The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 38: The Wisdom of John McPhee, and the Agony of an iPod Lockout

Episode Date: July 8, 2016

In this episode, John McPhee reflects on a lifetime of writing; we explore the future of Brexit; and a reporter nearly loses everything after forgetting his iPod passcode. 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.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today I'm going to talk with a writer who, for my money, is one of a kind. My teacher, my colleague, and my occasional fishing buddy, John McPhee. But first we have something to attend, something solemn. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, in the park, to inadvertently witness the dramatic breakup of these two people we have never met, Jamie and Aaron. anyone has any empathy at all, please now avert your eyes and hurry past. At this time, the couple would like to share a few words that they have always wanted to say and soon will never be able to take back. Jamie, in the past two and a half years, you've become my best friend, my confidant, and today you now become a future stranger. As I stand here, I can't help but to think back to the beginning. When we were both so much much. more attractive. You gave me a new outlook on alcohol and an excuse to not exercise. Six months ago,

I popped the question, is this even working anymore? And it was then that I knew that I wanted to eventually forget your middle name. I realized that I wanted to celebrate your losses and to tell our mutual friends of my successes in the hopes that they would share them with you. Aaron, I promise always to put you first when listing my exes in alphabetical order. I promise to delete all evidence of you from my social media accounts, even the photos you aren't in, but were there when they were taken. I promise never to forget that passing comment you made about my upper arm flap and to use it to make mutual friends take my side in this breakup.

Most important, I promise not to learn anything from this relationship and to continue to fail future partners in similar ways. Aaron, do you have any final hurtful words for Jamie? I was actually trying to hit on your friend Kathy the night we met. And Jamie, do you have one last stinging remark for Aaron? Your natural deodorant doesn't work. Aaron, Jamie, reluctant witness. You may now make your emergency phone calls to your therapists.

Amen. A breakup ceremony by Shea Strauss. Anthony Ramos and Jasmine Seifis Jones from the cast of Hamilton played the unhappy couple and Dylan Dawson officiated. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the people we turn to with The New Yorker to help sort out the lunacy and chaos of the world is staff writer James Surawicki. He writes the financial page column, and the fallout from the Brexit vote has been keeping him pretty busy lately. One of the sources of information and context that he's got is Sony Kapoor. an economist based in London, and the managing director of the international think tank redefine.

We're going to talk about the implications of Brexit for Britain, but let's start by talking about the implications for Europe and perhaps even the global economy. In the immediate wake of Brexit, there was a pretty profound sense of panic in world markets. That has calmed down considerably. But what's your take on the broader implications of Brexit for, let's say, for the European economy? I think it's important to put a corrective out there that a Brexit has not happened. And if things go according to the plans of a number of us involved in the policy discussion, and if the economy continues to haemorrhage as it is,

and public opinion continues to shift, it is probably more than 50% likely that a Brexit may actually never happen. In terms of the shock from the Brexit vote, the pound has fallen, which means that the profit in the near term of UK registered companies in British pounds will actually be higher. So the weak pound is good for big British international companies, at least in the short term profitability will go up. But in the long term, the prognosis is almost surely negative, yes. And on Europe. So there are two schools of thought, and the markets are trying to decide which one of these is the right one. One says that the UK being out of the EU will allow other countries, particularly Eurozone economies, to go ahead with further integration, which as we have seen from the Euro crisis, is necessary, but for which political will has been lacking. and in particular, the United Kingdom has been the most reluctant member of the School of Thought

that says we need more political union, we need more centralized governance mechanisms. So with the UK out, there are fewer obstacles to other countries actually integrating more. So that might actually be good for Europe. So the idea is that the Eurozone, where those countries that share a common currency, one of the consistent problems they've had is that they have had, is that they have a common monetary policy, but they have very little, if any, common fiscal policy. So there's no way for political integration and fiscal integration does not match monetary integration, which creates all kinds of problems. And that's very different from what we have in the U.S.,

where we have a common currency and a common federal political system. And since Britain is not a member of the euro, but has been a member of the EU, its departure in a sense could allow the U.S. and the EU to become more closely aligned. That's the thesis, roughly speaking? Absolutely. And with the United States, it took several decades, if not more than a hundred years, to turn from a monetary union into a proper full functioning federalized fiscal union that it is now. And we are trying to do in Europe that same thing over a far shorter time horizon. And rather than these being state, states within a single federal entity, these are separate countries. So in a way, the challenge in the Eurozone has been much bigger. But it is true that countries are likely to go faster. The other good

thing that has happened is that the economic panic and the political crisis unleashed by the Brexit vote has given voters in many of the countries where Euroscepticism has been growing, particularly the Netherlands, Denmark, and France, it has given voters a pause for thought. And polls just in the past week or so have shown a swing of 10 to 20 percent in public opinion towards remaining members of the European Union. And that's because of the backlash, the sort of economic slash political backlash that we've seen in Britain since the vote was taken. I think that has sent a very powerful message.

