John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage.

John's book is structured around the rhythm of a law school year. The reason, he says, is because he thinks the law has something to teach us about how to approach disagreement.

We talk here about why he thinks his book has surprising advice. We also spend a lot of time talking about the protests on college campuses about the war in Gaza, which have reached a fever pitch over the past week, and what his book offers to that incredibly intense disagreement. We actually kept coming back to the issue of American universities and their purpose and mission.

We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy.

But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with.

Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?"

That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome.

The point of Nick's Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens.

Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it.

You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book here.