The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 34: Cats vs. Dogs and the Late Zaha Hadid

Episode Date: June 10, 2016

When it comes to the war on terror, bomb-sniffing dogs are essential companions. When it comes to your sex life, no animal provides blissful privacy like a cat. So which is the superior domesticated animal? In this episode, the canine partisans Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out with the feline lovers Ariel Levy and Anthony Lane to settle the debate once and for all. Also, Lauren Collins talks with the British actor Damian Lewis about playing the part of an American on “Homeland” and “Billions,” and the late architect Zaha Hadid speaks with John Seabrook about her early life. 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. Ladies and gentlemen, all rise. Sit. I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, and possibly in a career-ending move, your judge for the day. For the last 10,000 years, give or take, since humankind first started domesticating pets, people, for one reason or another, have been arguing about which is better.

Cats or dogs? A global question. We decided to settle this debate once and for all, live on stage at the New Yorker Festival, with a panel of highly distinguished experts on each side. That's coming up on the New Yorker radio hour. We'll also hear a conversation with the late Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win architecture's highest award.

And Lauren Collins talks with Damien Lewis, who played an impossible. elegant terrorist on homeland, and now plays an impossibly elegant hedge fund guy on billions. That's all ahead today. But first, cats and dogs. Now listen, I don't have a dog or a cat in this fight. I have to admit that domestic animals and me, we just, we don't get along all that well. So I am the ideal person to have a certain kind of dispassionate judgment in this case. But you are the jury. You, the audience, will decide the verdict.

So let's get started. Opening for the team dogs is defense counsel, Mr. Adam Gopnik. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, your honor. Thank you, opposing counsel. I stand before this audience in whose hands the verdict will be decided tonight, not in any sense as an enemy of the cat,

are all the things that it represents. If I were inclined to do that, I might point out that without cats, my good friend, Andrew Lloyd Weber would have no career. We could compile a list of such offenses that we would hold cats liable for, but we are not going to do that. Not tonight.

All we have on our side, ladies and gentlemen, is simple truth. The truth of the dog will be presented to you tonight in contradiction to what I can only call with affection and esteem the cult of the cat. And I use the word cult, my friends, very advisedly. For what is a cult? After all, Mr. Lane, a cult is simply an occasion when a group of otherwise intelligent people invest an object with emotions and intellectual powers that it possesses only through their projection

of them into that creature. And in it, the cultists always insist that they can see signs of extraordinary powers to which all rational people are blind. On the other hand, we have the dog. We have the evolutionary miracle of the dog. Thank you. We go back to the cave of Chauvet. 50,000 years ago when Neolithic man was just beginning to scrawl on the sides of the cave, what do we find there? We find the track of only one animal, the track of a dog walking across the floor of the cave

in perfect unison with a small child who must be his master. Think about that, that the dog was the first animal to willfully break the circle of the campfire, to enter into co-dependence with man. We will show you how dogs can tend, how dogs can shepherd, how dogs can hunt, how dogs can care. We will show you dogs helping blind people across the street. I would challenge you, my good friend, Mr. Lane, to show us a single cat who has ever helped the blind across the street. But we will show you, I think, more than that. We will show, for instance, that all dogs are Democrats and all cats are Republicans. And if you think about it,

it's necessarily true. Dogs are social animals par excellence. They are exemplars of loyalty, engagement. It is the cat who removes himself from society, who pretends that others do not exist and need not be cared for. The cat is Republican in every imaginable way, and it is the sociable dog who is the true Democrat. So the choice before you tonight will not merely be the choice between the cult of the cat and the enduring truth of the dog, but also, and remember this when you vote between your deepest political and ethnic allegiances, which we will ask you to express. I turn the lectern over to my good friend, the attorney for the cat. Mr. Lane. Your serene majesty of ultimate power and oneness.

