This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor

In our recent series on artificial intelligence, I kept returning to a thought: This technology might be able to churn out content faster than we can, but we still need a human mind to sift through the dross and figure out what’s good. In other words, A. I. is going to turn more of us into editors. But editing is a peculiar skill. It’s hard to test for, or teach, or even describe. But it’s the crucial step in the creative process that takes work that’s decent and can turn it into something great. Adam Moss is widely known as one of the great magazine editors of his generation: He remade The New York Times Magazine in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and during his 15 years as editor in chief of New York magazine, shaped that outlet into one of the greatest print and digital publications we have. And he’s now out with a new book, “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing.” It’s a curation of 43 conversations with artists about the marginalia, doodles, drafts and revisions that lead to great art. It’s a celebration of the hard, human work that goes into the creative act. It’s a book, really, about editing. In this conversation, we discuss what musicians, writers, visual artists, sandcastle-builders and others have in common as they create; how editing is an underappreciated and often misunderstood step in the creative process; how creativity morphs in different stages of our lives; and trusting your own “sensibility.” Mentioned: “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” by Kara Walker “Miss Gleason” by Amy Sillman Ezra Klein Show episode with George Saunders “Mother and Child on Blue Mat” by Cheryl Pope Ezra Klein Show episode with Maryanne Wolf “Fidenza” by Tyler Hobbs “In a River” by Rostam Book Recommendations: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester Faux Pas by Amy Sillman The Sketchbooks Revealed by Richard Diebenkorn Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero, Rachel Baker and James Burnett.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  One thing we've been exploring more on the show this year is taste. I have this view that the taste is becoming more and more important in this age of so much being algorithmic, so much being served up to you. AI moving to this world where creating a derivative version of anything is that much easier. Knowing what you like, what you think is good, what you think is bad, what you respond to, that really matters. That is a way to maintain both humanity and the capacity to do great things. But after taste, there is this work of getting the thing to where you want it to be, right? If you know something is bad, you feel it's not there yet, how do you get it to where it needs to go? The thing you are trying to do there is editing. I think we have an overly narrow description of what editing is.

• 1:08Ezra Klein?

  We think of it as marking up the grammar of a sentence with a pen. But great editors, and I've worked with a lot of great editors, they're mystics of a sort. They're not technicians. They see something that isn't there yet, whether of their own work or your work, and not really knowing how to get there, they help you get there. Not really knowing how to get there, they help themselves get there. So this is a thing I've been wanting to explore because it's fuzzy. We don't have very good even language for it. But there are really great editors out there. Adam Moss is one of them. He's considered by many, considered by me, to be one of the truly great magazine editors of his generation. In his 20s, this is back in 1988, he begins this now very storied publication called

• 1:53Ezra Klein?

  Seven Days. It survives only two years and wins a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He comes to the New York Times, he remakes the New York Times Magazine, becomes a key home for great narrative journalism, for great essayists. He goes to New York Magazine, which he just turns into To one of the truly great magazines, it still is today, under his successors. In 2019, Mas steps down from New York Magazine. He spends more time painting and becomes interested in how artists get from something fine to something great. So he begins asking them, and the result is his new book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing, which tracks alongside 43 artists, some great piece they did, be it a visual art, a piece of music, a piece of journalism, from where it began.

• 2:38Ezra Klein?

  And he gets them to turn over their drafts, their sketches, their notes, and tracks where it ultimately goes and how they get it to there. So this is a conversation, really, about editing, about him as an editor, about these artists as editors, and about how we can all become better at editing, how we can all even understand when it is that we are editing. Obviously, in the conversation, we discuss some visual art. That doesn't translate that well into audio, so we will link the images of those works in the show notes. They are very much worth following up on and checking out. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:17Ezra Klein?

  Adam Mas, welcome to the show.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 3:19Ezra Klein?

  I had a rumor that this book had an earlier title. There was something like "on editing." Is that true?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Close, just called editing.

• 3:27Ezra Klein?

  Just called editing?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  Oh, I'm so glad that was true. Because that was a thing I kept thinking about in the book, a thing I think about with your career. What does it mean to edit?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I think any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. I think you're just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting or your heart is reacting. You know, it's not just an intellectual thing, it's also very much an emotional thing. Bob Gottlieb, in that Caro documentary, described editing as reacting. And that is a pretty good definition, I think.

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  But it's not just reacting, right? It's trusting the reaction.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's trusting the reaction. And then there's another part, which is kind of separate, which is figuring out what to do about it. I would write all over manuscripts, and sometimes I would have solutions, but often it would just be a reaction. Spent a lot of time Praising the stuff that I thought was good and kind of withholding when I didn't think it was good.

• 4:38Ezra Klein?

  So instead of saying this is bad, people could just read.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:41Ezra Klein?

  That you had just gone cold.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. Horrible, right?

• 4:44Ezra Klein?

  You must be fun to be in a relationship with.

