On a recent morning in midtown Manhattan, I walked to the back of the Whitby Hotel lobby to find Judith Light wearing large, resin-framed glasses and reading the New York Post. She was dressed all in black—pants and a long-sleeved shirt—her only nod to the sweltering summer heat outside a large, floppy, mud-colored straw hat that had once belonged to her mother.

Light is a veteran of the entertainment business, admired not only for her longevity but for her versatility. She’s done Broadway (three Tonys), soap operas (two Daytime Emmys), hit sitcoms (“Who’s the Boss?”), prestige cable drama (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace”), and an award-winning Amazon series, Jill Soloway’s “Transparent,” whose final season—a musical extravaganza in which Light sings, dances, and does a full split while spinning on a chair in a nude bodysuit—premières later this month. Light is what industry folk call a “jobber”—above all, she likes to work. She will appear in the new Ryan Murphy series “The Politician,” alongside Ben Platt and Bette Midler, and will star in the Spectrum series “Manhunt: Lone Wolf,” as the mother of Richard Jewell, the man falsely accused in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. And, last week, she finally earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Among her many talents, Light has the gift of gab. Throughout our roving conversation, she discussed how she fell into doing soap operas, her love of discount designer clothes, her unusual arrangement with her husband (they live in different cities), and the ups and downs she experienced persevering in the business for half a century. Over breakfast, she encouraged me to put down my utensils and scoop up melon slices with my fingers. At one point, she offered me advice on whether I should freeze my eggs. Our planned hour together stretched into two. Two follow-up phone calls, which were scheduled for twenty minutes each, lasted another couple of hours. Before the first call, I received a long voice mail: “Hi, sweetie, this is Judith Light. I want to tell you about my mother . . . ”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You grew up in New Jersey.

Yes, Trenton. Though my father was from the Bronx. No money. No fancy pants. Originally, my father was in the fruit and produce business. My grandfather came from the old country, and he was an egg candler.

I’m sorry, a what?

An egg candler! He was the person who held the egg up to a candle to see if there was a chicken in there or whether it was just the yolk.

That was an actual profession?

Oh, yes, it was in the Bronx. Then he got into the fruit and produce business, and my father, Sidney, followed suit. My mother came from some money, in Scarsdale. Early on in New York, she used to model for artists who would draw women for fashion things. Her name was Pearl, but she changed it to Sue, because she didn’t like it. My parents moved to Trenton so that my father could start his business, and she became a women’s buyer. She bought clothes there for a shop called the Ship Shop.

Did your mother have a strong sense of personal style?

My mother was always a bargain shopper. Loehmann’s was a big place where we shopped. I still have my Loehmann’s Gold Card. I will not give it up. I was never a Rodeo Drive lady. I’m Judy from New Jersey.

My mother’s style was very simple. It was elegant. She loved labels. But she also knew how to buy a really great white blouse, a great man’s shirt, in the vein of Carolina Herrera. She grew up in a time when women were not supposed to be more than a secretary. I think, if society and her family had supported her in a different way, I think she would have gone on to do much more. She always wanted me to do as much as I could possibly do.

You studied acting at Carnegie Mellon in the nineteen-sixties.

I was doing community theatre at the same time as I was going to high school. I had a remarkable drama teacher named Ruth Strahan. She was the one that founded the Carnegie Mellon program. I graduated in 1970, and then I went into repertory theatre for several years. I started at the Milwaukee Rep. Then, one day, Nagle Jackson, who was a wonderful artistic director, said, “You have to leave here. I know you can do more but you have to get out there. I’m throwing you out of the nest.”

What were some of your memorable early roles?

At the Milwaukee Rep, I did a play called “Cat Among the Pigeons,” which is a Feydeau farce, and I played the ingénue in that, or the soubrette. I was never really the ingénue. I always played a character-y character.

So you get to New York. You’re about twenty-five years old. What happens?

A casting director, Rosemary Tischler, who I think is still in the business, said, “I’m going to cast you in a very tiny part in a Broadway show.” And so I did “A Doll’s House,” starring Liv Ullmann and Sam Waterston. You may be too young to remember who Liv Ullmann was.

I know who she was!

O.K. We did it at Lincoln Center, at the Vivian Beaumont. It was just a remarkable thing to be given that gift. I got that, and then after that I thought, Oh, this is what it’s like. Great! You have someone who is your champion, and you come to New York, and then you do great theatre, and then you do feature films, and then you’re set. But, as time went on, it wasn’t happening like that. I was deeply disappointed, deeply unhappy. I was living on unemployment. I thought, Oh, my God. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I called my father at one point and I said, “Listen, I need six hundred dollars to make it through the month.” And he said, “I’ll give you three; see if you can make it.” I think he wanted to know that I had the resilience to pull this off.

