The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 11: Life as a Reporter Covering ISIS, and Puppet Sex

Episode Date: January 1, 2016

What's the funniest way to spook a horse? Cartoonists Matt Diffee and Emily Flake give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how jokes get made. Then, comedian Aziz Ansari critiques Hollywood’s casting habits. Journalist Rukmini Callimachi shares her insight into how ISIS views itself. And the screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman talks puppet sex and existential dread during a tour of the Whitney Museum.   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. He's very excited to be having a conversation when they can have that revelation. He's really smart. He's actually someone who's kind of savvy, you know, every parent. Maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process piece. Okay. I'm David Remnick and welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Life for a cartoonist isn't easy.

Every week you're churning out ideas to come up with a batch of draft. to give to the New Yorker's cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff. This week, cartoonist Matt Diffey calls up his colleague, Emily Flake, for a new installment of Life's a Batch. Hey, this is Matt Diffey. Welcome to Life's a Batch. I'm one of the cartoonists here, and I'm going to call one of my colleagues, my cronies, Emily Flake. She's been doing cartoons for the magazine since 2008. I'm going to call her and see how her works coming along. Hey, Emily, day one of the work week.

Yeah. Started anything yet? Of course not. It's day one of the work week. Yeah. That's like day zero. You know, with a new baby, I'm starting to think, you know, baby ideas. I've got one idea already.

The new mother has the baby in her arms and she's talking on the phone and saying, yeah, the doctor said to keep him swaddled for the first three weeks and then the dad is in a big swaddled blanket on the couch. Nice. For me, I was a little hesitant to pitch a lot of baby ideas because I didn't want to be stuck in the ladies. cartoon ghetto. Yeah. Your mileage may vary on this. Yeah, well, I mean, one thing that I'm pretty sure there's a joke in is the fact that

everything you buy for a baby is covered with choking warnings. You know, this is a choking hazard. Apparently, a baby can choke on anything. They can. They can choke on your ideas. If you have bad thoughts around the baby, your baby might choke. Baby CPR, I think you grab them by the ankles and sort of swing them around in a circle. Pretty sure.

That's how you kill a chicken. It's amazing how similar. Farming practices are applied to child. child raising. Yeah, that's another book you can write. Fertile Ground. Oh, ha, ha, ha. Yeah.

Well, cool. Well, I'm not worried about you. We'll talk maybe in four or five days. See how the week went for you. All right. Talk you later. Cool. Go then.

Bye. Emily Flake and Matt Diffy, cartoonist for the New Yorker. Today I'm going to be talking with Rukmini Kalamaki, who's doing some of the most difficult, bravest work in journalism right now, covering ISIS for the New York Times. And she's getting very close to people. who are inspiring fear all over the world. But we're going to start on a lighter note, a much lighter note, comedy. There's a tradition of comedians going from stand-up to sitcoms.

Think of Bob Newhart or Jerry Seinfeld. Aziz Ansari is ready to play in that league. After making a reputation on stage, he was cast on Amy Poller's Parks and Recreation where he played an Indian American who took the phony name Tom Haverford to boost his career in government. And he was kind of an idiot.

Every day, I start by hitting up Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. Sometimes I like to throw in LinkedIn. For the professional show, Odi's. Ansari's new show is Master of Nun. He's the creator and star, and he plays a character much closer to himself, a decent, well-meaning guy named Dev, a young actor struggling to make a place for himself. My dads are so weird.

I tell my dad I got a call back on the sickening. Oh, the Black Virus movie? That's great. Thank you. I told him, he's like, uh, okay, can you fix my iPad? How about, hey, son, great work. Or, uh, hey, son, I'm proud of you. I have, I have never, ever heard my dad say the word proud.

It's always like, that's it. So that's all you've done? Like, if I went to the moon, he would honestly be like, when are you going to Mars? Yeah. Oh, Brian, you went to the moon? That's like graduating from community college. When are you going to graduate from Harvard, aka go to Pluto?

Ansari came to the New Yorker recently to talk with staff writer Sarah Larson. One of the things I really like about your show is that the characters seem to have a lot of freedom to do fun, inventive, weird things and not have it blow up in their face. Like, I love the episode where there's a sort of first date that they fly to Nashville. And, you know, I feel like if that happened on a regular sitcom, first of all, it wouldn't happen. Secondly, if they did, it would just be to show what fools they are. You know what I mean? It would be kind of like, oh, this was a terrible idea. But actually, this charming scenario plays out, and they have all these fun and funny adventures.

They get to know each other. And there's a little problem at the end, but it's not because they're idiots for having taken a first date to Nashville, you know? Yeah. You know, these two people, they get along and there is this banter and all this, but there's a certain moments that are a little uncomfortable. Right. Like when Dev makes a joke about her being vegetarian and she's kind of a lot of a lot of a lot of it. Well, he realizes that she is vegetarian. I mean, they do have this intimacy and they do really like each other.

There they are in this barbecue place. You want to split a pit master combo, jommies and ribs? Oh, no, I can't do that. Why not? I'm kind of a vegetarian. No! Are you serious? That was a big debate in the writer's room.

