The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 3: Hacking for the Masses, and Gloria Steinem

Episode Date: November 6, 2015

The hacker group Lizard Squad ruined Christmas for a lot of people last year when it hacked into Sony and Microsoft servers and rendered new PlayStations and Xboxes temporarily unusable for online gaming. Soon after, the hackers starting selling an inexpensive program that anyone could use to block a Web site. Vauhini Vara, a contributor to The New Yorker’s Web site, talked to Vinnie Omari, a hacker who has been associated with Lizard Squad, about the group. This week concludes Jill Lepore’s three-part story about a woman’s search for the biological father she never knew. He was known as Big Brown, a Greenwich Village street poet whose work Bob Dylan described as “the best poetry I ever heard.” This final installment of “The Search for Big Brown” explores the connection among Brown, Dylan, and rap. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, speaks with Gloria Steinem about Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter, and a fundamental question for activists: which comes first, changing hearts or changing laws? Steinem also talks about her new memoir, “My Life on the Road,” and why she decided to change her book’s title. And staff writer Rebecca Mead discusses two of her current obsessions: the soundtrack to the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” and a classic novel by a man without children that offers surprising insights on motherhood. 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.

When they have that, it begins making sure pretty huge. This work is a national story. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and on today's show, the conclusion of Jill Lepore's three-part story The Search for Big Brown, about her childhood friend's quest to find her biological father. There was a list of things that he was called, and it was like around town with William Brown. There were just like a bunch of rhyming things, downtown Brown, and one of them was Big Brown. This seems like a made-up character. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us for the third episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. But we'll start off with a story today about a notorious computer hack. Last Christmas, I don't know if you remember this, but last Christmas, lots of kids and adults who opened Xbox and, and PlayStation's found that they couldn't use them. Because Sony and Microsoft had been hacked. The hackers who took credit were called Lizard Squad. And they, this group Lizard Squad, tried to make a hacking program commercially available so that anyone could use it.

Contributor Wahini Vara, who covers a lot of tech stuff for the New Yorkers here to explain. So Lizard Squad, what is that? Lizard Squad is an underground collective of hackers who met online. Lizard Stressor is the hacking tool they developed. Basically, it's a simple tool that can effectively shut down a website for up to eight hours or more, and anyone can pay to buy this. So on Christmas Day last year, Lizard Squad hacked into Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, and it was a publicity stunt because it turns out five days later,

they announced that this tool is available, like I said, for anyone to buy for $6 to $500. They have to pay in Bitcoin only, of course. So hacking for the masses. Yes, exactly. Just a few days after all this, 22-year-old Vinnie Omari is arrested in the UK. Okay, wait a minute. Who's Vinny? Vinny is a spokesperson for Lizard Squad, at least now he is. He's also a hacker who is part of Lizard Squad. He says his arrest had nothing to do with actual Christmas attacks,

but the search warrant says otherwise. So Wahini, what's the meaning of all this? What implications does it have for all of us going forward? So here's the thing. In the past, we thought of hacking as something that people with some technical expertise could do, right? Like hackers were scary guys who knew all about how to program computers to do bad things. Well, so now what's happening is that these guys and others are creating tools that allow anyone to hack. And so it sort of lowers the bar for this kind of criminal activity, which has major implications. So how does the hacking tool work? Well, I asked Vinny the same thing.

And he said the tool is so easy that my grandmother could use it. but I'll let him explain the details. He's never met my grandmother or my mother. In the simplest way that I could probably describe it, you put an IP address in of the website or the home connection or anything, basically, that you want a hit offline. You put the seconds or minutes or hours, and you just basically send that attack and all the servers that are connected to the Lizards' dress at all.

They basically send packets towards that IP address and just flood it, and that all cause the IP address or the server. or on the other end to just basically die down. And by packets, you mean just in layman's terms, kind of like messages or requests, right? Put it like this. Like imagine if someone was to send like 50,000 text messages to your phone at once, your phone would probably have a seizure or something. Right.

What was the point of Blizzard's dresser? Was it to make money? Was it to force companies to make their own computer systems, their websites more secure? Or was it just for fun? Yeah, it was literally just for fun. and to rake in some extra money, I guess. Well, the main goal was just to see how many people would actually buy the service. And a large sum was made in the sure amount of time that it was up and running.

How much money was made? I can't give you an exact number, like the exact number off the top of my head. But, like, I believe it was definitely over $10,000. And what was done with that money? Did you split it among yourselves? Or is it sitting in a bank account somewhere? No, I didn't actually touch any of it, like, especially because I was on bail, because this happened after I got arrested.

I'm always in it just for the fun, I guess, or just to see what we can achieve, you know? I'm not sure who else took anything. Like, I just didn't get involved with the money. As I recall, in the BBC interview, you described yourself as a spokesman for Lizard Squad. What did you mean by that exactly? What was your involvement?

Well, to be honest, the BBC 5 live interview was just a complete, like, joke. If you listened to it, like, you'd probably maybe hear me and my friend, I'm sniggering in the background. And that was a complete joke. Like, they were really serious about it, and we thought that it might be funny. But the Sky News interview was, like, serious. And a couple of days later, you were arrested. Yeah, I was arrested on the 29th.

