Taylor Branch: And rather than begin that conversation, people were only interested in who might have insulted whom by not giving proper credit on a larger issue that nobody expressed any interest in.
Cristina Martinez: Probably sending a text to the wrong person.
Branch: That’s all it is. [laughs] It’s kind of atrophied the public sphere.
Martinez: That’s all people should really focus on.
Branch: Well, they talked about it themselves on the phone.
•••
Martinez: So to think that we’re not affected by the placement of the planets, and the stars, and the moons, it seems impossible for us not to be.
Branch: But nobody trusts that we’d be able to keep ourselves away from them.
Martinez: I didn’t always understand how.
Branch: So we’ve gone from movement to spin.
Martinez: And now we’re here.
•••
Branch: These are rich dilemmas and there’s a lot to argue about, about what’s consequential and what’s not.
Martinez: So I do make it a point to sleep.
Branch: And it’s a very complex process.
Martinez: At the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
Branch: But that’s a tragedy for history.