The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 14: The Koch Brothers, the Ninth Planet, and an Undefeated Female Boxer

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

In this episode, three epic battles: Jane Mayer recounts her experience investigating—and being investigated by—Koch Industries; Junot Díaz discusses his fraught relationship with his native Dominican Republic; and the undefeated boxer Heather Hardy prepares for a big fight at the Barclays Center. Finally, the astronomer who wrote “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming” lays out his evidence for the existence of a ninth planet. 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.

in a conversation with someone, when they have that revelation. It's making sure. Maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process. Okay. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Today on the show, I'll talk with the writer Juno Diaz about his fiction and about his fierce criticism of the government of the Dominican Republic, where he was born. And we'll meet the toughest of women, a boxer who relishes combat so much that she fought a professional match with no prize money to fight for. Heather Hardy talks with the New Yorkers, Kelleifasane, later this hour. Now let's start with another tough-minded soul in a very, very different line of work. Jane Mayer is an investigative reporter. She's covered everything from the Clarence Thomas hearings to drones and the use of torture by the CIA. In 2010, she published an article in the magazine about the mega-billionaire industrialists

Charles and David Koch of Coke Industries and their funding of the Tea Party. Now, back then, the Tea Party, as you may remember, was thought of as a populist uprising. But Jane was investigating leads that the Koch brothers and other wealthy activists were sponsoring an actual instigating the movement. But as Jane was burrowing away in her reporting, she started to notice something odd was happening. I began to get warnings from a number of people who'd worked for Coke industries, who I wanted to interview, that I better be careful. And, you know, I tend to kind of laugh off such things. But people were saying they play hardball, watch out. And a number of them were unable to give interviews because they'd had to sign non-disclosure agreements,

but some of the ones that I was able to talk to, you know, were literally looking over their shoulders the whole time that I interviewed them and didn't want to meet any place in public, didn't want to talk on the phone. I mean, it was strange. It seems humorous at first, or at least overwrought, I thought. It stopped being funny. for me, though, on January 3, 2011, David Remnick sent me a strange email saying,

can you help me out with this? I got an email from Keith Kelly, who's the New York Post's media correspondent, and he's a good reporter, and he writes this, hi. We're hearing that a right-wing blogger may be preparing to let fly some pretty serious claims against Jane Mayer. On the one hand, it might be seen as payback for her bringdown of the Koch brothers in August,

And then Keith goes on to list a couple of these allegations about, quote, borrowing heavily from one story. And, you know, there are allegations of plagiarism. If you want to take down a reporter, there's pretty much nothing more lethal than charging them with plagiarism. There was no way it was true. I mean, I've made my share of mistakes in journalism, but I've always gone out of my way to credit my colleagues. And frankly, nobody's ever complained about this in my entire career. But when I looked at David's email, I froze. I knew I had to give a response by the next morning.

False allegations like this can haunt reporters for years. People would think there must be something about it that's true. It was four in the afternoon. I had 16 hours. By the following morning, I'd reached the authors of the four stories that I'd supposedly stolen from. And luckily, they were all stand-up people who were willing to go on the record saying it was not true.

I got their statements, and I sent them to both The Daily Caller and the New York Post, and both organizations dropped the story when they read it. But to the New York Post's credit, they actually kept reporting. Now, Keith Kelly, the media reporter, who had emailed David, looked at this, and he thought, what's going on here? My first sense was, oh, wow, great, a plagiarism scandal. What could be better? You know, this could be a big scandal involving a major magazine.

But then as we checked it out, it turned out none of the allegations were panning out. So the suspicion was that there was somebody behind it who was trying to discredit a legitimate story for their own reasons. He started writing a couple stories asking, who's trying to smear Jane Mayer? Yeah, we never actually identified who that could be exactly, but the list of suspects would be fairly short, I would imagine. I have to say, I wondered who was behind it too, but gradually I was able to piece together much of the puzzle. What I learned was that a so-called opposition research team had been put on me in an effort to discredit my reporting, and that they'd worked for months in an office. a few blocks away from the White House.

I was told by one source that what they were looking for was dirt, dirt, dirt, and that if they couldn't find it, they'd create it. I was told that the operation was led by a couple of longtime Coke operatives and that they were working with a private investigator.