Well, let me ask you this. The website of Lizard Stressor said at one point, there was a disclaimer that said, permission is granted to stress test dedicated servers and networks owned by you. This is the opportunity to make your firewalls better, not to misuse against the law. And I wanted to ask you, do you, I mean, did you really expect, who did you expect to see using lizard stress? Or did you think people would be using it to target their enemies? Or did you think owners of websites would use it to test their systems and see if they were secure enough? No owners would actually do that.

I mean, if it actually came to owners using lizard stress or any other stress testing tools like that, they'd most likely use it against their competitors. But the majority of them were just home connections. really, to be honest, because they're like simple and like a bunch of kids, nowadays on Xbox or when they're playing on their PlayStation 4 or 3, they just like to take down other people. Like when they're playing Call of Duty, for example, they knock off like a member or two on the other team just so they have their advantage of two extra players on their team

just so they can win. I see. So this isn't necessarily some kid in Nebraska trying to take down Amazon.com or something like that. This is some kid in Nebraska trying to take down some kid in Iowa. who he's playing a game with online. I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually tried to take down Amazon. I doubt they would because a lot of money would be needed.

An investment of at least like 200,000 pounds or $300,000, roughly around that much would be needed just to take down like Sony and Microsoft. It's unusual, right? For a hacker or somebody involved in a hacking group to be so public about what he or she is doing. And it seems to me that after you were public about what you were doing, that was one of the things that that may have triggered this arrest. And I wanted to ask why, I mean, you're talking to me now. Why be so public about what you're working on? Well, here's the funny thing.

My arrest, actually, according to the police that arrested me, it actually wasn't in regards to the attacks during Christmas. It was actually in regards to someone sending me $2,000 to be a leader in one of my gaming groups in an online forum. as soon as I went on Sky News and they saw my face and everything, I mean, they obviously knew who I was. They decided to come straight to my house. And on the warrant papers where they had the warrant to come to my house and take everything, it basically did explain that there was PayPal fraud and hacking into computers. And there was a couple of random other charges, along with Microsoft and Sony intrusions.

But on my actual charges, the Sony and Microsoft attacks, they weren't listed on there. And they've been dropped as far as I'm concerned. So when I tried to visit the Lizard Stressor website recently, it seemed to be down. What was going on there? I've noticed that a couple of times in the past when I've tried to visit, it's been down. And is there another way that people can access the service? No, it was actually taken off because there's quite a story behind it. At the beginning, it was just created to make money.

Recently, I'm not quite sure if you saw it, but basically the website that all of our servers were connected to. It was basically really vulnerable to several attacks. And the database was just leaked along with every single user's emails and passwords and whatnot on their payment methods. The National Crime Agency actually arrested six to eight people, I believe, and they're still looking into another 50 people. I'm curious about how your family reacted to all this, how your friends reacted. Did people in your life know that you were involved with Blizzard Squad before this? No, not really. my friends obviously

I don't really try and connect myself of a lot of people because that's usually the downfall of everything but I mean I can't really say that now because of the position that I'm in but yeah my family

they knew my dad would always tell me to stay away from the computer and stuff because he always felt like that I was doing dodgy things and stuff because most of the time I'd have like loads of servers and most people don't have that stuff usually on their computer screen

And how did you explain it? Well, I tried explaining in the simplest forms. I mean, I showed him, and after a while, he understood after like a year or two, actually. But at the beginning, he thought that I was setting drugs. Let me ask you a little bit about the ethics of hacking and of these kinds of attacks that lizard stressor allows people to perpetrate. Are they ethical? Are they unethical? Is there a gray area? Does it depend on who you're targeting, for example?

The attacks from lizard stressor? the attacks the kinds of attacks that lizard stressor allows people to make well that's pretty hard to say it really depends on the person i guess sure someone could have actually used it to like test their website security but like um the chances of that actually happening are very slim that's probably the only way that i could probably say that it's ethically or morally right so it's pretty useless so yeah i there isn't much uh of a of an ethical form of um so um so service, like, especially if it's like stresses and stuff like that or the tool specifically. So you would argue that as long as people are using things like lizard stressor to take down other people's servers that isn't an ethical use. Yeah, that's obviously as well as that it's illegal. Do you still consider yourself a member of Lizard Squad, for instance? Are you still interested in hacking activities that would be considered illegal? Or are you now, you know, Are you now on the other side of things?

You describe yourself on Twitter, I think, as a security researcher or a security analyst. How would you describe yourself now? And is that different from how you thought of yourself a year ago? Well, all security researchers or analysts, whatever you want to call them, they all do hack in anyway. So it's just, it depends on which side you're on. You're either on the legal side or the illegal side. Right. And the legal sides basically either finding yourself a job in a security company, working with the government,

working for the government, being a snitch or any of the others. Myself, I've always just been in it just for the fun of it. Right now, I mean, I'm doing like a computer security and forensics course at a university in London, and I only started like a month ago. My main and initial goal was to actually work with the National Crime Agency or some sort of policing agency in the UK or in the US and help them. Right now, the forensics teams, especially in the UK,

they absolutely, like, they suck really bad. And in my opinion, they definitely need to hire hackers. I'd assume it would be a lot easier. Because I'm still on bail right now. My next bell's on the 25th of November. I'm not sure what's going to happen. Like, I'm not sure if my charges are going to get dropped or if they're going to get extended again for several months.

