The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 18: Maria Bamford, and Fighting for Baltimore

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

This week, two stories out of Baltimore: “The Wire” creator David Simon drives the city with Jelani Cobb, and David Remnick talks to the thirty-year-old mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson. Also, Maria Bamford discusses mental illness and comedy, and the engineering evangelist Limor Fried tries to convince you—yes, you—to build some electronics. 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. Like, the phrase is making sure. You mean, if you get a source for it? Yeah, yeah, the telegraph. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Comedy right now is in a tricky place. Anytime you talk with a comedian now, you hear how they're more and more aware of whether a joke might offend someone or anyone, really. Sometimes, as in the case of Amy Schumer, that leads them to reconsider old jokes or get rid of them entirely. Or as in the case of Jerry Seinfeld, it gets his back up and he gets angry about what he calls political correctness. Maria Bamford's comedy will make you uncomfortable in an entirely different way. She doesn't drop a lot of F-bombs. She doesn't go for race jokes. none of the usual hot buttons.

But when she jokes about the pain of her own mental illness or a suicide attempt, you're just not sure you should be laughing, but you just can't help it. Bamford is very funny. A comedian's comedian celebrated by no less a pro than Stephen Colbert.

I'm here with Maria Bamford. Maria, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me on the program. Oh, my gosh. You know, I hope I don't embarrass you when I say that you are my favorite comedian on planet Earth. I heard you years and years ago with Mark Marin on the Old Air America Radio,

and I thought, who is this person with these extraordinary voices? This deeply troubled person with extraordinary voices. Listen, Stephen, a lot of people don't think that I'm this comforted woman inside. No, I have those voices because this one is so less than what I hope for. Maria Bamford is working on a show for Netflix called Lady Dynamite, And she talked recently with the New Yorkers David Hagland. Now we're alone. Kind of alone.

There's some other people around, but I'm going to pretend they're not here. So I've seen you live a bunch of times now. In my experience, at least, the people who are your fans are intensely devoted. And maybe for some of the same reasons that not everybody gets it. Because, you know, so you talk a lot about depression and anxiety and difficult experiences. in very specific and candid and vulnerable ways. And if you respond to that, then it really means a great deal to you. Yeah.

Let's just say I've heard my publicist just said that they asked me if I'd like to be on the cover of Bipolar Magazine. And I said, yes, I would. I have to buy that issue. I didn't even know there was a Bipolar Magazine. It comes out quarterly. I get it. Well, I will keep an eye out, at least. Yes.

You know, I think in terms of the way that you talk about things, you make yourself very vulnerable. I was rewatching the special, special, special, which is a comedy special that you taped with just your parents as your audience. And I have to admit, the first time I watched it, I loved it. I always enjoy your comedy, but I kind of missed the hearing the laughter of a big crowd. But when I rewatched it, so much of the pleasure of it was in these very quiet moments and partly in the fact that you are talking to your parents and sometimes talking about them. Yes. And there's something so intense and intimate about that that is unlike any other comedy special I've ever seen.

I mean, part of the reason I did that is because it was out of laziness and sloth. I had just gone through a couple of hospitalizations and just felt so tired. I was just like, what can I do? I can, this is what I can do. Like I can just do stand up to my loving parents, who my dad can turn a hearing aid down, and then he doesn't, you know, have to know what I'm saying. Well, and there's a way in which, I mean, watching you, you have this great bit at the end of the special where you talk about Joy Wackamol, which is.

the game that you say people play when one person says something that they feel really good about and that other people try to knock it back down. And you're talking about how good your mother is at this game. And she seems to take it in really, you know, in good spirits, even though I imagine that's kind of difficult to hear. Mom, Amy had her baby. Oh, that is great news, honey. I mean, it's not the greatest news for the 600,000 kids in foster care. But if she wants a fresh one, oh, geez.

everybody wants one that looks like them and so selfish mom i'm doing a show tonight sweetie i got a joke for you a friend of mine she's so funny she said you could use it she was in foster care she'd been airlifted out of the Sudan in the late 90s because she'd been be armed and belacked by the jeanjouis the horseback militia she'd love to do stand-up but she can't

oh oh and it's really a hospice situation it's just a matter of time but the priest comes in and he asks her, Would you like us to light a candle for you in the chapel? She says, sassy as you please, teletyping through her eyelids. Well, how many candles you got? Things have happened to her and keep happening.

Sweetie, have a good show tonight. What you do is so important. I would hope, and we've talked about this a lot as a family, my mom's a therapist, and my dad is always interested in soul. help stuff. So we talk about everything and they know that a lot of the things that I put on them are actually me. You know, I am the best Joy Wackamoler in, I think, of our family, I have to say. But my mom does have a gift for being on an even keel. One classic thing that she said was Sarah, Maria's disappeared and I'm worried she's killed herself and I have a hair appointment in town.