Dog people. It's wonderful that you've all felt that you could come here tonight to fulfill your civic duty as a jury. I live on a house. which has cats and dogs, fine examples of each. And to be fair, living with them all has increased my affection for and appreciation of the dog. What a piece of work as a dog. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, how an action like an angel, how an appreciation, like a dog. I come down in the morning. The two dogs greet me not with Good Day Master or how nice to see you again after a break of seven and a half hours,

but as if I were a gravely wounded and richly decorated soldier returning from the First World War. And meanwhile, the cat is sitting up with her on the window still going, if we're going to understand cats this evening, and I have absolutely no doubt that we're not going to, the way to imagine a cat is, at every point, it is smoking an invisible, filterless white French cigarette. Everything that we love and admire about a dog

is bad education for the soul. The way that they reward everything, you could possibly ever want, that we tell us that every day is going to be great. Every day is going to be the best day you've ever had in your life. Every day you're going to jump for joy. Your friends are always there for you, like Rachel and Ross, you know, full of brimming with interesting smells. If you're a serious perceptive person, if you are someone who lives in the world and know

what it consists of, you know that that's wrong, okay? and essentially what a dog is asking you to do in complete distinction what Adam said is to live a lie because there are sometimes those days when you just want to be alone not because you're a lou from a Republican but maybe just feel like being alone then look to the cat if cleanliness is next to godliness are both ranked just below tuna welcome to my template all I'm asking really is that you live in truth because truth

is cats. Cats is truth. That's all you know on earth and all you need to know, apart from the fact that the inside of a vole is, if anything, even more interesting than the outside. The naming of cats is a difficult matter, but the voting for cats is very simple indeed. You know what to do. The next speaker is from the dog side, Malcolm Gladwell, who's the author of four New York Times super-selling books, I would say, including what the dog saw. and other adventures, which contains his profile of the dog whisperer, Caesar Milan.

Mr. Gladwell. Thank you. Judge, members of the jury, I think it is really up to me in debates like this to really see the big picture. To raise the questions, I think, frankly, very few of us, particularly members of the cat side of Team Cat,

have either the imagination or, frankly, the courage to bring up, which is that this whole debate has massive national security implications. Allow me to explain with a story from my own experience. Not long ago, I was on an American Airlines flight from Miami to New York, and there was a bomb scare. And the pilot pulled the plane to the very edge of the airport, and the baggage handlers came,

and they unloaded every piece of luggage on the plane, and put it in a long row up and down the tarmac 200 yards long, and brought out an absolutely... adorable German Shepherd with his handler. And the German Shepherd started at one end, tail wagging furiously, and sniffed each bag up and down in one long, furious gallop, all the while projecting an air of absolute purpose and happiness. And thus clear of danger, we resumed our journey.

Now, allow me to make the absolutely obvious, but nonetheless, so often overlooked, observation. No cat would do that. Now why are cats so resolutely indifferent to pulling their weight in the war against terror? One answer might be the cat is ill-equipped to handle the task of bomb-snipping. That's nonsense. You know, as well as I do, that their noses are certainly up to the task. Another standard response might be, well, the cat is somehow indifferent to the threat that explosive materials pose to life. And we could put that to rest so easily, merely by popping a balloon next to the ear of a sleeping cat, observe his reaction.

He is absolutely aware of the threat explosive materials posed to life. So what's the answer? Well, I think it's staring at us in the face. The cat does not sniff for bombs because the cat doesn't want to sniff for bombs. Now, why? I think the answer lies in the famous distinction that has been brought to bear by the psychologist Carol Dweck. Carol Dweck, who in some of her seminal work over the last 10 years has argued that human beings can be divided into one of two groups, those with what she calls a fixed mindset and those with what she calls an effort mindset. The person with the fixed mindset, according to Dweck, has a notion that their abilities are innate.

People with an effort mindset, on the other hand, think of their abilities as fluid, as things that can be enhanced by effort and practice. I think you can see where I'm going with this. Dogs have an effort mindset. Cats have a fixed mindset. The cat does not sniff for bombs because if he misses one, he greatly fears that he has put his entire essence, his very catiness at risk. The dog has no such anxiety, right? He says to himself as he propels himself down the runway filled with happiness and purpose that it is better to have sniffed and missed than never to have sniffed at all.

Think about that. Think about that when Team Cat goes on and on as they surely will about how cute cats are. And when they show you a cute picture, remind yourself how many lives have been needlessly put at risk because of the cat's excessive self-regard. We are engaged in a life or death struggle in the West, and the cat is sleeping on the sidelines. Aria Levy is a staff writer for the magazine in her article, Living Room Leopards, appeared almost against my will in both the magazine

and the big New Yorker book of cats. I kid. It was a marvelous piece. Ari Levy. Malcolm, you want to talk about the truth? Palo came into my life as a bit of very large baggage with my last relationship. A decade ago, Palo and his owner

moved into my one-bedroom apartment, and immediately the cat and I recognized each other for what we were. were, natural enemies. From my perspective, an enormous gray monster was now taking up space in my tiny apartment, shedding, shudding, shudding the furniture. For his part, Palo understood that it was my fault that he was now stuck in a sealed box in the sky, and he loathed me for this.