a country where there is no prime minister, the leaders of the out campaign have both gone, and the opposition is also in a state of total tatters with the economy already looking down, that signal to voters in these countries that a vote to leave the European Union will mean massive economic and political carnage is a very strong signal to stay members. So I think that on the whole, apart from the direct negative, impact of the UK going into a recession and the uncertainty associated with it, this is more likely to be a positive development for the rest of the Eurozone over the medium to longer term. The pro-leave people, most notably Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, have tried to make the case

that Britain will simply be able to, in effect, maintain its current trade relationship with the EU, but just do so while outside of the union. But I, and I think others are much more, more skeptical that that would be possible. Can you talk a little bit about what you think the implications for trade between the EU and Britain are, if Brexit were to occur? So there are three aspects to this. The first is, if you look at it from the perspective of the European Union and other 27 member states, they have a very strong incentive to make sure that Britain gets a bad raw deal and is made to suffer. Politically, that is very important. Because that then tells other Eurosceptics if you leave. This is, it's disaster. Absolutely. Exactly. So some of that is already

happening and it's entirely seldom conflicted by us in the UK. But in addition to that over and above, there's a strong incentive to play it really tough. The second is the UK already has more exceptions than any other European Union member. We have had what is essentially a very sweet deal where we have kind of cherry-picked certain exceptions. We never have to join the euro. We are not part of the Schengen area. We are not part of the common migration policy,

particularly refugee policy, etc. So we have the best of both worlds where we've benefited from being part of the single market while having stayed away from what is domestically politically contentious. And in that context, for then the UK to go and ask for further concessions, this has been totally awful. And our international reputation is in tatters.

We have burned all our bridges. And frankly, we've been acting as spoiled brats, you know, a bull in the China shop, not just damaging ourselves, but just breaking everything around us. And whatever comes to us in terms of, let's say, say the EU playing hardball, it's entirely self-inflicted and very well-deserved. The last point is the arrangements that are possible, the most likely being talked about, is Norway. And I was a strategy-advised to the Norwegian government for a couple of years.

And the deal with Norway is that Norway essentially has to pay more or less as much as the UK does on a per capita basis. Norway has to... to blindly accept almost every single piece of legislation and regulation that is to do with trade and commerce and goods and services. Norway has to be part of Schengen area and Norway has to accept free movement of people from any other EU state. And these are the terms at which Norway gets access to the single market. And these terms will be unacceptable to those who have voted leave because the primary driver has been the populist backlash against immigration, against free movement of people. And yet what is very clear is that we will not have access

to the single market without free movement of people. So we are stuck in this dilemma of having to make an impossible choice where at present the deal we have free movement in exchange for access to single market is perfect, but we don't want this anymore. And we won the best of both worlds, which is politically impossible. So as is very clear from this interview and also is very clear from things you said before and wrote before the vote was taken, you view Brexit as to use a soccer term, an incredible own goal, basically Britain inflicting enormous harm on itself. When you think about the victory for the Leave campaign, where do you think remain failed? Where do you think the campaign to get Britain to stay in the EU failed? Why did Leave end up winning?

We have had a prime minister who has spent pretty much six years essentially insulting the EU, not having had a single positive word to say about Brussels or European institutions. And then in the past six months, he suddenly switches tack and becomes the lead campaigner for remaining in size. the EU. And even then, he can scarcely get himself to save one positive thing about the European Union. All he can focus on is that there would be a disaster where we to leave. We know we don't particularly like it. It's an uneasy relationship, but the alternative is worse. And in terms of inspiring voters, in terms of emotional involvement, in terms of increasing turnout and having people believe in something positive, which, given the austerity of the past few years,

they desperately needed, the Remain campaign totally failed. It was an entirely negative campaign that couldn't simply bring itself to say anything positive about the European Union, which historically has now been the world's most successful peace and prosperity-generating project, having successfully integrated the post-Soviet, Central Eastern Europe economies, and maintained peace in Europe for the first time, for the longest time in centuries. So we failed totally in our positive messaging, and we allowed the other side to promise motherhood and apple pie and the sky without being able to dent their credibility. And the leave side were emotionally vested. They were angry.

