Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to
Speaker 1: hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change
Speaker 1: their careers, what relationships influenced their work. The New Yorker
Speaker 1: magazine is having a momentous year. Two thousand fifteen marks
Speaker 1: its ninetieth anniversary and the year it moved offices from
Speaker 1: Times Square to one World Trade Center. David Remnick became
Speaker 1: the magazine's editor almost twenty years ago when Tina Brown
Speaker 1: named him as her successor. Remnick, who first started as
Speaker 1: a staff writer, continues to report and write profiles. Everybody
Speaker 1: has a cartoon of themselves, says Remnick. Mine is I
Speaker 1: write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.
Speaker 1: He's written six books and edited more than his share
Speaker 1: of anthologies. It's no surprise that David Remnick carefully considers
Speaker 1: how he spends his day. I'm very wary of not
Speaker 1: consuming time unnecessarily, and that's that's marital that's the modern battle. Well,
Speaker 1: not to eat it up with what ends up being crap.
Speaker 1: And I have a lot of friends who use Twitter
Speaker 1: and are on Twitter and are tweeting during the day
Speaker 1: and you know, meaningful lives present. Yes, but and I've
Speaker 1: amended that. You know, I'll do it far less than
Speaker 1: I used to write. But what I found for with
Speaker 1: people in jobs like mine who were tweeting, they did
Speaker 1: one of two things, and they both seemed mistaken. One
Speaker 1: is that they use it as a promotional vehicle, and
Speaker 1: they say, we you know, uh, we have a really
Speaker 1: swell piece on blah, and then three days we go by,
Speaker 1: we have a real we have a we have a
Speaker 1: great piece on data. And that's not with Twitter's for
Speaker 1: there You're not joining any conversations, You're just you know,
Speaker 1: you're just showing your backside, you your advertising. That's one
Speaker 1: kind of The other kind is the inadvertent overshare that
Speaker 1: you then spend weeks cleaning up after after your own elephant.
Speaker 1: And I didn't want to do that either. I figured
Speaker 1: that I had enough of a platform, either implicitly as
Speaker 1: an editor or explicitly as a writer, and once in
Speaker 1: a while to talk with somebody like you, or go
Speaker 1: on television or whatever once in a blue moon, and
Speaker 1: and that was enough. I think that's the right decision
Speaker 1: for me. When you not that the world is shaking
Speaker 1: in a desire for for for me to tweet. I
Speaker 1: love this quote. Michael Specter says the only person he
Speaker 1: knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own
Speaker 1: ex wife, Alessandras stayed with Stanley, the TV critic for
Speaker 1: The New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick one of
Speaker 1: their favorites. The BBC version of Look Are Smile These
Speaker 1: People came out on DVD. I said, are you watching it?
Speaker 1: And Remick said yes, he was writing a piece. He said.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm giving myself three hours of writing one
Speaker 1: hour of Smiley. I think that may have been the
Speaker 1: best thing I've ever seen on television. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Alec certainly in the high brower area. I mean Alec
Speaker 1: ginn is playing Smiley in Tinker Taylor and then Smile
Speaker 1: these people? What is Yeah? That was heaven the So
Speaker 1: you wake up in the morning and how do you
Speaker 1: plug in? What do you do me for news? And
Speaker 1: things like that. Look in general the New York The
Speaker 1: New York Times, either because it just is or because
Speaker 1: out of force of habit is the weather that we
Speaker 1: live in. In terms of what's going on, in the world.
Speaker 1: And that's why I think never more so than now,
Speaker 1: despite the profusion of all the websites that you and
Speaker 1: I could both name and maybe overlap on Medium, Vox,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, Slate or whatever rings your bell. But
Speaker 1: for me, the New York Times as a news gathering
Speaker 1: organization is still the most ambitious. It just is, and
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to miss that. Would you like
Speaker 1: to see them do better? Wow? Where I think they're
Speaker 1: holding up the the store is on things like international news,
Speaker 1: where it's just getting worse and worse. There are fewer
Speaker 1: and fewer places of endbition that can cover the world.
Speaker 1: I'd like to see the cultural coverage be a little different, really,
Speaker 1: I think it could be as ammbitious in certain areas
Speaker 1: as as the international coverage of political coverage. There's things
Speaker 1: that they cover in pop culture. I sit there, I
Speaker 1: go they put that on the front page of the
Speaker 1: arts section of the New York Times. I think that's okay, though,
Speaker 1: I think that so yeah, I do. I think I
Speaker 1: think it's it's important for somebody who's my age to
Speaker 1: remember that Kanye West is for his audience, and I'm
Speaker 1: part of his audience. What Bob Dylan was for Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan's audience thirty years ago. Pop culture is something that
Speaker 1: you're never going to love as acutely, especially in music
Speaker 1: as when the Pharaonomes were just flying through and when
Speaker 1: those songs meant something to you. Yeah, and so as
Speaker 1: somebody who still goes to see the Bobster and uh
Speaker 1: and others and it still means everything to me. It's
Speaker 1: so I don't mind seeing those things on the frontage
Speaker 1: because I know he's someone's Bobster. You bet, you bet.
Speaker 1: So that's okay. Now with what you do there, is
Speaker 1: it more management and you're involved in finances and marketing
Speaker 1: and the move downtown and so or is it just
Speaker 1: mostly editing. It's all of it. It has to be
Speaker 1: all of it. Look, my job is week to week
Speaker 1: and months and month, but it's also has to have
Speaker 1: some sense of what where we're going, what we're about,
Speaker 1: who we are, what our internal moral, journalistic, literary purposes
Speaker 1: in the world. And I have to think about X
Speaker 1: years from now, and I hope it's a lot of
Speaker 1: years from now where I hand off this thing in
Speaker 1: shape in every sense that it that it means what
Speaker 1: it should mean. But it's also financially healthy. What kind
Speaker 1: of shape with the magazine in or how would you
Speaker 1: describe the magazine when you took over. It was losing money.