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  I was an editor for a long time. I was editor in chief of Vox. I'm still an editor on this show in a way. And I think it took me at least a decade, maybe more, to even come to the idea that I should trust my own reaction.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I think happened in media somewhat destructively in the same period is that editors stopped doing that and writers stopped doing that. You began to look at social media for the reaction. You began to look outside, right? You know, we knew what people cared about because they were reading it. We knew what. And one thing that I think held in New York Magazine and has held even since you've left is it feels like it is for somebody, not decided by everybody. And I've started to understand that as more radical, more necessary. But it's also a tremendous act of faith in yourself against the whole world, right? How do you come to trust yourself, your reaction, as valid?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  It's like trusting yourself in any context, which is that you get a little courageous and you venture out and you try something. And I do think, just, you know, if we're going to get on the subject of journalism a little bit, one of the reasons that the thing that you're describing is true is that magazines have been so, newspapers, everything has been so disaggregated. It was much more necessary for the whole to be tied together with a single sensibility. Now, you know, many people, when they read, listen to anything, when they take in media, they don't necessarily even know where it was from.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So that I think that people have surrendered a little bit of that thing, which I also value a tremendous amount. The feeling that it came from somewhere, someone, something that I can feel and identify.

• 6:40Ezra Klein?

  So you are considered by many, considered by me, to be one of maybe the great magazine editor of your generation. Yeah, you're, I know, so you're gonna do that. So I've listened to interviews with you.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 6:49Ezra Klein?

  I know you don't like that.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:51Ezra Klein?

  So what you then do is you say, well, I've just worked with a lot of great teams.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 6:55Ezra Klein?

  I know. So it's very hard for people to say why their judgment is good. But somehow, the thing you did at Seven Days, which was the magazine you did in your late twenties, thirties, that won a National Magazine Award as it closed down, then did it New York Times Magazine at New York, these were different teams.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Ezra Klein?

  I have tried to hire editors. In fact, I have hired editors successfully. They've worked for me. It is extraordinarily hard to hire editors. Writers, you can see what they write.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:23Ezra Klein?

  So if it is just about your great teams, which I don't fully believe, but it's clearly somewhat true.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:30Ezra Klein?

  You clearly hired great teams in a bunch of different places.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I'm a very good hire. I will give myself credit for that.

• 7:34Ezra Klein?

  What do you look for in editors? How do you find good editors?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  You talk to them.

• 7:40Ezra Klein?

  Well, we all do that.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  But maybe you listen for different things than I do.

• 7:45Ezra Klein?

  What are you listening for?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I listen for confidence, but not too much confidence. I listen for just an interesting mind. Usually I'll ask fairly banal questions and see where they take them. I would kind of just keep prodding them to see how the gears of their mind work. And if I was bored, I wouldn't hire them. If I was excited by the conversation, if I learned something from the conversation, and if they seemed like decent people, which is not small, a lot of people come in and they're, they show signs of being the kind of editor that I think is destructive rather than constructive, which is to say that they'll run roughshod over the writer talent, or the

• 8:31Speaker 01

  visual talent, or whatever they're in charge of. And there needs to be a certain humility in an editor, but also they need to have a really interesting mind.

• 8:41Ezra Klein?

  Did you go to interview questions?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I would ask them to try to form story ideas on the fly.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Of whatever happened that day in either news or their own experience. And in part, that question was to see how alert and well-read they were, but also how fast their mind worked in formulating the raw data of experience into story, into narrative, into essay. And then I listened to my own reaction. Was I excited by this person? Did I want to be in their company? It's not really unlike you're sitting in a dinner party and someone's interesting to you or they're not.

• 9:29Ezra Klein?

  But do you not worry about being misled by charisma?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I think charisma is a big part of it, actually. So, yeah, I could be misled by charisma, but I'm a pretty good charisma bullshit detector.

• 9:41Ezra Klein?

  Because some people are great fun to talk to, but they're not great at doing the thing. I've run into this.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:49Ezra Klein?

  You get that. And the flip is I've known people who are actually not great fun to talk to.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:55Ezra Klein?

  They're introverted, they're nervous in the interview.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:58Ezra Klein?

  But they're amazing at doing the thing. And I've known editors like that, too.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have too, although I think I'm pretty good at getting shy people to relax. They have to be able to have the conversation, no matter what their basic personality inhibitions are. And then in terms of doing the thing, there are tests and stuff like that that you give them that you evaluate that. But also, I really think that you can teach people how to do the thing, and you can't teach people to think.

• 10:25Ezra Klein?

  I agree, yeah. I think that is the hardest part of hiring.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:30Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go back to something we were talking about a minute ago, about this theory that editing is about reading your own reaction and being able to work with that reaction. So you have this great interview with David Mandel, showrunner of Veep, a show that I love. And the two of you talk through a single joke on that show. And the way Mandel hears all these alternatives and uses his own reaction to guide to the final form of the joke. So can you just talk through that joke first?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  One of the impetuses for the book was that I went to the set of Veep. I was invited by Frank Rich, who is both a friend of mine and executive producer of the show. And he just, you know, just as a lark said, hey, come. I was in Los Angeles, come visit. So I did. And I sat there behind.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Dave and watched him. It was just some stupid joke that landed on a Jewish holiday.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And Moses led his people to the land of?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Hanukkah.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Canaan, Rabbi.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Shut up, Nakil. That stupid hat is too small for my head.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yom Ha'atz.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Fine, stupid hat is too small for my yom ha'atz.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  It's okay, Yona. Conversion to Judaism is about a commitment to the Jewish lifestyle.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, good, because all this learning is giving me a yom ha'atz ache.