They turned out in much larger numbers. So we are going to continue to discuss and debate this without the dust settling now and for many years to come. Thank you very much for talking with us today, Sony. Thank you for having me. Sony Kapoor is a macroeconomist and managing director of redefine, a global economic think tank. And that's the New Yorker's James Surawicki.

So we know that the FBI can crack the code on an iPhone, okay, but if you're a working journalist and you've got everything stored on your brand new device, and then you somehow forget the passcode. You could find yourself in pretty hot water. I thought, oh, what am I doing? It's one digit off. And I did one or two digits of that and one or two digits of this.

And then the next thing you knew, I was at six tries, but I should have stopped, really. We'll see what shakes out with that story a little later after my conversation with John McPhee. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. way back when, when I was in college,

I had the rare privilege of studying writing from someone known as a writer's writer, from John McPhee. If you're a lit major like I was, you studied with literary historians and literary critics and scholars, but rarely writers of the first order. Such was John McPhee.

I never had any other ambition than to write. I tell a story, which is about 94, percent true. Good enough. To wit, is that okay? Which is that I was a little kid with a football shirt on and I would run out on the field with the Princeton football team all the time when I was eight years old, nine years old. And I was there every game. And one November day when I was about eight, there was a driving rain, a almost horizontal rain with the wind in it, ice cold on that football sideline. It was horrible. And I looked up at the press box. And I knew that those people up there were not only sheltered, but had space heaters.

And I decided then in there to become a writer. Okay, that's 94% true. Yeah. So it seemed to be a place of privilege, a place where you had warm shoes and warm socks and you'd be okay, and yet you could observe life. I had a mistaken idea about writing altogether at that point looking up at the press box. I thought all you did was sort of move your fingers around and make my mind. money doing it. That's not it.

That's not it. I was misinformed. McFeed didn't exactly spend his career keeping his feet dry and warm. He's 85 now, and he's written about every corner of the American landscape, from the muddy orange grows of Florida to the Alaska gold country. And he's not what you'd call a political activist, but at the same time, he's written about the environment with real penetration. He's written about nuclear weapons and energy, the degradation.

of the natural world, and in a five-volume work that won the Pulitzer Prize, it's called the Annals of the Former World, he writes about the very earth we stand on, it's geology. McPhee has lived his entire life in Princeton, New Jersey, and he's been teaching at Princeton University for decades, but he gets around to do his work. To report his masterpiece coming into the country, his book about the Alaska frontier, he traveled the wilderness by canoe and plane. He went by helicopter and on foot, even by dog team. So we just pulled down a volume from your top shelf up there of a, it's a bound copy of notes, typed up notes from your Alaska trips in the

mid-70s. And they're meticulously typed up notes with photographs of people you saw and, and scenery and points of interest in Alaska. How did you invent this process for doing? Do you, what you needed to do beginning in the mid-60s. Invented it? Yeah. These are my notes. I typed them up. No, no, no, but this system, this, oh my God, is this where you lived? Where?

No, that's Wilkinson's thing. He was a gold miner, and he worked at Creek, and that was his cabin, and I went in there and saw him, and he had a jiffy peanut butter jar, whatever it is, full of gold. God, help us. I brought home four nuggets from up there somebody like Wilkinson had taken out of the stream and these four nuggets are on gold chains that my four daughters have.

The point being that a placer gold miner can look at a nugget and tell what stream it came from. It's amazing. So most of your books, most of your pieces, have books like this, volumes like this? Have a collection of notes like this. If you have the idea where you're going to start where you're going to end and how you're going to go in between from each of the components.

You then take those notes that you had previously made and not referred to while you're building this structure, and then you assign each part of the notes to some area or another of the structure. I think if a non-writer heard you talking about this like this, they would think this sounds an awful lot like, I don't know, construction or, you know, something very highly rational, something not magical, something not quote unquote creative. Where does the magical part fit in? I'll tell you my response to that. It sounds mechanical. But what it does is free you to write. So it has just the opposite effect. You go through all that stuff. Then when I'm in here, however long it takes me to get going.