How did you make it through the month?

I was in therapy. God bless my therapist. I think he charged me thirty-five dollars a session. He was a wonderful guy named Bill Kennedy. I was really heavy at the time. And Bill was the one who really taught me how to eat and changed my perspective on eating. I was eating from emotion and fear, and shoving my feelings down. He said to me, “You don’t know how to ask for what you want. It's showing up in your relationship to food.” And he told me to hang in. When we talked about career stuff, he said, “Don’t do anything until you see me next week. Something’s going to happen,” and I said, “Oh, great. Are you psychic?”

So was he psychic?

I literally left there, and my pager rang. Those were the days when you had a pager, and if your pager rang then you called your service, and your service gave you the message. The message was to call my agent, and he said, “They want to see you for an understudy on a soap opera.” I said, “Wait a minute. I told you I never want to do a soap opera. That’s not in my plan.” My agent said to me, “You’re running out of money. It’s three hundred and fifty dollars for the day.” So I said, “I’ll do it.”

That was “One Life to Live.” You played Karen Wolek, a housewife who turns to alcohol and prostitution. You had a famous scene where Karen admits in court that she is a prostitute and breaks down in tears. Did you ever feel, working in soap operas, that you were limited in what you could do as an actor?

No, I never felt that. There are constraints, there are boundaries. You have to learn to do something in one day. You have to learn a lot of lines the night before. There are a lot of challenges in getting it done so quickly. But, remember, all three of my directors on this show—David Pressman, Peter Miner, and Norman Hall—all came from the theatre. And almost all of the actors were theatre people—Michael Storm, Erika Slezak, Brynn Thayer, Robin Strasser. All of them. It was like being in a company.

But did you feel like when you said yes to the soap you were closing doors to yourself on the other side?

It was an acceptance of, this is the choice, for now. I have no idea where it’s going to lead. I don’t know if it’s going to close up everything to me. What I wanted more than anything was to grow. I also knew in my heart and my soul I wanted to do other things. But it wasn’t that I felt bad about being there. I was terrifically excited by the work and the story lines.

What happened after “One Life to Live”?

I wasn’t getting anything for quite a while. I did one Movie of the Week, in which I was awful.

What was the movie?

I can’t remember the full title, but I think it was called “Intimate Agony: the Herpes Story.” Do not laugh at me.

I’m not laughing at you!

They were going to call it “Lovesick.” It was about how herpes was being passed around a community.

I called my manager, Herb Hamsher, and asked, “Why am I not getting work?” Because I was auditioning like crazy. And Herb said to me, “When you’re walking in the room, you’re really angry.”

Did you think you were projecting confidence, and it was being interpreted as anger?

No, no. It was a sense of demand. It’s, like, Give me this, people. Anyway, I was angry. But I started to reframe the way I was going into a room. How about having some respect for the things that people have written and taken the time to do, instead of holding yourself disdainfully? And the first sitcom I got was “Who’s the Boss?” I went into that audition room with a whole shift in perception. I don't mean that in some sort of New Agey way. “I have visions. I have dreams.” I sit and listen to myself say things like that and I think, I’m not talking about “The Secret.”

But it is a little bit “The Secret,” right?

It’s not, If you do this, then this will happen. It’s, like, just stay open.

Did you know before “Who’s the Boss?” that you were funny?

Sort of, but I didn’t know that I was really funny. I was learning about it in a whole new way, because sitcom comedy is very different than other comedy. It’s music. You hear it or you don’t. I knew that I heard it, and I needed more application. I would watch Tony [Danza]. He’s a genius of comic timing. So was Katherine Helmond.

Since the eighties, when “Who’s the Boss?” was on, you’ve done so much with the gay community, including speaking out publicly about the AIDS crisis.

I remember going to the March on Washington [in 1987]. Friends who were sick and dying, sitting in a hotel room because they couldn’t get out to the march. I saw how people were treated, how difficult it was to get medication. I thought it was untenable. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say something about it.

Then I watched Elizabeth Taylor, and she said, I don’t care what anybody thinks about me. I don’t give a shit. She was, like, Excuse me, my friend Rock Hudson is dying. There’s this great line from “Death of a Salesman”: “Attention must be paid.” That’s how I felt.

You decided to come back to New York and do theatre, in 1999, after more than two decades away. How did that happen?