Now, that is just wonderful. Yeah, you want to dredge the shallows for your beloved person's body, but there's going to be a funeral. So why cancel a beauty service or I don't know. I think of that is sort of a Midwestern thing too. I don't know if that's accurate. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm from the Midwest, so I guess it definitely is. But everything is, I think as you get older, things kind of bleed together where the ups and downs of life, you have to share them all at once sometimes.

Yeah. You know, you said before you described your comedy as wordy and you move from voice to voice in a way that is not always signaled. How do you structure it? Well, I mean, it's just like any, like a painting or something you start, and then you're working on a bunch of things at once. I was trying to work on something about how my friend Jackie is a, you know, I've always looked down on her because she was so into video games and Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering cards. And, you know, I'd look at her while she was doing this finding jewels on the plane and say, okay, you go do that while I do something meaningful over here. And I started to look down at what I was usually doing on a plane. And I was usually filling out the blanks in a self-help manual.

And I realized that that's my dorkdom, that I am, in fact, just like any person at Comic-Con. But I'm just talking about different things, you know, like I, I totally. try to find, and this is very old school, but just finding three beats. So, I mean, my plan is for this one is to act as if in the manner of somebody who is at Comic-Con. So how many, how many 12-step programs are you in? Yeah, yeah, me too. Oh, A, D-A, S-L-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-L-N-T. Yeah, me too, me too. Have you ever met Oprah? God, if I met Oprah, I would totally Like just finding three beats to go in with that. And then hopefully that would be hilarious.

Yeah. You know, so you have this Netflix show coming out fairly soon. And as I understand it, it's sort of maybe loosely based on your life. Is that accurate? Yes. It's a wildly inaccurate portrayal of a mental breakdown. and then coming back from it. And it's really fun and may I say magical.

And it sounds from your description like it's at least partly inspired by your own experience of hospitalization that you were talking about before from a few years ago. Yes. Yeah, I had a – I'd always known I had depression and some issues with the OCD. And there was bipolar in my family. My mom has had it as well as my aunt. But at a certain point, I started talking very quickly and also having a lot of pressured ideas, ideas that had to be followed through on immediately. And my friend said, hey, remember when you told us to tell you if you're acting strange and you should probably go to a hospital? And so they drove me there.

And I was also at the same time feeling extremely depressed in sort of an active way, which I had never felt before, which was making plans for suicide. So yeah, so I was able to find a medication regime that has changed my life. I have never felt this good. of the past five years have been eye-opening. I did not know what people meant when they would say, oh, we're just, gosh, we're just going to go skiing. It's just fun. It's just fun just to go skiing. I was thought, oh, you're going to exchange this uncomfortable set of variables for another equally painful set of

painful set of uncomfortable variables. You call it skiing, but you may as well. I just, I didn't understand sometimes when people talked about having fun or hanging out. Right. And did this also make it easier to work, or was that, is that something you had to adjust to? I think I am definitely less prolific than I was. And I would say slower. I definitely sleep a lot more.

I have a tremor. So I guess I don't really care, you know, if I'm less of a comedian. Because of the meds, I don't care because I'm alive. But it was interesting shooting the show. They were 15-hour days sometimes, and I had to ask for a 12-hour turnaround, which from what I understood is pretty unusual, but I said, gosh, I have to get sleep so that I don't go mental. Right. I'd be willing to let a television show go on behalf of my health because I feel like, I've had plenty of success in life.

And yeah, it's super exciting to have that. But if I were to get sick again, then it's all for not. anyways. So. Right, and you already get to do this for a living. Yeah. Maria Bamford talking with David Hagelin. She's doing shows next month around California and in Phoenix. And her TV show is coming from Netflix a little later in the year.

In a moment, Jolani Cobb goes to Baltimore to talk about policing and race in the death of Freddie Gray. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Jelani Cobb. Freddie Gray was arrested in April of last year. He was placed in a transportation vehicle not secured. And during the transportation, he suffered a fatal injury. The case has highlighted questions around police and police use of force that have not only surfaced in Baltimore,

but have been kind of a recurring theme in a number of cities over the last two years. Last month I went back to Baltimore. I was interested in seeing how the city was handling the fallout from the riots last spring. Coming out, first thing in the day, where you park is a memory trick for middle age. I'm down this alley. I'm a huge fan of the wire. I thought it was the most insightful exploration of the war on drugs that we've probably seen in popular culture. I wanted to drive around Baltimore with David Simon because,

for years before creating the show, he'd been a crime reporter for the Baltimore son. There have been moments where prisoners have died in custody. I covered one 20 years ago. What was that like? Very little came of it, but a guy who was HIV positive, his name was pretty... Simon sees the problem as systemic,

and I wanted to understand where the system in Baltimore is breaking down. So we're in West Baltimore. Yeah, this is West Baltimore. So the morning after the riots, I came up here just to help with the cleanup because I didn't want CNN or Fox or any of them to be able to have grandiose stand-ups where the carnage became the optimum imagery. The optics matter to winning. This is where it happened. The police line was right across here.