Can we make Rachel vegetarian? Is that making her too unlikable? Would Dev ever date someone? Well, as a vegetarian, I feel like this is one of the nicer portraits of vegetarianism that I've seen in popular culture. Really? Yeah. I love the structure of the show, which has each episode is a different topic, basically. How did you arrive at that structure?

At a certain point when we're writing the series, we realized, oh, this show is more like my stand-up than a series, and that each episode is kind of about one of these topics and it really explores it. It allowed us to do that by doing things like we don't have an ensemble that shows up every week. You know, in most shows like this, you see the same four friends eating, dinner together every week. And at a certain point when we were writing, we're like, you don't see the same poor people all the time in your real life. You have different groups of friends that come in and out of your life. And, you know, you look at something like Allen wrote on Parks and Rec, and I think that becomes kind of a strange challenge at times where it's like, you know, there'd be times we're

filming Parks and Rec where I'd be like, why is Tom here right now? He doesn't need to be here. There's no way. Why does he even still work in this department and what is his job? He quit. He's not supposed to be around these people all the time. This doesn't make sense. Who cares? And also, I feel like it's a structure that has empathy built into it a little bit because you really look at things from other people's perspective. The episode about women, I mean, you cover some of that in your stand-up, too. Those feel like it came out of conversations with women about their experiences, being followed by creepy guys coming home from a bar or... Yeah, and, you know, we had women in the writers' room that we would have long conversations about this stuff. And, you know, one of the women told me when she leaves a bar at night, she would walk in the middle of the street and dialed 9-1 just in case.

Right. And so we put that in there. And the argument at the very end, I think, is really what that episode is about. And the argument at the end is a group of people are sitting at the table, me and my girlfriend in the show and my other friend Denise and the other guys' characters. and the director of this commercial that I worked on shakes our hands, but doesn't shake the women's hands. What? You didn't notice that?

That guy only introduced himself to the men at the table. He went right past us, like Denise and I were invisible. Yeah, he totally snubbed us. I don't know. I don't think that was intentional. You guys were sitting in the corner. He was probably just in a rush. Yeah, well, in this rush, he managed to shake hands with two random dudes in Arnold.

He didn't think we were important enough. I don't know. She's like he might be reading a bit much into it. We're telling you that this is something that definitely happens to women all the time. But fine, deny our perception of the world. Here's my issue. He just went to the bathroom, wash his hands, and they're still wet. I don't want to shake no wet hands.

And that scene, there was a split in the room of, even amongst the women in the writer's room. Like, some people are like, well, yeah, I see where he's coming from. And then some of the women were like, no, that happens to me. Like, that definitely happens. And I was like, and we're like, we've got to change it. It's very ambiguous. And I was like, no, this is actually perfect. That's great.

Like, it shouldn't be clear. The point is just to not immediately dismiss someone when they say something affected them that way and to actually hear them out and see what they have to say. Can we talk about R. Kelly a little bit? R. Kelly? Yeah. Okay. So you have done a lot of great comedic stuff about R. Kelly, and you've been a fan of R. Kelly, and our feelings culturally have changed about R. Kelly. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, I read this piece in New York Magazine that was really in... interesting about basically was asking the question like knowing like the shadiness of what's going on there yeah well he's had a lot of rape allegations and settlements and brutal stuff yeah yeah it's the worst stuff right yeah like when you hear ignition come on is it right to just be happy about right that right that's a hard question i mean i think the answers that same question yeah the answers kind of know right right i mean like the cosby show it's like i don't think I don't know if anyone's going to watch that show anymore.

Right. I don't know if a generation is going to, like, we're the last people alive that are going to know that monopoly scene in the Cosby Show. We're the last people. Like, I don't think anyone's going to raise your children. They're like, hey, you've got to check out the Cosby Show. Right, right, right. You know what's interesting is I was talking to these kids who are maybe 14, 15 years old.

They're my managers, one of my managers' kids that came to one of my stand-up shows. And I'm asking about stand-up shows they watched. And I brought up like Eddie Murphy delirious. Like, hey, I tried to watch that. And they're like, I couldn't make it through it, all the homophobia. I was like, wow, that's incredible to hear a young person say that. I couldn't imagine a kid that age saying that 20, 30 years ago. No.

It was an interesting thing to see, you know. Things have changed a lot in the last 10. Yeah, and I think even Eddie Murphy is like, hey, I was 22 years old when I did that special. and I said some stupid stuff. Right. And it was a different time and, you know. Yeah. There's things in my first stand-up specials.

I'm sure if I went back now, I'd probably change things or adjust things based on kind of growing as a person. I was also, I was thinking about, I read your piece in the New York Times about race and casting. Oh, thanks. It was quite good. And the end was so great and so interesting. And when you just kind of said, people will, you know, accept lots of things. There's kind of like, give us, you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robot, for example, you know, like a robot with a crazy Austrian accent. And I think there's a sense of relief when actual casting of not just a lot of good-looking white guys, straight white guys, when other kinds of people are cast, people like that. You know, audiences are thought to want a certain kind of thing, what we've had forever. But there's huge sense of relief and joy when we get Empire or when we get a show like yours.