“Who’s the Boss?” ended in 1992, and I did a show with George Segal that did not get picked up. Then Herb, my manager, came up with this idea for me to play a Martha Stewart wannabe. It was picked up for six episodes for CBS and they never continued after that. I was really despondent again. My friend said to me, “This is like Gandhi’s wilderness years.” I said, “Oh, honey, I am so not Gandhi. I need a job.”

I had been offered to audition for a play by a young man named Jonathan Tolins. He wrote a play called “If Memory Serves,” about an aging sitcom star. Herb said to me, “Oh, my God, this is perfect for you,” and I said, “It’s not perfect. It’s not right.”

You didn’t want to be Norma Desmond.

I was just, like, “I'm not an aging sitcom star!” I was completely defensive about it. It was a great play. Elizabeth Ashley ended up doing it on Broadway. I looked at what was happening to me and I said, “I’m going around giving all of these speeches to the L.G.B.T. community. I’m talking about how they really inspire me with their courage and their authenticity.” But I wasn’t really living it, because I was terrified. Herb said to me, “You’re terrified to audition for a stage play.” So I said, “The next thing that I get an opportunity to go up for, I’m going to go up for it,” and that was “Wit.”

I had to fly back up to New York. I thought, They’re never going to give it to me. I was walking out the back door, even then, and they gave it to me. It took me so long to say yes. I’ve always said that, if you ask anybody in this restaurant right now if they think they’re the right stuff, nobody thinks they’re the right stuff. In the heart of hearts, in the dead of night, everybody thinks, I don’t measure up. I’m not enough.

You’ve been married to your husband, the writer Robert Desiderio, since the mid-eighties. You’ve spoken before about the fact that you two often live separately.

One of the things that Robert and I talk a lot about is the willingness for each of us to have the lives we love together and also apart. I was living in Los Angeles and kept longing to be back in New York because I love the energy. I love the life that I have here.

When “Ugly Betty” came up and they said, “We’re moving you to New York,” I was, like, “I’m going.” Robert said to me, “Oh, my God, what are you going to do?” And I said, “Well, I think the question is, what are you going to do? Because I’m going to New York.”

This is the kind of marriage that we have. We adore each other. We want to stay together. We have this very vital, exciting life together. He loves his alone time. I love my alone time.

You and Robert chose not to have children, and you’ve been open about that decision.

Oh, I would never call it a decision. “Decision” implies something that’s locked in and torqued down. I choose to use the word “choice.” It was a very active, aware, conscious thing, which came out of an intense dialogue with my husband, before we were married. Speaking with each other, finding out where we both stood in relating around this, saved us a lot of heartache later.

A friend of mine described her own desire to have children as, “I feel a spring thaw in my veins.” I thought, I don't feel that. I looked at that and I said, “What if I choose to do this, and I don’t feel that kind of passion?” Because, let’s be clear, motherhood is a job. It is a joyful job, and it is a demanding job. I had other things to do. It’s not that I had more to do. Had we made the other choice, I think it would have been fine. I think we would have absolutely made it work. I think we would have possibly been good parents, not necessarily great parents.

My mother’s older sister Jean and her husband Barnett did not have children. They didn’t spend time being upset about the choice; they owned the choice. They went to the opera, they travelled for two months at a time to Europe.

Now a lot of people would call that selfish. I say, O.K., what about that? In the early days of the women’s movement, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I was, like, “I can have it all. I’m superwoman!” But wait a minute. Let’s just look at this. Let's say, “I can have everything that I choose. O.K., now what do I choose?”

It feels in many ways like you are peaking in the third act of your career. Do you think “Transparent” was an evolution for you?

I mean, who would cast me?

As an overbearing Jewish mother? Maybe a lot of people. But do you feel like Jill saw something in you that you didn’t?

I know that Jill did. Shelly started as a recurring character. Jill’s vision was to see who this woman was, having pushed down the voice and having sequestered herself. Shelly is the person who needs to be connected to everybody in that family more than anybody, all the time, but has absolutely no idea how to go about it, and so ends up being alone, because they can’t stand her.

The question that we were all living in on the show was, Will you still love me if . . . ? Which means, If I reveal to you who I am. If I tell you who my authentic self is, will you leave me or will you stay?

Did it feel difficult to do the finale without Jeffrey Tambor?

I would say, let’s not talk about this.

It’s not a refusal to talk about it. It’s that it’s painful to talk about it. I’m really trusting that people in your position can respect that. It's complicated. And it’s painful. It needs more time away. I said something a couple years ago and it was completely taken out of context and people were upset with me.

