Pod Insights Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso The New Yorker at 100 (with David Remnick) About this episode In the first 100 years of The New Yorker, only five have edited the magazine. Since 1998, it’s been David Remnick at the helm, shepherding the publication into the 21st century.
We discuss Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City (3:24), the new documentary, The New Yorker at 100 https://www.netflix.com/watch/81770824?source=35, chronicling the magazine’s evolution (11:00), how comedian Jon Stewart understands the rising influence of the podcast Manosphere (26:20), and the future of media (47:00).
Then, we turn to our first talk with Remnick from 2023, reflecting on the art that influenced him growing up in New Jersey (54:00) to his pathway to journalism at Princeton University (1:03:30) and his start at The Washington Post under the tutelage of legendary editor Ben Bradlee (1:09:00). We close with lessons from his early days running The New Yorker (1:14:30), why he cautions against despair (1:26:20), and a tribute to the creative longevity of musician Joni Mitchell (1:34:00).
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Transcript 16,609 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:21 Sam Fragoso? This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
0:38 Sam Fragoso? Today, editor, writer, journalist, David Remnick. Remnick has been at the helm of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. Before then, he was a reporter at The Washington Post under the tutelage of the late, great Ben Bradley. His work as a foreign correspondent in Russia, where he chronicled the end of the Soviet empire, resulted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lenin's Tomb in 1994. In the 27 years since he took over The New Yorker, Remnick has continued to write. He's published books on Muhammad Ali, Barack Obama, and, most recently, musicians with a certain kind of
1:18 Sam Fragoso? creative longevity. That book, titled Holding the Note, includes profiles of Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith. In our first conversation, which you'll hear a little bit of later in our program, we talk about his love of music, his salad days in the newsroom of The Washington Post, the state of journalism, and a whole lot more. But to begin, I called David back up to talk through the politics of 2025: Zoran Mamdani's mayoral win in New York City, Donald Trump's grievance-driven agenda, and the rising influence of the podcast Manosphere. I also wanted to have David back on to discuss The New Yorker's Centennial,
2:00 Sam Fragoso? which includes a new documentary on Netflix directed by Marshall Curry. That film, The New Yorker at 100, is a real testament to the invaluable work the magazine continues to produce with Remnick as editor in chief. And so we talk about the documentary, the magazine's history, its future, and of course, where David sees himself in the years ahead. That's coming up next with David Remnick.
2:42 Sam Fragoso? David Remnick, welcome back to the show.
2:44 Speaker 01 Good to talk to you again.
2:45 Sam Fragoso? How are you doing?
2:47 Speaker 01 I'm OK. I'm OK.
2:48 Sam Fragoso? Is that true?
2:54 Speaker 01 You think I'm going to pull a David Mamet on you? I listened to that, Sam, man. Wow. I don't know if I told you this. I listened to the David Mamet and the Terry Gross in one night.
3:06 Sam Fragoso? Wow.
3:07 Speaker 01 Wow is all you can say.
3:09 Sam Fragoso? And you felt what? I mean, how many feelings did you feel?
3:11 Speaker 01 After listening to Terry Gross, I felt faith in mankind. That's what I felt.
3:16 Sam Fragoso? Oh, well, that's very nice of you.
3:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:18 Sam Fragoso? I want to start with what is one of the biggest political stories of the year, to say nothing of New York stories, which is Zoran Mamdani's mayoral win. I'm curious, a month out from his victory and another month before he's sworn into office, how are you processing the whirlwind of his run? Because depending on which news outlet you frequent, his win seems to portend either the beginning or the end of the modern Democratic Party.
3:48 Speaker 01 Oh, I don't believe any of that. But here's what I'd say. I got a chance to interview him at some length for the radio hour. I think we were together for over an hour. And there are a number of conclusions that I would draw from it if you're interested. First of all, he's, and this is nothing original, but he's very talented. He's very disciplined. He knows how to marshal a certain degree of charm. He's called on an electorate that I don't think has felt a representation in city politics now or ever, which is to say Muslim voters, South Asian voters. All of that is extremely exciting. At the same
4:28 Speaker 01 time, he's running against, let's just be polite here and say, limited talent, when it finally came down to it. Curtis Lee was somebody I think I first encountered when I was a 22-year-old intern at The Washington Post, writing a long piece about him.
4:45 Sam Fragoso? In that interview, you described Cuomo, quote, "as someone who has the likability of a traffic jam."
4:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. And Andrew Cuomo, who's clearly, let's just say, has exhausted his, or the city has exhausted its patience with him. And I think a lot of Cuomo's voters were people who were anxious about Mumdani. Anxious probably for two reasons. One, I think there were a fair number of Jewish voters who did not see a friend in Zoran Mumdani. And then the other are people who were freaked out by the notion of democratic socialism. And these are not all wealthy people, too. So, look, Mumdani was never going to get a lot of votes in Staten Island, which is naturally fairly conservative by New York standards.
5:35 Speaker 01 But am I nervous? Well, you know, you reach a certain age, and the idea of somebody who is your son's age, having 300,000 employees under him, how old are you, Sam?
5:48 Sam Fragoso? Thirty-one.
5:48 Speaker 01 Thirty-one, okay. So you're two years younger than Mamdani. How many, can you imagine 300,000 employees, what it is? I'm 67. I could, I can't, I can't imagine 200. So there's that, that piece of business. You know, this was not a guy, and I'm, I'm very impressed with him in many, many ways. But this is not a guy who ever ran anything. So there was that anxiety. And even when he was in the, the assembly, it's not like he was setting the world on fire there either. I think he ran, my information is, my reporting is, and it's supplemented greatly by Eric Latch, who writes about this thing for us with great expertise, is that Mamdani ran for mayor this time out
6:29 Speaker 01 in the spirit that many young politicians will run for an ambitious office the first time, which is to make some inroads, get some name recognition, gain experience, have a lot of people go, oh, that guy, he's a comer. And then suddenly, the competition just collapsed and his talent prevailed.
6:50 Sam Fragoso? In your interview with Mamdani, you described him as radical. Rather, you said that he's described himself as radical. But there wasn't exactly a follow-up to that back and forth. And so I wanted to ask you, what about his politics or presentation read as radical to you?
7:08 Speaker 01 He's a unapologetic, ardent member of and activist in DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. I'm not criticizing it, I'm not, just, just describing it as fact. And by the standards of American politics, that is not anywhere near centrist. And, and, and he would never describe himself as a liberal. And what puts him in that category? I think some of his economic ideas and ways of going about them. Again, I'm not, I'm just describing here, not critiquing.
7:40 Sam Fragoso? You're not under investigation. It's okay.
7:42 Speaker 01 I, I sometimes feel I am, 24 hours a day. And he's not the first democratic socialist to be mayor. David Dinkins described himself as that too, interesting enough. You know, when I was in college.
7:56 Sam Fragoso? Which was last year?
7:57 Speaker 01 Some years ago. I don't know if I had like a membership card or a or anything, but I was very impressed with taken with a group called D-SOC, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. And the most prominent figure in that was Michael Harrington. You remember him? He wrote about poverty in America, a book that really impressed John Kennedy. And it just seemed to me, and it still seems to me, by the way, that the richest country in the world should be able to provide health care for its people. That higher education shouldn't cost $100,000. And I could go on and on about education. And so I don't know what that makes me, a social democrat or what the label is.
8:41 Speaker 01 But surely M'Ghanney sees himself on the left of the American spectrum.
8:49 Sam Fragoso? Shortly after he won, you said that the fire hydrant will open up on January 1st when he takes office, and it's unrelenting. To go along with the metaphor here, what do you imagine he'll have to extinguish?
9:01 Speaker 01 Well, Sam, I'm the editor of a magazine and it's got a couple hundred people working for it. And I pick talking dog cartoons and talk about ideas and arguments in the office, all kinds of things. And I it's pretty exhausting. But I'm not running a city of eight and a half million people where, you know, there are all kinds of constituency groups that are furious on any given day and a number of labor unions or police departments or the fire department or to bitch, that job is I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
9:37 Sam Fragoso? Well, would that have been Andrew Cuomo? Was that?
9:43 Sam Fragoso? All right, so leading the witness.
9:46 Speaker 01 But I'm sure, I could swear to it, but I would assume that I, at one point in my life, voted for Andrew Cuomo for governor or something. But his behavior was inexcusable. And he looked, just as a candidate, he looked worn out. In that first debate, which very few people saw, it's on like the local thing called Channel One, which I love, M'Donny cleaned his clock.
10:14 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
10:15 Speaker 01 The second debate was dull. M'Donny was just playing not to lose. And Curtis Lee was having, you know, a grand old time.
10:22 Sam Fragoso? Amazing.
10:23 Speaker 01 Curtis Lee lives down the street from me in what I think is a pretty small apartment with like 15 cats and his wife. He's been an eccentric figure on the New York Times.
10:33 Sam Fragoso? You invite him over for dinner fairly often, is that right?
10:36 Speaker 01 Not with those damn cats.
10:37 Sam Fragoso? So you've alluded to this job that you have as the editor in chief of The New Yorker a couple of times now, talking about how daunting and difficult it is just to pick out cartoons, although I think there's a lot more to it. Harold Ross, who founded The New Yorker 100 years ago, had three rules: never write about writers, never name editors, and never write about the magazine.
11:02 Speaker 01 We break them all.
11:04 Sam Fragoso? Now, with this new documentary on Netflix, The New Yorker at 100, you're in clear violation of all three.
11:11 Speaker 01 Totally.
11:12 Sam Fragoso? Why?
11:13 Speaker 01 Unapologetically. And I also, by the way, I'm happy to have the old lady in Dubuque read the magazine, which he also spoke against, so.
11:20 Sam Fragoso? He really, he threw that lady under the bus, or...
11:22 Speaker 01 He really did.
11:23 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
11:24 Speaker 01 It's cruel and unusual.
11:25 Sam Fragoso? Why was it time to violate those rules?
11:27 Speaker 01 Well, writing about writers, we've been publishing profiles of writers for decades, and I hate to tell you, even in Harold Ross's time, they did that, too. What were the other rules? Were these facacta rules that he had?
11:40 Sam Fragoso? Never name editors and never write about the magazine. I think the point-
11:44 Speaker 01 We don't have a masthead.
11:45 Sam Fragoso? Right.