Yeah, I think a lot of those people that make those decisions operate from a place of fear. Right. And they're not operating from a place of creative excitement. Right. And I operate from that place. Exactly. And if you operate from creative excitement, you believe in what you're making and you believe that if it's good, people are going to watch it. I think sometimes people are scared.

and I've heard people say things like, well, when someone watches a show, they need to see someone that they can kind of imagine as their person in the show. Or, you know, there's horrifying things of people being like, well, this character needs to be really hot. You know, everyone needs to want to have sex with that character. We need to sexy up this guy or girl.

I mean, more often these are things said about female characters, of course. And none of that, I don't buy any of it. I just don't. especially after Master of None. Because, you know what, Indians on TV, you'd show that to someone, and they'd be like, I mean, who's going to relate to this? This is such a specific issue about your, I don't know. Basically, what they're saying is they say things like, well, I don't know if mainstream audiences will enjoy that.

And what that basically means is I'm not sure white people are going to relate to that. Guess what? White people relate to anything. If it's good, well-written, you have good characters, a compelling story, you relate to anything. People watch anime movies about bugs and fish. They're relating to those problems. Yeah. Because all these things, ultimately Indians on TV,

we've all have had a version of feeling like that, regardless of your race or ethnicity. And I think the other thing is, I think Master of Nun feels authentic because it's written by me and Alan. And so that's our story. It's not like a white guy. If a white guy wrote Indians on TV, it would be horrible.

It would be so bad. If a white guy wrote... It's racist. It would be terrible. You know, it'd be, I mean, maybe it wouldn't be terrible. Maybe they were really interviewed, you know, me and Alan for a long time about our stories and then wrote that episode. They might have been able to pull it off, but it's just so much more real coming from us. And I think also me and Alan are real life.

We do have a mix of people like that. You know, when Alan and I hang out, there isn't any guy and an Asian guy. My world is diverse like that. Yeah. white people and sometimes that is a valid criticism of like really this is there's just white people and this is kind of a bummer to not see any diversity but then you watch like it's not the answer I also think is not like you watch like if Seinfeld came out today I think it should be those same four white people that was that's this world and that's what's happening girls girls well I think

that's her world I do see four white girls having brunch together a lot I see that quite a bit so I don't think it rings as phony I have seen four white girls hang out together. So I think the criticism of girls is, you know, I'm just saying like, oh, she just put four white girls. Whatever, like, that's her show. Like, you know, and you know what we need is you need more people that are coming up to get in a position where they can make their own show, you know?

Right. So maybe in a year or whenever or tomorrow, we'll see a show with four Asian girls hanging out. I'd love to see that show. Yeah. That's the other great thing about this stuff is you really really. We've told so many stories about white people. Right. There's an infinite number of stories left.

Right, right. And as more people come up and pursue careers like mine and are from different backgrounds, we'll see more of them. So you don't know yet if, are you making a second season? We haven't heard officially, but I think things are in our favor to do one. Yeah. Do you have thoughts about where you might want to take it? Honestly, it's hard for me because I'm so tapped at the moment. Like, I dump my whole.

head into this first season of the show. And so if we did a second season, I would just need some time or else I would freak out that what we're making wouldn't be as good as the first season. So you want to take a little break and just kind of recharge? Yeah, because otherwise, what would second season be about? It'd be a guy promoting season one of his show. It would be interesting. It would just be dev doing podcasts and radio shows.

Thanks for coming in, Aziz. Thank you for having me. comedian Aziz Ansari talking with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson. The show is called Master of None. In a minute, George Packer, who covered the Iraq War for years, will call up an old friend, a refugee from the war, who barely made it out alive. That's coming up in a moment.

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Rukmini Kalamaki, who was born in totalitarian Romania, and as a reporter for the New York Times is doing some of the bravest and most astonishing reporting we have on ISIS and other terror groups. I learned in Mali, in West Africa,

where I was based for almost eight years, that when an al-Qaeda-linked group or a jihadist group takes over an area, your initial reaction is, well, I can't go there, you know, and so you kind of put down your hands and go, I can't cover this. And in fact, I learned from covering Mali that you can go to the line of control,

to the last safe place before their territory starts. And in that area, there's often refugees that are coming across. There's traders that are going back and forth. And there's survivors of whatever atrocities they're carrying out that are making it into the safe area. The catalog of horrors Rukmini has written about is long, and the personal risk she takes is terrifying. But a lot of what she brings to the world comes from social media,

where she's getting much closer to jihadists than any of us want to be. By paying attention to Twitter and other platforms, she's trying to understand what motivates these people, what makes violent extremism so alluring to these young people. In the case of ISIS and also al-Qaeda, you have the entire body of what they say. And most of ISIS propaganda and al-Qaeda propaganda, it's coming out almost like a word vomit, you know, multiple statements a day.

And I think most reporters just... On Twitter, on Facebook. Twitter, on Facebook, on Telegram, on, you know, they make these little e-books, videos, YouTube. I mean, they're extremely prolific. How is this different from Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda was, at least to the popular imagination, largely a secretive organization. Yes. It did not hide in plain sight where I get the impression that ISIS wants you to know everything and more.

