The New Yorker Radio Hour - George Strait, on the Record with Kelefa Sanneh

Episode Date: July 28, 2017

 Country superstar George Strait’s search for the next hit, and Lawrence Wright’s exploration of how Texas is our future.  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.

Hi, it's David Remnick with just a quick note before we start. If you've been listening to the podcast, you've probably noticed that over the past few weeks, we've been trying something new. We're delivering two episodes to you every week, each about a half hour, give or take. It's the same exact contents of the radio hour that we broadcast, but we've rearranged it for the best podcast listening experience. So we hope you like it, and here's the show. I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.

And also, I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there. This really subversive, strange thing, in rap especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Pretty much every great singer reached,

is a point where he or she can start taking it easy. Show up to play the occasional concert, play the hits for the old fans, and everybody goes home happy. George Strait is certainly at that point in his career, but there's a wrinkle. Strait dominated the country music charts for decades, and depending on how you count the hits,

he's got as many as 60 number ones under his belt. Sixty of them. So playing them all in one night is kind of out of the question. What Strait is doing with this little, Anandrum is a series of concerts in Las Vegas where over two nights he'll play all 60 number one hits. Strait recently sat down to talk about this retrospective show with the New Yorkers Caliphassane. And that in itself was unusual, because for many years, decades, Strait has avoided interviews entirely, avoided speaking on the record at all.

That started in the 1980s after a tragedy, the death of his young daughter in a car accident. I just didn't feel like talking about it. And I just, so I just quit doing interviews. I didn't want to keep singing, absolutely. But I was at the point where I'm going, all right, if this is going to cost me my career, so be it. You know, but I'm just not. I'm just not.

It's the only way I'm going to be able to cope with it. And so that's what I did. And it just kind of turned out the way it did, you know. It wasn't an intentional thing. you know, the mystique, as some people say, and all of that stuff. You know, it's just, it was just a matter of choice. Did it make a difference in your career? Did you notice that records were moving up the charts more slowly

or that tickets were selling more slowly, or did everything just keep going the way it was? Everything just kept going. It didn't make a bit of difference. That's terrifying to hear for someone like me. You know, I hear a lot of people go, you know, I want to do that what George does. I don't want to do interviews and stuff. I'm going to do it. Right, sure.

I'm going to do that. That may be where Beyonce. I don't say learn her strategy from you. Another Texan singer. I know. Who does not do interviews. She doesn't do interviews either? That's her heart.

George Strait is known for performing in this uniform that he's worn pretty much ever since the 1970s. A pair of jeans, typically wranglers, and a shirt, kind of starched and ironed. I did iron my shirt, but I did not iron my jeans, because I thought you'd take one look at that and say I was trying too hard. He says that. he doesn't always get recognized if he's not wearing his trademark cowboy hat. And so seeing him on the tour bus, he's wearing, you know, running shoes and a baseball cap. He's got this dark tan. And so he looked a little bit different from the George Strait on the stage.

He looked like he could be any successful businessman from Texas, which in a sense is kind of what he is. One of the funny things about George Strait's life is that he grows up in Texas, but he doesn't really become obsessed by country music until he's in Hawaii. He's in the Army, and he has some downtime, so he gets a guitar and some songbooks and starts learning the old country songs. I eventually got the opportunity to sing country music for the Army.

You know, we got into commanding General Brooks. And he had done this thing in Korea where he started these bands from Army guys. He sent out word that he was going to start a country band rock band, a soul band, a Hawaiian band. And, you know, certainly getting the opportunity to go audition for that and then getting that job, that motivated me a lot. But at the time, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, eventually you're back in Texas,

right? You're playing these gigs and you're playing largely Texan-style country music. You're playing Western Swing. Were you just imagining, oh, we could kind of do regional touring around the Southwest, or Were you thinking, no, I'm going to be on the radio? I was totally thinking that. You know, once I played a few gigs in Hawaii and figured out that, hey, maybe I can really sing, maybe I do have, maybe it's a possibility for me to maybe someday get a record deal

