Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. This is Revenge of
Speaker 1: the Tipping Point month at Revisionist History, where we bring
Speaker 1: you stories and snippets in tantalizing tales from my new book,
Speaker 1: now available everywhere. And in this episode, we're bringing you
Speaker 1: the very first stop on my book tour, a conversation
Speaker 1: I had about my life and career with my old
Speaker 1: friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: We did this at the ninety second Street Why in
Speaker 1: New York City, my home away from home. I first
Speaker 1: met David almost forty years ago when he was a
Speaker 1: star at the Washington Post and I was a cub
Speaker 1: reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before. He's one
Speaker 1: of the people in the world who admired the most
Speaker 1: and our conversation was hilarious and fun. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2: It's been a while.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, Malcolm.
Speaker 3: I have to tell you that the title of this
Speaker 3: book is so brilliant because it's it's like Revenge of
Speaker 3: King Kong.
Speaker 2: That's fantastic, And.
Speaker 3: And I have to say that one of my fondest
Speaker 3: memories at the New Yorker.
Speaker 2: And we'll go back even earlier in a moment.
Speaker 3: But at the New Yorker, you're telling me, you know,
Speaker 3: I've written two pieces now, the Cool Hunters and The
Speaker 3: Tipping Point.
Speaker 2: I have this idea for a book.
Speaker 3: You got an agent there, a doubtable, Tina Bennett, and
Speaker 3: you thought, you know, if I could make just a
Speaker 3: small amount of money, I could help out my family
Speaker 3: and and and let's just say, by the end of
Speaker 3: the day things things went well. And now twenty three
Speaker 3: million books later, things have gone really well. But what
Speaker 3: interests me most is not success material success, however deeply
Speaker 3: jealous I am. What interests me is how you invented
Speaker 3: yourself and what you do because we have a not
Speaker 3: dissimilar background.
Speaker 2: We were both at the Washington Post, both at.
Speaker 3: The New Yorker, and I couldn't have them in many ways,
Speaker 3: a more conventional approach to journalism. I wonder when you
Speaker 3: look back and you look you at you were at
Speaker 3: the Spectator, you were at the Post, and then you
Speaker 3: came to the New Yorker. But something happened at a
Speaker 3: certain point that a more conventional story was left behind,
Speaker 3: and even a humorous story like the one at the
Speaker 3: Washington Post, where you did you had a dog on death.
Speaker 2: Row and you try.
Speaker 1: Oh, that was my finest work.
Speaker 2: It really was.
Speaker 1: There was a dog in Bergen County. Well, should I
Speaker 1: back up and tell it story?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: I was. I became the New York correspondent for the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, and I, uh, they were uninterested in stories
Speaker 1: about New York at that point. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: And then I decided to make my life more interesting
Speaker 1: and maybe increase my profile in Washington. I would only
Speaker 1: write stories from Bergen County, my county. Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: decided that Bergen County was more interesting. I still believe
Speaker 1: this than New York City. So I just every day
Speaker 1: I would read the Bergen County Record Record, that's right.
Speaker 1: And I saw a little tiny mention one day of
Speaker 1: a dog, a Nikita named Tarro, who had been confined
Speaker 1: to doggy death row. Now, doggy death row in Bergen
Speaker 1: County is in Hackensack, where I was born. Were you
Speaker 1: born in Hackeen? You bet there is. You know what
Speaker 1: you think I'm joking when I say this doggy death row. No,
Speaker 1: it is actually doggy death row. It's a you can't
Speaker 1: get there. There's like a ravine and if you want
Speaker 1: to you're on the other side of the ravine, and
Speaker 1: then you see a long string of cages, and that
Speaker 1: there's all these dogs who are there pending tho'se all
Speaker 1: kinds of appeals, obviously, and if they lose their appeals
Speaker 1: then they are euthanized, and they're there for biting people.
Speaker 1: And Tarrow what had happened was he had been asleep
Speaker 1: and a child, the nephew of his owner, had stumbled
Speaker 1: across him in the middle of night on the way
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, and Tarrow had swiped the kid. This
Speaker 1: is now all these claims I'm making, was subject to
Speaker 1: a great amount of litigation, and had cut stipulated, had
Speaker 1: cut the kid's lip, and the result was like they're
Speaker 1: like seven different lawsuits had and I became convinced that
Speaker 1: Tarrow was wrongfully convicted, and I rode for the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: I mean it was thousands impressively long, and the editor
Speaker 1: of the Washing Post the next day after it ran,
Speaker 1: came out to me and said, that was a very
Speaker 1: good piece on Tarrow. It was, however, four times too long.
Speaker 1: Just the greatest thing that was ever said to me.
Speaker 1: And they were t shirts. The owner printed up t shirts,
Speaker 1: Free Tarrow. They were distributed and the story made the
Speaker 1: front pench of the New York Post. That's the goal,
Speaker 1: that was they the Post, The New York Posts picked
Speaker 1: up my story.
Speaker 2: That's the heaven.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my point this, it was so my whole
Speaker 1: strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind
Speaker 1: of more fertile ground for.
Speaker 2: But this was this was rebellion.
Speaker 3: This was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the
Speaker 3: conventional which is that New York, as I believe, is
Speaker 3: not only the most interesting place, but on certain days
Speaker 3: the only interesting place.
Speaker 2: I'm a patriot.
Speaker 3: So but when when, at what point, as we know
Speaker 3: what a Malcolm Gladwell story is, the kind of sense
Speaker 3: of surprise, playing with ideas, exploring ideas, readings, social science,
Speaker 3: when when did that begin to click?
Speaker 1: I think it's starts to the Post. Because the problem,
Speaker 1: you know, whenever I would take a job, take a job,
Speaker 1: you have to kind of conceive of what is the
Speaker 1: problem that you're trying to solve on this job. And
Speaker 1: the problem that I had when I got to the
Speaker 1: Post was that I was twenty three and I had
Speaker 1: never written a newspaper story in my life. I had
Speaker 1: no idea how to do it, and I was surrounded
Speaker 1: by people who were the greatest, like yourself. Yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know, David in his
Speaker 1: day was an absolutely legendary one of the great newspaper
Speaker 1: reporters of his generation. And they were they were Woodward,
Speaker 1: Bob Woodward was when I got to the watch host.
Speaker 1: I was in the business section. Woodward was there and
Speaker 1: I would watch and like Steve call Dret Steve Colho
Speaker 1: went on to become I mean, he's still around me.
Speaker 1: He ran the Columbia Jerones in school call when he
Speaker 1: I think you told me you pointed this out to me.
Speaker 1: When you know, when we had the push button phones, Yes,
Speaker 1: he would. You know, when I dial, it would be
Speaker 1: like do do do do? To call was like that's
Speaker 1: too slow, and he'd be like it was like a
Speaker 1: concert pianist, you to play a chord. Yeah, like the
Speaker 1: white He'd get the White House. It would be like
Speaker 1: it would take him like five seconds. I'm like that
Speaker 1: was all. And I had Mike, the legendary Mike iss
Speaker 1: to Off was next to me. Anyway, my point is
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by all these people who were just better
Speaker 1: at daily journalism than I am. And so the problem was,
Speaker 1: how do you succeed in an environment whatever? And you
Speaker 1: succeed in that environment by being the thing that they
Speaker 1: are not. Right, everyone else was fast and fluid, So
Speaker 1: I decided I would be slow and weird right and then.
Speaker 3: And in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness.
Speaker 1: No, it did not, although the key was the key.
Speaker 1: I mean, the problem to be solved was how do
Speaker 1: you stand up in an environment where everyone around you
Speaker 1: is a total pro And so the to stand I
Speaker 1: get to what everyone else is not doing. So people
Speaker 1: around me were not writing five thousand wood stories on
Speaker 1: death rod dogs.
