The New Yorker Radio Hour - From “Talk Easy”: Sam Fragoso Interviews David Remnick

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

As host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick asks a lot of questions, and recently he had to answer quite a few himself, sitting for a long interview with Sam Fragoso, who hosts the podcast “Talk Easy.”  They spoke in December about David’s reporting from Israel at the start of the current war in Gaza; his recent collection of writing about musicians, “Holding the Note”; and more.  We’re sharing this episode of “Talk Easy” as a bonus for New Yorker Radio Hour listeners. 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.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Adam Howard. We have something special on the podcast for you today. It's an episode of Talk Easy, featuring our own David Remnick. Since David is usually the one asking the questions, we thought you'd be interested in hearing him on the other side of the mic, talking about his reporting and his life's work with host Sam Ferozo. Sam most often does very in-depth interviews with film people,

but he is a strong interest in journalism. and they spoke about David's reporting from Israel at the start of the current war in Gaza. David has another piece from Israel coming out in the next issue of the New Yorker. This conversation took place last month. Here's Sam Ferozzo of Talk Easy. David Remnick. Hey. Pleasure to meet you.

Good to meet you. I was sitting outside with my notes. And the first thing you said to me was, oh, God, you're prepared. You know, I said that there are all sorts of non-prepared. One of them is, my understanding is Michael Beschloss, the historian, once showed up to be interviewed at a radio station, and he had written a book about the U-2 incident. And he sits down with the host, and the host says, no, you two. What was Bono really like?

And then he says, well, I wrote a book about the U-2 incident, at which point the guy literally takes his index finger and shuts off the recorder with a big thunk, and that was the end of the interview. You know, I did see Adam Gopnik in the bathroom. What's it like to work with him? I haven't seen Adam Gopnik in the office, and I don't know how long. Therefore, I know you're lying. Someone who looks exactly like him. Really, it's an honor to be here and to do this with you.

It's great to see you. I think we sort of have to start with the latest piece that you published. It was called In the Cities of Killing. You wrote it in the aftermath of the attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7th, claiming 12, Israeli lives. Since that date, Israel has countered with what you've called colossal force with countless airstrikes on Gaza, killing roughly 16,000 Palestinians at the time of recording. Now, you've reported in the Middle East in the past, but this latest trip to Israel was different. You said, quote, I've been to many places and seen many things, and yet I've never been anywhere

where the grief, suffering, and the rage are more profound. So I want to start here. How are you holding that grief, that suffering, in that rage? And how does it inform how you tell this story now, two months removed from the horrendous assault on October 7th? Well, I'd have to admit to you something is that I don't know what degree the reporter or journalist aspect of my being is integrated with the person part. I sometimes think they are disintegrated or apart. Fractured? No, different. I've been doing this for an awfully long time,

and admittedly, in the last couple of decades, most of it is in an office being the editor of the New Yorker. But I do get out, and before that, I certainly was out all the time. So when I see who, horrible things, I don't only, it's a terrible admission to make in some way. I don't only experience it the way that you would necessarily, because I can't. I have a job to do, which is to remember things, to write things down, to think about them, to ask questions, to resist being lied to, to understand when that's happening. And even in some instances to seduce information, to elicit information. These are not ordinary day-to-day human activities,

they're journalistic ones. So your concentration is on that. But at the same time, you're seeing something horrible, thinking something horrible, imagining something horrible. And so your humanity, your humanness is also present in your brain. It's a very strange way to be. And so the experience of standing next to a mass grave in Chechnya,

open mass grave, or as in this recent trip, being at a funeral of a family of five, every single member of the family was killed in a kibbutz on October 7th. You're experiencing it in at least two ways. One is as a journalist and one is as a human being. And how those are integrated or disintegrated or I couldn't begin to understand. Now that you've written the piece in terms of the journalist side of the equation, how do you see the story in the story?

moment. So I wrote this piece called The Cities of Killing, and I also wrote a couple of dispatches, shorter dispatches online while I was there. I was trying to get at, at various moments in the piece, what I think is too rare in the public discourse here and elsewhere about what happened. In other words, what's very hard for human beings to do is accommodate numerous and conflicting realities and truths in their brain. So you have some people who say, look, here's the thing that happened on October 7th. Here are the details of its horrors

and it leads to certain political conclusions. Then there are other people who say, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, October 7th happened, but there's a context for it and it was more like an anti-colonial jailbreak, And the real story here is both what preceded it and what followed. And both of those points of view presupposes a very differing politics, right? And you see it on campuses, you see it in petitions, you see it even in certain kinds of journalism and accounts.

And I was trying to do this other thing, which is to try to look away from nothing. It is not a moral relativism, but a kind of display of complexity. And the complexity includes but is not limited to a day, October 7th, of not just escape from Gaza, but a binge of ecstatic, horrific, killing, hostage-taking, sexual violence, which only now is being accommodated to a sense of reality to a lot of people, the likes of which Israel has never known in its history in a single day, and shattered an Israeli.

an Israeli sense of security, like no other event I can think of, including the Yom Kippur War in October of 1973. That is true. At the same time, the war has killed now in Gaza. We'll know the numbers when we know the numbers,

but an estimated 16,000 people, at least half of whom, half of whom are children and adolescents, and the vast majority of whom are civilians, many of whom either resent, hate, despise, or are indifferent to Hamas. So those are two realities. And there's a million more. And they're contradictory and they're hard to reconcile and they're either historical or they have to do with this week or last week. I'm a believer in free speech. And at the same time

when I watch the testimony of three, and I'm no fan of Elise Stefanik, but when I watch three university presidents trip over themselves in their testimony in Congress, that's a reality too. McGill at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? If the speech turns into conduct,

it can be harassment. Yes. I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment? If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. So the answer is yes.

It is a context-dependent, decision, Congresswoman. It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony today. Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. That is not bullying or harassment. This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. McGill. So is your testimony that you will not answer yes. If it is, if the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes. Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide? The speech is. is not harassment. This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill. I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's

code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be harassment. The answer is yes. What does it mean? What does it mean to you? I don't know. I haven't done the reporting because I believe that's my function here not to gas and to gas off. That's day. David the reporter. Yeah, that's who I am. David, the human, though. I'm not a philosopher.

