The New Yorker Radio Hour - The New York Times’ Publisher on the Future of Journalism, and the Poet Paul Tran

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Over the past several years, as more democratic institutions and norms have come under attack, many journalists have raised the question of whether it is ethical to adhere to journalism’s traditional principles of non-bias, objectivity, and political neutrality. In May, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, staked out his position in the traditionalist camp in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. “The traditionalists in the ranks have long believed that their long-standing view speaks for itself. I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn’t make itself,” he tells David Remnick. Sulzberger shies away from the term objectivity, instead describing the “posture of independence” as one that prizes “an open mind, a skeptical mind,” and a clear-eyed pursuit of truth––even if it leads to uncomfortable conclusions. Sulzberger, whose family has owned the paper since 1896, says he wants to push back on a culture of “certitude” in journalism. “In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper, and louder and louder, about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences?” he asks. Plus, this week’s issue of The New Yorker features a new poem by Paul Tran, a young writer whose début collection was named one of the best books of 2022. The poem, “The Three Graces,” takes its name from a rock formation near Colorado Springs. “I was curious: what would these three rocks have to say about the nature of love,” Tran tells the producer Jeffrey Masters. Tran’s poetry explores their personal history—their family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam—as well as their trans identity.  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, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Five odd years ago, I sat down in this studio with the man who had taken on the most powerful position in the most important news gathering organization in the country, possibly the world. A.G. Salsberger, not yet 40 at that time, had been named the publisher of the New York Times. He is the sixth of the Ox Solsberger family to run the paper, and under him, the Times has rebounded from a period of constant cuts and potential sale

to a position of financial stability. It remains, though, in extremely tense time in the news business. Donald Trump's rhetoric about fake news and enemies of the people has had real and lasting traction on much of the country. People like Barry Weiss, who resigned from the Times a few years ago, characterize the place as being in the thrall of the dread forces of wokeism.

At the same time, left-leaning critics argue that the Times has been too cautious, too reluctant to call things as they are in an era of authoritarian demagogues. It's been really striking to me that the people making the strongest arguments, right, the people who are putting the intellectual muscle behind this conversation

about what is the role of journalists, Should the role of journalists be to push for a certain cause or party or group or ideology or even a specific outcome on a specific issue? Or should the role of journalists be to independently follow the truth and try to arm the public with the facts and the context and the understanding it needs, you know, for this giant, diverse democracy to come together and self-govern. Which is your view and the traditional view at the Times? That's my view and the traditional view at the Times. And I've been struck that a lot of the intellectual firepower has been making the opposite case. And that the traditionalist in the ranks, I think, have long believed that sort of that, that longstanding view, you know, speaks for itself, that the argument makes itself. And I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn't make itself.

Solzberger has just published a long essay in the Columbia Journalism Review. And it's called Journalism's Essential Value. What he's arguing there may sound like conventional wisdom to earlier generations of journalists, so I asked him where and how it gets difficult and why he's chosen to make this argument now. Let me just give a very specific example. Since the war in Ukraine started, right, we have had at least a dozen journalists on the ground every single day of the conflict. So my guess is that every one of the journalists on the ground wake up every day thinking they are going to tell a story. about Russian aggression, Russian atrocities, you know, how Russia is hurting this country that they invaded, right, in an unjust war.

But one day, you know, last year, one of the Times reporters woke up and found a different story. And he found that the Ukrainian government was using cluster munitions. And cluster munitions are internationally banned. And they're internationally banned for a reason because they disproportionately, um, kill civilians, and particularly children. And on that day, he told that story, right? And he didn't do that, you know, so that we could balance a ledger and, you know, on one hand, Russia does bad things.

On the other hand, so does Ukraine. He did it because it was true. And, you know, I think all sorts of people make question, like, with everything that Ukraine's been through, right, why would you point to misconduct on the Ukrainian side? And, in fact, the Ukrainian government was angry enough about that reporting that they tried to eject that reporter from the country, right? So why? Because it's the truth. Because these are internationally banned for a reason.

Because if independent actors don't track their usage, that international ban is toothless. and ultimately, if the press decides that the good guys can use it, it leads you to two questions. Are we always right about calling who the good guy is? And then two, doesn't that basically validate the bad guys using it too? Joe Kahn, your choice for executive editor, has said that, quote, you can't be committed to independent journalism and be agnostic about the state of democracy. So what I'd ask is, is the New York Times explicitly pro-democracy?