and have songs on the radio. It was a huge dream. Right. You know, because, you know, but I'd seen it happen, you know, to people. And I'd seen it happen to Johnny Rodriguez. I'd seen it happen to Mo Bandi. I'd seen it happen to them, and I'm thinking, well, why not, you know? By the time it's the late 1970s, a lot of the country music that's on the radio,

it's people like Kenny Rogers, it's barber men, It's people singing ballads, sometimes using string sections. And it's pretty different from what George Strait is doing. He's this guy playing Texas Roadhouses, covering Bob Wills and Merle Haggard. And so from a certain perspective, he would have seemed like a long shot. He would have seemed like not the most likely person to be the next big country star. A couple things changed. He started kind of broadening his scope a little bit,

showing that he could sing ballads. He could sing all kinds of country songs. The other thing that changed was John Travolta. All right. Okay, ask me like you come a bull ride. How do you become a bull ride? In 1980, John Travolta and Deborah Winger star in this movie, Urban Cowboy,

which is about people riding a mechanical bull in a bar in Texas called Gillies, a bar that George Strait has actually played. And this sparked a little, a mini craze for singing cowboys and the idea of a real Texas cowboy who could sing had some glamour to it. Here's a real live cowboy. Here's a guy who's worked on a ranch.

Here's a guy who knows how to rope. He had a kind of a real cowboy credibility, and that became a selling point. So George Strait gets this record deal with MCA Nashville, and his first single is this song called Unwound. It doesn't go to number one, but it's a pretty big hit, and it kind of announces him as a new voice in country music. You know what? I didn't really have all that.

high hopes for Unwound. I thought it was a good song. It had great fiddles in it, and, you know, it was up-tempo. It was way different than anything that was out there on the radio, for sure. Johnny Paycheck or someone had turned it down. Johnny Paycheck, that's the story. They'd written it for Paycheck. And he was in jail, so they gave it to me.

There was then, and remains now to some extent, a certain amount of self-consciousness about how country radio stations want their country music to sound, and whether some listeners are going to be. turned off by this loud fiddle at the beginning of the song. But the song became a hit, and it really established him as someone a little bit different. He got written up as hard country, or they called him a traditionalist and later a neo-traditionalist. A few years later, he has what is perhaps his defining song, which is this song, Amarillo by Morning. It's a real old morning up from San Antonio.

Everything that I got is just what I've got on. When that sun is high in that Texas sky, I'll be bucking at the county fair. It had actually been kicking around Nashville for a while. A guy named Terry Stafford had co-written it and recorded it. A guy named Chris Ledoux, who was a real rodeo competitor, had recorded a version. I started doing it into bars with the band, and we kind of developed our own little sound of it. And then when I got in the studio, we went even further with that with the fiddle. I mean, it was such a great song for me.

You know, I loved doing it in the honky talks. Probably the most requested song that we would get. I play Amarillo. Play it again. I just played it. What's the most times you ever played it in a night? I wouldn't do it more than twice, and most of the times I wouldn't do it again anyway. Have you ever been really surprised by a song that becomes a hit,

and you had no idea that it would take off like that? Well, I did a song that I've come to expect it from you that was a number one record for five weeks back in the 80s. and I love the song and I thought it was a great song and I thought we did a good job of recording it but I had no idea it was going to be as big a record as it was

sitting smoke cry and joke about these tears in my eyes no clue and then I've released some songs that I would have bet the ranch they would have been a number one record and they weren't like what?

Well, like meanwhile, I cut meanwhile, and I'm going like, I know that's a hit record. I just love it. I did it for a long, long time in my show, just because I just loved it, but didn't even sniff, number one. She sparkles, she dazzles, she lights up the roof. We walk together to a table for two. Every man stares, but her eyes are on. One of the things that really makes George straight unusual is longevity and consistency. I mean, year after year, he's releasing single after single.

Almost all of them are going into the top ten. He has more than 80 songs in the top ten of the Billboard, Hot Country Songs chart. About half of them are going all the way to number one. And, you know, there is this tradition in country music, including a lot of George Strait's heroes that have tumultuous lives, you know, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard. George Strait is unusual in that his was the opposite. He just kind of kept singing song after song. And so by this time he's become basically the defining voice of country music. And he was producing hit after hit after hit.