Speaker 1: I don't say that, you know, to pound my chest,
Speaker 1: but it was losing money, was going through a hard
Speaker 1: Why do you think it was because she was very
Speaker 1: pop culture centric? It wasn't about that, I think. I
Speaker 1: think it was The peak of advertising for The New
Speaker 1: Yorker was in the late sixties. And it's why, Alec,
Speaker 1: when we think, you know, we make a cartoon of
Speaker 1: certain periods, of certain things. The reason there were four
Speaker 1: parts series that weren't so interesting sometimes was because they
Speaker 1: needed the editorial matter to put next to the ads.
Speaker 1: It was that rich. And there's, you know, contrary to
Speaker 1: popular belief, there's just so much great writing out there.
Speaker 1: You know, advertising began to decline, and yet we were
Speaker 1: charging of minuscule amount for the for the magazine, you know,
Speaker 1: And my feeling is you should be able to charge
Speaker 1: each week for The New Yorker, maybe even as much
Speaker 1: as a cup of Starbucks or half of the movie costs.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yeah, So now we as a movie
Speaker 1: or a bad movie, and and now we do and
Speaker 1: together with advertising. It's a very healthy business. And we
Speaker 1: try to pay writers decently. Um, And is that a struggle? Well,
Speaker 1: we need a lot of good stuff. We come out
Speaker 1: every week and now we come out every second. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to see any diminution in in quality
Speaker 1: just because it's just the web. I don't. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying this for you to be kind. I mean, you
Speaker 1: obviously have great writers and and and but you want
Speaker 1: to pay them decent. And how do you compare, Like,
Speaker 1: who's paying the most money in your field right now? Well,
Speaker 1: who's sitting up there and just throwing money at nobody's
Speaker 1: throwing but nobody's nobody's an idiot, nobody's in here. Competitive absolutely, Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is if somebody comes to us from the New York Times, say, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Dexter Filkins comes from the New York Times
Speaker 1: to the New York He's not going to come for less.
Speaker 1: What he's doing is coming mainly to do something different.
Speaker 1: I think that's the main attraction. That's what happened with me.
Speaker 1: I was a newspaper reporter. I wanted to do something different.
Speaker 1: I had been I had the best newspaper job in
Speaker 1: the history of the Second half of the twentieth century
Speaker 1: was a Moscow reporter. It was heaven. But I was
Speaker 1: also writing, you know, faster than I could type. I
Speaker 1: was three times a day and no time to think.
Speaker 1: So got lucky this way to do something where you
Speaker 1: could right, if not for the ages, then at least
Speaker 1: not for the ten minutes that you were a looted
Speaker 1: so when you have But if I just finished one
Speaker 1: point you asked me about, I don't want to give
Speaker 1: the impression that being the editor the New Yorkers it
Speaker 1: is business all the time, but you just too. You
Speaker 1: have to pay attention to it. The pleasure of the job,
Speaker 1: the heaven of it is somebody down the hall has
Speaker 1: read somebody who's twenty four and puts in front of
Speaker 1: you his or her writing in some small magazine or
Speaker 1: on some website, and we aside to give her a shot.
Speaker 1: And the piece comes in and this person has a
Speaker 1: whale of talent that's enormously ground to give them what
Speaker 1: kind of a piece to write? Well, it depends on
Speaker 1: who they are. There's a woman named Sarah Stillman, for example,
Speaker 1: say her mid twenties, and she had written a few
Speaker 1: pieces here or there, and every piece she has written
Speaker 1: for us now, which maybe half does. She seems seems
Speaker 1: to win an award for it's it's amazing, she's got it.
Speaker 1: Rachel Levive for this guy Patrick Keith, who just did
Speaker 1: this piece on Jerry Adam. I was in touch with
Speaker 1: Rachel to try to get in touch with the woman
Speaker 1: who she talked about the the adoption case after California,
Speaker 1: and I didn't eventually email that woman because I wanted
Speaker 1: to get the rights to her story. I love Rachel's writing.
Speaker 1: She's terrific. And you know, she hadn't she had been
Speaker 1: in the I guess she had been in the village voice.
Speaker 1: She had been here and there. She wasn't invisible. It's
Speaker 1: not like she's right out of the eighth grade or something.
Speaker 1: But that is it's enormously gratifying. At the other end,
Speaker 1: So Roger Angel is ninety four years old, imagine that.
Speaker 1: And he hands you a piece he's that he's slyly
Speaker 1: been working on in which he's describing what it is
Speaker 1: to be old, what it is to lose your powers
Speaker 1: here and there two experience the loss of his wife,
Speaker 1: who he certainly figured he would, you know, go go first.
Speaker 1: And yet he's not through desiring. His sexual desire is
Speaker 1: still there, and he gets married again and he writes
Speaker 1: the most astonishing piece on year old text about what
Speaker 1: it is to desire it and you don't stop. The
Speaker 1: sap is still in the tree. God man. So when
Speaker 1: you have the magazine, obviously one's assuming that there's you know,
Speaker 1: pieces that are three months out, six months out. You
Speaker 1: have many pots on many stoves cooking, and do you
Speaker 1: sometimes I don't remember which pots are cooking? Were sometimes
Speaker 1: I really don't go going on long lead that way.
Speaker 1: These pieces take months to write and so forth, or
Speaker 1: maybe longer. And do you sit there and look at
Speaker 1: pieces and go, that's not a march piece. I don't
Speaker 1: want New Yorkers to read that in the dead of winter.
Speaker 1: I don't you know, Like, do you have a sense
Speaker 1: of how the magazines put together on multiple levels? Yes,
Speaker 1: and you're you know, there are a lead pieces and
Speaker 1: then there are shorter pieces, and by by New Yorker standards,
Speaker 1: a shorter pieces of four thousand word piece, you know,
Speaker 1: a profile. The longer piece can run twenty words. These
Speaker 1: are these are considerable things. And if you've delivered week
Speaker 1: after week of leads that are isis or some grim
Speaker 1: piece of life. You need to have some sense of rotation.
Speaker 1: I mean, the magazine is not the magazine if it
Speaker 1: doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business
Speaker 1: to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremitted, It's
Speaker 1: like a band having a set list. If you do everything,
Speaker 1: it's all sixteenth notes fermented. So or will you sound
Speaker 1: like the remotes? Although I've heard of worse things boom.
