The New Yorker Radio Hour - How to Cover Trump’s Presidency, and Football’s Concussion Crisis

Episode Date: January 27, 2017

An N.F.L. pro, whose son now plays football, struggles to balance safety against a certain necessary brutality, and BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith on why he broke the norm to cover Trump. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every so often, maybe once a week, the cartoonist Leanna Fink leaves the house early and buys a ticket for the Long Island Railroad. That's a commuter line that goes out of New York, but Leanna's not actually commuting. She's not going anywhere. She just likes riding the train. She likes the hubbub. She likes to be around people without getting sucked into conversation.

I like to come up with New Yorker cartoons on the train. I can't stand when people talk to me when I'm working, but I love when they talk to each other. A ride to exactly nowhere with Leanna Fink later this hour. But we're going to start with a ride of a very different kind, bracing and exciting for some and, frankly, terrifying for others, the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Donald Trump campaigned to bring change to the way things

done in Washington, and he's brought it, unquestionably. And with his team, dealing in alternative facts or falsehoods or lies, call it what you will, our job of telling you the truth, the job of journalists, as best we can figure out, is harder than it's ever been. Recently, there was more news about the infamous Russian dossier, the unverified documents, alleging salacious and very damning activities by the man who's now president. And nearly all of what we know about the dossier came from its publication online in BuzzFeed. Now, BuzzFeed, if you're not familiar with it, is a website that mixes a lot of things, quizzes, videos, listicles, all kinds of clickbait, alongside some very serious and very thorough reporting. Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief,

and he made the controversial decision to publish the entire dossier on BuzzFeed with a disclaimer telling you, the reader, to make up your own mind whether to believe it or not. Ben, I thought what we would do is before we get into a back and forth about whether it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do to publish this dossier. I want to know the narrative of what happened. We hear here and there that this dossier was floating around in Washington and elsewhere long before the election. So, I mean, as you say, this dossier had been in various versions, and if you look at it, it's dated, a monthly update. to it. We learned after we published it, lots of people popped up and said, oh, I had a copy. I had a copy, too. It was in fairly wide circulation and had been pitched both to journalists and to the FBI over the late summer. By whom? So we don't have original reporting on this. It's been reported that it was commissioned by a, so the sort of unique, very high-powered opposition research is sometimes the term for it shopped from a retired British spy. Because there were it's Christopher Steele.

I mean, it's been reported that it was, right, that it was a former MI6. Actually, I think the guy who ran the Russia desk at MI6, so not a random person at all, like meaning one of the best informed Western intelligence figures on Russia, period. And opposition research, meaning the political parties involved, the Democratic Party having its opposition research, Republicans having its, at some remove some time. Actually, I don't think it's been reported who paid for it. So go on. You know, nobody shopped. it to me. But you started to see it, you look back and you see, oh, this is what they were talking about at various points. Most notably, Harry Reid sent a letter, an open letter to the

director of the FBI in October saying, I know that you have explosive damaging allegations against Donald Trump in your possession. Please tell me more. And it was obviously shadowboxing around this document. And I think, you know, it's pretty remarkable that during a summer when the FBI was talking publicly about its investigation of Hillary Clinton. It was also keeping secret a parallel investigation into Donald Trump. But I think a lot of journalists, including us, and we got it saw it as a really interesting tip. You got a lot of interesting tips. There were a lot of very specific reporting lines in there. The dossier itself was merely a tip. Yeah, and it certainly, not merely, but one of the things it was was certainly a tip. You get all sorts of tips, true and

false. Well, I don't understand. In other words, it's a 35-page dossier which describes all kinds of uh... as is very famous now uh... hijinks in a hotel room at the ritz carlton in moscow but also uh... financial information and a lot of kremlinology as well who told what to whom inside the kremlin chronology so good that you're like wait does anybody have that information i gotta say maybe too good but we'll get to that in a second

when you first read it and this is before the election when you first read the thirty five page dossier in all its grimy detail what did you make of it did you believe it i mean i think i saw it as a like i think a lot of us saw it as huh this is really these are interesting claims and the a lot and some of them seem getable you know these are claims about things that either happened or did not happen they're not philosophical claims they're not they're not claims about people's mental states so you're working on this story the way you would with any as you call it a tip yeah we had we had

you know four really great reporters chasing different elements of it in washington in in in in your Prague and other parts of Europe full time yeah pretty I mean this yes they were very focused on it and did they make any progress you know well the thing with progress is you want to confirm me either you've confirmed something you've knocked it down and you don't really have progress until that and so obviously we didn't have anything that we felt was had nailed it down I would go back to saying when when we first got the dossier um our world editor miriam Meldar had spent years in Moscow most recently for The Guardian. A terrific reporter who I know well.

