The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 33: Awkward Dog Banter, and the Marxist Who Brought Us “Hamilton”

Episode Date: June 3, 2016

In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Kalief Browder, a teen-ager from the Bronx who spent three years jailed at Rikers Island without ever being convicted of a crime. After his release, Browder committed suicide. In excerpts from Gonnerman’s interviews with him, he speaks candidly about the psychological toll of solitary confinement, and what it meant to have the criminal-justice system take away years of his life. Also, the Public Theatre’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, tells David Remnick why “Hamilton” will have a real impact on America’s debate on immigration, and the New Yorker’s theatre critic, Hilton Als, speaks with the actress Michelle Williams. Lastly, we reveal the real answer to the question “Can my dog say hi?” 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.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Can my dog say hi? She already is, so I'm not going to violently fling your dog away, if that's what you're asking. Oh, what's his name? Her name is Lucy. Notice that I said her with no intonation, so it didn't sound like I was correcting you. Oh, Lucy.

I had a sublater once with a dog named Lucy. Wow, small world were there being more than one dog named a thing. I was subtly calling you on original. I picked up on that. Is she a puppy? No. Mine loves puppies. That's irrelevant because she's not a puppy.

She's four. Oh, four. You said any number. Good thing you didn't say one of those bad numbers. I would have had to be like, your age sucks all up in Lucy's face. Actually, I just remembered that she's five, but neither of us cares.

I'm guessing she's a beagle? Yeah, obviously. Way to go out on a limb there. I bet you're also that person at concerts who says the name of every song out loud so that everyone knows you knew it. That's so presumptu. But correct.

Whoa, get down, Lucy. No, no, no, it's fine. I've decided it's okay for your dog to jump up on me. Actually, let me take this opportunity to undermine you further by petting your jumping dog. Does that feel good, widow, Woosie, undermining your owner? Stay juku, tonight, overthrow your master. We should get going. We're going to suck around the park and then run into you again on the opposite side.

Sounds good. You can pretend to ignore me, but the dogs will pull towards each other, forcing me to diffuse the tension with a half-ass joke. Probably something about how the dogs go way back. I'm already dreading it. You know, talking to strangers under most circumstances is excruciating. But this force banter was worth the effort because I got to watch your dog's puffy tailnub wag really fast for 30 seconds.

Likewise. Happy dogs are pretty much the only thing I can unselfconsciously enjoy anymore. Same. Well, see ya. Bye. Bye-bye, Lucy. My dog's going to pee exactly where you just did in one final adorable act of domination. That's a story by Dan Hopper entitled Every Interaction Between Two Strangers, Walking Dogs, Ever.

Stephanie Wright Thompson and Nick Chokesy performed it for the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us today. Coming up today, we're going to hear from Michael Friedman, a composer who's traveling around America writing a kind of song cycle about the 2016 election, all of it taken verbatim from his interviews with voters. And we're going to visit backstage with the actress Michelle Williams who stars in the play Blackbird,

which is nominated for a Tony Award. Now, the Tony Awards are next week, and I've got a feeling that at least some of the people who tune in are going to be placing bets on how many awards can be won by a single show. Alexander Hamilton. My name is Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton is the biggest thing. to hit Broadway in I don't know how long. It's an innovative show that's squarely in the political zeitgeistin, and needless to say, it's a gigantic blockbuster. But Hamilton didn't start out on Broadway. It was first staged a few miles downtown at the much smaller public theater under the guidance of its artistic director, Oscar Eustace. Eustace has something of a track record for launching influential shows.

Back in the 90s, he commissioned Angels in America from Tony Kushner. and the public theater under Eustace presented Fun Home, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical last year. Eustace is a guy who just knows what to pick and how to make his plays work. Oscar, let's begin with the most obvious thing with Hamilton. It's the biggest theatrical smash of our time, and it's even been pronounced as the great artwork of the era of any kind by the First Lady of the United States.

So tell us the origin story of Hamilton, which I think began with you hearing just one song at the White House. That's exactly right. In April of 2009, Lynn Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton, was invited by the president to come to the first poetry slam at the White House, shortly after his inauguration. And he was asked to perform a piece from In The Heights, his Broadway musical that won a Tony Award.

And Lynn said, well, I'd love to come, but I want to do something else because I just wrote a song. And he did the opening song from Hamilton. And that was the only thing that existed at the time. So literally this show was previewed for the first time in front of the president and first lady at the White House. It was videotaped by the White House and posted on their website. And I saw that video.

And like anybody since who's been associated with Hamilton, I fell in love immediately and then began a process of pursuing Lynn to ask him to do the show at the public. So what's the process? You contact him and then what happens? For three years, he tells me it's not a show. It's a concept album. So he thought it was going to be something like Tommy? Exactly. Or Jesus Christ Superstar, which began as an album and then became a show. I think that that actually had two purposes. One was to hold me at arm's length because I was very eager. and the second was, I think, by saying that to himself, it freed Lynn from the pressure of thinking I'm writing a book musical.