Speaker 1: So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's
Speaker 1: your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility,
Speaker 1: you know. Even the cartoons you don't choose. I do.
Speaker 1: So the way that's done is is is there's a
Speaker 1: cartoon editor that gets all these roughs you've had, Ross
Speaker 1: Chest come by Rosal send in ten roughs, and she's
Speaker 1: cooking with gas. If one of them each week gets picked,
Speaker 1: that's the highest hit rate there can be. And and
Speaker 1: and and she's it. It's a hard way to make
Speaker 1: a living, and it's a hard way to be an artist.
Speaker 1: And even there you want variety of voices. You want
Speaker 1: they can't all be about frustrated men in bed with
Speaker 1: their you know, non giving girlfriends or something or it
Speaker 1: can't all be that joke. Can't all be desert islands,
Speaker 1: or or even meta desert island jokes. You've got to
Speaker 1: have some sense of variety. I told you my favorite
Speaker 1: of all time, Gaine Wilson had a fish in a suit,
Speaker 1: I think I told Rose this, and the fishes in
Speaker 1: a suit and an elevator, and a man is in
Speaker 1: the elevator, and the elevator doors have parted, and out
Speaker 1: there was an aquarium. There's water and bubbles and plant
Speaker 1: life and other fish. And the fishes turned to the
Speaker 1: man and says, I guess this is me. It was
Speaker 1: just my favorite cartoon in the New Yorker that I'm
Speaker 1: a refrigerator for twenty years, and you know, you get
Speaker 1: a nearer to this kind of stuff, You forget that
Speaker 1: this is this is not the kind of job that
Speaker 1: most people have picking cartoons for a living. In the
Speaker 1: other night, Esther and my wife, Esther and I have
Speaker 1: with three kids in one of them has autism. When
Speaker 1: we go to this Night of Too Many Stars, which
Speaker 1: John Stewart and Robert Smigel, and they do this amazing thing,
Speaker 1: and I, you know, said Ester, so what can we
Speaker 1: offer in the auction part? She said, well, you can
Speaker 1: auction off attendance at the cartoon meeting. I said, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole last twenty five minutes. You know, Robert Mankoff
Speaker 1: and I sit there and we make stupid jokes and
Speaker 1: we picked cartoons. How interesting can this be? Sixty four
Speaker 1: thousand dollars we get on the on the auction. Two
Speaker 1: different people for thirty two dollars a piece want to
Speaker 1: be in this meeting. I don't know what the hell
Speaker 1: to do with them. I think I'm going to have
Speaker 1: to bring in entertainment and addition to take care of themselves.
Speaker 1: I hope they're happy to be there. I hope. So.
Speaker 1: So when you're doing the piece you we're talking about
Speaker 1: Sarah Stillman, Yeah, I look at the New York and
Speaker 1: I think, you know, do you develop or do they
Speaker 1: get ready? We have to but they but they But
Speaker 1: this is this is the ethos of the magazine in
Speaker 1: the in the early days. It's gonna make you. It's
Speaker 1: it's hysterical to to to think it was true. But
Speaker 1: the big money makers for fiction writers way back when
Speaker 1: with short stories, so Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and to some extent,
Speaker 1: well before O'Hara comes along, they're making their living on
Speaker 1: selling short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, to magazines
Speaker 1: like that. So the New Yorker comes along and eventually
Speaker 1: Katherine White, Roger Angel's mother, is the fiction editor, and
Speaker 1: she's got to figure out where where can we make
Speaker 1: our bones. Well, we don't have the money to compete
Speaker 1: with the Saturday Evening Post and such magazines for for
Speaker 1: the big names, Hemingway, fitz Jaralin's son, So we're going
Speaker 1: to discover new talent. So that became the ethos of
Speaker 1: the magazine, and they just she discovers, for example, living
Speaker 1: in a railroad flat in Chelsea, which used to be
Speaker 1: railroad flats, not the you know, the buffed Chelsea that
Speaker 1: we know today, which is a you know, upper middle
Speaker 1: class neighborhood. John Cheever, now there's no question that now,
Speaker 1: because there is no Saturday Evening Post and the world
Speaker 1: has changed that sometimes writers will come to us and
Speaker 1: if not fully formed that they're certainly getting there. Do
Speaker 1: you have an affiliation with any kind of university programs
Speaker 1: where you you know, we we've we've done farm system
Speaker 1: so to speak. The farm system is the mail. The
Speaker 1: farm system is whoever sending us stuff. You know people
Speaker 1: think I'm kidding around. People email me every day. I
Speaker 1: probably get fifteen emails a day that go directly to
Speaker 1: me because my email is not that hard to figure out,
Speaker 1: and I have an idea, here's my short story. Now.
Speaker 1: Most of them are not going to work. We have
Speaker 1: a big staff. The pieces that come to me that
Speaker 1: way are not always masterpieces. Once in a while, though,
Speaker 1: it happens when you have people like that Rachel Vive
Speaker 1: and listen, Tad Friend and all your mass head. There
Speaker 1: the the top writers in the in the in the world.
Speaker 1: What's editing them like for you? When you when you edit,
Speaker 1: because I am ignorant about this, when you edit them,
Speaker 1: you just sit there and say, well, you edited for size.
Speaker 1: You said, well let's lose this. Unless you don't go
Speaker 1: to say this is a run on sentence that you
Speaker 1: need a strong gra Absolutely do you do? You absolutely
Speaker 1: do every writer. Look John Updike editing John Updyke, which
Speaker 1: I didn't personally do, but you know, you're presiding over
Speaker 1: various editors and stuff. He's about as perfectionist and handing
Speaker 1: it as close to what's appearing in the magazine as
Speaker 1: as possible to be. And then there's the other side
Speaker 1: of it. Different people do think different things. An investigative
Speaker 1: reporter is not necessarily a master of prose. That what
Speaker 1: you're shooting for there is well some of the I
Speaker 1: just love that statement, But nor is John Updike capable
Speaker 1: of uncovering the Pentagon papers. So what you're aiming for
Speaker 1: there is is lucidity and clarity and you know a
Speaker 1: kind of organization where the story unfolds in the proper way.