You know, I have limited skills. I've seen you do everything from reporting the Middle East to playing on stage with Patty Smith. I would say you have plenty of skills. For the latter, you just needed a little nerve, a shot of scotch and four cords. Exactly what I did right before I walked in here. Can we focus on one reality?

I want to sort of narrow the focus here. In recent weeks, reports, have come out about the clear security failures, information that the IDF had, that they did not properly make sense of. It's a generous way, probably the most generous way I can describe it. But the attack, obviously, is by Hamas. And I want to sit with the story of a man you met over there, Mr. Broditch. Is that how I say, Brodich?

Abichai Brodich. What happened to him and his family on the 7th? Avichai Brodich is a man who's married. and has three young children and lives in kibbutz called kfar azha azah is the Hebrew for gaza in the kibbutz like all the kibbutz seem they were involved in this was about as far from Gaza as we are right now from midtown Manhattan really really close and one morning um there was a lot of commotion on the on the morning of the seventh there was a lot of commotion at kfar azza and And Avi Chai Broditch went out to see what was happening.

He went out armed to see if there was an emergency. Family was in the house. It's still early morning. And when he got back from the house, his family were gone. Three kids, very young and his wife were all gone. And it was not clear for a long time if they were dead because there were corpses everywhere in the kibbutz. Other kibbutz seem in villages and notoriously at the... this kind of rave, this music festival down the road,

and places were torched. It was hellish. It was hellish. And then it became clear that Broditch's family had been taken hostage and almost certainly brought back to Gaza. Okay? The days pass, no news from this family. And Broditch, in his grief, in his desperate,

in his not knowing what the hell to do and to whom to speak, took a full, like a collapsible chair and his dog and sat down at about five o'clock of the morning outside of what's called the Kyria, the defense, the equivalent of the Pentagon in downtown Tel Aviv. By the way, the same place where the big demonstration's been going on week after week after week for the last practically a year in protest of this kind of judicial reform on the part of the right-wing government. He sat down and I don't know if he went on Twitter, or forgive me, X, but he certainly put it on other social media feeds and more and more people as a day past came around and people carrying signs, free the hostages, bring them home today.

And I went down there, you know, staying with friends just north of Tel Aviv and got there by late morning and had a long conversation with Brodich, and he was very, very careful. This is a guy who's a farmer, who are now studying to be a nurse. These are not settlers. This is not machine gun toting, hilltop settlers in the West Bank.

I don't want to characterize everybody involved in this on the attack, people of the left, peacnicks, people whose idealism drove them to live in these tiny kibbutzim, which are kind of atavistic at this point. It's not a growing part of Israel. And live this kind of slightly bucolic, either agrarian or light industrial lives where you know everybody.

And the kibbutz is maybe a thousand people or 15 hundred people. And suddenly these are hell on earth, hell on earth. 10% 15% of it given kibbutz dead, dozens of people taken away and by armed Hamas people and brought to Gaza. And thankfully, in that period that one week truce in prisoner exchange, Avichai Broditch's family was freed. But before they were freed, he said to you, quote, it was overkill by Hamas. I don't think they thought this would go that far. At least, I want to believe that. Their religion is peaceful.

We are going the wrong way. We, I assume in this case, means Netanyahu and company. we should be sending humanitarian aid to women, children, and the elderly. Hamas believes that women, children, and the elderly should not be attacked, but something on their side went very wrong. That passage, you say he knew that he was going to be read, but it is astounding to me. Either the compassion he genuinely felt or the compassion that perhaps was calculated, knowing that it would be read, do you believe him when he says...

I believe that he thinks the religion is peaceful. Do you believe that? I think I would agree with him in that religion is innately peaceful. Hamas is not. I also think he was frightened to death, frightened to death. And why wouldn't he be? His children. The youngest one is the age of four.

Correct. And his wife are separated from him and being held hostage in a tunnel somewhere in Gaza by Hamas fighters. And I think what he said was very measured. At the time, you'll notice, he did not tell me that he went out. He was part of the Kibbutz, you know, defense little guard and carried a gun because he didn't want Hamas to know that. I know that for a fact because his brother told me that day and I left it out of the piece. Why did to do that? Because he asked me to and I understood why.

You know, when somebody says something is off the record, it's off the record. And his reason was damn good. He did not want Hamas to get it in. its head that he was somehow a military figure and he, well, they might as well kill the family. He was terrified. And it only became public knowledge after it. So I think he was speaking as a father above all. Separated from his wife. His three kids. Yeah, because the news could have been totally other. That's right. And for people who still have family members and friends as hostages, Of course their first priority is that.

They're not military strategists. They want their sister back. They want their brother back. They want their child back. They want their wife, their husband back. And everything else is secondary. And at the same time, when I read Mosababu Toa, the Palestinian poet who I've been talking to endlessly, his priorities, the first thing on his mind, of course are family members. He's seen people killed.

He's seen, just these are people. In extremists, the likes of which you and I are privileged not to have to live day to day. And have the privilege to discuss in a way that is open and complicated and imperfect. You spoke to one Islamic scholar who said, Hamas is an idea embedded in the national tapestry. Quote, no matter what, we will end up where we started. With the Palestinians and the Israelis living here together and needing to find a proper formula. Given the entrenchment we've discussed on each side of that equation, not to mention the 1,200 Israelis and the 16,000 Palestinians dead, what do you see as actually being inside of a

proper formula? Let me say something that's what I think is both true and banal, but completely insufficient. Quite a preface. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are going anywhere, period. it sooner or later, and this is a process that's been going in not just for a little while, but for a century essentially, sooner or later, there has to be some kind of political arrangement that accommodates that fact and allows people to live decent, secure lives. And we know all the many, many formulas that have been proposed and that have failed and that have been rejected we know the moments of optimism and then we know the moments

and that we're living through now of the complete opposite. But I don't see how that fact changes because, yes, the Israelis may at some point find a way to declare military victory over Hamas, sure. And Hamas will never declare its surrender because what does that mean?

Because even if there are just 20 Hamas fighters left, they'll recruit more. We know this pattern. It's not unique to Hamas. What has to happen is that psychologists have to change, politics have to change, because what's not going to change is geography.