I think it sort of eased the internal pressure for him to say, I'm just writing the songs. So how did it develop, and what was your collaborative role with him? They developed the way we always develop shows, which is readings, workshops, and conversations. And what happens in there is that people involved exchange ideas, exchange criticism, But then a lot of what I was trying to do is talking about what is the actual scope of this story in what is the biggest version of this story. And to me, that biggest version was here is a young man whose idealism for his country and whose self-interest in his own advancement are joined at the hip. and we watch him both advance himself and advance the cause of his country until it reaches a point where it blows up in the middle of the second act.

And to me, the key thing that we had to make happen, because I believe this is true about Hamilton, is we watched him for the first time decide actually the good of the country is separate from and more important than me. Oscar, you are more than anybody I can even imagine steeped in not only theater but political theater, politics in theater. What's in your brain when you're trying to help project like Hamilton along, which is a deeply political theater. It's not just entertaining. Well, you know, everything I've ever read of work done is in my head. You can't think about political theater without thinking about Brecht.

Brecht was probably able to articulate more brilliantly than any writer. or a theoretician in theater history, what the storyline of a play that carries the politics is. And what I just described to you is in a way the fable of Hamilton. And you can tell that story many different ways. But the way I'm telling it right there is very deliberately on the one hand trying to give his character its full tragic journey. And yet, on the other hand, also trying to see that journey as part of the story of America. And if you can get both in the same storyline, then you've got something that really has impact, where through the personal life, you're expressing a value that's bigger than the personal life. Let's talk about politics in your own life.

You're the son of a Democratic Party official and a Communist Party member. Your stepfather ran for the governor of Minnesota on the Communist Party ticket. And I've heard that you even run a book club dedicated to this day to the work of Karl Marx. I don't know if that still goes on. It does. My father was chairman of the first district of the DFL, the Democratic Farm of Labor Party in Minnesota. My stepfather and my mother were members of the Communist Party to the day they died. I actually carry my mother's party card in my wallet. And I have been intensely influenced by both sides of the family. One of the things as a Marxist that I believe in is actually effectively trying to change the world. The goal, is not spiritual purity. The goal is not political correctness. The goal is to make the world a more just and equitable place. Well, Oscar, tell me what that means. You say you're a Marxist. What does that mean, what are the parameters of that, and how does that affect your view of the theater

and what it should be for and how you approach the work? In a way, I find that indistinguishable from my commitment to democracy, because it's basically the belief that every human soul is valuable and equal is a fundamental principle underneath Marxism that I believe in, which is the critique of capitalism is that it is the individual appropriation of collective creation. Everything that is created that actually matters is created by more than one person. It's created by the relationships among groups of people. Of course, the theater is a perfect example of that. Lynn wrote Hamilton.

He owns it. It's his intellectual property. It should be his intellectual property. But it could not have come to life. It could not exist without the work of hundreds of other people. What you want to ultimately believe is that that act of collective creation is the biggest expression of our humanity. The culture belongs to everybody.

Nobody should own the culture. There was a time when the idea of a free public lending library was radical. The idea that somebody could just walk into a building and walk out with one of the great books ever written, not exchange a dime. There's not a marketplace there. There's the idea that this is your birthright. This belongs to you because you're a human being, not because you pay for it. That's a model I would love to emulate with a theater.

And indeed, we do emulate it in Central Park every summer. Free Shakespeare in the park. That anti-market bias is, I think, a terribly important part of what I believe in about the public. How do you deal with the contradictions that lure it and otherwise of the position that you're in? For example, now, Hamilton has a show that you've got to pay a lot of money to get a ticket, unless you're very, very lucky. And yet you do unbelievable programs that take theater to prisons, to schools, all over the place. And on the next day, you're cajoling the very, very wealthy to fork it over to help the public theaters. Everything you just described, there's no contradiction, those things. Those things contain

But there's no contradiction to how I approach it. I'm doing the same thing fundraising that I'm doing when I'm directing a play. You're gathering some people around the table, and I'm trying to convince them if they invest themselves in this thing in front of us, they will be happier. Philanthropy makes people feel better. We have the metrics on it. We have the studies on it. It's a human impulse to try to contribute to something larger than yourself. When you first arrived at the public, you announced that you were a very important.

intended, at least you hoped, to make all tickets to the public completely free. How did the people, the money people at the public react to that announcement? As you can imagine, in our increasingly market-driven society, it's a tremendous uphill battle. But the battle, interestingly enough, is not primarily financial. It wouldn't take an unbelievable amount of support in order to make those tickets free. The battle is ideological. When you're When I first proposed this idea, the universal response I got back is you shouldn't do that. You can't do that, but you shouldn't do that because people don't value something unless they pay for it. I think the ideology that the marketplace is the only true measure of value is so pervasive

in our culture now that holding up an alternative model of value is really bucking the tide. And again, I don't know if I'm going to succeed at this. I don't know if I will succeed at it completely or partially, but I know it's a worthy goal and I know it's something that, again, it changes the mindset about what culture is. It's saying that culture is not a commodity to be purchased. Culture is a birthright that binds people together. You may be the greatest idealist in the city in many ways. And one of the poets that you love, W.H. Auden, said something completely contradictory to. your notion of things.