Speaker 1: Your your your goal there is different. But each writer
Speaker 1: has different stuff that he or she's you know, prone too.
Speaker 1: You know, as a writer, I've taken too much time
Speaker 1: clearing my throat in the beginning of the piece, and
Speaker 1: I hope I've learned myself to get rid of a
Speaker 1: lot of the crap after finding the group, after finding
Speaker 1: the rhythm, after finding what it is I want to
Speaker 1: say and where it wants to go. But very often
Speaker 1: my editor, Henry Finder, will just very quietly take a pen.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's who edits you. Oh yeah, and he's great,
Speaker 1: He's unbelievable. You know. The way it works is I'll
Speaker 1: send him the piece. Now I've been doing this for
Speaker 1: a while too, but nevertheless, I'll send him the piece,
Speaker 1: and back will come an email and the tone is
Speaker 1: very measured. Um, A lot of good stuff here, A
Speaker 1: lot of good stuff here, which is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a way of saying, there's some good things in
Speaker 1: your pockets, some lens as well, maybe old gum rappers.
Speaker 1: Maybe we don't need the old gum rappers quite so,
Speaker 1: maybe fewer gun rappers. I know how to read this editor.
Speaker 1: I he we know each other for a long time,
Speaker 1: and I get the point. Outgoes the gum rappers, outgoes
Speaker 1: the bilge about you know, Hillary Clinton's emails or whatever,
Speaker 1: the kind of extraneous crap of this first try as
Speaker 1: And I got this from Barbara Epstein as an editor
Speaker 1: of the late Barbara Apstein at the New York Review
Speaker 1: of Books. I was really honored to be invited to
Speaker 1: write something from Russia for her. The assignment was about
Speaker 1: Boris Yelson's memoir, but obviously the piece was to write
Speaker 1: about Yelson and the yeltsa phenomena. And I got back
Speaker 1: what she called a biggie. What's a biggie? It was
Speaker 1: a gigantic galley sheet, and it was gigantic because there
Speaker 1: were so many comments about how much I had screwed
Speaker 1: up or had run off at the mouth, or didn't
Speaker 1: explain sufficiently. And it was, you know, the signal that
Speaker 1: this process was going to take a little time. It's
Speaker 1: going to take a little time. And in the New
Speaker 1: York there are a lot of layers of editors, not
Speaker 1: just there's not just the editor that you have. There's
Speaker 1: also me kibbittzing in the background. There are fact checkers
Speaker 1: you've experienced this, and there are copy editors and what's
Speaker 1: called okayers. And there used to be a woman named
Speaker 1: Eleanor Gould, miss Gould, who would do her own proof
Speaker 1: and she was like a super grammarian. And I swear
Speaker 1: to God Alec, this is no longer. She once found
Speaker 1: four errors in a three word sentence. I will neither
Speaker 1: tell you who the writer was, nor tell you the sentence,
Speaker 1: but it was the most stunning achievement editorial achievement UM
Speaker 1: since Rosium and John Hersey. It was amazing. I remember
Speaker 1: listening to UM. You know, as my day is always
Speaker 1: the same. I'm more of an NPR person than a
Speaker 1: New York Times person these days. You're being interviewed and
Speaker 1: you talked about how your childhood I guess I think
Speaker 1: what was your mother's illness. I tried to write this down.
Speaker 1: I forgive me, but I tried to remember how I
Speaker 1: think what you wrote about your mother was very ill
Speaker 1: when you were young. Correct, she's still alive. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: had got m S when I was a very small boy.
Speaker 1: And it was there some comment you made about how
Speaker 1: that shaped the work you do. It was something about
Speaker 1: it it's more than the work to do, because the
Speaker 1: person you are. Right. So I grew up in a
Speaker 1: house where my mother had MS, which you know, was
Speaker 1: a kind of slow path down ward's now what's called
Speaker 1: a burnt out case. It stopped getting worse. So she's
Speaker 1: in a wheelchair, but she's you know, she's eighty three,
Speaker 1: and you know, okay. And my father was a dentist.
Speaker 1: He had a small dental practice. But by the time
Speaker 1: he was I think he concealed it because I think
Speaker 1: he the pressure on him to bring home the bacon.
Speaker 1: And although in our house no bacon, um was immense,
Speaker 1: and you know, his hands started shaking in the whitefish
Speaker 1: to bring home the white whitefish, very expensive um. His
Speaker 1: hands started shaking, and clearly this was you know, if
Speaker 1: it wasn't so tragic, it would have been funny. It
Speaker 1: was like Buster Keaton, the Parkinsonian dentist. And so by
Speaker 1: the time he was in his early fifties, he had
Speaker 1: lost everything. So I had some sense that I was
Speaker 1: going to have to make a living as my brother.
Speaker 1: Remember now you're saying this, and I so I had,
Speaker 1: you know, as a young guy, dreamed of being a novelist.
Speaker 1: But that the notion that I just kind of set
Speaker 1: myself up to be a novelist. Um, nobody was waiting
Speaker 1: for my novels. So I got a job. I was very,
Speaker 1: very lucky, got a job at the Washington Post. I
Speaker 1: mean that that's it. From a nervous world. Right out
Speaker 1: of college, I did well what my it's the major
Speaker 1: was called comparative literature and what my father called fancy English.
Speaker 1: And you were supposed to know a couple of foreign languages. Well,
Speaker 1: and I knew really well. You know, I grew up
Speaker 1: in a very different Jersey, right and Princeton looked like
Speaker 1: a country club. Oh my god, yeah, not even just
Speaker 1: it was just beyond yeah on Jupiter or something. And
Speaker 1: that part of it. I didn't like the intellectual part
Speaker 1: of it. This this sort of the pockets of people
Speaker 1: like you could. Yeah, I know I didn't get into
Speaker 1: a lot of places, but intellectually I loved it. And
Speaker 1: I also got lucky in a few teachers, and that
Speaker 1: that's the best thing that can happen to you in
Speaker 1: places like that. One of them was John mcphgeh, who
Speaker 1: taught writing and still teaches writing in Princeton. He's in
Speaker 1: his he's in his might be one or something like
Speaker 1: that still teaches, and to this is what's very rare.