Terrific reporter. You know, both said there's a lot in here that is, like, that basically was obviously written by somebody who knew what they were talking about, but there were also little inaccuracies in it. That gave her pause. That gave her pause and gave us pause, yes. And in fact, when we, yes. So January 10th, I'm in my office, and I've got CNN going, and late afternoon, early

evening, on comes this report. Jake Tapper, Carl Bernstein. saying that there has been this dossier, a summary of the dossier, was given to both the President of the United States and the then-President-elect Donald Trump. And they were read in on this. So you see this on CNN. You've held off on publishing for weeks, as you say. So quickly you made a decision to then publish. And I want to get your thinking on that.

And how are you able to decide so quickly? because it was only, it was really only a matter of minutes later where people are saying, oh my God, BuzzFeed is now posted or an hour or so, whatever it was. Tell me about that evening at the offices of BuzzFeed. Right. I think it had been sort of a hard call if at what point, if ever, do you publish? But right then we're thinking, well, you know, there's no particular urgency and we're chasing it. But I think we had always, or at least I had always thought at some point this is a story,

this thing is a story. Once both the allegations have been briefed to the president of the president-elect and effectively summarized to the country, that I think I felt immediately that instinctively the right thing to do is then to share the underlying document. And knowing that other places that you have some respect for, whether it's the Washington Post, the New York Times, it's obviously CNN, did that not give you pause on making your decision? I mean, I think there are certain kinds of decisions that I've certainly made through my career and that I think a lot of places that grew up in this new ecosystem have were the fact that older institutions have a reflex that's rooted in their history and their traditions in this notion that they are the sort of vestigial notion that they probably wouldn't really even say aloud, but that is in their culture that their job is to keep the gate and to keep information from their audience at certain times.

Not only wouldn't they say it aloud, they would scream and yell at you and maybe justifiably because these are places that have published Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib, whatever it is. These are not places. These are great journalistic institutions. And 98% of the time, we agree with them. Like, we also do deep extensive investigations where we take months or years to show wrongdoing.

It's on this one. I think, you know, the notion, it was an unusual situation, an unverified document kicking around with that kind of political battle over it. Like it's followed by a briefing. There aren't tons of precedence for that. But had CNN not put up its report that night, would you have posted that night? We would not have posted that night.

So it was a competitive decision or a moral decision or a journalistic decision or a little of all three? I think a little of all three. I mean, I think we, but I would say that already we were thinking and talking about at what point is it appropriate to publish. Yeah, you did a very interesting thing. You posted the document, but it also came with almost a warning label. and it included this phrase. Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect

that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Explain that to me. So we wanted to be clear, because obviously the notion of putting particularly really vivid allegations into play because the thing is the core allegations, those are very damning, incredibly damning allegations, that frankly we had not been able to stand

up or knocked down. So once those allegations had been made to the president and the president-elect and in public by CNN, to me, that becomes a much easier call. I think once the allegation that there is an allegation from a source reported as credible that the president of the United States has been compromised, almost any detail is preferable to that. Like the notion of I hold in my hand a list of communists, the notion of a of a secret mysterious document that has allegations so dark and explosive. What you're saying is then you might as well print the names of the alleged. I think that once you're, once you get halfway out on that allegation, it becomes an easy

call to come out to the other side. Let's acknowledge one dynamic of this conversation. You are the editor of BuzzFeed, which has a young audience and a very young staff, and it grew up on the internet. It is a child of the internet itself. I'm the editor of the New Yorker, which has been in existence. for 90 plus years. And that's called

a legacy media in your terms. You and I saw each other the day after this decision. We had dinner a longstanding invitation from you. We discussed this somewhat.

And you put it in terms of generation. That, in other words, that my reflexes, as the editor of a certain age for a legacy media, are different than your reflexes.