Speaker 2: No, no.
Speaker 1: And I remember the first time I wrote a story
Speaker 1: for The New Yorker. I was still at the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: and I was writing the talk to the Towns before
Speaker 1: they were signed, because that's so that way I could
Speaker 1: freelance without them knowing, so I would. I was writing
Speaker 1: these talk of the towns and I went to see
Speaker 1: Chip McGrath and.
Speaker 2: It was Tina brown'stupadias.
Speaker 1: And Chip said I had written this little talk of
Speaker 1: the town and he had some problem. He said, this
Speaker 1: is I want you to fix this problem? He said what,
Speaker 1: and so I said, I took it from him. I
Speaker 1: said okay, and I just wrote in the margins my fix.
Speaker 1: And I remember the looking at him and he was astonished.
Speaker 2: Vulgarian.
Speaker 1: It was vulgar. It was vulgar. He expected me to
Speaker 1: go home and come back in a week with the fire.
Speaker 1: I was like, no, I'll just just here do that.
Speaker 1: And it was that's at the New Yorker. You had
Speaker 1: to be that otherwise you if you wanted to be
Speaker 1: slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were competing with
Speaker 1: everyone else.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So I got there and I had to completely change.
Speaker 1: I had to work hard. I had to do all
Speaker 1: these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with more from my conversation with
Speaker 1: David Remnick.
Speaker 2: Which piece would you say set you off.
Speaker 3: Into You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary
Speaker 3: journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your
Speaker 3: first book and you're no longer twenty three years old. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there must be some sense of self examination about that.
Speaker 1: It was probably a piece called the Cool Hunt, Remember
Speaker 1: the Coolhid, where I I don't know how I found
Speaker 1: a woman who's still a very good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Did Gordon, who was a who went around whose business
Speaker 1: was going around America telling corporations what was cool T
Speaker 1: shirts and T shirts. And she was and still is
Speaker 1: absolutely hilarious. And she I wrote a piece about her
Speaker 1: about this idea that she would just go around and
Speaker 1: she would declare something cool and she would tell you
Speaker 1: what was and.
Speaker 2: Companies would hire her and hire her.
Speaker 1: But the whole point of that piece was the title
Speaker 1: the Cool Hunt. Once you had the title, just like
Speaker 1: it's like and there was you know, someone wanted to
Speaker 1: make a movie out of course never nothing ever came
Speaker 1: of it. But it was the first time I realized like,
Speaker 1: like that was you know, that kind of it was
Speaker 1: something else. There was something fun about taking being interested
Speaker 1: in pop culture for the New Yorker And did New.
Speaker 3: Yorker never have that kind of thing before? Now now
Speaker 3: this kind of story comes up. But was that an
Speaker 3: absence that you were feeling a vacuum?
Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone else in the New York It
Speaker 1: was the same. It was the same thing about trying
Speaker 1: to be different. So I didn't know of anyone else
Speaker 1: who was writing about DeeDee Gordon was not the typical
Speaker 1: subject of a New Yorker profile. No, I mean she
Speaker 1: you know, she was this kind of strange, hilarious. Uh.
Speaker 1: She had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves. She was
Speaker 1: obsessed with Keanu Reeves. But I just thought, like, this
Speaker 1: is different in a way, this is this will stand
Speaker 1: outlets I needed you just needed to stand out.
Speaker 3: And then you did the tipping point, which you know
Speaker 3: is now associated with with with you. But as you've
Speaker 3: said repeatedly that you what you were doing is taking
Speaker 3: an idea that was very much in the air in
Speaker 3: sociological terms, uh, in terms of crime and much else.
Speaker 2: So what was the idea for the book?
Speaker 3: You had these two pieces, and how did you cast
Speaker 3: out what the what the book? What would what it
Speaker 3: would be, what shape it would take, what voice it
Speaker 3: would have?
Speaker 1: Well? I didn't. My agent came Tina, who I knew socially,
Speaker 1: and then she became an agent. She was just like
Speaker 1: a She worked in the admissions department of something. She'd
Speaker 1: been a graduate student, graduates in history. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: just knew she's friends of friends, and then she became
Speaker 1: an agent. She said, can I be your agent? And
Speaker 1: I was like, I guess sure. And then she's now
Speaker 1: like the powerhouse, the powerhouses. But I knew her, and
Speaker 1: she said, you should write a book on this, and
Speaker 1: I but what is this the article the tipping point?
Speaker 1: Because people got really interested in it, and I started
Speaker 1: like someone in California flew me out to speak to
Speaker 1: their group about it. I remember thinking that was really
Speaker 1: weird that piece of New Yorker could so I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe people are kind of into this, and Tina's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you should do a book. So I knew the article
Speaker 1: in New Yorker was a chapter literally a chapter or
Speaker 1: a part of a chapter. And then I had to
Speaker 1: kind of improvise. I'd never written a book before, I
Speaker 1: had to kind of ye.
Speaker 3: But before we get to the way you reconsider the idea,
Speaker 3: because it's it's a very interesting bridge. I want to
Speaker 3: know it probably is not in the stack of cards here.
Speaker 3: I want to know how you invented yourself as a voice,
Speaker 3: and how naturally or not that came to me.
Speaker 2: Because I can.
Speaker 3: Read a paragraph of yours or a page of yours,
Speaker 3: and I know it right away that's you. There's a
Speaker 3: certain cadence, there's a certain way that a chapters end
Speaker 3: is there. There are moves that are as distinctive as
Speaker 3: somebody's you know, a piano player or an athlete.
Speaker 2: You you you know, you.
Speaker 3: Watch enough athletes, you you listen to enough music. There's
Speaker 3: a there's a Gladwell cadence. There's a Gladwell sense of humor.
Speaker 3: It's very, very distinctive. How self aware are you of it?
Speaker 3: How did it become itself?
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard to say, you know that. So I
Speaker 1: spent ten years at the Post, and there's something I
Speaker 1: think that's crucial, because what happens at at the Post
Speaker 1: is you learn how to write, meaning you learn how
Speaker 1: to write without fear and self consciousness. You're forced to
Speaker 1: remember by the end by time with the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: I remember when I was one of the last stories
Speaker 1: I wrote before I left for the New Yorker, there
Speaker 1: was a shooting on the l R R. And it
Speaker 1: happened at like four thirty in the afternoon, and back
Speaker 1: then the deadline was like six thirty. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: get on the LA R and I go out to
Speaker 1: the scene. I get there at like five thirty and
Speaker 1: it's clearly a front page story, and they're like we
Speaker 1: need the story.
Speaker 2: And there's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is
Speaker 2: a front page story in the in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: It was a big shooting. Ah. It was like serious,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be well. I mean my assumption was I
Speaker 1: was telling them, of course, it's a front page story.
Speaker 1: That's the way it works. This is huge Apeah, someone
Speaker 1: got shot in New York City. Hold the front page.
Speaker 1: It's about the fold, you know, like the whole nine
Speaker 1: year You know this. You did this drill yourself many
Speaker 1: many times.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can do it from Moscow and you
Speaker 3: could use They all get nervous.
Speaker 1: Michael Spector used to his colleague ours was so good
Speaker 1: at this. He would do a kind of salami slicing
Speaker 1: where he'd take a story and do ten stories out
Speaker 1: of it, and each one would get on the front
Speaker 1: page because he would it would be like it's changed.
Speaker 1: I said, there's another wrinkle, and they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: And they put the first wrinkle on the plump page,
Speaker 1: the second wrinkle, and then there's day three. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: I go out there. I'm on the l A R.