• 11:47Ezra Klein?

  So you don't even focus on that whole routine, right? You might think of that routine as an object, but no, just that, that first.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  It's just one word.

• 11:56Ezra Klein?

  Just one word. Tell me about it.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  There's only one change variable in it. So there's this thing, okay, there's this thing that they do called alts, where they actually take most jokes and they try to squeeze them as much as possible to get the most Jews as they can get. That's one of the things when I was beginning to think about the book that I watched with such awe admiration, I don't know. This moment is like three seconds in the show and they take hours on it, even though it just zips right past. Most viewers wouldn't even pay any attention to it.

• 12:28Ezra Klein?

  So what were some of the alts?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  So the alts in this case, so it's scripted and shot, Jonah's saying, "That land is called New York? Hanukkah?" That's the one they used. They also wrote Egypt. Mila Konzi, it's like a Yiddish name. Anyway, these were the various ones. They did shoot New York and Hanukkah, and Hanukkah's the one that they finally used.

• 12:51Ezra Klein?

  New York would be kind of funny, too.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it would.

• 12:52Ezra Klein?

  So tell me about what Mandel is doing there. What is the edit happening? How does he make the decision between them?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  He describes making the decision purely by reading his own reaction. And that it happens in the editing room. It also happens on the set because they only shoot some of them. He futzes around himself with the joke and then people feed him various other alternatives and he...

• 13:18Speaker 01

  He is just evaluating, and he's evaluating not in a way that feels conscious at all, but he's trying to understand what makes him laugh. There are, in my view, three stages of making art. One of them is the imagining, and the final one is the shaping. But in between, there is the judging, which is kind of what we're talking about here, the editing. And imagining gets a lot of space on YouTube videos and books that help you free up your imagination, which is very important. And then the shaping gets a lot of attention because it's about craft and technique and how you make the thing that is at least close to something in your head.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  What kind of never gets any love is this middle ground, which is the judging. And after your imagination has spewed, whatever it is that it has spewed, there has to be a kind of functioning intelligence that is not intellectual necessarily, but is nevertheless your mind operating keenly, making sense of what you've done, and then figuring out how you can best put it to use. And, you know, all of this is so subjective. Everything is so subjective. There is no objective explanation of this word will work better than that word. But in his case, he just sits in the editing room, and he laughs, or he doesn't.

• 14:38Ezra Klein?

  We should say here that the book's in some ways motivated.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:43Ezra Klein?

  By you have gotten more deeply into painting.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  And the distance between what you think is good and what you're able to do.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Is vast.

• 14:52Ezra Klein?

  And seems to fascinate you.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it fascinates me and frustrates me and did actually motivate my... I felt like, well, okay, artists may look at the world differently than I do. And there was a way of thinking that I didn't seem to have, so I went to talk to other people about how they thought. And that's kind of what the motivating thing in the book is.

• 15:13Ezra Klein?

  A number of the artists in your book talk about this idea of listening to the body. Twyla Tharp says, when she's drafting a piece, and she's a great choreographer, she says, "Okay, brain, catch up with the body." Kara Walker, who made the Sugar Baby sculpture in the Domino Sugar Refinery, said she had to, quote, "Put some paper on the floor and let my body do the work."

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:34Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about the sense of the tension between the cerebral and embodied.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And the physical.

• 15:39Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  It happens, actually, really, an unbelievable number of places in the book. And also, there's this other very strange thing that happens in the book, which is... Over and over again, people describe being most creative when they're in motion. So whether they put themselves in motion when they're running, or swimming, or something like that, or biking, or even just on a train, or an airplane, just moving, the body physically in space moving seems to unleash something in them. But I feel this way, I don't know, do you do things other than your journalism life? Because I do find that in my own painting, it's a physical sensation, it's a physical high, and it's one of the really satisfying aspects of it.

• 16:25Ezra Klein?

  I'm considering this. Do I do, first, do I do anything aside from my journalism? I do, I like to think that I have a full life.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't mean that.

• 16:32Ezra Klein?

  No, I'm not joking. I miss that state, which I think I used to achieve more often. And I think one reason I used to achieve it more often is that when I started out as a blogger, there weren't that many notifications competing for your attention. You didn't have Slack, and not that many people emailed me, and I find I break concentration much more now. The place where my body leapt up when you were talking was the plane. I find I achieve completely different mental states on planes. And I think it's because there is so little distraction. And so when you're talking about painting, I mean, I assume you don't paint on a screen,

• 17:14Ezra Klein?