That firm turned out to be Vigilant Resources International. When I looked up the firm, it was run by the Safer family. Adam Safer is its president Howard Safer, its founder, is the former New York City Police Commissioner. Naturally, I wanted to know more about this,

so I picked up the phone, and I called both Adam and Howard Safer to ask them about it. Both said they couldn't discuss it. They don't talk about their clients, and they would neither confirm nor deny investigating me or planting the plagiarism story. It was unclear to me

if the Koch brothers would have even known about an operation like this. But what was clear was that they hated my 2010 story about their political activities. They hadn't been able to find any errors in it, but they nonetheless tried to stop it from being nominated for a National Magazine Award. The Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Coke Industries, Mark Holden, said in a letter to the Asmi Board members, the Association of Magazine Award, that it's, quote, inappropriate for Jane Mayer's piece to be considered for the National Magazine Award because her article, was biased. And given these facts, it would be inappropriate for Asmey to give Ms. Mayer's article an award in reporting. But it was very clear in the aftermath that the Asmi officials behaved properly and didn't cave in. One of our nation's largest private companies is proudly built

on American values and skill. Coke Industries started in the heartland and has expanded to nearly every state. The Koch brothers themselves used to joke that they were the biggest company that nobody had ever heard of. That means more than 60,000 American jobs. We're still branching out into new fields. They've got pipelines, refineries, chemicals, tar sands. They even own Georgia Pacific Company, which makes household products like Dixie Cups. They make Stain Master Carpet. They make Lycra. It's really a phenomenal business that they've got. Together, we are The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are the sixth and seventh richest Americans at this point. They're tied for it. They've each got fortunes worth about $40 billion. And they have tremendous

financial interests at stake in American policy, and they want to influence that government to serve their business. But that is not the only reason they're donating. They are ideologues of extraordinary intensity, particularly Charles Koch. And from the start, really, beginning more than 40 years ago, he set out to create a movement to, quote, destroy the current paradigm. Theory and history have overwhelmingly demonstrated that the best way to help the poor, and for that matter, the rest of society is through a system of economic freedom. That's Charles Koch receiving an award at the Philanthropy Roundtable in 2011. He really believes that, as one of his mentors said,

government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. After the Citizens' United decision in 2010, many critics thought that corporations would pour money into American politics, but what happened was actually kind of different. Instead, a number of hugely wealthy individuals like the Koch, tap their fortunes to become political donors, many of whom had political agendas that helped their own bottom lines. Political reporters call this money dark money. It's money that comes from undisclosed donors, millions and millions of dollars sloshing through the American political system from people

who really want to influence our democracy, but don't want anyone to know who they are. Some of this reporting, it seems like, these days, requires not just a law to be. but an accounting degree, just to figure out what the rules are and to try to follow the money. Many of us have found ourselves at the end of the day looking not just over the tiny amount of disclosures that have to be made to the IRS and publicly. And you look over these forms and you look for names and you look for sums and they have often an address or two and you go to the address and it's nothing but a post office box. Now in the course of reporting that, you're story about the Cokes, I had stumbled across a kind of strange pattern that they had, which was when

outsiders tried to challenge them in ways that they found threatening to their interests. They struck back hard. For instance, in 1989, there was a Senate investigation into the Cokes, into Coke industry specifically, and whether or not it was stealing oil from Indian reservations. My name is Jim Elroy. I'm a retired special agent of the FBI. Jim Elroy was an FBI agent who had worked in Oklahoma, who became an investigator for the Senate committee that was looking into allegations that Coke Industries was stealing millions of dollars worth of oil from Indian reservations. So Elroy started working for the committee, and he started to feel that somebody was watching him and that there was some kind of intimidation coming, he thought, from Coke industry. I was back gauging oil sites, meaning I'm double checking, watching the Coke industries, employees, gauge oil. And then I'm gauging it, and I'm determining that they are not telling the truth when they're indicating how much oil they're taking that they're stealing oil.

I was up in north central Oklahoma. I went to the home of the employee to interview this person to determine who taught them to do this and why they were doing it. And when I left the interview, I saw a car parked down the street. I thought I'd seen the car before, so I surmised it might be a surveillance, and I got in the car and started to drive. I started making a couple of turns, and the car stayed with me. so I was sure it was a surveillance. So I pulled up at a convenience store, got out of the car, went in, went out the back, doubled back down the block, and came up behind this guy.

I took out my credentials and my gun and told the guy, FBI, put your hands up where I can see him. I could see the butt of what turned out to be a 45 caliber semi-automy. automatic pistols sticking out of his waistband. So he put his hands up on the steering wheel. I reached in. I pulled the gun out of his waistband. I got him out of the car and shook him down. So he just said he was a private investigator, and he was hired to determine which

Koch employees that I was interviewing. So I took the magazine out of his gun and ejected the cartridge out of the chamber and threw the gun. back in the car and told him that you'd go back and tell Charlie Coke that the next guy he sends out to run a surveillance on him, they'll go home in a bag. So I didn't seem to have any more surveillance on me at that time. At the time, a spokesman for Coke Industries denied spying on Elroy. The Senate did release a damning report, though, which concluded that the Cokes were stealing millions of dollars worth of oil from Native Americans in Oklahoma.