Or I'll have to, like, pretty much just, like, wait for my next bell day just to be able to, like, actually make a judgment for myself. That's the British hacker Vinnie Amari, formerly with the group Lizard Squad, talking with New Yorker contributor, Wahini Vara. So Wahini, if this isn't available anymore, so what? Does this have any lasting ramifications? I mean, this tool itself might not, but it lays the groundwork for others certainly to try to do the same thing. And so it sort of puts this idea in the air that hadn't been out there before. So we're going to have an army of kids in junior high school and high school who are going to get a hell of a lot more sophisticated about hacking. That sounds great.

Possibly. Terrific. Thanks, Waiini. Thanks, David. In just a moment, a woman searching for her biological father finds that he might have been as extraordinary as the rumors said. The best was a guy named Big Brown, who had long poems. I always thought this was the best poetry I ever heard.

Now, you have Bob Dylan saying this is the best poetry you ever heard. The search for Big Brown. That's just ahead in the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The last two weeks on the show we've been hearing the story of a woman's search for the biological father she never knew. Her name is Adriana Altie. And she's a close friend of Jalapur,

a writer for the New Yorker. You can find the first two parts at New YorkerRadio.org, but let me see if I can summarize it quickly. Adriana is mixed race. She was adopted into a white family in Massachusetts, and she found it difficult to talk with her parents about it.

But I am different, though, and they're like, no, you're not. And I said, but I look different. And they're like, well, you're just the same. You're just the same. And it doesn't matter what color you are. You could be orange. You could be blue. You can be white.

And I'm like, well, I know, orange or blue. This other color. As a young woman, she got to know her white birth mother, whom she calls Nina in this story. Nina told her some outlandish stories about her biological father, a man named William Brown. He was a street poet in Greenwich Village in the 60s and a favorite of Bob Dylan's. But nobody knew where he was.

They didn't know where he was. They didn't know where or when he was born, and William Brown is a pretty common name. So Adriana and Jillipur spent a long time searching for him, and they were stumped until they tried his nickname Big Brown. Big Brown, and just like doing a basic Google search for Big Brown and Bob Dylan, he pops up. Adriana Altie picks up the story there. You put Big Brown in YouTube, and, you know, his album comes up.

And Adriana starts emailing me. Oh my God, I found a recording. Here he hears the poet with his album between heaven and hell. Big round. There are all these songs when there suddenly we have his voice. And suddenly so suddenly I can hear, you know, this is him talking. The blues rind there blowing away any chore of gladness until you find that you like a sunken man in this ocean of sorrows.

and sadness. It's a bit of a mystery when it was recorded, but it's seven tracks, and it's Big Brown. It's called Big Brown the first, Big Brown, the first man of poetry.

Like, there's one that's called me, and it starts off, the greatest cat I ever met is me. The greatest cat I ever met is me. There's been no cat I could love or pet. It's very, very funny poem. It's so winking and parodic and it's just funny. Look at me.

I'm a sly witty guy, but I maintain my eye and don't love nobody. But every... So we had this, you know, a very exciting moment where we had found this recording. And then, but of course, then there was a, you know, a brief lull. So, because we went to dinner and we weren't talking about it because we'd been talking, talking. And we weren't talking about it. And I said, oh, no, she's going to move on. So I said, what about this Danny Fitzgerald character?

What are you looking to that? So Danny Fitzgerald is a blues musician. He lived in New York in the 1960s, and Adrian had found an album that he recorded. Talk about that time. I met Big Brown in Washington Square Park. Yeah, he was a poet. What's name got a lot of hits up from him?

Bob Dylan. Right. So I said to Joe, well, you know, Why don't, you know, why don't you just call Dylan? So I got an email address for the guy who handles Dylan's email, and I wrote to him. And we thought he would talk to us. But in the end, he didn't talk to us. But Adriana found something else.

Yes, I did. He turns out that he has given interviews where he talks about Brown. He said, all these black guys would come up from south of the border and recite poetry in the park. Now they'd call him rappers. The best was a guy named Big Brown who had long poems, Each one was about 50 minutes long. They were long, drawn out bad men's stories. Romance, politics, just about everything you can imagine was thrown into his stuff.

I always thought this was the best poetry I ever heard. Now, you have Bob Dylan saying this is the best poetry you ever heard. That's not nothing. That's not nothing. And that's, you know, actually was what she was saying was true. If Big Bound had been performing in Harlem, it would have been just like, just like another guy and people are like, yeah, he happens to be very good at doing it. But it stood out in a different way, I think, in Greenwich Village than it would have in a different

neighborhood. In fact, it stood out so much to people who were interested in the 1960s in the study of folklore and folk life that a bunch of folklore scholars began collecting these things, these things that are called toasts, which are these, they're like Braggart poems. They're these rhyming poems. They're these rhyming poems about, a lot of them are about hustlers. They tend to be sexually outrageous. They're a lot about pimps and prostitutes, and they have this whole badass thing going on. Honky-tongued, the hip cat, Stewart, was digging a game of poop.