That it's a generational thing and to some extent, somebody of in my chair, not necessarily me individually, but in my chair or at the Washington Post, the New York Times, wherever it is, they don't quite get it. Explain that. I wouldn't say that you don't get it. And I also think that reflexes aren't necessarily the most important thing. And I don't want to overstate the, you know, the different. I mean, I think there's a difference between reflexes and judgment reflexes and values. That said, I do think that BuzzFeed and I came up, you know, doing a kind of journalism that was, you know, doing a kind of journalism that

was often really fundamentally about saying to the audience, here is the thing under the thing that you're reading about in these very kind of formalistic ways in the great American newspapers. And I think, you know, some of that particularly was around the Iraq War, the sort of blogging culture around the Iraq War, which was very much about saying, you know, you're reading about these intelligence reports that have been digested six times through various layers of the administration, then pre-chewed and fed to a reporter at a major newspaper. And we, as educated random citizens can actually dig in and analyze this ourselves and come to different conclusions and distrust. I also do think that there's a...

But you're not saying that you just dump out all your notes and say, you know, have at it. I think that you should when you can share as much as you can. I think that, you know, I mean, I get crazy unverified tips to my email inbox. Why not publish them all that? And to my public Twitter constantly. If you're interested in random unverified tips, feel free to search my replies. Right. I don't think they're doing anybody any harm out there. by the way. I think people understand that you should not take what an egg avatar says, you know, and add

any particular truth value to it. I think that there's certainly a really, there's a legitimate and real debate over whether the media of the 1970s and 80s that could really fully exercise that gay peer function was better. If that was a better world than the world we live in now, I just think it's indisputable that that is not

this world, that the idea that you can keep things behind the gate and that the audience should just trust you is, you know, honestly, is something that there are a few institutions yours among them. I hope the New Yorker audience says, you know what, I trust David Remnick to show me some things, not show me others. I don't think that's a kind of trust

that most of us should take for granted. I certainly don't take it for granted. That's something you work for every day, isn't it? But what you're getting in a criticism from legacy media editors, journalistic, pointy heads, people at Pointer, various public editors can be summarized in this that your job is not just to receive

a dossier, it's to be verified, contextualized, and your argument, I think, I think, Ben, is that by putting this out and by fixing, in all fairness, putting your warning label that it's not verified and so on, that you're not speeding up

the process of getting to the truth, but slowing it down. So Kelly McBride, a pointer says that, that by throwing this out onto the web, despite the warnings, this is her argument, that in fact it gave Donald Trump the opportunity to say, see, it's all sleeves, it's junk,

and then the next time the story is advanced maybe in a different direction that is verified, he's going to be able to say the same thing. How do you approach that argument? I mean, I think that's a deeply specious argument and for a few reasons. You know, one is just that this is, these are the rules of engagement under which the media spent the last couple of years,

just getting steamrolled by Donald Trump. Right. But the idea that there was a stream of journalism saying, you know, we had just figured out how to report on Donald Trump and have him, you know, be forced to engage and react to us, and you guys blew it. I just think that's, that seems unlikely to me, that this was the moment when the media was finally going to figure out how to cover Donald Trump. But that's a matter of, I guess, political prognostication and her guess is in some ways as good as mine on that.

Usually, there's no reason to publish an unverified tip because it's not being briefed to the president of the United States. It's not affecting policy. It's just a claim in the air that you have no reason to act on. And then, on the other hand, we did chase it very hard. We did, and we and many, many others. Which is frustrating not to get it, but again, the argument is, okay, you didn't get it, but try harder. Keep going. Right. And I think the question of, like, I do think the question is, how long do you sit on this? thing that is being brief to the present. Until you get it. That's the argument.

And so you keep secret that the like Harry, you say, you know, Harry Reid saw this. He wrote a letter, but we are going to keep secret from you what that letter is about. Because, you know, Harry Reid may believe it, but we're not going to tell you. I think the notion that you should keep secret objects that are motivating people's decisions in power just seems in defense. Now, we are now a whole week into this new administration. On day one, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, walks into the briefing room and really explodes about to the press corps that somehow they are lying about crowd sizes and that you have this back and forth. And he described this as the most watched inauguration in history. We are off to the races here.

As the editor of BuzzFeed, what do you expect? What do you think this is going to bring us in terms of a relationship? between the new president and the press, and how should the press behave? I mean, I think Sean's first statement really boils down to who you're going to believe me or your lying eyes. Like, that was it.

