Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Sam Fragoso at Live Talks Los Angeles

Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Sam Fragoso at Live Talks Los Angeles
discussing his book, "The Message." This event was taped with an audience on October 27.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don’t-shape our realities.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer and Between the World and Me, for which he won the National Book Award in 2015. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair in English at Howard University.”
“[Coates] is intellectually fearless . . . unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.”-The New Yorker.
Just as Between the World and Me took the form of a letter to his son, The Message is crafted as a letter to his writing students. He bears an urgent message for them: their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
Coates’s call to action is in fact a diagnosis of the political and social polarization currently sweeping the globe: the world is riven by stories. He comes to this realization not as a geopolitical wonk or a statesman, but as a journalist who has seen firsthand how stories are more powerful tools of persuasion than the assemblage of interconnected facts.
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories-our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking-expose and distort our realities.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, The Message is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Next, he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning. In the book’s longest section, he travels to Palestine, where he sees the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, writers, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting interviews with Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he founded Talk Easy in 2016. The program is currently distributed by Pushkin Industries.