I know just what I want to write, and I know from the notes what it is, and it's just in my head. And then what I do, if the two hours I write or the three hours that I'm actually writing, I'm totally free of worrying about any other part of this great big thing

because of having been through this mechanical thing first. So its effect is exactly the opposite of some mechanistic, dumb dumb. You're looking back at what you've done and you have to see that there's some kind of pattern in subject as well. But I'd also say that, and you might not like this, that it adds up to a political dimension too, especially when it comes to the environment. I think that's true because I spent my summers all summer in a canoe-tripping camp. Off we went into the woods with the canoes. And a huge percentage of the pieces that I've done in the New Yorker derive from

that kind of thing, interest, including, for example, going to Alaska. And Alaska is not exactly Vermont, but I didn't know it. But did you feel any political impulse about being, at least in part? The political, about environmentalism or what became called environmentalism and so forth. But did it not seem that way in the beginning? Yes, no, it seemed that way, because this a place was a classroom of the woods. Your camp? They were teaching what's now called, you know, ecology and stuff like that when ecology meant the root and shoot relationships of plants. I have been called an agricultural writer, a nature writer, a sports writer, keep going, wherever these things that I've done are. But what all my pieces have in common is that they're

about real people and real places. I'm writing about the people. And then I tell a reader what I learn and what I want the reader to know about that person's passions and interests. So it doesn't start with a desire to write about nature. It starts with a desire to write about people. So you write a book called The Founding Fish, which is about Shad. And what's the origin of that? Fishing with my father when I was a kid. But I took it up again when I got interested in the Shad run in the Delaware River,

which is 15 miles from where we're doing this talk. Now, I want you to say this on the radio from coast to coast. How many shad have you caught in your life? 1,281. Damn. 14. I happen to know. Let me tell you something that happened.

I went to Kun Kelly with George Hackle. We caught 30-some shad sitting there. You just sat there for the afternoon? We sat there. We never moved about one foot. And we sat there. That's because you caught the same fish over and over again. We were sitting in those rapids and we caught one after another. You told me that when you came to the New Yorker and said,

I want to write about geology, the reaction of William Sean, who was the editor at that time, was not exactly a standing ovation. What was it? I told him my mother, I wanted to write about geology, and he goes, oh, oh, well, readers will rebel. And he then thought you were gone for a year. And in you went on your biggest project, really, of your writing life.

Why did you do that? Because some of them did rebel. I fell into a situation that broadened and deepened as I went along. My first suggestion was to go up somewhere near New York and write about a road cut and write about the provenance of the rock and its age. its origins and stuff like that with a geologist, talk of the town, see, over and done within three days. Thousand words. And I'm going to this outcrop. And then Ken DeFay's Princeton geologist agreed to do this with me.

And thinking about it, meanwhile, I said, what if we went to more than one road cut? What if we went up the Adirondag Northway, which is such a beautiful road with a huge, exposures of rock. And DeFay says, not on this continent. He said, if you want to do a piece like that where you move along, go across the structure. Don't go along with the structure. You go up to Adirondack Northway and it's all north of sight and everything else and you're in Montreal. And so then I got the idea, who, what if you go across the country? All this happening within a week or two. And this talk of the town piece changed into what eventuated as 20 years of work.

Now, if I had... How did William Sean react to that? Sean might rebel. I don't know. He was okay with that. Did you care? Did you care that an audience might have wanted X as opposed to why, or were you in such a position

and in such a state of mind that you were able to follow your interests absolutely from the beginning to where we are now? The latter. I mean, never market. research your pieces. I mean, I wasn't worried about what the audience would think. If you're enthusiastic enough about the piece yourself, people will become interested with you. The reaction in the geology is really curious because, yes, readers did rebel. How did you feel the rebellion?

Also, you got, well, some lawyer in Boston writes to me and says, please stop writing about geology and big letters on his legal letterhead. And I did not write to him. I. I did not write to him and say, you know, what we could use is one less lawyer and I nominate you. I didn't do that. I just did nothing. But the reaction from readers to the geology work is the strongest of anything I've ever done. No kidding. The positive side. Absolutely. It's so amazing. And they still coming along. I opened one up on my way in here just now. When I came up here to my office where we are, there was a somebody had pasted to my door an obituary and this guy said this guy's man's favorite book was annals of the former world and the kind of thing happens with some frequency. I was one of the things I learned to think about in your class was the way you could inscribe in a narrative a set piece, a descriptive set piece of in your case a bear or even a, or even a, or even could be an essay.

There's a kind of essay on deep time in the geology work, and that readers really responded to that in a very special way. It's an essay on time, the time of the earth, the time of the universe, the time, geologic time, how geologic time was established, what people thought in 1795. They literally thought the earth was about 2,400 years old, something like that, and describes what Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, and so forth are all about. And how many years ago we started and finished and why they'd move on to the next one.

