WEBVTT - David Remnick on Liebling, Dylan, and Glasnost 0:00:06.480 --> 0:00:09.680 This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, 0:00:10.480 --> 0:00:15.000 My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:19.320 hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change 0:00:19.360 --> 0:00:24.840 their careers, what relationships influenced their work. The New Yorker 0:00:24.920 --> 0:00:29.400 magazine is having a momentous year. Two thousand fifteen marks 0:00:29.440 --> 0:00:32.879 its ninetieth anniversary and the year it moved offices from 0:00:32.920 --> 0:00:37.520 Times Square to one World Trade Center. David Remnick became 0:00:37.560 --> 0:00:41.200 the magazine's editor almost twenty years ago when Tina Brown 0:00:41.320 --> 0:00:45.680 named him as her successor. Remnick, who first started as 0:00:45.680 --> 0:00:50.240 a staff writer, continues to report and write profiles. Everybody 0:00:50.240 --> 0:00:53.800 has a cartoon of themselves, says Remnick. Mine is I 0:00:53.880 --> 0:00:57.520 write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time. 0:00:58.200 --> 0:01:00.760 He's written six books and edited more than his share 0:01:00.760 --> 0:01:04.800 of anthologies. It's no surprise that David Remnick carefully considers 0:01:05.040 --> 0:01:08.520 how he spends his day. I'm very wary of not 0:01:09.040 --> 0:01:16.399 consuming time unnecessarily, and that's that's marital that's the modern battle. Well, 0:01:16.400 --> 0:01:18.840 not to eat it up with what ends up being crap. 0:01:19.520 --> 0:01:21.559 And I have a lot of friends who use Twitter 0:01:21.640 --> 0:01:24.040 and are on Twitter and are tweeting during the day 0:01:24.160 --> 0:01:30.840 and you know, meaningful lives present. Yes, but and I've 0:01:30.840 --> 0:01:32.840 amended that. You know, I'll do it far less than 0:01:32.880 --> 0:01:34.960 I used to write. But what I found for with 0:01:35.040 --> 0:01:37.720 people in jobs like mine who were tweeting, they did 0:01:37.760 --> 0:01:40.320 one of two things, and they both seemed mistaken. One 0:01:40.400 --> 0:01:42.240 is that they use it as a promotional vehicle, and 0:01:42.240 --> 0:01:44.280 they say, we you know, uh, we have a really 0:01:44.319 --> 0:01:47.280 swell piece on blah, and then three days we go by, 0:01:47.319 --> 0:01:49.360 we have a real we have a we have a 0:01:49.480 --> 0:01:52.840 great piece on data. And that's not with Twitter's for 0:01:53.000 --> 0:01:55.280 there You're not joining any conversations, You're just you know, 0:01:55.360 --> 0:01:59.520 you're just showing your backside, you your advertising. That's one 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:03.480 kind of The other kind is the inadvertent overshare that 0:02:03.560 --> 0:02:08.639 you then spend weeks cleaning up after after your own elephant. 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:11.160 And I didn't want to do that either. I figured 0:02:11.280 --> 0:02:14.120 that I had enough of a platform, either implicitly as 0:02:14.120 --> 0:02:17.360 an editor or explicitly as a writer, and once in 0:02:17.360 --> 0:02:21.080 a while to talk with somebody like you, or go 0:02:21.200 --> 0:02:23.399 on television or whatever once in a blue moon, and 0:02:23.400 --> 0:02:27.200 and that was enough. I think that's the right decision 0:02:27.280 --> 0:02:29.360 for me. When you not that the world is shaking 0:02:29.360 --> 0:02:33.920 in a desire for for for me to tweet. I 0:02:34.000 --> 0:02:36.200 love this quote. Michael Specter says the only person he 0:02:36.240 --> 0:02:38.760 knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own 0:02:38.760 --> 0:02:42.360 ex wife, Alessandras stayed with Stanley, the TV critic for 0:02:42.360 --> 0:02:44.600 The New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick one of 0:02:44.639 --> 0:02:47.760 their favorites. The BBC version of Look Are Smile These 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:50.480 People came out on DVD. I said, are you watching it? 0:02:51.160 --> 0:02:53.280 And Remick said yes, he was writing