  I assume you paint on canvas, and I do think there is a tension between the body, that kind of embodied flow state, and distraction and interruption. It takes time to get there, and I think it is difficult to stay there sometimes, and at least for me, I remember being there more often when I was younger.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting. Well, people describe it as one of the rewards of creating, is to get themselves into this thing that we've all come to know as the flow state, this sort of period of utter absorption, where all of the distractions in life just disappear. And I think that is real. I've even, as a terrible painter, I've even experienced it. But people actually seek a kind of physical sensation, as well as a total absorption. I mean- I have this one chapter in the book of Ian Adelman, who is this crazy magnificent sandcastle maker. And that's why I wanted to talk to him.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I wanted to talk to him about making this thing that would, that he has one day to do and then perishes at the end of the day. I thought that was something quite beautiful. And he describes making sandcastles not just in terms of the kind of crazy, almost supernatural focus, but also in terms of its physical sensation and describes it, compares it to the feeling he has on a bicycle, riding in traffic in New York City, dodging cars. And that just seemed like a fantastic metaphor because he's moving forward in motion. He's dodging cars. People, you know, when you make something, in a way, it's like,

• 19:01Speaker 01

  you know, this is just totally not true, but I'll say it anyway. It's like a video game. You know, things are coming at you. You're, you have to deal quickly with them. You have to make decisions about what you're going to do with them on the way to something else.

• 19:14Ezra Klein?

  What do you think about the relationship here between speed and this kind of creativity or intuition? Because there are people here working very slowly. And then something that comes up again and again is the power of the deadline.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Ezra Klein?

  The thing they did very quickly.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the people are different, right? Bob Dylan, for instance, famously said, he wrote all his songs in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. I have a piece of stationery in the book. The book is filled with process artifacts of all kinds. It's a very visual book. And this is just a written record of him writing Blowing in the Wind and inverting a stanza or a verse. And some people do their best work really fast and some people take forever doing it. But it's important to remember that those people who do it very fast, they're able to do it very fast because they have, just getting back to the body, like an athlete, they have kind of body memory.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  They have skills so ingrained in them that their impulsive decisions are informed by a lifetime of experience.

• 20:24Ezra Klein?

  I think another example of this just spitting the work out, at least at the beginning, is the chapter of Stephen Sondheim. So can you talk a bit about that process for him?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  There was a situation that's from The Musical Company, and there was a situation that the playwright wrote in which a bride is flipping out, having a full-blown anxiety attack. And it starts, and I have it in the book, it starts as this monologue of her having a kind of nervous breakdown. It's a great little monologue. And he thinks of this as a song, and he writes a song called "The Wedding Is Off." And its function is to recreate this nervous breakdown in music. And it's kind of a disaster. The singer can't sing the song. The rhythm's all wrong. It's jaggedy. It doesn't build. He's made a bunch of mistakes.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And it becomes absolutely clear the thing has to go. And just ruthlessly, just ruthlessly, he goes boing and just ejects the song right out of the show. And because he is Stephen Sondheim, the new song had different rules. And so the new song would have to be started essentially from scratch. And he was able to write the song, which is called "Getting Married Today", in a week, which is crazy.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Listen, everybody. Look, I don't know what you're waiting for. A wedding? What's a wedding? It's a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever, which is maybe the most horrifying word I've ever heard, and which is followed by a honeymoon where suddenly he'll realize he saddled with a nut and wanted to kill me, which he should. Thanks for lunch, but I'm not getting married. So go have lunch, because I'm not getting married. You've been grand, but I'm not getting married. And don't just stand there. I'm not getting married. And don't tell Paul that I'm not getting married today.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  When you listen to this song, which is well-known to be maybe the most dense, fastest song in all of musical theater, and also one of the most difficult to sing, you will see its incredible complexity. It's really one of the great theater songs of all time. And he was able to do it in a week because he had solved all the problems the first time.

• 22:49Ezra Klein?

  The Amy Sillman chapter is the one that sticks with me most. And it is worth the price of admission on the book just for that. So to give a little bit of background, abstract painter. And you have 36 or 37.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  39.

• 23:04Ezra Klein?

  39. 39 of the iterations this one painting went through. And it transforms utterly, but it is never clear to me exactly why. And you have some of her reasoning, but she is also very honest in saying.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  It's not very convincing, her reasoning, right?

• 23:23Ezra Klein?

  Not at all.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:24Ezra Klein?

  But she says in a way that others don't.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  She owns it, absolutely.

• 23:27Ezra Klein?

  It's not clear that this would have been any worse if I had stopped at number seven.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:30Ezra Klein?

  Or number 12 or whichever.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  The chapter starts with saying, you know, the first one was the best. I shouldn't have changed anything. And I actually could have done, she has about 100, over 100 iterations of this. I could have basically devoted the entire book to the path of this painting.

• 23:46Ezra Klein?

  And so there is this question then, is what you're listening to editorial intuition or neurosis?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Well, they might be the same thing. I mean, it's part of her, I don't know what you'd call it, I guess. Her own self-description, that it doesn't actually matter where she stops. That the important thing in the making of the painting is the making and destroying and making and destroying, that that's actually what the whole thing is about. I use this phrase, it's almost like a game of musical chairs where she decides to stop in that what I think is a fairly neurotic process, but I don't mean neurotic in a bad way. She is performing a kind of artistic ritual. And it happens to be that a great painting usually is the thing that she ends up with.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  But also, let me just tell you, because you can't really fully grok it until you see it, there's so many beautiful paintings on the way that she just ruthlessly erases. She doesn't really even think twice about it. And she doesn't have a particular regret about it. In fact, as she puts it at one point, regret. Is kind of what the work is all about.

• 25:01Ezra Klein?

