Gail Collins and Bret Stephens: A Last Conversation

The Conversation has been a staple of The Times’s Opinion pages since 2017. But after eight years, the weekly dialogue between the liberal columnist Gail Collins and her conservative colleague Bret Stephens has come to an end. The editor Aaron Retica joins Gail and Bret to answer reader questions and discuss how they’ve managed years of civil conversations — for the first and last time in audio.

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Aaron Retica: I’m Aaron Retica, an editor at large in the Opinion section of The New York Times.

In this job I work a lot with a number of our columnists and one of the great joys, really delights, of my life here is that I get to work on something we called The Conversation, which is a weekly dialogue between two of our columnists — Gail Collins, who is standing in for liberal America, and Bret Stephens, who is standing in for conservative America.

It has appeared every Monday morning and is a crucial part of the agenda-setting and thought world of the Opinion section.