The Press Box - Patrick Radden Keefe on Crime Stories, No-Access Journalism, Getting Tenure at The New Yorker, and Turning 'Say Nothing' Into a Series

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Last week, Bryan went to the Santa Fe International Literary Festival and was able to speak with Patrick Radden Keefe. They discussed a few things about Patrick’s career, including: How Patrick discovered magazines in junior high school and what stood out about them (2:21) How he pitches a story to The New Yorker today (12:20) His attraction to crime stories (17:19) Whether there are too many crime stories in the era of Netflix (25:07) Write-arounds and no-access journalism (31:20) Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Patrick Radden Keefe Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? Justin Verrier here from group chat on The Ringer MBA show. And we want you to come hang out with us for a live podcast recording on Tuesday, June 18th at 8 p.m. Bigwas, Rob Mahoney, and I are kicking off the Ringer residency at the L. Ray Theater in Los Angeles. Get your tickets now at the Ringer.com slash events while they last. Hope to see you there. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to a special bonus edition of the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters.

You may have heard me say that I spent the weekend at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, which is thrown by my wonderful friends of nearly 20 years, Claire Hurtell and Mark Bryant. I like to think of myself as a hardened journalist, or at least I play one on this podcast. But there is something truly wonderful about sitting at the festival listening to novelists like Jesman Ward and Tommy Orange and Anthony Dorr or journalists like David Grant and Hampton Sides. There's a lot of talk about craft and writing and telling stories, but at a simple level, I was reminded that books remain the coolest thing in the world, and it's fun to be around several hundred people that think the same thing. I was able to pull aside one writer for a

Press Box interview. He is Patrick Radden Keefe of the New Yorker. Patrick got his first assignment from that magazine in 2005. He got tenure, that is, he became a staff writer. Six years later, you'll hear both those stories in just a moment. Since then, Radden Keefe has written a ton of fantastic pieces. Even in the age of the digital table of contents, the TOC, if you will, his byline is always one that I look for. And my question, as soon as I open the page of the New Yorker or pull up his piece online, is what kind of story did he come up with this time? He's written books, say nothing, Empire of Pain and Rogues,

most recently a really, really good collection. We talked about everything from discovering magazines to going to law school, to writing crime stories, to writing on a motorbike with Anthony Bourdain in Vietnam, to why his byline includes his middle name. I hope you enjoy this one. Here's Patrick Radden Keefe. All right, Patrick, you have written that you discovered magazines

when you were in junior high school. What popped out about magazines to you at that age? Well, this is in the 90s, and my high school had a periodicals room, which is funny. It seems like such an artifact of... Put a word. No, I know.

My kids say that, you know, the periodicals room is like the phone. right it's not a but at the time it was this great room in the library that had a wall of shelves and face out they would have the new issues of you know like 20 magazines and um it was a it was like the place where i would wait for my mom to pick me up and so inevitably you start picking them up and the idea of the idea of something that you could if you have 15 minutes you can can kind of dip in and get something substantive out of it, you know, in a short period of time. It's not a commitment like a book. Was appealing.

And then when I discovered The New Yorker, the idea that you could, that there was the kind of nonfiction equivalent of a short story. I loved. The idea that, you know, it wasn't a book. You could, you're in and out in a sitting. But it has its own architecture. It's a beginning, middle, and end, or characters. It's a story.

You feel you've come away with something. You've inhabited another world for 20 minutes, 45 minutes an hour, whatever it is. I loved that. Who were the first New Yorker bylines you started looking for? So I didn't, at that age, I was just kind of reading what was there. Not really, this is in high school. I remember, I can tell you. very specifically the piece the first time I read a New York article and I and then I went back to

the beginning and tried to take it apart the way you would like a watch which was in the fall of 95 I was in my first year at Columbia and the OJ verdict happened and Henry Lewis Gates published a piece called 13 ways of looking at a black man and it was about he was he was interviewing a series of black intellectual and cultural figures, prominent black Americans, about their feelings about the OJ case. And it was this kind of range of different perspectives. Some of them surprising, some of them just kind of beautifully articulated it, but it was a sort of, it had a kind of, there was like a chamber music quality to it. And I remember getting the end of that piece and sort of like thinking this was

made, like going through and thinking, well, how many people did he talk to? And here's, this person he only quotes once, but this person he quotes at the top and then he comes back to and the, the sort of, how did he do the magic trick thing? That was the piece I think that at that point, I think I had a notion that I wanted to be a magazine journalist already, but it was more like, I want to tell people of a magazine journal. You know, it was more I had a sort of notion of what that, it's funny in retrospect, to think of the magazine journalist as an aspirational type. But it was more that I wanted to strike the pose.

Cut the figure of the magazine. Exactly. That was the first time that I actually thought about these as made things and kind of imagined how I would do it. So you pursue your career as a magazine journalist by going to Columbia undergrad and then going to Yale Law School. Why did you go to law school? Well, I had been, so I actually started pitching the New Yorker. in college. And my senior year of college, I was, I was, I started sending things. I have a rejection letter.

I have like what I think is my first rejection letter from The New Yorker. And it's funny because this is one of those things you can sort of look at both ways. Because I have a rejection letter from, I think, 98. And my first piece was accepted by them. came out in 2006, the pitch was accepted in 2005. And there's a version of that story, which is, look at how intrepid I was, I spent seven years pitching the magazine. I didn't take no for an answer.

Isn't incredible? And there's another version, which is the version of my wife tells, which is what kind of asshole college student is pitching the New Yorker? Like, in what world? Did you think that they would say, you know, up there in Morningside Heights, there's this diamond in the rough up there, this protean kid who, you know, has the skills.

So in the interim, during all those years of pitching, I liked being in school. I loved being a student. And it was kind of my, it was like my cover story. So I actually went to grad school first in the UK for a couple of years. I came back. I went to law school.

