Last night, Ta-Nehisi Coates packed McCaw Hall. The room holds 2,900 people, and organizers said they didn't think a writer—a journalist—had ever drawn that large of a crowd.

If you'd already read Coates's recent work, none of the conversation with Vivian Phillips seemed new. Phillips set the table for Coates to summarize his arguments in The Case for Reparations and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. She had him read from and explicate certain passages from Between the World and Me.

In his jovial but no-nonsense mode he called the entire south during Jim Crow a kleptocracy. He described slavery as robbery enforced through torture and sharecropping as strong-armed robbery. He shooed away cliches like "white privilege," saying that people know you mean "white supremacy" when you say that, so just say that and have the fight.

But there were a few brilliant, off-the-cuff, original moments, stuff I hadn't heard from him before. The first came when Phillips asked if Coates had been paying attention to 2016 presidential race. Coates said that he had not, and that he wouldn't start watching until January. Then the conversation turned to Ben Carson.

Phillips quoted Carson as saying that he—and not Barack Obama—would be the first black president. The implication was that Carson did not believe Obama was black. Phillips's assertion was not totally true. Carson defended Rupert Murdoch's idea that Carson would be the first black president, but he didn't say Obama wasn't black.

Coates hadn't heard about the Carson thing, but he offered a response that didn't necessarily rely on Phillips getting the news right.

Coates hung his head and said that it was "deeply painful" for him to watch Ben Carson. For kids growing up in Baltimore, Carson was "a light," he said. Carson was a committed member of the community, often speaking at camps and other functions. Coates called him "a model of intelligence to young black people."

Carson was the guy who separated conjoined twins for the first time. He was a world-class neurosurgeon. But now he's a Republican shill who says shit like: ”I have to tell you Obamacare is, really I think, the worst thing that’s happened in this nation since slavery."

"They did that to him," Coates said, presumably talking about Carson's handlers. He used to be a light to young black people, but now he "owes his popularity to racism," Coates said.

It was hard to watch Coates sit there onstage and try to reconcile the Ben Carson he knew growing up with the Ben Carson of today.

The other novel moment of the evening was Coates's response to one of Phillips's questions about the reception of Between the World and Me. Phillips raised the point that the book has been criticized for not offering any solutions. Coates replied by saying that Baldwin's The Fire Next Time only offered love as a solution, which isn't really much of one. Then he said, "I love Joan Didion, but she doesn't offer any solutions for death!"

Coates's book is a a work of art. If you want solutions, read his journalism.