It also noted that oil workers said they felt pressured by their superiors at Coke to use what was called volume enhancement. In fact, this particular system was known throughout the industry as the Coke method of gauging oil. The report also noted that a committee investigator's ex-wife said she was questioned by a Coke employee about their divorce. Now, that's not a common thing to see in a Senate report. When I read it, I realized, I'm not alone. As I did more digging, I found people like Wick Solars, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Senate investigation, and he later became managing partner at the Blue Chip Law from King and Spalding. Soler said that several other staff members believed that someone was going through their garbage.

He told me that we don't know who sent them, but someone hired private investigators to dig up anything they could. He said he'd never experienced anything like it before or after in his law practice, and he added, I'm not political, but it was troubling. The oil theft saga went on and on. It continued for at least another decade. The Senate report led to a federal investigation, but no charges were brought. Jim Elroy retired from the FBI, but he then went to work for Bill Coke, the estranged brother of Charles and David. and Bill Coke brought his own whistleblower lawsuit against his brothers

with the same charges having to do with the theft of oil and won. After all this, Elroy retired for good, and now he spends most of his time sailing. I'm going to do some sailing off the coast of Italy. I'm not sure how to say that. Coke Industries might come after me there, so. After the whole plagiarism ploy, I began to wonder how worried I should be.

And when I finally had drafts of the book that were not perfect yet and that I didn't really want out in public, I thought I ought to make sure they weren't just thrown out where anyone could see them. So I didn't have a shredder at home, and I wasn't sure what to do. And then, you know, I realized, well, gosh, they'd make incredible kindling. And so I took the pages and put them in the firebox. And when we next had a fire in the living room, my family got to enjoy, you know, toasting marshmallows over them.

Jane Mayer. Her new book, Dark Money, is a history of the Koch family's empire and its political influence. Coming up in a minute, we pay a visit to a boxing gym and then to a playground, where things get weird, Share the slide, honey bear. We have to share because if we don't, society will collapse

and we'll be no better than animals. That's all ahead in the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for tuning into the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week on the show, television critic Emily Nussbaum talks with the comedians who make the show Broad City. Emily loves the show, which if you haven't seen it, is like Leverne and Shirley with weed and sex. People are like, whoof, you guys are filthy.

And it's like, I don't know, it doesn't feel that filthy to us. But like, I guess on most shows, it's like sex is so tied into like getting the guy. Where in this show, it's just for the purpose of sex, which it is more in life. It's just pleasure. Broad City at the recent New Yorker Festival. That's up next week. Now, if I were to take you to Gleesons, a boxing gym in Brooklyn, you'd think you were on the set of Rocky or the harder they fall. It's any old boxing movie.

The place is the real deal. It's got that very, how can I put this, distinctive smell that only 80 years of sweat and blood can provide. Kelleifah Sane went to Gleesons recently to talk with a fighter named Heather Hardy. A woman trying to make it professionally still faces an uphill battle, especially with newer sports like mixed martial arts stealing some of boxing's thunder. And Kellef wanted to hear about it from a real contender. My name is Heather Hardy. I'm the WBC International Superbantamweight Champion, undefeated 14-0.

Stop leaning back. Don't pull it back. Slow it down. Good, good. Up, up, up, up. Punch, tomorrow work. Ten seconds. Is your schedule today pretty much like what your days are like? I'm in the gym every day by 6 a.m., sometimes 5.30, and 2.30 and 3 is when I walk over to, to get my daughter back and forth to school. But outside that, I'm either sparring, and I just finished training. After you guys leave, I'll have to get my daughter from school and then bring her here. She must be fascinated by the whole boxing thing, right? Wait, my daughter's 11.

She's so unimpressed by me. It's not cool when your mom does it. When Heather says that she's training at Gleason's gym, she might mean that she's getting ready for a fight, and she has a big one coming up at Barclays Center, the arena in downtown Brooklyn. But she might also mean that she's training someone else. Heather's day job, when she's not a boxer, is training clients,

some of them aspiring boxers themselves, some of them just looking for a workout. We're walking back to her office, which is hidden behind some barbells and weight benches. It's cluttered. There's a couch and a drum set because her trainer is teaching her daughter to play the drums. Heather's listed at 5'5, and she's a little thicker and more muscular than your average boxer. She looks like she could be an MMA star And she, in fact, did a little kickboxing Earlier in her career.

Let's talk about how this started. Did you have a reputation of someone not to be messed with? Not really. I mean, like, I had gotten into some little street fights When I was a kid, and, you know, my mom's big thing was Nobody's going to beat you like your mom. So I've always been really tough.

But I've been to some really hard times in my life, like some really hard, really hard times. And I was going through, divorced living with my sisters. The two of us had two kids. Neither one of us getting child support. I was working like six jobs. And they opened up this little karate school. So my sister was like, listen, you literally are working like around the clock. You need an hour. Just go. And within three weeks I had my first fight and there was like probably over a thousand people in this little venue and I won my first fight. So to have that feeling of a victory, it's like, it was like drugs for me.

