What is a Concentration Camp?

The phrase alone is enough to strike terror in your heart, and controversially, this phrase, so closely associated with Nazi Germany and with the Holocaust, has been used by some critics to refer to the current migrant detention facilities that the United States government is using to detain people at our southern border. To discuss the history and the politics, I'm

very pleased to be joined today by Andrea Pitzer. Andrea is a journalist who loves to unearth lost history, and for our purposes today, the lost history that she's uncovered is that of the concentration camp itself. Her book, One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps is a deep dive into the term concentration camp, where it came from, and where it's going today. And she's also been an

outspoken critic of the Trump administration's to tension policy. Andrea I want to start just by telling you my own story of how I came to expand on the uses of the term. I'm Jewish. Like a lot of Jews, I grew up hearing the phrase concentration camps and never distinguishing it from death camps or anything else that the Nazis may have done. And like a lot of people, I had teachers who had camp tattoos on their arms, and they and others used the term concentration camps in

a kind of generic way. And then I realized that it was a term that originally had something to do with a concentration of people, and that got me looking into the history a little bit. And then when your book came out, I thought, this is so great. Someone's actually doing this in a systematic way. So I guess I want to start by asking, is it the case that the first use in the English language, at least of concentration camps dates to the Bore War, the rebellion

against British authority in South Africa. Well, strangely enough, the phrase itself goes back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century, at least in the British press, and it's possible it's appeared some other language that I haven't found, but the earliest version of it in the English language press I could find was in the mid eighteen hundreds in the Times of London, and it was actually a

military term that meant something a little different. It was literally the concentration of forces, sort of getting ready for an offensive or a defensive move or a battle of some kind. So it had this military term for military people before it transitioned to mean concentrating non military people and doing this to civilians and isolating them from society in some way. The idea of the concentration of forces

is usually associated with Napoleon's doctrine of war. Put a lot of troops together in the same spot and go for it, and you're likely to overwhelm your enemy. So it was the term being used by the Times of London to describe a place where troops could be brought together in preparation for some kind of a very focused

and concentrated attack. Exactly. There's some connection between those ideas of concentration because if so, sort of fascinatingly, that connects up the whole idea of modernity and concentration camp, which will obviously get to with the idea of modern war doctrine, albeit in a very indirect way. Well it is indirect in that instance, but it's fairly direct. When we have the first decade of camps, they are all sort of eighteen ninety six and the ten years that follows. All

these camps are part of a military objective. Initially, they are doing something to civilians as part of a war strategy to defeat some kind of insurgency, and so I think there's this very natural move that happens. It's a very unfortunate move, but you can see the evolution of this modern war strategy bleeding over into how civilians are

going to be treated. And you know, there's this moment in eighteen ninety six where we sort of get this idea reconcentration of civilians in Cuba under the Spanish Empire. But even before that you had Spanish generals and British generals talking about rounding people up, talking about using this as a widespread policy, and I'm sure it happened sometimes, but as a really definite war strategy that was very clear, and people understood that it would cause suffering to do

this to civilians. That's at the very end of the nineteenth centuries when that idea emerges, and this eighteen ninety six moments in Cuba that you were describing, that's before the Spanish American Wars. What was the context and who was doing it in what language were they doing it in.

So the Spanish Empire had Cuba as its colony for quite a long time, and Cubans had been resisting that for quite a long time, and really from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Spanish American War itself, and then of course even after the Cuban people peasants mostly were seeking independence, and there were several rebellions that would sort of flare up and subside, and the eighteen nineties one flared up and the governor general there at the time said in a letter to Spain, Look, the

only way we're going to really end this and defeat these guys is if we sweep all the peasants off the countryside, put them in fortified cities behind barbed wire, and burn the countryside. This is kind of a transitional version of the camp because what they're doing is they're pushing them out of the countryside and into cities that they're holding and so people could come and go from the town, but they had no means to eat. Their

labor was basically agrarian labor. They didn't have skills that could be used in a city, and so you ended up with this very strange, bifurcated town where people on the edges were literally collapsing in the street and dying from disease and hunger, and the rest of the city was going on about its business. And so it isn't till the Bore War, which we get to very shortly after, that you have those sort of tense cities out from towns that we think of as a very classic version

