The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 12: Sarah Koenig on "Serial," and a Resilient Poet

Episode Date: January 8, 2016

Sarah Koenig, the host of “Serial,” talks with David Remnick about why her podcast’s success caught her by surprise.  Robin Coste Lewis, who recently won a National Book Award, explains how a devastating injury damaged her brain, but aided her poetry. And Jelani Cobb goes back to his high school. 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 with someone when they have that revelation right. 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. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, for many years, I've been reporting from Russia.

living there in the late 80s and early 90s as a reporter for the Washington Post and returning for reporting trips ever since. In the 90s, when Big Boris Yeltsin was in power, I was hanging out with some friends and I met a funny, smart young woman in the New York Times Bureau named Sarah Kainek. She wasn't long out of school,

but it was very, very clear that she had everything it takes to become a first-class reporter. But who knew what kind? Sarah Kainig, became the co-creator and the host of Serial. I think you know the rest. It was downloaded about a gazillion times

and changed radio and podcasting completely. Now Serial is into its second season with a story about a young man named Bo Bergdahl who wanders off his base in Afghanistan and ends up captured by the Taliban. He was a prisoner for five years until the U.S. government finally worked out a prisoner exchange deal.

Joining me is Sarah Kyiq. So, Sarah, I don't think we've talked in years. I met you in Moscow in maybe the 92, 93 or something like that. Am I right? A little later, I believe it would have been 96-ish. Ah, and you work for the New York Times. I did. I was a peon. And now we're talking some years later, and you are the host of the most remarkable podcast. And I'm I want to talk first about what came in between. Okay. You were a crime reporter for a conventional newspaper for a while, and what you made your mark on last year with the first season of serial was a crime story. And I'm wondering how you see the way you would do a crime piece in a newspaper and the way you said about thinking about things when you came all these years later to serial.

I mean, I feel like I, it's not like I was some great court reporter or anything. I think, though, maybe, maybe if I try to parse it now, I was always really suckered by both sides. I'd be covering a trial and I'd be like, well, that sounds reasonable, you know, and then the defense would get on and I'd be like, right, he didn't, that's right. I, like, I believed everyone. Like, there's shades of truth in here that are a lot subtler than we. generally acknowledge in this system. And that was always the part that was interesting to me. Were you sick of newspapers? Was there a fed up moment? No. I mean, I feel like, yes, I was fed up, but I was a bad fit. I mean, the stuff that was interesting to me was never quite what was

interesting to my editors. So give me an example of that. Oh, it's so, I just remember there was a time I had been covering this thing where the courthouse itself, the building, was basically sort of infested as the wrong word when you're talking about pigeons, but like there were just a ton of pigeons everywhere. And what would happen is like they would die and just like their carcasses would be rotting on the little balconies outside people's wind. Like it was disgusting. And people were starting to like, people were worried that it was like a health problem. People were getting like bronchial problems and getting weird infections. and I remember that they had a press conference in front of the courthouse, and there was a poster, like someone had pinned up a poster on the podium,

and it said, cancer, cancer, cancer. And I just found that really funny, just like the theater of how government works and how press conferences are, just like the inherent phoniness of them and the inherent theater of it. And like, I just remember really enjoying all of that and that kind of coming out in the story and just like all of it, cut, cut, slash slash, like take it out, take it out,

which is proper, right? Like, nobody cares. I don't know. The truth is I heard This American Life on the radio one day and was just like, what is that? I had never heard anything about like that. And I was like, that's what I want to do. That is what I want to do.

And so you went to work at This American Life for a while and started a side project called Serial. Yeah. And the first season is about a high school, murder mystery. It's a huge hit. And now the second season is about this kid who walks off his Army Post in Afghanistan. You and your colleagues strangely warned that people probably aren't going to like season two as much as they did season one, which struck me as kind of funny. Why did you say that?

It's not that they, well, I guess it is that they wouldn't like it. I think that there was, you know, and I weirdly did not understand this going into season one. Wow, people really like a murder story. I didn't understand the true crime genre. Did something about true crime bother you, the confluence of people die and it becomes a form of kind of entertainment and news at the same time? I mean, it bothers me now. I don't think I thought about it that much before I did the Syed case. It bothers you now what you actually went and did? No, because I don't think I did that. I see others doing it, and I like to criticize them, but I don't think I did it. So in 1965, the New Yorker published Truman Capote's in Cold Blood, which was a amazing.

mass murder. Two people broke into a house and killed an entire family. Truman Capote came to