And I just kept going back. Heather found herself sucked into the New York boxing scene. It's a world that hasn't changed much in 50 years, except now there are women like Heather Hardy fighting alongside the men. The big fights usually happen in arenas, but just about every weekend there are smaller fights, many at rock clubs,

with local fighters being cheered on by fans from their neighborhood. Fans might pay 50 bucks at the door, and fighters will get paid based on how many people they could get to show up. I was in Roseanne Ballroom, it was a big place for my pro debut. All these people came out and saw me, and I got caught with a straight right hand

and fell and hit the floor, and I got up, and I heard the rough, and I had eight seconds, because the first two seconds I was, like, still kind of out of it. And in eight seconds, I told myself, all these people came here to see you. Everyone believed that you are going to win this fight.

You have to beat the shit. out of this girl. So right after I got up, I did just that. I beat her, like, within an inch of her life. And I won the fight. One of the things that every boxer tries, thinks about is whether it's possible to do this and escape, you know, without suffering some sort of brain damage. I mean, how do you think about those longer-term risks? I was just at the Boxing Hall of Fame and got to see all them old timers and none of them really talked so good. And it was like, wow, you know. There are definitely times like, I forget everything,

but something happened with, oh, my phone password. I totally forgot. So that gets scary sometimes because I'm like, you know, I have this twitch in my eye, and I'm always wondering, like, is it just a twitch or is this like some kind of damage that suffered in my head? The point of boxing is simple. You keep winning. You win golden-glove tournaments,

maybe eventually you win an Olympic gold medal. Men's professional boxing is prize-fighting. The idea is to collect a big paycheck. Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the highest paid athlete in the world, even though most people don't watch boxing at all. For Heather, it's more complicated. In order to have an audience, she goes out to bars to convince people she knows or sees

to take a chance on her. And so when she gets in the ring, she's always conscious that there are people who paid to see her and that she has an obligation to entertain them. I feel that kind of pressure every single time I get in the ring, for the tickets I sell, for the people who help me, for the people who've been there for me. I don't feel animosity.

I don't have to gear myself up for it. This is my job. The same way you go to the office, when I get your 9-to-5 in the best you can. That's how I feel when I fight. It's fight night at Barkley Center in Brooklyn, the arena that's home to the Brooklyn Net, and it's Heather Hardy's fourth fight of the year.

She's fighting as part of a show that includes 10 different fights. The doors open at 4.30 p.m., although the main fights, which are going to be broadcast on showtime, don't begin until 9. While we were waiting for sat down with Lou DeBella, a former HBO executive who's now a boxing promoter, he promotes Heather Hardy, and he was putting together tonight's fights. Well, I mean, I signed Heather because I promoted her first fight, and it was like World War III. There was this cute, you know, blonde, like Irish girl from Brooklyn, but she had this rage in her.

Is there interest in showing women's boxing? I'm starting to get through. Okay, one of my fighters just scored a knockdown, so that's why I just stopped myself, sorry. It was real to slip. I was real to slip. Well, that's too bad. No, I think that Heather has a lot of charisma. You know, she's not the greatest female fighter in the world,

but she's one of the more exciting. Yesterday at the weigh-ins, Heather comes in four or five pounds heavy. Was that a surprise to you? Yeah, which shouldn't have been. She should have told me what was going on before yesterday morning. What it was happening is Heather was expecting her period this week, and it didn't come on the date it was anticipated, and she simply couldn't make weight physically.

And to be honest with you, it has me a little bit worried about tonight, and I gave Heather the opportunity if she wanted to to pull out of the fight, and she insisted she was ready she was going to win. About 8,500 tickets have been sold, most of them to people who want to see the main event, a battle between two middleweights, Daniel Jacobs and Peter Quillen. Heather has spent weeks selling tickets to this fight,

and you can tell which section is hers. It's the one full of people who starts screaming when she comes out of the tunnel and walks into the ring. Heather likes to start her fights as if she's angry. She's aggressive. Watching Heather fight can be a little bit misleading. She throws with conviction, but in fact she's not a particularly hard puncher. At one point, she throws two lead uppercuts.

That's a dangerous maneuver both for her opponent and for her. Don't stand there, watch her when you're punching. She pulls away in the second half as the action slows down. The referee calls a quick timeout, so the doctor can examine a cut that has started to bleed above Heather's right eyebrow. Some fighters are comfortable in a defensive crouch, but Heather likes to stand strong. and get close to her opponent, even though that's not always the wisest move.

In sports, and often in life, we like to think that hard work pays off, and we accept the idea that often the most rewarding achievements will be the most difficult. Boxing magnifies that idea. The appeal of the sport is inseparable from its brutality. Often, the thrilling moments are the violent ones, the times when a fighter gets hit and gets hurt and comes back.