of what's going to come. What were the British actually trying to accomplish with their tense city concentration camps during the Boer War as they fought the Afrikaans speaking Boar's efforts at establishing their own state. Well, actually, when you look back at the war strategy in Cuba in Southern Africa at that time, it was quite similar. You were trying to defeat these sort of guerrilla forces and they

were using barbed wire. And it's worth noting that the patenting and mass production of barbed wire is a really important piece of what made this kind of detention possible, because you just didn't need that many guards once you could really hold people. But the British were basically using barbed wire and the strategy of sectioning off parts of the terrain and then clearing it. And so if they could sort of clear an area and hold it, then

they can move on to clear the next area. But in order to do that, they needed to make sure that people out in the countryside weren't feeding or harboring or hiding the people that were fighting them. And so the approach that was, well, let's just get rid of all the civilians entirely from the district. Andrea, you know, you said something fascinating in there. I mean, you've said many fascinating thing as already, but you mentioned that barbed

wire was crucial to the process. That if you could put people behind barbed wire, which you could erect presumably very cheaply, unlike building a wall, then you could keep them there with fewer guards. And so as you were speaking, I just quickly googled and discovered what I had not known, which is that barbed wire was first patented in eighteen sixty seven and then improved with a new patent in eighteen seventy four, So barbed wire was pretty new as

a technology. Would it be an exaggeration to say that without the technology of barbed wire we couldn't have had the modern concentration camp. And I think that's absolutely true. I think the other thing we have to add in it wasn't quite as important in the first four or five years, but it became quite important later, was also

the mass production of automatic weapons. Because if the barbed wire slows people ability to escape, and then you have guards that can kill a lot of people in a very short burst, then it sort of locks the prisoners inside the detention camp. And so I would say that between those two inventions and sort of mass productions, because it really had to be able to get a lot of it to a far flung place to make this work.

There were other kinds of detention before, some of which were really close to what concentration camps would end up looking like Native American reservations in the US. We can think of as by far the very common precursor for concentration camps, and in some cases almost the only difference was this ability to detain people to actually hold them

in place without assigning a huge guard force. And I think that that's where we cross the line over some equally horrific, sometimes more horrific versions of detention that happened previously slavery forced labor camps, Native American reservations. We cross into this modern idea of detention not to steal people's labor, not to steal their land, but detention behind barbed wire

for detention's sake. That marks the concentration camp idea. The other thing that I thought was so fascinating when you were describing how the techniques of the British Hues and the Boer War were similar to those that the Spanish hues in eighteen ninety six in Cuba, was that it's a reminder that much as is the case today, where a theory of counterinsurgency becomes popular and then it spreads

from one military to another military to another military. Similarly, already in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, you had experimental military efforts to manage guerrilla warfarewell we today call insurgency, and one imperial power would imitate what another imperial power was doing. So it's sort of interesting to see ideas about military strategy, including the concentration camp

moving from place to place. Well, there's two things with that, And I think that the idea of the moving is important. This is an international thing from very early on. At the same time, when you have the same tools, when you have the same kind of training and you have the same technology at your disposal, things also kind of independently spring up. So sometimes there's a direct influence and sometimes it's just everybody has a hammer at hand, and hey, you know what you can do with a hammer. I

think that that's a fascinating thing. But the other thing is that you were talking about counterinsurgency strategy. Today we have so much concern and so much infrastructure built around dealing with this idea of terror and terrorism. It's important to note that concentration camps rise out of counterinsurgency strategy

and they never really abandon it. What happens is that who is game goes from people in battle and people who might be actually showing up to shoot you or kill people in your view of what's happening in the world. It goes to people who are in society next to you, who aren't wielding web but are somehow undermining and destroying

your society. But this idea of rooting out that dangerous dissident element that is going to destroy your society is at the heart of why concentration camps become acceptable and used and are used still today. That seems like an excellent point of transition to World War Two. And let's start with the Nazis use of concentration camps, and then we can also talk about the Japanese American internment camps.