Isis, so Al-Qaeda was secretive. ISIS has taken almost the opposite approach where they've flooded the system. They have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and they are so good now at the pitch. And believe me, they've tried to convert me. And I mean, I put up with it because I want to talk to them. How have they tried to convert you? When I reach out to these jihadists and speak to them and I speak to them through a variety of platforms, encrypted, non-encrypted, et cetera, often the way that I'll get them to talk to me is they think. that they can possibly convince me to give up my faith and accept theirs. The fact that I'm Christian to them, they think, gives them an avenue because I therefore, you know, already have a faith, and they will then try to convince me that Christ was actually just a prophet. And so I put up with this, you know, it's sometimes very tiring.

There was one guy called Abu Khalid al-Amariki, who I think was, according to reports, was killed in a drone strike a couple months ago. And it was just incessant. You met him where? I never met him. Never met him. I spoke to him on a platform called Kik. He's an African-American from the U.S., not clear where.

He claimed he was a Christian before. And he came out in one of these early videos, you know, threatening the West. But it was just relentless, relentless. And to humor him, he would send me videos and say, I will not talk to you until you watch this video. So I'd go. and watch the video, you know, and then come back to him with more questions. But did you see the video? Did you see what it said about Christ? Were we slow to recognize the rise of ISIS? Was it,

was it rising in plain sight? I think on the one hand, we have done ourselves a disservice, and I mean journalists and by constantly underestimating ISIS. And we've been doing that since 2012, 2013. The JV comments, you know, where we're sort of the framework for it. But, but, But we continue to sort of, we continue to not take them seriously, you know. And I know because I speak to them, I know that they're dead serious. I know that they really, these are people that are willing to pay with their lives, not in some metaphorical sense. They are willing to die for this now. We're sitting here in our nice, warm, and or air-conditioned homes in the West.

Yes. And we watch what we're able to watch and read what we're able to read. and we're not just reading about resentful cadres fighting the Western invader. We're a last use to this by now. We're seeing something else. We're seeing a level of depredation, of beheadings, of, as you've reported really brilliantly in the times, of sexual crime committed against Yazdi women against children, rape as a means, of control, of self-satisfaction.

Yeah. It goes, the list goes on. It's so extensive and so grotesque that it even offends Al-Qaeda. Yeah. It even offends groups that you would have thought unoffendable. Right. When you think about this, why is this happening? What is driving people to what, to us can only seem acts of, that goes well beyond the political,

that it goes into an area of psychosis. Right. What drives it? Yeah. My God, I mean, that's like the billion-dollar question. I can say from the people I've interviewed who either became jihadists or attempted to become and then pull themselves back,

once you buy into their brand of Islam and you sort of let down your guard, there's something exciting to them about being part of this apocalyptic project. They literally believe that they are living at the moment before the rapture to use a Christian corollary. They think they're on the verge of this end of times battle. And it's not just some sort of metaphor. They really believe that this is going to happen and that they are there. A lot of them have profile pictures of them on horses. They think they're going to be there on,

on their black steed at the moment of, you know, of the end of the world. And there's something, you know, a lot of ISIS members are basically teenagers, you know, and sort of early 20s. And think back to how impressionable one is. So this is the hard thing. Fundamentalism exists in various forms and sadly in all religions. Right. But this is different, is it not? it's a form of fundamentalism, right?

I mean the level... The level of intensity of it? The level of organization, the level of cruelty, the level of millinarian thinking. Yeah, yeah. And the thing with the cruelty is that I really do think that the senses get dull to it. And I just came back from Iraq, as you know. One of the interviews that I did was with a young boy. I think he was 12.

and he's a Yazidi child who had been separated from his mother and sent forcibly to a recruitment camp. And part of his training, he was taken by a Saudi deputy emir. Part of his training was the Sheikh would take him into his office, sit him down at his plush chair in front of the laptop, and force him to watch beheading video after beheading video, after beheading video. They actually had a photo of it that they had posted on Facebook that he showed me. And you see this little kid with this blanched face just looking at this, you know. And once you see this over and over and over again, I can say even for myself, because I've been forced to watch these videos. It becomes normalized in some terrible way.

It becomes normalized. And a couple of months ago, you know, the ISIS, I don't think could have predicted the PR hit that they got from the James Foley execution. I'm sure they thought it was going to be important. And when you say PR hit, you mean it in the perversely positive sense. Yes, yes. I mean, recruitment spiked. Twitter traffic to the Islamic State spiked. The woman that I ended up profiling from Washington State a Sunday school teacher,

that was the avenue that brought her to them. She saw this and went, oh, my God, and then she reached out to them. And within weeks, she was thinking that they're her friends, you know. But pause on that. Pause on that. Yeah. You're a teacher in the state of Washington. Yes.

And you see a human being beheaded. Yes. And this is attractive to you. And it causes you to completely transform your life. It's not attractive. She was disgusted and horrified by it. But she had never seen anything like that before. And this is a young woman who, like a lot of young people, had really no connection to the news.

And she heard on CNN that they had, that they were on. on Twitter and that they were under the hashtag message to America. So she went on Twitter, like all young people do, and found a hashtag, and decided to send questions to them. And what surprised her is that they responded. She couldn't believe that these so-called terrorists were taking the time to write to her. And then the thing that really surprised her is that they were nice to her. And this is a young woman who has a bit of a misfit, you know, existence.