Not the Freddie Gray, but this was the epicenter of the confrontation. Simon thinks the city's problems stemmed directly from the war on drugs. In my opinion, the drug war transformed the police department. It's made the police department ineffective. It's made them a force that can't actually do the functions that the city demands of it, which is, you know, police work. They're no good at police work anymore. They're good at filling the wagons and locking people up.

The drug war has destroyed. Whatever it touches at this point, it destroys. There used to be like rules to the game of policing the inner city. the drug war rewrote every rule. The drug war may have exacerbated this, but this is not where this dynamic of excessive violence being visited upon black people by police started. No, but there's no denying that we're now 50 years beyond the fundamental core decisions

that validated the civil rights movement and police community relations in Baltimore in the inner city are worse than ever. And I can tell you, from my time reporting the court, corner when we went to a drug corner in West Baltimore. The toughest, meanest, most brutal police officers working that sector of the Western were African-American. But does that mean if it's a black cop doing the same thing that a white cop used to do, but in a black community, it isn't, I think there's still a racial dynamic there. I think it's that that black cop would not be able to kind of behave that way in a white middle-class community.

Oh, absolutely. But it does raise the notion of, you know, you have a city with an African-Undtimore, American mayor, African American prosecutor, African American police chief at the time. To me, it expands the dynamic. It makes you look harder at what has become of policing. This is New Shiloh. This is one of the two great churches of West Baltimore. Oh, look. Should we go look at, if there's some police tape up, so. Sure. Maybe we'll go look at some misadventure.

There's a detective. Something happened. were there, one, two, three, four, five, six officers, six cars out here. Once upon a time in America, and by the way, you know, community policing and foot patrols and all the warm fuzzy and running police athletic leagues, all the warm fuzzy stuff that police chiefs try to sell the community when the community is really mad or when people are scared, none of them work, none of them work. I mean, because I've talked with a lot of different people about community policing. It means, please like us.

And showing the flag. We're going to put more people in foot patrols. We're going to walk. We're going to be in your neighborhood more. We're asking for your help. You know, here's what police are really good at when they're good, when they're doing what they need to do. When you've hired them and they're actually worth their money. They're like locking the right guy up.

The right guy. And it sounds simple. And it's not. Oh, you know what? We should go to Madamein, where the, uh, the, the fight. fighting started between the kids and the police. Probably the most overt, visual affront of the drug war to me

is the militarization of police. Why is a guy wearing a police vest and can camouflage? Why is he wearing camouflage? I mean, I know it doesn't mean much. It doesn't, you know... But it doesn't mean something. He could be the most benign... That guy could be the most benign cop in the world.

He could be doing his job according to Hoyle. Why are you wearing camis? this is not the jungle. This is an intersection in your city. That occurred to me in Ferguson, actually. You were looking around these guys were on top of these military vehicles. But you're not blending in.

What are you saying? They train themselves to run around the corners and lock people up for what is effectively nothing. And consequently, that person winds up appearing to be more productive than someone who's doing slow-deliberate police work. The guy who has 30 arrest, 30 Freddie Grays, a month,

he goes to court 30 times a prosecutor signs his slips and gives him two hours of overtime. He gets 30 times more court pay or 15 times more court pay than the guy who on his post doesn't bother with that kind of arrest with the Freddie Grace, but it maybe actually solves a robbery or solves a burglary. That guy's got one arrest. I swear, if they could fix the police computer so that an honest felony arrest landed with the weight that it should, they would start to fix the police department. I mean, we used to finish filming on the wire in East Baltimore. And the African-American, you know, members of my film crew and my cast would have to run a gauntlet to get back home. If we were at two in the morning, it was like driving while black in the Eastern

District. You know, my own assistant director, you know, got locked up for just trying to make his way home from the set at two in the morning in the Eastern District. And he wasn't buying drugs. He wasn't cruising. He was literally driving from the set. And, you know, he didn't give enough yes sirs. He expressed some polite irritation and bang. Welcome to the city jail. That's the CVS that burned. That's when you saw on TV there.

So it's coming back. Yeah. That's good. You were outspoken about the riots that happened after Freddie. I don't think that was all that outspoken, but Oh, you blogged about it. I stopped, I blogged the paragraph saying, please don't burn the city. That was apparently white privilege. You know, I never had more contempt for the critique of white privilege than at that

moment. You know, I live in Baltimore City. I work in Baltimore City. I'm vested in its future. There were a lot of armchair activists who were very comfortable saying, how dare you tell them what not to burn from places like London and New York, where, you know, you have a riot in Crown Heights years ago. The developing economy of New York cauterizes those. wounds and replaces the property overnight. We can go up to Gay Street right now and I'll show you the damage from 1968 from which the city is still trying to recover. The last couple years, Baltimore gained population for the first time in decades. It's like I want the city to survive and I want it to survive with all of us not having to leave. You know, you're talking to me about

the value of a good riot in East London and how, you know, London is a world capital. Baltimore is not, You know, the fragility of the place is not to be denied. There's a sign right here that says, rest in peace, Freddie Gray. Yeah. Uh-huh. This was his neighborhood. I guess I'm being Do Not Enter there. Which is the Do Not Enter?