You hinted. I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, that from the idea that you gather up and concentrate and imprison behind barbed wire the people who you consider to be a threat in a counterinsurgency, you can naturally evolve to imprisoning the people whom you see as a threat because of who they are, and that could lead to the interment of political prisoners, which was the Nazis first move, and then ultimately to people who are seen as kind

of existential enemies like the Jews. Is is that the process that took place in Germany? It is, But I think there's this transition moment we want to be sure not to skip, which is those first far flung colonial camps, which I will say held mostly women and children and had horrific death tolls I mean tens of thousands, more than one hundred thousand. That really shocked the world, and it was seen as a barbaric thing to use these camps.

But what made it reasonable and by the time we got to the twenties or thirties for countries to start using them again, was that they were used in World War One. So it goes from this very discredited brutal strategy of military war in the battlefield areas to in World War One, the idea sprang up again and it moved from out in far flung areas into the centers

of power. So you had detention camps. Let's say you were German and World War One broke out and you were in London, you were put into a camp there, you were put into a civilian camp in the area, and they had them in Berlin. And by the end of the war they had literally covered six continents and the Red Cross was investigating and visiting hundreds of different

locations in dozens of countries. You had a bureaucracy of detention show up, and the death tolls from these camps because everybody wanted to be seen as running the ones that were fair and just. It was a real propaganda war that was going on. By the end of that war, they had rehabilitated the idea of this kind of detention and it was called concentration camps at the time. What

we call it now is internment. And there was this idea that internment was a reasonable thing to do and that it didn't cause harm and that everybody didn't have to die. So after World War One, concentration camps are used everywhere. It becomes perfectly legitimate to lock up civilians in anywhere in the world, essentially, and that's where you end up with the early Soviet camps, and then in

the thirties the Nazi camps. When they first began, they looked very much like something that had been done before. And I think the alarm bells did not go off in part because the Nazis hadn't yet figured out that camps would be at the heart of the genocide that they wanted to conduct. But also alarm bells didn't go off because people saw this, they had seen it all

the time. It didn't look that different than things that they saw unfold around them in the twenties and thirties and during World War One, Andrew, can we talk about citizenship in that crucial transitional phase that you just described, because during World War One, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems as though these slightly better internment camps or concentration camps, the ones that were, as you said, rehabilitated the reputation of the camps were designed for basically civilians

who were citizens of a country y're at war with, so an enemy's noncombatants. So was citizenship the primary criterion during World War One for the creation of these camps. It very much was. There's hundreds of years of laws on the books about in most countries use them about this idea of enemy aliens. If somebody is alien to your country and there's a war, you can do just about anything with them. And that's been true for a long time. But what was different that it had been

more largely applied to individuals. So if you were an individual enemy alien in the eyes of the law, and there was some suspicion about you, there was great leeway in what could be done to you. But World War One marks this moment where you don't have to have individual suspicions about that person. We're going to apply that alien law to whole groups of people, regardless of their motivations or their actions, or whether you think their spy.

We just are going to sort of push that over the brink and use that existing law, and we're going to lock up vast numbers of people. So then once you're willing to do that to one group of people, what history teaches us is you just have to find the group you want to target and either take away

their citizenship or somehow move them outside those protections. And so from World War One on, the process really becomes how do you strip those rights of citizenship away from people so that you can do something to escapegoat them and lock them up. You're drawing a straight line year, I think too, we'll come back to the Nazis, but drawing a straight line here to the Japanese American internment camps, because after all, those included a combination of people with

different kinds of legal status. They were naturalized people from Japan who are US citizens, there were some natural born US citizens who were the children of people from Japan.

And then of course there were some people of the older generation who were in fact themselves still Japanese citizens and fit in some broader way under this enemy alien category because after all, the United States and Japan World War, but then all of those groups get lumped together in the exclusion order from the West Coast and then ultimately in the interment camps, which are actually called concentration camps. So that sounds like it's in connection with this idea

of the enemy alien being being locked up. And obviously, you know, not to give too much of a spoiler alert, but we are going to talk a little bit later on about the contemporary camps of the United States is using to hold non citizens and undocumented persons. There's obviously a citizen ship component that's crucial there as well. Yeah, this idea of the alien and the citizen becomes so

central to all of it. And it's worth noting that in World War Two as well, there was very little in the way of any threat from this community, and in fact, naval intelligence road to report saying we don't need to lock people up. And it's fascinating to me this history in which you had the Jay Edgar Hoover of the FBI against the idea of internment. You had the Attorney General at the time against the idea of internment. You had Roosevelt initially not wanting to run concentration camps