What was it that you said?

No, no, we are not going back there. Please, I beg you. I am not the kind of person, and I think you know this, that says, “Hey, press, you, Rachel, not talking about it!” This is, like, ow. That’s not the way I want to say it. I trust you understand what I’m talking about. It can be written in a sentence somewhere and then everybody gets . . . there’s no chance for any discussion further.

What do you think it takes for there to be nuance and healing? Just time?

Absolutely, yes, I think it requires time.

In the “Transparent” finale, the Pfefferman family comes together to sing and dance and mourn the death of Tambor’s character, Maura. Do you think people are going to understand the last number, the “Joyocaust” number? Making jokes about the Holocaust—

This is not a joke about the Holocaust. I think this is a way of speaking to everybody in the world, that our pain and our suffering is real and true, and how can we look at a way to move through the world in living color, reminding people of what it has gone through, and what we are still going through to this day. We are talking about a new framing, not discounting the past.

I think this is a much longer dialogue to have. It requires a 92nd Street Y discussion. It just does.

You do full spread-eagle splits in the finale. Where did you learn to do that?

I’ve always been pretty flexible, because I started taking dance years ago, as a little girl. And then I did yoga. That’s been in the lexicon of my body and my work. But I have a new knee and a new hip, so, if I didn’t have those I don’t think I would be able to do that.

Well, I could never do it.

Oh, sweetie, if you took enough yoga you could.

One thing I see happening more and more is that women from my generation are having dialogues with our foremothers about what they have been through. And we are also looking up to them as icons. When you stepped onto the Tonys red carpet recently, in that dazzling silver glitter column gown, there was a frenzy of appreciation for you on Twitter.

That’s my stylist, Jack Yeaton. He’s amazing. He also knows how to stop me when I’m thinking of something that’s going to take me in a direction that’s really away from that kind of simplicity.

Do you have instincts that are more . . . feathers?

I’m Judy from Jersey. I mean, I have a closet full of gold lamé, trust me. Jack is way younger than I am, and has a vision, a taste level, an appreciation for what fashion actually is and how it can rebrand someone.

People are always so excited for what you’re going to wear.

I didn’t know that.

Well, I’ll be the first to tell you, then.

There’s a sense that I have that people are paying attention. I would never call myself a fashion icon. But I appreciate that people feel that way.

A previous version of this article misstated Jack Yeaton’s last name.

Twenty-two years ago, Texas Monthly, the venerable “national magazine of Texas,” published a ranking of the state’s fifty best barbecue joints. The magazine had named the state’s best barbecue before, but the Top Fifty was an extraordinary feat of carnivorousness—a massive inventory of smoked meat, involving hundreds of meals and uncountable thousands of miles—and it became a phenomenon, on and off the newsstand. Regularly revised and updated in the years since, the list drives tourism both to and within the state, names and shapes trends, makes kings of newcomers, and topples long-established empires. So tremendous is Texans’ desire to read about barbecue, so essential is the food to the very notion of Texan-ness, that in 2013 Texas Monthly appointed the food writer and meat savant Daniel Vaughn to the freshly created role of barbecue editor.

This week, the magazine announced the creation of a new position to stand alongside its barbecue editor: beginning September 18th, José R. Ralat will become the magazine’s and the nation’s first taco editor. Ralat—who was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in New York City, and now lives in Dallas—has been something of a professional taco-eater for more than a decade, first writing taco reviews for the New York Press, and then, after decamping from Brooklyn to Texas, ten years ago, launching a weekly taco column with the Dallas Observer. He’s the author of the blog Taco Trail and, until the end of this week, the food and drink editor at the Dallas-based magazine Cowboys & Indians. His new role sounds like an office drone’s daydream: a full-time salary, plus benefits, just to wander around Texas and eat tacos? Sure thing, kid, dream on. But, as with its editorial commitment to barbecue, Texas Monthly considers this job to be not only serious business but essential Texas journalism: in a state where more than forty per cent of the population is Hispanic, including Mexican and Mexican-American residents, tacos are part of daily life, and key to Texan culinary identity.

I recently spoke with Ralat by phone about his new gig; in our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also explored how to categorize burritos, why tacos are essentially Texan, and Ralat’s mission to correct the record on breakfast tacos.

Do you already have an itinerary mapped out for your first few months on the road?

I have a rough idea that was part of my initial conversation with Texas Monthly—I sent them a list of, like, twenty ideas, thirty ideas. And it just keeps getting longer! It’s a big state, you know? It’s a huge state! And I have some friends who want to travel with me who are up for the drive. I’ll need them, because I don’t drive at all.