He expressed his feelings by hissing at me and periodically sinking his teeth and or claws into my flesh. But over the years, something inexplicable happened. That cat grew on me like a fungus. I started getting a kick out of his relentless sourness. I looked forward to seeing his sullen, scornful face when I got home at night. If he made a mess, I cleaned it up. If he destroyed a garment or a chair or, say, an outrageously expensive and beautiful Turkish rug,

I shrugged, sadly. He taught me something I was shocked to learn. A certain kind of very deep love. has nothing much to do with compatibility. If you spend enough time taking care of another being, you may eventually find yourself powerless to stem the transformation of your resentment into adoration. Living with cats immunizes you against codependence.

And for a guy who talks a lot about being Jewish, you don't seem to have gone to too many shrinks, Mr. Gopnik, because codependence is not a good thing. us. Biologists have been known to call cats commensal domesticates, which means they choose to live with humans, but they retain the ability to revert back to true feral status, unlike other domesticated species. What you glean from the general feline vibe is essential evolutionary truth. Cats can take us or leave us.

As Thorsten Veblen put it, the cat lives with man on terms of equality. By contrast, he said, a dog has the gift of unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's moves. I say liberty, equality, fraternity, cats. We are now at the stage of closing statements. We will first hear from the canine side, Adam Gopnik, and then from the feline, Anthony Lane. Mr. Gopnik. Thank you. Thank you, Your Honor.

Thank you, members of the CAT team. Thank you, my colleagues. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I think this is the easiest decision you will ever have to make in your lives. Again and again, as we listen to the arguments from Team Cat, what did we hear? Yes, it's true that cats are melancholic and isolated,

and sometimes in our most melancholic and isolated and depressive moods, we need. the company of a cat. My friend, Ari, has spoken of the relentless sourness of the cat she was presenting to us as Exhibit A in the case for cats. I don't want to appeal to your shallow or your deep-seated political allegiances

in any obvious way. But I do ask you if the young Margaret Thatcher had been given a dog... This is... And this is not a narrow question of Democrats and Republicans Republicans, it crosses oceans.

And the question of the cats' association with all that is wrong in the world far transcends Margaret Thatcher. So ask yourselves as you cast this terribly important and deciding vote tonight, if you want to stand with this genus,

or if you want to cross over and live alongside those who cherish the dog, J.F.K. Who brought a dog with him into the decision room during the Cuban Missile Crisis, knowing that it would bring a note of geniality and perspective to all of his executive committee.

Look in your heart. We ask for your vote tonight for Team Dog. Thank you. Mr. Lane, for the feline team. To the dog, life is all, well, how can we say? It's fidelity, it's kindness and a friendship. To the cat, all his own. mystery and bewilderment, and it presents us with this beautiful vision of the universe as being,

well, the universe is like a cat. It is unknowable, lethal, very beautiful, and beyond our comprehension. It shows us the cat that even when you think you've solved a puzzle, it remains a puzzle and in fact deepens into a mystery. So what is it that dogs actually do? They delay flights. We know that. They fetch game, which is really, really helpful when you've just shot a brace of partridge in Gramercy Park. Did Tom Jones stand up at Las Vegas and say, what's new? Poochee-Woch? No, he didn't. Did T.S. Eliot write a poem called Macavity, the Clarity Dog? I know. Did James Bond have a blonde bisexual girlfriend called Doggy Galore? I don't think so.

The cat is both wilder and yet somehow more urbane. It is less domesticated, but it is more civilized. We could have gone with that. And the other thing we could have told you finally is that cat people have better sex. And why is that? Firstly, because we are schooled in sensuality. Secondly, because there is not a flatulent Labrador

in the middle of the bed. And thirdly, because we are so refined that afterwards we don't go on about the fact that we did it in the kitty position. Anthony. Long live the cat. We will a shah. Long live the cats.

We will getto. Mau White's son. Thank you very much. Anthony Lane, on stage at the New Yorker Festival along with Adam Gopnik, Malcolm Gladwell, and Ariel Levy. We've had stirring arguments from both sides, and we're going to take a brief recess before hearing the verdict. And coming up tips on getting into character from somebody who ought to know the average. actor Damien Lewis. For one role, I wore a woman's thong for the whole film shoot instead of my own underwear. Whatever works, you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to

the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the first part of this hour, we put some of the great minds of our time arguing a question that's as old as civilization itself, cats or dogs. We have now come to the decisive part of the evening. First, we will hear in purely applause terms. We will hear from the dog side and then the cat side. And if I need to hear it again, you'll do it again. So the dog side, who votes in favor of the dogs? I got the idea.