Oh, I'm about to do the Do Not Enter. No. Sorry. He's not taking no for an answer. I don't even have any singles. How are they going to bring me in your cup? I honestly don't have any singles. Oh, so what? Bless me.

It's called Jenna. I give you the private. If I got a single, you're getting a single. Generous people. Will profit. You know what? You get rid of it. I do have a single.

That's what you're saying. It's called generosity. People are being missing that. How do you're going to miss that? Now, only way it's supposed to be givers. It's supposed to be cheerful givers. Stay warm, man. I'm just being used.

What are you doing tonight? I'm going to my friend's house. He got a apartment. All right, good. I'm not staying out on this. No, I know. I got to run. Be well.

Man, he worked for that. I know. Jesus. What do you think is the best case scenario for outcomes here? What should happen in Baltimore? They need to start changing the culture of policing. They need to walk away from the drug war. They need to emphasize guns.

They need to emphasize guns in shooting cases. They need to reestablish a retroactive deterrent so they lock the right people up. The most important weapon in solving crime and in keeping crime low is having the phone ring in the homicide unit or having people you can talk to in the neighborhood. In New York, you couldn't make detective without having two informants from whatever post and whatever precinct you were working. You had sources of information that were unique to you, the people who talked to you and told you the truth and their information checked out because they trusted you.

You know, if you told Baltimore police nobody's making rank unless you have legitimate informants, you'd start to change the culture of the police department. You'd also prove that you weren't such a son of a bitch as a cop that you couldn't get anybody to talk to. You know, somewhere, you're going to have to be respectful of somebody else's humanity to get them to voluntarily. And I'm not talking about somebody who's working off a charge. I'm talking about somebody who, you know from the neighborhood. Maybe it's a guy that runs the liquor store. Maybe it's a person that works down at the grocery or the person who works at the rec center or or some 18 year old that you just did a solid for one day,

giving them a lift up to the, you know, or whatever. It doesn't matter as long as you were human to somebody. And you established a connection that implied, I'm not the other, and you're not the other. And when somebody shoots somebody, it's no good for anybody. The other thing I would do is say, I'm not signing an overtime slip for a drug arrest

or for a loitering charge. Nobody's getting paid extra to do bad police work. Let me give you this image of the hundreds of times that I've seen, young black men squatting or sitting on a curb, hands cuffed behind them, cops standing over them, waiting for a shift supervisor to come to decide whether or not they had a charge. Sometimes it was a corner that didn't clear and sometimes the guy talked back and, you know, sometimes, and sometimes you'd like look and you'd see next to the kid's hand is a sandwich bag from the Korean carryout.

there's a clue there, officer. You know, like the probable cause cannot be a cheese steak sandwich. And you see they came up empty. They didn't have drugs. They just jacked them up. And now what they're doing is they're saying to these citizens of these United States, the Fourth Amendment doesn't exist. You don't live by the same rules as anybody else in the United States of America.

You're going to sit here with the girls that you know from high school walking past, with your parents and your parents' friends walking past, with everybody, you know, staring at you while you sit on the ground for 20 minutes while we decide whether or not we're going to, we have anything here. And then we're going to cut you loose. And then we think later on that you're going to be plausibly cooperative with us in any way. And that happens hundreds of times a day. Okay, see that little house at the end?

These are the Pohombs, Edgraw and Pohoms. Oh, okay. See the little house at the end that doesn't look like any of the others? That's Ed Grown-Poe's house in Baltimore. Really? Yeah. It's a museum that's open like two days. a week.

Okay. And they left it, but they built the housing project all around it. An old Baltimore joke, we used it in the wire. It was, you know, the typical tourist driving up and asking some guy on a drug corner near here. We're looking for the Poe House? You know, you'll take your pick. You know, there are Poe House is where I come from. You know, it was just too easy a line, you know.

It's been a Baltimore joke for generations. Looking for the Poe House? Jelani Cobb talking in Baltimore with David Simon, the creator of The Wire, The Corner, and Tramay. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the people who's trying to bring change to Baltimore and to policing is the activist Durey McKesson. McKesson is one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter. And during the unrest that followed Freddie Gray's death, he was extremely visible in Baltimore and nationally through his social media presence. Now he's looking to take his activism and turn it into political power.