11:46 Speaker 01 People, you know, who wouldn't know any better, who don't know who edits the magazine, because we don't tell them in print or online in a clear way, but now, at the end of pieces, they, you know, do have little bios sometimes and these little crazy little pictures. I don't know, it's just some of these rules just run out of gas and never made any sense in the first place. They just didn't. But, you know, Harold Ross was public in his own way, too. He was a fixture in New York nightlife. He was at the, if you want to keep yourself a secret, you don't spend every night at the Algonquin Round Table.
12:22 Sam Fragoso? Right, which is where the magazine was formed in the first place.
12:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:25 Sam Fragoso? So this documentary is, is kind of a deep dive into the last hundred years. And, and I wondered, as someone who has spent their life asking people questions, how did you feel having to answer them in front of a camera?
12:41 Speaker 01 You know, it was less answering questions because that I've done a little bit, you know, I, to my everlasting pleasure, did that with you some time ago for, for, for quite some time. And it was an amazing experience. And I've had other experiences that are maybe a little less amazing, but I've answered questions.
13:03 Sam Fragoso? But, but rarely has someone brought a camera into your house.
13:06 Speaker 01 This is the thing. That's the thing. To have cameras in the office, going to meetings, and then presumably, and this is the presumption of the filmmaker, just as it is of the nonfiction writer, that the subject would then forget about the presence of those probing colonoscopy instruments, was an interesting experience and a little unnerving.
13:31 Sam Fragoso? According to a piece from Jill Lepore in the Centennial issue, William Shawn believed that all writers were children who should be indulged. And Robert Gottlieb believed all writers were children who should not be indulged. And David Remnick believes writers are what?
13:47 Speaker 01 Adults worthy of respect. And maybe it's because unlike Harold Ross, who was a, you know, an itinerant newspaper reporter, to be sure, and William Shawn, who wrote, I think, one Talk of the Town piece in his time. How could I, you know, I'd be calling myself a child. I know, I know better. And adults are plenty childish at times, but even when you think of how you pay writers to be perfectly crude about it, yes, you pay a fee or a salary, but I think also respect has to be paid and attention. And I always wake up in the morning knowing,
14:28 Speaker 01 not thinking or imagining, but knowing that somewhere, any number of writers haven't heard from me in a while and need to touch base and need... Writing is you're on a tight rope in public and there's no net. And that is an activity that deserves having somebody looking out for you. So I try, and I know I'm always failing this, always, always, always, to spend extra time in being supportive of people's endeavors because it's really hard. It's really hard. Against their better judgment, they're doing this for a living, and it's really difficult.
15:10 Sam Fragoso? Why do you think you're always failing?
15:12 Speaker 01 Because we don't have two or three writers. So you know, you can, you know, there's just so many fingers you have to put in the veritable die, you know, of people's needs or desires to hear from you. It's fun, but it's also necessary to get on the phone and talk with writers just to bullshit about what they're working on. I think in the old New Yorker, as I understood the old culture of the New Yorker, it was considered vulgar to ask people about what they were working on or, God forbid, to ask them when they might be finished with what they're working on. And I understand that, too, but we do have to come out every day and every week. So I have, those practicalities need tending to, too.
15:53 Sam Fragoso? When the writer and editor Roger Angel hadn't received a piece from John Updike in a while, I've heard that he would drop a line to Updike to tell him about a promising young writer the magazine had just discovered.
16:07 Speaker 01 Just to get his competitive juices flowing. And Updike, this was John Updike. This is a guy who published 50, 60 books in his life, should have won the Nobel Prize by any, any stretch. And was the, while being one of the great novelists of his moment, was also one of the great men of letters ever. He was a pretty good poet and seemed to have an active social life as well. And even Updike, with the word that there was this young up and comer, would be prodded into a competitive frenzy. So that he'd then run to the desk and write a short story or an essay about a novel that he had some enthusiasm or contempt for. It is interesting to know that.
16:52 Sam Fragoso? So what are, what are, what are your methods of subtle, loving manipulation to get them back to the page?
17:01 Speaker 01 Sometimes it's not so subtle.
17:03 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
17:04 Speaker 01 I, you know, I would love, I would love to tell you that just by a, a nod of the head or a wink of the eye or, you know, ever so gracious little piece of language, I'm able to prod people some. But sometimes you have to say, my God, we're going to get beat 16 ways till Sunday on this story if we keep, if we keep lingering. Now, I'm not sure I would have said that to any number of fiction writers or Janet Malcolm. But, you know, we're also writing about politics. And at any given moment, we're probably not the only geniuses who've thought that it might be a good idea
17:48 Speaker 01 to write a profile of Cash Patel or something like that. I still have enough of the Washington Post gene in me, and I'm not ashamed of it, to be competitive. Because I think the reader benefits from it. Journalism benefits from it. Also, I don't mind winning.
18:06 Sam Fragoso? That's what I think. I think you're an extremely competitive person.
18:09 Speaker 01 I am.
18:10 Sam Fragoso? And I think, and something I have experienced, is you write very direct, thoughtful emails. One to two sentences.
18:18 Speaker 01 I, like the rest of the world, has probably lost the habit of leisurely written letters. Recently, I was reading two books of letters, Oliver Sacks's letters and John Updike's letters. And you can't tell me that those guys weren't writing those letters with the eye toward publication. It wasn't just to communicate with their family, or their boyfriends, or girlfriends, or mistresses, or whatever. Even their aggrieved notes to editors, or... There's a finish to them. There's a desire for them to be read beyond the correspondent. That's very striking. We don't have that. And that's probably a poverty. But I do think it's important nevertheless to touch base.
19:03 Sam Fragoso? I think one of the ways in which you are the most competitive, and one of the things I think the magazine does in a kind of singular way, is the profile. And as you know, I do an abundance of research for these episodes. And when I see that The New Yorker has published a profile of an upcoming guest, whether it's Nathan Heller on Richard Linklater, or Ian Parker on Noah Baumbach, it's a huge sigh of relief for me, because it means that...
19:27 Speaker 01 You don't have to do that much of a clip search.
19:29 Sam Fragoso? They've saved me hours and hours of legwork. But they also require months and months of reporting and access.
19:36 Speaker 01 They do.
19:37 Sam Fragoso? And we are in a moment where, quote, "people of interest" have an ability to tell their own story unmediated, whether they're on social media,
19:45 Speaker 01 Yep.
19:45 Sam Fragoso? On podcasts that they operate, documentaries that they executive produce. How do you and your writers make the case to a potential subject in the age of hagiography?
19:57 Speaker 01 It's a problem. So I'm a basketball fan. And I had the, as you know, every once in a while, I, instead of going to the beach, or... Going to Europe or whatever, I
20:07 Sam Fragoso? You don't go to the beach.
20:07 Speaker 01 Take the opportunity to go do.
20:08 Sam Fragoso? You don't go to the beach.
20:10 Speaker 01 Take a walk. I mean, how much time can you spend
20:12 Sam Fragoso? How often do you go to the beach?
20:14 Speaker 01 Waves are repetitious. So I, I, so I wanted to do a profile of, of LeBron James. As you know, and maybe it's my age speaking, I'm fascinated by the human condition of getting older. And I've written a number of music profiles of people who probably thought that they would be a sensation if they were lucky for a couple of years. And then they wake up and they're 80 and they're still on the stage. Bob Dylan, you know, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith just turned 80. And I never, it's a very interesting topic. So here's LeBron James. He's, he was then in his late 30s. I think he's 40 now. I want to do a profile. And I know it's complicated, but I thought I had it wrapped up. I thought I had it wrapped
20:57 Speaker 01 up. A friend of mine put me together with him. We had a great meeting. He seemed to agree. I gave him my book on Ali, put it on Instagram. I thought, man, I'm in. Three days later, his publicist shows up at my door and he said, we can't do this. If we want to tell, you know, have a comment on a thing of the moment, we go on Instagram. And if we want to quote, tell our story, we get J R Mooreinger or somebody to ghost write the book and we make a 15, 20 million dollar deal with Random House. Why in the world would I hand over my story to David Remnick, who can then do anything he goddamn
21:34 Speaker 01 well pleases? And this phenomenon is rife throughout show business. It's rife in sports. And I now find for very different reasons that we're doing more profiles that you and I would call a write around, even in politics. Mark Fisher's piece on Cash Patel. But on the other hand, we, we have these things called podcasts. So they go on a podcast with Rogan or whomever for, for, for three, four hours. And it's like a big bolus of material that, that, that you can use.
22:06 Sam Fragoso? Now, in the LeBron James case, what did you say in response?
22:10 Speaker 01 What can I say?
22:11 Sam Fragoso? You didn't roll over. You made the case.
22:13 Speaker 01 I made the case, but I'm not in the position of yes and no.
22:16 Sam Fragoso? Of course not.
22:18 Speaker 01 And then you go on, you know, you see these hagiographic documentaries where the six foot eight. Beautifully dressed guy walks through the bowels of the LA, whatever the arena is called now.
22:30 Sam Fragoso? Crypto.
22:32 Speaker 01 Can you believe that? Can you believe it's called the crypto fucking arena?
22:35 Sam Fragoso? We have to move on from that fact. It's too depressing.
22:37 Speaker 01 God. And you realize, oh, this is harder than when Roger Angel would get on a train with Bob Gibson, you know, and go from one town to another.
22:48 Sam Fragoso? But the reason I want you to make the case is because I want people to hear the work you guys do to get some of these profiles, because you still do.
22:56 Speaker 01 You do, and it gives me hope to remember that probably the greatest show business profile of all time, which we talk about endlessly, which is Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra Has A Cold. There's no interview. He follows him around. He sees him from a distance. He watches him record a little bit, but it's an exquisite piece of writing. Is it the same thing as a biography of Frank Sinatra? No, it is not. So I take solace in that, but it's still frustrating, I have to tell you.
23:21 Sam Fragoso? Okay, would you agree to be profiled in The New Yorker?
23:25 Speaker 01 That's such a good question.
23:29 Speaker 01 By whom?
23:31 Sam Fragoso? You don't get to assign it.
23:33 Speaker 01 That's true. Your question, though, and having been written about a little bit and having done conversations like this, does give me at least some sympathy or understanding of the nature of reluctance. And I have to tell you, as a tribe, we in the press are much more thin-skinned than politicians. Man, look at Chuck Schumer. Think of him what you will. Chuck Schumer in the last couple of years has been lambasted. Jon Stewart goes on, he makes fun of his accent, and he puts his, you know, his glasses at the edge of his nose, and he imitates him. And people bury him for, you know, being directionless in the Democratic Party. Not once, but day after day after day after day after day.