His parents wasn't sagging, but this cat wasn't bragging because he knew he was looking real cool. Hey, he was choked up tight. My name is Abiyudu Dune, Oye Wolle. and I'm a poet educator. Abiyudun Ayoole was a founder of the last poets in 1968. Selfish desires are burning like fires among those who are hard to go. So many of us who were researching the whole oral tradition situation in America,

we had to go back to the toast. Just like those folks in the toasts had to know something about Hyjohn the Conqueror and people who could fly, which are folk tales that we brought with us from the slave plant. And so that was really just a part of your learning process if you wanted to get down what they call the spoken word. And those who stole, the people's goal are definitely corrupt. Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills, real estate. You know, I know the toast were born basically in prison.

A lot of guys would just sit around and be creative. You know, it's like it's a necessity as the mother of invention. So you don't have a TV, you don't have your boys on the block, you don't have all the things to do that you would have to do if you were not incarcerated. So you're sitting around. Your mind is still working, but how do you direct it? So guys would create stories. They would create these phenomenal stories of all these colorful characters.

Of course, Dorella DuPontaine was one. She could persuade you to do things. that you didn't want to do and give her money that you didn't want to give, but she always came out on top. Doriella DuFontaine is a toast. It's a toast that Brown was known to have performed in Washington Square Park. And in 1969, the last poets recorded a version of it with Jimmy Hendricks. It's that hand in the glove when you look at it.

I mean, with Big Brown and Ginsburg and all the beat poets were doing down the village, it's alive and well today in more ways than one. I mean, these guys represent something that. we are trying to capture now. We've got a whole generation of young people who are living, breathing, and dying with the word. David Amram is a well-known composer and conductor and jazz musician. And in the 1960s, he was living in the village and knew a lot of the same people that Big Brown knew. He hung out with Ginsburg and Kerouac. And he tells the story about a time he brought a classical composer who was visiting from Europe down to Washington Square Park to meet Brown.

I said, Brown, this is a guy from Tondaleo. He's from Holland. And he's a wonderful composer. He came all the way over here. Symphony played his piece, and he wants to check out old American Brown. I said, come on with me, man. So we walked over a gesture.

So we took us to the middle of the fountain. He said, here's where you're going to see and hear it all. And Big Brown said, see what I'm, see what I told you, man. And then he started one of his raps. into Tom's ear, and Tom put his hand up to hear Brown, and then with his other hand on his other ear, was listening to all those great sounds at the same time. Brown had become like a sports announcer describing all the different things

that was happening, and then also giving a little rundown of the people who were playing. You know, say, that cat's from Ohio, and he ran away from home, and he's a songwriter, and there's a accordion, players, families, lived in the village, like for two generations, it doesn't speak English, said what, through the whole routine. And Tons said, now he said, I've seen and heard America. That's the nomination of the Democratic Party. One thing I found, which was very, actually very strange,

and it took a while to figure out what it was, was it was, Big Brown was nominated for, as a presidential candidate, as part of the Beat Party of America. So I looked up in the newspaper, and it turns out there was a, an AP wire service story in the summer of 1960 when Nixon and Kennedy are the nominees for the major parties. There's a third party ticket, the Beat Party of America, holds a mock presidential primary contest in Greenwich Village, and during the first round of voting, Big Brown got the most votes. So the AP wire service story reads like this. Big Brown's lead startled the convention,

Big, as the Husky Negro is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite sonny of any delegation, but he had one tactic that apparently earned him votes. In a chatterbox convention, only once did he speak at length, and that was to read his poetry. No, I don't indulge in politics, but I spoke up a UN national, foreign situation, impossible integration.

Didn't nobody speak with me. I'm with the whole South Seattle. Nina had always said, She didn't know whatever happened to Big Brown, but she had heard years later that he was run over by a steamroller in a Hollywood and killed. And I thought, I put that in the category of crazy-ass things that Nina says that no one could possibly believe because that is out of Looney Tunes. Like, that is not a real death.

That is what happens after Wiley Coyote drops an anvil on your head. Then Danny Fitzgerald says on this recording, we're listening to on the way home. And then he went to California. and he got run over. I mean, maybe he really did get run over by a steamroller. It was really hard to find out. Adrian had tracked down all kinds of people that might have known Brown. Danny knew this guy named Bill Gross.

Brown once stayed in Gross's apartment. Found this guy named Ned Otter. His father had taken pictures of Brown. When Ned was a kid, there were pictures of Brown on the wall of his apartment. And so we asked all these people, what happened to him? Did he really get run over by a steamroller? I heard that he had been in California. and been on a beach.