a piece. He said. 0:02:53.320 --> 0:02:55.440 I said, I'm giving myself three hours of writing one 0:02:55.480 --> 0:02:57.560 hour of Smiley. I think that may have been the 0:02:57.600 --> 0:03:00.560 best thing I've ever seen on television. Oh my god. 0:03:00.600 --> 0:03:03.760 Alec certainly in the high brower area. I mean Alec 0:03:03.800 --> 0:03:07.480 ginn is playing Smiley in Tinker Taylor and then Smile 0:03:07.520 --> 0:03:12.440 these people? What is Yeah? That was heaven the So 0:03:12.480 --> 0:03:13.720 you wake up in the morning and how do you 0:03:13.720 --> 0:03:16.120 plug in? What do you do me for news? And 0:03:16.160 --> 0:03:18.680 things like that. Look in general the New York The 0:03:18.840 --> 0:03:22.880 New York Times, either because it just is or because 0:03:22.919 --> 0:03:26.040 out of force of habit is the weather that we 0:03:26.160 --> 0:03:28.640 live in. In terms of what's going on, in the world. 0:03:28.680 --> 0:03:32.080 And that's why I think never more so than now, 0:03:32.760 --> 0:03:35.680 despite the profusion of all the websites that you and 0:03:35.720 --> 0:03:39.200 I could both name and maybe overlap on Medium, Vox, 0:03:39.280 --> 0:03:43.200 whatever it is, Slate or whatever rings your bell. But 0:03:43.400 --> 0:03:45.680 for me, the New York Times as a news gathering 0:03:45.800 --> 0:03:50.320 organization is still the most ambitious. It just is, and 0:03:50.400 --> 0:03:52.920 so I'm not going to miss that. Would you like 0:03:52.960 --> 0:03:58.440 to see them do better? Wow? Where I think they're 0:03:58.440 --> 0:04:04.560 holding up the the store is on things like international news, 0:04:04.560 --> 0:04:07.160 where it's just getting worse and worse. There are fewer 0:04:07.160 --> 0:04:09.680 and fewer places of endbition that can cover the world. 0:04:11.040 --> 0:04:19.960 I'd like to see the cultural coverage be a little different, really, 0:04:20.200 --> 0:04:24.679 I think it could be as ammbitious in certain areas 0:04:24.720 --> 0:04:27.800 as as the international coverage of political coverage. There's things 0:04:27.800 --> 0:04:29.839 that they cover in pop culture. I sit there, I 0:04:30.000 --> 0:04:32.039 go they put that on the front page of the 0:04:32.120 --> 0:04:34.560 arts section of the New York Times. I think that's okay, though, 0:04:34.600 --> 0:04:36.599 I think that so yeah, I do. I think I 0:04:36.680 --> 0:04:40.320 think it's it's important for somebody who's my age to 0:04:40.360 --> 0:04:44.599 remember that Kanye West is for his audience, and I'm 0:04:44.839 --> 0:04:48.360 part of his audience. What Bob Dylan was for Bob 0:04:48.440 --> 0:04:51.719 Dylan's audience thirty years ago. Pop culture is something that 0:04:51.760 --> 0:04:54.760 you're never going to love as acutely, especially in music 0:04:55.400 --> 0:04:57.960 as when the Pharaonomes were just flying through and when 0:04:57.960 --> 0:05:01.760 those songs meant something to you. Yeah, and so as 0:05:01.760 --> 0:05:05.640 somebody who still goes to see the Bobster and uh 0:05:05.680 --> 0:05:09.600 and others and it still means everything to me. It's 0:05:09.960 --> 0:05:11.719 so I don't mind seeing those things on the frontage 0:05:11.720 --> 0:05:15.279 because I know he's someone's Bobster. You bet, you bet. 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:18.760 So that's okay. Now with what you do there, is 0:05:18.800 --> 0:05:22.840 it more management and you're involved in finances and marketing 0:05:22.880 --> 0:05:25.479 and the move downtown and so or is it just 0:05:25.640 --> 0:05:27.800 mostly editing. It's all of it. It has to be 0:05:27.880 --> 0:05:30.719 all of it. Look, my job is week to week 0:05:30.960 --> 0:05:33.280 and months and month, but it's also has to have 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:36.760 some sense of what where we're going, what we're about, 0:05:36.839 --> 0:05:43.960 who we are, what our internal moral, journalistic, literary purposes 0:05:43.960 --> 0:05:46.200 in the world. And I have to think about X 0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:47.960 years from now, and I hope it's a lot of 0:05:48.040 --> 0:05:51.640 years from now where I hand off this thing in 0:05:51.839 --> 0:05:55.880 shape in every sense that it that it means what 0:05:55.960 --> 0:06:00.480 it should mean. But it's also financially healthy. What kind 0:06:00.480 --> 0:06:02.159 of shape with the magazine in or how would you 0:06:02.200 --> 0:06:05.239 describe the magazine when you took over. It was losing money. 