By the eighth round, Heather looks red-faced and exhausted, but she's been dominating her opponent. Ladies and gentlemen, after eight rounds here at Barclay Center, we go to the judge's scorecards. By unanimous decision, and stand undefeated from the... So it's finally over. We thought you were going to be fighting around 7 p.m. tonight or 6 p.m. tonight. No, and you fought around 11 p.m. What was it like for you, the in-between time? It's very exhausting, to be honest, the up, down, up down. You know, any fighter will tell you once you get ready and you're ready to go out there, and then they pull it back.

It's like, oh, you know, so I was really nervous because I was so tired. My muscles were, like, going to sleep. Tell me about this week. It seems like it was a rough week for you. Yeah, it was a tough week. Then weeks are always pretty tough for me, finalizing ticket sales, running around doing that, collecting money. You know, as a woman, you have certain times of the month

where it's harder for you to make your weight. So because I didn't make weight, my opponent took my whole purse. So my boss was nice enough to give me a nice little bonus, so it covered everything, you know, but that was a lot of stress too. And the rule is if you can't make weight, your opponent basically has the right to renegotiate the contract. So she took the prize money even though you won the fight. We have to renegotiate the contract.

She can either not fight or leave, and it was pretty much like, well, either I take all your money or I don't fight. And I had sold $24,000 tickets. I worked so hard for this. So I was really, before I walked in the ring, prepared to fight for nothing. But at the end of the day, I didn't come in on weight,

and I was willing to pay the price. And my boss wanted to scratch the fight, and I was like, I'll do, okay, I take my money, take everything. I don't care. It's like, like, I think I tell you this story, my mom said, if a black belt and karate stole your wallet,

would you give a shit that they have a black belt and karate? Hell no. Lou asked me, you're going to be all right? You're going to beat this girl? I said, I'm going to beat this girl like she just stole my money. Thanks so much, Heather. Thank you. My name is Heather Hardy.

I'm the WBC International Superbantamweight Champion, professional boxer, 15 now. That was Heather Hardy talking the sweet science with the New Yorker's Kelifasane. More to come on the New Yorker Radio Out. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour,

and this is Playground Pergatory. Is that your little guy over there? Yeah, that's Sebastian. What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide. Oh, she's so sweet. I feel like I've seen you here before. I'm Anna.

Yeah, you look familiar. I'm Sarah. This place is such a lifesaver. Total lifesaver. We're here like every day, sometimes twice. Tell me about it. We were here for 10 hours yesterday. I'm always so happy when I'm here

and never feel strange or despondent. Me too. So happy. The sound of all the kids laughing and screaming is so joyous. It doesn't sound like nails on a chalkboard at all. Never cried behind that tree. Me neither. Tessa. Tess.

Come on over here and put on your coat, okay, sweetheart? It's chilly out, and you need to put your coat on, okay? Your coat needs to go on your body. The fabric needs to cover your torso to help you. maintain a proper internal temperature or you'll die, okay? Pumpkin? Is that your little guy over there? Yeah, that's Sebastian. What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide. Oh, she's adorable. Wait, did I already ask you that? Did you? I don't think so. I don't know. I feel funny sometimes. Sometimes, when I'm in the sandbox, I can feel myself sinking like something's

pulling me down. I can feel the sand slowly suffocating me and it feels good. We should totally do a play date sometime. Oh my God, it would be so great to do a play date. Maybe I'll buy us a bottle of Pito Grigio. Nothing wrong with moms playing a little play date, right? Nothing wrong at all. Hey, I don't know if you're into it, but I bet I could dig up a little pot in the back of a drawer somewhere. It might be really old, but it could be fun.

Ooh, no, that would be fun. Great. I could probably score a line or two of Coke if you wanted. We totally don't have to. Oh, I am definitely down for a bump or two. Is that applesauce on your shirt? This, no, Tessa threw up on me. But applesauce or throw up, what's the difference, really?

They're both just things that get on your shirt that you lose the wheel to wipe off after a certain point. I mean, either way, you're going to give yourself a haircut with a kitchen knife, right? Sebastian, share the slide, honey bear. We don't own the slide, okay? We have to share, because if we don't, society will collapse and will be no better than animals. This playground and everything around it will deteriorate into a dystopian war zone.

And you know what dystopian war zones don't have? Slides. I love her outfit. It's so cute. I want to tear her arms off. Such a beautiful day here today. It's perfect. Not a cloud in the sky. Never is.