In one poem, he says, poetry makes nothing happen. Well, look, poetry and the theater are different because poetry is in some way personal, because it's received privately, for the most part.

The theater requires a large group of people to be brought together and to go through an artistic and emotional experience at the same time. It is inherent a social form. At the best, people walk into a theater as consumers, but they walk out as citizens. They walk out feeling like they're part of a body. And do you think that happens with Hamilton? People leave the theater not just thrilled, but somehow transform politically in some way?

I have absolutely no question about that, David. I think Hamilton is going to exert a quiet and totally real influence on the immigration debate in this country. Because, of course, core thesis of Hamilton is this country was created by immigrants and should therefore be considered the property of immigrants. Hamilton is so subversally powerful that is winning over people who completely disagree with its ideology. And that's how people change. Their hearts are taking them somewhere that their minds can't yet go, but their minds follow. We saw that happen with Angels in America. I know Angels in America had an absolutely real influence on what it meant to be gay in this country and how gay people were perceived in this country. How did you feel that impact?

Give you a perfect example. I did my second major production of Angels was at my home in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was living. And because it's Rhode Island, I knew everybody in the audience. It's a tiny place. I did the show and I would watch people leap to their feet at the end of the seven hours, and I'd be standing at the back of the theater, and I could point to their back of their heads and go, he's a homophobe, he's a homophob, she's a homopopoevob, and yet they were leap into their feet

at the end of Angels. No matter what people's ideology was, they were spending seven hours identifying with openly, complexly gay figures. You can't spend seven hours identifying with someone without feeling close to them, without understanding their point of view. Angels of America was not,

the main reason it's now better to be gay in America. But at that particular moment, in the early 90s, it was the major cultural artifact of a change that was sweeping the country and now has gone faster in the last 25 years than I could have imagined. Insofar as you can, in your position, set artistic works into motion and bring them to fruition, even though you're not writing them. What ideological struggle, what issue keeps you up in night? and do you want to see tackled by something on stage at the public theater? That's a really good question. And, David, like many other people in America, I am grappling with how we talk about this new gigantic growth of inequality in our country. How do we talk about that in dramatic terms? Lynn Nottage has written a brilliant play called Sweat, which takes place in Reading, Pennsylvania.

and what happens to this town when the industry's closed, when the steel mills close, what happens to the people, what happens to the community? And one of the things that the plan covers so brilliantly is that at the beginning of the play before the mills are closing, there isn't a race problem in Reading. By the time unemployment has reached over 35 percent, there's a huge race problem. And watching the way that the deunionization of the... of the states is part and parcel of the race issue in the states. It's just, it's brilliant. And so Lynn is one of those writers who I think has got a fantastic sense of it. How do we describe the way our world is working economically?

And that's what I think it's not just I'm hungry for. I think we're all hungry for understanding that. Oscar Eustace, director of the public theater. And this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Coming up, we're going to hear from actress Michelle Williams and then a very different kind of story about a young man who spent years in jail without ever standing trial for a crime.

That's just ahead on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is David Remnick and you're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker's theater critic Hilton Ales has been watching actress Michelle Williams at work for years. She's only 35, but she's been a professional actress for more than half her life. Williams has appeared in movies mostly small, independent ones,

and on stage as Sally Bowles and Cabaret a couple of years ago, and right now in David Harrower's play, Blackbird. Hilton caught up with Michelle Williams before performance of Blackbird backstage at the Belasco Theater. Dorm room or something, it feels very bare bones

in here. Her dressing room is small and hot, and she keeps a humidifier running just to stay limber. There's a photo or two of her daughter, Matilda. She still believes. She still believes. honestly believes. It's getting harder and harder, but she believes in fairies. She believes in Santa Claus, but she's wearing a training bra. So, and she needs, I mean, she is in like both world. I wish it would never end. It's just everything, like all exploding at once, and I love it.

William says her daughter is often at the theater after school, but she doesn't know much about the play. Listen to it. She just knows, like, bad things happen and she's not allowed to see it. But man, I mean, that kid is just... There's a lot of plays you might not want to take your 10-year-old to, but Blackbird has got to stand out. It deals with the aftermath of pedophilia and sexual abuse. Michelle Williams' character is named Una, a young woman who confronts

Ray, a much older man who's played by Jeff Daniels. Fifteen years earlier, Una and Ray had a sexual relationship, and Una was just 12 years old. Williams is on stage for the entire hour and a half performance, and when she first read the play,

she couldn't let it go. It had the defining quality for me that means, well, time to go to work. I just don't, I don't know if I can do this. That means I have to try. It is the thing that gets me out of bed if I don't know how to do it. I read this. I saw the six-page monologue in the middle and I thought, I have no idea how to approach this. I must try it. After I wrote about the play, I wanted to know how you did it. How How did you go into this character? And what did you have to use to find her?