And how does that, you know, align with Walter Lippman, who you quote in your piece, who argued that journalists ought not to be serving a cause no matter how good? Should the Times be serving the cause of liberal democracy, which is now, I think we can all agree, under horrendous threat and not just abroad in corners of place for foreign correspondents to cover, but right here at home. The Times serves the cause of the truth and an informed public. The challenge always comes not in the top line question. So do you support democracy?

It comes into questions that cascade underneath it. So if you are a Democrat, right, and you believe that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy, Is it then anti-democracy for an organization like yours, David, to produce reporting that raises questions about the actions, conduct, or fitness of President Biden, right? You could argue with it that is anti-democracy, right? Like, couldn't you? I think there are people that argue sometimes. I don't want to paint caricatures of them that if you're – very critical, or you're reporting as hypercritical, of Biden. That somehow serves the cause of his

defeat, and therefore the rise or the re-rise of Donald Trump or the like. Exactly. And that's the type of argument. That's the exact argument that the Ukrainian government made. But I could point to 10 other examples. I could actually point to 100 other examples, right? We hear that our coverage, you know, maybe independently each piece on Silicon Valley is worthy and defensible. But from inside Silicon Valley, we hear that together it's disproportionate. About 18 years ago, 2004, this is long before you took the reins, the first public editor of the New York Times, Daniel Okren published a column headlined, and you quote it in your essay, is the New York Times a liberal newspaper?

And the first sentence of that column was, of course it is. Now, the column caused a bit of a storm. Every time I've ever talked, certainly publicly to a New York Times editor, Dean Beckay and others, and asked them, is the New York Times a liberal newspaper?

When they're still in office, they always say no. When they're not in office, they say, of course it is. What do you say? I really will push back. on that. But why not come out of the closet and be, admit to being a liberal newspaper in the broadest sense that's also fact-based, that's also relentless about accuracy and is intellectually

honest and independent. Is it impossible to be those two things at the same time? Again, you know, coming out of the closet suggests that like we're hiding something here. Like it's, I think the premise is simply not true. Like all of the critiques of the independent model, I think there's some truth in there. And I hope in the essay you see me grappling with it, right? So, like, for example, almost everyone who works at the New York Times lives in a big city and graduated college. That alone makes, you know, our staff unrepresentative in many ways.

And that, and that alone, you know, means that we're going to underindex in gun ownership, under index in church attendance, right? the posture of independence, the posture of independence is all, it's not about being a blank slate. It's not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. And I think that that is a parody of the long debate over objectivity, that, you know, objectivity, as was originally formulated, wasn't about the person's innate characteristics. it was about the process that helped address the inherent bias that all of us carry in our life, right?

The key isn't, you know, being a blank slate. It's not, you know, that you don't have a theory going into any story. It's a willingness to put the facts above any individual agenda. And just you think about this moment and how polarized this country is. How many institutions in American life do you believe are putting, like truly putting the facts above any agenda, putting sort of a independent posture, the desire to arm the public with the information the public needs,

you know, to reckon with all the giant existential challenges we face. And the challenges are giant. And yet the public distrusts, I'll say us, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, at record levels. Our ratings are a misery. So I'll say a couple of things on that, right?

So I think we've seen a few things drive that. I mean, one, let's be absolutely clear. The former president of the United States, the current leader of one of America's two political parties, has now spent the better part of seven years, telling the public not just to not. trust us, but that we were the enemies of the American people, right? Like, that our work was actually fake, right, that it's manufactured, right?

So if that's the way that the political atmosphere has, you know, worsened trust in media, right? I think that we can agree that the social platforms have done the same, right? So in an era when it is easier than ever for like-minded people to gather, you know, to build their own narratives in which the loud and most extreme voices in those communities tends to rise, and when it's easier for those groups to mobilize and be heard, right? Like, those are the fundamental dynamics of social media. We now see, you know, the dynamic, the sort of zero-sum dynamics around tolerance for journalists challenging

in-group narratives that we used to only really see with abortion, with Israel, Palestine, and with presidential politics. It was like those were really the only giant stories in American life that had all those dynamics and where the sort of rhetoric and the intensity always felt dialed up to 10. Now it's everything. It's everything. It is everything. So that's the dynamic we're talking about when we talk about echo chambers and social media, right? The third dynamic inside our industry is that journalism, to some extent, has become an echo chamber, right? And what do I mean by that?