0:06:05.400 --> 0:06:07.159 I don't say that, you know, to pound my chest, 0:06:07.200 --> 0:06:08.600 but it was losing money, was going through a hard 0:06:08.640 --> 0:06:10.240 Why do you think it was because she was very 0:06:10.240 --> 0:06:13.280 pop culture centric? It wasn't about that, I think. I 0:06:13.320 --> 0:06:16.440 think it was The peak of advertising for The New 0:06:16.520 --> 0:06:20.360 Yorker was in the late sixties. And it's why, Alec, 0:06:20.640 --> 0:06:22.920 when we think, you know, we make a cartoon of 0:06:22.960 --> 0:06:25.760 certain periods, of certain things. The reason there were four 0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:29.000 parts series that weren't so interesting sometimes was because they 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:31.480 needed the editorial matter to put next to the ads. 0:06:31.920 --> 0:06:35.080 It was that rich. And there's, you know, contrary to 0:06:35.120 --> 0:06:37.720 popular belief, there's just so much great writing out there. 0:06:38.880 --> 0:06:44.400 You know, advertising began to decline, and yet we were 0:06:44.520 --> 0:06:48.080 charging of minuscule amount for the for the magazine, you know, 0:06:48.240 --> 0:06:50.280 And my feeling is you should be able to charge 0:06:50.400 --> 0:06:53.600 each week for The New Yorker, maybe even as much 0:06:53.640 --> 0:06:57.360 as a cup of Starbucks or half of the movie costs. 0:06:57.400 --> 0:07:01.080 Oh my god. Yeah, So now we as a movie 0:07:02.040 --> 0:07:04.960 or a bad movie, and and now we do and 0:07:05.080 --> 0:07:07.960 together with advertising. It's a very healthy business. And we 0:07:08.000 --> 0:07:13.760 try to pay writers decently. Um, And is that a struggle? Well, 0:07:14.000 --> 0:07:16.160 we need a lot of good stuff. We come out 0:07:16.200 --> 0:07:19.280 every week and now we come out every second. And 0:07:19.360 --> 0:07:22.360 I don't want to see any diminution in in quality 0:07:22.480 --> 0:07:26.480 just because it's just the web. I don't. I'm not 0:07:26.520 --> 0:07:28.040 saying this for you to be kind. I mean, you 0:07:28.200 --> 0:07:30.680 obviously have great writers and and and but you want 0:07:30.680 --> 0:07:33.000 to pay them decent. And how do you compare, Like, 0:07:33.080 --> 0:07:36.600 who's paying the most money in your field right now? Well, 0:07:36.640 --> 0:07:39.720 who's sitting up there and just throwing money at nobody's 0:07:39.720 --> 0:07:46.320 throwing but nobody's nobody's an idiot, nobody's in here. Competitive absolutely, Yeah. Yeah. 0:07:46.640 --> 0:07:51.600 Is if somebody comes to us from the New York Times, say, uh, 0:07:51.760 --> 0:07:54.800 you know, Dexter Filkins comes from the New York Times 0:07:54.840 --> 0:07:56.760 to the New York He's not going to come for less. 0:07:57.600 --> 0:08:00.600 What he's doing is coming mainly to do something different. 0:08:00.680 --> 0:08:03.480 I think that's the main attraction. That's what happened with me. 0:08:04.080 --> 0:08:07.040 I was a newspaper reporter. I wanted to do something different. 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:09.240 I had been I had the best newspaper job in 0:08:09.240 --> 0:08:11.080 the history of the Second half of the twentieth century 0:08:11.160 --> 0:08:14.760 was a Moscow reporter. It was heaven. But I was 0:08:14.800 --> 0:08:18.680 also writing, you know, faster than I could type. I 0:08:18.800 --> 0:08:22.640 was three times a day and no time to think. 