The play. And it's really where I found her. Like, I'll often do like a lot of extracurricular research for a movie, books, articles, watch things, read things. And this is really, it was really just a process of like, I spent so much time with the play. I started learning the monologue three months before we started rehearsing. So the words were like a current running through me. and everything that I understood about her, I gleaned from the play itself.

She walks in with a lot of authority and a lot of ideas about how things are going to go and a lot of gumption and a lot of guts. And, like, there is a survivor who walks on that stage. But it's a cobbled together self that falls apart over the course of their conversation. That's the performing that I love. When I saw you in Cabaret,

I loved her so much, and at the same time, I knew it was how Isha Wood had conceived her. I think what I wrote was, I said she clatters along like a typewriter, like she just kind of keeps beating herself in this way, and you have this ability to make intimacy happen in an imperfect way. That's the best compliment ever is seen. It's what I see in life. it's what I see in the world and it's what I seems true to me

and it's what I want to offer as like that's how I observe things that's how I experience life that it's full of these cracks and imperfections and sometimes it can be really jarring and difficult to watch like Isherwood said about Sally

she had the vocabulary and mentality of a 12 year old girl comic to the point of ridiculous that kind of person that can be a lot to take but I like making those gambols and saying like how much can I push can you love

can you love this person because loving people is like the hardest thing to figure out and so I really am intrigued in playing characters to push as far as I can the limits of an audience ability to love them. Because I find that's what life is really about. When you're in an intimate relationship with somebody,

like, can I love them in their totality? Yes. Was there ever any alternative to you from performing? Like, if you hadn't found performing, what do you think you would have done? God knows. I really, like, I hate to think what would have happened to me if I hadn't.

work has my work has slowly has become something that I can really like a string that I can hold on to when there's not a lot of like ground underneath me and it has really carried me through

so much and if I weren't doing this I mean I would probably just I would I would be a stay at home mom I can't really imagine and I don't think there's a job where you can just read books all day.

I don't think that exists. This has turned out to be, I don't know, I don't think I was, I don't even know if I really was destined for it in any way. I was really terrible when I started out. I mean, really a truly terrible actress. Really? Yeah, I wasn't gifted because I didn't know anything. I didn't have any examples of it.

Right. I had a desire for escapism, expression, words. I've always loved words. I had those desires. but I didn't know how to form a craft around them. You know, I auditioned for two years as a kid, and I didn't get a single job. Two years.

For two years? You've got to be pretty resilient. Pretty resilient and pretty nuts to stick it out, pretty desperate or something. But you just knew that it was a way to talk, really? I knew it was a way to talk. I knew I could use somebody else's words to communicate feelings that were confusing to me. Are you thinking about something else?

Moving forward, theater-wise? I want to keep building on what I know. I mean, I do this because when I took Cabaret and I did it for almost a year, I said to myself, you know, I don't know what's going to happen and I don't exactly know how to do this. But I know that I'll be better. I know that no matter what happens, if I fail horribly, if I embarrass myself, if I let myself down, I will be a better actor when I'm done. And that's worth the risk so that I can continue to do this for a long time.

And I'm tired, but I don't want to stop learning. I don't really know what's going to happen after the show is over. We're still just trying to get through the next, not trying to get through. I mean, we're lucky to... Yeah. It really is. It really is the work of my dreams. Actress Michelle Williams

talking with the New Yorker's Hilton Alls. You can find out more about the play Blackbird at New YorkerRadio.org. Now, before we hear about our next story, take a moment and think back to your high school years, where you lived, who your friends were, what you were into. Now imagine that your junior and senior years of high school never happened.

And instead, you had spent those years trapped in a jail cell without ever being convicted of a crime. This is not a story out of Kafka. It's what happened to Khalif Browder, a teenager from the Bronx. When Browder was just 16, he was held for robbery and assault charges after allegedly stealing a backpack.

He spent three years on Rikers Island, New York City's notorious jail complex, waiting to go to trial. New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonerman wrote about Browder in 2014, and the case put a spotlight on all the failings of New York City's justice system, delays in the courts,

the overuse of solitary confinement, teenagers charged as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. Two years after Browder got out of jail, he took his own life. His suicide became national news and was mentioned by President Obama in an op-bed condemning the overuse of solitary confinement.

The anniversary of Browder's death is on June 6th, and as a memorial, Jennifer Gonerman went back to the recordings from her hours of interviews with him. You can hear her pen scratching in the background as she takes notes. I met Khalif about nine months after he got out of jail. This was early in 2014. Here, each of your food was hot. Yeah, no, so I just have like a bunch of little questions. We get together near his lawyer's office.

Usually Kleefe showed up wearing a hoodie with one earbud in his ear. the other dangling down. All right. I have a whole list of stuff. He came across as shy and quiet, but when I would turn on a tape recorder, he would talk, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch.

Not just about his time in jail, but about his life before when he was still just a sophomore in high school. I'm not going to talk to you and tell you I was a good kid and did all my work. I did do my work, but I did fool around with the girls and the kids playing in the hallways.