The cat side. Besides Mr. Lane's untoward. performance. One more time, dogs and cats. Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, thank you for your extraordinary deliberations. Thank you both sides. Victory is to the dogs, but joy to all of you. Everyone here is on notice. Everything you do will be picked apart until I discover who is on the level and who's

a fucking whistling. Don't you get the rancke, all right? That's actor Damian Lewis as the deliciously evil Bobby Axelrod in the new Showtime series Billions. Axelrod is a ruthless hedge fund manager and publicly at least a great philanthropist. Lewis stars alongside Paul Giamatti, who plays a U.S. attorney hell-bent on bringing him down. I think Damien Lewis only does complicated. For fans of homeland, he's burned into our minds as Nicholas Brody, the Marine who was captured by Al Qaeda

and returns home a terrorist and who incidentally drives Claire Daines's CIA character a little crazy. Lewis also starred in the foresight saga and in HBO's Band of Brothers. The New Yorker's Lauren Collins profile Damien Lewis in the magazine and wrote Lewis sees himself as a champion for his characters

be they rapacious monarchs or domestic terrorists or capitalist pigs. acting for him is analogous to mounting a case. So the two of them sat down at the New Yorker Festival last fall where Lewis made the case for his Bobby Axelrod character. So I am getting a little bit of a libertarian, don't tread on me vibe from a Bobby Act. Yeah, yeah, a little bit.

Is he a Trump voter? He's close. He's close. So we know that when you do Henry the Eighth or something like that, you go to Hampton Court Palace and you probably, you know, eat some mutton roasted on a spit and you walk around and your cods. Throw it over my shoulder. Yeah. That sort of thing. But what are you doing to immerse yourself in the world of New York hedge fund billionaires?

Do you do the same kind of immersive research? One of the co-creators on this show is Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is the New York Times as leading financial journalist and wrote a fabulous book called Too Big to Fail. He's been a terrific source of information. He has access to all these guys. And so I've had wonderful meetings, actually, with Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, Larry Robbins, some of the most powerful hedge fund guys here in the city. And there's a sort of self-mythologizing that goes on with them, I think, because they believe they're the underdog always.

Because in some ways they set themselves against the house. So if the house, the casino is Wall Street and they set the odds, these guys are resolutely not part of Wall Street, and they're very keen to stress that. When you go into their offices, what's the first thing you ask? Where do you want to do? Where do you buy your suit?

Yeah. And they say, Tom Ford. And they say, okay, that's because you can afford it. Because this is the new world of TV now where there's this novelistic form of storytelling, where characters are now riddled with ambiguity. So everyone's an anti-heroes. So every villain has likable parts to him, every hero is compromised in some way.

It's actually what is making TV so exciting at the moment. There's no Gary Cooper anymore and some bald guy stroking a cat. You know, it's more complicated than that. And I asked them, I wanted an intellectual defense always. Give me your intellectual defense of being a hedge fungi of shorting companies. And the one thing I couldn't, they could never, they could never really persuade me of was that playing to a moral code that we might all conventionally understand, it wasn't possible to justify what they do. But if they just ever so slightly shifted the goalposts and created a new moral reality for themselves, which is essentially that as long as I don't break the law and as long as the game exists, I'm here to play the game. That's their justification.

The one thing that I couldn't get out of any of them in which I quibble with is if you know, for example, the guys who shorted the market in 207, 208 during the subprime mortgage, if you knew the whole thing was so crocked, didn't you feel some sort of moral obligation to wave the flag? And they just, there was so much money

that they stood to make that they actually just, They just kept quiet. Okay, so you're somewhere between God's work and vampire squid. Yes, exactly. Totally decided yet. Having said that, it is quite fun playing a billionaire. I'm sure.

I've been on more yachts, private jets, and helicopters than in my entire life in the space of the last two months. So that's quite fun. We're going to go back a little bit in time and watch a clip from one of your earliest projects, The Forsight Saga. Can we see that one? Miss Heron.