That said, he also, I think, took some pleasure in every now and again, tucking a little surprise into one of his albums. He had a song called Adelaida that was essentially a Zytoe song. It nevertheless became a big radio hit for him. And in 2001, he puts out an album that includes a song called Stars on the Water. It's a song written by Rodney Crowell, and George Straits' version has heavy auto tune on it. It's really one of the first uses in mainstream pop music of autotune, which is a pitch correction software as a musical instrument,

and that's definitely not something that people were expecting from George Strait. Another song that a lot of people weren't necessarily expecting to hear from you that I love is when you cut El Ray. To me, the fact that, you know, you're someone who grew up in, what, Piercel, Texas, about 90 minutes maybe from the border. What did cutting a song like El Ray mean to you?

How did that come about? Me and some of my friends used to ride motorcycles, and we rode through Mexico like three times. Had a blast, and every night we would have mariachi's. We would put a mariachi band together or hire one to play for us. I love Vicente Fernandez. El Ray was just one of my favorite mariachi songs of all times, and I'm going like, I'm going to learn that song,

and I'm going to, if I just do it with me and the guitar, I don't care. I took it to Nashville and I played it for the guys and going like, what? We're going to cut. They did a great arrangement of it, I thought. Yeah. I'd heard this girl mariachi band in San Antonio. They were amazing. And I told them, I said, whenever I come back to San Antonio and play the Alamo Dom again, I'm going to get you guys to come up and play with me. And they're going, yeah, right, whatever. After I cut El Ray, I got in touch with them.

And we played the Alamo Dome. And I've never heard a crowd go, I mean, that loud in my whole career. I mean, it was unbelievable when they kicked off El Ray. Hoo! So George Strait is semi-retired. This year he's playing these shows in Las Vegas, but it's not a tour full-time. He has lots of time to go golfing and fishing. And the other thing that's changed is that country radio isn't really playing that much George Strait anymore.

His last album was the first album of his career that didn't send a song into the top ten of Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. I saw it happen to the hag. I saw it happen to George Jones. Willie Nelson. Willie, I'd seen it happen, you know, and I knew. I'm not immune to that, you know, that's going to happen to me. For a lot of decades, it seemed like you were immune to that. Well, I did kind of.

I hung on for dear life for a lot of years. But, you know, it's at that point now. You know, I keep thinking that, you know, I'm going to come across that record that maybe they'll want to play again, but, you know, it's not the end of the world if I don't. He thinks of himself as an entertainer. He takes pride in that. And if you're no longer getting played on the radio the way you used to, if you're no longer on tour for half the year every year,

what metric are you using to determine whether or not you're actually entertaining people? As he starts to think about this part of his career, George Strait has different options. He could go do a passion project, record an album of Frank Sinatra songs, or Bob Will's songs, or he could do what Johnny Cash did, go hang out with Rick Rubin and make his version of those. solitary man albums.

Or maybe he gets back in the studio, records some great songs, and radio comes to their senses, and all of a sudden, George Strait is back on the radio. I think a lot of people wouldn't complain if that were the case. George Strait. He spoke with Kellefassane, a staff writer at the New Yorker.

You can find Kellefah's profile of straight and quite a few things he's written about country music over the years at New Yorkerradio.org. This is at a damn no mirror, don't really tell the whole show what's deep inside. Oh, read between the light reflection. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My colleague Lawrence Wright has covered some particularly intimidating topics.

He wrote a fantastic book about Scientology, something the Scientologists themselves did everything they could to prevent. and he spent some time in the Middle East and wrote about Al-Qaeda in a book called The Looming Tower, and that won the Pulitzer Prize. For his most recent work, though, he barely had to leave home. We had what is very formally called

an editorial conversation about, I don't know, a year, year and a half ago, and it went a little bit like this. Why don't you write about Texas? And I said, yeah, maybe I will. And then no more conversation, and a year later you came back with a manuscript, essentially a book,

and it'll be a book in March, and we'll talk again at that time. But my memory of that conversation, David, is you asked me to explain Texas. And I reminded you that I get paid by the word. That's a very big question you just asked. Well, I got what I deserved and thank God for it. Okay, explain Texas is not as dumb as it sounds, especially to those of you who live there. Larry lives in Austin.