This is a very small patch of land, and it's very hard for people who's never been there to accommodate. You know, we live in this enormous country, and our borders are with Canada and Mexico. This is a geography, sorry to be banal about this, but this is a geography at the scale of New Jersey. in which the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza are part of that geography,

and then it's surrounded by the region. It's surrounded by Lebanon to the north, Syria to the east, Egypt, and so on and so forth. There has been progress over the years that shouldn't be forgotten. Israel has a peace treaty with, however, it's a cold peace with Egypt, with Jordan. That's important. That wasn't always the case. And in our theme of holding contradictory truths in our mind, the people who have made those peace treaties often end up dead,

like Anwar Sadat and Yaskak Rabin. And I think it's also a truth that Yasser Arafat was not uninfluenced by the fact that if he had accepted, however imperfect, Ehud Barak's offer, of 23 years ago, he might have ended up dead too, because there are always radicals and extremists and rejectionists in all camps. Hamas is in that camp. Itamar Ben-Givir and other extreme right-wing,

tragically ministers as well as settlers are in that camp. And the influence of the settlers in recent years has been so profound that there are commentators who say that settlers have annexed Israel in a political sense. But again, it may take five years,

it may take 20, it may take 100, and let it come sooner than later. But the essential fact is there are two peoples in this very small plot of land that's supercharged by history and religion and violence. When you say may come, what does that mean may come? What would come? Because it hasn't yet. Right, but what would that look like? I'll tell you what I doubt it will look like, and that is a one-state solution.

I think if anything, what's happened in the last six weeks tells us that these are not two peoples who are able to live in peace and comedy. There are people in the debate, and they vary, by the way, who think that the only just solution is a one-state solution in which the land that we now think of as the state of Israel and the occupied territories altogether in Gaza would be one state. and whoever wins elections wins elections, and that's just not going to happen. It would be, you know, Yugoslavia all over again. Two-state solution, which now sounds rather sentimental and airy and God, we tried that, and at this point also seems hard to imagine,

but you got a better idea? There's just a limit on how that can be accomplished. You've apologized three times for being banal. It's early days. We'll get to more. I'm apologizing because for anybody who knows this subject, I could write about Russia, which is the other foreign thing that I've written about. I could write about Russia until that cows come home. And the reaction I get is very gratifying.

People are in the main. There are obviously Russian experts who have all kinds of bones to pick. We don't know a lot about this subject. Yeah. Thank you for informing us. Or Russians, and they're far away and so on and so forth. This is a very different subject. This is an intimate subject.

Right. My question is, is your apology actually a gesture to how challenging it is to talk about this? Because whether it's in the press or on social media or across college campuses, as you alluded to, the division and rhetoric seems to escalate with each day. I have friends who've been to each other's weddings. They won't talk to each other. Some of them are listening to this. Yeah. And they won't talk to you and what or me?

Well, they probably would like to talk to David Remnick. but that's the different story. But I keep thinking back on that line from Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. We have a failure to communicate. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Not always.

And part of communicating, as I understand it, as I'm trying to do now with you, is to sometimes fail. It's to fall short trying to understand the person across from you, the ideas and beliefs they hold dear. And I'm wondering, given your experience on the matter, given the identities that you come at this story with, as you said, a Jewish man, a reporter, an American, what about this issue and this specific moment in history makes communicating seem all but impossible to do?

There are a number of things because people do bring their identities and either their learning or their ignorance or somewhere in between. to the table. I like to bring all three. Exactly. And by the way, one aspect you left out is age, too. When I was nine or ten years old, we were just 20 years after the Holocaust.

Israel was this, you know, state that had just won a war in six days. And it was filled with sense of self and victory that would translate to New Jersey Hebrew schools and just was all over the world.

Israel had done a heroic thing. And of course, the 1967 victory would turn out to be in many ways a Pyrrhic victory because the territories it seized or won in that war would turn out to be, as we say in academia, deeply problematic. So if you're of my generation, you remember that distinctly, and that's part of what's in your brain and your calculus about thinking about this, even though you've obviously taken on many other things.

If you were my kid's age, you know, they're now 30. I thought you were going to put it on me. Yeah. You grew up with nothing but Netanyahu. You grew up with, you know, there are people that are your age, Jewish or non, who find Israel simply an embarrassment. This fuels the gap of understanding

and communication that you're talking about. You see it on campus. So, again, I don't want to make cartoons of anybody, but if you grew up in a world, you went to an academia that your frame of reference for this was you saw it as part of simply as post-colonialism, or you saw it in the same frame as France and Algeria, that's one way of looking at the world. And if you see it as, if you were brought up in a very different way, you saw it as an absolutely necessary refuge for a despised people over thousands of years who had been all but wiped out in

the Second World War. That's a very different frame of reference. But the president of Harvard. Yeah. And the other folks you alluded to go in front of Congress. They're more of your generation than mine. Yes. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. So tell me about the fear and the complication. Look, I don't think those three people have an anti-Semitic bone in their body. Okay. I don't. But the fear to talk about But I think they're trying to juggle, however ill-advised, a number of imperatives, which have to do with First Amendment rights, academic freedom, the legality of stupid speech as well as intelligence speech, and then the moral imperative calling things what they are, and in this case, anti-Semitism.

I've often thought, and I don't want to give away any editorial secrets, but I've had an editorial meeting lately and I said we should do a piece headline the worst job in the world and it might be university president so I have some sympathy for it I think they handled themselves at best awkward legalistic and the way that came off as weirdly amoral and they were being questioned by somebody in bad faith

that's right that is a bad thing yeah at least Stephanic I'm not going to sit here an excuse or at least Stefanic and the way she was looking for what exactly what she got, which was a kind of way that she could bash the elitist college presidents from, but it's a struggle. But you said at best it is that. At worst, it is what?

Morally tone deaf, that's even putting a nice gloss on it. It is. I'm a nice guy. In an article, the website ran called the anguished fallout from a pro-Palestinian letter at Harvard, just to button this up. There's a passage that reads, The backlash exemplified a tendency to conflate criticism of Israel. Israel with anti-Semitism and advocacy for Palestinian liberation with support for terror, holding multiple truths, not making cartoons out of each other. I would say is probably the main goal of

doing this podcast. So I want to try to do that with you. We talked about all the identities that you have that you brought to this story. I'd like to go back to 1964. Your six-year-old years old. There's a preschool you're supposed to go to, but they're not ready for you yet. How do you know this? Yeah. And you find yourself in a van with some older Jewish boys. Yeah. Heading to Yeshiva. And it's from them in that van that you first learn about the Beatles and most importantly, Bob Dylan. Two years later, you stumble upon the album, The Best of 66. What happens? I don't know where you scrape this up, but it's pretty accurate.