I was a kid. Doing what kids did. We were playing around in the bathroom. Sometimes get the hallway pads, play around in my friend's classroom or whatever. The teacher would be like, get out. I'm like, all, all right, I'm sure, miss. I'm going to go with my class. Stuff like that.

Like you flirt with girls in the hallway, that kind of thing? Right. Caliph's life as a high school student ended late one night in May of 2010. To be honest, I thought it was just a routine stop and search. Well, stop and frisk. When they came out the car, they told me, my friend to put our hands on the wall, and I just thought it was a search. No worry about it. You're just going to go to the precinct. We just want to figure out some things.

Most like you're going to go home. I know I didn't do anything, so I said, all right, I go to the precinct, but then I'm going to come home. But then I never went home. Khalif was taken over the bridge to Rikers Island, where he entered a whole different reality. That whole Rikers Island thing is one big misunderstanding. Like, the right and wrong is weird in there. Like, was right to them isn't right, and was wrong isn't wrong. It took a whole lot of getting used to it in there. For most of Khalif's time on Rikers, he was in solitary confinement, usually a 12 by 7 foot cell for at least 23 hours a day.

He got sent to solitary for fighting with other inmates, but once you got there, it was very easy to rack up more and more days. And the worst time of year was the summer. They have a vet and it blows heat for some reasons. I don't know why. You would think that it would blow out cold air, but it's heat. If you put your hand next to it, it's heat. The vents did serve another purpose, though.

All day long, inmates had conversations through them. I'll fake for friends somebody. What do you call it fake for friends? Right, because I'm not really trying to become your friend, but I'm talking to you, but then they feel like they're your friend, and then they want to talk about all this other stuff. I don't want to talk about that stuff. What do they want to talk about?

Gang stuff or I robbed this person or I shot this person A bunch of dumb stuff and I don't want to hear that And then there's times when they talk to themselves And yell at themselves and bang their heads on the wall all day And they're very loud You know it's real because they'll be in an event with you For about a month or two and they do it all day every day So you know it's not a game

What if it's 11 o'clock in night That could be going on 11 o'clock at night? That could be going on 11 o'clock at night? No, 11. It'll be 4 a.m. the morning. And then dude would be kicking, yelling to the top as long as ah. Then you try to talk to them, but they don't understand what you're trying to say because they're mentally disturbed so they get mad and then they start doing it more.

I mean, I have one dude. He was talking to himself all day, every day. He's actually having a conversation just like that with himself all day. That's the type of person where once in the blue morning, I really listened to and just laughed to myself. Like, there was a time when, you know, he was talking about a video game. Grant F. Auto, and one of the Grandf Ordo's that he was talking about, I actually played it. So when he was talking to himself about it and the stuff you do in the game,

I was actually laughing because he was telling the truth. But when you're trying to go to sleep and he's yelling and that goes out the window, you're like, it's not even funny no more. It's really annoying. Kaleaf missed his junior and senior years of high school. Teenage inmates do attend classes on Reiki. But because Khalif was in solitary, all that he had was something called cell study. A correction officer would slip worksheets under his door and pick them up a few days later.

The way I see it was like they put me in jail for something I didn't do. I might as well try to do something. So I used to take the school thing series. I used to really be looking forward to taking a test and the CEO will come and then she'll pick up people's schoolwork and I'm on the top tier. And I call her, yo, miss, comes on such and such cell on the top, I got work for you. Hey, I'm coming up there right now, then they don't come. Then you call Captain, Captain, my work, what's going on?

I'm gonna find out. Just give me an hour, I'm gonna come back and see what's going on. Then nobody, before you know, the shift's changing. You're like that. You're trying to really progress. You're really, this is school. You're not talking about anything else. You're talking about school, and they still don't even respect it.

All day I'm thinking about that. I'm hungry. hungry. I'm hungry. I used to actually beg this correction officers. They would finish surfing the food and there's always extras. But it would be, you know, two, three slices of bread left over. But I'm hungry. So I would ask him, I would say, you know, can I get that bread? And he would tell me no. You don't want that. Why not? Because it's the end piece of the bread. You know, I don't care if that's the end piece of the bread. I'm hungry. I want that bread. Nah, you don't want it. And they'll tell me no.

Khalif endured violence on Rikers Island at the hands of correction officers and other inmates but when I asked him what was the worst part of being on Rikers he didn't say the violence it was the hunger sometimes if you made a guard mad when he came around with the meal trays he'd skip your cell

you're just stuck in a cell and you're getting starved and you're hungry and then at nighttime you can't even go to sleep because your ribs are touching literally how can you not get angry at that Just being in a situation where you can't do nothing and you, you know, you're helpless, that's very stressful, like, and you're just powerless. When it's hot and the walls are sweating, the heat's coming out the vent, you didn't get in the shower past two days, your cell's dirty, and then you read all your books already, and you're just sitting there,

that's very stressful, like, it's crazy. Do you feel yourself changing? like, I don't know, getting more angry or short temper or... The anger would come when I would be in my cell and I would get starved. Then when I try to talk to their superiors, when I try to talk to them, they just walk away from me and then I'm in myself, so it's not like, I could tap his back and be like, hey, I'm talking to you. There was one way to get the attention of a captain.

