PITTSBURGH — It took 30 minutes and five seconds to read the introduction of Morning After the Revolution, written by former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles.

It took exactly the same amount of time to listen to the audiobook, which I did because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a word Bowles wrote. The mother of one, with the second on the way, narrates it herself in a soothing voice that never betrays an emotion, which makes the words all that more important.

In that very short period of time, my reaction is best described by quoting the late great Selma Diamond in her role as a bailiff on the ’90s sitcom Night Court when Bull asks her after hearing a wild-eyed story play out in court, “Well, that was quite a story. What did you think?”

Diamond’s deadpan, “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me,” is exactly what I felt just in the introduction. Days later, after doing a combination of both reading and listening to Morning After, my sentiment remained the same.

As the book progressed, I heard and saw a lot of things in our country that often didn’t make sense to many of us. From the takeover of cities by activists to the unquestioned origins of COVID to the normalization of men competing as women in women’s sports, we all sat back and watched once vaunted pillars of journalism in our country, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and CBS repeatedly telling us there was nothing to see there.

They also told us that if you question any of these narratives, you are racist, transphobic, or a conspiracy theorist.

Or all three.

Bowles writes she was in the thick of it until she wasn’t, even candidly admitting she was part of canceling someone and enjoyed the superiority of it. But Bowles did not leave it because she had an awakening as a right-wing-whatever-negative-name you want to put on it — deplorable, MAGA extremist, bible and gun clinger are favorite pejoratives — but because as a journalist, she was curious.

Once she let that curiosity become known, her liberal media peers slowly ostracized her.

Throughout the book, Bowles weaves a firsthand account, taking readers from her aspiration to work at the New York Times as a young journalist to today. Her dispassionate delivery is pitch-perfect, with zero trace of vengeance or bitterness. It is also wildly funny and sad in a way that makes you mourn for what we lost in the past few years, both in our lives and from institutions we once trusted, but it allows us to bask in the freedom it took her and her spouse Bari Weiss, also a former New York Times journalist, to begin their own publication, the Free Press, in 2021.

Bowles is a nimble writer bursting with curiosity, and her storytelling is that of an old soul, rich in detail and delivery. Meanwhile, the Free Press has flourished wildly beyond both of their expectations.

After reading the book I went to see the reviews from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. My first reaction to their reviews was they were clearly given a different book than I was.

They weren’t. They are angry because she betrayed her liberal professional caste. The reviews were scathing. Nonetheless, her book made the New York Times bestseller list on Wednesday.

In an interview with me (lightly edited for length), Bowles discussed her ability to find humor in the absurd, and the importance of grace.

Washington Examiner: What stood out to me was your relentless curiosity even when it became clear it was issues your bosses did not want you to be curious about.

Bowles: Curiosity is the core of everything when you’re a writer. It’s the core thing that you want to nurture in yourself. And, for me, it’s maybe the most valuable thing. The hard part about growing up is you start to sometimes become less curious or you start to see things over and over and things don’t seem as fresh, and the challenge is always to hold on to your curiosity.

Curiosity is what got me in trouble with the whole movement. And also, now when I’m thinking about the book, the chapter I keep thinking about is describing canceling a friend and being honest about my role in that and writing about that.

I think part of my curiosity was, first of all, writing about the progressive movement of the last five years and writing about the protests and all of that, but also being curious about myself. … Yeah, curiosity is the be-all and end-all if you’re a journalist. And as soon as you start blunting it, your writing suffers and your reporting suffers.

Washington Examiner: I don’t think acts of courage are all Joan of Arc moments. I think acts of courage are often subtle. They’re done without making a statement that you are brave because you did this. Can you talk about where that part of you came from in writing this book and in general your decision to be noncompliant with the [progressive] movement?

Bowles: There were a lot of the things that are asked of me for a long time and I want to please people for a long time. I want to stay in the good of the movement for a long time, and I manage it for a while, but eventually the movement becomes too demanding for me to accommodate and it wants too much. First, it was blunting my reporting. It was saying you can’t report on the most interesting stories of the day, which was really frustrating and crazy-making a little bit because it was like, “What do you mean we’re not supposed to cover the riots? What do you mean we’re not supposed to talk about” … you name it, hot-button issue of the day. And basically there was a media blackout for a while.

I call it now time wandering, which is all of the most interesting issues. You’re allowed to talk about it in the world of all the Substacks, the conservative media covers it, and the liberal media waits about two or three years and then they’re allowed to touch it.

So COVID origins or medical treatments for gender dysphoric kids or any of the most interesting of the day. Anyways, part of me was being frustrated in that regard, but it was really just that I couldn’t go along. At no point did I do a courageous act. It was just that I stopped being able to go along with the movement’s demands as they got too much.

So another example, when I started dating Bar [Bari Weiss], and don’t write about this in the book, but a friend of mine from college reached out and said, “You can stay in the good of the movement and you can remain friends with me, but you need to publicly disavow Bar.”

I remember just being like, “What?”

And she said, “You need to make clear where you stand apart and how you’re not going along with her and you need to do it in public.” And I was like, “First of all, I’m not even doing it in private or in public.”

Just the idea that I was supposed to do some sort of public repentance for being slightly off message in my writing or being with someone who this bizarre new movement decided was on the bad was so crazy to me.

So I didn’t do it.

When the movement really decided it was done with me and I decided I was done with it, was when we were supposed to all tweet the tweet denouncing the Tom Cotton op-ed.

We were all supposed to tweet, “This puts my black colleagues in danger,” and I just couldn’t tweet it.

I knew Adam Rubenstein, I liked him. I knew James Bennet, I liked him, and I just didn’t believe that that op-ed calling for the National Guard put people in danger. I just didn’t. And it was like, “I’m not tweeting it.”

A bunch of friends and colleagues wrote to me and said, “You have to write this message and if you don’t write this message, I don’t know how to describe what that says about you, but it says really bad things about you.”

And it was just the pressures of the movement got very demanding. So at no point was I like, “I’m going to be a brave truth-teller and step out.” It was just like, “Stop asking me to do stuff that seems like bulls***.”

Washington Examiner: Your first chapter was funny, sad, and in many was a dispassionate chronicle of everything we have all gone through coming from someone in the thick of it. You could have been angry, but then that would have been a different book. How weren’t you?

Bowles: It felt really cathartic. It felt very good to write it. An earlier draft was much angrier. I started writing this book basically as I started reporting it, which was when I left the Times. And at first I was mad and I felt like something had been taken from me that I deserve. Like I had earned this spot in prestige media and how could it have turned on me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I was so indignant.

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And then I rewrote it a year or two later because I started to see it as also funny. I started to see it also as sort of petty and small and this world that felt like it was the be-all and end-all, I started to realize it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. So then I could have a little more distance from it, but it felt very cathartic to write it.

And I didn’t want to name names and things because that felt nasty and it felt unnecessary, and I didn’t want to drag random nonpublic figure editors into the public eye and be like, “Look at this guy. He’s a real jerk,” because all of these people just represented the movement. There’s a dozen of each of them. You know what I mean?