24:16 Speaker 01 If that happened to me, or anybody else that I consider a member of this, you know, highly variegated tribe, I think they'd disintegrate by comparison.
24:28 Speaker 01 So it's tough.
24:28 Sam Fragoso? It gives you pause.
24:30 Speaker 01 It does.
24:31 Sam Fragoso? You know, speaking of Jon Stewart, you recently sat with him at the New Yorker Festival. It's my understanding that the New Yorker makes 80% of its revenue from the 1.23 million paid subscribers.
24:44 Speaker 01 I corrected a little bit. It's probably closer to 70%. I don't have it in front of me, and we're more like 1.3 million.
24:52 Sam Fragoso? Okay, 1.3 million.
24:53 Speaker 01 1.4, depending on, you know, Apple, blah, blah, blah. It's a nice, it's a nice number.
24:58 Sam Fragoso? Let's round up. Let's round up to 1.4 today.
25:00 Speaker 01 Sure, we'll call it 5 million.
25:01 Sam Fragoso? Okay, so we'll say 10, 15 million.
25:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:04 Sam Fragoso? Everyone's wages are going up with that as well, right?
25:06 Speaker 01 Oh, for sure. Instantly.
25:10 Sam Fragoso? Some of the remaining 20 to 30% comes from the New Yorker Festival, where, as I said, you talked to Jon Stewart.
25:17 Speaker 01 A small, a very small.
25:18 Sam Fragoso? A small portion. And I wanted to sit with this exchange you had, because you mentioned Joe Rogan earlier.
25:23 Speaker 01 Right.
25:24 Sam Fragoso? And you and Stewart talked about making work in the modern media landscape, where people like Rogan have an outsized reach and impact. And you said that Rogan platforms people with dangerous ideas. And instead of contesting these ideas, whether it's Holocaust denialism or vaccine hesitancy, he'll soak the ideas in, he'll sit with them. And in turn, so does the audience. And I want to play what Stewart said to that.
25:55 Speaker 02 And so, and this is, I think this is a great point. And it's, whoever's job who thinks that that information is dangerous, to fight, to get their point of view out there, to counter what they think is misinformation. You can't just deputize people to say, he should have known better, and he should have prosecuted that point.
26:16 Speaker 01 But the reality is, Jon, is that it might be my job, or the New York Times job, or even your job, but I don't have the audience that Joe Rogan does.
26:24 Speaker 02 Then get it.
26:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:25 Speaker 02 Then find people who do, then go on, then go on that show, then do those things. Like, that is, it's not acceptable to just say, well, I don't like what he does. Then do it better, beat them at their own game. It's not enough to just complain that that guy got a platform, and don't platform that guy. There's no one in this world right now that isn't platformed.
26:50 Speaker 01 I think John's wrong in one sense. I would go on Rogan. I would. First of all, it's a bigger audience.
26:57 Sam Fragoso? On YouTube, over 20 million.
26:59 Speaker 01 It's unbelievable. And Rogan's interviewing style, it's fascinating. His biggest interrogation is, holy shit. Count how many times in the course of three hours, he goes, holy shit. And then he'll retell something he heard on another show about, I don't know, underwater UFOs, or vaccines, or so on, so. I don't take him as a journalist.
27:22 Sam Fragoso? Right.
27:23 Speaker 01 That would be absurd. He's an entertainer.
27:27 Sam Fragoso? I don't think Stewart takes him as a journalist either, though.
27:29 Speaker 01 No, but I do. There is a problem, and here's where I part ways with John. You have some guy come on, and he's a conspiracy theorist, and the conspiracies are not just about little green men, but about the industrial slaughter of 6 million Jews and others in Europe in the 40s. Call me crazy, but I think that demands pushback, because it can penetrate into that audience in ways that, well, we now see the result. We now see the normalization in some corners of, and maybe broader than corners of, the Republican Party and elsewhere, of the likes of Nick Fuentes. It's now perfectly okay for the Vice President of the United
28:10 Speaker 01 States to say, you know, when people are having a chat group that are leading young Republicans, and it goes all Nazi, he just says, it's us, you know, young people kidding around. That's the Vice President of the United States, not Joe Rogan. Something's happening in the ecosystem if you don't push back against it. So I don't give him a free pass on that.
28:33 Sam Fragoso? I found the back and forth interesting, because it gets at a key tension, which is, what he's saying is, to reach people that don't already agree with you.
28:42 Speaker 01 Absolutely. That's why I would go on. Not that Rogan wants me or cares, and that's fine.
28:48 Sam Fragoso? But the diagnosis seems right, but the prescription was odd to me, because Stewart says, the way to reach Joe Rogan's audience is to, quote, "beat them at their own game."
28:59 Speaker 01 I don't know if he's succeeding or not, but I credit John with going on and doing the best he can.
29:04 Sam Fragoso? Right, but how could The New Yorker, or hell, The New Yorker Radio Hour, the political scene, any of the podcasts under the banner, how could they beat Joe Rogan at his own game? Because you would have to play a game that you folks do not play, with rules that you do not abide by, or do a thing you don't want to do.
29:22 Speaker 01 Absolutely correct.
29:23 Sam Fragoso? So what is the solve on that?
29:24 Speaker 01 Man, if I had, if I had the, what you're asking is the essential question of contemporary press ecology.
29:31 Sam Fragoso? I ask it of myself as well, of course.
29:34 Speaker 01 Of course, but I am simply not going to let that go uninterrogated. On the other hand, I do think it's important for The New Yorker Radio Hour to just not have, you know, I had, I just interviewed Adam Schiff yesterday. Great, but I've also had any number of conservatives. Now, some won't go on with me. You know, I think it's important that I do have Newt Gingrich on, that I do have, I had the philosopher Robbie George on from Princeton, who I think back in the day thought he was like the only person on the right in the entire humanities landscape at Princeton. And it was really interesting. I think that's important to do.
30:13 Sam Fragoso? We have invited any number of Republicans and none of them have accepted coming on the show. Not one.
30:20 Speaker 01 All you can do is try harder. I, you know, I have to say, it's, they're there, you know, and if it's not the big star Republican, then you go to somebody who's the head of the Young Republicans at, you know, University X. You'll get there. You know, I'd hate, far be it from me to advise you, but you know, conservative journalists would certainly go on with you, or author, or whatever.
30:41 Sam Fragoso? I'll take advisement from you.
30:43 Speaker 01 You think I'm, you think I'm nuts that that's not going to happen?
30:45 Sam Fragoso? No, I don't think you're nuts. Or I think you're nuts for different reasons.
30:48 Speaker 01 Go ahead.
30:49 Sam Fragoso? Which is because, quote, "You spend 95% of your time thinking, making, living and breathing The New Yorker," which is what you say in the documentary.
30:59 Speaker 01 And my work life. I do, it will shock you, I do have children, I do have a marriage, I even have-
31:06 Sam Fragoso? Three kids.
31:07 Speaker 01 Friends.
31:08 Sam Fragoso? I've heard you have friends.
31:11 Speaker 01 It's amazing. They put up with it, but I do. I do.
31:14 Sam Fragoso? As someone similarly obsessed with doing the thing that they love doing,
31:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:19 Sam Fragoso? as you know I am, 95%. Is that all right?
31:23 Speaker 01 This is a medical psychiatric question, I'm sure. It's a little late in the game for me to shift gears. Thank you for injecting some despair into my retroactive thinking about life.
31:37 Sam Fragoso? To quote you, David, despair is an unforgivable sin in politics, public life and personal life.
31:43 Speaker 01 It is. And, you know, that's the Jew plucking something out of the New Testament. So you've got to give me credit for cross-cultural.
31:50 Sam Fragoso? You know, one of the best parts of the documentary is that one gets to see all the people that make this thing happen week after week.
31:58 Speaker 01 And I wish you saw more of them, to be perfectly honest, you know, and at a greater length. Yeah.
32:03 Sam Fragoso? One department are the vaunted fact-checkers
32:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:06 Sam Fragoso? of The New Yorker. And my favorite part is I'm combing through the contents of a story in what could only be described as excruciatingly granular detail, as he did in a 2022 profile of the actress Natasha Lyonne, who grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, in what she believed was a mansion previously owned by Herman Melville. And I have a clip here for you in case you haven't heard that episode of our show.
32:34 Speaker 03 I'm born in the city. I feel like that's important because I lie about it often. You know, in other words, I say I'm from Manhattan, but I genuinely am. I swear to God. And they had this dilapidated mansion in Kings Point in Great Neck in Long Island.
32:46 Sam Fragoso? That your parents told you Herman Melville used to live in?
32:49 Speaker 03 That they said, yes, Herman Melville. And then The New Yorker told me, "Go fuck yourself. It's not Herman Melville's house." I said, "Well, why would you destroy my childhood? Who cares?" Like, I didn't know it was a fucking mess. And I didn't know they were pathological. Thanks so much.
33:02 Sam Fragoso? This is like discovering Santa isn't real.
33:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
33:05 Sam Fragoso? But The New Yorker bursted.
33:06 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I was like, who else was claiming Herman Melville's? Come down, Moby Dick leg.
33:11 Sam Fragoso? Why couldn't they just let you have it?
33:12 Speaker 03 Why couldn't they let me have it? We debunk your childhood, The New Yorker.
33:15 Sam Fragoso? Bursting bubbles since 1907.
33:19 Speaker 03 You thought your life was a mess. We're here to confirm it, bitch.
33:22 Sam Fragoso? You know what? It was just as bad as you said. We talked to many people.
33:25 Speaker 03 We talked to many people. We found out it was worse.
33:31 Speaker 01 God, I hadn't heard that. That's fantastic. You know, they work so meticulously. It's like they're using rakes, you know, in the sand to dig up oysters, except the oysters, the pearls are mistakes. And people don't always appreciate the clarifications in their own histories and so on and so forth. And there's a scene in the documentary where Fergus MacIntosh, who's now the head of the department, we check everything. I mean, some of it's more cursory than others, like poetry probably doesn't deserve three weeks of checking on a particular poem, but he was checking a cover, a Peter Decev cover. And it's a kind of portly guy happily sitting under a beach umbrella.
34:15 Speaker 01 And the angle of the shadow is actually, it's where it should be because of the angle of the sun and everything's perfect. The only thing he missed was that the guy had two right feet. And Fergus MacIntosh is going to have to live with that for the rest of his life.
34:33 Sam Fragoso? What do you think about this new tagline, "The New Yorker bursting bubbles since 1925"?
34:38 Speaker 01 I'm all with it.