Speaker 1: You when you're studying literature in college, you're studying somebody
Speaker 1: who's a literary scholar or a literary critic in the
Speaker 1: defense sense. He was a practicing writer and talked about
Speaker 1: things that writers talk about, um, the mechanics of it,
Speaker 1: how you the structure of it, how you break things down.
Speaker 1: So to have somebody concerned with the practicalities and just
Speaker 1: to hear that language that was life changing. Your first
Speaker 1: job as the Washington Post, Yeah, which is you know,
Speaker 1: preposterously lucky cops and sports cops, cops, uh, covering night police.
Speaker 1: I was the world's wars price. Yeah, but he's great
Speaker 1: at it. What you did is you sat at a
Speaker 1: desk in the newsroom of the Washington Post, and it
Speaker 1: was the night shift, which began at six and Washington
Speaker 1: back then, Yeah, crack murder and the racial breakdown Washington
Speaker 1: was horrible and and and you would call the various
Speaker 1: cop shops around the city and the suburbs and the hospitals,
Speaker 1: and you'd say, this is David Remnick in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: Are there any crimes, fires, or accidents I should know about.
Speaker 1: That's what you'd ask every every forty five minutes. And
Speaker 1: the answer, usually by seven thirty thirty, was yes. And
Speaker 1: then you jump in a car and go see some kid,
Speaker 1: invariably African American um shot to death somewhere on you
Speaker 1: know you street or an Anacostia. And we'd published two paragraphs,
Speaker 1: and there were people that are good at it and
Speaker 1: developed the stories, and I wasn't all that great at it,
Speaker 1: and I was in a big fat rush to write
Speaker 1: with a capital W. And so what happened was I
Speaker 1: had this job. It was a temporary thing, and the
Speaker 1: guy from the sports department said, you know anything about sports? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. I watched stuff on TV in the weekend,
Speaker 1: and probably too much of it, and I knew what
Speaker 1: this meant it meant a job, a real job, and
Speaker 1: I said yeah, And I became a sports writer for
Speaker 1: two years. How was that? Well, you didn't get the
Speaker 1: A plus assignments right out of the bat, but you
Speaker 1: just ran around the country and covered any you know,
Speaker 1: any game, and oh my god, I was on near
Speaker 1: plate all the time. And I covered boxing in a
Speaker 1: period when nobody cares about boxing. I covered something called
Speaker 1: the USFL, the United States Football League, which was in
Speaker 1: the summer. Huge, and this team that I had, and
Speaker 1: it was all sort of NFL cast off people who
Speaker 1: had aged out. You know, Koy Bacon, would you know
Speaker 1: he'd been at the I think he was a ram
Speaker 1: or something, and then he washed up, you know, like
Speaker 1: an old horseshoe crab at the USFL. How awful it
Speaker 1: was that the horseshoe crabs. Oh my god, exactly. It
Speaker 1: was the Washington Federals. Craig James was the big star.
Speaker 1: He was a running back, came from s and you
Speaker 1: and he's it said, it was, It was grim but fun.
Speaker 1: David Remnick moved from sports to the Style section, and
Speaker 1: then he took a very different job as a Moscow correspondent.
Speaker 1: More on that coming up. Listen to other episodes of
Speaker 1: Here's the Thing in our archives, like my conversation with
Speaker 1: Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone, among other films. He,
Speaker 1: like Remnick, got a big break early on. A friend
Speaker 1: had suggested he writes something about monsters. So I spent
Speaker 1: the next six weeks writing the script called Gremlin's and
Speaker 1: I sent it to my agent, who um liked the
Speaker 1: script but felt it was a little dark, and still
Speaker 1: sent it to about fifty producers and everyone passed on it.
Speaker 1: And Spielberg. Steven Spielberg was leaving his office on a
Speaker 1: Friday and passed the script and saw the title and
Speaker 1: he said that looks interesting, picked it up, read it
Speaker 1: that weekend, and decided he wanted to option the movie.
Speaker 1: Now I didn't know this. I gotta call up my loft.
Speaker 1: I get the phone. He got Chris, it's Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 1: I was stunned. Take a listen at Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
Speaker 1: here is the Thing. My guest today is David Remnick,
Speaker 1: editor of The New Yorker magazine. He and his wife
Speaker 1: moved to Moscow to cover Russian politics for rival papers,
Speaker 1: he for the Washington Post and she for the New
Speaker 1: York Times. And while they found themselves in the whirlwind
Speaker 1: drama that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a popular post at that time. Nobody else wanted
Speaker 1: to go. It's cold, miserable. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 1: I have no idea. No one was clamoring for that job. Well, look,
Speaker 1: you've probably been to Moscow since it's changed. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you were there before. No money started showing
Speaker 1: up when my wife and I got to Moscow in nine,
Speaker 1: in very beginning of eight eight and glossin Peristoi and
Speaker 1: gorbag we're now well underway there. Food shops said really
Speaker 1: attractive things like bread, That's what the shop would say,
Speaker 1: and there was no bread in it or PRODUCTI meaning groceries,
Speaker 1: and there were none of those either. It was really
Speaker 1: us um Stark. I loved it. People wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to us for the first time in decades, us being
Speaker 1: the tribe of journalists. They wanted to talk and you
Speaker 1: were there for how long? Four years? They wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about books. They wanted to come back often or
Speaker 1: very rarely. I was I lived there. You know what
Speaker 1: I mean to do, travel back to the United States
Speaker 1: from or you there from basically were there. Maybe we
Speaker 1: came back once a year, or any of your children
Speaker 1: born during the first child spent his first year there,
Speaker 1: and and yeah, and and we have I have pictures
Speaker 1: of him. He's not twenty four, you know, in a
Speaker 1: big giant, old fashioned pram that we put out on
Speaker 1: the little teeny balcony. Looks like we lived in co
Speaker 1: op City or something. It's kind of sturdy of to
Speaker 1: go get bread and PRODUCTI yeah, And and we would
Speaker 1: wrap him up in blankets with just his little nose,
Speaker 1: and plumes of steam would come up into the winter
Speaker 1: Moscow air. And his first words were Varona, the crow
Speaker 1: is flying. Okay, very smart. Boy doesn't know a word
Speaker 1: of Russian. Now, so you come back after four years
Speaker 1: to do what well I had thought. I we had thought,
Speaker 1: and we had discussed the possibility of men going in
Speaker 1: the Middle East. It's what foreign correspondence do you go
Speaker 1: to the next place. It's what foreign corresponds, by the way,
Speaker 1: talk about all the time, the next place. And I
Speaker 1: came home and it was very clear that my father's
Speaker 1: health had degenerated and the next place was going to
Speaker 1: be New York. There's just no going away. Family. Family. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so this is ninety one to his teammate in
Speaker 1: charge of the magazine. Then, so this is what happened.