Speaker 1: And I remember this is like this is when I
Speaker 1: was at the peak of my powers. So I interviewed
Speaker 1: all these people. I don't have time to don't there's
Speaker 1: no laptops back then, there's no like. And I did
Speaker 1: the thing which I had heard, you know, hard bitten newspaper.
Speaker 1: I picked up the phone and I called it in.
Speaker 1: I remember that feeling of like. I dictated a fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred word story into the phone to someone typing on
Speaker 1: the other end, straight through, and I was so pleased
Speaker 1: with myself. But I realized at the moment, I got
Speaker 1: nothing else to learn here. I have, they have. But
Speaker 1: that's what you learned like, and that you never lose
Speaker 1: that liquidity they hit so in no other was every bit,
Speaker 1: every every bad habit you have as a writer gets
Speaker 1: beaten out of you at a newspaper because it's just discipline.
Speaker 1: It's like boom, you know, tell the story, tell them
Speaker 1: in a way that's compelling.
Speaker 2: But something happens to your pros. And I will linger
Speaker 2: on this too long.
Speaker 3: But if I read Anthony Lane, for example, I can
Speaker 3: read him and I know that obviously Anthony is an
Speaker 3: incredibly airudite reader and writer, but I know that he
Speaker 3: did not get through life without reading PG. Woodhouse over
Speaker 3: and over again, that that informs this texture of this,
Speaker 3: this this tapestry. Who was that for you or was
Speaker 3: it just the newspaper business?
Speaker 1: Well no, no, no, So then I get to I
Speaker 1: don't think, I think I have a little bit of
Speaker 1: that the post, but it's but it's gets by putting it,
Speaker 1: you get you get pared down, you get rid of
Speaker 1: all your bad habits, and then you you have It's
Speaker 1: like a It's like you know, in playing a musical instrument,
Speaker 1: you spend the first ten years mastering the fundamentals, and
Speaker 1: then you're free to develop some kind of state. But
Speaker 1: you have to do the compulsory, you know, work to
Speaker 1: go to. And that's what the post is. You it
Speaker 1: it just you get reduced to the simplest essence of
Speaker 1: how to tell a story, and now you have the
Speaker 1: freedom and it come to the A lot of it
Speaker 1: was Adam Gopnik. So I was reading Gopnik long before
Speaker 1: I joined The New Yorker. And Gopnik is an exceedingly
Speaker 1: distinctive voice, right, and I mean a beautiful way of
Speaker 1: expressing himself. And and there's there's little kind of beautiful
Speaker 1: little frill. I mean, his his pro sings, his little
Speaker 1: choruses and frills, and it's just like and reading that,
Speaker 1: you know, he's I'm a I'm half a generation.
Speaker 3: But his move is he has many But what is
Speaker 3: the pop culture or boomer pop culture as he and
Speaker 3: I have discussed with reference when discussing something like you know,
Speaker 3: Nietzsche or the Friends.
Speaker 1: That's crucial. So this reminds me of something when I
Speaker 1: was very when I was in middle school, I met
Speaker 1: my lab partner was a guy named Terry Martin who
Speaker 1: no Urn Martin now a Soviet scholar, but he by
Speaker 1: happenstance in our little town in Canada. He was my
Speaker 1: lab partner. And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy. And
Speaker 1: we were in biology together and we would do these
Speaker 1: experiments and he would always refuse to do the experiment
Speaker 1: the way we were supposed to do it, like as
Speaker 1: a matter of and I remember at first utterly horrified
Speaker 1: because we would never we couldn't finish anything, nothing was
Speaker 1: ever handed in. We would always get terrible grades. And
Speaker 1: then about like by kind of November of seventh grade,
Speaker 1: I realize it's genius because what he taught me was
Speaker 1: that you have the freedom. I mean, he wasn't being
Speaker 1: destructive or nihilistic. He was like saying, okay, so they're
Speaker 1: all going to do it this way, but we don't
Speaker 1: have to do it that way. We can there's another
Speaker 1: way to learn what's going on here. He was deeply interesting.
Speaker 2: This is what so interested me. So play is what
Speaker 2: you use the word. And I think it.
Speaker 3: Even caused some people alarm or or they're offended intellectually
Speaker 3: or otherwise, or they're jealous or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: You use the phrase playing.
Speaker 3: With ideas as if this is to them somehow irresponsible.
Speaker 3: What is playing with ideas mean?
Speaker 1: It begins with Terry in seventh grade because Terry and
Speaker 1: I then we developed this deep friendship and we would
Speaker 1: play endless games of monopoly, and we then deregulated monopoly,
Speaker 1: and his whole our idea was this, This is our
Speaker 1: idea was the rules? At that point we were like, well,
Speaker 1: the rules make no sense. Like the game as it's
Speaker 1: a brilliant game, but for example, why do you start
Speaker 1: with fifteen hundred dollars? That's that is by the way,
Speaker 1: if you're interested. This is the great flaw with monopoly,
Speaker 1: because the point of monopoly is when you're playing it,
Speaker 1: it should be a question of what can I afford?
Speaker 1: Should it should be a difficult question. I land on
Speaker 1: Marvin Gardens, Do I want to buy Marvin Gardens? Should
Speaker 1: be a question that you have to entertain and come
Speaker 1: up with a serious answer to. If you give each
Speaker 1: player fifteen hundred dollars to start and you land on
Speaker 1: Marvin Gardens, you just buy it. How was that interesting?
Speaker 1: That's absurd?
Speaker 2: So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. So we started with one dollar and what.
Speaker 2: Could you buy with one dollar?
Speaker 3: So you can't even get a slice of pizza much
Speaker 3: Marvin guard you.
Speaker 1: So the first ten minutes is just speed circling the
Speaker 1: board a kim living capital and then and then you,
Speaker 1: and then you. We have to come up with all
Speaker 1: kinds of ways to Basically, we created systems for creating leverage,
Speaker 1: so you.
Speaker 2: Have too much time on your hand.
Speaker 1: We played so much monopoly, so we What I realized
Speaker 1: now is that we would sell the derivatives. So I
Speaker 1: would say we like, if I landed on your property,
Speaker 1: you had improved, you know, the blue property, you know,
Speaker 1: Vermont and Oriental and what have we? And I owe
Speaker 1: you five hundred bucks. We'd never pay the five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: That's silly. Why would you pay the five hundred dollars? Instead,
Speaker 1: it should be an invitation to a negotiation about there
Speaker 1: are clearly I owe you five hundred bucks, all right,
Speaker 1: So how can I be useful to you in some
Speaker 1: other way? Right?
Speaker 2: So it's goods and services.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, I have you land on you land
Speaker 1: on on Vermont, you'll meet five hundred bucks. I have
Speaker 1: Broadway and eat park Place, So I say, okay, pay
Speaker 1: me a hundred But if you land on park Place,
Speaker 1: I have the right of first refusal to buy that
Speaker 1: property front you right now, that's a that's a simple example.
Speaker 1: We constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives and we would
Speaker 1: play Did they have No Drugs? In Canada? We would
Speaker 1: play with Terry's cousin Fred, and we would play like
Speaker 1: three or four games an afternoon, and we would play
Speaker 1: hundreds of games a summer and we'd just would get
Speaker 1: together every morning just play the game like but it
Speaker 1: was the same thing. It was like, you know, and
Speaker 1: each over the coast of the summer we would create
Speaker 1: ever more elaborate structures around. But that's that's the origin
Speaker 1: of play. Because Terry's assumption. This is what Terry taught me.
Speaker 1: He was like, what does Parker brothers know about monopoly?
Speaker 1: That was self confidence of that was brilliant.