34:39 Sam Fragoso? It's pretty good.
34:40 Speaker 01 I'm all with it. We'll have Eustace Tilly with a little pin bursting bubbles.
34:44 Sam Fragoso? You don't have to credit me even. This is a hard thing to talk about, but you know, fact checking and copy editing, like many elements of the magazine, are an increasingly endangered species in the world of journalism. It's what's made The New Yorker, I think, singular in its quality.
35:04 Sam Fragoso? But of course, the magazine is not immune to market pressures. Just in November, The Washington Post reported on a firing of a senior fact checker and New Yorker union member, which your colleague, the poetry editor Hannah Eisenman, called in an email, quote, "A gross demonstration of hypocrisy, cowardice, and contempt for every single worker here. And New Yorker leadership either co-signed it or lacked the power to stop it." Now, there's not a place in the marketplace that has not seen contraction.
35:36 Speaker 01 Let's, and let me answer that question, though. I have nothing but respect for the Hannah Eisenman, who's a poetry editor and-
35:45 Sam Fragoso? Is that a fair characterization on her part?
35:47 Speaker 01 I'm not going to answer that. What I'll say is this, that there, this was not about contraction. It wasn't about somebody being let go because we were contracting the staff. This, this had to do with, in the estimation of Condi Nast, behavior that shouldn't happen in the work, in the workplace. And if it goes to arbitration, then it goes to arbitration and it'll be decided on the facts there. I can't comment on that. When it comes to contraction, I would say we had no layoffs. We, we had, we've had some layoffs and they're painful, but relative to what's going on in the world of media, Sam, you know, we have
36:27 Speaker 01 a fact checking department of 28 people. We have a very robust copy editing and people who are something called okayers. We have what we need to do the job properly as we see it, and that has nothing but backing from Roger Lynch and Condi Nast and the Newhouse family. You know, this, this dispute having to do with the union and so, that will get worked out. Not as quickly as, as some would like, but I can't, with all fairness, comment on the details. I really can't. It's not, it's not fair for any number of reasons. But, you know, my, and I should also say that The New Yorker has had a very good year economically.
37:11 Speaker 01 Turns out, people want what we do, and we're doing it at our best. And that's all I want. That's all I want out of The New Yorker, is for us to be doing the best we possibly can and hope like hell and gamble like hell that there's an audience for it, a continuing audience, well past its centenary, that wants us at our best, not dumbed down, not, you know, some skim milk version of ourselves.
37:37 Sam Fragoso? I think there is. I mean, and the fact that it went from 1.2, I think, last year to 1.4 million-
37:43 Speaker 01 To 16 million in our conversation-
37:45 Sam Fragoso? Right, to 22, more than Rogan. Actually, he should come on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
37:50 Speaker 01 I, I would love that.
37:53 Sam Fragoso? In the documentary you called The Magazine, which requires the participation of every department, including fact checking, copy editing, everyone that puts themselves into this goddamn thing. You called it a miracle. How do you continue to inspire that hope, that faith, that belief in the work at this moment?
38:14 Speaker 01 You know,
38:17 Speaker 01 what concerns me in our cultural world is not writers. I think there are, at any given moment, a number of people who want to express themselves in language and in different ways, and people who want to participate in that as editors and so on. What concerns me, if I'm being absolutely frank, is readers. Because of all the cultural factors that have conspired to challenge serious reading. I have no illusion, Sam, that all 330 million Americans, in this and every generation prior and future, is interested in reading what we have. That's a form of vanity and stupidity that even I wouldn't risk.
38:59 Sam Fragoso? Even you?
39:00 Speaker 01 Even me. But there is no question that this thing that I'm holding up in front of us, this little device, is part of a really profound challenge to concentration, human interaction, and I'm holding up an iPhone, obviously, human interaction and reading. And what is reading? Reading is to be alone and concentrating on a text that's often enigmatic or challenging or complicated or enriching. And to see that leech out of our lives, to me, represents a profound tragedy. And I, like my colleagues, like you, I work every day,
39:43 Speaker 01 and this sounds awfully high-minded, but I mean it, in defiance of those trends. And look, I'm a reader, but I'm not immune to the lures of this. Gizmo. And I have to, when I'm reading a novel, or I'm doing my nightly reading for The New Yorker, or the stuff that I catch up with on the weekend, I've got to put the goddamn telephone in another room.
40:07 Sam Fragoso? I think it's impossible to look at people reading less without putting it into the context that we're living in, which is a political climate in which the president is actively attacking the press. Which made me think back on the beginning of your career, which was at The Washington Post in the 80s, early 90s, where you covered the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then in turn, the rise of free speech that followed its dissolution. What can that moment, which was then, of course, followed by Putin's regime, tell us about where America may be heading in 2026?
40:44 Speaker 01 Well, I think it's probably wise, looking back, to be cautious about, what was that phrase about the stock market? Irrational exuberance. In other words, when I was in my early 30s, unbelievable things had happened. Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, parts of Central and South America, had become, if not entirely democratic, then kind of nascent democracies, or more democratic than they had been, or less horrible than they had been. You look at the Israeli-Palestinian question in the mid 80s, as opposed to now. There are any number of things you can look upon. And if I were being reductive about it, and self-centered about it, I'd say, oh my God, when I was a young man, things were great, and now they've all gone to shit, as if the
41:29 Speaker 01 world had anything to do with my age or concerns. And it is true that, right now, it is easy, all too easy, to lose hope. And the answer to every question is not Donald Trump. It's a lot of things, whether it's in Russia, or China, or India, the Middle East, you name it, and any number of, whether it's ecological, or cultural, all kinds of dark clouds hang over our heads.
41:54 Sam Fragoso? But I guess that I go by the maxim that things change. You don't step into the same river twice. And other cliches.
42:06 Speaker 01 And there's every reason to believe that it's possible that democracy will muddle through this dismal goddamn period and reassert itself, not like it was in 1955 or 65 or 85, but something better than now. And that goes with a number of places and aspects of the human condition. I just, I think a human being should be incapable of despair.
42:31 Sam Fragoso? Trump has called the press "the enemy of the people." He's threatened retribution, including jailing reporters, suggesting CBS's broadcast license should be taken away. But I think beyond all of that, that this has been a year marked by political violence. In a recent New Yorker profile of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Wallace Wells wrote, "America is a violent country. Nowhere else that is remotely as rich tolerates so many murders or so many weapons. But sometime during the tumultuous decade of the Trump era, it began to seem that simply participating in the political process puts you at risk." If participating in the political process, which includes, of course, covering it, puts
43:16 Sam Fragoso? one at risk, is it inevitable that more and more people, out of fear of retribution, abstain from politics?
43:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. I think it's alarmed a lot of people about running for office, for example. So Senator Murkowski from Alaska admitted as much. She said that sometimes she doesn't speak her mind because she's in fear for herself. And you can be sure that that's not limited to Senator Murkowski. You have a president of the United States who threatens people with execution. Execution. He, you know, it's old news that he would get up in front of crowds and encourage people to rough up any dissenters or naysayers. There's a brutality to Donald Trump that's equal to his cruelty, and it's incredibly
44:04 Speaker 01 dangerous, and it inflames a political atmosphere on a daily basis. It's not funny. There's a mistake that people make, and I think from the very beginning, that somehow Donald Trump was just a gas. He's funny. This isn't funny. I admit that, you know, he has a certain... Comic energy that is, you can't look away from it sometimes.
44:27 Sam Fragoso? That's true.
44:27 Speaker 01 But the damage he's inflicting on the country, day after day, culturally, politically, into the institutions of the country that matter and that, God willing, can be reasserted over time, is enormous.
44:43 Sam Fragoso? How has this made you rethink about what you do, what The New Yorker does, especially as we're celebrating its 100 years?
44:52 Speaker 01 That'll all be done. That whole celebrating thing will be, you know, at the end of the year. And that was fun and is great. It also, I have to say, it also had, it was a useful exercise and to think about what we're doing, what we're about, what we should be thinking about in the future. So besides all the kind of excessive eustace, tillydom, it was good to take that opportunity of a birthday to reflect on how we should move forward. Because, you know, you said earlier that I'd said that The New Yorker is a miracle. I believe it's, that's the case. And one of the reasons it's a miracle is that there are precious few publications in this country that don't just have a moment, but have a sustained period
45:36 Speaker 01 in American life. Life Magazine had this big moment, you know, in middle-class American life, particularly in a visual way. Time Magazine, there was nothing bigger in this country than being on the cover of Time in a certain way, or Newsweek. To assert something, nothing's permanent, but assert something that's really long-lasting, that has values that matter to it, that aren't just mouthed. It's not saying that there aren't arguments, there aren't controversies and disputes, but real values, but that's also capable of evolving. That's a pretty complicated piece of wizardry to carry off over time.
46:16 Sam Fragoso? You've been carrying it since 1998. And when asked about your retirement, you've said for the past decade, the exact same quote. I'm going to read it for you here.
46:29 Sam Fragoso? "I don't want to repeat the late stages of William Shawn, whose inability to reckon with succession as he got older was a profound drama." Now, you seem as sprightly, maybe even more sprightly than when I saw you a couple years ago.
46:44 Speaker 01 You know things are going wrong when they call you, you refer to you as spry.
46:47 Sam Fragoso? And you're brave.
46:47 Speaker 01 That's always terrible.
46:48 Sam Fragoso? You're also brave. And you're also sharp for your age.
46:52 Speaker 01 Oh, ow, ow.
46:58 Sam Fragoso? Have you decided when you should walk away?
47:01 Speaker 01 I haven't. And, you know, this is, I hate to say this, it's not the most important thing in the world. The New Yorker will.
47:08 Sam Fragoso? But it's the most important to you.
47:10 Speaker 01 No, you know, I would say, no, I have, remember, I asserted earlier, I have a family and I have, I even have friends. But it is very, it is important that it's done well.
47:21 Sam Fragoso? Right.
47:22 Speaker 01 That I don't overstay my welcome and hurt the New Yorker and that I do everything I can to put in front of the people who decide these things, plausible candidates who have a soul and an intelligence and the capacities to do this job, all knowing that they'll do it differently, totally understanding that. And that's all right and good, as it should be.
47:47 Sam Fragoso? My last question, because you have to go, David.
47:48 Speaker 01 I do. I have an ideas meeting, Sam.
47:51 Sam Fragoso? Yep.
47:51 Speaker 01 You should come.
47:53 Sam Fragoso? You know, you have my email and my phone number.
47:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
47:56 Sam Fragoso? In the preface of your book, Reporting, you write, "The subjects of this book, they are, with some exceptions, people obsessed with altering the history of their era or recording it." You, day to day, waking up at five in the morning, getting on that bike, coming to the office, is that still the aim? Are you still obsessed with it? Even in this climate where journalists have never in American life been more threatened, do you still feel determined to come back in day after day?
48:24 Speaker 01 I love this stuff. I love working with the people I work with. I like being alone in a room with a manuscript. I love talking with writers who have been on the staff for a long time and thinking through what they might do next and hear, just listening to them. I love reading people that might come to The New Yorker and might, you know, develop in certain ways. It's thrilling to, you know, bring on a young writer like Antonia Hitchens and see how she's covering the Trump administration. I could go on. I love the work. And you ask about when I'm not doing this, you can be sure that I'll also be doing this kind of work, but just not as editor of The New Yorker.
49:09 Sam Fragoso? Listeners right now are about to hear our conversation from 2023, which we're going to pick up you, young David Remnick, growing up in 1960 New Jersey. Is there anything you want to add as a preface before they hear this talk?
49:23 Speaker 01 No, I think they should grab a cup of coffee real quick, though.
49:28 Speaker 01 Sam, this is a great pleasure, really fun talking to you always.
49:33 Sam Fragoso? David Remnick, until next time.
49:35 Speaker 01 Be well.
49:37 Sam Fragoso? All right, so after a quick coffee break, we turn to my first conversation with David Remnick.
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52:33 Sam Fragoso? David Remnick.
52:34 Speaker 01 Hey.
52:35 Sam Fragoso? Pleasure to meet you.
52:36 Speaker 01 Good to meet you.
52:37 Sam Fragoso? I was sitting outside with my notes, and the first thing you said to me was, "Oh, God, you're prepared."
52:44 Speaker 01 You know why I said that? There are all sorts of non-preparing nightmares. One of them is, my understanding is Michael Beschloss, the historian, once showed up to be interviewed at a radio station, and he had written a book about the U2 incident. And he sits down with the host, and the host says, "No, U2! What was Bono really like?" And then he says, "Well, I wrote a book about the U2 incident," at which point the guy literally takes his index finger and shuts off the recorder with a big thunk, and that was the end of the interview.
53:16 Sam Fragoso? You know, I did see Adam Gopnik in the bathroom. What's it like to work with him?
53:24 Speaker 01 I haven't seen Adam Gopnik in the office in I don't know how long. It's therefore I know you're lying.
53:29 Sam Fragoso? Someone who looks exactly like him.
53:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:31 Sam Fragoso? Really, it's an honor to be here and to do this with you.
53:34 Speaker 01 It's great to see you.
53:35 Sam Fragoso? I'd like to go back to 1964. You're six years old. There's a preschool you're supposed to go to, but but they're not ready for you yet.
53:43 Speaker 01 How do you know this? Yeah.
53:46 Sam Fragoso? And you find yourself in a van with with some older Jewish boys.
53:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:51 Sam Fragoso? Heading to Yeshiva. And it's from them in that van that you first learn about the Beatles and most importantly, Bob Dylan. Two years later, you stumble upon the album, The Best of 66. What happens?
54:10 Speaker 01 I don't know where you scraped this up, but it's pretty accurate.
54:15 Sam Fragoso? Well, you're laughing about the boys in the van description?
54:17 Speaker 01 Just, you know, here's the thing, you get old enough and your past feels like somebody else. It just feels like a story that you've told or told yourself or other people. And it may be accurate, or it's roughly accurate, or you have no idea anymore. And it's a story.
54:33 Sam Fragoso? Well, we're gonna do our best to tell it together.
54:35 Speaker 01 I think it's roughly accurate. I'm of that generation who, you know, of kindergarten age or thereabouts, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, and it was incredibly exciting. And then something weird happened. So when I, around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And in those days, there wasn't any medicine to make you better or alleviate the symptoms. I have friends now who have MS, and you wouldn't know. You know, they go, some of them in worse shape, but a lot of people, they're okay. And I have to think that my mother, had she been born, you know, a generation or two later, might have been okay. But she, it was scary. It was really scary. And I think it scared the shit out of my father.
55:18 Speaker 01 They were young people, you know, they were your age and with little kids. And I think she thought she was gonna die pretty soon. She lived to be 85. You know, you make things happen in your life, everybody's lives. And and I became a kid that became obsessed with radio and music and things that I could amuse myself with. And I remember distinctly the process of buying music. You had the radio, and I wasn't cool enough quite yet for FM radio. So listening to, you know, AM WABC and Cousin Bruce and all that stuff.
55:52 Speaker 01 But once in a blue, blue moon, my father would take me to a department store called EJ Corvettes where I could buy an album. And I didn't know what to get. There were so many of them, and I wanted them all. So like an idiot, I bought a compilation so there'd be one song by Paul Revere and the Raiders, and there'd be one song by Chad and Jeremy, and there was one song by somebody I heard about, but I didn't know much about, called Bob Dylan. And on the album was a song called "I Want You" from the Blonde on Blonde album. And "I Want You" is this kind of phantasmagoric love song that I can barely make sense of now, and I certainly could make no sense of in any real way when I was eight years old, but it was transporting.
56:35 Speaker 01 And it was like something that you just entered another universe and you wanted more of it.
57:15 Speaker 01 And because it was radio, it wasn't YouTube filled with interviews with so-and-so, and everything was immediately available on Spotify. It came to you in this different commodified way. You'd have to buy it, or you'd have to be lucky enough to have the radio on at the absolute right time to hear Visions of Johanna and even more, you know, and then I had to work backwards and hear the earlier albums and all the rest. And I became a fanatic about Bob Dylan. People know this about me, but the depths of the fanaticism are six miles past embarrassing. And yet, it meant everything to me, it still means a lot to me, and it gave me nothing less than the greater cultural world, because Bob Dylan would mention, you know, later, when I was capable of- T.S. Eliot. T.S.
58:00 Speaker 01 Eliot, and I'd go buy The Wasteland or something. I didn't understand it, but owning it felt cool. Being confused by it felt important.
58:10 Speaker 01 I think that's the way most people enter complicated culture. They're confused by it and tantalized by it. It has an erotic pull and it has a psychological and a pleasure pull. And Bob Dylan was rock and roll, so had a pleasure pull, too.
58:26 Sam Fragoso? Growing up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, you said, quote, "I was hungry for worlds that I faintly knew were out there, shimmering faintly somewhere past the horizon of my seeing." That description sounds a lot like the kind of shimmering mirage in The Great Gatsby, looking across.
58:45 Speaker 01 Oz was across the river.
58:47 Sam Fragoso? That's right. Was there a sense of ambition in your house that was passed down from your parents?
58:53 Speaker 01 No, no. Ambition was utterly conventional. My parents were the children of immigrants. My grandparents, well, they were immigrants and not, but you know, you know, the world. They came from Eastern European Jewry, the lucky ones.
59:07 Sam Fragoso? They didn't want you to aspire?
59:08 Speaker 01 Yes, but in the most conventional way possible, doctor or a lawyer, because, because it meant you were your own boss. That was very important. The world of business was not in our world. Certainly the world of the arts. My mother was an art teacher, but she got sick very young and had to, had to quit her job and be home, and that was a struggle. It was modest. My parents wanted me to do well and study hard and be a doctor and go, you know, further than them and be a good boy. And how can I possibly blame them?
59:44 Sam Fragoso? You mentioned your mother. She was diagnosed with MS when you were about five years old. When you go to Princeton, it's around that time that your father is diagnosed with Parkinson's.
59:54 Speaker 01 That came later. That came.
59:56 Sam Fragoso? But he was in his early 50s.
59:57 Speaker 01 It's unclear. My father's a dentist. He had a very small practice. We were what? Middle class in the American sense, parents bought their house for $11,000 and we went to decent public schools, nothing great, but decent. And it became evident, maybe when I was in college, that my father was developing a tremor in his hands. And here's what you don't want is a dentist with a big tremor in his hands. But he tried to conceal it. And in early Parkinson's, if you take the proper medicine, it can-
1:00:26 Sam Fragoso? You called it, you said it would have been a Buster Keaton film if it wasn't your own life.
1:00:30 Speaker 01 Right. Buster Keaton as a Parkinsonian dentist, it's a dark joke, but there it is. And he didn't know what to do, because like, what would we live on? What would he do? So he faked it for a while, but finally he couldn't anymore, obviously. And by the time I came home from Moscow, when I was about 31 or two, they were both in bad shape.
1:00:51 Sam Fragoso? So that's what I want to ask you about, which is, you're in college at Princeton. There are medical troubles at home. You had grand ambitions to be an artist. You went to Paris and bust on trains. They paid you money to get away from them because you weren't great at it.
1:01:09 Speaker 01 That's not true.
1:01:10 Sam Fragoso? That's what you said.
1:01:11 Speaker 01 It just couldn't be avoided. I went on the train.
1:01:14 Sam Fragoso? From 10:30 in the morning-
1:01:15 Speaker 01 This is true.
1:01:16 Sam Fragoso? To 2:00 PM. You made enough money to pay for the hotel.
1:01:18 Speaker 01 Oh, easy, yeah.
1:01:19 Sam Fragoso? The movie and the drinks that night.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 Easy.
1:01:21 Sam Fragoso? But eventually you come back. And when you take John McPhee's class, I'm curious about settling in journalism. Did you feel a sense of obligation to pursue a career that at least had some clearer pathway to stability?
1:01:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:01:40 Sam Fragoso? And was that because of your parents?
1:01:41 Speaker 01 Absolutely accurate. I thought, you know-
1:01:44 Sam Fragoso? You looked at me like, I don't know where you're going with this.
1:01:46 Speaker 01 No, but you landed, you landed the plane. And when you're that age, to be a writer and an artist means only one thing. You're a novelist, or if you're really financially foolish, a poet.
1:01:58 Speaker 01 But I did have this intimation that I'd need to take care of my parents. I was the older son, one of two.
1:02:05 Sam Fragoso? Was that daunting?
1:02:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nineteen year old kid, how do you make these decisions? You know, half in the dark anyway. So here was my grand ambition. I thought I would go and retain my coolness and become a writer for the Village Voice. I thought that would put me in great financial.
1:02:25 Sam Fragoso? Bring you back to your 7-Eleven days.