Well, you're laughing about the boys in the van description? Here's the thing. You get old enough, and your past feels like somebody else. It just feels like a story that you've told or told yourself or other people, and it may be accurate, or it's roughly accurate, or you have no idea anymore, and it's a story. Well, we're going to do our best to tell it together. I think it's roughly accurate.

I'm of that generation who, you know, of kindergarten age or thereabouts, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, and it was incredibly exciting. And then something weird happened. So when I, around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And in those days,

there wasn't any medicine to make you better or alleviate the symptoms. I have friends now who have MS, and you wouldn't know. You know, they go, some of them were in shape. But a lot of people, they're okay. And I have to think that my mother, had she been born, you know, a generation or two later, might have been okay. But it was scary. It was really scary.

And I think it scared the shit out of my father. They were young people, you know, who were your age and with little kids. And I think she thought she was going to die pretty soon. She lived to be 85. You know, you make things happen in your life, everybody's lives. And I became a kid that became obsessed with radio and music and things that I could amuse myself. with. And I remember distinctly the process of buying music, you had the radio, and I wasn't cool enough quite yet for FM radio. So listening to, you know, AM, W.A.B.C. and cousin Bruce and all that stuff.

But once in a blue, blue moon, my father would take me to a department store called E.J. Corvettes, where I could buy an album. And I didn't know what to get. There was so many of them. And I wanted them all. So like an idiot, I bought a compilation. So there'd be one song by Paul Revere and the Raiders and there'd be one song by Chad and Jeremy. And there was one song by somebody I heard about, but I didn't know much about, called Bob Dylan. And on the album was a song called I Want You from the Blonde on Blonde album. And I Want You is this kind of phantasmagoric love song that I can barely make sense of now. And I certainly could make no sense of in any real way when I was eight years old, but it was transporting. And it was like something that you just entered another

universe and you wanted more of it. Like a size, the lonesome old good grinder cries, the silver saxophones say I should refuse you. The cracked bills and washed out horns, blow into my face was scorn, but it's not that way I wasn't born to lose you. I want you. I want you I want you so,

baby honey, I want you. And because it was radio, it wasn't YouTube filled with interviews with so-and-so and everything was immediately

available on Spotify, it came to you in this different commodified way. You'd have to buy it or you'd have to be lucky enough to have the radio on

at the absolute right time to hear visions of Johanna and even more, you know, and then I had to work backwards and hear the earlier albums and all the rest. And I became a fanatic about Bob Dylan. People know this about me, but the depths of the fanaticism are six miles past embarrassing. And yet it meant everything to me. It still means a lot to me. And it gave me nothing less than

the greater cultural world because Bob Dylan would mention, you know, later when I'm, when I was capable of. T.S. Eliot. And I'd go buy the wasteland or something. I didn't understand it. But owning it felt cool. Being confused by it felt important. I think that's the way most people enter complicated culture. They're confused by it and tantalized by it. It has an erotic pull, and it has a psychological and a pleasure pull.

And Bob Dylan was rock and roll, so I had a pleasure pull too. Growing up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, you said, quote, I was hungry for worlds that I faintly knew were out there, shimmering faintly somewhere past the horizon of my seeing. That description sounds a lot like the kind of shimmering mirage and the great Gatsby, looking across... Oz was across the river.

That's right. Was there a sense of ambition in your house that was passed down from your parents? No, no. Ambition was utterly conventional. My parents were the children of immigrants. My grandparents, well, they were immigrants and not. but you know the world they came from Eastern European Jewry, the lucky ones. They didn't want you to aspire? Yes, but in the most conventional way possible, doctor or a lawyer.

Because it meant you were your own boss. That was very important. The world of business was not in our world. Certainly the world of the arts. My mother was an art teacher, but she got sick very young and had to quit her job and be home, and that was a struggle. It was modest. my parents wanted me to do well and study hard and be a doctor and go, you know, further than them and be a good boy. And how can I possibly blame them? You mentioned your mother. She was diagnosed with MS when you were about five years old. When you go to Princeton, it's around that time that your father's is diagnosed with Parkinson's.

That came later. That came. But he was in his early 50s. It's unclear. My father's a dentist. He had a very small practice. We were what. middle class in the American sense, parents bought their house for $11,000 and we went to decent public schools, nothing great but decent. And it became evident maybe when I was in college

that my father was developing a tremor in his hands and here's what you don't want is a dentist with a big trekker in his hands. But he tried to conceal it and in early Parkinson's, if you take the proper medicine, it could... You said it would have been

a Buster Keaton film if it wasn't your own life. Right. Buster Keaton. as a Parkinsonian dentist. It's a dark joke, but there it is. And he didn't know what to do because, like, what would we live on?

What would he do? So he faked it for a while, but finally he couldn't anymore, obviously. And by the time I came home from Moscow when I was about 31 or two, they were both in bad shape. So that's what I want to ask you about, which is you're in college at Princeton.

There are medical troubles at home. You had grand ambitions to be an artist. you went to Paris and bused on trains. They paid you money to get away from them because you weren't great at it. That's not true. That's what you said. It just couldn't be avoided.

I went on the train. From 10.30 in the morning to 2 p.m. You made enough money to pay for the hotel. Oh, easy, yeah. The movie and the drinks that night. Easy. But eventually you come back. And when you take John McPhee's class,

I'm curious about settling in journalism. did you feel a sense of obligation to pursue a career that at least had some clearer pathway to stability? Yes. And was that because of your parents? Absolutely accurate. I thought, you looked at me like, I don't know where you're going with this. You landed the plane. And when you're that age, to be a writer and an artist means only one thing.

You're a novelist or if you're really financially foolish, a poet. But I did have this intimation. that I'd need to take care of my parents. I was the older son, one of two. Was that daunting? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a 19-year-old kid. How do you make these decisions, you know, half in the dark anyway?

So here was my grand ambition. I thought I would go and retain my coolness and become a writer for the village voice. I thought that would put me in great financial state. Bring you back to your 7-11 days. Exactly. I mean, I just, you know, I was an idiot. when it was concerned this.