McKesson just recently announced that he's going to run for mayor of Baltimore, which came as a huge surprise to people in the movement and in the city. Doree McKesson joins me now from Baltimore. So Doree, the way I'd like to start this conversation is by pointing out you're making a huge leap. You're moving from the world of activism to the world of electoral politics. And so many activists before you, whether in the civil rights movement or feminist movement, gay rights movement, have talked about and been tempted by moving from one thing to the other, but usually resist the temptation for one reason or another. Why have you decided to run for mayor of Baltimore? Yes, so remember that, you know, we challenge this notion of from protest to politics and want to offer an understanding that protest is actually one of the most political acts in this America.

that challenging the government to be the best it can be is fundamentally a political act. I think about sort of formal leadership roles is one where we think about how to change systems and structures from the inside. In protest, we are pushing those systems and structures from the outside, and it is not an either or it's like a both-and. But specifically about Baltimore, you know, I waited,

I held out because of the belief that someone was going to step forward with a plan and a platform that would really push the city and sort of challenge it, and that didn't happen. So I stepped up to offer a vision and a plan that I thought honored the promising possibility of the city. So let's begin with your own Baltimore roots. What were your circumstances? You know, my father raised us. Both my parents were gigantic. They both are now recovered. My father raised us since we were, since I was three. I have a sister who is a year and a half older. You know, and I think about so much of so much of what informs my own perspective.

of hope and impossibility is because I'm the child of addicts, but also I grew up in a rich community of recovery. I've like seen people at their most broken and vulnerable commit and change their lives. And seeing people recover, especially in my own family, has been a transformational experience in the city. So when I think about the other things I've done, I've done a lot of youth development and that sort of programming. So when I was a teenager, I led Baltimore's only youth-like grant-making organization that gave out money to youth-like community across the city. I read for most of the major funders as a young person. I was appointed by the governor to the Maryland Afterscore Opportunity Fund Board, and I was the only young person I did that.

And then I was a youth organizer in communities. How did you do it? Your parents were both addicts, and you became you. You were able to do all this as a young kid. How did, where did the wherewithal come from? Yeah, I think that my father, you know, he, you know, he loved us. And he was really thoughtful about making sure that we were in spaces where people could push us in ways that he might not have been able to. Was he able to work? He was, yep. So he worked. He was like a stock boy when I was a little kid. And then he went on to be a part owner of a bigger business. And now he works for one of those subsidiaries. You know, that's why I taught, right? I taught because adults cared about me who did not have to. And they pushed me to be the best self that I didn't know existed at the time. And then at the

age of, I guess, 17 or so, you leapt out of this Baltimore and went to, of all places, Bowden College in Maine. Why Bowden and what did that do for you? It's hardly the most diverse place that you could have ended up as a teenager as a college student. It's a much more diverse place now. You know, Bowden was a magical experience for me. I think about Bowden so often as a place where I fell in love with my mind. I'm such a small school. I, I, uh, I, I, experience education in ways that I had never known before. Like, I had never written a 20-page paper before I went to Bowden. I didn't know, you know, I think about one class with Professor Kitch.

We got a page of single-space-type feedback on every paper we sent in. That was, like, how he gave us feedback. And I thought that was normal. Like, I just thought that that was what college was. And it was only upon leaving that I realized that I had a deeply personal academic experience. I really pushed me to think and expose me to a range of ideas that I had no clue existed. So Bowden will always be a mess. magical place in my life. That left saying, I want to make this world a place that kids deserve,

right? They're like, honors their lives, which is why I became a teacher. You were involved in Teach for America. Yep. So I taught in East New York, Brooklyn, via the teacher America program, but in a New York City public school. Now, you're focused now in Baltimore, and Baltimore is a mess. The collapse of manufacturing and shipping industries has been a disaster. There's an estimated 16,000 vacant buildings in the city. The murder rate is shot up in the last year. 24% of Baltimore's population is living below the poverty line. Why is the condition so bad in Baltimore?

I think, I mean, part of that's why I'm running, right? This idea that the traditional pathways to politics and the politicians who follow them just have not gotten us to the kind of transformational change we need. So you think about safety, for instance, is that most people think about safety as a matter of the police. And what we know to be true is that safety is much more expansive than policing.

If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine where you feel the most safe, you would likely not say to me, Derey, oh, a room full of police. You would say a place where, like, there's family and, you know, I am fed, and there's, you know, a shelter. And, like, that's how we have to start thinking about safety.

So when we center the police in terms of safety, it leads to these sort of outcomes. The response to crime or trauma doesn't necessarily only have to be the police. It could be social work. We can think about crime in much more nuanced ways. And so much of this is preventative. How do we disincentivize the choices people make that have adverse outcomes? But so much of it is like how do we actually make a strategy around this stuff?

Let's get to the platform. You've got the requirement that police undergo at least as many hours of training and de-escalation and crisis intervention as they spend learning how. how to use their firearms. You've got the use of smart guns, mandatory anti-racism training for the cops. Yeah, so those are the things that people, I think, know the most about. You know, also, there's a portion that about redistricting

part of the police budget to invest in educational opportunities and employment, right? That we can't, what we know is that we can't arrest our way out of crime, that that actually doesn't work. We might actually be able to way to implore our way at a crime. So how about we reinvest or invest differently in creating jobs for people? How are you going to create jobs in Baltimore? So I think part of it is how do we sort of invite more businesses to the city and just think about development differently? So what if we think about transforming some vacant properties into spaces like we work, like incubators for startups, food startups or tech startups?