When the officers delivered the food trays and picked them up, they had to unlock the slot in the cell door. If you were quick enough, you could shove your arm out through the slot and keep it there. The inmates called this holding your slot. Because if you don't hold your slot, you're like an unheard voice. Correction officers would not put you in the shower, and they'll disrespect you or do all types of stuff to you, and you can't tell nobody. You'll try to talk to the captain. They'll just keep walking on you. Nobody wants to hear you. You have no voice.

If you hold your slot, they give you more days on that? It depends because you got some captives that they talk. They're working out with you, like, what's going on? Like a regular person. Right. But then you got some of them, oh, you're holding your slot. I don't care. Write him up.

So when you take matters into your hands, and it's like a double-edged sword, it might work and it might not work. I used to tell my mom's stuff the correctional officers to do to me, and it's like, I remember the days when I actually be able to come to my mom, like, mom, I need help, da-da-da-da-da-s something happened to me in school.

My mom be there, get me out of trouble. But now I'm in jail. I'm in jail, and then the correction officers are violated my rights. My mom can't even help me. It's a weird situation. My mom was always able to help, and now my mom was just crying on the phone. It was out of her hands. So it's stressing, especially during the times like Christmas and Thanksgiving

when I'm in solitary confinement. And I call my mom, but then telling me we're eating this, where you're doing this, we're doing that. And I'm just sitting in solitary confinement for something I didn't do. A few times the stress seemed to overtake Khalif. One night he tied his bed sheet into a noose and tried to hang himself from his light fixture. By then he had been on Rikers for almost two years and was still waiting for his case to go to trial. Every six or eight weeks, he was brought to the Bronx to stand before a judge. Every time with the court, it was always that's sad of me that's telling me, like, you're going to go home.

But then I try not to hype myself up because it hurts when you think you're going home, and then you don't go home. That's all I used to cut in my mind. I can't wait to go to trial, so I could prove I didn't do it. That's all I used to tell myself, I'm going to go to trial, want to go to trial, and no trial, no trial. And I used to tell myself, why aren't they ready for trial? I don't understand. Finally, after Khalif had made 30 trips back and forth to court,

a judge told him that he could go home today. All he had to do, she said, was to plead guilty. The first thing that came to my head is, for them to offer me something like that, they have to know they wrong. So they know they're wrong, there's no point in taking it. And I told her, I didn't do it. I'm not saying I did something I didn't do. She's like, I'll let you go home today.

You won't have no probation. She said a bunch of things that sounded good. And it really was tempted, too. It was a lot mentally because half of you wants to get out of there. And the other half don't want to leave just over the strength of a principle. You know, all of that put together just made my head go crazy. It's astonishing. but Khalif turned down the offer.

Even though he knew that if he went to trial and lost, he could get up to 15 years in state prison. After that court day, I cried and I said, yo, what if I made a mistake? I always knew that there's always people that's innocent that go to trial and they blow. You know, like, what if I go to trial and I do blow? Dudes that I was fake my friends in there,

he said tell me, Khalif, why, just take it, go home. I told him, bro, you. You don't understand how I feel right now. I didn't do this. I've been in here 30-something months. You think I'm gonna just take that and it's all okay and I'm gonna just go home? No.

So all the other guys on Rikers, they don't understand what you're talking about, right? They're like, they don't make any sense to them. They call me all types of names. You're dumb, you're stupid. If that was me, I would have said I did it, went home. And I'm not gonna lie, I mean, it did get to me. When they used to talk like that,

I used to go to myself and lay down and think like, you know, maybe I am crazy. or maybe I am going too far, but I just did what I felt was right. At his next court date in the spring of 2013, the judge dismissed the charges against Khalif Browder altogether. He moved back home into his mother's house in the Bronx and enrolled in a GED class. But he could not stop thinking about that day in court, how nobody had apologized him or even acknowledged the fact that he had just lost three years of his life. You can't understand it if you've never been to Rikers Island. It's not like out here.

Out here, you just live life and go about your business. And there, there's no living life. There's no life at all in there. It's just a hell. It's one big hell. There's no happiness to it at all. If we weren't sitting down and I wasn't asking you about this, do you think you would be thinking about it otherwise?

I think about jail and the stuff that happened in there and the stuff that I've seen in there every day. I just feel as if there's no way that somebody could possibly tell me to just get over it and stop thinking about that stuff. There's no way. Is that something that people say to you? I mean, some people feel as if I need to get over it, but, you know, it's not easy to get over it. In the spring of 2014, Khalif found out that he had passed his GED exam on the first try,

and he was ecstatic. He enrolled at Bronx Community College, eventually earning a GPA of 3.5. But his mental health problems continued. He had attempted suicide, and a few times he was confined in a hospital psychiatric ward. Last June, on a Saturday afternoon, I got a phone call. I saw that it was Khalif's attorney, and I knew that it was bad news. He wouldn't usually call on a Saturday. Khalif had killed himself.