But what happened was I got an internship at the Washington Post, did okay. They said, we can't hire you right away because the other paper in town is fold at the Washington Star. So go away. I taught in Japan,

bummed around Southeast Asia and India on $2 a day, came back at another internship and landed at the Washington Post. That's the curve of things. But, you know, still, I was making $18,000 a year. Yes.

Everything was falling apart at home. And I look back on it with terrible guilt because I'm living in Washington and day to day I didn't think about it. You know, maybe I'd send a small check. I just didn't have... Didn't think about what, helping? Of course I helped.

But I wish I had helped even more and, you know, I was raised to be a good son. Here's the thing. I hear about people's parents and their travails. Yes, my parents were disabled. But I think if there's a key to anything with me, it almost sounds like bragging

because it almost sounds rare, I never doubted one minute of my parents' love. Love for you. And my brother, yes. And they didn't understand what I wanted to do. They thought it was weird. Why were you majoring in comparative literature? What are you comparing?

So there was that divide. But I never thought they were over, and they were overbearing and needy. And for good reason. They were falling apart. They were falling apart. But so there were all kinds of crises until they were gone. But much later in life, I could deal with them financially.

I could, you know, install somebody to take care of them. And people to whom I'm everlastingly grateful and still talk to a lot. But then why the guilt? Because you can't make it better. You can't make the MS go away. You can't make the Parkinson's go away. You can't comfort them in the middle of the night when they have Parkinsonian hallucination.

you can't pick them off the floor when they fall down. They are your children now. God knows I'm not unique in that situation, but usually it only comes when people are very old. I have a child. I'm not closed about this. I have three kids. The youngest has profound autism,

my daughter Natasha. And it's really hard. And the psychological difficulty there is that even though I'm sitting here with you today and I'm healthy and knock on wood and my wife is healthy and but I've read in the newspaper that I'm not going to live forever and my daughter is you know 25 years old she's going to live longer so that horizon is a different psychological impingement so you're coming to somebody who's had a lot of unbelievable luck in his life professionally and maritally and otherwise but then there's this other

things. That's right. That's the human condition. If you're lucky, if you're lucky. Sounds like we're holding two competing truce. Yep. As a matter of day-to-day life, yeah. They're not competing. They're... Side by side. Yeah. How'd you get so wise so young? Breeding you didn't hurt. That's the last nice thing I'll say. All right. That's a deal. That's a deal. We'll be right back with our guest, David Remnick. You've had many strokes of luck. That's true. Let's talk about

the first time you are summoned into the office of Ben Bradley, the famous legendary editor of the Washington Post, presided over Watergate and all the rest. Like you said, you landed the job in the early 80s. You started on the night police beat. Right. You moved to the style staff formally in August of 1984. Feature section, yeah.

But I want to talk about the summer of 86. When you're writing the profile of, the late senator from New York. Daniel Patrick Winnihan. Yes. This was the first story that you brought into his office. Why did Bradley call you in?

So if you've seen all the president's men, you begin to see how charismatic and sexy this guy was. Jason Robards did an unbelievable job of almost conquering it. Tom Hanks, God love him in the paper, plays a different person in a way. And Bradley had a glass, just as I do here, He's not walls, it's glass, and you can see him. And by that time, he's a legend.

And he's like the great orca whale in his tank. Is that how you describe yourself? It's kind of little porgy fish. And you'd see him, and his feet were on the desk, and he's wearing these fantastic Turnbull and Asser shirts with the white collars and the broad stripes. And it's just the guy is exquisite, and it's inspiring. It's inspiring.

It's like Napoleon is back there or something like that. But taller? He doesn't have to fight anymore. And I'm working on this profile of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a kind of intellectual senator from the state of New York, who had been a Harvard professor, and quirky in ways that would be unbelievably unfamiliar now, he wrote a book a year. In addition to me, quite an effective senator in many ways. He also had the habit of enjoying liquid refreshments. Alcohol. Alcohol.

I asked him, because why beat him? around the bush, I said to Moynihan, what do you drink? Because, you know, people talk about it. And how much? And he said the following, I don't know if I'm getting this, because unfortunately, you have the books over there, not me. But Moynihan, it's not in there, I don't think. But Moynihan, as I recall, enjoyed a drink or two at lunch, if not more.

Then at dinner, he and his wife, as I recall, would split what he called a bottle or two of claret. I did not know what the word claret meant. And then, it was either preceded by some whiskeys or, and certainly followed by cognac after. Two to three cocktails, then the bottle of wine, as he said. I don't know about you, my friend, but

I stick to tequila only, actually. That's the one thing I cannot drink. It's like, killer hangover. I did it once. No headache for me. It's horrible. No sugar. Horrible. I was much more a fan of the other kind of enjoyment. Weed.

Yeah, about to say. So you're brought into the office because of his drinking? So I'm called into the office and Brannley's feet are up on the desk. And all I see are the souls of his shoes. And he said, I got this call from Moynihan. And he said, you're asking about his drinking. And I am fucking terrified. I've been summoned to Bradley's office and now I'm in trouble.

And of course, Bradley knows Moynihan socially and blah, blah, blah. And I said, yes, I'm writing this full and fair profile. and it just seems to be part of his day-to-day bearing. And not for one instance, do I suggest that he's incapacitated or unable to do his work? In fact, he writes a book a year and he's a very effective senator, but I do think it's pertinent. And I certainly asked him, yes, I did.

And then I made a huge mistake. And then I said, so don't worry. And his feet, the souls of his feet, part like a V, and through it I see this face, this rock hard, preposterous. wasp, handsome face with the hair slicked back in this beautiful salt and pepper. And he said, what the fuck me? Worry?

Get the fuck out of here. And that was the end of the discussion. We allowed to curse on this show, I suppose we can't. Absolutely. This isn't the New Yorker radio hour. Exactly. And I'm sent off and I write my piece and all that material is in there in one way. I know that I can't remember, but it certainly was in there.

and I never heard word one from Bradley and the lesson there was he's allowed to ask if I've got a good reason that's the end of the discussion and I'll never be able to imitate Ben Bradley in my bearing I mean look at me

you're 6-3 yeah well whatever 6-2 but who's arguing by next year it'll be 6 foot it'll be my head then and I can't imitate my predecessor Tina Brown or anybody

I can only be myself but I can learn lessons. And one of the lessons was that. If your person has done their reporting and there's a rationale and it's honest, then you go with it. Also, he was incredibly cool.