At any rate, I've gotten a number of letters from cancer patients, having read that essay, that 10,000 words, but mostly the last part of it. Because they're responding. It's about the perspective of time. which is so immense that it somehow had a soothing effect. Let me ask you this. How do you see time in the career of a writer? Life is short, writing life is short, all of it's short.

Obviously, as you get more experienced, it helps you save time and not make the certain kinds of mistakes that you might have when you were 25. How do you feel time as both a drag and as an advantage as you're moving along in a writing, and creative life. I mean, you're right on it. I guess it is both because I do, at the get-go on any piece of writing, I have no confidence, anybody right now 50 years ago. No difference.

I have no, well, at the beginning, no confidence, who am I to be doing is? What kind of a pretentious jerk am I to think that I can talk to the world about something? And on and on and on, see, this is the first draft. The first draft is the longest thing by a factor of about three or four to one over the rest of it. And when you're going through the first draft, you are one miserable creature. But at the end of that, that time that you're referring to kicks in. And it turns from being sort of grungy to a pleasant experience. And the longer I've been at it, the more pleasant it has become after the first draft,

Second draft, third draft, fourth draft, I love working on that. You sound miserable when you're writing, it's a tough process. But if you took a year off, what would happen? Let me tell you this story, that coming into the country was really tough to do. Which was a bestseller at that time, right? Yes, it was. The whole project took about three years. And as I was in the last six months of that and everything else, I kept saying,

was, if I ever finished this, I am never going to write another line if I ever finish this thing. And I would cuss around up there in my office. And so I finished it. And I was never going to write another line. And this guy in New York calls me up and says he's running this new thing at the time called the Green Market. How long after this? Is it after you've finished your Alaska book? It was a month.

It was in July of that year, and I'd finish this thing in June. And so I'd sworn never to write again, but I went in to do a talk piece on the green market. And I went back the next day to the green market. And then I put an apron on Hodgson Farms place and started selling beans. And the thing was that I really did not want to run. Right. You just wanted to sell beans? And I didn't write a talk piece. And I just, every once in a while, I'd make a few notes that were in my pocket. But I sold the beans. And this was July when I first went in there. And when I left, there was snow on the ground. And there was a period when I just didn't want to write. I wanted to sell beans. I have to tell you, I've been hearing you talk like this for more than 35 years. And when I first heard it in your classroom, it scared the hell out of me.

Because you would talk about how painful it is to write. And then the only thing that rescued me is that I then go, well, there wasn't Wikipedia, but I would see there's the bibliography of one book every 18 months or so for by then already 20 years and now a great deal longer. So somewhere, somehow, despite the pain of writing, the difficulty of it, the agony of it, which you almost delight in talking about, it always struck to me, but I'm sure it's no delight. things move forward. If you're there every day and you go through the process

I just described and then a little, you know, a few paragraphs or one paragraph or whatever goes into the bucket and like a drop of water and every day, after 365 days you've got a bucket full of water and call it a book and then get on to the next one. John, you began teaching at Princeton when?

1975. Up on your shelves, I see books by former students, and there's loads of them. How did this? It must be stunning to you. There could be lots more. It's just amazing. I'm looking at a bookshelf, and every book in it was written by a former student, every one over there. Over there, there's two more shelves.

Every book was written by a former student. But let me tell you this. On top of one of these bookshelves here, at the very top there's only a freight car and this freight car is sitting at the tip top of a shelf. Why?

Because Anne Tarbutton is the president of the railroad. She was in this class and my message to the students is if you can be the president of a railroad, do that. If you can't write the book that are underneath that's the priority.

John McPhee Fishing Enthusiast railroad enthusiast, rock enthusiast, kind of an everything enthusiast. We mentioned a few books in passing, and you can find all the titles we talked about, and more at New YorkerRadio.org. Recently, a buzz went around the office where everybody was talking about Rafi Kachdorian's iPod for some reason. And the thing I wanted to know is, who uses an iPod? I'm Nick Troutwein. I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

And one of the writers I work with here is Rafi Kachudurian. And Rafi's most recent reporting trip took him to Lagos, Nigeria. I stopped in his office the other night to see how he's doing. And when I opened the office door, he gave me an incredible stricken look, and he held up a little device that looked an awful lot like an iPhone. Just before this trip, I went to the Apple store, and I bought an iPod Touch. Rafi had returned from the trip with hours and hours of video and audio. A real treasure trove of gigabytes worth of data on this device.

