Among the cacophony of cable-news squawk-fests, socially mediated newsfeeds, and listicles, believe it or not, there’s still a niche market for sober analysis of current events. Fareed Zakaria’s got that market cornered. Host of a foreign affairs program on CNN, writer of a weekly column in the Washington Post, and author of five books, Zakaria is a rare specimen of that endangered American species called the public intellectual.
Zakaria has fashioned himself into an authoritative voice on matters of geopolitics, offering historical and political context to the events shaping our ever-globalizing world, all the while peppering his prose with timely allusions plucked straight from the Great Books curriculum.
It was a bit jarring, given such gentility, to read a recent column of Zakaria’s titled “The Unbearable Stench of Trump’s B.S.” It was less shocking to find out that Zakaria borrowed his definition of the term “bullshit” from a Princeton philosopher named Harry Frankfurt. When Zakaria called in to chat with The Santa Barbara Independent in advance of his talk at the Granada Theatre on September 27, it was on that subject that our conversation began.