Speaker 1: Tina took over the magazine from Bob Gottlieb and I
Speaker 1: had written exactly one story for The New Yorker one
Speaker 1: and one story for Vanity Fair for Tina, and I
Speaker 1: get called will you please have lunch with Ms? Brown?
Speaker 1: Four seasons. I get there and I don't think i'd
Speaker 1: even met her before. If I had, it was for
Speaker 1: two seconds in the office, and she was still out
Speaker 1: of Vanity, and all she talked about was The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: And as they say in Monty Python, I may be stupid,
Speaker 1: but I'm no idiot. And I thought something's up here,
Speaker 1: but I didn't quite figure it out. And then two
Speaker 1: months later she became the hetter than New Yorker and
Speaker 1: asked me to come right there, and and I was
Speaker 1: a very happy camper, which dead New Yorker writer. Do
Speaker 1: you wish you had met and worked well? A J. Leebling?
Speaker 1: So a J. Liebling, Yeah, A J. Lebling? I think
Speaker 1: a J. Liebling was this red blazeon enormously fat gourmand
Speaker 1: who literally dug his own grave with his teeth. He
Speaker 1: ate himself to death and enjoyed life if if his
Speaker 1: prose can be believed immensely. I don't like the early
Speaker 1: kind of you know, telephone booth Indian stuff where I
Speaker 1: think he's kind of making it up half the time
Speaker 1: and it's not and it feels jokey and dumb and
Speaker 1: comes from old world telegram feature writing style stuff. But
Speaker 1: what I love is the stuff about the Second World War,
Speaker 1: his boxing writing. He's the best sports writer along with
Speaker 1: Roger angel I can I can even conceive of his
Speaker 1: His work about Paris, about food um is just enormously warm.
Speaker 1: And I liked his lucky attitude about writing. He loved
Speaker 1: to be doing it. People would come into the office
Speaker 1: late at night, no air conditioning at the New Yorker
Speaker 1: in those days, and this pound guy would be stripped
Speaker 1: to the waist, typing and laughing at his own jokes
Speaker 1: to soap. And that's that not the normal bearing of
Speaker 1: your average writer. Mostly, there's a there's a certain self
Speaker 1: lacerating or lacerated field to writing, this sense of suffering
Speaker 1: a sense that this work is well. I think, first
Speaker 1: of all, writing is really hard. It's sold my memoir
Speaker 1: to Harpercolm. Now you have to write the damn thing.
Speaker 1: I wrote one book about my critique of the California
Speaker 1: family law system. So I wrote that book. And then
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this quickly. Because I went to go
Speaker 1: to the the big synagogue on Fifth Avenue. I went
Speaker 1: to go to Temple Manuel. I'm going to Temple Manuel
Speaker 1: to read for uh. The Library of American release for Roth,
Speaker 1: and the producers of the event put me in touch
Speaker 1: with Roth, and I call Roth on the phone. It
Speaker 1: was in Manhattan. Number is a little place in the city,
Speaker 1: I guess, and I get him on the phone and
Speaker 1: he said, I'm very sorry. I don't think I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be able to come because I'm not here, you know.
Speaker 1: He said, I wanted to thank you for coming and
Speaker 1: for doing this and doing the reading. It was myself
Speaker 1: and two other actors. Thank you, thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to say thank you. I said,
Speaker 1: my god, I'm so touched him with the great Philip Roth.
Speaker 1: So I hang up, I do the event. He emails
Speaker 1: me and says, um, I heard you were wonderful, and
Speaker 1: again I wanted to thank you by email, so I
Speaker 1: emailed him back and I go, you'll have to forgive me.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I said, I'm going to write a memoir.
Speaker 1: I want to write a fictional memoir. I want to
Speaker 1: have my character, you know, Joe Sweeney, go through life,
Speaker 1: and everything that happens to me happens to Joe Sweeney.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna transpose this and do this. And if
Speaker 1: you saw, I have it in my phone, if you
Speaker 1: saw the email he sent me back and all of
Speaker 1: his emphasis and capitals when he wanted to be he said,
Speaker 1: first of all, there is no such thing as a
Speaker 1: fictional memoir for you. The second of all, you must
Speaker 1: spare no one, he says, especially yourself. And he gives
Speaker 1: me this. That's the career. You know. We all read
Speaker 1: memoirs because either for a salacious reason, or we want
Speaker 1: the gossip, or we want to we like that person,
Speaker 1: or we admire or fear or something that person. We
Speaker 1: want to get to this story. But on the occasions
Speaker 1: that it becomes like a real book, Act one or
Speaker 1: I love I Love Lordering with intent terrific. But they
Speaker 1: they take you by surprise that was the thing that
Speaker 1: was the experience with Patti Smith. I mean, I love
Speaker 1: and love her as a musician and as a songwriter.
Speaker 1: Or or Dylan's Chronicles. You know, I grew up with
Speaker 1: that book Tarantula, which was this you know, kind of
Speaker 1: affected surrealism. But I because I so revered him, I
Speaker 1: memory eyes that the way Rabbi's memorized passages of the tumul.