That seems like an obstacle for this kind of job.

You’d think so, but it hasn’t stopped me yet. I’m from New York, and I have epilepsy, so at first I just never learned to drive, and then I couldn’t drive—I probably never will. But there are a lot of buses, and there are my friends. Daniel [Vaughn, the magazine’s barbecue editor] lives in Dallas, too, and he and I could conceivably team up on things so we can hit the road together, tacos and barbecue at once. I do plan on doing a taco of the week and a taco of the month, but Mexican food in Texas is evolving quickly, and so I’ll be covering Mexican pizza, and Mexican burgers, paletas, burritos—I’m a little scared of those, to be honest. I don’t know what that’s gonna be like. But I consider burritos to be tacos.

You say that like it’s a controversial opinion.

It’s not, though! There are a couple of books out of Mexico that detail the history of the burrito—an older book, called “Los Tacos de México,” and a more recent one, called “La Tacopedia,” by Alejandro Escalante. They explain that, yes, burritos are large, folded tortillas, but they are still tacos. It’s not a new argument, it’s just not really discussed a lot. I don’t understand why you would want to eat something that big in one sitting. That doesn’t make sense to me. But it does make sense to me that they count as tacos.

Do Mexican burgers and Mexican pizzas count as tacos, too?

I want to cover traditional Mexican dishes, new Mexican dishes, Mexican-American and Tex-Mex dishes. I want to talk to restaurateurs and restaurant owners who have been running the same restaurants for fifteen, twenty, thirty-five years. Taco Deli [a famous taco stand in Austin] is celebrating twenty years this year. They helped make breakfast tacos a national thing, so I’d love to talk to them about why they started, and what they think their impact has been.

If you’re covering the full breadth of Mexican food in Texas, why call the job “taco editor”?

With Mexican cooking, everything eventually makes it into a tortilla. It’s how you eat almost everything: put it inside a tortilla, and then that’s a taco. Tortillas are generally served with meals, at the table. Plus, “taco editor” is real dang catchy, isn’t it?

I would worry about running into an ontological brick wall—if everything is a taco, then the idea of a taco, as a distinct food, maybe becomes kind of meaningless?

No, for several reasons. For one, in general, when we talk about tacos, we’re really talking about tortillas, particularly corn tortillas. Corn is the foundation of Mexican identity, Mexican culture. Also, the taco is a quick, easy, perfect food—we don’t think about them that much because here in Texas we eat them multiple times a week. You buy tortillas nearby—or maybe you make your own, but that’s rare these days. When you go out to eat, they’re everywhere. Do we take them for granted? It’s a good question. I hope we don’t. I certainly don’t.

Barbecue, especially smoked brisket, is a quintessential Texas food. Tacos, on the other hand, are everywhere—and it seems like Californians sometimes pretend to have a monopoly on them.

A lot of people like to argue about which barbecue is better: Carolina barbecue, Texas barbecue, whatever. I don’t think that sort of thing helps tacos. I think that, for those of us who live along the border, tacos are part of our DNA—and, if the rest of America doesn’t know that, then, hopefully, I can help. A lot of reporting comes out of California. And, frankly, a lot of outside reporting about Texas tacos is due to reporters visiting Austin for South by Southwest. To think that that’s what outsiders think of as “Texas tacos” makes me cringe! Austin is a small city that gets a lot of attention, but it can only really be credited with one taco, and that’s the migas taco, which is their signature: crispy tortilla strips mixed with eggs and cheese, mixed with salsa that can be as simple as a pico de gallo.

Austin gets a lot of credit for breakfast tacos, too.

I hope that I’ll be able to finally correct this: there’s no such thing as an Austin-style breakfast taco! It doesn’t exist. Austin has great breakfast tacos, but for some reason the rest of the country’s breakfast tacos have always been described as Austin-style. They’re no different along the border, where they came from the Rio Grande Valley, which includes northern Mexico. They can be small or large, like the big ones served in thin, almost translucent flour tortillas in Brownsville, or the smaller, thicker, flour-tortilla-based tacos served in cities like San Antonio. To a lot of people who were born or live in Texas anywhere outside of Austin, the idea of calling a breakfast taco “Austin-style” is offensive. It’s not offensive to me—it just bothers me because it’s incorrect. It’s misinformation, and part of my job is to clear that up.

Can you say more about tacos as part of Texans’ DNA?