I don't know why the name Manhattan Beach comes to my mind. I believe the version I heard was that he was gotten a fight or that he was attacked at night on this beach and stabbed. And this is what comes to mind. I know Danny says he was run over, but I believe it was

some kind of a violent death. I heard he was rubbed out by mobsters. I heard he was shot during a card game, like a poker game. shot or maybe run over. Did you ever hear run over by a steamroller? No.

Okay, because that's the one we keep hearing. Did you ever hear stabbed on a beach? Nope. Did you say, my friend, that you're not afraid on this day when you meet death? Will you tell me that when the day arrives and you take your very last breath? Now, you've got to die. You know that's true, but you say it bothers you none. Everyone who said anything about him or anything I've read about him is that he is not only as a character,

but he's the kind of person that you, you know, if he's around, it's not like he's going to go unnoticed. In that sense, either he's gone or he's in some way so diminished from what he was that, you know, is it not recognizable as the same person. So either way, this person can't be around because, How could someone like that be around and not have anyone take note? So once we kind of really were hunkered down looking for a big brown, I thought, oh, I should see if there's any use as poet. You know, there's all these collections of poetry and sound archives all over the place. So I went to like the obvious places like the Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard

and looked through their archive and just various. Then I went through oral history collections trying to see if anybody thought, this oral history movement in the 1960s. Someone surely sat this guy down and didn't oral history. I get kind of nothing. So then I was looking through the finding guides to the collections at New York University, which is in Washington Square. He was pouring through the Larry Rivers Collection. Rivers was this kind of beat artist of some renowned and acclaim.

And he was also a filmmaker. He was a painter and a filmmaker. Rivers, actually, I had known him mostly as like a painter, so I actually didn't know about this film. He had made a film of documentary of sorts about breasts. And I was like, oh, okay, here we go. this is a perfect setup for what we're going to hear is probably not going to make you very happy.

See, yeah, we didn't know that it was... Yeah, we didn't know. We just saw it was brown on tape. We had no idea it was about breasts. Like, for instance, if you're with the woman, isn't it mainly that you make the aggressive, suckling gestures and that she very rarely, I mean, I have... Women are looking for you continuously

as hard as you're looking for them. If they like you or if they're curious about you, they're seeking you as strong as you're looking for them, you know? You know, Larry's trying to... sort of leading him down this, like, how do you feel about breast? And Brown goes off in this whole sort of, well, you know, they're part of the woman

and you're going to know the woman, and they're something good. Good, he's good. He's a good, good man. I was proud. I just felt like, oh, he was led down this path. It could have been really very unpleasant to hear,

and he just, um, it's great. They're talking. They're talking just like you talk out of your mouth. A breast or? Absolutely. Well, what about elbows? What's wrong with elbows? Why, what? I never went out that far.

Well, that's what I'm trying to say. But then I'm sitting there thinking like, never is. Just ask him like, where were you born? What year were you born? What's your security number? What's your actual name? I mean, here's somebody's actually talking to him. He's kind of important questions.

It's like, nothing. It's like, I want to know. I mean, unless a cat can play her, you know, for the sound and the rhythm and the jazz had come from her. You know what I mean? She's just, you know, just a nice girl. I was thinking about half her after lunch.

and I said, what are you going to do now? And you're like, I'm going to go back. And I was like, we already listened to it. And we transcribed it mostly. And you're like, I just want to listen to him. Yeah. It's probably simplistic to say. But, I mean, they make him like a real person where I have, I mean, I've known of him about him since, you know, I met my birth mother.

So for, you know, almost 30 years. And I didn't ever really sort of get from her the feeling. feeling of like, that I knew him. So it kind of has done that. And it's interesting what, you know, what Limer was saying about being in the village and, you know, he's an artist. So he was there. And, you know, Brown was performing. He's an artist and he was there. But there weren't really black people, that many black people. There was predominantly white thing. But people were there because of their art and because of their, you know, what they were trying to do. and that's something that I've had a struggle with

and that I went from being very young to going to art school where I was maybe one of two black people practically in the whole school or at least my class and not just an artist, not a black artist, not a white artist, but you're just an artist. Most of us go through life finding people and losing people and finding them again and that's actually a big part of why I'm a historian.

I like to figure out where things came from, but I also like to find things have gotten lost and find people that have gotten lost. So this story has actually been really hard for me because I thought we would find him, like find him meet him, find out exactly what happened to him. And it's really hard to find a guy named William Brown. But I know, too, that it's meant so much to Adriana

to find out what we have found. And I kind of think that she's kind of put the pieces of him back together in a way that brings him to life. she was visiting when we were kind of finishing up doing the research that we had done. And she said, I have to go home now because I've just ordered 50 pounds of brown clay. It's going to be delivered. And I have to get home because I have to be there to pick it up. And I said, okay, well, hold on.

Wait, back up. What are you going to do with 50 pounds of clay? I decided to make some sculptures of him. So what does that mean? That means. To make him. Well, you know, I mean, it means. literally means, you know, putting the clay on the armature and making his face.