0:08:23.600 --> 0:08:25.920 So got lucky this way to do something where you 0:08:25.960 --> 0:08:29.160 could right, if not for the ages, then at least 0:08:29.160 --> 0:08:30.880 not for the ten minutes that you were a looted 0:08:31.160 --> 0:08:33.760 so when you have But if I just finished one 0:08:33.760 --> 0:08:36.440 point you asked me about, I don't want to give 0:08:36.480 --> 0:08:38.959 the impression that being the editor the New Yorkers it 0:08:39.000 --> 0:08:41.040 is business all the time, but you just too. You 0:08:41.080 --> 0:08:44.000 have to pay attention to it. The pleasure of the job, 0:08:44.480 --> 0:08:50.240 the heaven of it is somebody down the hall has 0:08:50.280 --> 0:08:53.320 read somebody who's twenty four and puts in front of 0:08:53.320 --> 0:08:58.400 you his or her writing in some small magazine or 0:08:58.440 --> 0:09:02.280 on some website, and we aside to give her a shot. 0:09:02.679 --> 0:09:05.880 And the piece comes in and this person has a 0:09:05.920 --> 0:09:10.440 whale of talent that's enormously ground to give them what 0:09:10.480 --> 0:09:12.320 kind of a piece to write? Well, it depends on 0:09:12.360 --> 0:09:15.000 who they are. There's a woman named Sarah Stillman, for example, 0:09:15.080 --> 0:09:18.760 say her mid twenties, and she had written a few 0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:21.960 pieces here or there, and every piece she has written 0:09:22.040 --> 0:09:24.240 for us now, which maybe half does. She seems seems 0:09:24.280 --> 0:09:28.640 to win an award for it's it's amazing, she's got it. 0:09:28.880 --> 0:09:31.199 Rachel Levive for this guy Patrick Keith, who just did 0:09:31.200 --> 0:09:33.600 this piece on Jerry Adam. I was in touch with 0:09:33.679 --> 0:09:35.439 Rachel to try to get in touch with the woman 0:09:35.679 --> 0:09:38.760 who she talked about the the adoption case after California, 0:09:39.240 --> 0:09:41.600 and I didn't eventually email that woman because I wanted 0:09:41.600 --> 0:09:43.600 to get the rights to her story. I love Rachel's writing. 0:09:43.640 --> 0:09:46.439 She's terrific. And you know, she hadn't she had been 0:09:46.480 --> 0:09:48.720 in the I guess she had been in the village voice. 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:51.360 She had been here and there. She wasn't invisible. It's 0:09:51.400 --> 0:09:53.600 not like she's right out of the eighth grade or something. 0:09:54.200 --> 0:09:58.880 But that is it's enormously gratifying. At the other end, 0:09:59.120 --> 0:10:03.600 So Roger Angel is ninety four years old, imagine that. 0:10:04.920 --> 0:10:09.600 And he hands you a piece he's that he's slyly 0:10:09.640 --> 0:10:14.000 been working on in which he's describing what it is 0:10:14.040 --> 0:10:18.720 to be old, what it is to lose your powers 0:10:18.760 --> 0:10:22.920 here and there two experience the loss of his wife, 0:10:23.160 --> 0:10:26.520 who he certainly figured he would, you know, go go first. 0:10:27.520 --> 0:10:31.959 And yet he's not through desiring. His sexual desire is 0:10:32.000 --> 0:10:36.520 still there, and he gets married again and he writes 0:10:36.559 --> 0:10:40.640 the most astonishing piece on year old text about what 0:10:40.679 --> 0:10:44.480 it is to desire it and you don't stop. The 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:50.200 sap is still in the tree. God man. So when 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:54.280 you have the magazine, obviously one's assuming that there's you know, 0:10:55.080 --> 0:10:57.959 pieces that are three months out, six months out. You 0:10:58.000 --> 0:11:00.800 have many pots on many stoves cooking, and do you 0:11:00.880 --> 0:11:03.680 sometimes I don't remember which pots are cooking? Were sometimes 0:11:03.720 --> 0:11:08.000 I really don't go going on long lead that way. 0:11:08.200 --> 0:11:10.319 These pieces take months to write and so forth, or 0:11:10.440 --> 0:11:12.720 maybe longer. And do you sit there and look at 0:11:12.720 --> 0:11:15.079 pieces and go, that's not a march piece. I don't 0:11:15.080 --> 0:11:17.040 want New Yorkers to read that in the dead of winter. 