Speaker 1: But it made no sense whatsoever. And I, you know,
Speaker 1: as an editor, went to read Chronicles um with the
Speaker 1: hopes of excerpting it, which is a long story, and boy,
Speaker 1: that's a real book. It's a terrific, honest book. And
Speaker 1: that's by the way, and that's wrath soul thing is
Speaker 1: just unsparing honesty. That's that's the career that's at the
Speaker 1: center of everything about that writer. What's a profile you
Speaker 1: were hoping you'd be able to do, or that the
Speaker 1: magazine was able to do that eluded you. Well, when
Speaker 1: I was growing up, everything I cared about culturally came
Speaker 1: from one person. It came from my obsession with Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan obsession. My parents sent me to a yeshiva for
Speaker 1: kindergarten because I was ready to go to school, but
Speaker 1: the public school wouldn't have me yet, I was too young.
Speaker 1: So I would go with these older boys in a
Speaker 1: van to Patterson, New Jersey, to a yeshiva called Yavna,
Speaker 1: and they started talking about the Beatles. I was really young,
Speaker 1: six or so, the Beatles, the Sky, Bob Dylan, and
Speaker 1: so I bought my first album a year or so later,
Speaker 1: called the Best of Sixties six and it contained the
Speaker 1: song I Want You Now. I was pretty young. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what that song was about, desire whatever,
Speaker 1: no idea, but something, something magical entered my brain. It's
Speaker 1: the combination of the language, the music, the excitement, the cool,
Speaker 1: the fact that he was named Zimmerman probably had no
Speaker 1: small amount to do with it. All of that, so
Speaker 1: that everything that I started to care about was because
Speaker 1: he mentioned it. Oh there's this thing called the beat Poets.
Speaker 1: So I started reading Alan Ginsburg. Oh this is this
Speaker 1: thing called Rambo. I started, without any comprehension at all,
Speaker 1: reading Rambo as the Drunken Boat or something like that,
Speaker 1: or Elvis or all my cultural uh u interest came
Speaker 1: from that hub. From that hub, and it was maybe unhealthy,
Speaker 1: but you know, got me, gave me a brain. It
Speaker 1: started the curiosity. Curiosity in many, many directions and very
Speaker 1: much of a time. So I always wanted to do
Speaker 1: a profile of him. And one fine day I get
Speaker 1: a call. I'm now the editor of the New Yorker.
Speaker 1: Bob has actually written his book Chronicles Great And he
Speaker 1: wasn't offering. There was no profile in the offer. I'd
Speaker 1: love to read it, send it, he said, because that's
Speaker 1: what happens. People send you a PDF. They send you
Speaker 1: a manuscript, and you read it and you promise not
Speaker 1: to give it to anybody. No, no, no, no, uh,
Speaker 1: we can't send you the book. You have to come
Speaker 1: to the Dylan office. Now. Is that there's an office downtown.
Speaker 1: It's like a c I a front press. The button
Speaker 1: that says Dada obviously doesn't say anyth about Dylan. You
Speaker 1: go up six flights whatever and you go into this
Speaker 1: huge office and it was like it was like erotica
Speaker 1: for me. Right, it's just nothing but Dilliana an Dylan stuff,
Speaker 1: his albums closet. And they sat me in a little
Speaker 1: room smaller than this with the manuscript with a bear table,
Speaker 1: and I read it. Took me about three three hours.
Speaker 1: I said, I'll do it. How many in the book
Speaker 1: is terrific. If I don't know if you've read it,
Speaker 1: but it's really good, you should. And and he wrote it,
Speaker 1: and he did write it unmistakably, unmistakably isn't a good writer.
Speaker 1: He's him, he's him. He starts the book, you know,
Speaker 1: coming to New York, a whole child, nothing about that.
Speaker 1: Then as soon as you get to the point where
Speaker 1: he's going to write those unbelieved what he calls his
Speaker 1: own golden period, he skips that and he goes to
Speaker 1: the eighties where he's screwing up and he's sick of
Speaker 1: his own sound, of his own voice. It's a wild
Speaker 1: interesting book the way he chooses to tell his story.
Speaker 1: He's He's He's He's now in a stage of his
Speaker 1: life he wants a possession of his own narrative. But
Speaker 1: in a very Dylan esquay, I come to an agreement
Speaker 1: with the publisher, but I don't make I don't sign
Speaker 1: a contract because we had a handshake agreement. And it
Speaker 1: comes the summer, right before publication, said, I call the
Speaker 1: publisher and I say, okay, we're ready to go. Um,
Speaker 1: you know what week should we do it? We'd agreed
Speaker 1: which five thousand words to do. It's Dylan's arrival in
Speaker 1: New York. He had basically hitched to come to arrive
Speaker 1: in New York, and he starts singing at Gertie's folks
Speaker 1: sitting and becomes himself. He said, there's one problem. Bob
Speaker 1: wants a cover. What I said, we don't have covers.
Speaker 1: This isn't Rolling Stone or Life magazine in the seventies
Speaker 1: or we we have. We have these funny drawings on
Speaker 1: the cover. He said, well, the long pause, Bob wants
Speaker 1: a cover. I said, you told me Bob loved the magazine.
Speaker 1: He said, yeah, yeah, he does. He yeah, yeah. I said,
Speaker 1: what's going on here? He said, well, if there's no cover,
Speaker 1: we're gonna give it to Newsweek. Yeah. I said, what
Speaker 1: we had an agreement, he said, long pause, meaning and
Speaker 1: you could have translated, we don't have a somebody walking
Speaker 1: down the street carrying a dealon album in retrospect. I
Speaker 1: probably should have caved like that, and I dug in
Speaker 1: my heels and the next thing, you know, the Dylan
Speaker 1: appeared on the cover of Newsweek. And you know, at
Speaker 1: this point he looks like David. He looks like, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, he looks like Vincent Price playing a cowboy,
Speaker 1: right with that kind of pencil mustache and and so on,
Speaker 1: and I lost it being of a David Lynch movie
Speaker 1: and I, you know, I don't have a bad temper,
Speaker 1: but I kind of flipped out. And Dylan's got a
Speaker 1: very nice guy named Jeff Rosen calls me and he says,
Speaker 1: we'd like you to come here the new dealon album.