She has some disabilities, doesn't have a lot of friends, doesn't have a lot of things to do. and suddenly she has this community. She's embraced. She's loved. She's sent. And you see these messages just gushing with affection. My dear sister, how are you today? How is your blood pressure?

Are you feeling better? Do you have a cold? Take this medicine for this cold. How's your gardening going? Oh, those kind of greens are better planted here. She suddenly has something to do. And so what the cognitive dissonance for her was, these people are called terrorists.

but they're some of the nicest people I've ever spoken to. So therefore, what the media is saying about them must be wrong. And your sources, when you talk to them, do they exaggerate? Is there any way to verify what they're – I don't mean when they're talking about ideology or their ideas or their enthusiasms, but their experiences. Of course they exaggerate. You know, of course it's always – like Abu Khalid al-Amriki tried to claim to me that he was holding multiple American hostages.

And because this happens to be something that I followed very closely, I know he wasn't holding, you know, American hostages. And I called his bluff on it, and he got kind of upset and didn't talk to me for a couple of days. And in this world, in this world, Rikmini, what factor does it play that you're a woman in this world working as a reporter? How do you navigate that good, good, better, and different, literally down to the details of what you wear, how you have to behave? Does it matter that you, is it almost an advantage that you're working with a translation? later sometimes. On the one hand, the initial access to the jihadist is, I think, harder for me than if I were

a man. I've had many of them shut me down, you know, citing Quranic verses that prohibit them from speaking to women that are not family. But once I'm in, I feel that I have an advantage because they see me as soft, they see me as female, they see me as these things. And so there's like, there's kind of like a sweet spot, you know, for. a while, and then very quickly, from there, it goes to them hitting on me. And that's when it all goes to hell, because as soon as, you know, I have to say very clearly, early on now I say, and by the way, I'm married, here's a little bit about me. I live in the New York area.

And I always throw in very early on that I'm married and happily so to try to shut down, you know, that avenue. There was this one guy, he was a member of Al-Qaeda, and I worked on this guy for almost a year, David. I had a post-it note next to my bed because he was, I suspect that he was in Egypt. I wasn't totally sure, but by the time difference, I think he was in Egypt. And so he was getting up for early morning prayers around the time when I was going to bed. And so at every night, I tried to like start texting him, you know, a little bit and have a little bit of discussion. And he always had like, it was like this thing he was dangling in front of me where I always felt like he was almost going to start talking to me, almost, you know, open up. And a year into it, by the way, in the process,

of this year. He pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. He left Al-Qaeda. So I was able to sort of, I was able to get something, you know, out of this. And a year in, he finally said, Rikini, you know, I have something to tell you. And I'm like, yes, what, you know, what are you going to tell me? And please, you know, this is something quite sensitive. And I said, oh, sure, great, you know, go ahead. And he said, you remind me of a woman I wanted to marry. I was like, oh, my God. I know, like, you know, all of that effort for that. Well, I've been reporting a very long time. That's never, never happened to be.

Right. Oh, God. Right. Getting hit on by Al-Qaeda. Right. So how did this get resolved? I'm married. I'm married. I'm happily married.

And he actually sent me a message. The last time we spoke was three or four months ago, and he sent me a message saying that he's just gotten married. It's like, good. Some major figures in American politics and also in the first. foreign policy world, ranging from the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, to Leon Panetta, who headed the CIA and the Pentagon, have used the same metaphor to describe what's going on in the Middle East, in particular, which is that it's going to be a 30-year-s war. Why is this going to be with us for so long? What is the complication? How do you see it ending?

Oh, my God. Honestly, I don't see it ending. I mean, I don't. I wonder if in our lifetime we're going to see the end of this. Because, What I see is... Maybe we should define what this is. That means what? The problem of extreme Islam. But on the other hand, militarily, what I saw in northern Iraq and in Syria is that when you put real force against them, it's like pushing on an open door. And this is what happens with these groups is I think if you have a real force pushing them back, they fold very quickly.

The problem is you don't have to stay. And does the United States or any Western power, Do they want to stay, you know, in these places? And now the question isn't just staying in Iraq. Now the question is staying in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, pretty soon, Somalia, the Sinai. They're trying to take over Bangladesh, Afghanistan. I mean, you know, and not to mention the suburbs of Paris. And so that's the...

That's why your forecast is for a very, very long war. I think so. Because I think it's... What I've seen about this ideology is it's almost like a poison that enters the groundwater. And how do you get it out? out. Rukmini, thank you so much, and I'd love to have you back again. Thanks, David.

That's a pleasure. Rukmini Kalamaki is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. New Yorker staff writer George Packer covered the war in Iraq and went on to write the book, The Assassins Gate. He's written about American politics and many other subjects, but he still writes about the causes of extremism and its victims. I met Omar Mahdi in 2005 while I was covering the Iraq. War. He was a doctor before the war and he went on to work for Western NGOs and eventually

as an interpreter for journalists, starting with me. He had a phenomenal memory. He was calm in every situation and he was an objective and non-sectarian Iraqi and all those things made him the ideal person to work with in the most dangerous years of the Iraq War. He and I became very good friends and as the situation in Iraq deteriorated into a civil war, I worried about Omar's safety. His two younger brothers were kidnapped. Fortunately, he was able to get them released. Another was tortured, shot twice in the head, survived but was horribly wounded.

And finally, Omar's father was abducted by a Shia militia, and Omar found him in the Baghdad morgue. When was that, Omar? That was in 2007. When someone dies, usually we take them to a place where they wash them. and my friend Ali Fahler gave me a digital camera and he told me to take picture to the buddy and he said that will be approved on what you've gone through.

And I remember they put my father on like a concrete, almost like a concrete step where they put the body on before they wash them. And I hold the digital camera in my hand trying to take pictures and I just looked and said that's unfair. I don't want someone to see him like that. You see him partially decomposed. There was like maggots and warms coming out of him.

And I just say I can't do that. And I shut down the camera and I left. And we buried him that day. And by then I knew that that's it. There's nothing left for us. And I managed to get my family to Syria. What I remember from that time, Omar, is just the feeling that everything was over in Baghdad,

but you couldn't leave because you had applied for a Fulbright. I remember writing a letter for you. And then month after month after month went by while you waited for the visa, even after you were approved for a Fulbright scholarship, you had to wait for the visa. And I just kept thinking every day he waits, he is a day closer to him getting killed. And I just wanted you to get out of there. And you and Ayad, your friend, were living together almost like hiding in a house in Mansour, hardly ever going out and waiting both of you to hear whether you had gotten your visa to the United States, finally you got the visa and you flew, of all places, to Muncie, Indiana, where you became a

journalism master's student at Ball State, right? Yes. It's crazy to an American to think you go from Baghdad to Muncie, Indiana. It just seems like you couldn't have gone farther away. That's true. And I was overwhelmed how quiet and silent the town was. And in the first week, I wasn't even unable to sleep because you're used to the noises in Baghdad and the helicopter sounds and the machine guns and explosion going on here and there.

And suddenly I'm in this peaceful place where literally you hear nothing. And one night in particular, I remember I used to sleep and leave the window. open and suddenly there were this like loud bang and I just like jumped jumped from the bed and it was like where is this and it was the the trash truck the dumpster and when they put it back it banged and so it was like it brought painful memories but I think in a way going there also helped me heal because it was just quiet and peaceful and abo state everybody was really friendly and nice to me. And eventually your family came over too, your mother, your sister and her family and your younger brothers, right?

Yes. As I said, before I left Iraq, I moved them to Syria. They applied for the United Nations refugee organization seeking resettlement in a safer country. I'm wondering how you see the current crisis of refugees and how it compares. with the situation you and your family were in? First thing, I think we are lucky that we got here and we were able to rebuild our lives. I feel really sad that those people,

they might never be able to come here. It's not easy going through what they've been through and they had to leave everything and literally leaves with their clothes on them, like what we did. I met few people that through work or through other friends, and they told me later that when they first met me, they were suspicious of me. But then after they knew me, these suspicions resolved.

And we became good friends. And I find it really hard now because the problem is the leaders or the candidates, they encouraging this fear and they incur, they are encouraging this division. We could start, Omar, with the governor of your own state of Indiana. And I should say you're now an American citizen and you are a doctor again at a hospital in Indianapolis, which is a great thing. But the governor of your own state refused to allow a Syrian family to be resettled there. And they had to be redirected from John F. Kennedy Airport to Connecticut, which welcomed them. I wonder how that made you feel as a resident of Indiana.

It really made me feel sad because that's – first of all, I talk about – about this family themselves, who came from horrible situation, and they're looking forward to a new life. They want friendly faces who smile at them. That's all what I wanted. And then they arrived and they hear this terrible news that you're unwelcome in Indiana, and luckily they find another state that welcomed them.

And here in Indiana, that tells the people that we cannot trust those people, cannot trust whoever comes from the Middle East. And I think this made damage to the relationships between people here. Did the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, change anything for you, Omar? I think for some Americans, it seems to have sent a huge current of fear, unlike anything I've ever seen in this country in my lifetime. And I'm wondering if you felt it there in Indianapolis. I have felt it. I was in the hospital when this happened. And I, I, immediately like paused. I was going to see a patient and then I saw the breaking news came on my phone and

and I was like, oh my God, what's going on? And the whole night I had anxiety. I could hear my heart beating in my neck. I just wanted to hear what's going on. And I became more concerned when when they say they were like, this is not like other mass shooting. There were two people, three people and things were organized. And again, I was like, I hope it's not a Muslim. And that's usually the thought that comes to me whenever I hear shooting or something bad happened. And then I finished my shift. I went home and I was still, they were still didn't announce any names. And then, I think around 11 or so when they said the name and it was Saeed Faru. I remember and I cursed. Like I was like, that's it. That's going to even get the backlash. And usually I wake

every morning on my alarm set on NPR, and I immediately went to my clock, and I turned it off because I didn't want to hear the news in the morning, because I knew this will be really bad. I knew there will be a big backlash, and unfortunately, that's what happened. And again, Donald Trump, he started to add all this inflammatory response, and he wanted to ban all Muslims. So he was telling people, look around you, whoever looks like Muslims, this is a risk, or this is a potential threat to you. Yeah. But you're here and you're not going to be going anywhere,

and I'm going to remind you, Omar, that you owe me a visit. I will come and visit, I promise. You better. Take care, Omar. Thank you. You too. Omar Modi, a doctor in Indianapolis, talking with George Packer. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us today on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Next week, I'll talk with a woman who, last year, seemingly overnight, became one of the most important people in American journalism. Sarah Kahnig, host of the podcast phenomenon, Serial. That's next week. Now let's check in with cartoonist Matt Diffey and Emily Flake and see how they're making out with this week's batch of cartoons. Hey, this is Matt Diffey, back to Lysa Batch. We spoke to Emily Flake, beginning of the work week, for a cartoonist. That was Wednesday. But now it's Monday.

Hopefully she's got a few ideas by now. We'll see. Hello, Matt. How are you? I'm doing all right. It's Monday. I feel like I should, like, you know, read you a couple of just, like, the random things that are written down here. Yeah.

Like towns of hell, chihuahuas, hoof prints in the sand, fat kitty size. I'm thinking about, like, kitty size ice cream cones. Not fat kitty size. That's for a different publication. Okay. I got a lot of ideas while I do mundane tasks, you know, like making dinner, washing the dishes. I actually sold a cartoon about dishes, a plumber taking a cog out of a drain and a sort of sour-looking woman standing by. And the plumber is saying, yep, it's about 25 years of resentment.

All right. Well, what do you got, Matt? I want to do a joke about, you know, like horse people, they're always, oh, we're spooking the horses. Right. They always use the word spooking. Right. But I don't know what to do with it. I don't know if it should be ghosts, riding horses,

or if it should be something ridiculous. Like, we should quit talking about the economy. We're spooking the horses. Right, right. Okay, well, cartoon like the wind, I guess. I will do the same, and we'll talk after we've found out whether we sold or not. All right. See you later.

Matt Diffey and Emily Flake. New Yorker cartoonists. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Charlie Kaufman hasn't made a lot of movies, but the ones he's made tend to be cult favorites and critical darlings. Movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. So a new Charlie Kaufman movie is a bit of an event. Now, the earlier movies had real people in them,

but the one that's just come out, Anomalisa, is different. It's filmed entirely in stop-motion animation with puppets. He and his co-director, Duke Johnson, recently met up with the New Yorker's tad friend, and they went to the Whitney Museum of American Art here in New York, which as it happens, maybe wasn't such a great idea. You're blowing out someone's eardrums now. He said be natural.

Act like you normally act. That's true. Have you guys been to this new wedding? No. Me neither. Whitney? We're in the wrong business. Why is that?

You know, people that don't really understand modern art. Who decides Which of these works of art is worthy enough to be put in a museum and admired? Is it like by committee? Is it an individual? Charlie gets one vote usually. I get one vote, yeah. I was out this day. I have to do my little thing, which is to say I'm tied in front.

I'm here with Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Anomalisa and Duke Johnson, the director. We directed it together. I'm sorry. Let me do it again. I'm Chad Friend. I'm here with Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director, and Duke Johnson, the other director. Okay, they're sort of nodding of Anomelisa. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, the directors. Yeah, that's good.

And one of them is the writerial. Charlie Austin. That kind of limps. Yeah. We're going to spend a little more time on this anyway, and the creators of the new film Anomalisa. That doesn't work so well for me. And Charlie also wrote it.

He wants it to be known. I won't be speaking to each other after the first. this time in the Whitney. I'm Tad Friend, a staff writer here at the magazine. Anomelisa is a stop-motion animation film about spending a night in a Cincinnati hotel room, drunk and alone, and trying for a stab at romance.

Like a lot of Charlie Kaufman's work, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and adaptation, it's also about the sort of unquantifiable mystery of being a human being. Well, is there, I guess one of the things I was curious about is why stop-motion animation for that film? At first, it was sort of an accident. My friend Dino Stamatopoulos had seen the play in 2005,

and he really liked it. It was a radio play. It was a staged radio play. Yeah, so... With sound effects. Yes, and Carter Burwell conducting musicians with his score. Dino had seen the play and he liked the play. So they came to me with the idea of stop motion because that's what they do. Ultimately, I think it ended up being the right choice for it. Dino and I had been working in stop motion animated television comedy, adult comedy. We'd always wanted to take the medium of stop motion and use it to tell emotionally authentic stories. Every single thing you see in stop motion is a choice.

Every finger movement of a character is... So you're starting to see sort of this whittling down of human movement or something into its most essential version, maybe. And then I think there was also this sort of dreamlike quality that came with it, which fit with the story. Right. And the handmade aspect of it adds a soulfulness, a sense of life beyond what you're looking at, you know? The influence of the animators.

Yeah. You can see that, and we're very careful to keep that in the movie. Basically, where the animators are touching the thing, and you've got little fabric moves, you've got hair moving and stuff like that. It's basically it's the brushstrokes. Every time they touch it, the impression. impressions of their fingers leave some sort of impact. Right.

And you feel that. You do when I was thinking like there's something about the way Michael Stone, the main character, kind of flops on the bed, that if he's on after doing that, it would seem like just a movement that he happened to. But in this case, it seems like some existential, you know, beached whale kind of giving up, throwing himself into the waves. I don't even know.

Because I think you know, in some level as an audience member, that that was planned out, that it's not an accident. It's not a choice in the moment by an actor or one of 50 takes. It's like from the moment of the genesis of this movie, the moments were built into this happens here, this happens here. Right. There's a lot of thought that goes into that, right? Because like him falling back on the bed,

the bed has to be rigged with washers to make it go down in the shape of his body. And that didn't quite work. He doesn't really bend like a human. so he's kind of hard laying on this bed that's curved in, so we actually had to, like, animate the comforter. Whereas it's three minutes for shooting with live actors. It's like, could you flop a little harder? Okay, done.

Three minutes, and you've done it 20 times. Right, yeah. More flopping, less flopping. More anxious flopping. You're talking about how he's not quite human in his body. Did you guys discuss the uncanny valley aspect of it? A lot, yeah. The idea that at a certain point, if something looks human but not quite,

human, it freaks us out where something that looks totally robotic doesn't bother us, something that looks human doesn't bother us, but something in the middle does? Do you want to get into the uncanny valley? No, we didn't. We didn't, and we worked really hard to avoid it. We put a lot of attention toward the eyes. They're always active in this thing, and they're very articulated. And then the thing, you know, the feeling of the animator's presence, the imperfection of of the movement that sort of lessons or tempers that that uncanny valley thing.

Should we keep wandering? Yeah. Do you guys have thoughts of doing another stop motion? Yeah, we'd love to. If this works, you know, if this makes any kind of commercial sense, and then someone wants to invest. Does it make commercial sense? What's your

sense of whether it makes commercial sense? I have no idea. We don't know. I mean, you know, it's really weird. There's no one's really done this people, right? It's usually sort of Wallace and Gromit. No, it's R-rated. It's R-rated. And so, is there an audience? The sex is kind of like... Sex is good. Sex is amazing for, you know, these puppets.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, congratulations, Duke, thank. That is the best puppet sex I have seen. Thank you. Well, we did it together. Right. We within our studio have talked about... If we do another one, let's make it a little more broad,

appeal to a broader audience, which is kind of sad, but... I understand the... In response to... In response to Anomalisa? Yes, because Anomalisa literally... almost destroyed the studio multiple times because it was like... Cost $10 million or because it took the longer? It cost about $8 million, I think.

Took up all their studios. The whole studio, the whole building for two years. They're not making any profit at all. We love this experience. We're happy with the film, the way that it came out. We're happy with the way that it's being received. But if we had to do it again exactly in this process, it would be difficult to say, okay,

and to dive into three more years of, like, struggling every day sometimes crying in the parking lot you know it's like how about it was there Charlie all the time you couldn't get him out of the parking lot actually just this morning

I had to find a parking lot in the city which was hard I know oh look as we walked through the Whitney Charlie stopped and made his way over to the puppets and said oh look continuing his

obsession with puppets I wonder if they're real I don't think they're real They're not functional. They don't look functional. Should I grab one? Well, I mean, they're real things, but they're made to look like marionettes, right? Ventura lists, yeah.

You guys are coming out at the holiday season? Yes. Does it seem like a good holiday movie? Oh, you know, I think it might be. I think it might be counterintuitive, but it might be good for the lonely people. I don't know, maybe not. If you're lonely of the holidays, go see Anamilisa. That's the...

Yeah. Do you think lonely people are comforted by seeing other people being lonely? I think people who feel things that aren't represented in the media feel comforted by seeing themselves represented even if it's in their pain. I feel that way. If I'm not feeling connected, I don't feel comforted by seeing connected happy people when I don't feel it's honest, you know? Is there any representation of happy connectedness that Drake's you who does Drake you as honest? Yeah, probably I have to think about it. How do you feel at the end of It's a Wonderful Life?

Yeah, that's not my movie. That's Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson talking about their new film, Anomalisa, with the New Yorker's Tad Friend. Let's check in with our cartoonist now and see if they finally made their deadline. How's it going? It's going well. How are you? Pretty good, because I actually sold a cartoon this week. I also sold a cartoon, which makes me very happy. The cartoon I sold is a family, you know, picking apples, and the father is sort of brightly saying,

maybe next time we can mine our own salt. That's pretty good. Well, I sold one. Remember I was talking about spooking the horses? So it's two cowboys right on horses, and one of them saying, stop saying President Trump, you're spooking the horses. Yeah. I had one, though, that I don't even think we talked about, but I really hoped it would sell. Three cowboys on horseback.

and one of them is looking into the pot, and he's saying, which one of you keeps eating all the oatmeal? And then when you look at the cowboys on horseback, you realize that one of them is not actually a cowboy on horseback, but a cowboy centaur. I truly love the idea of a centaur being part of a cowboy crew. I think you can exploit that for other jokes. Paul Centaur batch next week.

Matt Diffy and Emily Flake, cartoonist extraordinaire. Matt will be back in a few weeks with another installment of Life's a Batch. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us today on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week, I'll talk with Sarah Canning, the host of Cereal. Till then, have a great week and a happy new year. 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 Gervis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby,

Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino with help from Becky Cooper.