0:11:17.120 --> 0:11:18.560 I don't you know, Like, do you have a sense 0:11:18.600 --> 0:11:21.840 of how the magazines put together on multiple levels? Yes, 0:11:22.120 --> 0:11:24.480 and you're you know, there are a lead pieces and 0:11:24.480 --> 0:11:27.000 then there are shorter pieces, and by by New Yorker standards, 0:11:27.000 --> 0:11:29.480 a shorter pieces of four thousand word piece, you know, 0:11:29.520 --> 0:11:33.120 a profile. The longer piece can run twenty words. These 0:11:33.160 --> 0:11:37.760 are these are considerable things. And if you've delivered week 0:11:37.840 --> 0:11:45.679 after week of leads that are isis or some grim 0:11:45.840 --> 0:11:50.679 piece of life. You need to have some sense of rotation. 0:11:50.880 --> 0:11:53.320 I mean, the magazine is not the magazine if it 0:11:53.360 --> 0:11:56.120 doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business 0:11:57.240 --> 0:12:01.120 to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremitted, It's 0:12:01.120 --> 0:12:03.960 like a band having a set list. If you do everything, 0:12:04.760 --> 0:12:09.080 it's all sixteenth notes fermented. So or will you sound 0:12:09.080 --> 0:12:13.520 like the remotes? Although I've heard of worse things boom. 0:12:13.960 --> 0:12:18.480 So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's 0:12:18.480 --> 0:12:22.440 your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility, 0:12:22.679 --> 0:12:26.480 you know. Even the cartoons you don't choose. I do. 0:12:26.600 --> 0:12:28.400 So the way that's done is is is there's a 0:12:28.440 --> 0:12:31.520 cartoon editor that gets all these roughs you've had, Ross 0:12:31.600 --> 0:12:35.360 Chest come by Rosal send in ten roughs, and she's 0:12:35.400 --> 0:12:38.080 cooking with gas. If one of them each week gets picked, 0:12:38.360 --> 0:12:41.079 that's the highest hit rate there can be. And and 0:12:41.360 --> 0:12:43.760 and and she's it. It's a hard way to make 0:12:43.800 --> 0:12:45.560 a living, and it's a hard way to be an artist. 0:12:46.600 --> 0:12:49.480 And even there you want variety of voices. You want 0:12:50.640 --> 0:12:54.480 they can't all be about frustrated men in bed with 0:12:54.600 --> 0:12:57.600 their you know, non giving girlfriends or something or it 0:12:57.640 --> 0:13:01.079 can't all be that joke. Can't all be desert islands, 0:13:01.200 --> 0:13:05.480 or or even meta desert island jokes. You've got to 0:13:05.559 --> 0:13:07.760 have some sense of variety. I told you my favorite 0:13:07.760 --> 0:13:11.440 of all time, Gaine Wilson had a fish in a suit, 0:13:11.559 --> 0:13:13.280 I think I told Rose this, and the fishes in 0:13:13.320 --> 0:13:15.679 a suit and an elevator, and a man is in 0:13:15.720 --> 0:13:18.360 the elevator, and the elevator doors have parted, and out 0:13:18.360 --> 0:13:22.080 there was an aquarium. There's water and bubbles and plant 0:13:22.120 --> 0:13:24.079 life and other fish. And the fishes turned to the 0:13:24.120 --> 0:13:28.439 man and says, I guess this is me. It was 0:13:28.480 --> 0:13:31.120 just my favorite cartoon in the New Yorker that I'm 0:13:31.120 --> 0:13:34.000 a refrigerator for twenty years, and you know, you get 0:13:34.000 --> 0:13:35.959 a nearer to this kind of stuff, You forget that 0:13:36.240 --> 0:13:38.120 this is this is not the kind of job that 0:13:38.200 --> 0:13:40.480 most people have picking cartoons for a living. In the 0:13:40.480 --> 0:13:43.079 other night, Esther and my wife, Esther and I have 0:13:43.160 --> 0:13:45.079 with three kids in one of them has autism. When 0:13:45.120 --> 0:13:48.080 we go to this Night of Too Many Stars, which 0:13:48.160 --> 0:13:52.880 John Stewart and Robert Smigel, and they do this amazing thing, 0:13:54.280 --> 0:13:57.400 and I, you know, said Ester, so what can we 0:13:57.520 --> 0:13:59.400 offer in the auction part? She said, well, you can 0:13:59.440 --> 0:14:01.880 auction off attendance at the cartoon meeting. I said, you know, 0:14:01.920 --> 0:14:05.800 the whole last twenty five minutes. You know, Robert Mankoff 0:14:05.840 --> 0:14:08.280 and I sit there and we make stupid jokes and 0:14:08.320 --> 0:14:12.400 we picked cartoons. How interesting can this be? Sixty four 0:14:12.440 --> 0:14:15.200 thousand dollars we get on the on the auction. Two 0:14:15.200 --> 0:14:18.560 different people for thirty two dollars a piece want to 0:14:18.600 --> 0:14:20.000 be in this meeting. I don't know what the hell 0:14:20.040 --> 0:14:21.320 to do with them. I think I'm going to have 0:14:21.360 --> 0:14:24.080 to bring in entertainment and addition to take care of themselves. 