Again, you played on stage with Patty Smith? That's not nothing to... I think the first time I did that, I was wearing gray, what my mother would call slacks. And what most people would call slacks. Yeah. God bless her.

Makes you rest in peace. Yeah, exactly. I'll have a shun. Now, you mentioned Tina Brown and what you learned from Ben Bradley as an editor. I want to go to the moment you're hired as the editor of the New Yorker. It's officially July of 98. And in the first two months of running the magazine, it's my understanding that you lost about 10 pounds. Is that right?

I'm going to write a book called. the weight loss method of getting a new stressful job, that you don't know what you're doing. And because you didn't know exactly what you were doing. Not exactly. I didn't know anything about what I was doing. You asked a deputy editor for Anna Wintor why she is so good at her job.

And she said she knows what she wants. And it was really interesting to me because obviously we have different personalities and she has both a reality and a persona, and I'm a jlub in the corner. But nevertheless, that is a very important thing because I can see sometimes if I'm in the meeting. Oh, what in the corner?

That comes naturally, my friend. In the course of a day, you make a bunch of decisions, and some of them can be painful, often having to do with people, or they can be consequential, or they're minor or inconsequential. But you need to make them. You can't let them indefinitely pile up and pile up and pile up. A, because that's bad management, and B, it confuses people. And you have to know that you're going to make some bad decisions, too, along the way.

The quote was, because she knows exactly what she wants. So when did you begin to understand what you wanted from the magazine? And what was that? Maybe this contradicts what we just said, but I don't believe in the reality or the fiction of the imperial editor. Ben Bradley couldn't possibly read all of the Washington Post every day, much less make all the decisions that go into it. And there are subjects that I know something about,

and there are subjects that I know nothing about, and then there's a lot of in-between, and I'm good at some things, and I'm crazily bad at others. What are you good at and what are you bad at? I'm pretty good at getting things done. Take writing, for example. I'm pretty good at making my deadlines,

but that doesn't mean I'm a better writer than people who have trouble with their deadlines. You know, A.J. Liebling, I'm not applying this myself, but A.J. Liebling used to say that he was a better writer than anyone who wrote faster than him, and he was faster than anyone who wrote better. Yes. Which is a nice little neat formulation, but...

When you write, do you also maniacally laugh at your own jokes? No, with my shirt off. No. But I have, not to deepen the impression, but I have what's called Zitzflesh. the ability keep your ass in the chair. To sustain. Right.

But look, I now run a business, and it has to be a coherent, sustainable one in order to do the things that I value the most. I have to be asking the right questions. Otherwise, I'm going to be steamrolled into doing things that I think are bad for the magazine. When you took over the magazine in 98,

it was not making money. That's right. You brought it into the black. I would reject the vertical pronoun, but we brought it into the black. We bought it in. black. Thank you for the all gender bathrooms too. My pleasure. I'm cutting that line. I know you are because you're chicken. Oh, I'm chicken. You're the one who

didn't say what you were bad at. Get the hell out of here. The sun ain't yellow. It's chicken. Okay. You still haven't answered what you're bad at, which we're going to, we're going to. Lots of things. Yes, but tell me, you said the things that you value. Do we have enough time? You said you have only till 2.30. David, you have only till 2.30. Don't that's not true. I would be here forever. You said the that you value in the magazine. Yeah. What are the things that you value? Tell me what that editorial vision look like

in those days and now. I value the values of this magazine, which are depth and consideration of being writer-driven of accuracy and care. It is inevitable that with change in editors over time, that there are going to be perceptible and even imperceptible change. it shifts in emphasis.

So Bob Gottlie, who followed William Sean and preceded Tina Brown. It passed away this past summer. That's right. Great, great, great book editor and the editor of The New Yorker for six years and brought a lot to the desk, as I say. I don't think the thing he favored

or had an affection for most in this world was journalism. I think he spent a lot of his time at The New Yorker on the fiction, on a certain kind of comical reporting all kinds of other things. But it's funny, when I ask you about values, you go to what another editor

didn't value. Is that your way of saying that you value journalism? Yeah, I think I'm probably more journalistically into it. Hard news. Not hard news. Very few pieces would be considered traditional hard news. But I certainly value investigative reporting. I value foreign reporting.

Not that Bob didn't publish it. He published Alma Guillaume Prieto. from Latin America. You publish all kinds of people. It's just a shift in emphasis, volume, view, and also the world has required different things

of us at a given time. Let's talk about the internet in a minute. I can only be who I am. So for fiction, Deborah Treasman, who I made the fiction editor, who had been working under Bill Buford,

she and the fiction department, Crescent Elyshund, William Davidson, and so on. They read all the stories. They choose a short story. stories. My only thing with them is send them to me what you've chosen, and I want to make sure I'm reading them, and a certain percentage I maybe pass on. And I also want to make sure that even though I'm saying yes to things that I think will be interesting, and I'm putting a lot of faith in

those editors and writers, that I'm not knowingly thinking, this, God, this will be incredibly boring or wrong for us. But this is the first subject that you've been. You think I'm being evasive? A little vague. Well, then dig in, because I'm not going to, I'm I have no intention of being evasive. I guess I want to understand how you view the function of the magazine and journalism at this moment, because you've said in the past, the first job of journalism is to put pressure on power, investigative pressure, reporting pressure, intellectual pressure on the ideas being put out by power. That's journalist's first role, not entertainment, not selling copies, not clicks, pressure on power. Yeah, but I also want to be publishing science reporting that's not necessarily about climate. change. That's just about, you know, how something works. You know, one of the great profiles

the magazine's published in the last 50 years is, say, Mark Singer, his profile of Ricky Jay. Ricky Jay was who? He was a magician. So its social consequences are modest. One of my favorite profiles. It's a fantastic profile in Magus. And I just think it is a primary function of journalism writ large, not just the New Yorker, but, you know, any journalism worth its name is to put pressure on power. That's for damn sure. Since 2016, the circulation of the New Yorker has increased. No, is decreased? It's been in recent years at 1.2 million. In 2018, it was reported at 1.2. Then there's some new survey that came out recently that says 1.25. Yeah, but that's more or less the same. If you're asking about the economics in the magazine? I'm asking about the economics and how you balance

the economics while still applying pressure to the powers that be? I don't see any contradiction in it. I think the great gift of my job and the job that my colleagues, jobs that my colleagues have is that our readers expect us to be the best forms of ourselves. In other words, what we want to be in our best days, that's what our readers want us to be. There's no, like the readers secretly want us to be dumber or less rigorous or, or more cotton candy. We all want cotton candy, by the way,

as well as our, you know, potatoes. You know, we're dessert of some kind. Magazine can all be hardcore investigative reporting or something like that. So that's a very happy coincidence of interest

of readers and the people who do the work. Why don't we talk about the existential issues in journalism right now? Because you recently sat with the New York Times publisher, A.J. Solzberger, perhaps in this room. Right here.