1:02:27 Speaker 01 Exactly. I mean, I just, you know, I was an idiot when it was concerned this. But what happened was I got an internship at the Washington Post, did okay. They said, we can't hire you right away because the other paper in town has folded the Washington Star, so go away. I taught in Japan, bummed around Southeast Asia and India on, you know, $2 a day, came back, did another internship and landed at the Washington Post. That's the curve of things. But, you know, still, I was making $18,000 a year.
1:03:00 Sam Fragoso? Yes.
1:03:00 Speaker 01 Everything was falling apart at home. And I look back on it with terrible guilt because I'm living in Washington and day to day, I didn't think about it. You know, maybe I'd send a small check.
1:03:08 Sam Fragoso? Didn't think about what, helping?
1:03:10 Speaker 01 Of course I helped, but I wish I had helped even more. And, you know, I was raised to be a good son. Here's the thing, I hear about people's parents and their travails. Yes, my parents were disabled, but I think if there's a key to anything with me, it almost sounds like bragging because it almost sounds rare. I never doubted one minute of my parents' love.
1:03:36 Sam Fragoso? Love for you.
1:03:37 Speaker 01 And my brother, yes. And they didn't understand what I wanted to do. They thought it was weird. Why were you majoring in comparative literature? What are you comparing? So there was that divide, but I never thought they were over, and they were overbearing and needy and for good reason. They were falling apart. They were falling apart. So I, there were all kinds of crises until they were gone, but much later in life, I could deal with them financially. I could, you know, install somebody to take care of them and I, people to whom I'm everlastingly grateful and still talk to a lot.
1:04:14 Sam Fragoso? But then why the guilt?
1:04:17 Speaker 01 Because you can't make it better. You can't make the MS go away. You can't make the Parkinson's go away. You can't comfort them in the middle of the night when they have Parkinsonian hallucinations. You can't pick them off the floor when they fall down. They are your children now. God knows, I'm not unique in that situation, but usually it only comes when people are very old. I have a child, I'm not closed about this. I have three kids. The youngest has profound autism, my daughter Natasha. And it's really hard. And the psychological difficulty there is that even though I'm sitting here with you today and I'm healthy and knock on wood and my wife is healthy and...
1:05:01 Speaker 01 But I've read in the newspaper that I'm not going to live forever. And my daughter is, you know, 25 years old. She's going to live longer. So that horizon is a different psychological impingement. So you're coming to somebody who's had a lot of unbelievable luck in his life, professionally and maritally and otherwise. But then there's this other things.
1:05:24 Sam Fragoso? That's right.
1:05:25 Speaker 01 That's the human condition. If you're lucky, if you're lucky.
1:05:28 Sam Fragoso? Sounds like we're holding two competing truths.
1:05:31 Speaker 01 Yep. As a matter of day to day life, yeah. They're not competing, they're...
1:05:36 Sam Fragoso? Side by side.
1:05:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. How'd you get so wise so young?
1:05:40 Sam Fragoso? Reading you didn't hurt. That's the last nice thing I'll say.
1:05:44 Speaker 01 All right, that's a deal. That's a deal.
1:05:52 Sam Fragoso? We'll be right back with our guest, David Remnick.
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1:08:03 Sam Fragoso? You've had many strokes of luck.
1:08:05 Speaker 01 That's true.
1:08:05 Sam Fragoso? Let's talk about the first time you are summoned into the office of...
1:08:11 Sam Fragoso? Ben Bradley, the famous legendary editor of The Washington Post, presided over Watergate and all the rest. Like you said, you landed the job in the early 80s. You started on the night police beat.
1:08:24 Speaker 01 Right.
1:08:25 Sam Fragoso? You moved to the style staff formerly in August of 1984.
1:08:29 Speaker 01 Feature section, yeah.
1:08:30 Sam Fragoso? But I want to talk about the summer of 86. When you're writing the profile of the late senator from New York.
1:08:38 Speaker 01 Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
1:08:39 Sam Fragoso? Yes. This was the first story that got you brought into his office.
1:08:44 Speaker 01 Correct.
1:08:44 Sam Fragoso? Why did Bradley call you in?
1:08:48 Speaker 01 So if you've seen All the President's Men, you begin to see how charismatic and sexy this guy was. Jason Robards did an unbelievable job of almost conquering it. Tom Hanks, God love him, in the paper, plays a different person in a way. And Bradley had a glass on, just as I do here. It's not walls, it's glass. And you can see him. And by that time, he's a legend. And he's like the great orca whale in his tank.
1:09:13 Sam Fragoso? Is that how you describe yourself?
1:09:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm kind of a little porgy fish. And you'd see him, and his feet were on the desk, and he's wearing these fantastic Turnbull and Asser shirts with the white collars and the broad stripes. And he's just, the guy is exquisite. And it's inspiring. It's like Napoleon is back there, or something like that.
1:09:34 Sam Fragoso? But taller.
1:09:35 Speaker 01 He doesn't have to fight anymore. And I'm working on this profile of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a kind of intellectual senator from the state of New York, who had been a Harvard professor, and quirky in ways that would be unbelievably unfamiliar now. He wrote a book a year. In addition to being quite an effective senator in many ways. He also had the habit of enjoying liquid refreshments.
1:10:00 Sam Fragoso? Alcohol.
1:10:01 Speaker 01 Alcohol. I asked him, because why beat around the bush? I said to Moynihan, what do you drink? Because, you know, people talk about it.
1:10:10 Sam Fragoso? And how much?
1:10:11 Speaker 01 And he said the following, I don't know if I'm getting this, because unfortunately, you have the books over there, not me. But Moynihan, it's not in there, I don't think. But Moynihan, as I recall, enjoyed a drink or two at lunch, if not more.
1:10:27 Speaker 01 Then at dinner, he and his wife, as I recall, would split what he called a bottle or two of claret. I did not know what the word claret meant. And then it was either preceded by some whiskeys or, and certainly followed by cognac after.
1:10:44 Sam Fragoso? Two to three cocktails, then the bottle of wine, as he said.
1:10:47 Speaker 01 Okay, I don't know about you, my friend, but I.
1:10:49 Sam Fragoso? I stick to tequila only, actually, this is my.
1:10:51 Speaker 01 That's the one thing I cannot drink. It is like killer hangover. I did it once and.
1:10:56 Sam Fragoso? No headache for me. That's the.
1:10:57 Speaker 01 It's horrible.
1:10:57 Sam Fragoso? No sugar.
1:10:58 Speaker 01 Horrible. I was much more a fan of the other kind of enjoyment. Weed.
1:11:03 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, about the same. So you're brought into the office because of his drinking?
1:11:07 Speaker 01 So I'm called into the office and Bradley's feet are up in the, on the desk and all I see are the soles of his shoes. And he said, I got this, I got this call from Moynihan and he said, you're asking about his drinking. And I am fucking terrified. I've been summoned to Bradley's office and now I'm in trouble. And of course Bradley knows Moynihan socially and blah, blah, blah. And I said, yes, I'm writing this full and fair profile and it just seems to be part of his day to day bearing. And not for one instance do I suggest that he's incapacitated or unable to do his work. In fact, he writes a book a year and he's a very effective senator, but I do think it's pertinent. And I certainly asked him,
1:11:47 Speaker 01 yes, I did. And then I made a huge mistake. And then I said, so don't worry. And his feet, the soles of his feet part like a V and through it, I see this face, this rock hard, preposterously wasp handsome face with the hair slicked back in this beautiful salt and pepper. And he said, what the fuck me worry? Get the fuck out of here. And that was the end of the discussion. We let the curse on this show, I suppose we can.
1:12:20 Sam Fragoso? Absolutely. The New Yorker Radio Hour.
1:12:22 Speaker 01 Exactly. And I'm sent off and I write my piece and all that material is in there and one where I know I can't remember, but it certainly was in there. And I never heard word one from Bradley and the lesson there was he's allowed to ask. If I've got a good reason, that's the end of the discussion. And I'll never be able to imitate Ben Bradley in my bearing. I mean, look at me.
1:12:47 Sam Fragoso? You're 6'3".
1:12:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, whatever. 6'2", but who's arguing? By next year, it'll be six foot.
1:12:53 Sam Fragoso? It'd be my height then.
1:12:53 Speaker 01 And I can't imitate my predecessor, Tina Brown, or anybody. I can only be myself, but I can learn lessons. And one of the lessons was that if your person has done their reporting and there's a rationale and it's honest, then you go with it. Also, he was incredibly cool.
1:13:15 Sam Fragoso? Again, you played onstage with Patti Smith. That's not nothing to...
1:13:18 Speaker 01 I think the first time I did that, I was wearing gray, what my mother would call slacks.
1:13:24 Sam Fragoso? What most people would call slacks.
1:13:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. God bless her.
1:13:31 Sam Fragoso? May she rest in peace.
1:13:32 Speaker 01 Exactly. Well, that is shalom.
1:13:34 Sam Fragoso? Now, you mentioned Tina Brown and what you learned from Ben Bradley as an editor. I want to go to the moment you're hired as the editor of The New Yorker. It's officially July of 98. And in the first two months of running the magazine, it's my understanding that you lost about 10 pounds. Is that right?
1:13:59 Speaker 01 I'm going to write a book called The Weight Loss Method of Getting a New Stressful Job. That you don't know what you're doing.
1:14:07 Sam Fragoso? And because you didn't know exactly what you were doing.
1:14:11 Speaker 01 Not exactly. I didn't know anything about what I was doing.
1:14:15 Sam Fragoso? You asked a deputy editor for Anna Wintor why she is so good at her job.
1:14:22 Speaker 01 And she said she knows what she wants. And it was really interesting to me because I, obviously, we have different personalities and she has both a reality and a persona and I, I'm a zlub in the corner, but nevertheless, that is a very important thing because I can see sometimes if I'm in a meeting-
1:14:41 Sam Fragoso? A what in the corner?
1:14:42 Speaker 01 Zlub.
1:14:43 Sam Fragoso? Even that is a persona, by the way.
1:14:45 Speaker 01 That comes naturally, my friend.
1:14:46 Sam Fragoso? No.
1:14:48 Speaker 01 In the course of a day, you make a bunch of decisions and some of them are, can be painful, often having to do with people, or they can be consequential, or they're minor or inconsequential. But you need to make them. You can't let them indefinitely pile up and pile up and pile up. A, because that's bad management and B, it confuses people. And you have to know that you're going to make some bad decisions too, along the way.
1:15:14 Sam Fragoso? The quote was, because she knows exactly what she wants. So when did you begin to understand what you wanted from the magazine? And what was that?