William Sean, the editor at that time, and said, and he kind of lied. He said, I want to

write a piece about the way this murder affected the town. And Sean thought this was a great

idea. And then, of course, Truman Capote went out and he wrote the greatest true

crime book ever written, and it kind of invented what's now known as the nonfiction

novel. And one of the secrets of New Yorker history is that William Sean hated in cold blood. Really? Embarrassed him. Yeah, it made him worry. People are running to the newsstands to hear about this thing that I'm finding deeply unsettling. It was untoward. You're saying that you didn't do what Capote did in some way? Well, I mean, I think maybe we're talking apples and oranges. I think that there's an industry of true crime. And then there's also just like the whole. whole, you know, franchise of like CSI, SVU, law and order, all of that stuff, right, which is drama, which is a different thing. But, you know, I think sort of taken together, there's this whole industry of crime stories,

murder stories. And mostly they are making things more fake than they are. And I don't think that in cold blood does that. I think that he, the brilliance of what he did. right is he makes you kind of almost empathize with these killers. I mean, he makes you, or at the very least, he forces you to try to understand them. And like, that's the huge difference that I see. And that's what you want. That's what I want. Yes. You want us to empathize with the subject of the first one and now Bobbergdahl. Or at least try to understand. At least don't judge before you've tried to

understand. That's what I want. When you're looking for a second story, You're looking for a second season. Mm-hmm. What were you looking for? What did you want? And then how did the Bob Bergdahl story happen? So we didn't know what we want. We really were like, we were really floundering around for a while.

So the Bergdahl story came because Mark Bowles production company, page one. So Hugo Lindgren, who's, I don't remember his title. I think he's the president of page one or saying. He knew Julie Snyder, my partner. And so he sort of came to her and was like, hey, we have this tape. Do you think we could do something with it? So this is totally fascinating. Mark Boll, I think it's fair to say that he was a journalist, turned to the movie business.

And he's famous for Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. And he goes and he approaches Bo Bergdoll and gets access to him and interviews him for 25 hours. What was the arrangement there? Because in the movie business, when you do that, and you get someone's access and life rights, you very normally, you pay for them. Was that the case in this case? So he, you know, like obviously Bo had agreed to talk to him

and Bo knew that these conversations were for research for this movie. I feel like I probably shouldn't talk about whatever Mark's arrangement is with Bo just because it's not my business. But isn't it your business? I mean, if... Well, I know it. I know it. I just don't know that I should be talking to you about it.

I mean, what I can say is like, we've certainly not paid Bo any money. And as far as I know, there's not been any money exchanged between page one and Bo. But I would want to totally fact check that. That I can say. That I can say. Yeah, yeah. And what's your relationship with Bo Bergdoll? So my relationship is very arm's length.

It's completely immediate. through Mark. So that's a challenge, I've got to think. Yeah. What challenge does that present? How do you deal with it? So I really worried about that in the beginning. I was like, how am I even going to find my way into this material if I can't interview him on the record myself and all of that?

Can you interview him at all? Did you talk to him off the record or for background? Or it's just, do you have the ability to pick up the phone and talk to Bergdoll? I do not have the ability to pick up the phone and talk to Bergdoll. And no way communicate with him. It's a little. What I'll say is what I have access to are the recordings that Mark Bull has made with Bo. And it's 25 hours of it.

And the first thing you do is do what? You just listen straight through? Well, the first thing I do is read straight through, read the transcripts. And when you read them the first time, what was the impression that you had? You thought, oh, my God, he's so brilliant. He's an idiot. He's so fast. What's your... I mean, I think my thing was I'd never seen someone talk about this topic in a way that felt intimate like this. And frankly, just some of the fact of it are on their face extraordinary. So he's also describing something that like almost no one has experienced before. The other thing that struck me is he's a really unusual person. The way he thinks is not the usual way. And I felt like he was trying really hard to explain himself in a way that I find rare.

How do you mean? That he's really trying to explain how things felt and how he put pieces of information together in his head and then the decisions he made based on that information, how he's like processing stuff. And sometimes it's shocking. At one point, I was listening, I guess it was in episode one. and he says he wants to be Jason Bourne somehow. He wants to, quote, prove to the world that I was the real thing. Like a super soldier, you mean?

Why not just wait and see if you got the opportunity to prove that, like, on a mission, you know, because you hadn't even been there that long? Like, why not wait? I've been there very long. Why not wait a couple months and see if you get a chance to prove yourself in a, you know, some kind of tactical engagement? Because it was a question. Right, right, right.

Two birds with one stone. I was just going to say two words with one stone. I mean, this is also what's cool about it is, you know, at the time, Bo doesn't know that he's talking to a podcast audience. Bo's just talking to Mark for research on a movie. It's not a journalistic endeavor in quite the same way that I was doing with Adnan where, like, I'm approaching him as a reporter saying, like, I would like to do this right. But just to be clear, Bergdahl was okay with the switch. over of the purpose of those tapes. Oh, of course.

