Vidal, each in his terribly different way, are instances of that — and those who may not be original stylists but who we admire for trying to be better thinkers than they were before, stumbling toward truth from a starting place very different from the one we happened to inherit. I disagree, for instance, with David Frum about almost everything, from Iraq to the legacy of Pierre Trudeau in our native Canada, but never doubt his integrity or desire to tell the truth about the world.