And what he set out to do was to look in great depth at what happens in the Capitol, where every statewide office is held by a Republican and has been for quite a while. Larry's article in The New Yorker is called The Future is Texas. And by that he meant our future, the whole American future. Larry, I've got to ask you right off the bat. It sounds to me in the era of Trump, we've got two political polls that are establishing themselves, independent of Washington. you've got California, which wants to be the kind of liberal opposite of everything Trump, and then you've got Texas.

Right. How is Texas establishing itself as a political center? And how is this happening, taking shape? Well, long before the country became as Republican as it is now, Texas was that. In a way, it was the model for the country that we have become. And what's happening in Texas is that the conservative agenda has largely been accomplished, has been years ago. And now the party, the only party in Texas, really, the Republicans, are splitting in half between the conservative business-oriented group and the more social, cultural group. And that side has not yet enacted its full agenda, and they are really on the war path.

I have a feeling that, you know, this is a kind of model for what's happening right now in Washington because the Democrats, just as they have been in Texas, have been sidelined in Washington. And the argument really is between two wings of the Republican Party. The governor Greg Abbott doesn't have much of a national profile like, say, Scott Walker or Jerry Brown. Where does Abbott stand politically? Well, until this current legislative session, Greg Abbott was saying. seen as a kind of business conservative and a cautious figure. He's popular in Texas and in part because I think he's quiet and, you know, he doesn't raise quite a lot of ruckus, you know.

But this session, the word that I got when I was doing this story and spending a lot of time in the Texas legislature is that he has been terrified of the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, running against him. And Patrick is a formidable, probably the the most powerful political figure in the state. He's terrified of his own lieutenant governor. And even though Patrick said at the beginning of the session, he was not going to run against Greg Abbott, Abbott's behavior has been such that he is constantly fearful of being outflanked on the right by his lieutenant governor. So whatever Patrick does, you know, Patrick had a list of several bills that he wanted the governor to pass.

He demanded that the governor call a special session, which the governor did. What did he really want? Well, there are two things that he wants. One is he wants to have a bill that would cap property taxes. And property taxes is the main way we finance our schools in Texas. It's a way of smothering public schools. In Dan Patrick's world, we'd be moving to private schools and vouchers. And that's something that he's fought for very hard.

To crush public schools? Well, he's defunding them, and that's the same thing, isn't it? I can see. And then the other thing that he's avid for is a bathroom bill, as we call it. He calls it the Women's Right to Privacy Act. Now, I've spent a lot of time listening to the testimony. I can tell you that there were trans people coming in who, you know, for instance, people who had been girls when they were born with full beards. male pattern baldness.

You know, where are they supposed to go to the bathroom? And there's not much time spent on taking care of their concerns. Now, is this what their constituents want? Is this what suburban Texas constituents want above all from their legislators? Or are these legislators going above and beyond the cultural call of duty? No, the majority of Texans don't care about the bathroom bill. The Republicans, especially in the suburbs, are passionate about immigration, however. And so, you know, the Sanctuary Cities bill was very popular in the suburbs.

You know, there's a lot of feeling that, you know, that, and this is where the... To punish sanctuary cities in some way. Yes. And our sheriff, who's just elected, Sally Hernandez, had campaigned on a kind of sanctuary city's platform. and the governor withdrew a million and a half dollars of state funds immediately from Travis County, which is Austin, and he's been lampooning her on the, you know, it calls her sanctuary Sally and so on. But they passed a law that would imprison somebody like our sheriff if she refuses to hold in jail a person that the immigration, officials might be interested in. Now, Larry, if I remember right, you were born in Oklahoma, but you've lived in Texas

virtually your entire life. But we both were born at a time when the most liberal inheritor in the presidency of the FDR New Deal model was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan. So how do you view the evolution of Texas politics? Why did it get so conservative? What happened in Texas? Well, you know, I had this conversation the other day with Carl Rove, who I have a regular breakfast group on Monday, and Carl sits in every once in a while. And I was asking him about how Texas turns so red, given that it had a very progressive background.