It's been a while since I looked at your bio. So I can't say this for a fact. But if you are like many journalists of your generation, and if you're like many journalists of my generation, you probably started a local paper, did you? Unless you consider the Washington Post the local paper. I don't. You could get in a lot of trouble right now.

I don't. I don't. I got lucky and it was a different era. Well, you might just be more talented than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, you know, like many journalists in my era and many journalists of your era, started at a local paper. That was the path. That was the traditional path. That's the traditional path. And what was the day like in a journalist at that point, right?

Every day you were out in the communities you were covering and you were being confronted with the full diversity of this country and of the human experience, right? Like on the same day, you would talk to rich and poor. You'd talk to a mother who just had lost a son to murder and a mother whose son was just arrested for murder, right? You would just see everything. So people just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don't think that's the case. Of course it's the case.

I mean, so that type of work, putting people out in the world, is so expensive. And so as traditional media phase, and particularly local media faded, right? And as digital media, you know, filled that vacuum, we actually saw a fallen version of how days were spent. So the new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. And if you have to write three to five stories a day,

there is no time to get out into the world and see it in all its complexity. You're spending your time writing, right? Which means that you're drawing on your own experience and the experience of the people immediately around you. So literally, many journalists in that, this country have gone from spending their days out in the field surrounded by everything else in the world, in life, to spending their days in an office with people who are in the same

profession, working for the same institution, living in the same city, graduating from the same type of university. But you allude to something that's just incredibly painful in American life, and that is the contraction of local journalism all over the country. all the many, many newspapers that have either collapsed or their newsrooms have shrunk to the vanishing point. When Ben Smith started as the media columnist for the New York Times having come from BuzzFeed, his first column was about the potential dangers

of the New York Times' immense success, ironically enough. I think, you know, it wasn't too many years ago that I wrote in The New Yorker that there was a moment not too long ago where the biggest question about the New York Times was about when the Salzberger family was going to be forced to sell the Times and would Carlos Slim or Mike Bloomberg be a better or worse proprietor? That was a very dangerous moment because neither one of them, to be perfectly honest, was anywhere near well enough equipped to head this, I'll say it, essential American institutions. Now your success is gigantic, and the distance between you and your competitors and putative competitors has widened, and I don't see that it's going to get any narrower in the near future. That's an enormous responsibility for you. What are the perils of the times as success? And it's singularity, if that's what it is. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind of words. I also read the New Yorker and admire it very much.

I appreciate that. Eight years ago, when I started getting deeply involved in shaping the modern strategy of the New York Times, one of our biggest challenges and our highest aspirations was, let's make a market. Let's make a market for great journalism in this country. And you'll remember that the skeptics thought it was ridiculous to try to make a market, like a paid market for journalism. You know, we were widely ridiculed for launching a paywall, for asking people to subscribe to our digital news report. Same here. Yeah. And not only did we, you know, grow ourselves, right?

And we've grown from – so at the time when we launched the paywall, the consultants who helped us launch it told us that if we did everything exactly right, we might be able to get 650,000 subscribers, right? That was going to be our ceiling. You know, today we're almost at 10 million. But one of the things I'm proudest of is we didn't just make a market for ourselves, right? What's happened? The Washington Post has more subscribers than it's ever had in its history, right? You know, they don't publicly report their numbers, but I've heard anything from two and a half to three million, right? Or those slipping lately.

Yeah. I mean, two and a half to three million is nothing to sneeze at. I think the New Yorker has more subscribers than at any time in your history. You probably can't say it because you also don't publicly report your numbers. But I think the Atlantic has more subscribers than at any time in your history. And what do all – in their history – the journal, more subscribers than any time in their history. What do all those have in common? Those are the institutions that are still investing in the really resource-intensive work of original.

There is a problem, though, that comes with that. You've just named the New Yorker. All national media. Something called the Atlantic. I've never heard of it. But the Atlantic, the Times, the Journal. And they're not cheap to get. And they are considered by the general public, you'll forgive me, elite media.