  One of my very favorite chapters, Cheryl Pope, using felt in this absolutely gutting piece of art, Mother and Child on Blue Mat. I found it extraordinarily moving. Can you say who she is, what that work is?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  She's a Chicago-based artist. She works in lots of different media. She had been deeply upset while making this work, which of course, interested me. And she was just absolutely a wonderful person. But the story here is that she had three consecutive miscarriages. And she really, very much wanted to be a mother, wanted to give birth to a child. And she said she felt almost deranged to, in a sense, create the child in an artwork,

• 25:55Speaker 01

  to have the artwork be the motherhood that she couldn't have physically. And so she created a work on felt, in which she visualized the child. In fact, at one point, two children, then one child. At one point, the child and the mother had no faces, because she was afraid giving them faces would be too, well, specific for an artwork, but also too painful for her. And eventually, she decided she needed to give them faces. And after the work was finished, she regretted that decision.

• 26:34Ezra Klein?

  It's possible this is actually said in the chapter, but just while we were talking about it, the reason the felt is so affecting is it's something children make artwork out of.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not said in the chapter, but I think that's true. The other thing that I felt about the felt was that-

• 26:51Ezra Klein?

  It looks like yarn, I should say.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. Is that she has to punch through it. So, the physical act, we talked before about the way that physical action factors into the making of the art, but in this case, the punching through, since this was built on so much-

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Anger and upset also moved me.

• 27:17Ezra Klein?

  One thing the book is very interested in is tools. And something I noticed was how seldom a digital tool was mentioned. I feel like the only people who used a digital tool were the musicians recording into the Voice Memos app of their iPhone.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:36Ezra Klein?

  Almost everybody else was using paper of some sort or another. The notebooks were paper, the sketching was paper. It felt like people were really pushing themselves, particularly in the editing process, in the idea generation process onto paper. First, is that right? And second, why?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's not entirely right. There's a whole chapter that's the exception to that, which is about a guy named Tyler Hobbes who's a generative artist. And why I like that chapter so much is that the machine is super important. It becomes the hand. He creates algorithms, gives it to the computer, the computer spits stuff out, he reacts to it the same way that a painter might react to whatever they've painted with their hands. And then he changes the algorithm and just keeps going that way.

• 28:25Ezra Klein?

  Well, he's in a way become the editor of the machine.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 28:28Ezra Klein?

  Which I think, I have a thing that AI is going to turn us much more into editors.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:34Ezra Klein?

  Because we're going to have to know if the thing is spitting at us is correct.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And evaluate it, yes.

• 28:38Ezra Klein?

  The generative artist you mentioned, whose work is very cool. He has to be working in code because he is trying to get the computer to create more interesting work.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:51Ezra Klein?

  But the people for whom the question is, how do they get themselves to create more interesting work, felt to me almost ostentatiously oriented towards paper.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Towards paper, yeah.

• 29:00Ezra Klein?

  And that included the young ones. I didn't notice a large age gap here. It wasn't like the young people were all, you know, typing away on an iPad. And so what is it about paper? Why are they doing that?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Well, paper, for one thing, is something you can throw away. So there is a thing that a lot of artists and writers do, which is they create a first pass that is perishable, that is meant to be disposed of. So they write in longhand as opposed to type something. They paint, like in the Amy Sillman example, and mean to paint it over, or George Saunders.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Who did such a great episode with you that I listen to actually all the time. George Saunders gives himself six months to just totally screw around as the way to make the thing. So there is a kind of built in failure stage, very important, I think, and pretty universally expressed.

• 29:59Ezra Klein?

  Well, my theory, the thing-

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you have a theory.

• 30:01Ezra Klein?

  The hypothesis I am testing here to see if it comes up-

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  Is that it is easier to achieve certain kinds of states with paper. So I did an episode some time ago now with Marian Wolf, who's a great scholar of how people read and the reading mind. And the point of a lot of her work is that different things happen in your mind, reading on paper, reading on a screen, reading on different kinds of screens, what is happening with distraction. I mean, it just changes. Form does change content. It certainly changes the reception of content.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think you're more focused when you're working with paper. I mean, I find, at least in my own experience, and I, you know, I'm a focus group of one, that my mind wanders more when I'm reading on a screen. I mean, even just thinking about the smoothness of a computer screen versus the texture of a page. One has a kind of scratchiness. There's a lot, in art, there's a lot of preoccupation with what the, what the surface feels like, the toothiness of the surface. In fact, you know, my book is, is sort of smoother than I would have wanted. It was the, the smoothness was a compromise in order to get the imagery production to be so good. So, and the imagery production is really

• 31:15Speaker 01

  good, but I would have rather it had a kind of, um, almost mountainous kind of texture.

• 31:22Ezra Klein?

  Which the cover does.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, the cover does.

• 31:24Ezra Klein?

  The book is a, I really want to say this, and I want people to hear it. It's a piece of art. It's a, it's a beautiful object. I mean, I enjoyed its physical form more than I've enjoyed the physical form of a book in a long time.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Oh, that's nice.

• 31:38Ezra Klein?

  And that was clearly highly intentional.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, the, um, the cover is a-

• 31:45Speaker 01

  The image on it is a Proust manuscript in which he had crossed the whole thing out with these giant blue Xs. And then to actually get Penguin to agree to do the book in this cloth cover reproducing those Xs, it just felt like, okay, that's, that's really is the book I'm trying to make here. And, and they were generous enough to do that.