I think there's a way to do that. I think that a different commitment to small businesses, you think about what does it mean to live in communities where the only place that you can spend money legally is a corner store. But how does gentrification fit into that? When people think about gentrification, they often think about housing units and not necessarily the development plan, but that is actually a different side of it. So, you know, what I'm saying is that let us have the development plan actually focus on anchor institutions and build around those because we know that they exist, right? So not just the Hopkins, but the coppins and the morgans and be really intentional about that. Sooner or later, in a campaign debate or a reporter's going to come up to you, Durey, and say the following. What a lot of people want out of their mayor is they want the snow shoveled, they want the murder rate to go down.

They want very, very practical things. How do you answer that? You're 30 years old and your political background's been in movement politics and in teaching. How do you answer that question, those really blunt practical questions that you're inevitably going to get? Yeah, I would direct them to the website. I agree, right? I'm running because I know that people's lives can be better, and I'm offering a plan to get us there.

That you're right. People are focused on what it means to be in a city that's safe, their access to health care and healthy food, that those things are fundamental and real. And I agree. So you'll see that the platform definitely has a perspective and approach section at the top of all of them. So when I think about safety, again,

a core belief of mind is that the safety of our communities is not predicated on the presence of police, but safety is much more expansive. And then you'll see what the plans call for, right, that the officers shouldn't be able to strike members of their hearing board or definitely not a whole panel, that the police union conduct should be fair and just, that they shouldn't have 10 days not to make a statement.

And that's in the state officer, Bill of Rights, right, that those things are real. And when I think about schools, you know, I'm also honest about the fact that the mayor's city hall doesn't manage the school system. So the things I'm offering are, you know, what we can do is think about expanding, not just expanding pre-K, but making sure that every kid in the city has access to preschool services, like services before schooling. And we can do that with like a, you know, coordinate effort between Head Start and Pre-K.

We can do that. What if we thought about coordinating with after-school and wraparound programs around some deep literacy training but making it a citywide strategy? And also thinking about adult literacy, you know, what does it, to be in a city where there's so many people, the high school diploma as an adult illiteracy is high, that is an impact on the economy and the jobs that people take. And we can definitely target those sort of things, the G.D. Prep and just a real literacy strategy at the city level that brings together partners beyond the classroom, but the classroom is obviously a central role. And remember that the school system doesn't have a robust adult basic education program. It's not a part of their purview at this point. But there's an opportunity to do

at the city level, bringing in the college and university partners as well. You've seen in New York that Mayor de Blasio's had major problems with his police department. He was criticized for his handling of the death of Eric Garner and for acknowledging in a press conference that he'd spoken with his son about how to deal with the police. He was very blunt about it, very moving about it, and a lot of police were upset about this. If de Blasio and New York has had trouble managing his police department, should Mayor McKesson expect, I don't know, total insurrection from a Baltimore police department after you're elected? No, you know, I would not go into this role expecting insurrection. Do I, you know, do I think

there might be challenges? Yes. Do I think we can work, work through them? Yes. I want to believe that the police also want to live in a city where there isn't much crime, right? They want to, they want to work in a city that is safe and that they are willing to part. with agencies and other departments to think about how their role is a part of a continuum as opposed to the only component of a safety strategy. And I want to believe those things, and I'm willing to engage in the process to get us there. Dure, thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. It's great to talk to you. Thank you, you as well.

That's Doree McKesson, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, and now he's a candidate for mayor of Baltimore in the all-important April primary. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. About a mile to the north of here as the pigeon flies, this is small factory, a sort of electronics workshop, and the proprietor there would really like you to start engineering.

Yes, you. The company is called Ada Fruit, and it's owned by Lamor Fried. She's known in the tech geek community as Lady Ada. It all started for her with a little juvenile delinquency. You remember there's rotary phones. We have to go way back. There's rotary phones.

And then there was tone dialing. So you'd get this little box and I had a speaker in it and you'd hold it up to the receiver. And when you pressed like the key, like said that D, D, D, D, DTMF tones. So if you open it up and replaced the timing crystal inside of it with a 6.5536 megahertz crystal, which you'd buy for about a couple dollars. And then you could go to pay phones, and when you pressed the, I think it was the star key,

it would signal that you would put in a quarter, even though you hadn't. So you'd be allowed to basically make long-distance phone calls by pretending that you had paid for them, but you hadn't. It was a little frustrating at first because I didn't know how to solder. But once I got it working and I kind of tried it out, it was awesome, because I felt like I had this control over technology, like more in control of technology other than the technology being in control of me.

Freed started her business in an MIT dorm room. She's grown her company to 80-odd staff and about $40 million in revenue last year by selling electronic components to schools and hobbyists. And Freed considers herself not just an entrepreneur, but an evangelist of this old-school radio shack spirit. Nicola Twilly went to visit Ada Fruit. Hi.

