The New Yorker Radio Hour - Anthony Hopkins on “The Father,” and Patricia Lockwood’s First Novel

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

At an age when many actors are slowing down or long retired, Anthony Hopkins has kept up a feverish pace, with recent roles including Pope Benedict XVI in “The Two Popes” and Odin in Marvel’s ��Thor” movies. In his new film, “The Father,” Hopkins’s character, Antony, is beginning to suffer from dementia, but he doesn’t want to accept a caregiver when his daughter, played by Olivia Colman, can no longer live with him. The film brings the viewer into Antony’s experience, particularly his confusion about what’s happening around him. Hopkins tells Michael Schulman that he hasn’t dealt with dementia in his own family, thankfully, but that he wasn’t daunted by the role. “When you’re working with a superb script, it’s a road map, and you follow it,” he says. He advises younger actors, “Don’t act too much. Keep it simple.” Plus, the writer Patricia Lockwood, who’s just published her first novel, on how she created literature out of the fractured consciousness of an obsessive Twitter user. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. At an age when a lot of people are slowing down or who are long since retired, Anthony Hopkins has started taking on some of the most ambitious projects of his career, and he is 83. In the last decade, Hopkins played King Lear for the second time. He's on HBO's Westworld. He played, Pope Benedict in the two popes. He even played God, the Norse God, Odin, in Marvel's Thor movies. You're out of vain. Greedy, fool. Anthony Hopkins's new film, The Father, is ambitious, but it's still much more down to earth. He plays a man whose dementia is starting to make itself known, and it's getting the better of him. He's struggling to make sense of his shifting realities, and he's fighting with his daughter all the time.

and she's played by Olivia Coleman. Hopkins talked about the film with New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman. If you think Zoom greetings are usually awkward, you have never tried introducing yourself to a literal night. Hi, Sir Anthony, I'm Michael. Schumann, nice to meet you. Tony, Tony, Hawkins, Seller.

Tony, okay. Tony Hopkins gives one of my favorite performances of the year in The Father. The film is directed by Florian Zeller, who also wrote the 2012 French play that it's based on. Much of the action concerned Hopkins character, who's also named Anthony, resisting his daughter's efforts to hire someone to help take care of him. So if I understand correctly, you're leaving me. Is that it? You're abandoning me.

Dad. What's going to become of me? Obviously, this is very important to me, otherwise I wouldn't be going. I really love him. I can come back and see you often at the weekends. But I can't leave you here on your own. It's not possible. That's why if you refuse to have a carer, I'm going to have to... To what? To what?

You have to understand, Dad. Anne, you're going to have to what? So in The Father, you play a man who is in the throes of dementia. And one of the incredible things about the movie is that it places the viewer in this man's subjectivity. We're confused along with him. I'm so curious how you understood for yourself what that would feel like and what it would look like. Well, fundamentally, what it is for me is, actor starting that. I've never experienced dementia. My own family. My father didn't suffer.

He died of heart disease. My mother died of old age, actually. She died at the age of 18. And she had complications, but not dementia. But it is an extraordinary condition. When you have a great script screenplay writer like Christopher Hampton or Floreen who is, I think, a remarkable genius of Florian, made it like, as you say, over here, walk in the park. It was so easy. So my idea is that I try to I mean I try to explain to younger actors when they ask me, how would you get into the bottom? I said, I don't really.

If you follow a superb screenplay, the language, it's a roadmap. And so you don't have to act. So it's very easy. And then you work with someone like Olivia and it makes it so easy. Acting is not required. Just go through the scenes as if as normal.

And I think because I'm now 83, I'm closer to that age, that dangerous age when it could happen. I hope to God it doesn't. That's why I play the piano and paint and read and learn poetry and stuff. But it was easy. It was easy. And every day was fun, although it's not a fun subject. Yeah, in a way, what he's doing the entire movie is coping with his denial, that he actually has this problem. And there's just an incredible scene at the end when he finally breaks down and kind of regresses into childhood, really.

He's calling for his mommy. It's so upsetting and heartbreaking. You've said that this was a really easy movie to do, but that seems hard, wasn't it? Well, let me put it this way. I've been doing it a long time now. I've been around a long time. And I found it as the years have gone by, I found it easier to act, you know, but I've found it easier. Occasionally, we used to have a forum out of young actors, and I'd ask them questions.