And he said he didn't really think of it as a progressive background that it was more a populist one. and that the populists believe that somebody's after them. And the Texas populists of old believed that it was the Wall Street bankers that were screwing the little guy. But that's changed. Now they believe that it's government. And government is the enemy that's taking advantage of the little guy. We're sitting here in New York, where you thank God, come visit us every once in a while. President Johnson once complained that the greatest bigots in the world,

are the Democrats on the east side of New York, especially when they're thinking about Texas. Right. You get that a lot? Do you feel that the rest of the country, particularly the Big Bad East, during elites along the Amtrak corridor, look down on Texas?

Oh, they do. It's not a feeling. You know, it's openly expressed. But I've often thought, you know, when people think of Texas, you know, they think of us as, you know, braggards as, you know, kind of having a careless, personalized,

and, you know, up and down, narcissistic and caring only about ourselves and so on. You referred, I think you referred to the eastern attitude toward Texans as the Texans have, they possess the nation's id. Yes. And I've thought the politician who most expresses that is probably Donald Trump. And if he'd put on a cowboy hat rather than a gimmie cap, I think people would have recognized him in a way. But I do wonder, will Manhattan ever be held to account the way Texas is for his political figures? I haven't seen it.

Well, I think isn't he getting held to account, Trump? Is expressing a Manhattan cultural ideal? I don't think so. No, you make a good point. Larry, you've written that Texas bears the responsibility of being the future. What is it about the state that makes you think it has a certain kind of destiny, political or otherwise? Well, for one thing, it's growing so fast. It's outsized growth and it's expected to double by 2050. Why is it growing so fast?

Well, jobs mainly. It's, you know, been a tremendous job center. It hasn't necessarily produced a kind of good-paying jobs that one would hope for. but still it has a tremendous amount of opportunity. And how will the population boom in Texas affect its politics, do you think? Well, immigration in Texas is one of the things that turned it red initially. You know, it was in migration of non-Texans into the cities from the Midwest and from the coast who had different political traditions than the kind of progressive Democrats that we had in office in the 50s and early 60s. They brought a different tradition,

and it was Dallas where I grew up that became the first Republican city when it elected Bruce Alger, real right-wing congressman, and John Tower. Then we became our first senator. And that was a break with the past. It's interesting now,

you know, those people filled in the suburbs. And the suburbs are where the redness really gets bright. So when people talk about and have written about the coming purple Texas, a political transformation of Texas, this is kind of stars in the eyes in Democratic Party about Texas. Do you believe it? Well, you know, Texas would be blue now if people actually voted. Why is that? Well, it's been said that, you know, because it's ethnically, you know, the Mexican Americans don't vote. But the truth is, The people who don't vote are the young, the poor, and the poorly educated.

And that's what we have in abundance in Texas. And there's an effort by the Republican establishment to keep those people from voting. The voter ID laws that have been acted repeatedly and repeatedly overturned by the Supreme Court. You know, this is a total effort at disenfranchisement. There's very little money put into the schools. Hillary Clinton made a big ad by. I thought she had a shot at Texas. At least for a while, I thought she had shot Texas.

She was ahead by one point at one point. But was she diluted? Yeah, I think, you know, her campaign manager, Gary Morrow, said Texas is not in the balance. You think it'll be in the balance in our lifetime? Oh, yeah, I think it could be. I think the thing is that both parties in Texas are fragile. You know, the Democratic Party doesn't even have offices in a lot of counties in Texas. The portrait you paint of it is that it's disorganized, depleted, leaderless, rudderless.

They're now desperately seeking celebrities to run for offices. Who does it want to get? Tommy Lee Jones would be top of the list for some. And he'd be hard to vote against. He does have that craggy look. But the Republican Party is also divided. In a way, it's akin to what the Democratic Party in Texas was decades ago, which was really two parties. Do you feel hopeful about the direction of all of this for Texas?