We went to his house that night. His parents, siblings, cousins, aunts. and uncles were there, and everyone seemed to be in shock. On the second floor, his father showed me where Khalif had pulled an air conditioner out of the wall, looped a cord around his neck, and pushed his body out through the opening. He was 22 years old. That was a year ago. Now, when I listen back to my interviews with Khalif, I wonder, why did he spend so many hours confiding in me, a stranger, about the worst experiences of his life? I know he wanted his suffering to count for something so that other people wouldn't have to go through what he endured.

But I also think about how in the end, Khalif never got his day in court. And I think he really just wanted the chance to finally tell his story. My friends that was in school. They didn't know anything because I bumped into a few of them. They would ask me, where are you been? I haven't seen you out. I told him, like, I was arrested. I got locked up.

And I had to tell him the sob story. What do you tell them? Like, how do you tell the short version of that story? I would tell them how I got arrested. did it for something I didn't do. I took 37 months to prove that and then do it. Khalif Browder, who died last year on June 6th, talking with the New Yorker's Jennifer Gonerman.

You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We have one more story for you this hour, but before we hear that, I want to check in with one of my colleagues, Daniel Zolevsky. I've known Dan a really long time.

He's the features director at The New Yorker, and I see him, I don't know, 20 times a day, but he never fails to surprise me with what he's interested in all the stuff that he knows about. He reads about as much as it's possible for a human being to read. Dan, what are you reading these days? There's actually one of my favorite books that I don't think people read as much anymore, which is Ida Calvino's Barron in the Trees, which is from the late 50s, a big, sort of warm-hearted, charming, almost Y-A kind of novel about a young baron who doesn't want to sort of fulfill his royal duties

and goes to live up in the trees for his entire life and never comes down. And the book kind of in a really just wonderful way, you know, answers the way that a kid would say, well, how would you do that? Like, how would you go to the bathroom? How would you sleep? All those kind of questions are kind of answered. But then when I think about it now, it's almost like terraforming. or something. Like, if you were to go into this place where you think it would be impossible to live,

if you have the human mind, and if you have observation, and you have kind of confidence in your own ability, resourcefulness. You could have to create a whole world. And would you recommend this kids? Yes. Dan, what else you got for us? Google Photos. And what interests me about Google Photos, you know, it's something where you can take all of your pictures, store it in the cloud. That's not interesting. What's interesting about it is the algorithms that silently work on your photo collection. and start providing memories for you. You'll suddenly get a little message that says, here was your life four years ago.

And they've turned it into a little story, a little photo album. But it's more that it just, it selects the photos in which your smile is the brightest. Does it get rid of your terrifying Aunt Irma? Yeah, it gets rid of all the kind of the shots that you wouldn't necessarily want to keep and just kind of creates a kind of pristine,

slightly sanitized version of our lives. And that's what I think is kind of, creepy about it, though I think this is something that we're going to live with. There's just something about having this incredible visual archive. I mean, everyone, you know, we've had in the past letters, you can go through your letters and go through the past, but there's nothing just swifter in terms of like, you know, really filling up your mind with memories than photos. To me, like, there's something that we have to reckon with the fact that we've creating these visual libraries of themselves, and now the fact that we can comb through them and create

these sort of new pathways, it's going to make us even more obsessed and tell kind of new stories about who we are. The New Yorkers Daniel Zolevsky talking about how to spend even more time online with Google photos and the 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees by Idle of Calvina. The last few months we've been following the progress of a composer and songwriter named Michael Friedman. Friedman has written Broadway and off-Broadway shows, but right now, he's been following primary elections across the United States talking to voters and non-voters about politics.

He's got a very particular method. He records long interviews and then uses the transcripts verbatim to create his songs. The New Yorker's Sarah Larson has been checking in with him and they spoke about his visit to Colorado Springs. When you write your songs, you talk to people for a long time and you transcribe, how do you figure out what to use as lyrics and how do you figure out how to shape the song based on those long conversations. You know, it's interesting. The song, I think, that we're going to hear today, took a little longer for me because I was really intrigued by this interview. I actually did two different interviews with this young woman. And finding the spine of her story, which is a very

compelling story, took me a little while. I just found this young woman in Colorado very compelling because her story I felt like I had so many of the things I've been witnessing. on college campuses and in cities. She's from the south and living in the west, so she brings a very interesting sensibility to sort of the way she's looking at Colorado as someone who's from Georgia. She's politically active and also in some ways

a little politically discouraged and speaks very beautifully about being a young African-American woman in Colorado, about being a young woman on a college campus. I found her both eloquent and at times also a little lost, which I think is true of a lot of college students now. And like many of us. And yeah, maybe that's not just college students. Maybe we're all a little eloquent and a little lost.