And you said to him, public distrust of the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, are at record levels. Our ratings are a misery. Well, why? The ratings are what's called

the mainstream press are a misery. Why is that? Are you going to stop crossing your arms at some point over there? No. Technology, politics. So I came to the Washington Post post-Watergate, and the press was, in some people's eyes,

had rescued the Republic of a crook in office. Now we've had a crook in office for four years and is possibly coming back as, you know, an insipient dictator. Just yesterday I interviewed right here, Lynn Cheney, a ardent right-wing conservative, arguing that we're sleepwalking to dictatorship. So what's different?

Well, you all of a sudden have this figure who doesn't resign, but in fact tries to overturn the election. And part of his strategy, which is diabolically effective, is to attack and make an enemy of the press, is to take advantage of technologies that did not exist in Nixon's time, to create an alternate universe not only of the press, but of fact and non-fact itself. And unfortunately, not just the United States, but all over the world, the authoritarian temptation, the septibility to conspiracy theory and lies, we know what that is. We've seen it historically. And technology has only exacerbated and its manipulating abilities are unbelievable. Ask Putin. Ask Trump. Ask and ask and ask and ask. It's just plainly evident. So do I take it personally?

The phrase that I might hate most of all in modern life is, it is what it is because I don't want it to is. I want it to be otherwise. But that's just a fact of modern life. Because you're going to ask me, I'm going to tell you to be honest, now you'll get people pissed off of me. I don't think the New York Times,

for all its faults and we all argue with it, and it's in a way the weather, I don't think it's ever been better. some people will argue it's more ideological, it's more, I've been hearing that all my life, which is now not short. You know, it's anti-Israel, it's pro-Israel, it's pro-Palestians, it's anti-Palceans, you hear that. But their intentions are optimal. Same with us. We have good days, we have bad days, we have, you know, successful pieces or transcendently successful pieces, we have the opposite. But life has changed, technology has changed, politics have changed

in such a way that it's taken a toll on what Sarah Palin so eloquently calls the lamestream media. When Trump was elected in 2016, the morning it became clear that he was going to become president. You published an article called An American Tragedy, and I have this vivid memory of being awake at 3 in the morning, reading your piece. I must have just turned maybe 22, I think it was. I moved to Los Angeles.

And I remember everyone around me. Where are you from? Chicago. I'm thinking in the time since then, the eight years, as we head into 2024, you know, we started this conversation talking about Israel Palestine, which is a story you've told with an and and not a but. And that is perhaps the most useful way to talk about a country that elected Obama and a country that elected President Trump. And so as we head into 24, you often in interviews talk about this term, presentism, that we should not be guilty of thinking the present moment will persist forever. Quote, despair is an unforgivable sin in politics, public life, and in personal life. Despair is unforgivable. Too much depends on us not being despairing, whether it's the environment or countless other issues of public American and international life.

I'm not a religious guy, but that's what the Bible tells me, that's what the Bible tells me, despair is the unforgivable sin, and I think that's right. Look at my, just where I'm slotted in politically in my experience. When I was your age, I was in Moscow, and what was happening in the world was that Eastern Europe was liberated. The Berlin Wall came down. Soviet totalitarianism was in shambles. There was a promise of democratic progress in the air. There had even been pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Latin America was showing signs of democratic development in life. When you left Moscow in 91, you said, quote, I was unreasonably optimistic.

Totally. And South African apartheid was overcome. And a few years later, the Oslo Accords were signed. And so there was a sense, however, unreasonable. that life was political life, public life, civic life, was at the very least promising. And now we've talked about the Middle East. We know what's going on in Ukraine. We know what's going on in power in Russia.

China is no more delightful than it was. And the environment is maybe the biggest subject of all, but people find it boring to talk about. So when I hear about mental health and when I hear about political dissatisfactory, action and anger for people of your generation, how can I think it could be otherwise? It's a really rough time, and I think we'd be idiots to say otherwise, but what do you do? Throw up your hands, but politically as citizens, the idea of ceding the ground to dictatorship in this country now, no matter how fucked up the country has proved to be time and time again, no matter how self-deceiving we can be about America and American history, or our so-called exceptionalism,

etc i'm just not and you shouldn't be if you don't mind my saying or any of us can afford to be to give into despair that's the enemy or one of them we should not be guilty of thinking the present moment will persist forever yeah but i have to tell you yeah this is where i add a butt okay when you go into 2024 and you ask people to choose between trump and biden it doesn't feel like a present it sounds like the past sounds like we've because of age not just that but that it's the same two folks with their own set of problems what are you doing about coming into 24 and so how do you know no no no no no what are you doing about no no no you can have me on your show but but i but no no no we each play our the despair the despair how do you beat back against it because this is not unique this is a country

that had a civil war this is country that had reconstruction and its betrayal This is a country that's had Jim Crow, people hanging from trees, Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 20s. Political instability, political betrayal, lying in government. What's unique here is unique here. You've got a black comic authoritarian on the brink of re-election. Okay, that is unique, re-election to the presidency. I see my role, as you can imagine, as an editor. in this and the little writing I do.

You mentioned that piece, American Tragedy. The difficulty, of course, is I'm speaking to you and the kinds of people who listen to you and the people who listen to the New Yorker Radio Hour read The New Yorker. That's not 330 million people. That makes it very tough. But throwing up your hands,

I think, is not just crazy. It's defeatist. It's immoral. It's understandable, second by second, but ultimately to throw up your hands is just wrong. A week before you started in 1998 in the June 22nd issue of The New Yorker, you wrote an article. It was about a critic, Alfred Kaysen. And I wanted to perhaps return to that in the first paragraph of it and see where it landed with you and how it may be instructed. for us in this moment.