Speaker 2: Fair enough, But when you're when you were dealing with.
Speaker 3: Auto safety, medical tests, all the many subjects.
Speaker 2: In other words, at what point do you feel.
Speaker 3: Grimly responsible toward the set of ideas and the and
Speaker 3: the facts and and and how does that interact with playing?
Speaker 3: What's the difference between what you're doing and what an
Speaker 3: academic feels obliged? Because I mean, I remember having a
Speaker 3: piece of yours and there was a piece and it
Speaker 3: was so mean to Ralph Nader, who I was.
Speaker 2: So great, who I was brought up.
Speaker 3: To think was just an incredible hero for all. Okay,
Speaker 3: he lost the election at one point, but another mind.
Speaker 1: But I can tell you where that came from. So
Speaker 1: this goes to you.
Speaker 2: And then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what like.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so genius that so on the sense of play?
Speaker 1: What shoot? The first the first layer of play is
Speaker 1: understanding other people who want to play, right, So I
Speaker 1: got I like cars, and I thought it'd be fun
Speaker 1: to write about autobile safety for the New Yorker because
Speaker 1: nobody was running on other books, and if they were
Speaker 1: writing about it, they were writing about it, and this
Speaker 1: kind of really kind of wrote boring. So find someone
Speaker 1: who has an interesting take on auto safety. Now where
Speaker 1: would that person reside, Well, not in academia. They would
Speaker 1: work for a car company. Right. Turns out there's a
Speaker 1: Scottish guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department
Speaker 1: at General Motors. And Leonard wrote a book called Traffic
Speaker 1: Safety in America, which is so genius. And I read
Speaker 1: Traffic Safety, I was like, oh my god, Leonard, you're
Speaker 1: a genius. So call up Leonard and he's got this
Speaker 1: whole Scottish brogue accent, and.
Speaker 2: He's been waiting for you all.
Speaker 1: He has been waiting for him for me his entire life.
Speaker 1: No journalist has ever called Leonard, of course left. And
Speaker 1: Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the
Speaker 1: hell he is, and he doesn't even bother the clearer
Speaker 1: it with General Motors public Relations because he's never had
Speaker 1: a journalist call him before. He's just on the phone
Speaker 1: with me and Leonard does something. The first story Leonard
Speaker 1: gives me, he goes in his Scottish accent, which I
Speaker 1: can't do. He says, you realize we're talking about airbags.
Speaker 1: And one of this is in the mid nineties or
Speaker 1: in late nineties, and one of Leonard's points was airbags
Speaker 1: were suddenly a big deal. Everyone was in love with airbags.
Speaker 1: And his point was the airbag, if you're not wearing
Speaker 1: your seatbelt, the airbag is kill you can kill you,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're very young, or very old, or very small.
Speaker 1: And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is
Speaker 1: that the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader.
Speaker 1: And Ralph Nator didn't understand this fact, and he was
Speaker 1: promoting the airbag without he thought it was an alternative
Speaker 1: to the seat belt, as opposed to an accompaniment of
Speaker 1: the seat belt. And then Leonard said, and I never
Speaker 1: wrote about this. He said, what you should do is
Speaker 1: you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with
Speaker 1: the whatever the automobile, whatever the transit automobile bureaucracy is
Speaker 1: and ask for all the cases of people who died
Speaker 1: because they weren't wearing a seat belt and the airbag
Speaker 1: went off. And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's
Speaker 1: hands and I was like, oh my god. So I file,
Speaker 1: I file the foil request and like two months later,
Speaker 1: like seven huge boxes show up at the Washington Post
Speaker 1: and it's all the case files. What did I do
Speaker 1: with that story? Nothing? And then so I remember this,
Speaker 1: and I remember letter, and I get to the New
Speaker 1: Yorker and I'm filled with shand I never wrote the story.
Speaker 1: I would have won the pull of surprise. I would
Speaker 1: have won the Letard gave me a pull of surprise.
Speaker 1: He was all there in the boxes. It was like
Speaker 1: hundred of people. I mean, it's sad.
Speaker 2: He did say it was sad hashtag sad said.
Speaker 1: And Leonard is not happy with me for not doing
Speaker 1: a story about this. So then I say, okay, I'll
Speaker 1: do the Ralph Natter story. Just I can't. I'm not
Speaker 1: now the ship is sailed, but we'll do the Ralph
Speaker 1: Natter story. And then I go. So then for some reason,
Speaker 1: I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard.
Speaker 1: I hang out with his competitor at Ford, and I
Speaker 1: think he got very well. Lennon certain about that. It
Speaker 1: was unhappy. But the guy at Ford had this whole
Speaker 1: thing about three point belts and we crashed all these cars.
Speaker 1: It was so much fun. And then so I came back.
Speaker 1: But the point it all starts with Leonard. Like Leonard
Speaker 1: was a guy who wanted to play. He was an iconoclast, ignored,
Speaker 1: sitting in his office in Dearboat and nobody was listening
Speaker 1: to him, and he was writing these books that were
Speaker 1: read by seven people, and he was just great. He
Speaker 1: was just like and when you want to cover someone
Speaker 1: like that? And he was so thrilled with the idea that.
Speaker 3: I think another thing that thrilled you is that all
Speaker 3: the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics
Speaker 3: or show business or sports are obsessed with access. Right,
Speaker 3: you want to write a profile of Lebron James, you
Speaker 3: want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever,
Speaker 3: and you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed
Speaker 3: of handlers and no and no, and can we have
Speaker 3: quote approval and photo approval?
Speaker 2: And the answer is no. Okay, blah blah blah. It's terrible.
Speaker 2: It's terrible.
Speaker 3: And I think part of it, And tell me if
Speaker 3: I'm wrong, was your antipathy to that? I mean, the
Speaker 3: closest I think you might have done to a true
Speaker 3: celebrity profile. One of my favorite pieces was the guy
Speaker 3: who was the Ronco what was it called the Ronco
Speaker 3: jar and bottlecutter.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces of to all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I ever did. On the guy who did the
Speaker 1: Showtime artisary.
Speaker 2: That's really the right o. The retissary chicken God.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And but what I gleaned from that also, you
Speaker 3: you had a very early interest in here. We're going
Speaker 3: back a little bit. Before you were in journalism, you
Speaker 3: were in advertising.
Speaker 1: What was I wanted to be in advertising? I think
Speaker 1: they couldn't get a job.
Speaker 2: You couldn't get a job. Why did you want to
Speaker 2: be in advertising?
Speaker 1: Well, because I liked the idea that someone can tell
Speaker 1: a story in thirty seconds. I just thought that was
Speaker 1: fantastic and I was in awe of I thought the
Speaker 1: greatest achievement was a well told thirty second story was
Speaker 1: the hardest thing in the world. And the idea that
Speaker 1: it can make you laugh or cry in thirty seconds
Speaker 1: while they're selling you something. It's just in the degree
Speaker 1: of devillion on that is just author.
Speaker 2: Charts well Son, I wanted to do that. Hence what
Speaker 2: was his name, the Ronco Jority.
Speaker 1: Bottle, so Ron Pape he did the remember he did
Speaker 1: the He used to do the late night infomercials. He
Speaker 1: was the infomercial king and he did He made him
Speaker 1: a number of things. But his showpiece product was the
Speaker 1: Showtime Ortistery Oven, which was I claimed, dollar for dollar,
Speaker 1: the finest kitchen appliance ever made, and I still believe
Speaker 1: that to be the case. And I went out to
Speaker 1: la and I hung out with Ron, and it was
Speaker 1: I decided to go deep on Ron. And he turns
Speaker 1: out he's from like Asbury Park or somewhere in his
Speaker 1: His people were all.