I have substantial income, and I'm currently looking for a commodious house in the region of Hyde Park. My family are of the very best. We have all professional people. And my expectations and respect of my father's property are the very highest. I'm in good health. I have the honor, Ms. Aaron, I'm asking you for your hand in marriage. I'm funny a little tip. So I was reading some interviews you did at the time when it came out, and you said, you know,

demographically, for me, this wasn't so much of a stretch. I sort of knew this world. I knew this milieu. How did your familiarity with that world help you in that role? That's a good question. Look, my mother, for example, was a Deb and came out in 1957, 55, I think, at the Dorchester Hotel in London in a time when these things were still reported in the Times. So I suppose in some respects I was I was born into a privileged, privately educated, you know, boarding schooled family.

I say in some respects, I was. And I don't know, an experience of people with power, with money, yes, I have grown up with those people. It spent quite a lot of my time trying to get away from them in order to do what I really wanted to do. but certainly, I suppose, a certain deportment, knowing how to carry yourself. I went to a school I'm sure you've heard of, Eton College, and we wore tails and stiff collars. We no longer had to wear top hats, but we wore tail coats.

Casual Friday. Yeah. Casual Friday was, you just lost the waistcoat. You still had to wear the tails. Yeah, and, you know, stiff starched collars and, you know, So that character was, you know, of that milieu, and that's possibly why I made that comment. Well, we have another foresight clip. Yeah, okay.

So, if you couldn't commit the matter to paper. Keep your daughter away from my son. You probably know they are together as we speak. They met at June's Gallery. My son is staying with Val and Holly. Your daughter invited herself down, invagled her way in. Baldarte and his wife extended Fleur an invitation. She forced their hand.

She must be like you. She sees something and decides to get it. Make sure this doesn't happen again. Stop it, you mean? Absolutely. You come here behind your son's back and tell me to break this up. You, of all people,

the man who once lectured me on the importance of happiness in marriage, the man who spurned his own family to follow his heart, who stole another man's wife in the name of love. John and your daughter aren't in love. Have you asked them? This liaison is repugnant to me too. Your son. With my daughter, I'll do my utmost to stop it,

and I presume you will too. But at least I don't have to play the hypocrite. So I look at this and I think how great, but I know sometimes for creative people, going back to anything that you've done a long time ago is, you know, anywhere. from just you're indifferent or you're embarrassed. When you look at this, I mean,

do you think your acting style has evolved or not since then? I was quite pleasantly surprised by that. Wasn't terrible. Lawrence Olivier famously stole things all the time off people. He was a magpie. Some people even said, you know, uncharitably, that, you know, he was only really interested in meeting and befriending people who he was interested in.

for material for his own for his next role. This, I arrived on set, the very first day's filming of the Forsyte saga, with terrible, terrible stomach pains. And I'd been to see a doctor down in London, and they said, you've probably just got wind here, just stick this up your rear end

and everything will be fine. And I said, I thought they only do that in France. Anyway, okay. So I was weak. later, I was just in considerable pain. I mean, it came to the first days filming and we had to stop at lunchtime because I went green. By that evening, I was in emergency in hospital because I had acute appendicitis and everything had ruptured and it was all a mess and I was seconds away from parent-nights and all the other stuff that, you know, poisons you and kills you. So anyway,

so I was out for two weeks and I came back and realized that they had, there's a point to this story. I came back and realized that they had shot some wide shots of me on my back and they'd used this guy sprayed his hair red and had him knock on a few doors

and this guy had this oddest walk and he'd sort of walked along like this. Like this and I was furious. I said, well this is ridiculous. You can't use this guy and it should only be my image on the screen and this is a wide shot and you're contracting lines.

And I watched it again. And then I just, and I nicked it. I stole it. I stole it. And I kept this sort of, and that's where, from that scene, this rather sort of, you know, sort of thing came from Soames. When I just got, and I stole the whole thing. And it sort of rather unlocked the whole character for me. This incredible sort of tension that lived in him.

And I still, to answer your question, do that. I still steal things and observe people and watch. and funnily enough, a little, just one article of clothing of your costume can unlock something for you. And then I'll do more quirky little things like for one role I wore a woman's thong

for the whole film shoot instead of my own underwear. That was home. It's uncomfortable, I'm here to tell you. But, no, in a film called The Escapeist and I was playing a leader of a sort of gang, the in-prison gang. It was a film with Brian Cox and everything.

But he had this walk that I couldn't quite get and I knew I wanted to get it. So I started wearing a woman's thong for my underwear and I got the walk immediately. That's the trick? Well, it was for me, yeah. It was just sort of a bit like this. It just meant I just walked a bit more like this.