I should read it. They would rather hear you than me. The inexhaustible urge towards self-expression makes it nearly a sure thing that there will always be writers around as long as there is us. The diceyer question is whether there will be readers.

Not just readers of the sports pages and the jumble, of self-help bestsellers and the consultant's confessions, no, but passionate readers who ignore the phone and the TV for a few hours to engage a book

whose difficulty, in quotes, is that it fails to soothe the ego or flatter a limited intelligence, the reader who honestly believes that the best and deepest of what we are is on the shelf, and that to reach across the shelf changes the self, changes you. When it ran in 98, your friend, mentor, and now a staff writer for you, John McPhee, said in the Washington Post, that's a pretty good portrait of David himself. and a pretty good forecast of how he'll run the New Yorker. He did. John McPhee, man.

92. 92. My teacher, my mentor, my colleague, and my, despite my best efforts, fishing buddy, drags me out into the horrible outdoors twice a year to dip a hook into a river for some unknown reason. Please don't invite me. You have no idea. Look, I am not blind to the world of,

Netflix, TikTok, my phone, which is sitting six inches away from me. Which you looked at four minutes ago? I looked at four minutes ago. But the fact of the matter is, I know nothing in our cultural lives, our intellectual lives, and our civic lives, that is effective and that reaches more deeply than the best of what is written. And I'm a huge movie watcher and junk television watcher and ballgame. viewer and and and but written expression that's what I ended up giving my life toward and it's immensely enriching and gratifying and I believe in it I remember very distinctly interviewing Philip Roth about 15 years before he died when I first got to know him and he was despairing about

writing in not the literary world, but just this piece of business, and I bet you I borrowed the language from him, which is that he despaired of the notion that enough people were turning off the TV, turning on the lamp, throwing the phone across the room, and devoting themselves for an hour or two or three to an enigmatic, difficult text of any kind, because it requires a lot of you. and I'm guilty enough of that too, even though my professional life demands it, but it's the gift of a lifetime, and I know that I'm hardly alone.

You've committed yourself to this, to this craft, to making this magazine. My last question for you. McPhee himself is a great example of creative longevity, which is at the heart of this new book of yours, holding the note, in which you profile a series of musicians who are all still working till the very end.

You write, for musicians late in their careers in the spirit of Cestinudo, of Sustain that purvade. Writing, playing, and performing keeps them in the game, helping to replenish what age has attenuated. And as we leave, I thought we watch some of this performance by Joni Mitchell at the Newport Festival last year.

Yeah. Can you set that up? Yeah, Johnny Mitchell, who was such a hugely important and wonderful singer and songwriter and musician, and whose masterpiece is maybe one of the great albums of the era as Blue. In recent years, she kind of went missing. She wasn't performing. Her health was bad. And then she's had in recent, less year or two, she's kind of popped her head up again.

It reemerged. Here I am, and she's become kind of more welcoming to younger musicians who come and worship her to feet and also play with her. And she appeared at Newport. And no, her voice is not this incredibly pure tone that we remember from the 70s and blue and ladies of the canyon and miles of aisles and all kinds of things, Mingus. It's something new. It's deeper.

It's rougher. But it's her. And there's something beautiful. about that. It is very rare in anything that anybody's doing their best work when they're very old. You know, I went to see Bob Dylan out in Brooklyn a month ago, and it was amazing. He's a rarity like that. You know, it's not like a Rolling Stone anymore, but he's fully engaged. His audience is there. There's something beautiful about that. My own life, look, I'm nowhere near these, you know, remotely in these leagues. And if you're asking me slightly, and,

I think you are a little bit about what's down the road. I will not cling to this post forever because I think it's wrong. I think you need to make way for new talent, new points of view, and new mistakes, new everything. And if you clog up the works for too long, it's not healthy. But when I do leave, and it won't be a million years soon now, not next week or anytime very soon, but it'll happen. I hope to write again more consistently. And it may come to nothing, and it may be of trivial importance,

but I do love the activity of writing, which is very, very different from the activity of editing. Editing is also a social thing that you get right or you get wrong. We do both. It's an imaginative one, and a deeply collaborative one.

Writing, you are out there on the diving board all by your lonesome. I find that thrilling. This is both sides now by Joni Mitchell. Amazing. I can't speak. You know, it's, you just saw time. You just listen to time and a musical mother and a daughter.

And it's amazing to me. David, my last, I have to ask you because now we're both. That line, well, something's lost, but something's gained. But even more than that is to hear. hear her the difference in her voice. And because you're hearing in one year, her voice from 60 years ago, whatever it is, and the voice now, and what it's giving to them, you know, if any artist can produce that sense of feeling that you and I, I think, obviously, are experiencing simply by clicking on YouTube, well, that artist has done a lot. And God bless her.

I never quote YouTube comments on the podcast, but I'm one person. wrote about the Joni Mitchell song, a 23-year-old wrote a song for her 78-year-old self to sing. That's where I want to leave us, which is the creative longevity, the commitment you've made

to yourself, to the magazine, to do this work in that great piece we quoted from. Alfred Kaysen, who I think the occasion for that piece is that he died. He died.

But he, like you, believed that reaching across the shelf, picking something up, it changes you. It didn't change me. It doesn't change us. It makes us,

if you're lucky, and if you partake of it. And, I mean, a lot of other things do, too. We talked about some of them today, you know, your parents, your world, your environment, your mistakes, after mistake, after mistake. but there it is.

The library is the gift to ignore it, man. It's a sin. I'm trying to give you a compliment, but it's not going well. I have to end on this because we've got to go. Yeah, I appreciate it. Which is that you and the writers you've presided over and made better

have changed me, and I'm so grateful for it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was extraordinary. I appreciate it. I really do. David Rundick.

A pleasure. Take care, my friend. That was the December 24th, 2023 episode of Talk Easy, hosted by Sam Ferozo. On our next episode, David Remnick will be talking with New Yorker staff writers

about the upcoming Iowa caucus and what it says about the future of our politics.