I'm Anna, by the way. Playground Purgatory by Colin Nissen, performed by the New Yorker Radio Hour's own Sarah Nix and Julie Sharbett. When Juno Diaz started contributing to the New Yorker around 20 years ago, his stories were like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. They're fast. They're vivid and racy. fantastic storytelling. But both in their language and their politics, they also served many readers as an introduction to the culture of Dominicans in the United States. D.S. has been ferocious about criticizing the Dominican Republic, in particular, its treatment of workers and immigrants

from the adjoining nation of Haiti. He's written on this issue for many years, and recently he compared new rules about deporting Haitians to something out of Nazi Germany. So, Juno, what is your argument with the Dominican Republic? Well, it's not with the Dominican Republic. It's with this political party that's engineered a retroactive change to the Dominican Constitution. You're only a Dominican if you can trace your Dominicanness to parents before 1930s. And it was basically this reading was engineered to target Haitian Dominicans as part of a larger kind of policies and larger politics to isolate, marginalize, and menace the larger Haitian immigrant community in the

Dominican Republic. Julia, you were a favorite son of the Dominican Republic. You were born there in 1968. You've won all kinds of awards. In 2009, you were awarded an order of merit by the Dominican Republic, by the government. And now you were stripped of that order of merit. Well, I mean, I wouldn't describe a writer as a favorite son. of any country. Certainly not.

But there has to be enormous national pride that you've risen to such prominence as a novelist and a writer of short stories here. Well, I think, again, I think you have to understand the kind of culture of the Dominican Republic. If I was a baseball player and a vachatero, I think that the country would have a wider sense of who I am. Again, I'm very minor figure, and I'm not just saying that of humility. It's true, very minor figure. But we're talking about a political elite that I've, you know, tried everything possible to stay as far away from. And I'm not surprised that suddenly these very folks who gave me a medal, which I never claimed, suddenly discovered that they hadn't read anything I'd written. Because certainly if they'd read anything I'd written, I would be the last person that they would be trying to give, these politicians would be trying to give awards to.

You know, the late John Uptych said that in a writer's early career, that you're able to almost easily work off the memory of your life. You left at six years old, which is a very critical pivot time in any person's life. What the mother load of memory from the Dominican Republic was that you were able to retain before six years old is, for some people at least, pretty slim. How much of it was real memory of life lived there and how much of it was kind of received through lore and your mother or other relatives and the rest? Yeah, I think it was multiple. I think there was a real memory. There was sort of fantastic memory. Certainly, one of the things that ends up helping is that when you grow up in an immigrant enclave, when you grow up in a Dominican sort of milieu, there's more continuity than you would have

expected. So of course, I'm sitting surrounded by all these Dominicans in New Jersey, many of them who don't speak English, many of them who, even if they've been living in the States for, five, six, seven, eight years, you would think that they had just gotten here from the Dominican Republic. And in some ways, it kind of helped focus my recollections of the Dominican Republic. I think part of what ended up happening with me, David, was that I was a kid whose father was in the United States while I was living. in the Dominican Republic. He preceded you here by some years, right? Exactly. And so I spent my first six years of my life dreaming of another place. I was always thinking and dreaming about this

father in America. Well, what ends up happening is that I come to the United States and suddenly my entire Dominican world is gone. It's vanished. It's like, you know, Superman, Krypton being just exploded. And suddenly I just swapped from sort of longing and trying to imagine and trying to to connect with an America that was distant to I started doing the same for the Dominican Republic. It was linked to relatives like my grandparents who I loved. It was linked to a time of safety. You know, being an immigrant is incredibly hard. You know, being in America was for many years a source of great pain, the pain of, you know, acculturation, of learning language, of that shock of American xenophobia and racism. And so, of course, that my mind and my heart would

cast itself back to the Dominican Republic and that I would have these muscles that would enable that. What were your experiences of racism as a kid? How did, what was the, what are the incidents? How to describe it to somebody who's not living the same life as you? My first experiences is that I came over in December 1974. So, of course, in the first six months that I was in the United States, I watched the last remnants of the American Imperial Project in Vietnam collapse. And you're aware of it at age six. Well, because you're learning English and you have the TV on. Right. And all that is on television is Vietnam. I always tell my friends, I'm like, the first word I learned in English was Vietnam.

And it was amazing some of the kind of racial just madness that, you know, that was, you know, just part of the kind of vocabulary of America in that time around Asians and around Asian Americans. I mean, I think I learned all the racist terms for Asians in those first 12 months because of that kind of trauma and that history that America had vis-a-vis Vietnam. Well, it's funny. You just mentioned before that the experience of being plopped down here was almost a science fiction kind of experience from one world to the next. And part of your early reading, and sometimes your attempts at writing are in the science fiction vein. You know, I'm a bit older than you, but we grew up with one science fiction thing in common. You love it. I've seen them all, but I cannot fathom it. I don't understand them.

Please explain to me the importance of Star Wars to you. Yeah, you know, it's funny because when one thinks about me. I have no idea. I have no idea what's going on. I go. I see them multiple times. galaxies are exploding because people are searching for a map to see Mark Hamill. I have no idea what's going on.