Tacos are Mexico’s gift to the world. In Texas, we’re lucky enough to live in a place that used to be Mexico, and that helps make them part of our DNA. My wife is Mexican-American, and she’s largely responsible for getting me into this mess. She made me breakfast tacos for the first time, she made me lengua [beef tongue] tacos for the very first time. For me, those were rapturous moments. I’ve joked that I fell in love with her because of breakfast tacos.

I’ve only lived in Texas for ten years, and I’m still not calling myself a Texan, but I’ve been entrenched in this little world for a while now, and I’ve been fortunate enough to tell these stories—not just the stories of the tacos but of the people who make them. I do this job at their pleasure, and I feel welcomed as one of them. I can see how important tacos are to every Texan. We argue about them so much, and for no reason whatsoever.

What are some common taco arguments?

Corn tortillas or flour, that’s intense—the answer depends on where you live and what you eat. People argue about two ways of making tortillas: maseca, a brand of dehydrated corn flour that is combined with flour to make corn tortillas, versus nixtamal, or nixtamalization, which is the ancient, time-consuming process of soaking and cooking corn to separate the hull from the interior of the kernel and imbue nutrients into corn, which is then ground and made into tortillas. That’s a really big question that involves economics, labor, and all kinds of other things. Sure, keeping ancient traditions alive is important, but you also can’t blame a place for using commodity tortillas when it’s expected that they sell two-dollar tacos. Oh, now, there’s an argument right there! Should tacos be cheap, or should they be expensive?

Alex Stupak, the chef of New York’s Empellón restaurants, has talked a lot over the years about how frustrating it is that if he were to offer a dish of, say, two beautifully seared scallops dressed with gorgeous sauce, diners would be happy to pay twenty or thirty dollars for it, whereas, as soon as he puts a tortilla underneath the scallops, people freak out and refuse to pay more than five bucks, because it’s a taco now.

It’s ridiculous! Just like any other food, you get what you pay for. If you want a beautifully made, hand-crafted item—something made from scratch, using ancient methods, with sauces that take days to make—you’re gonna pay five, ten, twelve dollars. I was in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, and I spent twelve dollars on a taco, didn’t even think about it. Because it was handmade, well-made, and delicious.

Barbecue, by contrast, isn’t always a cheap meal—it’s not fancy, but it can sometimes be awfully expensive, and yet people don’t seem to complain about those prices.

It’s true. But I think that tacos are more accessible than barbecue. You can have three Mexican-food businesses in one strip mall, but you could never do that with barbecue. People make barbecue a destination event; tacos are what we eat every day. If you’re running late for work in Texas, you bring breakfast tacos as a mea culpa. But they are, sometimes, getting to be almost as expensive as barbecue, depending on where you go. I blew four hundred dollars at a modern Mexican restaurant, and it was amazing! It was worth it! I don’t expect everyone to do that, or be able to do that, but the point is that, although tacos are more accessible, they can be just as expensive as barbecue, if not more.

Right now, with so much national attention on the border, and the President egging on such intense anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sentiment, does it seem important for you that tacos are being placed up there with barbecue on the highest level of Texan identity?

It really is. Since you brought that up, when the shooting happened in El Paso last month, it brought things into focus for my family. My wife’s parents are from El Paso, and we have family there, we have friends there. Since that weekend, my wife says that she’s worried about me when I’m working. It’s a legitimate concern. I don’t know what to say other than, well, I’m still gonna do my job.

Is this a case of, every Texan loves tacos, but not every Texan loves the people who make the tacos?

You know, chili is the official dish of Texas. And it’s designated as such because it is the culmination of all of the foodways that have given this state its culinary identity: it has European influence, American influence, Mexican influence. Tacos and barbecue come out of that same tradition. It’s a shame that people outside of Texas think of barbecue first as a Texas food, but before there was barbecue there was barbacoa—that’s where we get the name from. I like to joke with Daniel Vaughn that barbecue isn’t perfect until it’s in a tortilla.

Now there’s this thing called Tex-Mex barbecue, and that’s really curious to me. It’s a style that includes dishes like brisket tacos topped with serrano-tomatillo salsa on flour tortillas, pork sausage stuffed with queso Oaxaca and serrano chilies, beef-chorizo sausage, smoked-brisket tamales. It’s considered new, but barbecue has always been Mexican and Tex-Mex. Barbacoa, specifically South Texas beef-head barbacoa, is a major influence on contemporary Texas barbecue. Tortillas have long been served with Texas-barbecue elements in Mexican-American households. But it’s only in the past year that this idea of Tex-Mex barbecue has received attention from the mainstream press, and the term has become a buzzword. Is it a case of barbecue co-opting tacos? I think we need to be careful when approaching this kind of topic. It can look an awful lot like Columbusing.