Speaker 1: Know when he's heard it, I thought, God, come on,
Speaker 1: what am I nine years old? Here? Yes, I will
Speaker 1: come because I can't resist. And I go down to
Speaker 1: the studio on Tenth Avenue and I'm put in a
Speaker 1: room and they play the album, which had yet to
Speaker 1: be released, called Love and Theft. Okay, great, so I
Speaker 1: don't know what to do next. The album meant so
Speaker 1: I really liked it. I would love to have heard
Speaker 1: it again. And I come out of the room and
Speaker 1: there he is. There's Dylan. I thought, oh God, I
Speaker 1: don't know what am I gonna do here? And he
Speaker 1: he comes up, he saying, and your book about Mohammadan,
Speaker 1: Yeah he's and he's he's acknowledging my presence in the universe.
Speaker 1: And we have this kind of awkward, five minute, six
Speaker 1: minute conversation. I didn't have a stop watch. And that
Speaker 1: was it. That was my encounter with Bob Dylan. And
Speaker 1: and and I'm not sure I'm glad it happened either,
Speaker 1: because it kind of pierced the mythological aspect of it.
Speaker 1: He was perfectly I don't know if polite is the word,
Speaker 1: but he was himself a cipher. He's not he's anything,
Speaker 1: but he's not a cipher. This this this just a cipher.
Speaker 1: But he can appear to be what he's dealing with
Speaker 1: people he doesn't know. Just I mean, Alex, I got.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine what it is to be you,
Speaker 1: much less this guy. Who ever, since he's twenty one
Speaker 1: years old, people think he's a deity. He has a
Speaker 1: like a minor motorcycle accident. It was like the earth
Speaker 1: spun off its axis. And it's been like that since
Speaker 1: he's twenty one years old these now and his seventies.
Speaker 1: So everybody that comes up to him all day long
Speaker 1: wants to tell him the obvious that he changed my life.
Speaker 1: And so I determinedly did not do that, but was
Speaker 1: suitably respectful. And but I the conversation, I don't know
Speaker 1: that whether it felt like one second or three and
Speaker 1: a half hours, it was very very strange. Was the
Speaker 1: same with McCartney when you were when you're on Long
Speaker 1: Island and McCartney is out and about and people he's
Speaker 1: very personable, right, he's very Oh no, he's very warm,
Speaker 1: and but people start crying like a like a forty
Speaker 1: year old woman was start sobbing. You have no idea.
Speaker 1: He probably puts his arm stuck. Understands he says, he
Speaker 1: hugs him. But my favorite walk in the other direction
Speaker 1: like a lot of you know, when I think of
Speaker 1: you when your work and you know this is just
Speaker 1: my characterizing it. Your you know, your DNA is so
Speaker 1: strongly political and we live in this national security state,
Speaker 1: this post nine eleven world and the government and secrecy
Speaker 1: and what it's like to cover politics today, and is
Speaker 1: it frustrating for you? Very very I compare it to
Speaker 1: Roger Angel's description of covering baseball when he was young.
Speaker 1: You could get up next to the ball players, and
Speaker 1: ball players had some sense of who you were, and
Speaker 1: there were casual relationships, particularly spring training. He used to
Speaker 1: go down to spring training for weeks and just yammer
Speaker 1: with these guys, and they you know, they were rich
Speaker 1: because they made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars dollars.
Speaker 1: Derek Jeter no more needed to talk to a reporter
Speaker 1: than he needed to dress up like a chicken. It
Speaker 1: just didn't occur to him. So it became harder politics
Speaker 1: to cover a campaign. Now you the campaign bus. I
Speaker 1: think it's well portrayed in the newsroom, where basically it's
Speaker 1: it's um, it's very very young people filing from the
Speaker 1: bus every five minutes. It's not interesting, or it's it's interesting,
Speaker 1: but it's radically different. Um. It's hard for me as
Speaker 1: a writer to get interested as a profile writer if
Speaker 1: I if if somebody says, well, we'll give you twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes, and it's such in such a hotel room,
Speaker 1: and you're not allowed to ask this that age, there's
Speaker 1: just nonsense. It's crap. We're about to enter it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: We're about to enter political race in which the main
Speaker 1: character is the most disciplined person in history when it
Speaker 1: comes to the press, Hillary Clinton. And I think most
Speaker 1: of my readers are a lot of my readers are
Speaker 1: not facing the dilemma, do I vote for Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: or do I vote for a right wing Republican or
Speaker 1: or center right Republican, if there is such a thing.
Speaker 1: It's how do I feel about Hillary Clinton. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, it is now decades and decades and decades
Speaker 1: past time when a woman should be in the White House.
Speaker 1: There's a New York Times piece I don't know yesterday.
Speaker 1: I think it was about the preposterous levels of violence
Speaker 1: against women, rape, sexual aggression, sexual violence, countries where it's
Speaker 1: legal to beat your wife. It's just and that's just
Speaker 1: the beginning of it. Say nothing of economic unfairness. It's
Speaker 1: just it. It is so long past time. And on
Speaker 1: the other hand, you know, her other qualities are also manifest.
Speaker 1: We may well forget about this email piece of business,
Speaker 1: but it revives um dilemmas that you have about this
Speaker 1: and how to write about this when she really you know,
Speaker 1: you're dealing with both her and a press machine that
Speaker 1: is beyond disciplined. And I understand why. I know what
Speaker 1: it comes out of. It comes out of many things,
Speaker 1: not least the the the whole impeachment Monica Lewinsky drama
Speaker 1: is the spiriting. David Remnick was highly critical of Hillary's
Speaker 1: press conference to address her use of private email and
Speaker 1: a secret server. It's one thing for a politician to
Speaker 1: be stupid, which Hillary is not, he told ABC's This Week.
Speaker 1: It's quite another for a politician to believe that we're stupid.
Speaker 1: The fast writing David Remnick will be following the upcoming
Speaker 1: election carefully. Go to New Yorker dot com for his
Speaker 1: latest work. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing o.