Yeah, well, you know, if you've seen the latest movie, even those of us who have a lot of literacy on Star Wars, I think it would be a far stretch to actually make sense of what's going on. People loved it. They love this one. It's kind of a straight forward parable of masculinitys and conflict. It is about boys and their fathers. and male power and male superpowers, all the different ingredients of boys' adventure stories, swords, medievalism, bad dads, space travel. You know, it's in many ways I'm telling you,

all of the basic building blocks of kind of American popular mythology have found their home in Star Wars. I got to tell you, the more I listen to you, the more it sounds like you want to write one of these sci-fi epics. Oh, God, no, not in that very. I think I recognize their hold they have on me, but I don't, I would not want to write them in that vein. Now, a few years ago, you published a story in the New Yorker, and it was a story called Monstro. And you were thinking about turning that into something longer?

Yeah, I'm still wrestling with it. You know, it's kind of my take on zombies and monsters, you know, on the island where zombies and New World monsters first went into circulation. And so it was kind of my attempt to bring the kind of post-colonial zombie monster home to the Caribbean. But it keeps just kind of derailing. So I'll keep trying. I just keep having this idea of what would happen if the world ended in a country where the world has ended multiple times, where that's something, in fact, that we're quite used to. The United States, the world ending would be this singular tragedy.

In the Dominican Republic, it's just a return to the North Carolina. normal. How do you mean? Well, I mean, Jesus, how many times the world ended in the Caribbean? You know, you had the poor world ending for all the indigenous people when the Europeans came over and colonized and sort of through disease and through slavery and violent trade. Yeah, man, it's the apocalyptic core of the Caribbean is, it's really, really deep. It's really deep, you know. Do you know, I am dying to talk to you about the election. And in 2012, I remember you were on with Bill Moyers. And you were impatient with Obama. You said that he had failed to tell a story. The other night at the State of the Union address, arguably he's telling his close to his final story. He had an hour of air time in which he's talking to the American people about his accomplishments, about his career as president. Where are you on him at this point? My sense of Obama has always been that he's an atypical politician. Most politicians, I know, have at least some thirst for the conflict, that they have some kind of competitive edge, that they kind of like knocking heads a little bit, that it's hard to be a politician if you're not of slightly combative. And, you know, as a political figure, he's always struck me as far more melancholy than combative. as far as sort of what is narrative, other than the fact that he's Obama, his narrative has been disorganized.

It's really hard to put a finger on. If you're somehow connected to the vast Latino communities in the United States, when you think of what his legacy is going to be, it was a nightmare. Tell me why you think so. Well, I mean, I don't think it's just exaggeration that people call him the deporter in terms. chief, I think numbers hold up. The politics around immigration that were enacted by his administration, that's, I think, something that is hard to square with a guy who himself presents and has a discourse, very humanistic, very tolerant, very patient. You know, I'm always divided. I'm someone of African descent. I'm a Latino and I'm an immigrant. And while the symbolic victory that Obama represents is

something very dear to me, the kind of injurious politics that its administration underwrote, are hard to forget. They're very hard to forget. Do you know, maybe this is a complicated question to even ask, much less to answer, but when I got to the New Yorker, the UR writer here, was somebody we didn't see very often, but wrote with incredible regularity, and that was John Upduck. Every year there'd be a new book. Every several weeks, a perfectly honed, critical essay. The fertility and the stream of work just began in the 50s and ended with a book

of poems literally from his deathbed. It's intimidating. That kind of notion has to be intimidating to all of the writers. You've had your ups and downs with this. You've talked some about difficulty of getting a book launched or getting one launched for as long as a year or two and then setting aside, to put it politely. How do you deal with that? Do you feel it's a matter of block, or it's just a matter of that's who you are and that's how you're going to create and that's how you're going to go about it? I think it's important that we have that kind of diversity. I think that I laud the updikes and the George Carroll Hots, the Samuel Ardellanis. We need people who live through their writing, but we also need the folks who are, you know, they kind of,

dwell in deep, deep places and emerge with pearls only, you know, once every few decades. And again, I think that the... How do you see your own life in those terms? I think I see my life as someone who has to generate a lot of crap to get anything good out. It happens, man. And it doesn't get easier. I don't think it has. I think what I've come to learn is that one book or 40, the books that you don't write,

are simply opportunities for people to read other writers. And that helps, man. I mean, I'm slow, and I've had to kind of, you know, fight with that, my lust and desire, my longing to write faster. But the slow dawning that we have the rhythm that we need to create the art that matters to us and hopefully to other people. You cannot wish another rhythm on yourself. You can maybe work to try to get it, but I've learned to understand.

and begin to appreciate that I was given this rhythm for a reason. There are things that need to be written that can only be written by slow poke like me. And I sort of take comfort of that. Pulitzer Prize winning writer in slow poke, Juno Diaz. His most recent book is This is How You Lose Her. You can read some of his stories at new yorkerradio.org. We're going to wrap up with the really big news this week. not the economic turmoil or the scandal in professional tennis,

not the presidential campaign, but the big news, which takes place millions of miles away. I grew up as I bet you did with nine planets. Then came the big fight in astronomy over the status of Pluto some years ago, and then there were only eight planets. Well, guess what? Now we most likely have nine planets again.