It happened that he'd come back, set the device aside for a few weeks, and turned to another story. He filed the draft to me, picked up the iPod, and he found that he had forgotten the passcode. So the passcode to my phone is 2668, and so I altered the pass code by one number. So when I picked it up cold, for the first couple of tries, maybe two or three tries, I absent-mindedly put in my phone's code, which was certainly not it. And I thought, oh, what am I doing? It's one digit off. And I did one or two digits of that and one or two digits of this. And then next thing you knew, I was at six tries. And at that point, I kind of slowed down a little. But I should have stopped, really. Talk to Apple support now. So I come to Rafi's office. And Rafi is hunched in his desk chair. Oh, let's try chat. With a look that it's somewhere between my team lost the World Cup and a meteor destroyed my.

house. I have a password issue. Can you help with that? And I am on my eighth try. Okay, let's see what Brian has to say. Never fun when your advisor begins his response with yikes. It will stop allowing you to try after 10. I see. I see. So if I did it eight times, I have only two chien. I can't even talk anymore. Rafi picked up the iPod and said, take this with you, or I'm going to stare at it all night and not be able to sleep.

It's worse than that. I was worried, but I would have some impulsive, like, vision of, like, it's this. And I would use one of my remaining tries. So I didn't want to even have that in my hand. And I put it in a safe place in my desk and went home for the night. I mean, I woke up the next day,

and I felt that something had been stolen from me. I guess that thing that was taken is this kind of thing that we increasingly do with our devices. We put part of our thinking of our memories, of our recollections into them. And of course, I couldn't access it, not unlike the difficulty I was having, accessing the code from the own labyrinth of my own memory.

I went to go see Henry Finder. I'm the editorial director at the New Yorker magazine. He's like one of the... of the smartest guys, like not only that one could know, like one could imagine. You know, the first thing that he said was, what we do as writers here is deal with uncertainty all the time. And this is just only part of that continuum. And then he went and quoted almost verbatim. An exchange between John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. The story is that Thomas Carlyle, great British, Scottish, I should say,

writer, critic, and historian, had completed the first volume of his magisterial history of the French Revolution, and he entrusted it to the great thinker and writer John Sturt Mill, seeking his notes. Apparently, Mill left it in the vicinity of a fireplace, and his charlady used it to fuel the fire.

John Stuart Mill went to apologize. And then when he left, Carlisle felt that he had to comfort his friend. He wrote this letter to Mill. And the part that Henry had recited almost verbatim is, My dear Mill, you left me last night with a look which I shall not soon forget. That I can never write that volume again is indubitable. Singular enough, the whole earth could not get it back. But only a better or a worse one.

There is the strangest dimness over it. A figure thrown into the melting pot. But the metal is there. The model also is in my head. In other words, it's still in here. And after that, Henry suggested then that I try and find a data recovery company. Well, let me say a couple of things. Okay.

Jim McGaw is a neurobiologist at UC Irvine who specializes in memory. First of all, it's obvious to all of us that we forget. And by the time I called him, I was beginning to suspect that the passcode was not just any variation of the one in my phone, but that it was based on my daughter's name. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. The only problem was I wasn't sure I could trust my memory at all by that point. So why do we forget? Well, first of all, we forget just because with a passage of time, something happens that we don't understand that makes memory grow weaker. But the ability to retrieve information that we have is influenced by things that we had already

learned before, and that's competing, or things that we learned after. Is it reasonable to think that the number is in there somewhere in my brain? Yes. So really what we're talking about is a question of access. Can I get it? It's a question of retrieval. You had used this many times. times in Africa. Yes. So what is it that causes this well not now to be remembered? Did you write it down? Did you look at it? I never wrote it down. I was very confident at the time that I would never forget it.

But you used it a lot, so the odds is there. At 10 tries, you would... Two left. What are the conditions that make a particular memory accessible? Well, context is very important. So I'm sitting here right now, dressed in an outfit that has... only been configured once before, and that's while I was in Nigeria. I was this morning rereading passages of a novel that I had taken with me. Just the act of doing that was making me think of other things in Nigeria, other flashes of other memories. So, Rafi, you've reached into the back of your mind, and you have arrived at a number you feel reasonably confident about. So that number is sort of based on my daughter's name. I will say that you're you're

you came into my office more confident about 2685. I feel really good about 2685. It triggers some memory that when we were in a sawmill in Nigeria, it's in the middle of Lagos, and this is one of the most impoverished places I've ever, ever been to. There's some little faint thread of a memory where I was putting the passcode in and thinking of my daughter's name

being entered at that particular place and thinking about the peculiarity of that. Like, who would have thought that that would happen? So we have two attempts left. Today we're going to do one of them. I'm not going to do it. You're going to do it because I am not going to put my jittery hands on that thing and accidentally press the wrong button.