0:14:24.120 --> 0:14:26.520 I hope they're happy to be there. I hope. So. 0:14:26.520 --> 0:14:28.600 So when you're doing the piece you we're talking about 0:14:28.600 --> 0:14:30.840 Sarah Stillman, Yeah, I look at the New York and 0:14:31.040 --> 0:14:33.360 I think, you know, do you develop or do they 0:14:33.560 --> 0:14:35.840 get ready? We have to but they but they But 0:14:35.960 --> 0:14:37.760 this is this is the ethos of the magazine in 0:14:37.800 --> 0:14:41.840 the in the early days. It's gonna make you. It's 0:14:41.920 --> 0:14:45.080 it's hysterical to to to think it was true. But 0:14:45.200 --> 0:14:48.920 the big money makers for fiction writers way back when 0:14:49.360 --> 0:14:54.520 with short stories, so Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and to some extent, 0:14:55.560 --> 0:14:59.760 well before O'Hara comes along, they're making their living on 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:03.560 selling short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, to magazines 0:15:03.600 --> 0:15:06.960 like that. So the New Yorker comes along and eventually 0:15:08.000 --> 0:15:12.760 Katherine White, Roger Angel's mother, is the fiction editor, and 0:15:12.800 --> 0:15:14.520 she's got to figure out where where can we make 0:15:14.560 --> 0:15:16.680 our bones. Well, we don't have the money to compete 0:15:16.680 --> 0:15:19.840 with the Saturday Evening Post and such magazines for for 0:15:19.880 --> 0:15:22.360 the big names, Hemingway, fitz Jaralin's son, So we're going 0:15:22.440 --> 0:15:26.120 to discover new talent. So that became the ethos of 0:15:26.160 --> 0:15:29.720 the magazine, and they just she discovers, for example, living 0:15:29.760 --> 0:15:32.360 in a railroad flat in Chelsea, which used to be 0:15:32.440 --> 0:15:35.440 railroad flats, not the you know, the buffed Chelsea that 0:15:35.480 --> 0:15:38.080 we know today, which is a you know, upper middle 0:15:38.080 --> 0:15:42.880 class neighborhood. John Cheever, now there's no question that now, 0:15:44.000 --> 0:15:46.320 because there is no Saturday Evening Post and the world 0:15:46.360 --> 0:15:51.440 has changed that sometimes writers will come to us and 0:15:51.480 --> 0:15:55.560 if not fully formed that they're certainly getting there. Do 0:15:55.600 --> 0:15:58.640 you have an affiliation with any kind of university programs 0:15:58.640 --> 0:16:01.760 where you you know, we we've we've done farm system 0:16:01.800 --> 0:16:04.880 so to speak. The farm system is the mail. The 0:16:05.040 --> 0:16:08.240 farm system is whoever sending us stuff. You know people 0:16:08.240 --> 0:16:10.920 think I'm kidding around. People email me every day. I 0:16:11.000 --> 0:16:16.680 probably get fifteen emails a day that go directly to 0:16:16.840 --> 0:16:19.160 me because my email is not that hard to figure out, 0:16:19.960 --> 0:16:25.320 and I have an idea, here's my short story. Now. 0:16:25.520 --> 0:16:28.680 Most of them are not going to work. We have 0:16:28.760 --> 0:16:32.080 a big staff. The pieces that come to me that 0:16:32.120 --> 0:16:36.600 way are not always masterpieces. Once in a while, though, 0:16:36.840 --> 0:16:40.440 it happens when you have people like that Rachel Vive 0:16:40.560 --> 0:16:44.560 and listen, Tad Friend and all your mass head. There 0:16:44.600 --> 0:16:47.200 the the top writers in the in the in the world. 