1:15:25 Speaker 01 Maybe this contradicts what we just said, but I don't believe in the reality or the fiction of the imperial editor. Ben Bradley couldn't possibly read all of the Washington Post every day, much less make all the decisions that go into it. And there are subjects that I know something about and there are subjects that I know nothing about and then there's a lot of in-between. And I'm good at some things and I'm crazily bad at others.
1:15:52 Sam Fragoso? What are you good at and what are you bad at?
1:15:54 Speaker 01 I'm pretty good at getting things done. Take writing, for example. I'm pretty good at making my deadlines, but that doesn't mean I'm a better writer than people who have trouble with their deadlines. You know, A.J. Liebling, I'm not applying this to myself, but A.J. Liebling used to say that he was a better writer than anyone who wrote faster than him and he was faster than anyone who wrote better.
1:16:14 Sam Fragoso? Yes.
1:16:15 Speaker 01 Which is a nice little neat formulation, but-
1:16:17 Sam Fragoso? When you write, do you also maniacally laugh at your own jokes?
1:16:20 Speaker 01 No, with my shirt off. No. But I, I have, not to deepen the impression, but I have what's called zitzfleisch, the ability to keep your ass in the chair.
1:16:31 Sam Fragoso? Sustain.
1:16:31 Speaker 01 Right. But look, I now run a business and it has to be a coherent, sustainable one in order to do the things that I value the most. I have to be asking the right questions. Otherwise, I'm going to get be steamrolled into doing things that I think are bad for the magazine.
1:16:47 Sam Fragoso? When you took over the magazine in 98, it was not making money.
1:16:51 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:16:52 Sam Fragoso? You brought it into the black.
1:16:54 Speaker 01 I would reject the the vertical pronoun, but we brought it into the black.
1:16:57 Sam Fragoso? We brought it into the black. Thank you for the all gender bathrooms, too.
1:17:01 Speaker 01 My pleasure.
1:17:03 Sam Fragoso? I'm cutting that line.
1:17:04 Speaker 01 I know you are because you're chicken.
1:17:06 Sam Fragoso? Oh, I'm chicken. You're the one who didn't say what you were bad at.
1:17:09 Speaker 01 The sun ain't yellow, it's chicken.
1:17:13 Sam Fragoso? Okay. You still haven't answered what you're bad at, which we're gonna, we're gonna.
1:17:16 Speaker 01 Lots of things.
1:17:17 Sam Fragoso? Yes, but tell me.
1:17:19 Speaker 01 I'm not.
1:17:19 Sam Fragoso? You said the things that you value.
1:17:21 Speaker 01 Do we have enough time? You said you have only till 2:30.
1:17:23 Sam Fragoso? David, you have only till 2:30, don't. That's not true. I would be here forever. You said the things that you value in the magazine.
1:17:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:30 Sam Fragoso? What are the things that you value? Tell me what that editorial vision looked like in those days and now.
1:17:36 Speaker 01 I value the values of this magazine, which are depth and consideration of being writer driven, of accuracy and care. It is inevitable that with change in editors over time, that there are going to be perceptible and even imperceptible change. It shifts in emphasis. So Bob Gottlieb, who followed William Shawn and preceded Tina Brown.
1:18:05 Sam Fragoso? Passed away this this past summer.
1:18:07 Speaker 01 That's right. Great, great, great book editor and the editor of the New Yorker for six years and brought a lot to the desk, as they say. I don't think the thing he favored or had had an affection for most in this world was journalism. I think he spent a lot of his time at the New Yorker on the fiction, on a certain kind of comical reporting. All kinds of other things.
1:18:29 Sam Fragoso? But it's funny, when I ask you about values,
1:18:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:32 Sam Fragoso? you go to what another editor didn't value. Is that your way of saying that you value journalism?
1:18:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I'm probably more journalistically into-
1:18:41 Sam Fragoso? Hard news.
1:18:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, not hard news. Very few pieces would be considered traditional hard news.
1:18:47 Sam Fragoso? Right.
1:18:48 Speaker 01 But I certainly value investigative reporting. I value foreign reporting. Not that Bob didn't publish it. He was, he published Alma Guillermo Prieto from, from Latin America. He published all kinds of people. It's just a shift in emphasis, volume, view. And also, the world has required different things of us at a given time. Let's talk about the internet in a minute. I can only be who I am. So for fiction, Deborah Treisman, who I made the fiction editor, who had been working under Bill Buford, she and the fiction department, Cressida Leishen, Willing Davidson, and so on, they read all the stories. They choose the short stories. My only thing with them is send them to me what you've chosen. And I, I want to make sure I'm reading them.
1:19:33 Speaker 01 And a certain percentage I maybe pass on. And I also want to make sure that even though I'm saying yes to things that I think will be interesting, and I'm putting a lot of faith in those editors and writers, that I'm not knowingly thinking, this guy, this will be incredibly boring or wrong for us.
1:19:51 Sam Fragoso? But this is the first subject that you've been-
1:19:53 Speaker 01 You think I'm being evasive.
1:19:54 Sam Fragoso? A little vague, a little-
1:19:55 Speaker 01 Well, then dig in, because I'm not gonna, I'm not, I have no intention of being evasive.
1:19:59 Sam Fragoso? I guess, I want to understand how you view the function of the magazine and journalism at this moment. Because you've said in the past, the first job of journalism is to put pressure on power, investigative pressure, reporting pressure, intellectual pressure on the ideas being put out by power. That's journalists' first role, not entertainment. Entertainment, not selling copies, not clicks, pressure on power.
1:20:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I also want to be publishing science reporting that's not about necessarily about climate change, that's just about, you know, how something works. You know, one of the great profiles the magazine's published in the last 50 years is, say, Mark Singer. His profile of Ricky Jay. Ricky Jay was who? He was a magician. So its social consequences are modest.
1:20:44 Sam Fragoso? One of my favorite profiles.
1:20:45 Speaker 01 It's a fantastic profile, the magus. And, and I just think it is a primary function of journalism writ large, not just The New Yorker, but, you know, any journalism worth its name is to put pressure on power. That's for damn sure.
1:20:58 Sam Fragoso? Since 2016, the circulation of The New Yorker has increased. No, it's decreased?
1:21:05 Speaker 01 It's been in recent years at 1.2 million.
1:21:09 Sam Fragoso? In 2018, it was reported at 1.2. Then there's some new survey that came out recently that says 1.25.
1:21:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that's more or less the same. If you're asking about the economics of the magazine?
1:21:20 Sam Fragoso? I'm asking about the economics and how you balance the economics while still applying pressure to the powers that be.
1:21:28 Speaker 01 I don't see any contradiction in it. I think the great gift of my job and the job that my colleagues, jobs that my colleagues have is that our readers expect us to be the best forms of ourselves. In other words, what we want to be on our best days, that's what our readers want us to be. There's no, there's no, like, the readers secretly want us to be dumber, or less rigorous, or more cotton candy. We all want cotton candy, by the way, as well as our, you know,
1:21:58 Sam Fragoso? That makes me sick.
1:21:59 Speaker 01 potatoes. Well, you know, or dessert of some kind. Magazine can't all be hardcore investigative reporting or something like that. So that's a very happy coincidence of interests of readers and, and the people who, who do the work.
1:22:15 Sam Fragoso? Why don't we talk about the existential issues in journalism right now? Because you recently sat with the New York Times publisher, A.J. Solzberger, perhaps in this room.
1:22:26 Speaker 01 Right here.
1:22:27 Sam Fragoso? And you said to him, "Public distrust of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal are at record levels. Our ratings are a misery."
1:22:38 Speaker 01 Well, the ratings of what's called the mainstream press are a misery.
1:22:42 Sam Fragoso? Why is that?
1:22:45 Sam Fragoso? Are you gonna stop crossing your arms at some point over there?
1:22:47 Speaker 01 No. Technology, politics. So I came to the Washington Post post Watergate. And the press was, in some people's eyes, had rescued the republic of a crook in office. Now we've had a crook in office for four years and is possibly coming back as, you know, incipient dictator. Just yesterday, I interviewed right here Lynne Cheney, an ardent, right-wing conservative, arguing that we're sleepwalking to dictatorship. So what's different? Well, you all of a sudden have this figure who doesn't resign, but in fact, tries to overturn the election.
1:23:29 Speaker 01 And part of his strategy, which is diabolically effective, is to attack and make an enemy of the press, is to take advantage of technologies that did not exist in Nixon's time, to create an alternate universe, not only of the press, but of fact and non-fact itself. And unfortunately, not just the United States, but all over the world, the authoritarian temptation, the susceptibility to conspiracy theory and lies. We know what that is. We've seen it historically. And technology has only exacerbated and its manipulating abilities are unbelievable.
1:24:10 Speaker 01 Ask Putin, ask Trump, ask and ask and ask. It's just plainly evident. So do I take it personally?
1:24:20 Speaker 01 The phrase that I might hate most of all in modern life is, "It is what it is." Because I don't want it to is, I want it to be otherwise. But that's just a fact of modern life. Because you're gonna ask me, I'm gonna tell you to be honest, and now you'll get people pissed off at me. I don't think... The New York Times, for all its faults, and we all argue with it, and it's in a way the weather, I don't think it's ever been better. Some people will argue it's more ideological, it's more... I've been hearing that all my life, which is now not short. You know, it's anti-Israel, it's pro-Israel, it's pro-Palestine, it's anti... you hear that. But their intentions are optimal. Same with us. We have good days, we have bad days,
1:25:03 Speaker 01 we have, you know, successful pieces or transcendentally successful pieces, and we have the opposite. But life has changed. Technology has changed, politics has changed in such a way that it's taken a toll on what Sarah Palin so eloquently calls the lame stream media.
1:25:18 Sam Fragoso? Hmm. When Trump was elected in 2016, you often in interviews talk about this term, presentism, that we should not be guilty of thinking the present moment will persist forever. Quote, "Despair is an unforgivable sin in politics, public life, and in personal life. Despair is unforgivable. Too much depends on us not being despairing, whether it's the environment or countless other issues of public, American, and international life."
1:25:48 Speaker 01 I'm not a religious guy, but that's what the Bible tells me, that despair is the unforgivable sin, and I think that's right. Look at my, just where I'm slotted in politically, in my experience. When I was your age, I was in Moscow, and what was happening in the world was that Eastern Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, Soviet totalitarianism was in shambles, there was a promise of democratic progress in the air. There had even been pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Latin America was showing signs of democratic development in life.