You’ve talked before about how you don’t like to see the word “authentic” applied to food. Why is that?

It’s very confining; it doesn’t allow for a dynamic, evolving system. Authenticity exists, if it exists at all, only on paper—in the kitchen, everyone’s recipe for rice and beans is different. There’s no truly authentic rice and beans.

What do you think people who use the word are actually trying to say?

I think they have a lot of good intentions. But what they’re trying to say is that they know something about that item, that product, that dish. That they have some sort of ownership over it. And we don’t own anything. Even different towns have variations on the same dish. One example is birria, which is a stew—it can be made with goat, it can be made with beef, it can be made with lamb. You can’t really say that one is more authentic than the other. Barbacoa can be made with anything. It’s a process, a method—not an item. Everyone adds something a little differently.

How long do you think a person can write about tacos before running out of things to say?

There’s no telling. There’s enough to learn to last me a lifetime. I’m excited about chile-rellenos tacos, which are becoming more popular, and about tacos de trompo, which are a regional cousin to tacos al pastor. They’re seasoned differently, and they’re only found where there are large Monterreyan immigrant populations, like in Dallas and Houston. I wish I could have some sort of “Star Trek” transporter directly to San Antonio, because the pork-chop tacos there, wow. Whole pork chops, bone in, served on flour tortillas—they’re amazing. I hope I’ll write about tacos forever.

In a recent interview, the writer Malcolm Gladwell said that one of his goals as an author is “to get people to take human psychology seriously and to respect the complexity of human behavior and motivations.” Gladwell, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, could offer a master class in the analysis of human behavior and the complexities of our decision-making processes. Over the years, he has written about topics as varied as the neurological causes of violent crime, the evolution of criminal profiling, the invention of the birth-control pill, and the psychology behind religious fanaticism. He has also written six books, including “The Tipping Point” and “Blink.” His latest book, “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know,” is a provocative look at the detrimental ways in which we often misconstrue the motivations and intentions of others.

This week, we’re bringing you a selection of Gladwell’s pieces from the magazine. In “The Coolhunt,” he follows the path of two fashion “coolhunters” as they discover and forecast cultural and consumer trends. In “The Tweaker,” he examines the editorial genius of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. In “The Talent Myth,” Gladwell recounts the failings of Enron’s corporate culture and writes about the role of talent and virtuosity in the workplace, and, in a piece from 1999, he considers what sets physical geniuses apart from other people. In “Thresholds of Violence,” he reports on the epidemic of school shootings across the United States. Finally, in “Troublemakers,” he investigates the unconscious biases that lead to racial profiling. Gladwell’s writing offers a fascinating look at many of our entrenched systems and distinctive phenomena; we hope that you enjoy these glimpses into a curious mind at work.

—David Remnick

“The Coolhunt”

Who decides what’s cool? Certain kids in certain places—and only the coolhunters know who they are.

“The Physical Genius”

What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon named Charlie Wilson have in common?

“Thresholds of Violence”

How school shootings catch on.

“The Tweaker”

The real genius of Steve Jobs.

“The Talent Myth”

Are smart people overrated?

“Troublemakers”

What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.

Of all the Presidential hopefuls who have promised to oust Donald Trump in 2020, Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has perhaps the most compelling electoral record. In 2016, he was the only Democratic governor to be reëlected in a red state, winning by four points among Montanans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Trump. His bid is centered on a pledge to reform campaign finance, and, at stops in Iowa, he routinely touts his history of working with a Rebublican-led legislature in his home state to curb dark-money contributions. And yet, Bullock, the last governor left in the race, failed to secure the necessary number of individual donors to qualify for Thursday’s Democratic debate. Like a number of his fellow-candidates, he has criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria, which, for at least a night, winnowed the Democratic field to ten. Last month, the billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars of his own money on advertisements, announced that he had received enough individual donations to qualify for the next round of Democratic debates, in October. A number of candidates expressed dismay, but the most vocal was Bullock, who appeared on television to criticize the lingering influence of money in politics. He conceded that the D.N.C.’s rule was well intentioned, but, he added, “what it really has done is allow a billionaire to buy a spot on the debate stage.”