0:16:47.560 --> 0:16:50.040 What's editing them like for you? When you when you edit, 0:16:50.080 --> 0:16:51.960 because I am ignorant about this, when you edit them, 0:16:52.080 --> 0:16:54.720 you just sit there and say, well, you edited for size. 0:16:54.800 --> 0:16:57.080 You said, well let's lose this. Unless you don't go 0:16:57.200 --> 0:16:59.520 to say this is a run on sentence that you 0:16:59.520 --> 0:17:03.400 need a strong gra Absolutely do you do? You absolutely 0:17:03.440 --> 0:17:09.480 do every writer. Look John Updike editing John Updyke, which 0:17:09.480 --> 0:17:12.600 I didn't personally do, but you know, you're presiding over 0:17:12.680 --> 0:17:17.119 various editors and stuff. He's about as perfectionist and handing 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:19.439 it as close to what's appearing in the magazine as 0:17:19.480 --> 0:17:21.960 as possible to be. And then there's the other side 0:17:21.960 --> 0:17:25.080 of it. Different people do think different things. An investigative 0:17:25.119 --> 0:17:29.680 reporter is not necessarily a master of prose. That what 0:17:29.800 --> 0:17:35.159 you're shooting for there is well some of the I 0:17:35.240 --> 0:17:39.200 just love that statement, But nor is John Updike capable 0:17:39.240 --> 0:17:43.719 of uncovering the Pentagon papers. So what you're aiming for 0:17:43.840 --> 0:17:48.159 there is is lucidity and clarity and you know a 0:17:48.200 --> 0:17:51.080 kind of organization where the story unfolds in the proper way. 0:17:51.200 --> 0:17:55.720 Your your your goal there is different. But each writer 0:17:55.800 --> 0:18:00.240 has different stuff that he or she's you know, prone too. 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:03.960 You know, as a writer, I've taken too much time 0:18:04.000 --> 0:18:06.120 clearing my throat in the beginning of the piece, and 0:18:06.560 --> 0:18:08.399 I hope I've learned myself to get rid of a 0:18:08.480 --> 0:18:11.760 lot of the crap after finding the group, after finding 0:18:11.760 --> 0:18:13.760 the rhythm, after finding what it is I want to 0:18:13.760 --> 0:18:16.800 say and where it wants to go. But very often 0:18:16.920 --> 0:18:21.280 my editor, Henry Finder, will just very quietly take a pen. 0:18:22.400 --> 0:18:25.280 Oh yeah, that's who edits you. Oh yeah, and he's great, 0:18:25.520 --> 0:18:29.960 He's unbelievable. You know. The way it works is I'll 0:18:30.000 --> 0:18:32.119 send him the piece. Now I've been doing this for 0:18:32.160 --> 0:18:35.119 a while too, but nevertheless, I'll send him the piece, 0:18:36.320 --> 0:18:39.919 and back will come an email and the tone is 0:18:40.080 --> 0:18:45.280 very measured. Um, A lot of good stuff here, A 0:18:45.280 --> 0:18:47.240 lot of good stuff here, which is a little bit 0:18:47.280 --> 0:18:49.000 of a way of saying, there's some good things in 0:18:49.040 --> 0:18:56.640 your pockets, some lens as well, maybe old gum rappers. 0:18:56.920 --> 0:18:59.680 Maybe we don't need the old gum rappers quite so, 0:19:01.600 --> 0:19:05.600 maybe fewer gun rappers. I know how to read this editor. 0:19:05.680 --> 0:19:07.760 I he we know each other for a long time, 0:19:08.520 --> 0:19:12.120 and I get the point. Outgoes the gum rappers, outgoes 0:19:12.160 --> 0:19:16.080 the bilge about you know, Hillary Clinton's emails or whatever, 0:19:16.160 --> 0:19:21.040 the kind of extraneous crap of this first try as 0:19:22.320 --> 0:19:24.680 And I got this from Barbara Epstein as an editor 0:19:24.720 --> 0:19:26.399 of the late Barbara Apstein at the New York Review 0:19:26.400 --> 0:19:30.679 of Books. I was really honored to be invited to 0:19:30.680 --> 0:19:33.760 write something from Russia for her. The assignment was about 0:19:33.800 --> 0:19:37.000 Boris Yelson's memoir, but obviously the piece was to write 0:19:37.000 --> 0:19:41.479 about Yelson and the yeltsa phenomena. And I got back 0:19:43.000 --> 0:19:46.720 what she called a biggie. What's a biggie? It was 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:51.640 a gigantic galley sheet, and it was gigantic because there 0:19:51.640 --> 0:19:54.919 were so many comments about how much I had screwed 0:19:55.000 --> 0:19:58.560 up or had run off at the mouth, or didn't 0:19:58.600 --> 0:20:03.600 