There wasn't an acting class as such, but, you know, and all my could say to them is just keep it as simple as you can. Don't act too much. Just keep it simple. But I say, if you have to do Stanislavski on it, you have to do early Strasbourg, fine. But keep it relaxed and know the text. And as I said, with Christophampton who adapted Florence play to the screen. It is a roadmap. You don't have to figure it out. You don't have to rewrite or anything like that. One thing I did gather was that Florin told me when we met, he said, I'm going to, the name is Anthony.

It's my name. He said, yeah. He said he wrote it for me. I don't know if he is that true. But he said he did. And so he put my actual birth date in. And there's a scene in the office with the doctor when I say, yeah, she's a date of birth. I said Friday the 31st of December 1937. Now I do happen to have that kind of mindset I fascinated by days. But I wanted to as a little bit of character I said, can I add Friday? So I said, but why?

I said, because I know the date. He said, okay. And I wanted to show the doctor, I'm in perfect control. There's nothing wrong with me. Friday. You got a problem with that? Friday, 31st of December and 37 and 37.

That is a man who is in control, but of course he's not. But he's been used to control all his life. He's a man who is a bit of a tyrant. He's not a bad man. He's just been a tough old father and impatient and irascible. And now finally he's losing control of it all. And the last scene is, yeah, I'm losing all my leaves.

Everything's falling away from him. And that must be a devastating tragedy. Well, it reminded me so much of King Lear, which, of course, you've played twice. I believe you played King Lear 30 years apart. But having played Lear twice, did that... that character informed this one at all? Was there

overlap? Yes, in a way. To go back to Lear, it was a remarkable experience for working with Richard Eyre and Emma Thompson and Jim Carter. I played it 30 years ago. David Hare directed it,

the author David Hare, at the National. And I was okay. I was okay, technically, I was okay, but I was still too young. And I thought I could crack it, no. because then you had to have the old age problem. Well, I'm now 80, about it was 80 when I played King Lear the last time.

So it was easy for me. Tell me my daughters, since now we will have us both of rule, interests of territory, cares of state. Which of you shall we say, doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge. And what I wanted, and I worked it out, I thought, where did I go wrong before?

well, okay, I'm going to play him as a tough old soldier who has no love or a love embarrasses him. He's a tough old warrior. He drinks with all his pals and he's rough and he even treats his favorite daughter. He doesn't like his two daughters. Can't stand him. But his one daughter, he loves, but he treats it as a boy.

And he thinks he's free. Right, I don't need love. But in fact, it wrecks him, destroys him deep inside because he's not allowing himself to feel as a human being. And when he comes to the end of it all, he said, I'm a foolish fond old man. And he admits to himself, I've been foolish all my life. Because I never loved.

So this with, and I'm a bit like that in my own life because my father's a tough old guy, you know, this baker worked hard all his life. And it wasn't a very touchy bit, but you drink up and smoke and all. And, but he was a lonely man. And he was emotionally wrong. himself, especially in his weaker years. So that's what I brought to it, I think.

Yeah, well, one thing that this role has in common with King Lear, I'd imagine, is that they both need to be played by an actor of a certain age and their characters who are losing their faculties, but you need incredible stamina and skill to play these parts. You know, anyone who's seen your work over the past couple of years, like the dresser and the two popes and the father can see that you are absolutely on the top of your game at 83. But I was curious if you have, if the process is the same for you in your 80s as it was, say, in your 50s when you were doing the silence of the lambs, have you come up against any sort of just limitations of getting older that have had to, where you've had to adjust how you work?

Well, I can't run now. My knees. Well, when I was in silence of the lamps, I was in great shape, but I still am, 80, I'm in, and make sure of my diaries, and I don't smoke, I don't drink, and all that stuff. And I remember working on the film with Lion in Winter with O'Toole and Catherine Hepburn,

and she said to me, she said, always look after your health, without that you're gone. And I took that to heed. It took me a few years to get in through my thick scar. But I thought, well, I've got one life, but I think it's an attitude of mind. I do believe this. It's no good saying,

oh, well, by the time you play King Lear, you're too old to remember the lines. Well, that's a fallacy. You have to say, we've got a perfect memory. It's a form of self-hypnosis in a way. You say, I can do it. And it's beyond positive things, I can do it. And I feel strong enough to do it.