Not just, you know, and probably... Can I push you on that? Hang on, hang on, hang on. But you can. Of course you can. But hang on. And the concern is... and I think Ben Smith

reflected it and others have that while those media not only have their readers they also influence other media and there's a trickle-down effect of the facts that they uncover and the stories they write or publish or broadcast there's a widening gulf

just as there's an income inequality problem in this country that gets worse and worse there's an information problem that's got that the map of that information problem has gotten and different. I'm not saying that A.G. Salzberger can be responsible for it and can control it and make it all better

with a stroke, but there is that problem. I disagree with the hypothesis. So I think there is an information problem, but I think it's about the collapse of local news. And I think that that is an American tragedy, and I think a very dangerous and insidious

force in American life. Do you have any responsibility as an ascendant and increasingly responsible? Let me get to that. But let me push back on the other part, right? So at the peak of COVID, half of Americans were using the New York Times to get essential information about how to navigate the pandemic. On election day, we typically have more than a third of the country using the New York Times. Again, we have fewer than 10 million subscribers, right? Like, those are not all subscribers. The daily, you know, which is now reaches far more

people than our front page and is free. The morning newsletter, which lands in six million in boxes every morning, is free. Our homepage free. Why am I saying that? Because I think there's often, you know, sort of an imaginary person who wants to read quality news but are being boxed at because of the cost. I really don't believe that that is a real population in any significant number, right? based on my own. I assume the hope, though, is that people who do avail themselves of those freer service will subscribe because they make you make an appeal at the end of every broadcast of the daily, hoping you do. Well, so you anticipated the next spot I'm going to go to, which is, I think it is so interesting that our industry has an obsession with making the news free, even though the news is so expensive to make. The New York Times was the only newspaper that had a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan every day of the conflict and still has a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

And just literally just think about the implication of that. Had the New York Times not borne the cost of covering this war on behalf of the American public, we would have had a conflict where American troops were on the ground, but no American journalists to hold them to account to bring the reality of the conflict. back to the American people. So I think there's been this, you know, this hangover from, you know, the honestly terrible conventional wisdom of the early Internet, information wants to be free, right? That I think almost... That was a canard. It almost sunk our industry. And instead, do you know what an average cup of coffee costs in New York? Sorry, not in New York, in America. I use the same analogy every time I'm talking about a subscription price. Believe me, I know. It's $3.99. And that's the national price.

for, you know, less than a cup of coffee a week. I think you stole this from me. A week? I just, I don't think the journalist should apologize for that. We don't expect medical care in this country or food or electricity. Water. Like, water is not free in this country, right? But yet we think that this essential service should be free.

And we know what happens when it is. We've seen what happens, which is people can no longer afford to support. reporting. I'm speaking with A.G. Sulsberger, publisher of the New York Times. More from our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remne. I'm speaking today with A.G. Salzberger, the publisher of the New York Times. He's published an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review called Journalism's Essential Value. It's a defense of the traditional independent stance held by generations of reporters at a moment of intense controversy. over news coverage.

One particularly damaging controversy that erupted under AG's watch was the publication of a guest opinion column by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. In June 2020, during the protests that followed George Floyd's murder by police, the Times op-ed page published Cotton's essay with the headline, Send In the Troops.

Cotton argued in that piece that the federal government should order the military to put down what he called an orgy of violence that he said was being led by left-wing Nylis and Antifa. Now, the purpose of an opinion page is to air differing viewpoints, but this column, coming at the moment it did, caused real outrage, including in the Times newsroom. James Bennett, who oversaw the editorial pages, was forced to resign, and he later said that the Times had, quote, signed up so many new subscribers in the past few years, and the ex-examination. expectation of those subscribers is that the times will be Mother Jones on steroids.

When you look back at that and you're a person of thoughtful self-criticism, and how do you evaluate it? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? How do you look at that episode? The thing I took away from it. So a lot of people wanted that, that, episode to basically be a proxy for our view on this principle of independence. And the very particular way the principle of independence manifests on the op-ed page, or in our opinion pages, as we now call them, the thing the episode underscored more than anything else was, of course, the principle matters. It is like the first and most important thing.

but process matters and execution matters. And if you get process wrong and you get execution wrong, and then you wrap a flawed thing that you produced in that principle, right? So, you know, the thing that you produce is flawed. People can see you as flawed. How is it flawed? I don't want to go into too much detail because I have so much respect for all the folks who are involved, and I don't want to reopen what I'm sure for many is a really difficult episode.