Like now that I know what he looks like and can sort of guess, you know, I have a whole, I'll have a lot, actually a lot of ideas for different things that I want to do based on, you know, him. I don't know. I have it that's been, it has actually been a while that I've been very, you know, excited to make something. I don't know. So do you feel like you found him? I feel like, I do feel like I found enough to feel like I knew who he was. And, you know, it makes me very happy in a way that, you know, when I was younger, I didn't want anything to do, you know, with that at all.

And by the time I had, you know, sort of gotten old enough to realize that, you know, it's not bad to be brown or whatever, I didn't, I hadn't lived as part of a black community, a community of color. And so I felt a little like I'm almost like an imposter in some ways. Like I felt that I was, you know, appropriating something because I didn't feel connected myself to it. And maybe that is what I'm doing, but I know that I feel more connected to it. And I feel like I, in a way, have a right to, you know, this person who turns out as like

a pretty great guy, you know. And I'm very happy about that. I'm happier than I would have thought that I would be. I definitely didn't anticipate that I would feel like connected to him in a way. Because, you know, I met my birth mother. And, you know, she is my birth mother. But I didn't ever, I couldn't see myself in her. And I don't know him, but everything I have heard about him

makes me feel like I know him and I feel like I am like him. I mean, I'm actually like somebody where, I mean, I've never been like anyone that I've ever known. So, you know, and still felt like that I could claim them. You are like him. I mean, I think for me to see that photograph and see how much he looks like you, and the first time you sent me the record, listening to that first track, I remember

just saying, oh my God, how can that be inheritable? Like, you sound like him to me? So it fills in a lot for me. So I feel, in this very different way, I'm so happy to have found the best poet

Bob Dylan ever knew. When you get all you long for in your struggles in life, then the world make you king for a day. Go to the mirror and look at yourself and see what that guy has to say. For does not your mother, your sister, or your brother whose judgment upon you must pass?

The guy who counts most in your life is the guy staring back from the glass. He's the one to live up to, never mind all the rest, for he's with you, clear up to the end. And your past your most dangerous, difficult task if the guy in the glass is your friend. You could be like Jack Hall And chisel a plumb Thinking you're a wonderful guy But the guy in the glass

Say you're only a bum If you can't look him square in the eye You could fool the whole world Down the pathway of years And get paths on your back as you pass But your final reward Would be heartaches and tears If you're cheating the guy

In the glass To that own self Be true New Yorker staff writer and professor of history at Harvard, Jillipur, talking with her close friend, the artist Adriana Altie. And Bob, if you're listening, and you want to come on the show and talk about Big Brown, just give us a ring. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I want to turn now to one of the most important figures in the history of American politics and feminism.

one of the founders of Ms. Magazine and the author now of My Life on the Road, which is a kind of autobiography through travel. And I was honored to be in the studio with her a few days ago, Gloria Steinem. We started off by speaking about her book. Your book is called My Life on the Road. It wasn't called that in the beginning. You had a different title, and it was called Because Everyone Matters. And your editors said, or you said, maybe we should think better of this.

Why? Well, actually, you know, I'm really good at giving other people titles. I'm so good at it. What editors do. Yes, I love it. But I'm not so good at doing my own titles. Isn't it true that Ms. Magazine at one point before it became Miss was called bitch? It was called something else.

Bimbo, there was an idea? It was called Sisters, and then people thought it was a religious magazine. It was called Bimbo. It was called All kinds of Things. And it was called Ms. even though at the time we didn't know that this was a term from centuries ago in England that was just a abbreviation of mistress which like master doesn't betray marital status. We didn't invent it. We just found it. But why did you not decide to call this because everyone

matters? I mean, we had lots of titles. Nomad, you know, but then nomad sounded random, even though nomads themselves are not random. But did it conflict with Black Lives, man? Yeah. No, my favorite title was America dash as if everyone matters. A little irony here. We need a little irony as if everyone matters. And I was still campaigning for that, but when Black Lives Matter came along as a hashtag and has become so deeply important, I didn't want it to take away from that or seem to be derived from that. Actually, my book was another book, a different book, which was published in India last year, is called As If Women Matter. So you can see I was fond of this concept. We get right off to the races with this book with its dedication. That

often, that usually doesn't happen. And the dedication is to Dr. John Sharp. And I'd love for you to tell us who he was in your life and why you dedicate the book to him. I was living in London on my way to India. I had just graduated from college. I was on my way to India. I was working as a waitress in an espresso bar. I was pretty sure that I was pregnant, and I was doing all the things you're not supposed to do, like go horseback riding and throw yourself downstairs and other superstitions.

And then I met an American playwright who made me understand that it was somewhat possible in England because if you got two physician signatures that said your life was at risk, essentially, that it could be performed legally in London. So I picked a name out of the phone book, literally, a nearby name. And he was a wonderful, gentle old man in a bed-sitting room. And he said, as I say in the dedication,

that he would take the big risk of being the first person to sign for this abortion if I promised him two things. First, I wouldn't tell anyone his name, and second, I would do what I wanted to do with my life. Wow. Now, I've always remembered that, and I've always honored the name part, but I know since he was a very old man at the time, and this was a half century ago, and given the changes in the world, I think now he would want to be known as someone who knew the laws were wrong and unjust. Are you surprised that at this date, so many years after Roe v. Wade, that we're still arguing about this in our Senate campaigns, congressional campaigns, and most of all in the presidential campaign, as if almost as if Roe had not happened. We're not arguing about loving, about interracial relationships and marriages. We're arguing about this. Why is that? Well, it took me a while to figure it out, too, because they don't tell us this in school. You know, the economics courses ought all to start with reproduction, not just production, because it's actually more basic, but they don't.