I knew that I had all the muscle to play King Lear in my way without playing him with self-pity. And with the father, the same. You have to be fit. You have to be confident. You really do have to know what you're doing. This is what I do. You recently marked 45 years of sobriety.

Congratulations, first of all. So that was, I believe, 1975 that you gave up drinking. Was it difficult to do that? No, no, it was a... I tried to avoid this subject because I don't want to be boring about it. I'm not a preacher and evangelist. if you can have a drink and have some fun with it and fine

and I know people who, you know, they drink and they're fine with it. They don't have to destroy the furniture. I was not a good drinker. So I, but I became addicted to it because it gave me some sense of escape, some sense of peace. But in the end, I thought,

this is not helping me at all. This is just making me more uncomfortable. And, you know, I was drinking quite a lot. It wasn't so much the amount. It was what it would do to my brain and what it would do to my body. And I thought, one day, this is stupid. And it was done.

It was over and done with, and that's 45 years of a new life. And it's funny because, you know, I used to drink it up with all the old actors and all those guys. Because that's what you do and that's what you did in those days. I used to, I went to the Salisbury pub in London once,

who was about 15 years ago and it was a beautiful sunny day and I just looked in the salt and a brew where I used to drink and I just stood in the doorway and the barman he said hello there he said you're Anthony Hawkins

says yeah oh come in if you didn't drink guys no I'll tell you what I'll have a tonic water he said oh good he said you I said come in here

and I looked at all the brass and a beautiful pub of all the Victorian design and he said sit down and he said gave me a tonic water and a sandwich he said you used to come in here

I said I knew the more He said, yeah. He said, they're all used to come in. You're all the famous actors have come in. I say, yeah, they're all dead now. And I thought, my God, they're all dead. I thought, God, almighty, but, you know, brilliantly talented people. You think, well, that's the way they did it.

They burned the rafters. They touched the rafters of life. But in the end, I thought, well, I'm glad I didn't have to go that far. Well, this era of British theater, late 60s, early 70s, was an incredible time. You know, this was the same theater scene that gave us Ian McKellen and Judy Dench, all these great actors. But you fled, essentially. As far as I can understand, you just got out of there. I think the story is that in 1973, you were playing the title role in Macbeth, and you left the production, and you moved to Hollywood to be in a movie with Goldie Hawn.

And at the time, you know, you were really coming into your own as a great Shakespearean Thespian and all the rest. This seems like a pretty drastic, you know, left turn. You've said that you didn't fit into that scene. Can you tell me why? Why did you leave something that you were flourishing in? Well, I think it was I dragged up from my past, from my schoolboy years, that I wasn't bright enough to do anything.

But I had an instinct. I had a rough, rough house kind of ruffian instinct about acting. But I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't educated in such and such. And I didn't have the confidence in the people of service of Shakespeare and I said, well, I did the Scottish players, they say. And I just didn't feel I fitted in. And if you approach anything in life and you have doubts and big doubts about yourself, somebody will pick up on it and they'll attack you.

They do. They'll see it as a weakness. and I suffered that for little and I remember directors saying no Tony talking to me like a child and I would become volcanic with rage

that goes back to that and I remember one day it was in January in 1973 and something yet had gone wrong and I mean nobody sold as might

but I thought I'm out of you and finished and I was doing a play at the Misanthrop with John Dexter directing director. And he would pick on me as his whipping by, and one day I said, fuck you. And I left. And I was warned, I said, you will never

work again. I said, I don't give a shit. I don't care. And I told my agent, as I'm out, he said, you're crazy. I said, no, I don't care. And I've been off to do a film with Goldie Horn in Vienna called Girlfriend Protrathka. And one day, I came back to the hotel and my ex-wife was on the phone. She said, somebody's coming out to see you in Vienna tomorrow. I said, oh, yeah, who's that, John Dexter? She's, yeah. John Dexter, the director I said, are they going to

find me or are they going to sue me for, he says, no, he wants you to do equest in New York. So I met John the next day and he was a tough guy. He said, so why do you walk out? I said, because you're a bastard, that's why. And he said something to be, he said,

but now when I listen, he said, you're a much better actor than you think you are. Stop all this nonsense. So I went to New York and it was the change of my life. It was the best times in the best perhaps that way. But it turned out that I was no threat at all to anyone that maybe I'd mellowed over the years. Yeah, it's funny to hear you describe yourself as a younger actor who was so full of anger because you certainly seem very happy go lucky now, but it wasn't so much anger.