Just, you know, because I had this woman's thong on and it was, you know, if I didn't move quickly, it was going to cut me. So I had to just do that. So you went to the thong story? and you were like, it's for a movie. Yeah, I did. I just went and I had great fun.

You guys have great underwear. Is it way too boring for you to talk about the American accent because it's so extraordinary? No, thank you. When was the first time you came to America? Well, actually, I cheated here as well. I was an insider. Actually, my aunt, my mother's brother,

moved to Derryan, Connecticut, and when we were all like seven, eight years old. So almost immediately we packed our bags for summer vacations and came and visited them. So the grilled cheese at the Daryan Country Club, I'm here to tell you, is one of the greatest grilled cheeses I've ever had. So I suppose America was very much part of my childhood. We watched American programs, just like every other kid around the world. Dukes of Hazard wins that one. And then, oh, and we went to a dude ranch in Wyoming.

That'll do it. Which is one of the greatest vacations I ever had. And I wept uncontrollably when I had to say goodbye to Smokey, my pony. And then, yeah, and Band of Brothers came along, and I had a few American dialect lessons just to keep it, you know, just to get focused in. actually one of the veterans on the show who was one of our technical advisors

who had actually served came up to me one day and he said Lewis I got no idea what part of the states you're from but you sound American and that's good enough for me and from that moment on I just kind of stuck with it because I didn't really know where I was from either

okay let's watch a homeland clip my name is Nicholas Brody and I'm a sorry in the United States Marine Corps. On May 19, 2003, as part of a two-man sniper team serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was taken prisoner by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein.

Those forces then sold me to an al-Qaeda commander, Abu Nazir, who was operating a terrorist cell from across the Syrian border, where I was held captive for more than eight years. I was beaten, I was tortured, and I was subjected to long periods of total isolation. People will say I was broken. I was brainwashed.

People will say that I was turned into a terrorist. Taught to hate my country. I love my country. So amazing. What state was Brody supposed to be from? Did you have an idea about that or was that? Brody was more difficult. We just, we didn't want him to have a southern accent.

He was, he was supposed to be blue-collar, nondescript American. President Obama invited you to the White House pretty much on the strength of that. Yeah. What was that like? Unforgettable. Unforgettable. It was really extraordinary. I tried to make a quip as I was being introduced to him. So I meet the president and I just say,

it would be remiss to me, Mr. President, if I didn't ask on behalf of the writers, if you are going to go into Iran, please let us know so we can make season two as current as possible. And just wished I hadn't said it almost immediately. And he looked at me and just right away with a twinkle in his eye and he said, I'll be sure to let you know, and shook my hand.

But almost as quickly, I just felt this enormous hand sort of whack me on the side. And he said, it's this enormous security guy behind him, I went, move along, please, sir. He sent me down, sent me down. All I could is, someone said,

Iran in the White House. Someone started talking to the president about Iran. I was going on. And so I was immediately a security risk. Who did you sit next to? Well, extraordinarily, Helen, my wife and I walked into this fantastic marquee set up on the south lawn of the White House and walked through the cherry blossoms, the Japanese cherry blossoms and down to it.

It was really extraordinary, exquisite. Looking for our seat, which we assumed would be next to the revolving doors going into the toilet or the kitchen or something. And walked around the whole room to arrive at top. table one to find our places with me realizing that I was sitting across from the president of the United States, from POTUS, and he sat me opposite him, with David Cameron on his left, Vice Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Helen, my wife was next to him, David Cameron and then Michelle, someone called George Clooney, your George Clooney. You're George Clooney. on the other side.

And I had, and had I known, I was about to play a hedge fund billionaire, of course I'd have spent much longer talking to him, Warren Buffett on my left. Oh, well. And just had the most, the president was charm and grace personified. He was relaxed. He made jokes. He even engaged myself and Warren Buffett in a three-way conversation about fracking at one point.

I had a lot to say and they listened intently some of that policy is now being put into effect Damien's law Yeah But funny thing about Warren Buffett Who's the most delightful man But the more wine I drunk

The more he started to seem like Burgess Meredith And But anyway So it was an extraordinary Extraordinary night Please join me in applauding Damien Damien Lewis spoke with New Yorker writer Lauren Collins. He plays a British intelligence agent in the film Our Kind of Trader based on a John LaCarray novel.

And it opens next month. Till then, you can just binge on season one of billions. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. More to come. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. It's been three months since President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, And there's no sign that the Republican majority in the Senate will agree to hold confirmation hearings.