explain sufficiently. And it was, you know, the signal that 0:20:03.680 --> 0:20:06.439 this process was going to take a little time. It's 0:20:06.480 --> 0:20:07.639 going to take a little time. And in the New 0:20:07.720 --> 0:20:09.320 York there are a lot of layers of editors, not 0:20:09.359 --> 0:20:12.640 just there's not just the editor that you have. There's 0:20:12.680 --> 0:20:17.400 also me kibbittzing in the background. There are fact checkers 0:20:18.359 --> 0:20:23.880 you've experienced this, and there are copy editors and what's 0:20:23.880 --> 0:20:26.760 called okayers. And there used to be a woman named 0:20:26.760 --> 0:20:30.439 Eleanor Gould, miss Gould, who would do her own proof 0:20:30.720 --> 0:20:33.560 and she was like a super grammarian. And I swear 0:20:33.600 --> 0:20:36.560 to God Alec, this is no longer. She once found 0:20:36.600 --> 0:20:40.960 four errors in a three word sentence. I will neither 0:20:41.040 --> 0:20:43.240 tell you who the writer was, nor tell you the sentence, 0:20:43.280 --> 0:20:48.960 but it was the most stunning achievement editorial achievement UM 0:20:49.000 --> 0:20:53.920 since Rosium and John Hersey. It was amazing. I remember 0:20:53.960 --> 0:20:57.040 listening to UM. You know, as my day is always 0:20:57.080 --> 0:20:59.439 the same. I'm more of an NPR person than a 0:20:59.440 --> 0:21:04.280 New York Times person these days. You're being interviewed and 0:21:04.320 --> 0:21:06.240 you talked about how your childhood I guess I think 0:21:06.240 --> 0:21:08.360 what was your mother's illness. I tried to write this down. 0:21:08.440 --> 0:21:10.440 I forgive me, but I tried to remember how I 0:21:10.480 --> 0:21:11.919 think what you wrote about your mother was very ill 0:21:11.960 --> 0:21:14.000 when you were young. Correct, she's still alive. Yeah, she 0:21:14.040 --> 0:21:16.320 had got m S when I was a very small boy. 0:21:16.359 --> 0:21:18.119 And it was there some comment you made about how 0:21:18.160 --> 0:21:20.560 that shaped the work you do. It was something about 0:21:20.560 --> 0:21:22.280 it it's more than the work to do, because the 0:21:22.320 --> 0:21:24.760 person you are. Right. So I grew up in a 0:21:24.800 --> 0:21:29.520 house where my mother had MS, which you know, was 0:21:29.560 --> 0:21:32.400 a kind of slow path down ward's now what's called 0:21:32.400 --> 0:21:35.280 a burnt out case. It stopped getting worse. So she's 0:21:35.320 --> 0:21:38.080 in a wheelchair, but she's you know, she's eighty three, 0:21:38.080 --> 0:21:41.959 and you know, okay. And my father was a dentist. 0:21:41.960 --> 0:21:45.439 He had a small dental practice. But by the time 0:21:45.480 --> 0:21:49.160 he was I think he concealed it because I think 0:21:49.160 --> 0:21:52.560 he the pressure on him to bring home the bacon. 0:21:52.680 --> 0:21:58.000 And although in our house no bacon, um was immense, 0:21:58.119 --> 0:22:00.879 and you know, his hands started shaking in the whitefish 0:22:01.000 --> 0:22:04.919 to bring home the white whitefish, very expensive um. His 0:22:05.000 --> 0:22:08.840 hands started shaking, and clearly this was you know, if 0:22:08.880 --> 0:22:12.639 it wasn't so tragic, it would have been funny. It 0:22:12.720 --> 0:22:17.960 was like Buster Keaton, the Parkinsonian dentist. And so by 0:22:17.960 --> 0:22:22.480 the time he was in his early fifties, he had 0:22:22.520 --> 0:22:27.399 lost everything. So I had some sense that I was 0:22:27.440 --> 0:22:29.240 going to have to make a living as my brother. 0:22:30.480 --> 0:22:33.359 Remember now you're saying this, and I so I had, 0:22:33.600 --> 0:22:37.080 you know, as a young guy, dreamed of being a novelist. 0:22:37.359 --> 0:22:39.960 But that the notion that I just kind of set 0:22:39.960 --> 0:22:42.560 myself up to be a novelist. Um, nobody was waiting 0:22:42.600 --> 0:22:45.280 for my novels. So I got a job. I was very, 0:22:45.359 --> 0:22:47.159 very lucky, got a job at the Washington Post. I 0:22:47.160 --> 0:22:50.840 mean that that's it. From a nervous world. Right out 0:22:50.840 --> 0:22:56.399