to put this whole community in. But it became this political fight. It became some people argue an economic fight over the really productive and fertile lands that were being farmed by this community. And certainly what we see in every concentration camp setting arose here too, which was the useful vilification of a group of people. So if you vilify this group, if you demonize these groups, what can

you extract from that politically? And it turned out there were a lot of people that could extract things politically, and so everybody thinks of this as a panic response. So we locked these people up in camps. That was wrong, but they didn't know better. They knew better, and it was this systemic thing that happens again and again with camps that sort of steamrolled it and took it the

other direction toward incarceration. You mentioned earlier that in Nazi Germany, the initial concentration of Jews was not focused yet on what came to be called the final solution of ultimately murdering and eliminating the Jews of Europe, but initially was part of a not exactly an anti insurgency strategy, because there was no Jewish insurgency, but rather of a let's gather up people who might we perceive as hostile to us.

It's a long and complex story, but would you give us just a shortened version, a compressed version of how the concentration camps that you've been describing from the eighteen nineties through the nineteen thirties sort of bleed into the creation of actual death camps in World War Two. This is the question that is real at the heart of the issue that today people are wrestling with on what do you call a concentration camp? What gets to be

called a concentration camp? And while that issue goes back actually more than one hundred years, people have debated this question these first years of Nazi camps, I think can

help make it clearer for us. In those first years, it was a terror strategy employed by the Nazis to stifle descent, and I don't think most people realize that German Jews were not rounded up in groups to be sent to concentration camps until Kristallnacht near the end of nineteen thirty eight, So those camps existed for five years, five and a half years really before you had mass

round up of Jews. What happens before then is exactly what you're saying, the rounding up of dissidents, the rounding up actually off homosexuals, the rounding up of people who were seen as vagrants, gypsies, what we would now today call roma and centie. People were rounded up that way. And in those first years, the Jews are being attacked by the Nazis in Germany, but it's mostly through the law.

They are stripping them of citizenship. They are saying you can't work in a hospital, you can't use a hospital, you can't hold a professorship at a public university. And it isn't until I believe, and certainly there's room for a lot of different ideas. But after Kristall knocked, when they arrested tens of thousands of Jews and held them in camps, that the world really didn't do anything, and

they ended up releasing. Actually those first five years and even after Kristall, more than ninety percent of those Jews were released, there was horrible violence done. Some people were killed, so I'm not minimizing that terror of the Jewish community at all, But even then, the camps were not an extermination tool at that point. It isn't until they still have members of the Jewish community that are not leaving, and at that point they can't leave. No countries will

take them. There's almost no country that is willing to harbor Jews at that point, and the Nazis realized that they're not going to be able to push this community out of Germany. And then, of course, when Hitler invades Germany is moving through terrain in which there are whole towns that are majority Jewish. So instead of the one or two percent that are estimated German Jews who have been before the war, they suddenly have these vast Jewish communities to deal with, and what are they going to

do with that? And this is where we end up with the debate that resolves in the idea of this final solution. And I don't think you can get to that death camp system without those concentration camps being opened for years beforehand, with them developing strategies, with them looking at tactics and techniques of control, and starting to experiment with how do you kill a lot of people. I don't think that you can get to the death camps

without having those non death camps in place. And it's those non death camps that I'm calling concentration camps, because the extermination camps were simply meant to kill as many people as quickly as he could, bringing bodies in, executing them, and getting the bodies out. In fact, I remember, actually very vidly when I was a student, having an older scholar explained to me why it was that we hear

the name Auschwitz all the time. Was the largest of the concentration camps ultimately, and so rarely hear the names of camps which were pure extermination camps like Bell Jettes would be a great example of one that's not a household name, but at which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered. And he explained to me that the reason was that many many people survived Auschwitz when liberation took place,

that is to say, many people died. Of course, huge numbers of people died, but when liberation came, they were still people alive because it was a labor camp, not purely a deathcamp. There was an attached death camp as well, but at a place like bell Jets, ninety nine point nine percent of the people who came through the door were immediately murdered, and so there weren't survivors to say I survived this camp, or tiny numbers of survivors, and so as a consequence, those are not as salient in