Nikki, nice to meet you. Okay, hello, welcome. Sorry, I had to wrap up a thing. It was like five and it was like, let me get to the deadline, and then I did it. Lamor Fried is lively, full of energy even at 6 o'clock on a Wednesday evening. She walks me all the way through the factory up to a wall of bins full of tiny electrical components. So I feel like I am in a candy store right now. I'm like standing in front.

We have 3,000 candies. This is a really fun one. This is Gemma. This is a very, very small wearable computer. So it's designed for, especially young people, because it's meant to be low cost and easy. This is like the size of a quarter. I mean, this is a computer.

Yeah, it's amazing what you can get now. And now we're heading into where? This is the south side of the factory. Amazing wearables. My name's Becky Stern. I'm the director of wearable electronics here at Adafruit. And Lamar is dawning one of our gentlemen. NeoPixel Masquerade masks.

We do a ton of Halloween projects. So there's a regular sort of headband that you would get. But then there's this beaded, velvet, like half mask. And then the special AtaFruit touch is this, oh, like across the front where you might just have beads. We now have LEDs in rainbow colors. And it's all controlled with a Gemma. What does the kit for this look like when it comes? This headband is 3D printed, and so we provide the file for you and the filament and the 3D printer.

And then the tutorial defines each product you need in order to build this. So it'll say you need eight single neopixels and one 12 neopixel ring, a Gemma, this size battery, and this wire. And so every tutorial for each of these projects has a list of exactly what parts you need. Usually when people are first starting, they don't have a lot of confidence. So we go step by step, and Becky has a video. and a tutorial, and we have, it's literally like step one, do this, step two, do this. But then once it's complete, you know, you still can go back and modify one of the previous steps. And so we encourage people to do that once they have that confidence of, okay, I was

able to follow the instructions and get something going. All of these start at Freed's desk, which is right on the Aidafruit production floor, just a couple of steps away from the buzzing, beeping machines that assemble the circuit boards. Well, I can you even show you some stuff? I was, I just was working on, let me open up my viewer. This is this a little Wi-Fi. Boris just allows you to add low-cost Wi-Fi to anything. So like a few weeks ago we had, in my apartment, there was a leak around the toilet.

But it was happening kind of inconsistently. And so I was a little scared of leaving the house. That's when it's going to flood like crazy. So what I did is I took this little Wi-Fi sensor and I added a water detector to it. And so what would happen is when this Wi-Fi module detects water, it would send me an email. And how long did just making your own little custom water detector take? Oh, we actually livestreamed it. We live streamed making it. It's about 90 minutes from beginning to end. How much of your time is making stuff versus dealing with everything else?

Well, I try to spend about half my time doing engineering. And nowadays we actually do streaming from home. So when I go home, what I'll do is I'll set up Twitch or Ustream or YouTube, which is all these live casting things. And I'll actually sit down and I'll do an hour of engineering. And as I'm doing it, I'm explaining why I'm making certain decisions, why I pick that part. You know, why are going there, not over there? You know, why is this color important and broadcasting it and chatting with people and answering questions live? Not only does Lamar let people watch her engineer new projects, she also uses web, streaming to build a whole community around electronics and engineering.

Every Wednesday night, she hosts two live web hangouts. There's one where people can ask her any engineering question they have. That's called Ask an Engineer, of course. And there's another that's just plain old show and tell. People of all ages log in from all over the world to show off their projects. Welcome. You're here to show off your maker project, your hacker project, your tools, your 3D printing, your warbles, your electronics, stuff you sewed, stuff you would,

worked, whatever it is. We'd like to see it. We're going to start off with Seth. Hey, Seth. Um, hey, can you come back to me later with just stop walking? Yeah. Okay, no problem. We'll come back to you. Hey, Dee, you've got a skull. Hi, I took the basic skull that you guys did last year, and we kind of adapted it a little bit. And I added a neopixel ring and gave, I did a day of the dead wall hanging. It's, actually a quilt, the eyes and the computer all inside. When you release the design for something that you've made, whether it be code or even art or a novel, you're very vulnerable because you're basically showing your heart. You're saying this is what I have spent my time on. This is

important to me. And it's really, really easy on the internet for people to turn around and say, like, wow, that was a waste of your time, you know, or like, that sucks or would have done it better. And that's an excellent way to basically destroy people's desire to make and share. So that's why we have the show and tell, and we kind of make sure everybody feels really good about it, and we give stickers. Stickers. Yes, you get a sticker. I mean, getting more women into engineering is, like, obviously women are underrepresented in engineering.