So what we don't learn is that reproduction is kind of the whole ballgame, and who controls it is the most fundamental question. We're in the middle of a presidential race, and Hillary Clinton, who I know you've supported for a long time, had a confrontation with a discussion with, members of Black Lives Matter. You want to run a tape of that, and then we'll discuss it. You were saying that what the Black Lives Matter movement needs to do to change white hearts is to come up a policy. Look, I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources. You change the way systems operate.

You're not going to change every heart. You're not. But at the end of the day, we can do a whole lot to change some hearts and change some systems and create more opportunities for, people who deserve to have them to live up to their own God-given potential, to live safely, without fear of violence in their own communities, to have a decent school, to have a decent house, to have a decent future. So we can do it one of many ways. You know, you can keep the movement going, which you have started, and through it, you may actually change some hearts. But if that's all that happens, we'll be back here in 10 years having the same conversation.

That conversation has led to a lot more conversations, whether it's online or at kitchen tables. And I wonder what you thought of it. Well, I understand where that's coming from. You know, there was a great South American novelist, one of the great novelists who said the people could withstand floods and pestilence and killings, but when the laws were unjust, they went crazy. So there is a kind of betrayal trauma. You know, you might say that comes from the law. but she's underselling culture.

A culture is really just deep politics. Do we have a democracy in our house? Do we see violence at home? If so, as children, that's going to make it seem normal and inevitable until somebody in a social justice movement raises the possibility, you know, that it's not inevitable. So the law tends to change last and often needs to be subverted, by culture. Is it just a question of different roles? I mean, in the mid-60s, you had a movement

pushing on race. Lyndon Johnson essentially said to the movement, if I'm going to have a voting rights act, you have to make me. Hans Selma came about. And Selma... That's what Roosevelt, too, is said to. As Obama is always, always fond of quoting. So is it a question of differing roles? Or do you think that Hillary Clinton is a little bit deaf to this new new movement or new stream of the movement? You know, I don't know. She has more black support than any other candidate, more than Bernie Sanders, more than any other candidate.

But I don't think it's really, you know, you can't understand what it's like to be black in America unless you're black in America. You can't understand what it's like to be a female human being, unless you're a female human being in some ways. But we can strive to empathize with each other first, empathy is first, and then listening. I think there's a very simple activist rule,

which is if you are in a situation in which you have more power, then you have to be careful to listen as much as you talk. And if you are in a situation in which you have traditionally or that moment have less power, you have to talk as much as you listen, which is sometimes just as hard. This goes to your metaphor that you talk about in the book of the turtle. I wonder if you could tell us that.

I was in college taking the least scientific science course I could possibly find, and it was geology. And we were on a field trip in the Connecticut River Valley. And I, of course, was paying no attention because I had discovered a turtle, a huge, really pretty big turtle, who was embedded in the mud on the side of the road and I was sure was going to crawl up on the road and be crushed, right? So I picked up this turtle with some difficulty and lugged.

I mean, it was very pissed and walked all the way down the road and had just slipped it into the water of the river. When my geology professor came up behind me and he said, you know, that turtle has probably spent weeks crawling up that road to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road. And you have just put it back. All right. I felt terrible, but it was too late. However, it took me decades to understand that was a political lesson. Always listen to the turtle. That is, the person who is experiencing something probably knows more about it than the experts.

Gloria, we're sitting here at a time when the evident hostility toward Hillary Clinton for various reasons and from various directions is quite clear. You've been watching her for a long time. What's the reason for it? Well, to address some of the deep reasons for hostility to women in leadership roles, women of every race, Hillary and everybody else, I think in a deep sense we won't escape this until men are raising children as much as women are and women are as active in the world outside the home as men are. because right now we associate, most of us, women too, have been raised by women as infants and little children. We associate female authority with emotionality and nurturance and home. We don't see it as a comfortable kind of leadership in the outside world, a rational leadership where we've mostly seen men. So I don't think this is going to go away easily.

It's going to take quite a long time. It's not peculiar to Hillary Clinton or Americanness. No, it's not. No, I mean, part of the reason that we have female leaders earlier in other countries is because they have stronger family systems, you know, in India, say, with the Nehru family. So the family mitigates the disaster of being a female, so to speak. I'm happy to say, I think we're more democratic than that. We don't quite view families in the same way.