• 32:10Ezra Klein?

  I like this topic of the way, the feel of a thing, or your relationship to a material or a tool, changes the way you think. You have a great chapter with the musician Rostam.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 32:22Ezra Klein?

  And I want to play a bit of the song you talk about, "In a River."

• 32:39Ezra Klein?

  So he starts off playing the mandolin there, and then he switches to the guitar, which is such an unusual transition, and it just changes the tone of the song completely. And what's wild to me in your interview with him is that Rostam didn't know how to play the mandolin before composing that song at all. And this just comes up repeatedly, where people are using new materials for work that becomes really important, like Kara Walker using sugar to make that massive sculpture. What's going on in this confrontation with new tools and materials and approaches? What does it unlock for these artists who really know something really well, to then move into using something they don't know that well?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think the artist is drawn to things that will excite them. And I think that artists, like anyone, get bored doing the same thing over and over again. And so they, they seek new adventure. One of my incredible frustrations as a painter, even today, and my painting is just very, very tight and conservative, and...

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I just decided about two weeks ago that I would just put away all the brushes I had, wouldn't touch them, and then I would just make paintings using whatever materials I have around. Palette knives, sure, but scissors, any ruler, anything that I had so that I could smear the paint, so that it wouldn't have the kind of fastidious relationship to the thing that it really is in real life. And I wanted to just allow myself a little bit of berserk. So I'm, myself, trying new materials in order to produce something different. And actually, it's kind of working. I was really struck by all that, too, that

• 34:22Speaker 01

  how many times in the Cheryl Pope chapter, for instance, she just keeps changing media. And she doesn't know, she tells me that she goes into Home Depot and she asks the salesperson, "How do you actually do that? How do you use glue this way? Or how do you use felt this way? What is the device I should buy?" And they just continue to do it. The point I would emphasize here, because I found it both reassuring and frustrating to hear this over and over again, was that the reason they're able to do this, the reason they're able to work in a different medium that they don't know is because of their training.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And one of the things that training does, the Rostam example, Rostam, I mean, as he describes, playing the mandolin is just playing the guitar upside down. And he has gotten a really rigorous, early musical education, which enables him to be able to do the thing that I couldn't do. I don't know how to play the guitar. I would certainly not know how to play the mandolin. So anyway, there's that, it's a basic thing that kind of has to be said, that the training really helps. There's not a lot of short cutting that goes on. But the other thing is, just, we had talked about this a little bit earlier, is faith, is that once they learn, they can actually succeed using new materials, they're

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Moved to use new materials again and again.

• 35:55Ezra Klein?

  It made me think of Stephen Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From. And one of his arguments in that book is that great ideas often come from adjacency. Somebody knows a lot about a domain.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Ezra Klein?

  And then looks over to the next domain and applies it.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:08Ezra Klein?

  And that's what I see happening often here, which is adjacency. Rostam knows a lot about, I assume, the guitar and other things, looks over into the mandolin and can feel something.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I would say that this whole book is exactly that. I never wrote before. I hate writing and I have been a terrible writer for most of my life because I had this idea of how to write, that there was a way to write. And so that way to write was pretentious and I couldn't stand it. And so the draft process was really teaching me how to write. It was like using my editor skills that I had honed in a lot of years and applying it to myself. And I kind of found I was a pretty good editor of myself. And I was able to strip this thing down, strip this thing down, strip this thing down into something I could stand. I still didn't like doing it, but I'm not horrified by what I produced.

• 37:03Ezra Klein?

  As a writer, I functionally cannot start writing until I can see the entire thing.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:09Ezra Klein?

  So many of the writers I know, they write a little piece for here, they start in the middle.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Nonfiction writers?

• 37:17Ezra Klein?

  Nonfiction writers. I know tons of nonfiction writers who they're very able to put together the pieces where they know what the scene, they have this argument, and then they begin stitching.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:28Ezra Klein?

  For me, I will just be stuck until the entire structure reveals. Now, that might not be the final structure the piece has. Things can change in the edit. But I need the whole thing there.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I'm more like you.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  But people are different. That's the point here.

• 37:46Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  There's 43 chapters in the book and there's 43 different ways that people make art. That's not to say there isn't anything that unites them. I mean, I do think that they are a little bit unusually a collection of freaks. And that is that they

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Have a kind of superhuman drive that enables them. There's a great quote that I found early on by James Baldwin saying, "Talent is insignificant. What matters are love, discipline, luck, and most of all, endurance."

• 38:21Ezra Klein?

  And one thing- That's what people who are really talented at things say.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Really talented. Well, I think it's really, I mean, you know, having done a kind of data set of these 43, that is, seems to be true. These things take a long time. They're hard work. Ultimately, they need to go the distance. They need to not give up when pretty much everyone else would give up.

• 38:38Ezra Klein?

  So we've been talking a bunch here about artists who edit a lot. But I want to think about the other side of that, too, those who go out more raw. So let's hear a clip by this performance artist, Grady West, who invented a character named DeDina Martina.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Do you have good salads?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Very good.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Oh, good. Then I'd like a small Caesarian. Oh, but does it have glutton? I really don't want glutton.