And that's a... Old Groucho Marx. And I think that's a real test. Like, there will be outlets, and I think they are trying to... There's an effort now to create and build a new alternate world of media outlets for whom they will believe Donald Trump

not their lying eyes, and they will attack people. That includes being in addition to Right, Bart. What else? Info wars. I read recently the Gateway Pundit is going to have a seat in the White House briefing room. It is interesting to see, not only BuzzFeed, headlines in the New York Times saying, telling another lie, comma, Trump says, da-da-da, using the word lie in headlines and leads and all the rest. We've gone somewhere new. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's an incredible, I think there ought to be a very high bar to using the word lie because you're speculating about somebody's mental state. intention. Yeah, about their intention, which is a hard thing to know.

You have to have really clear evidence that they knew, you know, that they knew what the reality was. And then they said the opposite. I mean, I think Trump does occasionally clear that bar. Other times, I think he says things that are false and his motives and what's going on in his mind or a mystery. So how are you going to go cover the White House in Washington now? Is it any different than covering the Obama administration? I think that the notion that you primarily cover the administration, by getting and printing the words of the spokesman is pretty far gone.

I mean, I think that was, I don't know when that started deteriorating, but by the time, you know, I was covering campaigns like 15 years ago, the idea that the White House, that the most fun job in Washington was to be in the White House. Do you care where the White House press room is? If they move it to the old executive office building, does it matter? You know, it seems to me that there's, that the administration wants to pick a series of fights with the press and wants to pick ones that will make the press look petty. And fighting over your seats maybe seems like it looks petty.

But I do think that you've got to think about, okay, what's the next one, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. And given that they seem not to have accepted this very basic convention that when asked a direct question, you give a truthful answer,

I don't really think the press ought to be giving ground on any of the other conventions. Ben, you're a terrific user of Twitter, and you're very good at it. And I want to know how... So what about you? Do you just lurk? I just lurk.

But you do lurk. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Is there a David Remnick account where I can go see who you follow? No, there is. Do you have a secret account? No. Or you just sort of look at Twitter. How do you do that?

I look around who interests me and that leads to one thing or another. You know, I've never wanted to do it because I knew in my heart that it would just take up too much time. Right. Time, what else you got? But I completely confess to, not that I need to confess to it, that I look all the time. I see your stuff. and I see when a big news story is going, I go on Twitter like half the world.

And you search the term? I'm sort of interested in like the kind of the very, I feel like there's some very... I think describing chaos is the difficulty, but there's some very high-powered Twitter lurkers out there. How should we cover and think about Donald Trump tweeting? Because God knows I look at that every day. You know, as you said, I think, you know,

I don't want to pretend that I really know. the I think there's this there are these opposite impulses that are both obviously

wrong, one of which is you know, just you gotta devote all your energy just like echoing and saying what he just tweeted and that kind of fast twitch newswire way

and then ultimately that you ignore statements from the President of the United States because of the medium they're made on which doesn't make sense. Presidents have always

sought to make statements in ways that they cannot be engaged or rebutted directly, whether it is a written statement, a speech, and a video from the Oval Office, an address. I mean, it's not, like, you know, I hope you will give press conferences and answer questions, but also it's not new that the president would just say stuff. No, there's a kind of myth that if you somehow ask the question keenly enough, ferociously enough,

that suddenly the president or whatever official will just go to pieces and all the truth will come pouring out. And somehow that's real journalism. It seems to be the Brits can do that. I've never seen an American journalist do that. while you'll see some interview on the BBC, where the interviewer asked the same question 17 times. But part of it is exactly that, because it goes on long enough. Yeah. Press conference is an orchestrated thing where you don't have that. And if you look at the good Trump interviews, I feel like Jake Tapper figured this out better than anybody else,

the good Trump interviews ask the same question. You keep banging away. You keep banging away. And when he can skip from topic to topic in a press conference, it's a show that he loves and enjoys and can't ever really be pinned down. Do you think the Kellyan Conway method of defunds, reflection, changing the subject, pretending non-reality as reality and vice versa. Is that a, now, by the way, of course, her predecessors have all done it at one time or another,

but she seems to violate the privilege. And do you think this can go on for an unlimited amount of time? I mean, I think that we're obviously really in uncharted waters, and it's possible. And if you read about authoritarian regimes that just lie all the time with no consequences, that is obviously a possible world. Are you fearful of that? I mean, it's obviously a pretty scary moment. I think, you know, the tradition of American presidencies is that they, not to this degree and in this extreme way, but always come in with a bunch of stories about how they are, A, popular, which Trump is not. But B, have learned some new trick to go around the media.