All right. I have in front of me Rafi's iPod Touch. I have a piece of paper with the code written on it. I don't know if I can watch. So slide to unlock. I'm sliding to unlock. Enter passcode. iPod Touch requires your passcode after restarting.

No kidding. Here we go. Two, six, eight, five. Ha ha ha ha ha. It's open! Oh my God. It works. Rafi did it.

Fantastic. That is a really big relief. The New Yorker's Rafi Khach, Dorian, in a moment of salvation, his editor, Nicholas Troutline. Here's an evangelical church where there are a million people. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Rimnick. We recently told the story or started the story of a New York bartender named Bob Bozik and his quest to inherit a mansion. The mansion happens to be in Belgrade, Serbia, and it was taken from his family more than 70 years ago. A quick recap, Bozik's father was very wealthy

but he fled to Canada after the communists came to power in Yugoslavia. Bob was born in pretty tough circumstances. He was a foster child. He was a runaway, and he grew up to be a professional boxer. Later, he was a bank robber and delivered medical supplies to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For more than a decade, Bob Bosick has been trying to get the Serbian government to give his father's mansion back. New Yorker staff writer Nick Palmgarten wrote about that mission, and at the beginning of this year, Bozik called Nick with pretty big news.

He'd quit his bartending job, and then he got on a plane to Europe and tried to close the deal. So here's Bob Bozik, leaving his life in New York to reclaim this place that was taken from his family back in 1946. Serbia wants to join the European Union. To do so, it has to follow restitution laws, requiring the return of property taken, quote-unquote, illegally by the communists. And so, after years of legal and bureaucratic battles, Bob has gotten almost all the necessary approvals from the various levels of government. Almost.

I've been at them every few years. Why do you keep doing this when I do? You know, because this is what I do. Everything was just a preparation for the final fight, and this is my final fight. So off he goes. He promises to keep in touch. The very next day, voice memos start pouring in from him,

sometimes several a day. Bob's Belgrade Diary Okay, Nick I'm going to give you a summary here So I arrive in Belgrade I go to the house I walk in and it's like It's like a ghost

It's like it's not returning to my past It's like returning to my castle in the sky So what I learned today With something interesting I'm actually a political pawn I was going to go home and read my books And they've turned off the electricity and the heat Ah, so it begins.

Now they decided that, you know what, this guy in New York, another few weeks in the dark and cold, isn't it going to hurt them? So it's going to be a while, just waiting in this 22-room house. I live in the library, which has quilted leather doors, surrounded by the Austrian-Hungarian carved bookshel. Bob starts sending me a memo as he records while walking through the house. So leaving my house constitutes the big wooden door at the front. Walking out of the house.

You can hear the lock. Walking down the street. Right by, as I pass by the Turkish embassy, which is, well, two doors away from my house. Getting coffee. Dobr... Yeah, this is the coffee place. Don'tbridon.

They look at me bewildered. I can have some coffee. These memos are like postcards, half amazement at what he's seeing, and half expressions of homesickness. Yesterday, after an evening of dinner, by myself, walked along the dark streets. They're very dark here.

Fumbled with my latch key. Three doors they get into my house. A 22-room house, you have one room. The rest of the house is dark. Outside is the crying and the screaming of feral cats. So many times I've woken up and put on a flashlight and said, who's there? Who's, excuse me?

And it turns out they're outside, but they sound like they're right there. And it's a recipe for madness. And then this morning, I wake up and I phone my lawyer, so saying, okay, what's going on with the signing? He says, you know, Bob, you have to understand. This is the process here. I said, the process. Sounds like the trial by Kafka.

So four months of this, and I should be mad. Being in Belgrade in this house really got Bob to start thinking about his father. Dobrevoy Bozik was born in 1886, studied in Germany with Rudolph diesel and Albert Einstein and new Nikola Tesla. In the 1920s, he invented an airbrake system that allowed trains to travel at higher speeds. The Bozik brake revolutionized train travel throughout Europe and the Bozik family became very wealthy. They owned a yacht, a coal mine, a timber farm. That's when they bought the mansion Bob's gone back to reclaim. Then came the Second World War. The Germans took over the house, and the Bozik family lived uncomfortably alongside them.

