On April 29, 2025, Gail Collins and Bret Stevens announced in their New York Times column, The Conversation, that they were bringing their collaboration to a close. Across eight years they have published nearly 300 episodes, each in the form of a written dialog between conservative opinion writer Bret and progressive opinion writer Gail.
They argued, teased each other, laughed together, and found occasional areas of agreement. They found that working together in this way felt good. In their final column, Gail wrote: "Have to admit I was surprised it was such a pleasure to do. I love my work, but I was still shocked to find myself thinking, 'Oh great, tomorrow’s Conversation day'.”
Through their exchange of ideas, Bret and Gail created something for themselves and their readers that neither of them could have done alone: a mental model of the world informed by different perspectives. Each learned from the other; each sharpened and clarified their own ideas by grappling with the other's ideas.
We think that their 8-year long collaboration functioned as a reinforcing feedback loop, much like the Tim/Kim reinforcing feedback loop featured on the Welcome page of Loops Behind the News:
The breadth and depth of Gail's ideas grew through exposure to Brett's lines of reasoning. The breadth and depth of Brett's ideas grew through exposure to Gail's lines of reasoning. Together, they spiraled upwards in a virtuous cycle towards something closer to a true representation of the complex world. And they enjoyed the process, just as we have found great pleasure in the Kim/Tim feedback loop.
The Gail/Bret feedback loop gained piquancy by the contrast between Brett's conservative ideas and Gail's progressive ideas. The Kim/Tim feedback loop has benefited by the contrast between Kim's perspective as a natural scientist and Tim's perspective as a social scientist. Both loops have been enabled by mutual respect. The "pleasure" in this kind of interaction comes not from winning an argument against another person, but from discerning or co-creating a new insight.
The Gail/Brett and the Kim/Tim loop both benefited from partially-overlapping domains of interest and knowledge. The participants had enough shared interests and concerns to keep the conversation going for years, time enough to turn the collaborative loop through many cycles. And yet the participants were sufficiently different that they could point out weaknesses in each other's lines of reasoning, bring to the table a larger collection of observations upon which to build inferences, and draw upon different strategies for seeking truth.
Finally, all four participants in these two collaborative loops share the conviction that the world is explainable – although the explanations may elude us for the moment – and that a pathway towards stronger explanations lies through a virtuous cycle of deep conversation.