It was just being a young man, you know, when you meet young kids and you make that, of course, anger, there's no, nothing wrong with being angry or, uh, driven or aggressive, yeah, fine, that's all part of being alive. Otherwise, we wouldn't survive. But as the years have gone by, I thought, dropped the anger. There's nothing to be angry about, you know, you're lucky to be alive. And so that was a transformation. That was slow.

But that wasn't so much anger. It was just insecurity, fear, ambition, misplaced, you know, paranoid probably, all those things. But when you're young, that's what you have to accept. you see young kids today, they're full of doubts and insecurities. They try to be cool, you know, cool. But you can see beneath the mask that they're not cool. They're as scared as anyone else's.

And to admit that we are afraid is a wonderful freedom. To also come to the confession that we're insignificant. And that finally, everything is important, but finally nothing is important. It's all smoke. Tony, thank you so much for spending some time talking with me. And congratulations on The Father. I'm excited for people to see it. Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Michael. Anthony Hopkins. He spoke with the staff writer Michael Schulman. The film The Father is out this weekend. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. When we talk about the power of the Internet these days, we usually don't mean anything particularly good. We're thinking about conspiracy theories, trolling, companies harvesting our data, a president using social media to inspire a deadly riot. But that's not the whole picture, it never is. We all live online more and more, and the effects of this new way of life. It's hard to understand and describe. The New Yorker's Katie Waldman has been paying attention to writers whose work tries to capture that uncanny and modern experience. Katie spoke recently with the woman who's been called the Poet Laureate of Twitter, and not as a joke. Katie, tell me about Patricia Lockwood. Well, she is a writer who just published her debut novel.

It's called No One Is Talking About This. And it's a fascinating text, so we should get back to it in a second. But before we do, it's sort of helpful to know where Lockwood is coming from. She is a creature of the internet, even maybe an imp or a genius of the internet. And she first got attention for her tweets, which are like little stabs of poetry. very funny, raunchy, often extremely bizarre, and something about them seems to tap into the native language of the internet. One tweet that really delighted me is she actually tweeted at the Paris Review's Twitter account. So is Paris any good or not? And David, there was no punctuation,

no question mark or anything, so it really captured that kind of ironic deadpan of online voice and also kind of the psychotic literalism. But what's really surprising about her writing, I think, is that she actually can command so many different tones and registers. That really goes back to her background as a poet. She has written several books of poetry, and she also has a memoir called Priestaddy, which is how I first encountered her.

Me too. I love that book. I love Priestaddy. It's amazing. But the new book reads pretty differently. It's much more experimental. In formal terms, how did she make the language of being online, being online constantly, the stuff of a novel? Yeah, well, it's an interesting question because one thing to note about this novel is the protagonist who's unnamed very closely resembles Lockwood herself. And the narration of the novel very closely resembles the way your brain sort of skips from tweet to tweet. It's like these little fragments of text.

And so it's either a Twitter scroll or it's the broken consciousness. of a Twitter user. It's divided into two distinct pieces, and the first half is a pretty naturalistic attempt to conjure kind of the experience of being online. Actually, here's Lockwood reading a passage from that first half as the main character goes online. She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, bliss, pictures of breakfast in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a Shiba Inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to to greet its owner, ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises. The world pressing closer and closer.

The spider web of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk. And the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this? What's interesting is in the second part of the novel, something very dramatic happens in the protagonist's personal life. It is kind of wrenching and it drives her offline effectively. And the experience kind of unlocks a different register of expression or even existence for the protagonist. The language itself is more classically beautiful and lyrical.

And then something about the nature of her relationship to the world changes. The mystery of the book is, how do these two halves relate to each other? Is it thesis antithesis or something more complicated? I talked to Patricia Lockwood recently and got to ask her about all this. So your main character in this book is someone who is extremely online, and I know that that's probably a phrase that you hear a thousand times doing the press for this book. To you, what does that mean? And what is the experience of the internet that you're trying to capture?