Remember, Bob wasn't even born yet. After the war, Tito and the Communists came into power and accused Bozik Sr. of cooperating with the Germans. The Communists seized control of the house, and Bozik, Sr. fearing execution, fled with his family to Italy and a small skiff rigged with sheets as sails. The family eventually settled in Ontario, where Bob was born. But just a few days afterwards, his father left the family,

and his mother gave Bob up to foster camp. Bob never knew his father, who eventually made his way back to Serbia and spent the rest of his life there. Bob's connection to it all was always kind of notional, a story for him to tell. But, living in his father's old house, Bob begins to find traces of his family's history everywhere. On the front gate, there's a letter D in Cyrillic and then letter B in Cyrillic and then letter B in Cyrillac. Daubervoy-Bosik. It's still the original gates from 19... well, 46, so they left. His connection to the city becomes more vivid.

He sends me recordings about wandering to the hospital where his father stayed, to the apartment building where his father lived. So last night I went for dinner in the old part of Belgrade down by the Danube. And on the way home, I decided to stop by my father's apartment. And as I'm thinking about leaving, this man, Nicholas walks up. And a young man, and he says, oh, I recognize you. Bronco Bozic? I said, yeah. And he says, I've seen you in the, in the news.

newspapers, and now here you are. And he lives in that building. I said, you live here? And he says, yeah. He says, please come in for Iraqia. And then he says, you know what? I wonder what apartment your father died in. And I said, I don't know. He and Nicholas went to see the superintendent, but he didn't know much. So Bob was on his way out of the building. Suddenly the superintendent yells, come back, come back. My wife heard us talking. And she says, so if we go back upstairs, this is wife. She didn't speak English. And she's got. But this whole scrapbook of newspaper clippings, my father was in that apartment, that superintendent's apartment. They have news clippings. She says, I kept these clippings from when your dad died. And these were during the communist time, these clippings. They said bizarre things. Like, for instance, my dad was rich, but they didn't claim that they stole the properties.

They say he gambled it all away. They gambled all the money away. that he had from his inventions and the property he had to sell. Well, they seize the properties. Everybody knows that, but whatever. So she shows me around the apartment, and she showed me the power room. She says, he probably died in here. Either way, when I do get the decision, I want to go back and sit down and have another Rakhia in the room that my father died in. And that'll sort of close the story for me. Anyhow. Bob sends a few more scattered memos here and there. stories of his adventures with Peatar or of his travels to Sarajevo.

And then, silence. I don't hear anything from him for weeks. Till one day, he texts me and tells me he's coming back to New York for a visit. Tom Niels one, right? Yeah, Terminal one. He's a big fella, bald Serbian looking. Here's Bob looking good. Hi, boys and girls.

Welcome home. Come on in. Come on in. Here. Here. Thank you very much. This is, this is, is it rocky? No, it's gorky liquor.

Yeah, don't worry. You want to taste? Here, take a taste. Is it homebrew? It's homebrew. Yeah, I mean, you can buy it the stores, but most of those are homebrew, go ahead. Is it strong? Yep.

The 17th Street Prospect Park West. Yeah, right there. I asked Bob to give me a quick rundown on where his claim stands. Frankly, with all the back and forth, this judge, that council, the city, the state, the party. I've lost track. It's the thing that is happening and yet isn't happening. It's more quest than Grail. I own the house, but they're still disputing it.

Nobody wants to be responsible for saying yes. Bob says he's already in talks with potential buyers of the house. He means to sell it, says it's worth about $2 million. He's never really had any money, but still you get the feeling this one's not really about the cash. It's about blood. Special. I would put, I phone Canada and put my cousin who speaks Serbian on it, and I wanted to know that this, you know, to me it's, it's sort of like the one child they did not keep is the one who's there fighting for it, you know, fighting for the house. The one of all the family, I'm the one in there, I'm trying to make the right decision, is trying to push the point and all that. The one they didn't keep. That's the foster kid talking, the old runaway.

This Belgrade house may not be home, but it does give him a real claim to his heritage, his history, his family name. It's almost like Bob's still trying to prove himself to parents who died years ago. But a lot of us do that. I guess my hope for Bob is that he gets the house once and for all and then moves on to whatever retirement might mean for him. On the other hand, maybe it's good for Bob to keep fighting. He's a fighter. Always was. All right, man.

Well, I'll keep in touch with you. Of course. Yeah. So, thanks, man. You got a bottle of Rocky. What do you go? I got a... I made out like a bandit.

See you'll whenever to see you. New Yorker staff writer Nick Palmgarten, talking with Bob Bozick. That's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're done for the week. But I'll be back next week to talk with Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, about the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that sent his company into Chapter 11. Till then, I hope you have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.