But if you go back and read about it, just like the process, you know, if you imagine that if you had seen that piece, you would have said, okay, this is going to be one of the most controversial things I'm going to produce all year, right? And if you had decided that it was an important piece and that it met your standards, you would have put it through the, the ringer to make sure that you got everything just nailed down. You would have thought about the headline, the presentation. You would have made sure that every bit of it was, you know, like, perfectly fact-checked, right? You know, the same way that when the newsroom counterparts have a giant investigation, say, when we got Trump's taxes, you know, which he had been hiding from the public for years, right? Dean is involved at every single step. And Dean Beck-Khek, the executive at that time. And his closest deputies were involved, right? Like, there are a lot of

cooks in that kitchen. And you know that when you do a big, difficult piece, right, you put it through a lot of steps. And, you know, as was, I think, widely reported at the time, this piece was rushed in, and it showed. So my main takeaway, and it's one of the reasons I, you know, I talk about process so much in this piece, because I think the disciplines of the journal process are really essential to supporting the underlying principle of independence, right? It's not enough just to have the principle, right, and wave it around. You also have to execute on it well, especially in an era in which that principle is so frontly under attack. One of the arguments was that that piece somehow endangered the lives of Times' reports. particularly Times reporters of color. Do you believe that was true?

You have to remember when that argument was being made in the context in which it was being made, right? Like, that was, I don't know, was it six months into the pandemic, five months into the pandemic? And then we saw the eruption of the single largest social justice, you know, protests moving in this country in a half century, right?

sparked by a hideous murder that was on the film. Exactly. And in that context, I'm sympathetic, you know, to how folks felt. What I will say, right, going back to the principle, is, you know, and some folks wondered, does this mark a retreat from the times from independence or a commitment to having a wide range or controversial views on our op-ed page. I'd point out to the thing we did

not just like months later, but that very weak, which is we ran a series of pieces attacking the New York Times for our handling of that piece, attacking million times for our handling of that piece in our own pages

from the left, right, and center. Some folks pushed back saying we should never have run the piece at all, and some folks pushback that we should have stood behind it and defended it every turn. So the broader thought with opinion, you know, I would just say, look three years after that episode, do you feel that the Times' opinion pages, are you regularly seeing pieces from every side of the political spectrum on the abortion debate, right, on economic, political questions?

social, political questions. I think you do. I think you do. And I'd argue, actually, under Katie, you're seeing more of them than ever, right? She just replaced James Bennett. That's right. And I think you see that she's just hired another conservative columnist, our first evangelical columnist, also a military veteran. It's David French.

David French, you know, who's done extraordinary work for us so far. And she's worked really hard to broaden the number of voices coming in to the op-ed page. So, you know, I think that that principle- Would you hire a Trumpist? So this is a question I've been getting now for six years, right? And it's a really tricky one. It is harder than you'd think to find the Trumpist who hasn't at some point said the 2020 election was rigged. Donald Trump won the election.

Barack Obama was, you know, it's an open question. I get it. But a huge number. Tens of millions of people either tolerate that point of view or believe it. Yeah. So independence is not about both sides of them. It is not about... So you would not have a Trumpist who had said that at some point on your op-ed page.

We would not have anyone who... But you'd have guest columnists say. I mean, Tom Cotton, it certainly doesn't... So we would not have... We certainly would not have a columnist who has a track record. of saying things that are demonstrably untrue. So another controversy earlier this year had to do with coverage of trans rights, right?

In particular, it focused on Times reporting on medical care for trans minors, coverage that was cited in support of some Republican anti-trans legislation. And trans advocacy organizations were involved, and there was a public letter by some of the Times' own contributors. Now, regardless of your objections

to the way that the petition was handled, or the way specific reporters were singled out, put that all to the side, if you would. Did you find any of the criticism valid? Look, we've listened really deeply. Like, I know the Standards Desk, Joe Kahn and his senior editing team, you know, have met with a bunch of groups, inside groups, outside groups, you know, who have raised concerns about the coverage. I want to say unequivocally that I think the action. accusation that the Times coverage has been anti-trans is just demonstrably untrue. And I'd encourage anyone who has the slightest bit of skepticism of that just to type in the phrase

transgender issues, New York Times, and go to the landing page that's automatically populated with everything we've written. And you will find hundreds of stories there doing the very thing that we've been accused of not doing, right? Which is, these are stories that are exploring the groundbreakers, you know, in the trans community who are blazing new trails across a huge range of industries all over the world, right, and gaining new acceptance and recognition for trans people. We're chronicling the dismaying rise of prejudice

and bigotry and attacks that the trans community is facing and all the efforts at the state level to undermine trans rights. So we've been writing all those stories. part of our job is also to write the stories that society is working through, right? The stories that are less cut and dry, right? So we've never written a story that question whether trans people exist or should exist, which is an accusation I've heard from many corners. That is just literally factually untrue.