Speaker 2: They were tumblers.
Speaker 1: There were sales on the boardwalk in New Jersey. They
Speaker 1: all sold like knives and stuff on the boardwalk. And
Speaker 1: Ron was the you know, another guy Ed McMahon was
Speaker 1: part of that circle. And a guy named Kidders Morris,
Speaker 1: who was rom p Appeal's grandfather, was a legendary guy
Speaker 1: from the Old Country who came over and was selling
Speaker 1: kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk. And they were they would
Speaker 1: do the spiel and you know, the chop chop chop.
Speaker 1: They'd have the they'd have the all the vegetables and
Speaker 1: they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show
Speaker 1: you the knife and they go chop chop, chop, chop shop.
Speaker 1: And the whole thing was to turn. This is a
Speaker 1: crucial thing that he learns back then, which is so
Speaker 1: the crowd gathers around you and you got the Ginsu
Speaker 1: knife and you're chopping vegetables, and then at a certain
Speaker 1: first of all, you can't you have a He taught
Speaker 1: me this. He's like, you got the carrots and the potatoes,
Speaker 1: and you got the pineapple. You can't ever chop the
Speaker 1: pineapple because it's so expensive. It's just there. It's the
Speaker 1: thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple.
Speaker 1: That keeps the people coming. But no, no, you chopped
Speaker 1: the carrots. The carrots are like five cents of carrot.
Speaker 1: But the key thing is a turn. So the people
Speaker 1: come close to get around you, you're going chop chop,
Speaker 1: chop chop, and you got to sell them the knife,
Speaker 1: and they got to get out of there because the
Speaker 1: news one do people have to come in. That's the key,
Speaker 1: so that anybody could do the thing. Chop chop, chop,
Speaker 1: chop chop. People got around, But it's turning that crowd
Speaker 1: and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion.
Speaker 1: That's and Ron was battle tested on the board He
Speaker 1: was the greatest of all the boardwalk. And then he
Speaker 1: goes to l A and he takes it up a
Speaker 1: notch and he starts doing late night infomercials. And he
Speaker 1: was so good. And I hung out with him and
Speaker 1: he from I was out there for like two weeks,
Speaker 1: mostly goofing around, but hang and I talked with the
Speaker 1: guy who collaborated with on the showtime oven, and I
Speaker 1: actually got it. I used to eat for years. I
Speaker 1: used to cook my chickens on the Showtime. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: No more, I think, I don't know what he got
Speaker 1: really squeaky In like year six, he had a squeaky road.
Speaker 1: I had a squeaky one. And Ron told me that
Speaker 1: I had to fix it, and I.
Speaker 2: Threw it out.
Speaker 1: But his big thing was you threw out the oven.
Speaker 1: I did his big thing that. You know a lot
Speaker 1: of the back then in the old days, the rotisseries. Uh,
Speaker 1: they they went like this like this is the spirit.
Speaker 1: They were vertical. And Ron's like, why do you do it? Vertical?
Speaker 1: Makes no sense? The juices flow to the bottom. Crazy,
Speaker 1: It's got to be horizontal. He's the guy who starts
Speaker 1: through Arizona at history and he was so it was
Speaker 1: so and getting into the family history and at one
Speaker 1: point he takes me to the grave site in New
Speaker 1: Jersey where all the whole the three generations of these
Speaker 1: legendary pitchmen who work the board bark and they're all
Speaker 1: buried in this thing. And he starts to cry, and
Speaker 1: it was just like it was just unbelievable. But the
Speaker 1: move there and this minitor, your dear friend Henry Finder,
Speaker 1: was very He was another very formative figure in this.
Speaker 1: He's like everyone. The standard move is to make fun
Speaker 1: of Ron Papeal. Do not make fun of Ron Papeal.
Speaker 1: You have to genuinely. He's a hero you have and
Speaker 1: if the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man,
Speaker 1: you've failed. And that is the single and to this
Speaker 1: day people make this air journalists due they think at
Speaker 1: some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to the subject. Yep, no,
Speaker 1: the subject. The subject is the hero, and you have
Speaker 1: to find your job. There's ten ways to write that.
Speaker 1: Peel had a very complic.
Speaker 2: Except in political reporting.
Speaker 1: But okay, yeah, well, but Ron had a. There's ten
Speaker 1: ways to write the ROMP Appeal profile. Nine of those
Speaker 1: ways you make fun of him, thank you, and one
Speaker 1: way you reckon. You look for what is what was
Speaker 1: fantastic about this guy, which is he devoted his life
Speaker 1: and his people for a three generations, devoted his life
Speaker 1: to making working in the kitchen a happier, healthier, easier,
Speaker 1: more efficient. That's a fantastic He cared about whether the
Speaker 1: chicken was vertical or horizontal. We'll be right back. We're
Speaker 1: back at the ninety second Street Y with David Remnick.
Speaker 2: You are no Lorna twenty three and you've just had
Speaker 2: a couple of kids. They're how old though?
Speaker 1: I got a toddler and a baby. I'm forbidden. I've
Speaker 1: forbidden sixty are you? You're fourteen?
Speaker 2: First of all, good luck, second of all, second of all.
Speaker 3: Famously And you once told me you know how you
Speaker 3: did one of your moves about college admissions.
Speaker 1: I love that stuff.
Speaker 3: Crazy they're getting in And then ninety second Street Y
Speaker 3: Kindergarten and Ivy League this and Da Da da and Canada.
Speaker 3: We just filled out an application the night before and
Speaker 3: I okay, all right.
Speaker 1: No, no, not even the night before you the day of
Speaker 1: day up, David. My parents weren't even involved. My father
Speaker 1: asked me where you applying to college? I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just doing the form now.
Speaker 2: And what did you put on it? Monopoly?
Speaker 1: No, you just send the form in. It's like a page.
Speaker 1: You just send it in, all right.
Speaker 3: So your kids are gonna not stay toddler and yeah,
Speaker 3: baby for very long. I promise you that I this
Speaker 3: This is one area where I know more. How are
Speaker 3: you going to feel about college admissions when they get
Speaker 3: to be sixteen, seventeen eighteen, because you're your your rant
Speaker 3: about Ivy.
Speaker 1: League, which I've been doing for years.
Speaker 3: Which is it's one of the most perfected rants of
Speaker 3: all time.
Speaker 1: I got a new rant, by the way, I got
Speaker 1: I got two episodes of my podcast. It is so
Speaker 1: I've been working on this rant. You're right, fifteen years.
Speaker 1: I have perfect I got two episodes of my podcast
Speaker 1: coming out I think next week. It's called the Georgetown Massacre.
Speaker 1: It is when I say this is this is like
Speaker 1: it is my Beethoven's fifth it is my it is
Speaker 1: my White album, it is my everything else I have done.
Speaker 2: This is what's going on is just like.
Speaker 1: Chump change compared this is two parts two parts on
Speaker 1: one case involving a tennis player goes to Georgetown. And
Speaker 1: every single everything I've done as a writer has been building,
Speaker 1: building towards It's so genius and like, by the end,
Speaker 1: it's just like and it has twists and turns and
Speaker 1: it's just.
Speaker 2: It's Would you like to preview it?
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to give it away. You gotta
Speaker 1: listen to it, so I'm not giving it away. So good. No,
Speaker 1: but this is why I have to work for a living.
Speaker 1: But no, I know what you're saying. Am I going
Speaker 1: to be a hypocrite? Yeah? Of course? What the one
Speaker 1: thing I will not do?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What? There was one place where I believe.
Speaker 2: Where are you gonna We're gonna draw the line?