That's what the smart money is saying in astronomy. It's just not the same nine. Alan Burdick edits the New Yorker Science and Tech blog, and he talks with the guy who's causing all the commotion in outer space. I'm Mike Brown. I'm a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. I love trying to figure out how the whole solar system put itself together and what got the Earth and all the other planets to be the way they are today. And you are the guy who killed Pluto, am I right? You have a book called How I Kill Pluto and How It Had It Coming. What's up to that?

Yeah, I guess it's kind of hard to hide if I have a book called that. So, yeah, so I am the guy who killed Pluto, or what really happened is that I found the first object in the solar system that's more massive than Pluto. When we found that, you know, the question no longer is Pluto a planet. The question becomes, what is this new thing? And that's what finally led astronomers to really step back and look and say, are we really going to add yet another thing that doesn't actually make sense and call it a planet? or should we reassess what we think planets really are? And I give astronomers a lot of credit. It was a hard decision to make, and it was the right one to say,

all these things that I found and Pluto are not planets. Only the big gravitationally dominant things are really planets. And when all this happened 10 years ago, people would ask, so are there any other planets out there? And I would say, nope, that's it. They're just eight planets and we'll never have any more. Well, now, just last December, though, there was this flurry of excitement about planet X-rays.

had claimed to discover Planet X and you were the Debbie Downer. Yeah, that was almost embarrassing for our field, I would say. The problem is that it's very easy these days with the Internet for any random person to say they have done anything without much vetting. There was no double-checking, and it was just not true. I love the language in your paper. You and a colleague have published a paper with a title, Evidence for a distant giant planet in the solar system. you say we motivate the existence of a distant eccentric protuber.

Yes. So in the paper it is the distant eccentric protuber when we're actually talking about it. We actually call it planet nine. This would be the real ninth planet in the solar system. And the one that I didn't think existed 10 years ago when I told everybody that eight planets was what we had and eight planets is all we're ever going to have. We are pretty convinced there's a ninth one out there waiting to be found. And it is, in your mind, a planet. Yeah, I think that's unambiguous.

So it all started with this object, Sedna, that was on a strange orbit that couldn't be explained. And we have tried for nearly 15 years now to try to explain the orbit of Sedna. And in that time, more objects were found sort of like Sedna. And it turned out that all of these objects, when they go on their very eccentric orbits, when they go very far away from the sun, they all go in the same direction. There's no reason they should all go in the same direction. They should all be randomly scattered around the sky

going off in different directions. And when we realize this, it's really started us scratching our heads. And after a long analysis, a year and a half of back and forth and back and forth, we realize the answer is that there is a giant planet which is sculpting the orbits of these objects. This giant planet that's very far away

in the very outer part of the solar system. In many ways, you could argue that this is the, this is more of a planet than anything else in the solar system. It is gravitationally dominating a region that is, that is orders of magnitude bigger than the whole rest of the solar system put together. It's forcing all these other Kuiperbald objects into their orbits. How long would it take us to get there if we were able to get there? Oh, I love this question because even before we were starting to think about

the existence of a planet out there, I've been working with a group who are trying to think about how to get as far as we can. It would take 20 years to get to Planet 9 if it's at its closest approach. I want us to go there. I want to know what this things looks like. I would, you know, if it's out there, I almost don't say if. When we find out where it is, I want to get those rockets ready to go as fast as possible. What are the odds do you think that you yourself will find this?

we could probably find it in 10 years. It takes a long time to cover all the parts of the sky that it might be in, and so 10 years might be it. The probability that we are the ones who find it is not high. And, you know, I'm a little sad about that. I would love to be the one who discovers it. At the same time, I just, I want to see it. I want to know it's there.

I'm just going to jump up and down, even if it's not me who finds it. Your colleague told me that you sometimes call it George. Only because Neptune was originally supposed to be George's planet. I'm sorry, Uranus was George. Do you have other nicknames? We really actually call it Jehosephat. Jehosephat is the single most common name in my family tree for a male child. And I always thought Jehosephat was a great name,

as long as we use the nickname Fattie for it. So, in fact, we actually call it Fadi when we're just talking to each other. Fatty, that's not very nice. Astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technique, talking with the New Yorker's Alan Burdick. You can watch Brown's very instructive video, How I Kill Pluto, at New YorkerRadio.org. I just hope this guy leaves Earth alone.

I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week on the show, the comedians of Broad City and the creative genius behind the musical Hamilton join us in conversations from the New Yorker Festival. Have a great week. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional scoring this week by Paul Schneider.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.