Did you talk to some, you talked to some native Coloradans? Yeah, I talked to also a bunch of college students who were actually, who had grown up in Colorado Springs. And I spoke to many, many an actual native Colorado, some pretty intense libertarians. Colorado is full of really interesting, really spring. and really complicated libertarians and a lot of Republicans, a lot of Democrats. Colorado is a state in which all the chaos of America seems to find its way. It might be the scenic beauty means that everyone sort of likes being there. I'm registered in Colorado, couldn't vote in the primary.

I had a class thing, so I wasn't able to do that. It's been hard to follow the primaries. I don't have TV, so the way I get my information is like Facebook, where everyone is posting these arguments. It's been really hard to piece together because there's so much coming at me at once and I don't know which one is legit. I'm from Atlanta, but after being in Georgia forever,

I was like, I need to get out of here. First, I went to public school, like my mom's an assistant principal. There's a lot of corruption. And then I switched to a private high school, one of like 10 black kids, and that was a total culture shock. It was like, oh, wow, people are actually rich and they have a bunch of money and get cars when they turn 16

and politically like they would say, they're going to take my parents' money. and it's like they aren't going to take your parents' money. And senior year, I kind of took a break from religion, which was like a big deal, and I got an argument with my mom. I'd always gone to church every week, and I had always gone through these phases like, yes, yes, God,

then like, I don't know. Yes, yes, God, I don't know. So I told my mom I didn't believe in God and was questioning it, and she was like, I'm not going to pay for college, so I had to apply for some loans, and it came down too like money, so I ended up here. Colorado Springs is a very strange place,

a lot of religious presence, a lot of military presence, and a lot of conservative presence surrounding us, which makes people not want to go out and meet people. And this is supposed to be like this liberal school, but I guess maybe I just don't know what that means, because people here are very hesitant to, like, try and really understand things they don't know, like last year with the yikaks. Oh, there's this anonymous app where you can post anonymous content,

and we had this whole week where all. all these racist things were posted, like go back to the cotton fields like black women aren't beautiful. And then we had to have an assembly on it, and that was a disaster. And the TP, the TP is for Nesu, the Native American Students' Union, and the TP has always been disrespected, and they posted on Yikak, which I guess is always a bad idea. Can you please respect the space? And of course, people commented about how Native Americans are alcoholics and our government is just Giving them money and don't play the victim and shut up.

You've never lived in a teepee. And I feel like a lot of people don't even know that Nesu exists. And I think there's a lot of things people don't understand and don't want to understand. Like in the election, I'm a little nervous. My friends and I don't know who to vote for. If Bernie doesn't make it, we of course don't want to vote for Trump, but we also don't want to vote for Hillary. There does seem to be on campus this big divide.

between Hillary and Bernie, but like, what is the appeal of Hillary? Because the people I know who are for Hillary are very for her, and they talk about her a lot, and they, like, worship her, and she's, like, really funny, and she was on the TV show, Broad City, but a lot of times when you bring up stuff she's done, that's not okay, they kind of just ignore it. I don't know. I actually really want to know who my mom is going to vote for.

I think she's probably gonna vote for Hillary. She doesn't really talk about politics much. I asked her and there was no response, so I just don't know. I know a lot of people think, oh, Bernie can't win. It can't happen in America. That's not realistic. And that's a big thing, what they see as realistic to what America is. Like, I try not to think about how I'm gonna make money.

It's like one of those things that I know is there. One of the things I'm gonna have to think about what to do about after college that I'm trying to avoid because I haven't started getting any bills for my loans yet. I never think about retirement. I mostly think about ways that I can still live a decent life. And I've come to the conclusion a lot of people in my family had kids really young, like my mom had me at 21, so she had to pay for kids and daycare and student loans.

So I'm like, I'm not going to have any kids. I'm going to pay off my student loans and live in an apartment and have roommates. I'm never going to retire. I'm going to be working forever if I'm lucky. Michael, that's great. I love that song. It always kills me when she's the decision is I'm not going to have kids and I'm going to live in an apartment and have roommates. None of the things, not that there's anything wrong with that.

And work forever. And work forever if she's lucky. Yeah, the sort of culture of diminished expectations. Yeah. And it seems like the way she says it is mature, not despairing. but maybe I'm not not the opposite of despairing was an incredibly inspiring wow um young woman and so for me it was in it was complicated because it almost made me worry about choices i've made that possibly this is someone who's less greedy and um and that her realism is you have like dream big and you'll get

to do anything you ever want and the world is yours is also the culture of like destroy the planet and don't worry about other people and be thoughtless Yeah. Part of me wanted to be like, no, no, dream big. And then part of me wanted to be like, maybe you're right. So it's slightly heartbreaking and also possibly true. Thank you so much, Michael. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Sarah.

Composer Michael Friedman, talking with the New Yorker Sarah Larson. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for this week. Next week on the show, interviews with the actor Damien Lewis and the late Zahahad, the Great Architect. If you want to stay in touch with the show, find out what's on and what's coming, we've made it easier for you. Go to New Yorker.com slash radio newsletter. Spelled normally, no capitals or anything,

New Yorker.com slash radio newsletter. And of course, you can talk to us all the time on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music from Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.