Like, yeah. I mean, we wouldn't, I wouldn't be doing the podcast if you weren't. Like, yes, of course. And in a way, it's kind of freeing, you know, for me, where I don't have to worry about that relationship all the time. It's stressful to manage that relationship over like a year and a half or however long I was doing it with a nun. Over time, in the same way that a writer develops a voice in print that's not precisely him or her. you've done the same on radio. How conscious is it and how did you come to it?

So I don't know. I think the best way I can explain it is when I started to write season one, the first episode came pretty easily. But the second episode, we did like edit after, after edit. It was just taking weeks. And my colleagues were just like, it's not working. It's not good. finally, Julie Snyder, who's my partner,

and she was just like, I need to know what you make of all this. You, Sarah Caney make of all this. Otherwise, I don't care. I don't know why you're telling me all this stuff about, like, high school kids. I don't care. You need to make me care. And I was like, oh. And I was quite uncomfortable with that initially.

But then I realized, like, oh, that's the thing that's going to make you listen to the stuff I think is important. And that's what makes the show, right? I mean, to some degree, it's Sarah. Canig's voice and also the peeling back of the artifice of old-fashioned journalism of saying, here's the way this sausage is done. Sarah, is your voice on the radio completely written out? Yes. Yes, it is so scripted.

Everything is scripted. So then what are you trying to achieve in the Sarah Koenig that you're presenting? No writer is herself or himself on the page exactly the way they are out in the in the cold, messy life. So what's the difference? What's the difference? I mean, yeah, I'm probably more cheerful on the room. I mean, I don't know.

You know, like, I feel like that's so personal. I feel like you're asking me to, like, you know, undress or something. We're not in the same room. People should know that. That's true. I know. I think that I am trying to convey that you can trust me because I've done my homework. I know that sounds really boring, but for me to get away with having a little fun in it,

like making a joke every once in a while, which I just think like sometimes you just need it when the material is dark. Like it's just, it helps you get through. Like the moment of here's me calling the Taliban. Sure, right? Like, I mean, I'm just, it's funny to me. Like I would like to be able to make jokes. But I think like you have to earn them in the sense that like it can't just be self-indulgence all the time. You have to kind of, you have to, you have to, you have to, telegraph that, like, I'm going to be interrogating this story in the same way you, the listener, are interrogating it at home. I'm standing in for the listener all the time. I feel like that's what I'm trying to do. So clearly newspapers in this country, not just provincial newspapers, but newspapers

in general are having a horrendous time. Yeah. And it's not just because of the squinching down of advertising and all. It occurs to me that some of it might have to do with style. And along comes this different way of telling a story, and it appeals particularly to younger people. What do you glean from? What lessons do you take away? What do you think you've brought to the table that wasn't there that caused such a fewer and such a center of interest? Hmm. I mean, nothing that I did was new exactly. You know, and, you know, and In other words, like narrative journalism isn't new. Serialized storytelling is not new. Having a voice in your stories is not new. But I think that there was something about the bringing together of all of these things and especially the kind of week to week thing where you had to wait a week in between. And I think what happened is people found that they were enjoying, they were interacting with it in their brains in the same way that they're interacting with like escaping. entertainment. So like House of Cards or something like that, you know. And then they sort of were like, wait, it's not, but it's real. It's journalism. This is journalism. And I'm interacting with journalism in the same way that I interact with with escapist entertainment. So of course that, like, so that raises like a question right. Like, is that okay. And I think you answer that. And yeah. I mean, I think it is okay as long as I am sticking to journalistic principles. And as long as we're sticking to the truth, you know, I mean, however you

define that, but I think we're okay. I mean, you want people to listen to your story. Like, we all do, right? Like, there's no... You want the story itself to innately matter, to have some larger... You want it to matter. Yeah, of course. And, but like, a lot of people listening helps make things matter. I mean, that's, it's, it's, no matter how beautiful it is, if, like, 10 people read it, it wasn't going to matter. We'll be listening. And Sarah, it is great to connect with you again after so long. Thank you. Take care. Bye. Peter Canning is the host and executive producer of the podcast, Serial. We did follow up with Mark Bowles Production Company, and they confirmed what Sarah said.

Bo Bergdahl has not been paid to participate in the making of cereal. I'm David Remnick. Coming up, Hilton All's talks with the poet Robin Cost Lewis, whose story of enduring a personal disaster, a terrible accident, to win a claim as a writer, is truly remarkable. That's next on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stay tuned. Oh my God, this book is one of the high points of my life. Gosh. I begged, I begged to review it.

Thank you. And I said she's going to win this award. Yeah, I'm glad everybody knew I didn't know. That's Hilton Alls, a staff writer at the New Yorker, talking with Robin Cost Lewis, about her debut poetry collection, which just won a national book award. The book is Voyage of the Sable Venus, and it takes its name from an 18th century engraving. Because it's a gorgeous black woman on a clamshell like Botticelli's Venus. and she's attended by all these classical figures.

And it is until you really look at that you realize it's a pro-slavery image because Triton or Neptune is carrying, instead of a Triton, he's carrying a flat of the Union Jack. That got her interested in images of black women in Western art, a research project that got much bigger than she ever anticipated. It just led me on this whole path, and I really thought at the time it was going to be a few pages long. And then every time I would do research,

it would just get darker and deeper and longer and more horrid. It just didn't stop. It didn't let up. Voyage of the Sable Venus is Robin Koss Lewis' first book of poems. She was trained as a Sanskrit scholar at Harvard, and now in her 50s she's working on a PhD. The Western Art Project, as beautiful as it is, it also has such an ugly underside for so many kinds of people. Well, it had to hack a web,

Absolutely. Absolutely. Other things in order to stand on something, right? Right. So, you know, like for me, if I would go into a museum and see some kind of grand historical painting about some emperor doing something fabulous, conquering some land, there might not have been a black woman in that painting, but the frame might have had black female bodies carved throughout it. Yes. In some kind of subservient position. Yes.

Do you know? And we're not supposed to notice that frame. And we're not supposed to think about it. But it's there. And that's what was so fascinating to me is that there are so many black women in exhibitions all over the world in every time period and every country, every continent. It's everywhere. But you wouldn't think of it because who would think to look at the carving of a comb closely or the face of a button for an emperor? Why would someone need to carve a black female body onto the...

the button of an emperor. Why? Yes. You know, and then when you start looking just for that, that's when it begins to kind of emerge. Yes. And so I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have done, I don't think, I don't know that I would have seen that had my brain not slowed me down and made me look more slowly. Yes. I know that you began writing poetry because of something that happened.

Yeah. Do you, do, would you mind talking about it? Not at all. Well, not at all. I was in what they call a catastrophic accident. I fell through an open stairwell and I... What does that mean? There were no stairs? There was no rail. That I didn't know and it was a dark room and I was going to get my coat in a restaurant and they failed to tell me there was a hole in the middle of the floor and I walked into air. Where was this? In San Francisco. I was at a conference and I was just having dinner with a friend and I got cold and I asked for my coat and they led me back to this room and said it's over there and I could see my coat. hanging on a wall, but I couldn't see the hole in the floor.

Oh, my gosh. So I fell through. And for the last, I guess it's 16 years now, 16 years, I've been doing a lot of rehab and recovery. And somewhere... What was the effect of the falling? Well, oh, thank you. So I was diagnosed with permanent mild to moderate brain damage, so a traumatic brain injury. Oh, my God.

And then I had all kinds of injuries all over my body. I still have so many surgery. to have that I'll be going into soon. But the most kind of devastating part of it was the brain injury. And at some point, I couldn't read or write, and I was very, they call it exquisite hypersensitivity, everything triggered some kind of symptom, talking, walking, seeing, hearing, smelling, you name it, anything that had to do with the senses would send me into a spiral. I would end up sleeping for days upon days. My memory, I fought really hard for a year to teach myself the alphabet again. It took a year just to do that because the language central of my brain was badly damaged.

But, you know, I hate to be that person that is always looking for the green side of something. But it turned out to be, in many ways, a blessing in disguise that calm brain damage the gift that keeps on taking. you know. And I don't think that I know, I joke with my friends that this book is actually about brain damage. I know I would not have written this book had I not had that accident. So partly because if I'm going to die, I can write whatever the hell I want. Exactly. You're free.

I'm so free. Yes. And there's no one to care about much in terms of pleasing. But also, the doctors told me I can only write one line a day I could only read one line a day. And that, of course, spiraled me into an incredible depression for several months. And then at some point, you know how that grace, that voice of grace just comes into your mind? And this voice just said to me, okay, then, it's going to be the best damn line I can think of.

And so every single day I would spend in bed thinking of the best line. And I couldn't write because my hands were all in different casts and all kinds of splints. Were you a mother when you had this accident? No, no, no, no. They also told me I couldn't have a kid. They told me I could never write again, teach again, read again, and not become a mother. And you've done all those things. I was annoyed.

I was enraged. Yes. There's nothing like being annoyed to get the juices going. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Tell me about your son, and how did that miracle occur to you? Oh, my God. What do you mean? how. Well, I know how it happens.

But the decisions are... There's a bird and there's a bee. Yes, exactly. There's a stork in the diaper. Exactly. But how did you decide to become a mother? This is such a great question. I have been haunted with being a mother all my life. And when they told me I couldn't have kids, I really had to think about it.

And I thought about it for like a decade. You know, what does it mean to be a disabled woman and to have a child and don't be selfish? and mess with this kid's life if you can't really raise him or her well. And then one day I was walking down the street in Boston. I was doing major rehabilitation at the time. I was in occupational therapy, speech, language therapy. Just, you know, going outside would hurt. And one day I'd gone to do something, and there was a woman,

this gorgeous woman in a power wheelchair. Wheeling down the street, it would felt like to me 60 miles per hour with two of her kids in her lap. Wow. She was like high-talent. were having such a good time. And I was like, you idiot. If this woman can raise her kids, you can have a kid. And she was such my inspiration. And so then I was hell-bent. And I tried and tried and tried for many, many years. And then it finally happened. And the deep irony for me is that

my father was the first person to tell me way before my accident, I think you really should have a baby, Robin. You want to be a mother. You should just do it. My father was incredible. Oh, he was funny, too. I love him already. Oh, he was so good. Yes. And the deep irony is I found out after years of trying to get pregnant, I found out I was pregnant four days after my father's funeral. Oh, wow.

Which felt so magical to me because I always told him, you know, you know, when you die, you better take me with you. Yes. There's no reason I'm staying without you. Yes. And so the fact that when I found out I was pregnant, it felt like he stayed with me in some way. How does the accident impact you today? Well, I mean, I've grown comfortable with being brain damaged. It's become familiar.

You know that saying that human beings can get used to anything. I got used to it. I don't know. I still very much appreciate that my brain has become an odd little bedfellow with me. We love each other. I'm like, you're a freak brain. And that's kind of sexy to me. I like that you see these.

things that other people aren't seeing. Yes. But keep it to yourself and we'll try to turn it into art at some point. Yes. Yeah. Does it help you parent in a different way, do you think? Absolutely. It helps me put it in fifth gear every day from the gate. And, you know, I'm... You wake up with him and it's like, look, we're here. Absolutely. And also, I mean, this is the macaw part.

Like, supposedly my brain won't last as long as most people's brains will last. I know that. And I think that's also why I push myself so hard to write. there's a certain urgency I feel like I'm fighting the clock until my brain starts to rot and so I try to have a lot of fun I try to parent him for the future

like I've already I have a whole library for him once I'm gone I have friends sign books to him for the future because I know there's going to come a time where I won't be able to be present in the same way that I am now so I just Do you talk to me about that?

I do. I mean, I had to because my disability is invisible. Yes. And so the way I described it to him when he was younger, I said it's like mommy's brain is in a wheelchair. And sometimes, you know, it's hard because, you know, he's a gregarious, precocious, fabulous child. He's about eight now. He's seven.

And I have to tell him sometimes to be quiet. That's a drag. It's just a drag. Or I can't, you know, I'm sad that he doesn't know the person before. for my accident because I was a huge audiophile. I mean, like, a music collection that's brilliant. And I can't listen to music and have people talking at the same time in a room unless it's a lot of people talking. So things like that.

Like, I'm constantly repressing his little spirit in ways in order to say, in order to stay asymptomatic and, like, take care of him or make him dinner. So in those ways. But it's also okay because I feel like, you know, he's getting to learn about the ways in which bodies are different. And also the ways in which life curtailed us. Absolutely. That's Hilton Alls, a staff writer at The New Yorker talking with the poet Robin Cost Lewis. Her debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, just won a national book award.

I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker, and whenever I run into him in the hallway, he's got something interesting, maybe even eccentric, to say and to recommend. you were recommending to me a documentary that's on Hulu. Yeah, it's a sort of documentary. It's called Symbiocycotaxoplasm, Take One. It's an intermingling of documentary and fiction. It's made by William Greaves.

All right, clear out of the way here. Claire out of the way. Who was the host of Black Journal on PBS in late 1960s, early 70s. This is one of the pioneering independent films by a black director. The story involves a couple who are going through a romantic crisis. He has four or five different couples play this story out in Central Park

with a crew that is being filmed making the film. Alice? Come on, Kenchard, wait a minute, wait a minute. What? Just leave me alone, okay? Just leave me alone. What are you looking forward to in 2016? Well, the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan,

have a new film coming. Hail Caesar. It opens on February 5th, and it's an inside Hollywood comedy. It's all about a big Toga film, but the story involves a fixer, someone who works behind the scenes to control the images, to control the public image, and also to control the scandals that arise in the course of the making of a film. And it's one that's set in the 1950s, which I think is special. Inside Lewin Davis is one of their greatest films. And I think that's so because it comes from their early childhood. They're attempting to reconstruct something very personal to them. And I think

the same will hold for Hail Caesar. Of course I haven't seen it. And you never know about predicting. But it's a great cast, Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton. I'm very much looking forward to it. Richard, before we go any further, I've got a question. Why, in God's name, in your 2015