our minds. And I think that I've always thought that that may be partly the explanation for why in popular language we often don't distinguish concentration camps or deathcamp from deathcamps. It's because the survivors whom we were fortunate enough to know were mostly survivors of concentration camps rather than of

pure death camps. I think you're absolutely right. Auschwitz represents something that in people's minds is the epitome of the death camp, but it actually is one that made the transition and continued as a concentration camp even while it was a death camp. And I think that that's the lesson to learn, is that it is actually possible to

go from one to the other. And while I don't think the particular centuries old hatred of Jews and political manipulation of that that happened worldwide, especially in Europe in the centuries before the Holocaust is going to be replicated in the US, or in Russia or in China. I think that there are pre existing hatreds and prejudices everywhere, and even if we think that they will never culminate in something like the deaths that happened in the Holocaust.

Auschwitz is this instrumental point to realize that it is possible to make that leap. And why would we want to have the concentration camp there as the setting from which something more horrible can come? So now I want to transition Andrea from this fascinating, important, searing history to the contemporary political debate over the border detention facilities that the US has built and has been using extensively. In

recent months and years. You've been very vocal, as someone who has written the leading history on this, about how you see these current internment camps. In the New York Review of Books, for example, you wrote a piece the title was quote some suburb of Hell America's new concentration camp system. Did first of all, did they give you a say in that title? Was it where at least have supervisory authority? I did not, which is normal in journalism.

So I don't. I don't take issue with that. Often don't get to pick your headlines, but I don't have a problem. Yeah, but you're okay with it. So tell us, first of all, what your position has been on the obviously extraordinarily contentious question of how these terms should be used today. So, the definition in my book of a concentration camp was the masked attention of civilians without trial on the basis of identity, and that could be a

religious identity, political identity, racial or ethnic identity. And so literally, from the moment that President Trump declared his candidacy came down the escalator. We immediately heard in twenty fifteen the rhetoric of Mexicans as rapists. I mean, we soon got into this question of how many people was he actually calling animals that were souves of the border, and arguments

over how big that group was. But this dehumanizing rhetoric of people over the southern border literally started from the moment the candidacy began. And when you have somebody with a clear animus, it really sets the tone for something that is very clearly a policy of exclusion and elimination and really motivated by the very profound things that have started concentration camps. And so if everything we're allowed to operate without that animus and without that motivating factor, you

wouldn't get to what we have. You don't get to what we have by having a rational, realistic decision about what is the best way to do this, Although that would be disputed by if we had someone you know, in the studio from the Department of Homeland Security, from

the Trumpama decision, they would say something different. I mean, I'm not saying I would buy it, but they would clearly take the view that there is genuinely a huge number of people crossing the border, that there is a need to detain because otherwise people will will escape into the into the United States and will not be found. I mean, and that once you're detaining large numbers of people,

you need some mechanism for doing so. Again, I'm not saying we have to accept that argument, but they would make that argument. And so it seems worrisome to me that we would use the term concentration camp or not use it based on who's right on the facts of whether these camps are in fact necessary. So, first of all, I'm trying to take this on in a very practical, serious way, like to not just be throwing the word

concentration camp around in some willy nilly fashion. When you are dealing with surges at the border, when you are looking at some of the situations that have arisen historically, it might be almost impossible to deal with them without having people housed somewhere for some period of hours or days. Literally. Having any immigration system is probably predicated on having people in a place for some period of time. But the crossing over of that is that the detention becomes the point.

I mean, even people coming into Ellis Island would have to wait sometimes for processing if they family members certainly did. Yeah, yeah, so I mean, so I want to be clear that it isn't just like who's presenting which facts. It is literally immigration is a process that often would require holding people while their process for some period of days or some you know, some small manageable period when the goal

is clearly to move them through that process. But wouldn't wouldn't the Trump administrations say the point is not to detain. We would much prefer to send all of the people in these facilities back where they came from. That's the administration's stated goal, but they would say, because of international and US law that requires processing and requires in some circumstances a hearing if someone makes a claim to asylum,

we're therefore stuck with these detention centers. So you say the point is detention, and they would say the point is not detention. We would rather not detain anybody, but it's the legal system that's requiring us too. The thing about that is that everything that has happened since twenty fifteen has pointed the meaning of what they're doing not to things that solve practice coal matters, but to punitive measures.