On Thursday night, as his fellow-candidates stood behind their lecterns in Houston, Texas, Bullock sat at the corner of a glossy wooden bar at the Continental Lounge, a gastropub in Des Moines. The governor was in good spirits, hunched over a glass of Coke, with his right sleeve rolled up and his cowboy boots planted on the base of his stool. “I’d rather be on the debate stage,” he told me. “But I don’t think being on the debate stage is going to define what the first week of February looks like.” Earlier that day, in Clive, Bullock had attended a meet-and-greet hosted by the wife of Iowa’s former governor, Tom Vilsack. By his side at the Continental sat Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa and an old friend, who endorsed Bullock in May. (Miller, Bullock also noted, was one of the first state officials outside of Illinois to back Barack Obama in 2007.) They both ordered bacon cheeseburger flatbreads, which arrived, garnished with pickles, on marbled slabs of wood. Bullock, who had also ordered a refill of soda, looked surprised when the bartender arrived bearing tumblers of Bulleit bourbon.

“This is brought to you by the Gillibrand team,” the bartender said, gesturing to his left. A few former staffers of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, who withdrew her candidacy last week, waved.

“I guess we have to drink, then,” Bullock said, raising his glass.

“To a fair shot,” one of his staffers offered, toasting to their campaign’s slogan.

During the debate, Bullock offered wry, knowing nods on several occasions, as when Andrew Yang unveiled plans to extend his signature “freedom dividend” to ten American families. “So he’s getting names by offering twelve thousand dollars?” Bullock said, pulling up Yang’s Web site on his iPhone. (As he predicted, it displayed a prominent banner for the candidate’s giveaway above a registration form.) Later, the New Jersey senator Cory Booker’s criticism of Trump’s foreign policy—“Trump’s America first policy is actually an America isolated, an America alone policy”—sounded startlingly familiar. “He took my line!” Bullock joked. “C’mon, Booker.” He chuckled at Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s zinger on Medicare for All—“While Bernie wrote the bill,” she said, “I read the bill”—and also seemed to appreciate her opening: “Houston, we have a problem.” (“That’s not bad,” he said.) When the first commercial break arrived, ninety minutes in, Bullock glanced at his watch. He expressed a sort of empathy for the candidates when I mentioned that the entire program would include only two breaks. “In three hours?” Bullock asked, shaking his head at the thought of “how much you’d sweat—every break they put more shit on your face.” The onslaught of makeup, he told me, is “one of the most humiliating parts of running for office.”

The bar was loud, and the owners had enabled closed-captioning on the debate channel. Still, it was difficult to tell—without consulting Twitter, as a few of Bullock’s staffers did—who was carrying the night. Bullock characterized the debates as somewhat “disconnected from people’s lives.” “I don’t know that any of these debates are helpful to voters,” he said, using his fingers to scoop a few ice cubes from his empty soda glass into his tumbler. “It really is more about gotcha moments.” He added, “Never before in our history has the D.N.C. been trying to decide who the voices should be going forward.” At the same time, Bullock said, his visits to early-voting states made him question whether anyone besides voters could winnow the field. “I find people are a long way from really making these decisions. Even as you’re all following on Twitter, voters are, like, ‘All right, who won? Or does it matter?’ ” People, he added, didn’t necessarily want to “see all that.”

Neither, apparently, did the staffers. Not long after the break, Bullock’s team, which had been exchanging jokes over plates of bruschetta, poutine, and avocado egg rolls, closed their tab and moved across the street to Up-Down, an arcade bar outfitted with retro video games. The basement was bathed in red and green lighting. Not a single screen showed the debates, but a wrestling match was on, as was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The Bullock team scattered to play at Skee-Ball, Jenga Giant, and Mario Kart. Bullock, a father of three, settled in with an expert’s stance at Donkey Kong—his favorite—hinging at the hips and grabbing the joystick with his left hand. It didn’t take long for him to post the machine’s new high score.

At a quarter to ten, as the debate was wrapping up, Bullock left his can of Bud Light at the bar and lumbered up the stairs. His staffers had been trading text messages with their colleagues at the headquarters to hone a statement on the night’s events. Outside, sirens blared. A gaggle of twentysomethings tumbled out of a Jeep, took a glance at a Maserati parked behind them, and asked if it was Bullock’s. “No,” the governor said.

Bullock found a stretch of block with a nondescript background and recited his statement for one of the staffers to record. It took a few takes to perfect—drunken passersby kept stumbling through the frame—but Bullock persisted, criticizing the influence of money in politics, noting his own record, and pointing out that none of the candidates who qualified over him had once broached the subject of fighting dark money. “There wasn’t even one question asked about that in three hours of debate,” he said. “If we want to get anything done, we need to start by getting the corrupting influence of money out of our elections. This is the fight of our time, and it’s been the fight of my career—and I’m going to keep fighting until we win.”