Speaker 1: S a t prep Now I'm not I'm not making
Speaker 1: the call.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, you mean the call to the the mocher.
Speaker 1: Call you call in. I know, the guy who knows,
Speaker 1: the guy who knows the guy who's on the board,
Speaker 1: not doing that, Okay, I say.
Speaker 3: We talked about voice before and and one of the
Speaker 3: reasons I think that your podcast is so successful and
Speaker 3: so seductive and I don't miss them is that it
Speaker 3: has a real human voice. It doesn't feel read, even
Speaker 3: though I know damn well that you've worked on them
Speaker 3: really hard. Similar to your pros, it feels your written
Speaker 3: crows feels spoken, and vice versa, which I mean is
Speaker 3: high high praise. Podcasting is a relatively new form. Why
Speaker 3: did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way?
Speaker 2: It's not, it's not. This is not some advocation.
Speaker 3: In fact, at a certain point, you know you've done
Speaker 3: work where the book is an extension of the podcast
Speaker 3: is with the Bomber book. So tell me about that
Speaker 3: in your attraction to it.
Speaker 1: Well, there's certain kinds of stories. So for example, the
Speaker 1: story I was just telling you, what's George Semasker. You
Speaker 1: could you could write it, but it's not nearly as
Speaker 1: fun in written form. Right, So there's a certain kind
Speaker 1: of story which lends itself beautifully to audio, where audio
Speaker 1: permits you it could be more playful. You can get
Speaker 1: away with stuff. What does that mean? Get away with stuff? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no critical infrastructure, so it's like.
Speaker 2: No one's gonna I don't understand. You could be more
Speaker 2: full of shit.
Speaker 1: No, you could be like you have to be.
Speaker 2: You're careful I mean.
Speaker 1: I am. We're not not making stuff up. What I'm
Speaker 1: saying is people are more accepting of a kind of
Speaker 1: playful outlandishness. So part of the the Georgetown Masker episodes
Speaker 1: there there's the tongue is in the cheek, right even
Speaker 1: as I'm making a substante point, and.
Speaker 2: You feel you can do that more than on in
Speaker 2: Caslon type in.
Speaker 1: The Again, you would not let me write that for
Speaker 1: The New York You take it.
Speaker 3: Out because I would feel what it wouldn't work.
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't. It's hard to explain because a
Speaker 1: lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing
Speaker 1: with your voice, right, So you're you know, I can
Speaker 1: I can adopt a tone of voice that says we're.
Speaker 2: We're having a fun, right, we're playing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like there's a character in the Georgetown Masker. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's it's part of it. There's a turn and we
Speaker 1: meet there's a guy who's charged in a case and
Speaker 1: he takes as his lawyer. There's the two legendary two
Speaker 1: greatest defense lawyers in the country, Roy Black and Howard Trevnick.
Speaker 1: These two guys in Miami and we meet Royan Howard.
Speaker 1: Now the first crucial thing is.
Speaker 2: I can.
Speaker 1: If I'm running a print version, you'll meet Royan Howard.
Speaker 1: I describe them like you gotta hear. When you hear them,
Speaker 1: it's just so much better and you realize, like, and
Speaker 1: then when you're describing them, I can describe them in
Speaker 1: a much more colorful way when I know you're going
Speaker 1: to hear their voice. Right, I can't explain it better
Speaker 1: than that, But there is something about I can. Like,
Speaker 1: Howard has got long hair and rides a motorcycle in
Speaker 1: the early morning hours and it looks like a movie star.
Speaker 1: And uh does this he in this trial? He does
Speaker 1: a he does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter
Speaker 1: that is just so masterful. I mean, it's just it's
Speaker 1: like and I was reading, you know, you read the
Speaker 1: transcript and you come to this thing and you're like
Speaker 1: someone because people like you and I. You know, our
Speaker 1: business fundamentally, it's not about We're not in the writing business.
Speaker 1: We're in the interviewing business. Right. We only to write
Speaker 1: because we've interviewed somebody. It's really interviewing.
Speaker 2: You think of it that way.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, really, oh yeah, the whole game is interviewing.
Speaker 1: It's not okay, the writing is I would never write
Speaker 1: something without it. The idea of writing something just without
Speaker 1: having sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable
Speaker 1: to me. Right, So when you a defense lawyer, is
Speaker 1: just a stipulate.
Speaker 3: That's the fun part for you. That's the that's the
Speaker 3: that's the juice of it above all.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't find the writing part hard. I find
Speaker 1: the the writing part is just it's just a matter
Speaker 1: of sitting down, and it's the it's unders.
Speaker 2: Tell any writers that, no, But that's the.
Speaker 1: Gift of being at the Washington Post for ten years.
Speaker 1: It used to be hard, and it wasn't. By the
Speaker 1: time I was done there, I was on the phone
Speaker 1: dictating the story. Like they solved that problem. The hard
Speaker 1: part is can I sit down with somebody and can
Speaker 1: I understand who they are and what they're trying to
Speaker 1: say and represent that in a way that's meaningful and
Speaker 1: powerful and all of that is stuff you get from
Speaker 1: the interview. You don't. You can't make it up after
Speaker 1: the fact, So you have to. Like I was doing
Speaker 1: this summer, I spent I spent like twenty hours maybe
Speaker 1: I've forgotten how many hours, ten fifteen, twenty hours with
Speaker 1: this woman he was a psychologist, and it was incredible,
Speaker 1: Like she agreed, thank God, to sit with me for
Speaker 1: that long. Who's telling you steal it? You're like the
Speaker 1: competition for goodness sake, that.
Speaker 2: Hurts me very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not telling you, I'm telling you. It was the
Speaker 1: same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've heard of him where he you know, he sat
Speaker 1: for forty hours and the whole thing. The trick, not
Speaker 1: the trick, the what's interesting, what's hard about that was
Speaker 1: not writing it up afterwards. All those problems were solved
Speaker 1: in the interview. The trick was when we were talking.
Speaker 3: To him and I if I started to interrupt, which
Speaker 3: is the worst thing you can do in an interview.
Speaker 3: But I've interviewed Paul Simon. He's not immediately easy. And
Speaker 3: you had him for you know, on and on and on,
Speaker 3: and it got richer and richer and richer, and he
Speaker 3: is something you did something about you, your patience, your interest,
Speaker 3: your silence, whatever, whatever it was, and drew out a
Speaker 3: guy that I think it's fair to say, is not
Speaker 3: immediately thrilled with being the process of being interviewed.
Speaker 1: He was. I don't understand why he was so he was.
Speaker 1: He kept on. I kept on saying I'm done, and
Speaker 1: then he would he would say, no, let's when are
Speaker 1: we meeting again? And we would me and Bruce, my
Speaker 1: friend Bruce did it to get there, and Bruce I
Speaker 1: would look at you, yeah, Bruce, I would look at
Speaker 1: you like he really wants to do it again, and
Speaker 1: he would always do it again.
Speaker 2: And then I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, if I was kind
Speaker 1: of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with
Speaker 1: his time, that would be part of it. Part of
Speaker 1: it was, I think we were uninterested in the parts
Speaker 1: of his life that he felt had been picked over.
Speaker 1: So we're not interested in your marriage to so and so,
Speaker 1: in the relationship with Art Garf, but we were really
Speaker 1: interested in his dad. And I remember there was one
Speaker 1: moment were was a musician who was a musician. I
Speaker 1: remember there was one time where Bruce and I asked
Speaker 1: him some question. I asked him some question about his dad,
Speaker 1: and he went He talked straight for like half an hour,
Speaker 1: got incredibly emotional, and then he said I have to stop,
Speaker 1: and he got up and walked outside. I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: it was there was something really deep and the idea
Speaker 1: it's so interesting, and it's that thing moment when you're
Speaker 1: giving somebody. First of all, it never gets old when
Speaker 1: you tap into something. So we had talked into something
Speaker 1: that was real about him. That his relationship to his father.