With Bush, it was speaking to local news, going over the filter was the term he used. With Obama, it was social media, it was the web, it was talking to favorite outlets. Clinton did it, and it works until reality intervenes, and suddenly there is gasoline spurting out of a pipe in the Gulf of Mexico, and all the cameras are pointed at that pipe. And you can say that's not really important, it's not that much gasoline, it doesn't exist, please point your cameras back toward me. but you can't but you know but it doesn't work and and that and that there's an illusion in the white house that you can control the story and then and that and for each president there's a moment when that illusion totally shatters i mean i think the VA is another good example i think the Bush administration you know inherited made this horrible crisis at the VA and i think felt

you know not totally unreasonably my god can we focus on something else and the answer is no we can't You're president. Ben, thank you. Thank you. Ben Smith has been the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed since 2012. I spoke with him just a few days ago, but in that time, new details, and they're coming all the time, new details have surfaced about the dossier and its sources. You can find some of the latest reports at new yorkerradio.org.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's much more to come. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. You need to watch about only 45 seconds of anything. any pro football game, before you realize that can't be good for you at all. There have been plenty of spectacular injuries on the field, even deaths, but the invisible damage. The damage from getting your head walloped with huge force repeatedly, that has just recently become known to science, leading to what's been called football's concussion crisis.

Nicholas Schmiddle has been reporting on ways to make the game safer in light of that crisis. Now, Nick, just give me a reprise on what we know about the damage from concussions and how we know it? Yeah, well, about 15 years ago, a couple of former NFL players committed suicide. And a neuropathologist by the name of Bennett Amalu performed the autopsies on these two individuals, as well as one other former player who had recently died. And Amalu discovered on each of their brain's high concentrations of an abnormal protein known as tau. Tao typically presented in Alzheimer's patients. And so he was struck that this was afflicting relatively healthy, middle-aged former professional athletes. And Amalu published his findings. They were not well received by the NFL.

And for several years, the NFL denied that there was any connection between playing football and brain damage. In 2011, a number of former NFL players sued the league, alleging that it had deceived them as to the health risks of the game. And the NFL recently settled with the players for just shy of $1 billion. This has led, or at least it's a major factor in a dip in participation in football. There are at least 20 percent fewer boys playing football now in 2009. Nicholas Schmiddle spent some time back in the fall at a high school in Florida, St. Thomas Aquinas, that's spending a lot of money trying to make the game safer. St. Thomas Aquinas is a private high school in Fort Lauderdale with students walking around and doxiders,

parents picking up children and in BMWs and such. It is not a school with a shortage of resources. It also has a nationally competitive football team. The reason why I went to St. Thomas is that as a result of the NFL's own concussion crisis, the coaches and the athletic director at St. Thomas are taking concerted steps to play the game safer. The other dynamic that appealed to me and that I was intrigued by was that several parents of active players were themselves former NFL players. Last November, on one weekday after practice, I went out to dinner with one of the players, a defensive end named Kavon Bennett

and his father, Cornelius Bennett, who was a... NFL legend, Hall of Fame nominee. And we met at a Steakhouse in Fort Lauderdale. You can just leave that on the table. The picture, yeah, you can just leave a little water picture on the table. I'll probably drink seven, eight glasses or other. Cornelius Bennett was a legend in the NFL. He played 13 seasons, went to five Super Bowls.

He played outside linebacker and was ridiculously fast, incredibly tenacious. Cornelius Bennett leaping up and volleyballing it to the tur. Like his dad, Cornelius, Kavanaugh-Bennett is a fierce defensive player. He plays defensive end for St. Thomas Aquinas. And again, he runs into Bennett. Number 95 gets his big paws around Javante Smith. I really like this player. First time I watch...

Kavon, you're just coming back from practice today, yes? This is your first week as captain. Right, yeah? How did that come about? I think that just came about, you know, just being a natural leader in school on the field. trying to make sure we always stay as a brotherhood. You know, I think that's an important value that my dad and all my coaches throughout the years have instilled in me. Do you have any particular stories from grown up?

First practice of Little League football, my dad told me, I want you to be in front of the line when y'all are doing sprints. He always wanted me to be the head of the team because that's what he did when he was playing in the league and in college and throughout his life as well. What I did was I stayed out of the way with football, stayed outside the fence and watching practice, and I would give him pornists riding home from practice or what have me. But I've always tried to stay out of the way, but I wanted it to be his decision because it's a tough sport,

and it's not for everybody. And that was a point in time when Kaban didn't want to play football at all, and I was cool with it. I feel as though development that Kaban has had over the last two years has been phenomenal. He's gone from unheard of to where he is today. And it's just a, you know, attributed to his willingness to go out and work. And he has listened to me over the years, which makes me proud.