• 39:01Speaker 05

  I'll have your glutton. I'll have her glutton.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  You will?

• 39:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, just get it on the side.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Oh, that's great. Yeah, just have him put the glutton on the side. And Doreen, I think I'll hand things off to you.

• 39:14Speaker 05

  Is your Red Bull in a can or is it fresh? In a can. Oh, that's a shame. Do you have any breakfast wines?

• 39:21Ezra Klein?

  So Grady West is voicing the Caesarian lady there. That's Dina Martina. How did that act, that persona, come together?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so he goes to this cabaret and he doesn't think about it for one second. The night before, he finds a wig, I think, and he smears this makeup on his face and he goes out with nothing scripted and just starts to talk and calls himself Dina Martina. This all happens without any forethought whatsoever. And he does have a very particular sense of humor. We were talking before about taste. Sense of humor seems to be the same, operates under the same wavelength. He has now ridden Dina Martina.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  For decades, I think three decades, into an international stage act in lots of different places. I know him from Provincetown, where he's kind of in residence over the summers. But it is an hour of a character completely oblivious to how anyone else would see him. It has a bunch of characters, one of them, you heard, Doreen. Doreen is the heir to the Kotex fortune. He has a child named Feibi, which is a puppet. The thing is insane. It's just completely unhinged and it's perfectly intact in terms of a bizarro world that he has created. There's no cracks in it.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  And he developed it in one second, in 19 what have you, into a sort of alternative cabaret context. It's amazing. And then he, now, yeah, he writes it. Now it's honed to a 55 minutes, but basically it's still anarchy.

• 41:37Ezra Klein?

  One thing I enjoyed about the book is the age range of the artists profiled.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:42Ezra Klein?

  Generalizing wildly, what is different? What are the hallmarks of great art produced early in a career and late in a career?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  For the most part, I think that one very important quality of an artist is that they have faith that they can make the thing. There's a great line that Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours, said to me at one point, he just, I didn't even realize he was saying it, but I was asking him how it was possible that when he'd written a draft of the book, he had to throw away the draft and... I kind of probed him about that and didn't that feel just really awful? He said, no, there's plenty more where that came from. And he just said it like that. And that is a one-sentence description of a thing that is absolutely essential to an artist, which is the faith that they can keep doing it. And those people, as they got older, people had more and more faith.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  The flip side of that, and one thing I know from my own experience, is that you make kind of wonderful things when you're young, when you don't know any better. There was a magazine I did called Seven Days when I was starting out. It was really, it broke every rule in the book. It just was like, it didn't have a middle, it was just all sidebars. It was just, it was, it was nutty. That from the perspective of someone who understands how to build magazines, it broke every rule and for no good reason. And I would never make that in my life now or in the last 25 years. I would have, I'd just looked at it and thought, it's kind of amateurish and stupid. And yeah, it kind of worked.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  It was exactly the right thing for then, and I did something that I wouldn't be able to do later. Look at Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. He wrote that book throughout his life. There's the young man's version and there's the old man's version. And some of the language changes as he gets closer to death, and that's interesting. And the poem is in some ways better at the end, but not in all ways. In some ways, it was best at the beginning.

• 43:42Ezra Klein?

  I know writers, and primarily I know political writers and nonfiction writers. And my gloss on this would be that, pretty in politics, young writers are arrogant and overconfident and don't know what they don't know and don't know what's going to fail. And old writers are way too cautious and know too much what's going to fail and are too locked into what the rules have been. And both sides are completely right in what they're annoyed at in the other.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  And the balance of that in any given career is really hard.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  It is, and it's not necessarily true that the middle-aged person has it all together.

• 44:19Ezra Klein?

  No, and I really mean this, and everybody is right. I've come to think of the, of this kind of thing, and I think there are many dynamics like this, that you have to think of it like an ecosystem.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:29Ezra Klein?

  We always want people to be the right balance, but ecosystems need to be in balance. You need like young political thinking. That is kind of wild.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:41Ezra Klein?

  And doesn't know that we tried this and it completely failed.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:45Ezra Klein?

  And you actually need that, just as you need the old thinking, and one is not better than the other, they need to both be there. And asking one person to embody it all?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:53Ezra Klein?

  Is not reasonable.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, that's true. I mean, I'll make, I mean, I just think balance is correct in almost every context. And just to pull back to artists for one second, the essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance, or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It's so hard. It's so hard to get the equilibrium right. You're too childish and you can make a glorious mess, but it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult and the thing has no fire, no, there's nothing animating it. So this crazy middle ground, in all of these cases that

• 45:38Speaker 01

  we're talking about, is somehow where you have to live. And it's very hard to be there.

• 45:45Ezra Klein?

  One thing that comes up a bunch in the book is you'll know that people will find a much earlier version of a piece for you than they realize they had.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:54Ezra Klein?

  Right? A jotting, a draft, something else. And it's far before they realize they were working on the thing they were working on. And you often, you keep repeating, it was there. It was already there.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:06Ezra Klein?