No, I'm not hopeful. I'm upset. You know, as a citizen of Texas, I'm disturbed at the direction that is taking. It's, you know, Texas is a marvelous, dynamic entity, and it's got tremendous resources and great people and, you know, and a possible wonderful future. But it's not going to be wonderful if we don't educate our children and if we don't take care of the health and welfare. of our citizens, and that's where the state's falling down. Larry, thanks. My pleasure. You can find Larry writes, The Future is Texas,

and everything he's written for the New Yorker at New Yorkeradio.org. The cartoonist Leanna Fink has an unusual ritual in her working life. Once a week, maybe she leaves the house early and buys a ticket for the Long Island Railroad, the commuter line going east from New York City. But Leanna's not actually going anywhere. She just likes riding the train. She likes to hubbub.

She likes to be around people without quite getting sucked into conversation. It's a chance to clear her mind and just work. I like to come up with New Yorker cartoons on the train. It's good because I don't have a fixed workspace, so I started working in fancy cafes, and those are wonderful, but they are obnoxious, like people,

are always eyeing your table because they want to sit at it. I can't stand when people talk to me when I'm working, but I love when they talk to each other. I don't like to be in a vacuum when I'm drying. I think my ideal would really be to be a ghost and get to be around people all the time. Back to the floor, please. A train is better because people are mostly facing the same way.

No one's going to look you in the eye. There you go, change in Babylon. It's after sunrise, but not very long after, and the sky is grayish and cloudy. There's a 7-Eleven and an auto body shop and a lot of cars, and it's a type of bleak that I like. It's maybe suburban sprawl. I'm always mean to start coming up with cartoons on the train, but sometimes I just send emails. and look out the window. But I start to feel free in a certain way.

I think one of the nice things about the train is that I can't really do perfectly finished work on it. I have to, like, I can't make a finished cartoon. I have to just come up with ideas. And I think, like, my favorite thing to do is just to think and to play. And on the train, I'm forced to just think and doodle. We're transferring at Babylon.

We just got onto a fancier train with higher headrests and two stories and a bathroom. I printed out some an old batch of New Yorker cartoons that I liked a lot that didn't sell even though I thought they were really good that time and I'm going to look at them and see if I can make them clearer and maybe this time they'll sell.

So this one is a pine tree with an air freshener dangling from it that is shaped like a car. That's good. I don't need to fix that one up. This is a hall of statues. Oh, I guess they're busts on pillars. That says hall of life-size-pres dispensers. This one doesn't bring me joy anymore. I don't think it's funny anymore.

I don't think it ever was. This one is interesting. I think this one brings me joy. It says pigeon nest, and it's a nest on a tree that's made of garbage. I love pigeons. And I think I need to think more about, like, maybe the reason this isn't a good cartoon yet is that it's on a tree. Maybe a pigeon nest isn't on a tree. Like, I'll think about that.

Here's a stupid one. It's a bird inside a gator's mouth, and the bird is saying, do you even floss? I have really good dental hygiene. Birds are like the dentist's patron animal because they do clean the mouths of some kind of gator, a la or crocca. The gator does not look anatomically correct. I once saw an iguana that got loose from its container on a train, and it was just walking really slowly down the train aisle,

and then its owner didn't realize that it had escaped, and everyone's just kind of like, like, what's that? It was really big. It's getting really beautiful outside. There's a ponds at the window with those things that look like wheat coming out of it. The houses are, they look like a fisherman might live in them. It looks like the town has been this way for a long time. I love that it doesn't look brand new.

It's funny. I don't think I'm telling you accurate stuff about what I think about on the train because my drawing self, I think, is one self, and my talking self is another self, and I just, like, can't access the drawing self when I'm talking. My drawing self is smart and savvy, and knows exactly what she's doing, and my talking self is kind of a human impersonator.

Like, in my drawing, I feel like I can be anyone. Like, I can channel all kinds of personalities and thoughts, and I don't tell myself what to draw. It just comes out. when I'm in the city I feel like my social self which isn't exactly my real self is just on high alert

and she's always expecting someone to talk to her and but on the train you have no choices and no one's going to talk to you and I get to just like put her on a shelf a bit more and then ideas come out

the drawing self gets to be alive again it's almost time for us to get off I always wish that I had a lot longer, and that's a nice feeling. Leanna Fink on the Long Island Railroad, we've got some of her work up at New YorkerRadio.org. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. 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 with additional music by Alexis Quadrato.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianne Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frilman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithely Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Jessica Henderson, and Terrence Bernardo. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.