I see him as being as, you know, as good as he want to be. Despite having this Sterling professional career, arguably one of the highlights of Cornelius Bennett's football career overall is, a tackle that he made as a college player. In October of 1986, his school, Alabama, hosted Notre Dame. Notre Dame had won the previous four contests. In the first quarter, Notre Dame's quarterback, Steve Berline, drops back to pass. Just as Berline was looking down field to find a wide receiver, Bennett comes off the end, running at full speed. Burline has no idea he's coming, and Bennett just drives his shoulder into him, lifts him off the ground, and leaves him on his back. Could you talk about the Burline hit?

Wow. It was the only time in my 20, however many years of playing football that I actually knew that I'd hurt somebody, not intentionally, of course, because I could hear when I hit him basically the air going out of him, you know, almost like, you know, when you puncture something, he just, shh, I mean, it was just like that. And so, I mean, I saw him as he was turning around, as he was almost getting the ball up, and I just, you know, was in him before.

I mean, that's the only way I can describe it. He was there, and he just happened to meet that speeding train. That's okay. He hadn't been standing on the railroad track. He tried to go with the next play, but I think he eventually fell from under the center. and I think, you know, they ventured to call the time out and got him out of the game. But Berlin was concussed, and, I mean, you all then broke Notre Dame's streak of beating Alabama. You went into the NFL, retired in 2000.

For you, retirement life was great. You golf, enjoy them. They're whatever I want to do. So some of your contemporaries, however, we're having a little bit of a hard time of it. Can you talk about sort of the point that you realized that there were people of your generation that were suffering from some effects of the game? Well, when you say, so I would assume you're talking about brain injuries or what have you. Wow, you know, you just, I mean, these are things that have been going on behind closed doors with the union.

And we knew that there was some of causing the fact. but the owners kept it to themselves and whatever, and hence the billion-dollar concussion settlement. Do you recall specific concussions of your own? There's one in particular that I know, looking at it now, we're playing Pittsburgh in the early 9th as in Buffalo, and I took a hill to the side of the head. But of course it happened on more occasions than that. I think in my medical file probably six listed, but that's more. That's, I mean, that was...

Would you think that 12, 15 would be a... More than that. Of course. I played for a long time. So when Cornelius retired is right around the time that the concussion crisis was becoming news. And he wanted to use his own street cred, his own reputation, to get involved in trying to change the game for future generations. He had a son who was seven or eight years old and asking his dad if he could play football. And so Cornelius becomes involved in the negotiations between the players association and league owners in trying to change the rules, trying to

essentially make the game safer for his kid and other children of his age. What do you think have been the most significant for better or worse, rule changes that have really changed the game. To me, just the lesson of contact and practice, I mean, that's huge. That ain't no infancy butt. That mean, when I played, you hit every day, and you had two days every day. How many days can y'all? Two days.

If you think about that practice, you have, in my case in high school, we play on Fridays. So we'll have four days of practice. And it's what you do in those four days that determines how healthy you're going to end up being for the Friday night. If you hitting all those four days, you might be a little banged up, and you're going to think, I'm going to still go out there and play. And then on the Friday, it just gets to the point where your body just can't handle it, and it turns out to be, God forbid, something serious. The days nobody's seen. Sundays, the targeting stuff, that's probably the biggest. What Cornelius means here is that on game day, the most important rule change concerns targeting,

which covers a variety of illegal forms of contact, including blindsiding, unsuspecting players. You said a hit on Spurline, if I had hit that like that today, I'd have been ejected. Ain't no offense in butt. Have you had any, have you had any dings, concussions that you've? No, I've been great with head injuries. You know, I think that's just a part of the technique. They teach us and also how they keep our practices like full speed, but as light, full contact as possible. I was actually talking to one of the St. Thomas coaches this afternoon, and he was sort of grumbling about the rule changes and saying, you know, like as a former safety, this is not the game that I was playing.