We had John Kelly talking months before the family separation policy was put in place that they might do it as a deterrence. Something that is a deterrence is a punitive approach to keep people, to make it have a cost to do something. In addition, when those policies that were first paid attention to last year, in the first half of last year, that kind of culminated in the family separation policy a little over a year ago, there

was not the surge that we are having now. That is, in part a byproduct these things were done in advance of the larger numbers coming. You did not see the big waves that we've been having in recent months that some people are attributing to Trump's discussions of closing the border in this fear that they may not be able to get in if they don't get in now. And so I think it's disingenuous to say we're doing this

because of the numbers. But I want to be honest and fair that a mass immigration system, you're going to have to have people housed somewhere, And difference between that and a concentration camp is in part, how long are you holding them? Is it indefinite? Is there a plan will they be released? And do they know when they will be released? And is there a punitive aspect to it?

And if detention, if mass detention is the point of the thing, which it is here because the Trump administration has been detaining all kinds of people that these children that it could release, that have relatives in the US that are waiting to deal with them. If it were a priority, if they wanted to make it happen, they

would not need to be doing this. There's I believe that there is a very public detention centered aspect in which they're trying to focus that, but also the idea that you could just leave, which a lot of people say. I have talked to border reporters who have said no. Some people have said, oh my god, don't take my child from me. We will leave, and it's too late. They can't do it. So this idea that they are

just allowed to go is not true. It's not accurate. Andrea, I just want to close with a different angle of critique that comes not from people who say that the trumpa Indmistration doesn't intend to create concentration camps, but who say, we share your sense that this is a terrible moral wrong, but we believe that the term concentration camp, notwithstanding the history that you've uncovered, has such a close tie to the horrors of the Holocaust, and arguably, some would say

to the unique circumstances of the Holocaust, the association of the concentration camps with death camps, that therefore we shouldn't use the terminology, not because we should be careful about using that to condemn the United States, but rather because we should be protecting the unique legacy of circumstances of

historical historical memory. What's your thought on that line. I think if people out of respect for memorializing the millions murdered, really unparalleled thing in history, you know, in the camps of the Holocaust. If they want to not use that term themselves, understand that impulse, and I respect that, But for myself, there is forty years of history of things called concentration camps that the world has largely forgotten that

are how we got to the Holocaust. And to not realize that the Holocaust was made possible by these earlier camps that were concentration camps that we are repeating the history of today. I think by not naming that erases that history in a way that makes the Holocaust seem as if it happened from nowhere, which is a really

dangerous historical idea. But also knowing that we are repeating that history and calling these concentration camps tells us something about what is going to happen next, because we have a lot of case studies from those early camps and we can have a pretty good idea of where things will go. And by not calling them that, I think we'd look away from the likelihood of what is going

to happen next. In what we're doing today. Andrea, thank you for that very thoughtful and I think, in many ways powerful response to that concern, and thank you for your historical work in clarifying the very complex history of concentration camps. I think we're much better off for understanding and gathering what that history shows. Well, thank you for the chance to talk. Listening to Andrea, I was gripped

by two strongly competing impulses. On the one hand, as I understood more deeply the history of the concentration camp itself and where it came from, I was really struck by the ways that any massed attention of civilians can

credibly be considered a concentration camp. Andrea is right when she says that without an understanding of that history, we can't understand where the Nazi camps came from, and that it's very important to keep that history in mind as we remember that many concentration camps are not death camps, but our camps started, albeit for political reasons, by any government that's trying to detain large numbers of people in

order to protect itself. On the other hand, I was also powerfully influenced by the consistent feeling that most concentration camps throughout history have been designed to have some transformational effect on a piece of territory, that they're designed to move people off of one piece of land to take

over some piece of land. And that's not really the case for the migrant internment camps and facilities that the United States has been creating, because after all, the goal of those camps is, even if one has the most critical view, to move people out of the United States ultimately going forward, what we need to do when we look at and understand the conditions, often the terrible conditions in these facilities, is to make sure, as a democracy

that believes in human rights, that nobody is being detained in those facilities for punitive reasons, and that the conditions in those facilities don't even begin in to approach the terrible conditions that have been present in concentration camps over the last century. The more we do to communicate that, the less likely history is to attach the terrible term of concentration camp to these facilities. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Geancott,

with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is deep background