But his candidacy might not be dead in the water. Next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, legal analyst Jeffrey Tubin talks with Pamela Carlin, a law professor, an official in the Justice Department, about the Supreme Court nomination that's just sitting there on ice. Zaha Hadid was one of a handful of architectural rock stars who reshaped our understanding of what a building could be. taking full advantage of computer-assisted design and engineering to create buildings that sweep and flow

like they're not made of solid matter. Her most famous buildings include the London Olympic Aquatic Center in the Guangzhou Opera House. She worked all over the world. There's a huge cultural complex in Baku, Azerbaijan that opened recently, and her World Cup Stadium in Qatar is under construction. Hadid was the first woman ever to receive the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award given to an architect.

She was born in Iraq and based in London. Her fatal heart attack in March came as a shock to the architectural world. A few months prior to that, staff writer John Seabrook sat down with Hadid at the New Yorker Festival to discuss her life and her work. Hi, I'm John Seabrook.

Staff writer in the New Yorker. Welcome to the festival. Zaha and I know each other from 2009 when I wrote a profile of Zaha and the New Yorker. And since then, some amazing project opened. I want to talk about the one in Azerbaijan. What is interesting about it is three buildings morphed into one. I mean, it's a theater, museum, and a library.

And the landscape, they are all continuous surface. They all kind of fall into one. And the lobby, the area, which is part of the public domain, is for all of these entities. So the Azerbaijan project is made of fiber concrete. And what is interesting about this material is that you can have a completely kind of continuing with surface, seamless surface. And the way it meets the ground, it looks like it's a material, but it's not.

You really have to move through a Zaha building in order to really experience what it's like. And there was a piece written about the building in Azerbaijan, which I thought I just read a little bit from. visitors find themselves in a curving wonderland that widens and narrows, rises and falls, pushing them along in a dynamic flow of converging and diverging walls and ceilings that transmit the dynamism of the shell to the interior. One aspect of your work which has been consistent is the idea of the inside and the way it's used and moved through informing the outside.

So the inside almost becomes the outside. We did all these studies of cities, and I think what happened, that kind of urbanism was sucked into the interior of these buildings. And then we started looking at the ground being the most important kind of public domain. That's why the exterior and the interior kind of flow into each other. And I think then also we began to talk about liquid space,

but at the time we talked about it, but we didn't really know how to actually. achieve it. It took a long time to see how we can really convert this idea of kind of space of landscape or liquid's ways into an architecture. Yeah. And again, landscape. Often her buildings, when you see them from a far, actually look like landscape. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, people always say, oh, you know, you don't have a handrail. I say, when you go for a walk in the landscape, we don't have a handrail. People can still, you know, they don't mind. But this idea of the landscape,

or let's say the fluid space, came out of looking at the time at certain developments, let's say, in the harbor. How you can replace these things, these kind of very large buildings, and connect the water back to the city through the idea of a land formation. So the land formation led to when I became fluid space.

Let's jump back to Baghdad and your early years in Iraq. Now, you were born at a time. when Baghdad was a very peaceful, cosmopolitan, dynamic place, your father was a progressive politician, and there are a lot of people coming in and out of the house talking, you recall as a young person. What was the house like as a young person? You know, I was very curious.

My parents always, when I went and nagged them, continuously, they did extend things to me. So I was very aware of politics, I was saying, from maybe when I was six, seven years old, was six, seven years old. Yeah. So I understood that complexity of politics. And I was very lucky we were affluent families,

so we traveled a lot. And we always go to Beirut. My brother, my other brother married a Lebanese. So that was like a second home. And back there, that was very nice. I went to a nun school. Yeah, a convent. Although I was a Muslim.

You know, the non-school had girls of every kind. Christian, Muslim, Jewish. And we all used to pray until one day I discovered that I wasn't a Christian that I shouldn't be crossing my heart. And I asked my parents and my parents said, well, you don't have to, which was a very big mistake that you should not tell me this.

Because I went back to the nuns and said, I don't have to cross my heart. So they then decided to exile the Muslim girls and the Jewish girls to the playground, which was for us was great, but they didn't tell us it's freezing cold in winter anyway it was a very nice school

and it had a very interesting headmistress she was a very tough nun and she really believed in the education of women so my life had a very nice life in Baghdad you had an asymmetrical mirror in your room which I designed

I was into asymmetry when I was obviously a newborn well also again you know I wanted my to design my own bedroom. That's right. Which I did. You designed your own bedroom. Yeah, and then everybody liked my bedroom.