Speaker 1: He's a man in his seventies, his father's been dead
Speaker 1: for thirty years. He eclipsed his father in every conventional
Speaker 1: way by a million miles. And yet and he was
Speaker 1: still you realize, he was still writing about his father.
Speaker 1: He was still dreaming about his father. His father was
Speaker 1: still like with him. You know. It was just such
Speaker 1: a kind of like. But that when you get there,
Speaker 1: and that was that's a long time for us to
Speaker 1: get there. When you get there with somebody that, like
Speaker 1: I said, the writing is not hard when you get
Speaker 1: that kind of moment on the How.
Speaker 3: Did your parents affect the way you look? You're now
Speaker 3: at this some you're moving forward but slightly retrospective. You
Speaker 3: have kids, your life has changed.
Speaker 2: You look back on it. How did your parents inform
Speaker 2: who you are in your work?
Speaker 1: Well, my dad was uh was a He was a
Speaker 1: mischief maker in the He was someone who had no
Speaker 1: interest whatsoever in any authority in any he did not.
Speaker 1: The psychological term that best describes him was disagreeable. Not
Speaker 1: the psychologis. When he's a term, they don't mean obnoxious.
Speaker 1: He was the furthest thing obnoxious, incredibly gracious man. In
Speaker 1: psychological terms, disagreeable means you are uninterested in what in
Speaker 1: the approval of others. No, could care less. Just the
Speaker 1: idea of standing out and being different was just second
Speaker 1: nature for him. It wasn't that he relished that being different.
Speaker 1: He didn't care, just did what he was.
Speaker 2: He different, he taught man to man.
Speaker 1: He was. He was that kind of I've told this
Speaker 1: story many times, but he we came, we moved to Canada,
Speaker 1: were living in rural Canada and in kind of men
Speaker 1: in nite country. It was all these old older Mennonites,
Speaker 1: people who are like the Amish. They're in driving buggies
Speaker 1: and a barn would burn down and they would do
Speaker 1: a barn raising that all gather the next day and
Speaker 1: they would raise the barn in one day. Hundreds of
Speaker 1: Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies from miles
Speaker 1: around and they would, you know, have huge spread of
Speaker 1: food and they would just it was incredible to watch
Speaker 1: actually if you go to a barn raising, hundreds of
Speaker 1: them putting up a barn and and my father decided
Speaker 1: to join. And he see, so there's one car, a
Speaker 1: kind of you know, a volt his Volvo in with
Speaker 1: like a hundred horses and buggies, and he is like
Speaker 1: an English guy. They're all like clean shaven, wearing black
Speaker 1: pants and like these you know hats, straw hats, and
Speaker 1: he's like got a big beard and a tie, and
Speaker 1: you know, he looks like a mathematician, an English mathematics
Speaker 1: and drives up in his ball though with his kids
Speaker 1: in tow, and not an ounce of self consciousness, not
Speaker 1: even for it didn't even occur to him to ask
Speaker 1: permission to show up. He shows up and says, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: put me to work, and they're like okay, and they
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what they're doing. So he's doing the
Speaker 1: most manual labor. No one, none of the one hundred
Speaker 1: people this barn raising had more than a sixth grade education.
Speaker 1: He has a PhD in advanced mathematics. And he's the
Speaker 1: happiest man there. That's so my dad he's just like
Speaker 1: like and like went home and then never spoke about
Speaker 1: it again, or my other favorite story of my dad,
Speaker 1: a story he told me when he was in his seventies.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I never told him this before.
Speaker 1: He's married my mom. My mom is Jamaican. They're in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: He's teaching at the University of West Indies, where one
Speaker 1: of his students is Kamala Harris's dad common as a
Speaker 1: stat and he decides he wants to write. He's writing
Speaker 1: some paper and back then, if you needed a book,
Speaker 1: you would it wasn't There's no the book he needed
Speaker 1: was not in the University of West in his library,
Speaker 1: and he figures out it's at the Georgia Tech library,
Speaker 1: and so he's going to go to Georgia Tech. And
Speaker 1: so he writes a letter to the professor friend who
Speaker 1: knows that Georgia Tech. My name is Graham blahblah, I'm
Speaker 1: a professor University of we Sidey's I would like to
Speaker 1: come to Georgia Tech to read your use your library.
Speaker 1: Guy says yes, and he's preparing to go, and he
Speaker 1: learns later that it kicks off a panic at Georgia Tech.
Speaker 1: Because it's nineteen sixty Georgia Tech is segregated and they
Speaker 1: don't know whether he's white or black. They just know
Speaker 1: he's a professor from the University of WestIndies. God knows
Speaker 1: he could be a black guy coming to our camp.
Speaker 1: But we just invited a black guy to the campus.
Speaker 1: Holy shit. And like they go nuts. And finally there's
Speaker 1: no telephon there's no there's telephones, but there's no direct line.
Speaker 1: They try and find out who. Finally they reach you
Speaker 1: on the phone before he's about to come, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's called to the switchboard whatever, you know, Professor Glappel, Yes,
Speaker 1: this is so and so from Georgia Tech. Yes, are
Speaker 1: you white? He goes yes, and they go, oh, thank god.
Speaker 1: So then but this is the story's out over. So
Speaker 1: then now they're going to roll out the red carpet, right.
Speaker 1: But so he gets on the boat, sails from Jamaica.
Speaker 1: I'm like, he gets on the bus. How you did it? Back?
Speaker 1: Then takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta, goes they
Speaker 1: have a welcome dinner. They're all sitting down, all like
Speaker 1: these white men, right, And halfway through the meal, he
Speaker 1: pulls out a large eight by ten photo of my mom.
Speaker 1: He says, yes, my wife, I was going to bring over.
Speaker 1: I said it again, hands it around the room like no,
Speaker 1: to him, that was a fantastic moment, like show these
Speaker 1: guys never mentioned a word about that story for forty
Speaker 1: somewhere and then he's ran, He's like, oh, I went
Speaker 1: to Georgia Tech and I I had interviewed some guy
Speaker 1: there who was the head of the political science department,
Speaker 1: who was a black guy from Atlanta. And I told
Speaker 1: it to my dad and goes, oh, it's so funny.
Speaker 1: Was it all was that way? And then the story
Speaker 1: but his that was so hammy, just like he just
Speaker 1: it was like he just liked, he loved nothing more
Speaker 1: than like poking the bear. But he didn't, you know,
Speaker 1: you didn't make a big.
Speaker 2: Deal about it.
Speaker 1: He just wanted to go around poking the bear.
Speaker 3: Before I asked about your mom, you mentioned that your
Speaker 3: dad was taught Kamala Harris's far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Donald Harris was a student of his. We knew
Speaker 1: him somehow. Donald Harris told me this, not my dad,
Speaker 1: because my dad obviously had passed by the time Kamala
Speaker 1: became a big deal. But yeah, they were Donald Harris.