A wide receiver should be scared coming across the middle of the field because he's worried about getting hit. And now there's such protections to defend the skill players, the wide receivers, the quarterbacks, et cetera, that it's changing the game. I do think, you know, I'm an old defensive player. Yeah, I don't want to buy the cross in my face, and I can't lay the wood on them. Laying a good lick on a guy in the football field is kind of part of what the game was all about. Were there things that you were trying to show Kavana when he was 9, 10, 11 about how to protect himself playing the game? Do you remember? When I sat there on the fence, I tried to, you know, the bull in the ring

and stuff I did when I was a kid, hey man, that stuff is outdated. The bull in the ring, can you describe what does that drill look like? That's one guy in the middle, a circle of guys. And the coach gave everybody in the circle a number. So he'd say one, one charges, boom, you take him on. You know, 10, boom, five, boom. And you know, until the coach gets tired of you're getting hit. I mean, stupid stuff, you know, it ain't.

trying to make you tough kind of thing or whatever. It's stupid. Dacinine. It's just dumb. Do you think about head injuries? Do you... I just think about going out, playing, doing my job winning. That's the only thing I think about in the play.

That's old school. You don't go out there thinking about them, but doing your best. Does the game seem safer now than it did when you played it? Or is football just frankly a... a dangerous game that can never ensure. It's safer because of the new rules and the high school associations. They're going to have to make provisions for that.

God forbid, I don't ever want to see football going. It's something I love to watch, you know, my son and other kids more than I like watching the NFL. You know, my dad was a steel worker, and I think if he'd have known about asbestos and other stuff that dealt with in that steel mill, Knowing that he had to provide for his family, I don't think it would have changed his mind about working in the steel mill. And that same thing with us in football.

I don't have no regrets. All I've tried to do over the years is trying to make it a better, safer game. At the end of the day, people that don't play football and haven't played football at a high level, their opinions are going to be different from those of us that are going to end up playing. football at a high level. So, but football is still football, people, going to be die-hard fans for years to come. That's Kivon Bennett, and we heard his father, Cornelius Bennett, who retired from the Indianapolis Colts in 2000. They talked with the New Yorkers Nicholas Schmiddle, who wrote about the use of safety measures by Kivon's high school team, including some very expensive

tackling robots. You can find that article at Yorker Radio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Hey, Adam. How are you? Hi, David. Good to be here. Adam Davidson joined the New Yorker just a few months ago, and we've been working him like crazy. He's written about economics and business, not to mention Donald Trump's conflicts of interest. So, Adam, this has been just your average week. We had inauguration and a very kind of soulful, subtle inaugural speech followed by continuity. Yeah. An incredible. incredibly crazy series of events, and it promises, I don't know, untold tumult in days and weeks and maybe years to come.

How do you get through it? I mean, as a reporter, I can't think of any time. You covered the fall of the Soviet Union. I would guess that came close to this kind of what... But can I be honest? Yeah. That wasn't my country. I was the visitor.

I was from the outside looking in, even though I was living there. This is different. This is different. And I, like many people here at the New Yorker are working on some bigger substantive stories that take a big view of who this man, President Trump is. And what it means is all day, every day, we are in reaction mode. And I'm talking about Trump. I'm thinking about Trump. I'm reading about Trump.

I'm writing about Trump. And it is overwhelming. But what's necessary here, if you're going to live a life, is to get relief from it. And so your three ways of doing so are? Number one is the funny or die TV series, now on Hulu, Billy on the Street. Yeah. Have you seen Billy on the street?

I have pretty damn good. So Billy Eichner is a stand-up comedian who years ago, before anyone outside of a very small world had heard of him, used to do on his own very lo-fi video interviews on the street. He'd do a stand-up bit in a New York theater and play these videos. And eventually they became a TV show produced by Funnier Die. And now he has his own show, a different show that I also like called Difficult People on Hulu. But Billy on the street, to me, it is the perfect escape from the news today.

Because Billy Eichner runs around the streets of New York with a camera crew screaming at strangers on the street, just yelling questions at them, demanding that they participate in these. Sounds like my morning commute. It sounds like your morning commute, exactly. It's how you run this magazine Running around screaming at us Miss, miss, for a dollar For a dollar, you can win a dollar

True or false If you put a black wig on Jane Lynn She'd look more like Chris North Than you'd think True or false True or false Sure or false Sure or false

Yes, you win here Go buy yourself a piece of fruit I'll do more for the book No, I'm gonna wait and see What I really want Oh, oh I'm just not gonna, you know Spend it on

A piece of fruit I mean, you know A piece of fruit Piece of fucking fruit. Well, what does that mean? What do you mean? I mean, I'm talking about a piece of fruit.