But we have, you know, is our journalistic responsibility as an independent news organization, to reflect, for example, the very real debates happening in the medical community and even among trans people and parents of trans people about what type of interventions, medical intervention should happen for minors and when. And when the risk of not acting outweighs the risk of acting. And these are questions that the medical community is actively working through. There's an active debate there. and, you know, our critics have effectively asked us to pretend that debate is not happening for fear,

and again, this is going back to the same theme, for fear that the information could be misused. And that fear is legitimate. There are all sorts of bad faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country, right? But on the other side of the ledger, right, you know, if that's what we're hearing publicly, what we're hearing privately is we've got in so many notes from trans people, from doctors who care from trans people, and parents who are making decisions on behalf of trans minors. But you're saying that there's nothing in the critique that you thought, okay, they have a point here or there. You know, for example, on the story I'm citing right now, we, you know, I know we did make a correction, right? But overall, no, overall, I think, look, if I was to have finished that sentence, like what I would have, what I was, where I was building towards is those folks, people within the trans community, people who, you know, who've dedicated their lives to caring for people within the trans community have written us notes at times begging us not to stop this. reporting. And what they've said is that their greatest fear is that we get to a world in which

the only information they have is in talking points of various groups, right? The talking points of people want to crack down on trans people and the talking points of trans advocates who are trying to make the strongest case, you know, to, you know, for trans rights in this country. And what they've said is these are life and debt decisions. These are decisions involve personal health. We need information we can trust. And if there's a debate happening in the medical community, we don't want that hidden from us, right? E.J, are you willing to say what your politics are, just broadly speaking? I remember, you know, I worked for Len Downey.

Yeah. As he was the executive editor of the Washington Post before that was Ben Bradley. And Len not only wouldn't reveal his politics, although it was pretty plain what they were, he didn't vote. You, again, you live in New York City, you went to Brown. everything tells me that you're pulling the Democratic Party lever if not every single time, then 90-odd percent of the time, that probably people think they can guess what your politics are. Why not say it and then still be committed to this quite in-depth,

well-thought-out and coherent presentation of what independent journalism has? The thing I feel most passionately about in the world is that society needs independent actors and independent journalists. I just believe it. And there is nothing I feel more strongly than that. I do not believe that the truth ever resides in just, you know, that any one person will ever have the full truth, right? It's why I get that. But that requires you to not say anything about this? You know, I was really struck as I've learned about the Red Cross, right?

Everyone, you know, and particularly, you know, Western nations want the Red Cross to declare an allegiance in this conflict, right? They want the Red Cross to say, Ukraine is right. And the Red Cross is stubbornly asserting that the world needs an independent actor to enforce the laws of war. And that if they say that, it's going to be harder for them to get access to the prisoners on the Russian side. It's going to be harder for them to push the Russian government, right? And their belief is that society benefits when you actually have independent actors. And I believe that that's the case. I believe that's the case with the judiciary.

I believe that's the case with medicine, right? I believe that there are these parts of the world where we want independent. So it must irritate you that some of your reporters go on television or social media and very blatantly declare their politics. I mean, without naming anybody, it's very clear. That must fly in the face of this kind of Red Cross model of at least the appearance of, what would you call it? Look, independent. But it's, you know, again, I'm aware of how old-fashioned. in this sounds.

But I guess what I would ask you is in this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper and louder and louder about declaring their personal allegiances

and loyalties and preferences? Or do you think there's space for some actors who are really committed just to serving the public with the full story. Facts fall where they may. A.G. Salsberger, thank you so much. Oh, it's a real pleasure. Thank you.

A.G. Selsberger became publisher of the New York Times in 2017. You can read more from my conversation with him at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, there's a new poem by a young writer named Paul Tran. Their debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Neeling, was named one of the best books of last year

by my colleagues at The New Yorker. The book explores their family's history immigrating from Vietnam and their trans identity, among other things. Hey, how are you? So good to meet you. So good to meet you. The poem we published is called The Three Graces.