Speaker 1: My mom knows Donald Harris is from is from Brownstown,
Speaker 1: which is where my mom went to school. She knows
Speaker 1: she went to school. She went to church at his
Speaker 1: father's church, and like they clearly must have seen each
Speaker 1: other across a few at the age of the degree
Speaker 1: of excitement in well all, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: what's hilarious is there's one group that says Kamala Harris
Speaker 1: is black. Then there's another group that says she's Indian,
Speaker 1: and then there's the Jamaicans or like she's a Jamaican, right,
Speaker 1: And so the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over
Speaker 1: her is my mother like, literally she's ninety three. There
Speaker 1: is zero chance she will exit this world between now
Speaker 1: and the election. Zero. It's it's not happening. Like the
Speaker 1: degree to which her defense I call her up, she's
Speaker 1: just the first time that's just defending Kambala against they
Speaker 1: were attacking her for her big thing is attacking her
Speaker 1: for not revealing her positions. She's just started. How can
Speaker 1: you how could she have positions before she's started? My
Speaker 1: mother's the whole thing is this should unfold over the
Speaker 1: passage of time.
Speaker 3: Is I remember I had the privilege of meeting her
Speaker 3: a few times, particularly in Washington, and she she struck
Speaker 3: me as a very proper.
Speaker 1: She's my mother is a very very Yes, she is
Speaker 1: a very refined, dignified Jamaican lady. Yeah, you don't nobody
Speaker 1: messes with she was. She also, you know, she loved
Speaker 1: also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great
Speaker 1: effect in our little town. They had never met.
Speaker 2: How did she navigate rural Ontario?
Speaker 1: She just sailed right in. She she met all the
Speaker 1: kind of power brokers in town, charmed them, got on
Speaker 1: all the right committees. And I mean it was menn nights.
Speaker 1: So the men nights are There's no, they're not. They're
Speaker 1: the opposine end of the.
Speaker 2: They are not racist.
Speaker 1: It's no racist. There was no racist. You know, it
Speaker 1: was nothing. And also it's a very different now that
Speaker 1: I understand this, it's a very different different story when
Speaker 1: you're the only black person in town. I don mean, well,
Speaker 1: she talked about this time book. An outsider is not
Speaker 1: threatening at those in those numbers, right, particularly an outsider
Speaker 1: who is and she was. This is a deeply Christian town,
Speaker 1: and my mother is a very devout woman, and so
Speaker 1: she read very she seemed very familiar to them, even
Speaker 1: if she was at the same time in some sense exotic,
Speaker 1: but she's very She would never register even if something
Speaker 1: untoward was done to her, she would never register that
Speaker 1: in the moment, you know, she would hold it back
Speaker 1: and she would tell you about it maybe later, but
Speaker 1: it was in a And also there's a lot of
Speaker 1: us things will tell you this. It's very different to
Speaker 1: come from a culture where you're in the majority. You know,
Speaker 1: a story actually I told her an Elars when my
Speaker 1: mom was in she was a scholarship student at a
Speaker 1: boarding school in Jamaica, and all of the scholarship students
Speaker 1: were black, right, and they would be and they were
Speaker 1: all there because they were really good students. And so
Speaker 1: she's like eleven years old and she reads in the
Speaker 1: in Psyclar Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to
Speaker 1: white people when it comes to intelligence. And she is, no,
Speaker 1: she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the
Speaker 1: smart people are these in the Britannica. Yeah this is
Speaker 1: like from nineteen hundred. Ye they're still in Jamaica in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty whatever. But in her world, all the smart
Speaker 1: people are black and the dumb ones are the you know,
Speaker 1: the plantation owners daughters you know these white kids from
Speaker 1: you know one general, They're like, what are they doing here?
Speaker 1: You know? And so it's like that's the if, that's
Speaker 1: your mindset when all you you know her, so she
Speaker 1: has a So you come to Canada and you have
Speaker 1: no comprehension of the base. You think of racism, You
Speaker 1: think of racist tropes as absurd, as opposed to being malignant.
Speaker 3: Malcolm, I, I want to thank you deeply for your
Speaker 3: your work and your friendship.
Speaker 2: I miss you. You live in like god knows where
Speaker 2: in upstate New York.
Speaker 3: I wish I saw you much more often.
Speaker 1: Your idea of Upstate New York is like Awestening. That's
Speaker 1: about as far as you go. You're like, we're we're
Speaker 1: thinking you and I are going away where you're going?
Speaker 3: Yonkery, what was your theory there was?
Speaker 2: What was the mountain Jews? I'm not a mountain Jew you, No,
Speaker 2: I'm really not.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a
Speaker 3: wonderful and healthy environment for you.
Speaker 1: No, you're an environmentist because you you've you've been told
Speaker 1: there is an environment out there.
Speaker 3: I'm I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill mckibbon
Speaker 3: and and and others.
Speaker 2: And I'm told, like the other day, I was.
Speaker 3: Walking into my my building and I heard this racket.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I said, what is that?
Speaker 3: And the and the dork I said, those are birds.
Speaker 3: Evidently this is a bad attitude. I want to close
Speaker 3: by asking you a very crucial question. You you have
Speaker 3: have an ambivalent relationship with sports. With sports, you once said,
Speaker 3: and you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo bills running, You're
Speaker 3: terrific runner. But you've also said that sports are a
Speaker 3: moral abomination.
Speaker 1: Did I say that you did? Yeah? Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: what what in what era of.
Speaker 3: My I think you were your annoyance with professional sports?
Speaker 1: Well, I do you know? So here's my in a nutshell,
Speaker 1: my current thinking on this. I was a very good
Speaker 1: high school runner, and then I quit and did run
Speaker 1: for thirty years and started again and became a kind
Speaker 1: of slightly better than mediocre.
Speaker 2: Better than that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, when I was at sixteen, I was up here.
Speaker 1: When I was fifty, I was down here. And I
Speaker 1: had way, way, way more fun when I was at
Speaker 1: fifty in mediocre than I did when I was fifteen
Speaker 1: and a national champion. And it is maybe realize that
Speaker 1: you actually you want to be mediocre. You don't want
Speaker 1: to be you don't want to be good, aside from
Speaker 1: the very very small group of people who genuinely if
Speaker 1: you're Lebron or you're Usain Bolt, fine, but the idea
Speaker 1: that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind
Speaker 1: of athletic excellence is in the stake and what's happened
Speaker 1: there is I think in the audience a woman named
Speaker 1: Linda Flanagan, who wrote this book I adore called Taking
Speaker 1: Back the Game, which is this critique of what's gone
Speaker 1: wrong with youth sports, and this is I think one
Speaker 1: of her this is one of her central arguments in
Speaker 1: this wonderful book which really changed the way I think about,
Speaker 1: which is that we've destroyed the very thing that made
Speaker 1: sports fun, play play right by this kind of professionalizing
Speaker 1: of youth sports. And I realized that was my problem.
Speaker 1: When I was fifteen, I was caught up in a
Speaker 1: fantasy about that I was going to go to the Olympics,
Speaker 1: and it ruined running for me. And I didn't run
Speaker 1: for thirty years. And that's heartbreaking because I learned running
Speaker 1: more than almost anything else, and I recovered my joy
Speaker 1: of running only when I was coming in twenty eight
Speaker 1: in my local five K. And so that's what I
Speaker 1: mean by like this. We shouldn't be telling. We shouldn't
Speaker 1: be Linda would tell you, why are you taking a
Speaker 1: thirteen year old and putting them through the torturing, the
Speaker 1: torture and getting in a car and driving for three
Speaker 1: hours for like a soccer match. Why the drive should
Speaker 1: never be longer than the match. That should be a rule, right,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Blodwell, thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to that conversation with David Remnick at the ninety
Speaker 1: second Street. Why you can find Revenge of the Tipping
Speaker 1: Point wherever you get your audio books. Next time on
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, an update on Broken Windows theory. Revision's History
Speaker 1: is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben the Daphaffrey and
Speaker 1: Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Original scoring
Speaker 1: by Luis Kira, mastering by Echo Mountain, ring by Nina
Speaker 1: Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and as
Speaker 1: always El Hafe Greta Cone. I'm Malcolm Glappo.