A piece of f***ing fruit. I actually like it a bit less as he got more famous and he brings on celebrities. Those are fun too, but the idea of just a weird, crazy Jewish guy running around New York screaming at people on the street in a very funny way was very fun. But in fairness, it sounds like a third of the population in my neighborhood,

but nevertheless, what's your number two? My number two is a CIA spy novel series by the former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who I didn't know well, but I knew a little bit in Baghdad. We both were reporters there. And I've never been one for these spy novels, but this one has been great for the last few weeks. It's really seen me through. It's what I read at night, as I'm trying to just close out the day. I don't want the frantic Billy Eichner. I just want something to read.

This sounds like heaven. And it's, I mean, granted, like all spy novels, the plots are absurd. But it is written by a reporter, a reporter who actually, I think the books have done well enough that he, the first one was written about places he had traveled to as a New York Times reporter. But now my senses, I don't know for sure, is he makes enough money that he actually goes to the places. So if there's a description of Cape Town, South Africa, it has that kind of reportorial richness. that comes from someone having actually been on the street. And so what I've learned about my escapist literature cravings is that I'm fine with a ridiculous plot

where there's some superhero who doesn't die even though he should have died 500 times before and who solves the world every other week, as long as the base narrative is really factually accurate. And there's 10 of them. The 10th comes out next week. I'm halfway through the 9th. I'm just hoping to time it so that there's not a night where I don't have Alex

Barrenson to read. But I don't know what they're called because they all have the same, all those spy novels, you know, a mystery at night, flying through the Eagles, whatever. Knife of Dawn. Knife of Dawn. Alex Barrensen, John Wells is the hero you can look at it up. The third one is actually, for me, is a true piece of literature. And it's Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, born to run.

I mean, I'm a lifelong, profound Bruce Springsteen fan. But it is more than just. just, you know, the self-indulgent memoirs of a pop star. There's something... Did you read it or listen to it? I listened to it. How was that? It was amazing.

It's him reading it. And it's read beautifully. And for me, anyway, it's... There's something about a man nearing 70 who is both raw and honest, but also incredibly forgiving for himself and his father. and other people in his life when he was a young, angry, furious man. It helps me imagine one day being close to 70, looking back at this time,

and hopefully having some perspective, some generosity, as well as some stark truth to it. The New Yorker's Adam Davidson. There's more coming up, so stick around. Welcome back to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And this is Chiracco Dunlap, stressing over how to draft the purpose

text message. Okay, do I wait for him to text? Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, I had so much fun last night. You're great. Oh, boy, no, no, no, okay. I had so much fun last night, you're great. I'm an alien.

Okay, no. Hey, last night was great. I'm an alien trying to aid in humanity's demise. Oh, I got ticks to Ed Sheeran. You like him, right? I know that, because I can read your mind. No, okay. I hope I'm not coming on too strong,

but I honestly feel like I could fall for you. I have a second layer of skin that puckers during the act of mating in a way I think you'll find attractive. Do you like karaoke? Are you DTF? By which I mean down to fulfill the destiny of humankind by disintegrating tomorrow at midnight when we activate the laser beams. We'll just start over. We'll just start right over. Thinking about you and you're thinking about.

How? You didn't cry when your grandmother died, but you did cry when your internet went out in the middle of an episode of Nashville? I have got to stop reading your mind. Oh, look, I'm extremely sensitive and scared to tell you how much I like you. But, here goes, I like you. Oh, that feels great. I'm going to try to download your brain before the ray guns obliterate you. It's 2 a.m. What? Up.

Sharako Dunlap's drafting the perfect text. You can find all her work for the New Yorker, most of it far too weird to put on the radio, at New YorkerRadio.org. We're going to close up today after we spend a little quality time with another comic genius of the New Yorker, cartoonist Leanna Fink. Her work has a kind of gentle absurdism,

a silly side, but also a very sharply observed sense of human nature. About once a once a little absurdism, Once a week, Leanna Fink takes a long trip on the Long Island Railroad, which goes into the suburbs and the rural counties east of New York City. 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. 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 a bad line. It's after sunrise, but not very long after, and the sky is grayish and cloudy. And 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 a suburban sprawl. Freeport Station, American Next, this is Freeport. 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. in our Babylon is next. 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 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 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 summer for workup at New YorkerRadio.org, and you can find the whole hour there as well. I'm David Remnick, and this has been The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for joining me today. 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 Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrata. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.