And just to put that in the most fatuous terms possible, do you have a theory of the internet? It's so interesting to be tagged with a phrase that I would. myself never ever used. They're not just using it, but it's like the headline. It's like Patricia Lockwood speaks about being extremely online, which is the thing that I would absolutely never say. But yeah, a person who is extremely online has the internet in their bloodstream. It's just rushing and rushing in their veins. And that's something you can feel. It means that you want to pick up your phone and see what's going on when you're not looking at it. It means that you're looking at Twitter while you're pooping. It means all of those things. I mean, that's the easiest

definition, right? If you're extremely online, you're looking at Twitter while you're pooping. So I wouldn't say that I have a theory of the internet. It's more of a feeling. It's more of a pulse. It's something that is inside me. The character becomes a sought after authority on internet culture. And it's after a tweet of hers goes viral. And the tweet is, can a dog be twins? Which I've had many conversations with people in my life about like why particularly that's funny, but I'm wondering, how did you settle on that particular joke? Oh, man, when it hits, you just know. It is like when the doctor hits your knee with a hammer and the knee, like, your leg kicks out. It had to be something that I thought would actually go viral. So it's not

something that I ever posted, but it is just close enough to something that I would post that I think a lot of people would also like and find funny. But yeah, I do present it as a sort of real and plausible job that this person just became famous for those words, Can a Dog Be Twins? At this point, the novel written in fragments is really popular and actually so popular that it can be somewhat easy to mock. But you chose that structure deliberately. And I was wondering if you could talk about that choice. Yeah. I mean, I think that you have to write in the voice of the portal, and I think that you have to write in the look of the portal as well. And the portal, of course, is the way that you refer to the internet.

And the protagonist also talks about that. I mean, she also is to a certain extent mocking it. She says, why were we all writing like this now? You know, why are we all jumping from synapse to synapse lily pad to lily pad? Partly because this is the way that the portal writes, that we are participating in a way that requires us to make leaps. And this has always been true, I think, of a certain kind of fiction that is composed of fragments that goes back historically a very, very long way. Yeah. How would you describe the qualities that make your sensibility internety? Like, there's this quality of, like, remixing everything that the world has to offer. And I'm thinking specifically in your novel of a scene that's in a medical setting, and there are doctors filing in and out. And one doctor is described as a Madonna and a grotto with a fish-shaped foot, which is just, like, where did that come from? That's gorgeous. I don't know.

When you think about the way that what you're trying to do with your art coincides, with like the way the internet moves and works, what comes up? So no, it's a really good question. I think I have a metaphorical mind and I think that I like to make leaps. So I think that what happens with a really good tweet or, you know, something that kind of like makes its way to meme status, something like that, is it makes a leap through the air of the mind, which is also a sort of definition that I've used for poetry.

So I would say that one quality that I think is notable is there's a sort of bodilessness to it. It's like anything can happen. You can have any form. You can be a cartoon. You can be a serial mascot. You can be gritty. And that's the place that I've always been most at home. I think this is true for people who don't feel wholly comfortable in their bodies. I think that people who want to live on the internet maybe feel that way. And I think that we share that affinity. So people talk about the experience of being online in often really negative terms, like doom scrolling and hellsight. But to you, being online is different, and you write about sort of your arms being full of the sapphires of the instant. How do you find pleasure in this thing that seems to make everyone miserable? Well, first of all, when I started the book, you know, the term like doom scrolling didn't exist. It wasn't exactly hellworld yet.

We were on our way there. But I think that what is true for me is that words have always been very tactile. There's something that I feel I can reach out in touch, something that I can smell, something I can turn around in my hand. There's always been this tremendous sense that I could walk among text as through a room of objects or through a forest, something like that. I think that maybe that is why it's pleasant to me. Yeah. In the second half of the book, the protagonist sister gets pregnant with a child with a rare genetic disorder called Proteus Syndrome. and it's sometimes called elephant man's disease.

And because of the condition, the baby only lives about six months. You've talked about the book as auto fiction. From the acknowledgement section, we know that some of this mirrors, some of what was happening in your life. And there are moments where the character feels like she can't post about what her family is going through.