1:26:24 Sam Fragoso? When you left Moscow in 91, you said, quote, "I was unreasonably optimistic."
1:26:29 Speaker 01 Totally. And South African apartheid was overcome. And a few years later, the Oslo Accords were signed. And so there was a sense, however unreasonable, that life was political life, public life, civic life was, at the very least, promising.
1:26:49 Speaker 01 And now we've talked about the Middle East. We know what's going on in Ukraine. We know what's going on in power in Russia. China is no more delightful than it was. And the environment is maybe the biggest subject of all, but people find it boring to talk about. So when I hear about mental health and when I hear about political dissatisfaction and anger for people of your generation, how could I think it could be otherwise? It's a really rough time, and I think we'd be idiots to say otherwise. But what do you do? Throw up your hands? But politically, as citizens, the idea of ceding the ground to dictatorship in this country now, no matter how fucked up the country
1:27:33 Speaker 01 has proved to be time and time again, no matter how self-deceiving we can be about America and American history or our so-called exceptionalism, et cetera. I'm just not, and you shouldn't be, if you don't mind my saying, or any of us can afford to be, to give into despair. That's the enemy, or one of them.
1:27:53 Sam Fragoso? We should not be guilty of thinking the present moment will persist forever.
1:27:57 Speaker 01 Because this is not unique. This is a country that had a civil war. This is a country that had Reconstruction and its betrayal. This is a country that's had Jim Crow, people hanging from trees, Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 20s. Political instability, political betrayal, lying in government. What's unique here is unique here. You've got a black comic authoritarian on the brink of reelection. Okay, that is unique. Re-election to the presidency. I see my role, as you can imagine, as an editor in this and the little writing I do. You mentioned that piece, "American Tragedy",
1:28:41 Speaker 01 and the people who listen to the New Yorker Radio Hour or read The New Yorker, that's not 330 million people. That makes it very tough. But throwing up your hands, I think is, it's not just crazy. It's fetus, it's immoral. It's understandable, second by second, but ultimately to throw up your hands is just wrong.
1:29:07 Sam Fragoso? A week before you started.
1:29:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:09 Sam Fragoso? In 1998, in the June 22nd issue of The New Yorker. You wrote an article. It was about a critic, Alfred.
1:29:18 Speaker 01 Kazin.
1:29:19 Sam Fragoso? Uh huh. And I wanted to perhaps return to that in the first paragraph of it. And see where it landed with you and how it may be instructive.
1:29:30 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:29:31 Sam Fragoso? For us in this moment.
1:29:32 Speaker 01 I should read it.
1:29:32 Sam Fragoso? They would rather hear you than me.
1:29:34 Speaker 01 "The inexhaustible urge towards self-expression makes it nearly a sure thing that there will always be writers around as long as there is us. The dicier question is whether there will be readers. Not just readers of the sports pages and the jumble of self-help bestsellers and the consultants' confessions, no, but passionate readers who ignore the phone and the TV for a few hours to engage a book whose 'difficulty,' in quotes, is that it fails to soothe the ego or flatter a limited intelligence. The reader who honestly believes that the best and deepest of what we are is on the shelf. And that to reach across the shelf changes the self, changes you."
1:30:19 Sam Fragoso? When it ran in 98, your friend, mentor, and now a staff writer for you, John McPhee, said in The Washington Post, "That's a pretty good portrait of David himself and a pretty good forecast of how he'll run The New Yorker."
1:30:33 Speaker 01 He did. John McPhee, man.
1:30:36 Sam Fragoso? 92?
1:30:36 Speaker 01 92. My teacher, my mentor, my colleague, and my, despite my best efforts, fishing buddy, drags me out into the horrible outdoors twice a year to dip a hook into a river for some unknown reason.
1:30:51 Sam Fragoso? Please don't invite me.
1:30:52 Speaker 01 You have no idea.
1:30:56 Speaker 01 Look, I am not blind to the world of Netflix, TikTok, my phone, which is sitting six inches away from me.
1:31:07 Sam Fragoso? Which you looked at four minutes ago.
1:31:09 Speaker 01 I looked at four minutes ago. But the fact of the matter is, I know nothing in our cultural lives, our intellectual lives and our civic lives that is as effective and that reaches more deeply than the best of what is written. And I'm a huge movie watcher and junk television watcher and ballgame viewer and, and, and. But written expression, that's what I ended up giving my life toward, and it's immensely enriching and gratifying. And I believe in it. I remember very distinctly interviewing Philip Roth about 15 years before he died, when I first got to know him. And
1:31:54 Speaker 01 he was despairing about writing and not the literary world, but just this piece of business. And I bet you I borrowed the language from him, which is that he despaired of the notion that enough people were turning off the TV, turning on the lamp, throwing the phone across the room and devoting themselves for an hour or two or three to an enigmatic, difficult text of any kind, because it requires a lot of you. And I'm guilty enough of that too, even though my professional life demands it. But it's been, it's the gift of a lifetime. And I know that I'm hardly alone.
1:32:35 Sam Fragoso? You've committed yourself to this, to this craft, to making this magazine. My last question for you. McPhee himself is a great example of creative longevity, which is at the heart of this new book of yours, Holding the Note, in which you profile a series of musicians who are all still working till the very end. You write, "For musicians late in their careers, in the spirit of sostenuto, of sustain that pervades, writing, playing and performing keeps them in the game, helping to replenish what age has attenuated." And as we leave, I thought we watched some of this performance by Joni Mitchell at the
1:33:20 Sam Fragoso? Newport Festival last year.
1:33:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:22 Sam Fragoso? Can you set that up?
1:33:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, Joni Mitchell. Who was such a hugely important and wonderful singer and songwriter and musician, and whose masterpiece is maybe one of the great albums of the era is Blue. In recent years, she kind of went missing. She wasn't performing, her health was bad. And then she's had, in recent, last year or two, she's kind of popped her head up again.
1:33:50 Sam Fragoso? Reemerged.
1:33:51 Speaker 01 Here I am. And she's become kind of more welcoming to younger musicians who come and worship her feet and also play with her. And she appeared at Newport, and no, her voice is not this incredibly pure tone that we remember from the seventies and Blue and Ladies of the Canyon and Miles of Isles and all kinds of things, Mingus. It's something new. It's deeper, it's rougher, but it's her. And there's something beautiful about that. It is very rare, in anything, that anybody's doing their best work when they're very old. You know, I went to see Bob Dylan out in Brooklyn a month ago, and it was amazing.
1:34:35 Speaker 01 He's a rarity like that. You know, it's not like a Rolling Stone anymore, but he's fully engaged, his audience is there. There's something beautiful about that. In my own life, like, I'm nowhere near these, remotely in these leagues, and if you're asking me slyly, and I think you are a little bit, about what's down the road, I will not cling to this post forever, because I think it's wrong. I think you need to make way for new talent, new points of view, and new mistakes, new everything. And if you clog up the works for too long, it's not healthy. But when I do leave, and it won't be a million years from now, not next week or any time
1:35:17 Speaker 01 very soon, but it'll happen, I hope to write again more consistently. And it may come to nothing, and it may be of trivial importance, but I do love the activity of writing, which is very, very different from the activity of editing. Editing is also a social thing, that you get right or you get wrong, we do both. It's an imaginative one, and a deeply collaborative one. Writing, you are out there on the diving board all by your lonesome. I find that thrilling.
1:35:50 Sam Fragoso? This is "Both Sides Now" by Joni Medjel.
1:37:10 Speaker 01 Amazing.
1:37:15 Speaker 01 Can't speak.
1:37:18 Speaker 01 You know, it's, it's, you just saw time. You just listened to time and a, and a musical mother and a, and a daughter. And it's amazing to me.
1:37:29 Sam Fragoso? David, my last, I have to ask you, because now we're both crying.
1:37:35 Sam Fragoso? That line, "Well, something's lost, but something's gained."
1:37:39 Speaker 01 But even, even more than that is to hear her, the difference in her voice and because you're hearing in one ear her voice from 60 years ago, whatever it is, and the voice now, and what it's giving to them. You know, if any artist can produce that sense of feeling that you and I, I think, obviously are experiencing, simply by clicking on YouTube.
1:38:04 Speaker 01 Well, that artist has done a lot, and God bless her.
1:38:07 Sam Fragoso? I never quote YouTube comments on the podcast, but one person wrote about the Joni Mitchell song, "A 23-year-old wrote a song for her 78-year-old self to sing." That's where I want to leave us, which is the creative longevity, the commitment you've made to yourself, to the magazine, to do this work. In that great piece we quoted from...
1:38:34 Speaker 01 Alfred Kaisen, who I think the occasion for that piece is that he died.
1:38:38 Sam Fragoso? He died, but he, like you, believed that reaching across the shelf, picking something up, it changes you.
1:38:48 Speaker 01 It didn't change me. It doesn't change us. It makes us, if you're lucky and if you partake of it. And I mean, a lot of other things do too. We talked about some of them today. You know, your parents, your world, your environment, your mistakes after mistake after mistake. But there it is. The library is the gift. To ignore it, man, it's a sin.
1:39:18 Sam Fragoso? I'm trying to give you a compliment, but it's not going well.
1:39:20 Speaker 01 Well...
1:39:21 Sam Fragoso? I have to end on this because we gotta go.
1:39:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I appreciate it.
1:39:23 Sam Fragoso? Which is that you and the writers you've presided over and made better have changed me, and I'm so grateful for it.
1:39:33 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was extraordinary. I appreciate it. I really do.
1:39:39 Sam Fragoso? David Remnick, a pleasure.
1:39:41 Speaker 01 Take care, my friend.
1:40:40 Sam Fragoso? And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify. You can leave us a review on Apple. You can post on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. All of this really does help us continue making the program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Madison Houston and David Krasnow at The New Yorker, Adam McKay at Hyper Object Industries, Alison Walker at Netflix, and of course, our guest, David Rundnick. The new documentary, The New Yorker at 100, is now available to watch exclusively on Netflix. For more episodes, I'd recommend
1:41:19 Sam Fragoso? Tariq Gross, Gia Tolentino, and Hilton Als. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit subscribe on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok, our executive producer, Janix Abra. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and Caitlin Dryden. It was mixed by Andrew Vastal. Our music comes from Dylan Peck. Our illustrations come from Chris Shannoy. This episode was made in partnership with Lemonada Media and
1:42:00 Sam Fragoso? Pushkin Industries, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you again for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here on Sunday with actor Kate Winslet. Until then, stay safe, and so long.
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1:43:12 Speaker 04 avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.
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