  It made me think, years ago, my story of myself as a journalist, it's the whole thing about how I sort of learned to be a policy journalist, you know, writing about healthcare at this certain point in time. And somebody brought me some columns I had done for the alternative school newspaper when I was at UC Santa Cruz. And this was before all that. And it turned out I just sounded like myself.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 46:30Ezra Klein?

  Right? I was writing about John Kerry's tax plan. And I was shocked to find out that I was writing about John Kerry's taxman. I didn't think I had that interest at that point.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:39Ezra Klein?

  And there is something that may come out, or it may not come out, but there is often a sensibility buried somewhere that is trying to come out for a long time.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:50Ezra Klein?

  Whether you can let it out is a question, and socially dependent, and a million other things, but there is something buried in people that, for better or for worse, it's often hard to get away from.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, okay, so I have two responses to that. One is, one of the really fun things about the method of this book was to actually show the various artists the early work, or the early version of the thing, which would usually amaze them, and it would get them to speak truthfully and to remember exactly how it went in a way different than their memory has distorted it over time. Second thing is that, yes, people have a sensibility that is theirs, that they can't escape. And this, again, this is a refrain, "Oh, my God, how many people have said, you can't run away from yourself, you can't, you are yourself, that's it." I mean, Gregory Kruzen, who's a photographer who makes these very unusual photographs,

• 47:47Speaker 01

  which are kind of like film stills, and they're giant and very beautiful, he was just apologizing, in a sense, over and over again, for the fact that all of them inhabit a certain kind of common sensibility, which I thought was marvelous, but he was, he says, "You're just constantly trying to escape it." Kara Walker, you know, when she was making the sugar sculpture called The Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby, she was tired of the Annabelleum silhouettes that had kind of made her famous, or not tired, but she felt she'd exhausted them, and she was trying to do something different. But how different?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  She says at one point, "You, Kara, who are you?" And that is kind of a question they're all asking. I kept, you know, talking to Thomas Bartlett, who was a music producer, and we were talking about this record, which was people doing covers, Martha Wainwright, or Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, their own versions of covers of Neil Young's Harvest, I think.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And no matter what their intention was, the song would sound like them. It would not sound like Neil Young, it would sound like them. And they were not trying. This was just something they couldn't get away from. So this, I think, obvious, but still impossible not to marvel at fact is that you are who you are.

• 49:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to end with something very related to this, which is this distinction or question of whether you're editing for yourself or editing for the audience. I found myself pulling a bunch of my media diet back to magazines over the past year.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 49:39Ezra Klein?

  One, I think they remain in many ways my favorite form. They're just remarkable acts of curation, almost every single one of them. And I found myself, once again, in a way I haven't been for some time, just sort of desperate to feel like somebody actually liked this.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:57Ezra Klein?

  Maybe I wouldn't, but somebody, somewhere did. They chose it, they made an intentional decision. And I want to bring it back to New York Magazine, the magazine you edited. I love New York Magazine, longtime subscriber, it's my favorite magazine. And the thing that has always amazed me about it is that I cannot describe why it all goes together, but the sensibility is very coherent and it has survived you, which is more impressive. Right? It has been great since you've left, which means that what you did was not just you sitting there telling everybody what to do, that there's something that emerged. You guys do all, or did do, all kinds of Washington DC profiles, but I know you would not really profile Jake Sullivan.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:43Ezra Klein?

  But there's another kind of profile you would do.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:47Ezra Klein?

  I cannot extract out of it the description of it. So how were you figuring out what went with what? Was it an idea of the audience? Was it just you, you were just editing for yourself and you are the audience? Who's on the other end of that process?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Certainly the latter. I was always editing for myself and the reason I left the magazine is that I felt like I was no longer. The audience for it, and the audience needed to be younger than I was, and they needed to have a certain way of looking at the world that I didn't have anymore. So I left. It's very poignant to me that the curator, the editor, the decider has become of less importance in these times. But I don't know how, I never knew, in all of my years as an editor, I never knew how to edit for somebody else. I had to edit for myself. I had to have this thing that we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, this thing that you trust. And the only way to trust it is to feel it.

• 51:47Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a nice place to end. So then, always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Okay. There are three kind of related to this project, but they're books, they're all three books I really like. One of them is a book of interviews with Frances Bacon by David Sylvester. I think there's nine of them. I learned more about art from reading these interviews. I'm not a wild fan of Frances Bacon's art. I am a wild fan of Frances Bacon as a thinker about how art gets made. And I learned so much from that book that went into this book that I wrote. So that's one. Another book, written by one of the subjects of the book, Amy Sillman, is a book called Faux pas. She's a great painter. She is an amazing writer. And this book is so much fun, filled with her own erudition, absolutely,

• 52:35Speaker 01

  but also illustrations, charlits. It's just a fun object and also really smart and wonderful. And then, because nobody talks about these when they come here, I want to throw in a purely visual book. It's the sketchbooks of Richard Diebenkorn. It's just pages and pages and pages of years and years and years of his sketchbooks, his drawings of his wife, himself, some in pencil, some in ink. I can just sit and live in those pages, imagining him as the drawer, which is kind of was what my project was all about. So there you go.

• 53:14Ezra Klein?

  Adam Moss, thank you very much.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 53:25Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team includes Roland Hu, Kristin Lin, and Aman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Semelousky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero, Rachel Baker, and James Burnett.