And it takes the name from a rock-format. near Colorado Springs. You'll hear Tran describe it, these towers of rock leaning toward each other in a way that strikes the eye as distinctly and weirdly human. Paul Tran read the piece and talked about it

with our producer Jeffrey Masters. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that you are among the first generation in your family who could read, write, and speak in English? Yes. How did that affect or like shape you

as a poet. As a child, I was the family translator. I would translate for my mom at the doctor's office, at the grocery store, the dentist, parent-teacher conferences, and the practice of locating the precise words in my limited vocabulary or locating the precise words by expanding my vocabulary, spending so much time flipping through the English and Vietnamese dictionary, feeling frustrated that I couldn't often find the most accurate and precise words. And so I had to approximate. That taught me very much, not just as a poet, but as a person. Because just think about that. If we cannot find the exact things we need, most of the time, We have a proxination, but as a poet, I'm not always satisfied with close enough.

I want to get closer. Was poetry a presence in your home growing up? My mom is the family poet. She wrote poems when she was little, and she especially wrote poems when she first came to the United States as the way of keeping herself company with herself, when she felt especially estranged or alone, having to learn an entirely new language,

having to readap all of her recipes, given the ingredients that she could find in California. And so you grew up aware that my mom is a poet, like, capital P? I don't know if it was capital P. I know she wrote, metered and rhymed lyric poems about love, heartbreak, missing her homeland and her family and her friends,

but they were just poems that she wrote for herself so that, for example, when she was hemming a pair of pants or embroidering Irish dancing dresses late into the night, she could hum her own poems as though they were songs to herself because she didn't have access to the books she read growing up. She didn't have access to Vietnamese literature and culture at the time, and so she had to be her own cultural producer. Moving to the Three Graces, your new poem,

what was going through your mind when you were working on it? In the spring of 2021 in Colorado Springs, the experience of going to the Garden of the Gods and the experience of seeing the Three Graces, which is this incredible rock formation. And among the formations are these fins, if you will, called the Three Graces. And I was stunned.

Wait, three fursions. Fins, what is that? It's at this point that I'm taking out my phone to make sure I'm saying this right. Let's see, let's see. Yes, okay, okay. Wikipedia.com, under the subsection Geological Formations, says that the outstanding geological future of the park, which includes the three graces,

are ancient sedimentary beds of deep red, pink, and white sandstone, conglomerates and limestone that were deposited horizontally, but have now been tilted vertically and faulted into, quote, fins, end quote. And it looks like this. Oh, so it's a very tall, long, red rock structure? Yes. I was curious. What would these three rocks have to say about the nature of love? Because I have to write this poem for a wedding. I love that. Should we read the thing?

Yes. Okay, let's find a quiet space. Who could care about the probability of love when brought like us to this world under endless darkness? A great mountain engulfed by a greater ocean we formed ever so slowly from tectonic plates colliding one mounting another riding the way time rode sunlight and moonlight across the icy surface of the water. We learned with time to view and invent this life from the depths where beasts now extinct,

bellowed and belted their brutal songs, all that remains of them. And of that time are the bones we buried, burnished beneath beds of sand, and limestone made unknown and then known when the waves and the darkness dried up. The wind whittled us like a restless sculptor, pacing around a slab of marble, imitating God with a hammer and chisel in the garden of the gods. We endured the erotics of erosion, loss, change, what we couldn't change, and what we lost to time made us more fully ourselves and full of ourselves. We fooled around and made a fool of God. We, in our faulted and faultless glamour, became a brand new home for the big horn sheep and lions.

the canyon wrens and white-throated swifts swinging low below a cloudless sky. We drank the sky and threw up acres of wild prairie grass, pinion, juniper, and ponderosa pine from the remains of ancestral ranges and sand dunes. Maybe this was love after all. We remained. We reinvented ourselves. We let the weaker parts of us go and decided, despite our egos and the tests of time, to test time,

and show how miraculous it is to exist, to live beyond survival, to be alive twice and thrice and countless times, to find one with, and within another, what are the chances of that? One in a thousand? One in a million? One in love proves and is living proof

that anything and everything is probable through seasons, counting on rain to come down like a downpour of stars' seasons. of never this again, seasons, of this could last forever. Paul Tran, reading their poem, The Three Graces. You can find it at New Yorker.com. Tran spoke with Jeffrey Masters, one of our producers. And this is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keith line, Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

Thank you.