Maybe there are things that are too raw for the internet. Did you feel that way? And did that affect your decision to maybe put this in the, the more hospitable form of the novel? So I have spoken of feeling as if the child had to be put into the book intact, that she had to be settled into it almost as if the book were a cradle for her. So the thing in the book that is true is her syndrome, is what she experienced,

is her personality, just all of her. And the reason that the protagonist feels that she can't put her in the portal is because she's not the child's mother. And I very much felt the same way. But for some reason, I had no qualms about putting her into the safety of the book. Thankfully, my sister did not either. I asked her about it right away. And I said, I am writing about Lena.

I can't keep myself from writing about her. Is that okay? And it was. And it made her happy. And there's a sense that she will be memorialized. You know, when a child only lives six months, there is a bold question. And that question is who remembers her? How do they remember her?

Do they remember her as a human being or only a series of soft sensations? But she had such a distinct personality that I thought, I can preserve that. I can put that into the cradle of the book and I can rock it and I can keep her safe there. So I'd love to ask you to read another passage that takes place right after the birth of the baby. She found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it. She was doing so well. She was stupendous. In every reaching cell of her, she was a genius,

just like the man with the basketball whose body always knew what to do. Her eyes traveled and traveled, though she could not see, would not be able to see. It was immediately clear. There were drops of wild dragon-scale fluorescence where her irises ought to be. So? So what? That every person on earth might be watched in that way.

given a party whenever she waved and raised her little arms, breathed, just like the rest of us, turned to hear a voice she knew. The news, the news. It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming, sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot hospital coffee and then went,

like George Clooney on ER, like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world's optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this. Thank you so much. So that reading, of course, gets back to the title of the novel. No one is talking about this. What is the this? That's a good question. It's a very encompassing. word. And it is funny to think that even the title is taken sort of from meme language. But I just sort of think of this as like the umbrella that is that we're holding over us. It's everything. It's what is encompassed in our experience of the world. In that moment, you know, she wants to speak to everyone in the world. She wants everyone to hear these words. Do you know about this?

She wants to show everyone the same picture. So there are times, I think, when one word becomes the biggest thing in the world and it absolutely holds everything. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating because the arrival of the baby is sort of a turning point or a Volta. Volta, that's so good. Do you know my first book of poetry was called Volta? You know that sweet first book of poetry that's so terrible that you're convinced is this work of genius and you sleep with it under your pillow and you pray not to get hit by a car before the world sees it? Mine was called Volta. Oh my gosh. Well, here it is, reincarnated. Yes. But, I mean, certainly the tone doesn't recede,

and even a lot of the concerns of the first part don't necessarily recede, but they're suddenly collaged with this powerful reminder of the life that happens offline. And in a way, the second half reveals the depths beneath the shallows of the first half. Like, it doesn't necessarily knock over everything that the first half has established. It just, it sort of says, like, this same collectivity, this openness and abundance and receptivity, like, that can also be expressed in this, like, singular person. Yeah, and I like the word abundance, because I think that that is what she feels or what she felt originally in the portal. I do think she feels greater abundance with the baby. But there's a line

at the end where she does talk about how she entered the portal because she wanted to delight and to be delighted. And that's something that is easier to achieve with a child. It's harder sometimes to be delighted by and delight the world. The contrast is there, but I think that these two impulses partake of each other. I think they do deepen each other. Yeah. So you see these documentaries coming out about how social media is rotting our brains, and there's a kind of pessimism there about the internet right now. Do you think that pessimism is warranted, or is there a more nuanced way to think about what the internet should do or be? I think there's always a more nuanced way, but it is easy to be in a black mood about the internet at this moment in time.

But I don't think that it's a permanent mood. I mean, it's still the place where we go to congregate, to gather. And I think that there can always be beauty and good power in that. And I think that the darker things will stay with us. But as long as we can gather in a place, I think that there is hope. Thank you so much. Thank you, Katie. Patricia Lockwood, her new novel is called No One Is Talking About.

this, and you can read Katie Waldman on books of all kinds at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon & Corby, David Krasnow, Gophon, and. Poutubewelle, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabel Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from

Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.