I’m 42; Samuel Moyn is 54. When we talked about his new book, Gerontocracy in America, it felt less like an interview than a conversation between two people who’ve learned to live with the price of telling older, richer people something they don’t want to hear. Maybe Moyn was trying to give me advice when I asked him to describe what it’s like to write non-fiction that leaves a mark.
“I tend to write books that get a lot of blowback,” said the Yale law and history professor, clad in a navy-blue, school-branded T-shirt, zooming into the call from the wood-paneled head of college office in New Haven. He noted that a friend of his even told him he is always “antagonizing people,” but “this is on a different level.”