So everybody, the carpenter made it for everybody. So there's a mass-produced bedroom. What was it like? What was it like? Well, it was kind of very 50s, 60s-looking Italian wooden thing. Sounds nice. It was nice. I don't know whether it's still there, but.

What about the house? Do we know what's happened to the house? The house was boarded. The only thing which was looking, living in it was some very bright colored trees. But I think someone is obviously taken over and I think has been looted. Because I finally find, I find pictures of my childhood

or letters I sent to my father on the internet. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh my God. So I think it's been. How did you find them on the internet? Just somebody. Well, somebody called me and said, we have a letter

which you must have sent to your father. And I thought, I don't, doesn't sign bright. So I looked at the letter and I thought, doesn't sound like me. Then someone else read it said, no, actually, it sounds very much like you. Because it must have been all cheekiness you were a kid. And then suddenly suddenly certain photographs

that's appearing. Not when I was a baby, but you know, in school and something like that. I know, it's a bit strange. You haven't been back for a long time? No, I haven't known. And I would like to go about it. actually.

Is it an ambition to one day build? I'm building. I'm building the parliament and the central bank. What an amazing thing that would be, with your father and your... Yeah, absolutely. My father was saying, hello, the Iraq Democratic Party, and that would be really great. So some of your early drawings for projects essentially look like abstract paintings. I mean, you did paint, I think.

Well, you know, I think that, you know, so I think through... through the Malavish technology, looking at that research, and suprematism, one looked at abstraction. Yeah. And actually the abstract drawings were really analysis of the site. Yeah. They were not like sort of just abstract for the sake of it. Let's talk a little bit about how the computer came in during this period.

I mean, in some ways your designs anticipated computer-based design, but perhaps wouldn't have been possible to realize without the computer. I think it would be able to, you can realize it, but I think not with the same precision. Because I remember Patrick telling me, before you had computer-based design, you would take drawings and put them on the Xerox, on the glass of the Xerox, and move the stretch to the shape. He is wrong because that's when he started. But he doesn't know what happened before he started.

I mean, we were 20 of 10 of us there trying to do most complex drawings. I think stretching on the Xerox machine was one, but before that it was all done by hand. You see, what I think interesting is that all the research and drawing informed the work. It didn't, because it didn't just distort, it eventually made the work like that. So I might take a kind of a simple box

and through distortion or manipulation, but the work became like that. Now, do you just work on the computer, begin working on the computer? I don't. Do you still draw? I draw, yeah. Well, they don't understand my drawings. You do a lot of product design, sort of small things, and then you switch to very large buildings.

Do they inform each other? Well, they come from an idea of we've already done in architecture. They're kind of connected. Shoes? Could shoes inform a building? Yeah, they're more like the architecture. More like the architecture, the shoes. I mean, the Adidas thing was a different project.

Can we get those shoes now, the Adidas shoes? I don't know. I couldn't get any either sold out. They're sold out? But I think they can get them, I'm sure. Did you actually work with Farrell Williams? No, Farrell just really called us and asked us to do this collaboration. But he seems like a big fan of yours.

No, that's nice, yeah. I mean, maybe I'll write a sign. He's a very nice guy, actually. Do you have some dream projects that you're looking to the sky and rain? My dream project is to go on a vacation. No, I really don't know. I think that all these projects are rather, you know, they all come with a different agenda. I mean, we've been very lucky.

We've done bridges, from large project to small projects. So it's been very interesting. Your own residence, as I recall, is not particularly highly designed. It's not a Zaha Hadid, really. No, because nobody in my office will do it. Well, maybe you don't want to live with your design. No, I don't mind doing in my design. I think that it would be nice to live in one's own thing.

I think you can do that early when you are very young, when you don't mind waking up every day and seeing your mistake. Or you're quite old where you're quite delirious and you don't notice it. Well, that's a lovely note. finish on. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Zaha Hadid, the late architect and designer of shoes, jewelry, objects, even the stage set for a Pet Shop Boy show in 1999.

She was interviewed by New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook last fall. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. Next week, Jeffrey Toobin guides us through a critical moment in the future of the Supreme Court. I hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a corporate. production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music this week from Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced with special assistance from Carrie Hillman, Matt Fiddler, David Ohana, and Rhonda Sherman. The New Yorker RadioRour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.