Best-of list, you tucked in there right at the end, 50 shades of gray? 50 shades of gray. For all of its clumsiness for all of its artifice, and by the way, I think Dakota Johnson is a superb actress. For all of its

Hollywood corner cutting, it takes its subject straight on. Right. Anything else you're looking forward to? Well, since we talked about 50 Shades of Gray, I'm looking forward to 50 Shades of Black. I've seen the trailer, and it looks like a lot

of fun. Is that a sequel to 50 Shades of gray? What is it? It's the parody, starring Marlon Wayans. I think I'd rather see that than the original. Richard Brody blogs about films for New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Probably the biggest trend in education lately, and certainly the most contentious, is school closure.

Officials using testing to evaluate school performance and close the ones that are underperforming. Recently, we've heard more parents and educators, even some school officials criticizing that approach. They say it punishes teachers and students for economic and social issues that affect student achievement, and that closing schools and opening new ones is destabilizing rather than helpful. There's been a lot of school closure here in New York. Sometimes it still makes the news. Keep the school open. Give it the resources it needs. Like when a once prestigious old school, like Jamaica High School out in Queens, shut down.

New York City Department of Education is planning to close Jamaica High School. Jamaica High School has an incredibly proud history. Its alumni include several Pulitzer Prize winners and Olympians. As recently as the mid-80s, when the New Yorkers Jolani Cobb was a student there, it was cited as an outstanding school on the national level. But it shut down in 2014. And Jolani went back recently to find out what had happened. I graduated in 1987, and Jamaica does have a reputation in New York City. For one, it was a academically rigorous, institution and it was known for producing really high-caliber students. It also had a kind of no-nonsense tradition. I lived in a community about a mile and a half south of the school called South Jamaica. It was mostly working class. There were some poor families who lived there as well. And there was a really important thing, you know, for my parents, particularly, that I lived in the neighborhood that probably wasn't the best, but I was zoned for one of the best schools

in the city. There's a story that illustrates the kind of place that Jamaica was, and it takes place not long after September 11th. At a point where there was still a lot of tension in the public, people were really afraid, and, you know, you saw it manifest in different ways and different places. I was on an airplane, and I just boarded and sat down, and I saw a gentleman coming down the aisle, and he was a brown-skinned man, and he had on kind of a flowing tunic outfit and, you know, baggy pants and people kind of saw him and identified him as Muslim. You can almost see the tension ratcheting up as he comes closer and closer.

And he then sits down across the aisle from me, and I look over and realize that I recognize him. And I said, shake, and he looks over at me kind of quizzically. And I said, it's Jelani. We were in the same breakdance group in high school. And you could see everyone just kind of relax. Like the tension just dissipated. He was like, oh, he was a breakdancer in high school. And, you know, he's not going to do anything to harm us.

The irony of it was that, you know, I'm a large African-American man. And I'm actually in the position of making a group of white people feel more safe and comfortable, which is not how I typically experience the world. But the more notable thing to me was that Jamaica was the kind of place where a black kid from the south side of the borough and a Pakistani Muslim who was from not far from the school could meet and bond over our mutual interest in break dancing. So I would take the Q5 bus. I went back to the neighborhood recently. I wanted to see my school since it had closed. Back in high school, I rode a bus 45 minutes each day.

way to get to school. And then we'd get off and start walking up this hill. You know, that old story about people's parents who said they walked uphill five miles each morning to go to school. And that was kind of like, we felt like we had some equivalent of that just by braving this particular hill early in the morning. My parents moved to Queens in about 1967. And I was born in 1969.

and moving to Queens was a big deal at that point. You know, the black population in Queens was coming from Harlem, you know, the Bronx, communities where, you know, African-Americans had largely been restricted to living. And this hill is legendary. People just got to refer to it as the hill. When you get to it near the top of the hill, you see this majestic building.

And as you see it, the building itself resembled a state capital. This magnificent structure. You know, with these two wings and this long central corridor connecting it and this rolling green, you know, in front of it, looking at the building, it's a wildly idealistic undertaking to just say, let's build this magnificent structure and then teach people here. For most of its history, that idealism was rewarded until it wasn't. In the early 2000s, New York City adopted a policy of school choice,

which allowed students to enroll in any high school in the same. city. That policy, combined with demographic changes that brought larger numbers of low-income and non-English-speaking students into the school, made it harder for Jamaica to compete. Other schools began siphoning off top students that once would have applied to Jamaica. By 2009, the graduation rate had sunk to 39%. Two years later, the New York City Department of Education decided to close the school. When I visited, I found my school covered with scaffolding. So you can't really see just how incredible the structure is on its own. You kind of have to use your imagination.

You graduated in... So I wanted to talk to a recent graduate who could talk about... Are you not sure? What Jamaica was like toward the end of its existence. 2013, I'm sorry. It's 2013. I was a class of 2013. Kimberly Walcott graduated a couple years ago.

Today, four smaller schools occupy the space that once held just one school. So what was interesting to me is like when I was here, there seemed to be a lot of activities. You know, I wound up participating in, you know, science programs and played baseball. And, you know, there was another program for students who were interested in business, medical careers. Was that like your experience? Did you feel like you had those opportunities? When I came here, I was accepted as a law. I think they had a law program.

But everything else just sort of fizzled out. we just became like, I guess, a lower class in the school. So the other thing that I remember that was notable about the school is that it kind of looked like the United Nations. You know, so we had, you know, students from all over the Caribbean, we had students from former Soviet bloc countries. We're here. Lithuanian students, Russian students, South Asian students,

East Asian students. And, you know, there was just this incredible diversity of the population. I did not. there was not a diverse, I mean, in the beginning, a bit more than how it ended. At the end, they were just a majority of Caribbean students. Haitians, yeah, Caribbean, a lot of, no white American. I don't remember, probably very few, like, to count. I could probably count, actually.

Wow. Oh, yeah, they're cool. Yeah. Oh, you can kind of see through this glass here a little bit, and that glass case has yearbooks going back. through all Jamaica's history. And I remember being excited that 1987 was in there, because not all of the yearbooks are just kind of random selections.

I was like, oh, yeah, we made the cut. So apparently they weren't too ashamed of us. So here's the kind of not good story. So we're at the central entrance here for the high school. If you go through those doors, you'll be in the main corridor and directly across from you, was the auditorium. And in 1986, we would typically meet in the mornings before classes started,

and we would kind of mill around in the auditorium and talk. And that particular morning, there was a conflict between a young man by the name of Stanley Pacheco and another young man by the name of Gregory Evelyn. And Greg pulled out a gun and shot Stanley in the auditorium. I heard of that incident, but I wasn't sure. of how it went down. You were actually here for that. I was here. I was a student here. Wow. What was it like? Unfortunately, school shootings are common now, but at this point in time, we did not have any frame of reference for something like that happening. And the school went on,

but we were, for the rest, and that was my senior year, for the rest of the year, that incident kind of hung over us. I was going to say, I think that, It was probably the reason for a lot of the bad name that Jamaica high school got. That's been amazing to me that's something that happened almost 30 years before you graduated, and it's shocking that people were still talking about it, that you still knew. Yeah, I was definitely, I was aware, but it wasn't like we sort of constantly talked about it. You know, just it was brought up, and then we're like, oh, wow, maybe that's the reason why Jamaica's, quote-unquote, a bad school. And so I think that's one of the things that's interesting, too, like, when we close schools,

we're not just closing the school you know what we're doing is closing a particular history I don't know what exactly should have happened here when the school closed about 63% of the students here qualified as low income it almost seemed like a no-brainer like if you're going to have that population you have to have the resources to address what their needs are

and for a long time it seems like this was a place where that happened and then it was a place for that ceased to happen. It's fenced off and it looks like a funeral shroud almost and it's a metaphor for a particular kind of idea about education, I think. One of the things that was most notable to me about this story is that when it came out, that same week a group of parents and community members had begun a hunger strike to prevent the closure of Diet High School in Chicago.

And it struck me that this is not just. a local story, is not just a personal story, is really a national story. And there are lots of people in lots of different places who are concerned about what happens when an institution in their community closes. On the surface, it's hard to understand why a community would protest the closure of a failing school. But people weren't protesting to keep a failing school open. They were protesting because they believed that institution had the potential to be great once again. Most of the people who I grew up with did not wind up going to college or did not wind up going to graduate school

or having opportunities that I wound up having. And I kind of look and say there's one less way for that person. Someone coming from the community that I came from who has those aspirations to get to where they want to be in life now. That's staff writer Jalani Cobb at his alma mater, Jamaica High School. We'll close the show now with a story about being a parent and how it sometimes takes you to strange places you didn't quite expect. John Seabrook writes a lot about music for the New Yorker.

And I know that his taste runs to the stones and James Brown and the Beatles, middle-age guy kind of stuff, but in the last few years, he started writing about contemporary pop music, profiling the producers and artists who dominate the top ten charts. This fall, he published a book called, the song machine about the pop industry. But truthfully, John wouldn't have even listened to pop music if it weren't for his son Harry. I started playing myself when Harry was born because I thought that it would be a great thing to have music around the house. My mother played the piano

around the house. I wanted to pass along the gift of loving a song. Yeah, I guess I kind of also wanted to educate him a little bit in what I felt was sort of a classical pop music. music education. You know, the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young. But he loved the songs, I think. They sank in. You feel like they kind of embedded themselves somehow in you? Now that you mention it, one or two songs you successfully transmitted.

That one Bob Dylan song? Not one of heaven, zero? No, no, no. Oh, Love minus zero. That one, that one. You picked up on that one. The imagery in that song is really powerful. In the time stores and bus stations

People talk of situations Um Repeat quoteations Draw conclusions on the wall Okay I know We go Draw conclusions on the wall That's a cool image

Right I remember seizing control Of the front seat In fifth grade I was allowed to ride in at once You got big enough And yeah Mom declared that it would be okay

one time and then I never really it was impossible to uproot me from the front seat so once I sort of had established my empire in the driver's seat empire of the front seat right then I started like colonizing the radio presets and I reconfigured all of them to the top 40 channels instead of like NPR

92.3 Z100 103 all these ones I would sort of dig around I scan until I found pop stations. Wherever you go, you hear these songs. If it's a high school basketball game and the band plays them at halftime or if it's the Super Bowl and Katie Perry is singing them,

these songs have become the soundtrack to all of our lives and very, very little is known about the songwriters and the producers who make them. That's how the book that I wrote the song. machine came about because I was fascinated by these songs and I wanted to know who made them and how they were made and what their influences were. And it became a great source of conversation for us because Harry was really into it too. You know, some guys talk about sports for their kids. But music, you know, that's something that we totally kind of saw eye to eye on and bonded over. What had changed in pop music between the time I stopped listening to it and started listening to it again was the lyric.

The lyric had gotten much raunchier, much more R-rated, if not sort of borderline X-rated. That was kind of a hip-hop sort of influence, I think, coming in, you know, the 50-cent zone. Candy shop, okay. Wow, what's that about you? think. I don't know. It's a lollipop. I thought he was just

like candy. He liked candy. Right. Well, I was concerned that the double entendre wasn't conceal enough. So you get a little embarrassed at first,

but I was struck by the amazing sonic texture and tapestry that if you come off of the street, not listening to pop music for 10 years, and you listen to right round, which is a Dr. Luke's song,

the production, the sounds, the sound of the way that starts. Yeah, I remember being very embarrassed about liking that song. And I was acutely aware that that was like Kesha and you're supposed to dislike Kesha, but I was like, mm, this is kind of catchy. Well, I guess most of us would be horrified

and appalled by these songs. I mean, I've always liked a good song. And what I call a good song is a song that moves you, that communicates this ecstatic feeling at some point. I felt that right round really had something, which I understood, even if it was in a different package. And, you know, I mean, it wasn't a guitar solo. That sound is not a guitar solo.

You know, I realize that this giant change had taken place, but songs used to be a melody writer and a lyric writer. The melody guy would maybe sit at the piano. sketching out melodies, and the lyric guy would sort of throw out words. And that was how, you know, for many years, decades, going back to Tin Pan Alley and before songs were made. And there had been this enormous change. And now songs were tracks that were made by producers and then hooks.

They were added by these kind of, they call Topline Riders, that would come in and kind of improvise on the mic. And then the lyrics kind of came afterwards. and were often written by somebody else all together. It's kind of like the whole thing is a giant assembly line. I was already aware that they didn't, not all of them wrote their own songs, but I really didn't realize the extent to which

this whole thing is a machine until dad started writing about this. It's sort of disenchanting. But I have found that in terms of like listening to new music and listening to good songs, that pop music has gotten kind of more, more interesting in a musical way, at least, in a sonic way. You know, I have this love of music.

I got this love of music from my mother in particular who loved, you know, show tunes, my fair lady, I have often walked down the street before. And it was like the fun times. It was the times when, like, the furniture seemed to lift a little bit up off the floor. And music in the house just made everything seem happier. So I just wanted that. That for me was an important value that you kind of want to pass along to your kids.

Yeah, I maybe narcissistically think that a lot of his interest in pop stems from me. I don't think the book would exist without you, man. So how about a high five? He didn't like that for the record. John and Harry Seabrook. John's book about the making of pop music is called

the song machine. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week, we'll get workout tips from the novelist Nathan Englander. See you next week. 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 Garpers of Tune Yards.