Is it just that it doesn't seem fun, or is it, or is there a bigger barrier that you're trying to overcome? I think the most important thing we can do is show, well, models and examples. I do videos on live cast and tutorials and show that, hey, it's awesome to do engineering. And this genuine enthusiasm is infectious. You show people that it's, it is fun, and there's a final project, there's something that you were doing with it. And I think that just gets more people interested, especially people who already have an interest. Like, if you're interested in fashion, a few months ago during New York Fashion Week, Zach Posen had a dress with a Gemma, microcontroller inside of it.

And the actress, Lupita Nguongo, was wearing it, and it was full of these beautiful glowing LEDs, and she showed up on the daily show. That can't hurt getting more people interested in electronics. It's just going to show more people what you can do. Notice that she didn't really answer that question I asked about women in engineering? As Lamour and I were talking, it dawned on me that, for her, it's less about getting girls and women into electronics

and more about getting all of us excited about engineering. So we have an employee here, Marty, and his mother has a degenerative muscle disease. She wanted to listen to audiobooks, but she can't control most audiobooks because the buttons are very small. So we use one of our very large buttons. We have these gigantic, like six-inch-cross buttons, and he hooked that up and wired that to the audio player.

So when she wants to pause and play, she has this gigantic button to press. It's very easy. And then he got kind of excited. He's like, okay, I'm actually able to build things that don't exist yet. And you could call Apple and say, hey, you should make this. And they'll say, well, if we don't have 10 million people who are going to buy this, we're not going to make it. If someone who is not an engineer can design and make usability products for someone who he cares about,

he can make sure that it's exactly the right thing. And that's just a small sliver of the many examples of what people are able to do when they control. their technology rather than just waiting for it to show up in the app store. Lamar Freed is the owner and founder of Ada Fruit. She spoke with Nicola Twilly, a contributor to New Yorker.com, and co-host of the podcast, Gastropod. To wrap things up, I'm going to check in with my friend Henry Finder and see what he's into these days.

Henry is an editor at the New Yorker. In fact, he's my editor when I have a piece in the magazine. So let's just say he has exquisite taste, especially when he likes a first track. What's going on? Well, let's see. You know, there's this new book by Kevin Young out. It's his selected poems. It's called Blue Laws.

And a couple of years ago, after my father died, I found myself reading Kevin Young's The Book of Hours. And that's a book that's partly about grieving. It's partly about elation. It's the death of a father. it's the birth of a son. And it got me thinking that, you know, we have this word fatherhood, but we don't have the reciprocal word. We don't have that other word, you know,

sonhood is not a word. And then I was thinking, you know, there are a lot of words we don't have, a lot of blank tiles in the dictionary. And that may be one function of poems is to find the words when there is no word. You know, there is no word for the word. the intersection between, you know, your personal identity and your social identities.

There's no word for the taste of pepper vinegar, right? There's no word for the condition of being the son to a father. And then the poet arrives and the words are found. He's a great poet. What else is on your desk or screen? Well, you know, there's a half-hour TV series called W1A. It's a sitcom. We share this. We love this. It's a sitcom you can see on Netflix, I believe. It's a BBC show about the BBC.

And much of it takes place in a series of meetings involving the head of values played by Hugh Fonville, known from Downton Abbey, the head of governance or strategic governance and so on and so on. It just sounds like meetings I've been in. Everyone at the BBC that you meet says, it's funny because it's true. You know, the brand transformations, the attempt to come up with a BBC logo that's more app-ee.

Anyone who works in the media during a time of transition. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Knows the nature of these kinds of disguise. It's just, it's done... It's just a few episodes, right? It's two seasons now, actually. The seasons are short.

But they're short. They're British seasons, yeah. What's final? You know, I've always been obsessed with the, also rands. The people who are edged out of our attention and our memory little unjustly because they weren't quite the number one player. And so I'm going to throw out Georges Encelot.

Who is he? The point is, you never heard of him. He is... He spells his last name? O-N-S-L-O-W. In his day, he was heralded by Ply-L as publisher as the French Beethoven. He was The French Beethoven

He did astonishing works Chamber Music, symphonies and so on And yeah He wasn't Beethoven But it's the inequality problem In the realm of reputation Why does all the attention funneled to the 1% You know, it's like

Heer's Hayden was really good But you know Christian Kanabish From the Monheim court He was also really good It is you know The Hoffner Symphony of Mozart

He can't get arrested though Yes. So what should we listen to of the French Beethoven? A couple years ago. A couple years ago, the brilliant cellist Maria Cleggle recorded Onslow's cello sonatas, number 16. And they're extraordinary. They compare very, very well to Beethoven's cello sonatas.

Almost as good. Yeah, almost as good. So Ansela was the Engelbert Humperdink of his time compared to Tom Jones. That's just unkind. Thank you, Henry. Thank you. Glad you could drop by. Henry Finder is an editor at The New Yorker.

And that's it for today. I hope you have a good weekend and a good week ahead. Next week on the program, a conversation with Jud Appetow, and Evan Osnos has the story of a Chicago priest who's put his life at risk to preach against gun violence. I hope you'll join us.

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 Garvis of Tuneiard, The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.