So when we finally get an elected woman, I think she's much more likely to really represent the majority of the country. Seven years ago, you wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, and it was at the moment of an intense rivalry between Obama and Hillary in the primaries. And I wonder what lesson you derive from it because it caused a real storm. It was a highly supportive of Hillary, but it had things to say about, Well, it was comparative about black suffering and feminism and history of women. And you kind of stepped into it in a way. And maybe you could describe that. And what lesson, because you were usually so adept at these situations,

whether it's bringing others onto the stage or using your own influence to be inclusive, that this was a moment where it was the first time I remember seeing, wow, glorious times in a situation. And it's inevitable that anybody that's, as you say, a media worker might have that happen. How do you look back on that? Never let your text be edited on the telephone, even if it's the New York Times. Good advice to the young journalists out there. It was a very bifurcated experience because I got all these phone calls from people who knew me telling me how wonderful the column was and how it had changed.

the results of the primary in New Hampshire and how much, because I had posited the idea that, you know, what if Obama were a woman? And I had made clear in the text of the column that I supported them both, you know, that I would, I wanted sequentially, one should be president and then the other, that race and sex were intertwined, that you couldn't uproot one without uprooting the other. But what really happened was that the one sentence that was from the kitchen to the White House, that that sentence, which could be construed as making a value judgment, was used as the pull quote. And once the pull quote got on the web, then there was – Well, hellbrook.

Yeah. If people read the whole column or if they knew me, you know, it was extremely painful. It was very painful. How so? How did you experience that? Well, you know, to be misunderstood makes you feel crazy. You know, I mean, it was thinking I had said something that I spent my lifetime not saying. But in the end it was a great experience because my friends rallied around, you know, in a wonderful way.

And also because at the end of it, I suddenly remembered something that the great Florence Kennedy said, which is that the purpose of kicking ass is not that you get your ass, kicked at the right time for the right reason, but that it keeps your ass sensitive. So I thought, good. You know, this is a good result. Words to live by. That was Gloria Steinem. Her new book is called My Life on the Road. I'm David Remnick. Now, when I need to stretch my legs or clear my head in the office from whatever I'm doing, I'd like to roam the halls and see what people are up to. Let's go pop in on Rebecca Mead. She's a staff writer

for the magazine and she always seems to know what's going on and what's interesting. A while back she wrote a profile of Lynn Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Broadway hit Hamilton. And she interviewed him recently on stage for the New Yorker Festival. Hey Rebecca, how you doing? I'm all right, David. How are you?

Would you like a seat? I would. By the way, you were great. Thank you. Did you stay? I stayed about 45 minutes to watch you and Lin-Manuel at Miranda. He was a charm bomb. Isn't he? Oh my God. It was hilarious. It was hilarious. I mean, I loved Hamilton, but he was just out of control funny. He's really wonderful.

Yeah, he's sort of just charisma incarnate. God Almighty. So what have you got going? Well, one thing I've been doing is listening to the soundtrack of Hamilton. Really? Yeah. I just happen to have it queued up here. I'll bet you do.

I'll tell you why. I tell you what, no, there's so much. You've seen the show. Have. So you know that it is. I haven't seen it on Broadway yet. I saw it downtown, which, you know, gives me downtown cred. And my son saw it on Broadway, it was nuts about it.

He thought it lost nothing in translation. So it's the story of the founding fathers, the story of the beginning of America, told through hip-hop. And here we go. Strike me as a woman who has never been satisfied. I'm sure I don't know what you mean. You know, Lynn has talked a lot about how, when he started reading Ron Chernow's biography,

which is the book that it's adapted from, how it was just obvious to him that Alexander Hamilton's story was a hip-hop story because he's this kid who comes from nowhere and he's poor and he's an orphan and he's got nothing and he just pulls himself up and makes himself into, you know, who the first secretary of the treasury. What I love about it is that Lynn manages to bring the founding mothers into the story too and does it in a, you know, like a really good feminist way. So I approve. Rebecca, you got anything else going? on? I do a lot of walking. And I listen to a lot of audiobooks. And mostly what I listen to is like great works of literature that I read, you know, a hundred years ago and now...

You can do that. I can't do it. I cannot do it. I almost drove a car into a tree listening to a great production of King Lear. Well, I don't drive, you see. I mean, if I was, if I was driving, it might not be safe, but I'm just walking. It's you driving into me that I need to worry about. So I'm right now listening to D.H. Lawrence. is the rainbow. And I haven't read Lawrence. I've read Lawrence for so long. And I read him when I was a teenager.

And then sort of when I got a little older, oh, Lawrence, he doesn't know anything. He gets it completely wrong about women. And, oh, it's horrible. And now I'm reading The Rainbow. I think he understands women completely. Really? It's just, I mean, reading him on motherhood,

how did this guy, never had any kids, is a man know so much about what it feels like. like after you've had a baby and how your emotional relation to that baby. I'm staggered by it. Well, you sold me. I'll read the rainbow. Take care, Rebecca. Thanks a lot. Bye.

That was the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead. And I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with more stories. If you're listening on iTunes, let us know what you think, and don't forget to rate the podcast. Thanks a lot and see you next week. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm going to get my butt kicked by the Atlantic Ocean

when the writer William Finnegan takes me on my one and only attempt at surfing. Yes, Chris. I'm David Remnant. That's next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour.