The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 22: Nate Silver on Trump Versus Cruz, and Roz Chast’s Horses

Episode Date: March 18, 2016

This week: Three great political minds talk to David Remnick about the 2016 election, Roz Chast is visited by a young cartoonist who is following in her footsteps, and Hilton Als sits down with Cynthia Erivo, the English actress who stars in “The Color Purple” on Broadway. Take our WNYC Studios audience survey! 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.

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I recently spent an evening, as I bet you have to, a lot of evenings, talking about the presidential campaign. Because what else? The evening I'm talking about was a little over a week ago, and I spent it with three of the best political thinkers I know.

Amy Davidson is a columnist for the New Yorker, where she watches like a hawk pretty much every move the candidates make. Kellefasana has profiled a number of the Republicans who are or were in the race, and the guest of honor was Nate Silver, who runs the blog 538. Silver isn't a journalist exactly, but a statistics guru,

and he's got the best track record for predicting elections of anyone. But this campaign is putting even his powers of prediction to the test. We met in front of a small audience at a place called the Noia House in Manhattan. I'd like to start with Nate Silver. I don't know how to ask this question any better.

and I'd be remiss in failing to start this conversation with anything other than Donald Trump. I had a feeling that would be there. Yeah, good guess. Good guess. Why? That's my question. In other words, we have been hearing for years about social dislocation, economic problems, demographic shifts in the country, radicalism, within the Republican Party. And yet, at the end of the day, the Republican Party, sooner or later, came around to putting forward John McCain, Romney. And now we have somebody who's been a figure of bizarre fun and ego and, you know, sort of gold-plated craziness since the late 70s.

And if I had told you a couple of years ago that Donald Trump would be leading the you'd laugh at me. That's true. I mean, we would have laughed at ourselves, I suppose, too. But look, I think there are three essential elements to the Trump story and that any kind of accurate tale of Trump has to tell from these three perspectives. One is from the perspective of the voter. You know, part of the Trump story is about nationalism and racism. From what we can tell, his voters do care a lot about immigration,

they are not fans of Obama, they're very anti-Obama. They don't care as much about social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. They don't care as much about big government versus small government. So it's a different kind of more European bouquet of issues that they care about. The second part of the story is a party story about the Republican Party both in the long term, you know, maybe having sold a bill of goods to its voters, and I think it was Josh Marshall at TPM who talked about, when you do a project quickly at work, and we discover this too,

there's kind of a debt that you pay. You patch something together and it works fine, but then it might break down really badly later on. And the GOP has had a lot of close calls. 2012, the nomination process wasn't that close a call, but still at this point in the process, Rick Santorum was still, and Newt Gingrich were still viable contenders. Obviously, the various government shutdowns,

more critically debt-sealing negotiations have gone up to the brink, getting a new speaker of the house. You know, you would kind of think that if you are on the verge of a disaster 10 times and avoid one, that's not a sign that you miraculously avoid disaster. It's a sign that sooner or later,

like if you're driving drunk, you're going to get into a crash. So this is like drunk driving or terrorism, it only has to happen once for it to succeed. Well, look, I mean, I think inherently still, with all this said, a lot of things have had to go wrong for Trump to be in this position. And one thing that is important to keep in mind is that for all the discussion of Trump, he still only has won 34% of the vote.

And there are polls suggesting that if you had a strong alternative to Trump, that he would tie or lose maybe, that he is actually relatively unpopular for a GOP frontrunner. And the third part, I don't want to hug too much time, but there's also a media story too where Trump has spent his whole career learning how to get attention, to manipulate the media. He, however, has close relationships

with people in the media. People say, oh, behind the scenes, he's a good guy, he gives a lot of access, and if you give both access and ratings, then you'll get covered a lot. It's appropriate to cover Trump, certainly to a degree, but I think on the network news,

in all of 2015, Trump got nine times more coverage than Marco Rubio, nine times more than Ted Cruz, and that's a unique circumstance. It won't stop anytime soon, but, you know, the media is kind of a third wheel in this drama. So Amy Davidson, Nate makes the point that he's overexposed or he's getting way more time on the air than anybody else. Why is that, and what is the media doing wrong, if anything?

I don't believe that he's overcovered. If anything, I believe that he's been undercovered. I think that there was a candidate who was overcovered despite all information about what voters thought and what voters were interested in, and that was Jeb Bush. With Trump, he was covered as a phenomenon, but there was always the addendum that this isn't actually about a candidate. You know, you had the three perspectives, but let's add a fourth one,

that I think might be important, which is Donald Trump's. As a personality, as a performer? As a decision maker in this process, because a lot of the coverage was premised on the idea that the minute he's bored, he's out of here, or he's only in this to buff up his brand. But also, I think that there was a point when early in the primary process,

when Trump looked around at the other candidates, and more, I think, than the press did recognize their weakness. So, Kellevah, you've now heard four reasons of where we are with Donald Trump, and maybe more than any writer at the New Yorker, you've spent a fair amount of time writing about, thinking about conservatism, libertarianism. Is that an adequate map that they've sketched out for the reasons why? Does it satisfy you? Well, I think that there is a political, ideological element, too,

which is that, you know, Trump is someone who doesn't care that much about politeness, and he's willing to violate all sorts of norms about what nasty names you shouldn't call people, et cetera. And he's also willing to violate some of our political norms. And the thing that he's noticed, either through strategy or through sheer accident, is that there are certain issues where voters feel as if they're not being spoken for. Certain issues where voters feel like the elite consensus doesn't reflect how they feel. And similarly, on free trade, if you're not being spoken for, certain issues where voters feel like the elite consensus, But how is it that the person that's articulating it most successfully, and I open it up to all of you,

is a guy who's a real estate magnet living in a golden tower with golden golf clubs and a golden jet plane and who was born not on third base but practically sliding into home? My great-grandmother lived in, and we've constantly visited her in Coney Island, in a Trump building. This is not a self-made man. This is not a log cabin story that we constantly. require of our presidents. How does he become the mouthpiece and the articulator, the most successful articulator of American raw populism? Amy? Well, the word of this election is rigged. People believe the system is rigged. Trump comes out and says, it sure is. I've been part of the

rigging. They're all corrupt. All of them. All of the guys on the state. And he says it without damage to himself. He basically says I pay politicians to do my bidding. It's like Augustine. It's like I've been part of the corruption and now I'm here to tell you all about it. The other thing is that we're so distracted,

we think the gold paint is disqualifying. Most of America, you know, for all of this year when Trump supposedly got all of this attention, the only real case that was being made against him was an anesthetic case, that a guy like this can't be president, a guy who's so

tacky, a guy who's so rude, as if what Americans are desperate for is the most polite, tasteful president. Some figure in Downton Abbey. And also to see politicians who people know at this point spend a huge amount of their time asking rich people for money, to have them be saying, we're the serious, tasteful ones, and that guy who's exactly the kind of guy who supports us, is so not of the right sort. And, Kay, I didn't want to cut you off on your point, but in terms of support and your analysis of Trump's support. Well, I mean, again, that's part of it is that there are these issues.

If you're someone who's really concerned about the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership and you want someone who's full-throatedly speaking against that and speaking out about immigration, weirdly you don't have a lot of options. And as we've seen with Cruz and Rubio going at each other, both of them from the perspective of someone who's an immigration restrictionist, both of them are vulnerable. Neither of them is, quote-unquote, pure on this issue.

So to mangle two expressions at once, with Trump, it kind of is the triumph of audacity over hope. It is this sense that he's willing, to say this thing that has been literally thought to be unsayable in American politics, perhaps for good reason, but in any case he's willing to say it. Here's a weird dilemma that I'm in, is that for a long time we've been skeptical of Trump, and I think we still are. We still think the one thing that's missing is a recognition of how many Republican voters resist him, but the path for the other candidates is also really problematic. I mean, let me cheat. Your politics

are not a secret. And we were talking about Trump. and Ted Cruz, and you said what a lot of people say who are political liberals, Cruz is worse. Let's talk about Ted Cruz, who seems to be the one candidate, maybe I'm wrong, but seems to be the one candidate, and Nate will correct me on the numbers here, who has the best shot of possibly squeezing into the left lane and passing Trump, although maybe no time soon. Why do you say that? I look at Ted Cruz, I listen to Ted Cruz, he seems to me the candidate most likely to start a war out of sheer intellectual vanity. He's a real extremist. And it's fascinating that, you know, the GOP finally mustering to respond to Trump and to Trumpism,

that the argument that Ted Cruz has been pushing and pushing hard is that, that Donald Trump is a raging liberal and that the GOP needs to be more pure, more ideologically extreme. You know, they all want a wall. They all want a wall. But Trump's vulnerability, if I'm reading what Nate is telling us in 538 and here tonight,

is that Trump's vulnerability is not his so-called liberal positions, but rather he's embarrassing to too many people. He's outrageous to too many people to bring them on board. Is that right, Nate? I mean, I think he has a lot of strengths and a lot of vulnerabilities. One mistake Republicans made, and not until pretty recently, attacking him, there was a lot of coverage. It wasn't particularly focused, I guess he'd say.

There was kind of a paralysis of any real strategy against Trump, and that part's interesting, too. I think maybe people thought he would go away potentially. Other people thought he was inevitable. It was kind of this weird thing, where... And, you know, when we talk about why the other Republicans didn't attack him early on,

there was a not serious, but there was also, they wanted his voters. They wanted what he had. They just wanted the cover. And, you know, they wanted to excite the same passions. They wanted to get the same hatred on their side. And they didn't want to offend his voters

by attacking him, because they hoped that they would be the subtler object of their affection. And that's the thing. If you're a politician and you see that kind of passion and you see those kinds of crowds, it's a little hard to resist. It's really hard for a politician to say, no, we don't want those people, we don't want that candidate, we've got to keep our party sensible. And the idea that a politician on any side would be somehow would not be vulnerable to that temptation or that kind of excitement, politicians live for that. They live for the idea of here's someone that can really attract a bunch of people.

Nate if, unless I'm wrong, you wrote a piece about what happens to parties in crises like these. One of my colleagues, I mean, look, one question is, is the GOP in the midst of a realignment? Because these things do happen every 40 or 60 years, and one of the problems with kind of a narrowly focused imperialism is that kind of all the data we use to understand how nomination processes work come from 1972 or 1980 or so. onward, when the two-party system has been fairly stable. It was kind of right after you saw the last big flip where the New Deal coalition broke apart, and Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats

no longer agreed very much, and they became Republicans. So what are the rules once you're undergoing one of these in real time? I don't know. Then there's still a part of me that thinks, even though the Trump thing is enormously consequential, what if it's all just some weird one-off fluke? What if it's Ross Perrault? Yeah, and it never replicated it again. It's just like we kind of forget about it for you. I mean, I don't think there are still good lessons from it no matter what. Trust me, I'll never forget it.

But I mean, what if early on? You think it's just an air bubble in the pipe? I don't think, but I think you have to have multiple. I think it probably is a crisis for the GDP. I'm like 75% sure of that, but 25% of me thinks that. Or perhaps it's what's called Obama derangement syndrome, that the phenomenon of Barack Obama as a figure, racially and to some extent ideologically

and also the fact that the Obama side has in many ways won the culture wars, whether it's gay marriage or any number of things, that there is a reaction to it. But think about what realignment would really require. Think about a populist GOP. Does that mean that they support the higher minimum wage and then this newly kind of elite-dominated Democratic Party as opposed to a higher minimum wage?

I mean, it really is, it's a little hard to imagine. Nate, let's move to the Democrats. The standard narrative here is that Hillary Clinton has all kinds of problems, all sorts of vulnerabilities, some of them having to do with weariness or wariness or reputation for slipperiness, but a reputation among enough voters for competence and intelligence. some voters eager to see a woman at last in the White House as president. But Bernie Sanders has brought something to the selection. He's clearly, maybe not so clearly,

but it looks like he's not going to make it past an image as a kind of insurgency in somebody who's influencing the frontrunner. How do you see the narrative any different than that? I think Hillary Clinton is a, an underrated politician in many respects, including doing some of the basic blocking and tackling stuff, I'd call it. She's a good, if not perfect debater. She cares about policy. I think sometimes she gets too lost in the weeds and is vulnerable to kind of soaring rhetoric on both sides, but there's no doubt that Democrats are moving to the left. There's just less, as a

horse race, it's easier to analyze. Because as a horse race, this is a game that we've played before. It's a basketball game. You can kind of say, well, Team Clinton's ahead by 15 points. I know it's only early in the third quarter, but you can do the math. With the GOP race, we don't even know the rules of engagement anymore. So it's different. Okay. I mean, when I was watching some of those early states in the success that Sanders was having, I couldn't help but think that Hillary Clinton was lucky in a sense. In other words, the person that she drew as her major opponent was not super youthful, was very polite, when you compare it to the Republican side, very kind of polite and restrained in his attacks on her, unwilling to talk about one thing that might be one of her

biggest vulnerabilities in a Democratic primary, which is foreign policy. I mean, this is someone who was Secretary of State supported things that a lot of Democrats might not support, and yet she draws as her opponent, someone who does not want to talk about foreign policy. And sometimes it seemed to me like Bernie Sanders was something of a placeholder and a vessel into which people could pour whatever frustration they felt about Hillary Clinton, but someone who didn't necessarily generate the kind of passion that, I don't know, maybe Elizabeth Warren might have generated if she were in the race. Amy, I sense in you somebody who was not somebody who saw perfection personified in Hillary.

Clinton. You're very tough on her in many columns. And yet if I'm reading you right, and God knows I read you, that you've changed a bit. You've not softened where she's concerned, but you've grown more comfortable with her, sympathetic with her to a degree. Is that fair? My worry about Hillary Clinton is that the sort of decision, institutional decision, that she would be the candidate. And that's happened twice now. It happened in 2008. It didn't quite work out. It happened now. Has kind of pushed down the emergence of a new generation of Democratic politicians. Every Democratic woman in the Senate, and there are 16 Democratic women in the Senate, I think every one of them, maybe it was one exception with at least as much experience as Ted Cruz.

And they're not jumping into the race. And it's because they are. all signed a letter together saying, yes, we're for Hillary about two years ago, that there was this decision. And I'm really curious about what this race might have looked like if there is that generation of Democrats. We're going to play Jeopardy here. Nate, you've probably never been asked this question this season, and all in particular, please game a Trump versus Clinton general election. instinct, which you shouldn't trust, my instinct is that Trump would motivate the Democratic base like no one else, therefore Hillary could run to the center, be the pragmatic experience

candidate who will have a steady finger on the nuclear button, and therefore gets to have her cake and eat it two, and therefore wins by eight or nine points. That's my first instinct. Does anybody... However... However... There's something to the fact, number one, that Trump's broken a lot of rules before, and you should be mindful of that. There's something on the fact Number two, that he will transform and in some ways be the most moderate general election candidate that GOP has nominated in a long time, potentially. And something about the fact that a little bit, like I was saying with Clinton Sanders, where you get two people in a ring and they go round and round and round and round,

and there's some element of unpredictability. What we say in boxing is, Stiles makes fights? That's right. Stiles make fights. Stiles make fights. And just because Frazier can't beat Foreman doesn't mean that. Ali beats Frazier. And I think, I mean, I would love to see a special sub-survey of predictions

about Trump versus Hillary, but where you only ask people who correctly predicted that Trump would win the GOP nomination if that's what happens. Because, I mean, one of the strangest things about Trump is he's upended so many of the rules that it, for me, even when I watch one of these debates, I watch the debate, I think, well, what did I just watch? And then I think was that good for Trump? Was that bad for Trump? I have absolutely no idea. The one thing I'm sure about about a Trump-Hillary race is that it will be so ugly that, you know, that I do not think it's like a welfare program for journalists. He's not going to hold back. Yes, yes. I want to thank Kay. I want to thank Nate and Amy and everybody at Noia House, Rhonda Sherman and everybody at the New Yorker.

Thank you for inviting us here. Good night. Amy Davidson and Kelafasane of the New Yorker with Nate Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of ESPN's blog 538, recorded just over a week ago at Noia House in New York. We're going to shift gears in a moment and talk to Roz Chast about a very different kind of politics, family politics. Nobody is as keen an observer of how we relate to our children and our parents as Roz Chast. That's next on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Two J-birds, a crow and a raven, sit on the branch of a large tree. Dusk.

Why don't we go to that bird feeder on Elm? Ooh, I was thinking that we could all go for thistle seeds tonight. Oh, dizzle seeds. Cool. Something wrong with thistle seeds? No, that sounds great. It's just I had dizzle seeds for lunch, so... Courtney and I would be down for some carrion.

Carian is exactly what I feel like right now. Yeah. Do you want carrion, Jen? You know I'm vegan, right? I thought vegans aren't supposed to eat insects. That was like two months ago. You try being vegan. It's harder than it looks.

Oh, somebody get her a medal. Carian's pretty good, Jen. I don't eat, Carian. I don't want Carian. Caron's off the menu. Why don't we go to that bird feeder on Elm? That place will be packed at this hour. Then we'll wait.

Wouldn't hurt us to wait and talk. Oh, yeah. Conversations are a great start. Really, really annoying. I don't see what the problem is with thistle seeds. the problem. Some of us like flavor. Hey, we all like nuts. It's been ages since I've had a good nut. I know a great tree.

Why don't you guys get nuts and I'll get thistle seeds? Well, that ruins the whole point of eating together, David. You know, I think I may migrate east this year. Jesus, get over yourself. Look, here's what we're going to do. I'm just going to start flying and then we'll all decide on the way. We start flying without a destination. We're going to end up at the bird field. It always happens.

It's like clockwork with you people. You people? Watch it, Courtney. How amazing is this sugar syrup? If you guys like this sugar syrup, you should really taste the sugar syrup they have at the feeder on State Street. Totally worth the flight.

Hey guys, Steve's flown all the way down to the bird feeder on State Street. I hadn't heard that. What's your problem with Steve? I don't have a problem. Maybe someone should take a break from the sugar syrup. Maybe someone should migrate early. That's it.

Can we have one goddamn meat? without everyone at each other's beaks. Is it too much to ask? Please, tell me if it's too much to ask. I would like to know. Jennifer, the whole theater is staring. Let them stare. We never find time to get together.

We finally schedule a night. I didn't want thistle seeds. Sure, but I tried to compromise. We wait half an hour to get inside this goddamn birdhouse, and still, it's nonstop bickering. You guys have ruined everything. I'm sorry, Jen. Yeah.

Whatever. I mean, it's fine. I just want us all to enjoy our sugar syrup, okay? Okay. Okay. We will. Happy birthday, Jennifer. Yeah, happy birthday, Jennifer.

Waiter, can we get some more sugar syrup? That's Bird Foodies by Ethan Cooperberg. Performed by Rebecca Henderson, Carson Elrod, Alex Barron, and Ave Carreou. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The list of cartoonists who are household names is a very short list. but Roz Chast is certainly at the top of it. She's been publishing in The New Yorker since she was 24,

and her book, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. Her cartoons stand out for how personal they are. They're about marital tensions and the stress of dealing with your crazy parents and your even crazier children. And her drawings, everyone looks completely frazzled, even the animals.

Hi, I'm Leanna Fink. We are outside Raz Chast's house in Connecticut, and I brought her some flowers that might be a bit too romantic. Leanna Fink grew up studying Roz's cartoons, and she started contributing her own cartoons to the New Yorker just a couple of years ago. I think she was 27. They share a certain stressed-out line and a love of birds.

This is Jackie. She is a kayak. She's very unshigh. She looks like a Disney caravan. She's these big eyes. She's a little bit of a cartoon bird. I've been falling in love with Jackie. She's trembling while I pet her. I was a really shy kid, and I've always felt really comfortable with animals

because they don't do the things that I feel like I have to pretend to do, like hold conversations that are really hard for me. I always feel connected to pigeons. I feel like there are these wild creatures in the city, and I'm like that too. That's a very good bird. This is my very neurotic and very sweet African gray. And she says many, many things.

As you can see, she plucks. She looks like a lion because she has this plucked body and this regal head. Hey, Eli, what's this? That's right. That's right. What a smart bird. What a smart, smart bird. This is a list of the thing.

that she says, by the way. She says chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. Who cares when she gets scared? Sometimes she'll say to herself, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. She's, you know, self-soothing kind of thing. Yeah, she knows. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do too. I mean, yeah, me too. Yeah, it's okay. I say fearless. I sometimes I say like, people do this, you know, like when I'm driving especially, because driving and I am not good friends. You had a cartoon about driving where you just tell the story of driving, but you call it sailing instead of driving? Yeah, it is. It is. I thought maybe if I did a cartoon where I was comfortable with it, like somehow, like I would actually become more comfortable. And, you know, gradually, I'm more, it's better than it was when I started, but, I mean, it worked, the cartoon worked.

but I still getting lost is I mean the GPS is good but then I worry about the GPS going out I read your work most deeply when I was in high school and college I think I was 14 when I found your work and we had just moved to this suburban kind of fancy kind of waspy town in New Jersey and I related so much as this kind of outsider and as a person who drew and as a shy kid and as a Jew, like, it just, it just completely summarized my world. And you got a lot of zeitgeisty stuff in there, too. Like, it was much more intense than rereading an old diary or looking at photographs or something. I feel like you really caught that era and caught my life.

And how do you feel when you reread your work? Hmm Sometimes it does bring me back Because I guess A lot of my work is kind of personal So Do you feel What do you feel about your cartoons

Being the most autobiographical ones In the New Yorker? Definitely There's a part of me That is that voice of sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, you know I mean sometimes

I wish that I did a whole different kind of work, you know. But I always think there's that Yiddish, you know, if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. Yeah. You know, I mean, if I were a very different person, then I would do different cartoons. Are you terrified of people? Oh, yeah. I'm, it's, and I know that everything that I say this afternoon, I'm going to rewind in my head and regret. Oh, no.

and that is just what, I mean, I'm just almost, I wouldn't quite say used to it, but I just know that that's... I still regret some things that I've said to you like a year ago. And I probably won't be able to. It's just like a regretters festival. Yeah. Well, I'm a very big fan of your work in the magazine, too. Thank you. I love seeing it, and I love seeing that it's appearing, you know, more and more frequently.

God finding all the prayers of mankind in his spam folder, I think, is just saying. sensational. Thanks. I mean, I didn't care about them. I mean, I love working. I don't care if they're good. If I cared, I would be paralyzed. Do you have ways that you sort of tricked yourself of kind of getting out of that? Yeah. I think it might have been easier for me if I were a guy and encouraged to be assertive. Do you feel that like making jokes sometimes like comedy is a way of being assertive and expressing anger that like you can be like very indirect about it. Yeah. Yeah.

I never even thought of myself as funny and I still don't. I think of myself as really needing to express myself and I think for some people that's the same thing. I kind of think for you it's the same thing. For me, it doesn't seem to work to like deliberately like try to be funny. I mean, I might make something that then I think, well, That's really a pretty good joke. It was pretty funny, but it's not funny.

Yeah. I remember drawing things that made me laugh when I was really little. Yeah. And that I liked that. I mean, I think when I got to be a certain age, it was like things came out funny. And I didn't really want them necessarily to come out funny, but they came out funny. Like, you know, drawing horses. And I could not draw horses.

Because I don't, I'm not a horse. I didn't like horses. When I wrote you some fan mail when I was 15, a lot of it was praising your horse. horses. And then your magnificent letter that you wrote back to me contained some drawings of horses with their big teeth. Yes, I just actually was drawing some horses the other day just for fun. And actually I'll show them to you. Right here, I was just kind of, I was trying to explain to somebody, the horse drawings that I did when I was a kid. So it's a page of watercolor paper with 20 horses on it. And all of them have kind of hair that was cool in the 90s, like sticking straight up.

And also this very game grin on their faces, kind of like bros. You know highlights for children? Oh, yes. Quasi educational magazine for children. It was often in dentists' offices and waiting rooms. Yeah. They had this thing, our own page. and I wanted to get a drawing onto our own page when I was around 10,

and I noticed that most of the drawings that were accepted by little girls who have horses or quite a number of them were. And so one day I decided I was going to, God damn it, I was going to learn to draw horses. I was going to make myself draw a horse after horse until I got it right. And I filled up this sketchbook with drawings of horses. And then I looked at them and I laughed. so hard that I nearly like lost, you know, control of bodily functions. It was, they were just so terrible, but they were so funny. And, uh, hello, we hear you. What's it like when you get letters

from young women, do you feel this huge responsibility? People like me probably send you very personal letters in which they maybe think that you're their mom or something. Is it? What's it like? Well, I feel like women relate to each other differently from the way men relate to each other. And I don't know. I mean, when I give talks and stuff, it's mostly women in the audience, different ages, but mostly women. But guys too. I do think there's something different in how we're made.

But I also wonder whether there's so many more obstacles for a woman to become something like a cartoonist. that may be the women who, and the obstacles are very insidious and invisible, such as I don't see anyone like me doing this, so I'm not even going to try. So I wonder if the women who do make it are people who are really, really honest. And I wonder if like the way your cartoons are different is you happen to be a really honest person and you're not going to fall into a form that doesn't come from inside of you? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know how this relates to that exactly, but I think I felt like, well, you probably won't like me anyway, so I might as well do what I want to do. Roz Chast is the author of, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, and Theories of Everything. Leanna Fink is the author of a Bintel Brief.

You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour, more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. David Remnick. Next week on the show, we'll have two of the people who've got a list very high on the most influential people around. One is Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, the hugely successful photo app. Very early, I think people were excited because you could follow people without knowing what language they were speaking. The first person I really connected with, his name was Koji, and he is in Japan and was sharing just his life. And then the natural disasters happened in Japan. It was like, I think, March of the following year. And all of a sudden, my

experience totally changed because I knew him just as like a long-distance friend. And then he was taking photos of his house that had been turned totally upside down. The other is Brian Stevenson, the lawyer and civil rights activist. Stevenson has fascinating ideas about one of the real hot-button issues in the national conversation about race, reparations. You know, if we have been really focused in the 1960s, we would have been saying to repair the damage of disenfranchisement, we're going to have different policies for black people.

We're going to say every black person is automatically registered to vote. when they turn 18. And then we're going to say, we're going to allow black people to vote at any voting precinct they go to. We're going to actually go to the homes of black people and get their votes as a courtesy to express the need to recover from this history.

We're going to allow black people to go to public state universities at half the price of everybody else because we've denied them admission wrongfully for decades. We're going to do these things that are reparational because we have to help these communities recover, But also, we want to express our rejection of our parents and four parents embrace of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. It's going to be interesting. I hope you'll join us for that.

Now take a listen to this. You to love me. You to love. I've got my sister. Feel her now, she may not be here. Now that's a voice. Here's how New Yorker theater critic Hilton Lawls described Cynthia Arrivo. She's a little girl with a big voice,

who, like the young Judy Garland, doesn't really know how to pretend. What she has to offer is her authenticity. Arrivo is currently playing Seeley in the Broadway production of the color purple. She's a poor young woman living in the South in the 1930s. The production started in London, and Arriva was the only member of the London cast to come over to New York. We have so much to talk about it, and I know you have to get to the theater. I love those glasses. You know I'm a spectacle, girl. I love them.

Arievo set down recently with Hilton Alls to talk about her upbringing and her training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I was lucky enough to be taught by a woman called Dekannon, And she kind of spotted me. And when I say me, I don't say the physical me. I mean like me in my heart, my soul really quickly. She knew that there was a girl who was really good at playing strong but has vulnerability but too afraid to show it in front of others.

And she helped me be unafraid of using that vulnerability as my strength. And I guess I've gone back and forth. when it comes to doing roles to that point in my life, in my training, because it's always the thing that helps me get to the character quickest. It's what is this character afraid of? What does this character need? What do they want? What is the thing that drives them?

For Sili, I really truly believe that it's her sister. Yes. I think that the whole thing is about, yeah, her real love. Her real love is about making sure her sister's protected, making sure that her sister's okay. So I genuinely believe she'll do anything for that to be. And I guess I made the choice not to cover up and hide all those things because I felt like they helped. Do you think that your propensity to cover up had anything to do with race?

You said that this very interesting comment that you made about saying, I don't think it's different to be a black girl in England than it is to be a black girl from America. We all collectively share in a penitably. of displacement and not feeling like we belong in places. Did you feel that growing up? I think so. I mean, you just don't, it's so strange, you just don't see very many of us anywhere. Particularly in theater.

Yeah, I can walk down the street and see hundreds and hundreds of us or everywhere. Yes. But then you'd switch on the TV and we don't really exist or can't see them on television. You sort of think, I don't know if that's going to be me. am I going to disappear just like everybody else? Am I not going to be a part of the world that I want to be a part of? I want to be able to create and tell the stories,

but I want to be heard as well when I'm telling them. You don't want to just fade into the distance and not be there. You want to be able to share in creativity. One of the things that I was interested in was how did John Doyle find you? I had heard that they were going to do this production in London and I got on the phone to my

agent and I said I really want to be seen for it I really want to go in for this character I want to go in for Seeley I don't know why it was her that I wanted to go in for but I knew it was that character Then I sang for John And what was your audition song? My audition song was I'm changing

from Dreamgirls Can you sing a little bit for us? Where should I go from? Look at me look at me I am changing, trying every way I can. I am changing. But I need you. But I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you. I need. I'll get my life together now. I am changing.

I'm going to start right here right now. I'm hoping to work it out. And I know that I can be just fine. I know it's going to work out this time, because this time I am. this time I am and so it goes Bravo brava brava Well how could he not give you the part

After that after that audition That is so incredible Thank you And so he just said that's it Well he called me in he gave me the song I'm here called me back the next day So I went in and I remember the room was sort of dark It was like one or two lights on

It was sort of like nice and dim And we just sat and talked I remember we talked just about me, Cynthia, about him, about life, about where it'd come from, about my parents, about my sister, about all of those things. And then I read these sides and he just let me be messy and fierce in it. And it was so strange because I'd come from a show so I had my face on and all of that stuff. And it wasn't right, but for some reason this time round I could just get past all of it. of the stuff that I was using for that show to be in this moment here. I just remember having a great time doing that.

Tell me about your background a bit. I'm from London, born and bred. My parents are both Nigerian. And I guess the African background is very emotional anyway. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. That's something that's truly open. But being in London, you kind of learn to, I guess, downsize that slightly. I went to RADA.

It's been known as a repressed culture. Ever so slightly. Ever so slightly. And I went to Rada and... Tell our American listeners what Rada is. Rada is the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. It's one of the long-standing drama schools in London in the UK. It's about classical training.

Very much so. And I guess... Is that from high school to Rada or... Actually, I went from high school to university because something in my head went in the opposite direction. direction and said, well, I should do a book course and learn that way. What were you studying? I was studying music psychology.

What does that mean? Well, it's the psychology of music, i.e., I have this fascination with the voice and how we perceive it and how we ourselves change it for others when we're speaking to others. Because I believe that the speaking voice is very connected to the singing voice. If you can't go from speaking to singing, then there's something that's not. quite right. There's something that's not connecting. Is it because you associate it with the voice with freedom? Yeah.

So you associate the ways in which we speak or don't speak or sing or don't sing with blockage. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. I remember I was doing a work. It was actually just a question and answer thing that a school had called me in so that I could sit and talk with these students of the school and they could ask me questions about what I had done. where I was going and all of those things. And one of these ladies, she asked me a question, and I remember it was she had this tiny, tiny voice. Like it was, like she turned the volume down on herself. Wow.

And it was miniature. And I remember looking at her face thinking, that doesn't match you. And I said, you're not using your own speaking voice, what's happening here. Has anyone said that you intimidate them when you speak with your normal voice? and she burst into tears. So I took her to the back of the room and I said,

just say hello into the curtain as if no one's there and try and get that word hello to the back of the room behind you. Take a breath, breathe and say the word, really say it. She said it, it came down in pitch and it was booming all of a sudden this voice. So it went from hello to hello, which was like to me was fascinating because all of a sudden I thought, well, that's your speaking voice. Right. You want to be able to walk into the room and have a person.

and see you, all of you. I feel like if they can't hear you, they can't quite picture what's going on and who you are and what you can bring to something and automatically you walk into a room afraid. Yes. So I just wanted to make sure that she at least started somewhere to know that she didn't have to walk into her room.

And not projecting fear. I mean, the thing that you do as silly that is so brilliant is that you don't over-project. Seeley's fear at all. Your body is so relaxed on stage. Was there early energy about getting it to New York? I think there was, but I was blind to it. Well, you were in the character.

Yeah. Celia's never been on a plane. Yeah. And I was like, okay, yeah. So it was like the first, I think it's the first show. And I remember I spoke to Scott Sanders, who is our producer. And he said, would you be interested in taking this to New York to Broadway? And in my very English way, I was like, oh, of course, if you'll have me, oh, we're great, that would be fantastic.

I didn't realize that Scott is not very good at joking. I didn't realize that that was an actual proposition. He was being 100% serious about the consideration to take it to Broadway. And then about two months later, I was called into the office to have a conversation about it and whether or not it was something I wanted to do. And I was like, yes, yes, that's a certainty. you know, really and truly I don't think I believe that it was actually going to happen

until I was sat on the plane to get here. Yes. It still wasn't like, it hadn't sunk in yet that I was going to relive this role on Broadway. I still... You still can't believe it? Yeah, I'm still a bit like, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

How did this happen? Yes. Part of what makes the experience so profound, of course, is the audience that comes It is sad but true that a lot of Broadway audiences aren't mixed. Yeah. This audience is so mixed. So mixed.

Was it the same in London? I think it was actually. It didn't start out that way, but more and more it trickled out to the communities. And everybody was there, young, old, white, black, Chinese, whatever. Everyone just was there. Yes. And it was wonderful to see this mixed bag of people, whether it was someone who worked in the city or someone who worked at Tesco's or something.

It was just people coming together to watch people. Yes. And it was wonderful. And to see that en masse now here on Broadway is completely overwhelming. The hall is bigger here. Yeah, much bigger. It's like 1,100 or 1,078 or something like that, a roundabout there. And compared to England, which was...

200. Oh, my God. Yeah. I didn't realize the discrepancy was so huge. Yeah. The first night when I stepped on stage here, I was like, whoa. This is huge. Wow.

So every time someone said, it was a really intimate theater, I was like, you have no idea. I literally was like singing with someone's nap. Yes. This before. This is like huge. Cynthia Arriva talking with the New Yorker theater critic Hilton All's. She's performing now in the color purple on Broadway. Who knows?

knows what you'll do next. If Hamilton did come up and they wanted to put a female in one of the male roles, I would love to take that challenge on and try and do something like that. I would love to just have an adventure, see what happens. That wraps up the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. If you're a podcast listener, we want to know more about you and how you listen to the show. Nothing creepy about it, but please visit WNYC.org slash participate. That's WNYC.org participate or go to New Yorker Radio.org for more information. Thanks for being here with us. I hope you'll join us next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Mashih, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper, Rick Kwan, and Alex Barron. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.