And that whole time I was pitching and trying to make it happen, but I just sort of didn't know how to engineer that kind of career. And ended up getting a book deal before I got any magic. magazine assignments, took a year off from law school to write that book. And then finally, after I, like a few months after I'd actually passed the New York bar, the New Yorker accepted my first freelance assignment. Now, this is a generic rejection letter you're getting from the New Yorker? Did they actually tell you why they weren't accepting your... I mean, they said something like, it was often, initially I would get, it's a little confusing because I also wrote short,

I tried writing fiction. And so I have those and those were, that I would get like a little kind of index card, which is totally generic. And then eventually I got the index card with a little note in the margin. It's like, you know, keep pitching. Probably written by some editorial assistant who was two or three years older than I was at the time. But with the nonfiction stuff, no, they always wrote letters. It was nice. They didn't explain.

They just sort of said it doesn't, this doesn't, you know, fit our needs or some other generic phrase like that. It was enough to keep the dream alive anyway. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I do think that the, and this was probably, this is probably as true now as it was then, I do think that if you, if you want to do this kind of thing at all,

learning how to efficiently metabolize rejection is in some ways the most important thing, both in the sense that whether you want to write books or articles or whatever it is, editors are going to reject you, people aren't going to respond. But also, I mean, As a reporter, I don't know.

I mean, I've, you know, in any given week, I probably reach out to 50 people to try and interview them. And maybe I hear back from 10 and maybe I talk to five and maybe two of those are really of any use to me. So that idea of kind of being in a business that is like inescapably low yield, I think is something you kind of have to get comfortable with. We're always pitching and getting rejected even after we've gotten the staff writer's job. I'm telling you, man, every day. What did it feel like to get that first assignment in 2005 from the New Yorker? Well, it's funny because at the time, I do distinctly recall thinking like, I'm set. You know, kind of this is the, you know, finally after all these years, I've made it.

And I published the piece. The piece came together well, I thought. and um i published the piece and i mean i'm i'm only slightly exaggerating but i i was i finished the story and basically said you know i'm ready to be a staff writer and uh they didn't think so so who had to gently break that news uh it was the it was my my editor then and my editor now i mean because i sort of said i i i want to do more i want to contract and um i kept saying that for six years. I kept basically for six years, they would let me write one piece a year. And during that time, I was doing all kinds of other stuff, basically to subsidize my life as a, because I mean, I wasn't,

I wasn't all that, you know, I was, you know, I was in my 30s at this point. And it, you know, I had two kids by the time, the New Yorker made me a staff writer. So I was, I had to find ways to make ends meet. But it took well. And what's the story that tips you end up becoming a staff writer finally? It wasn't a story for the New Yorker. It was a, I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine. It was the first piece I had done for them. This is a funny little, it's funny to think about how long ago this was.

I pitched them the story in 2011, and I wanted to write about the Sinola Drug Cartel. And I said, I wanted to write about this guy, Chapo Guzman. And they said, Chapo who? I mean, he was not a, he was not a well-known figure at all at the time. And I wrote this story about the kind of business model of the Sinola dark cartel. And they put it on the cover and they offered me a job. And I was actually kind of ready to take the job because I figured if it was going to happen at the New Yorker, it would have happened. And so I told them I'm leaving.

And then they said, hold on. This is how it happens in journalists. I'm telling you. You can do the work for the publication, but when you do work for a different publication, and they imagine you going away. There's a very strong why-by-the-cow dynamic in play. How do you pitch a story to The New Yorker now? So I have a, because I've been working with the same editor for nearly 20 years,

Daniel Zaleski, who's the features director at the magazine, I have the luxury of it being, I mean, it's, I mean, it is somewhat. informal, but only up to a point. So it starts as a conversation between the two of us, and then at a certain point, it's a conversation between the two of us and David Remnick or Daniel and Remnick. And usually, I mean, I think my hit rate has gotten better just by virtue of time spent with the institution. And the other thing I think that I didn't, when I was a freelancer, a big disadvantage that I had was I was kind of on the outside of the walled guard. So I didn't know what was in process.

And so sometimes I would, you know, I'd come up with some idea and I'd spend a couple of weeks developing it. And then I would put my carefully worded pitch together and send it and they would say, oh, Philip Garevich is already working on that or whatever the thing was. And I now, there's just a little bit more of a shorthand where I have a sense of what's in process and what's not. You don't always, I mean, there's still left hand, right hand issues. There are times when you have two writers independently who start kind of, sniffing around the same thing and there's a little bit of diplomacy with which you have to sort out what happens in those situations sure but that's the lesky's job not your job exactly exactly

i'm happy to leave that to others so that first conversation is usually a phone conversation do you write out an email to him uh i he is a an extraordinarily busy person because in any given week, he's closing a massive piece. And so as a consequence, the nature of that triage is that the best thing for me to do is physically plant myself in his office, like in his line of sight. And then we can, we will sort of talk about ideas.

So what I'll do is I'll just come in and we'll talk through ideas. I mean, occasionally I'll just text them and say, hey, what about this? But in a way that I really benefit from when I'm closing a piece, you know, it's like that person who has that role, they're like an ER doctor, right? So it's like there's the patient in front of them at a given moment in time. And if you're coming in and saying, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing in a couple of months, it necessarily, it's not going to have. the same urgency as whatever's more pressing.

I find the in-person pitching process is very valuable because editors, I don't know, about Zaleski, tend to have a very bad poker face. And if you say something that doesn't interest them, they just ice over. Yeah. And if you say something that interests them or say the same idea in a slightly different way, their eyes light up. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that there's a kind of, they're particularly with him because I've been working

with him for so long, so closely. And I think a lot of, I mean, candidly, like a lot of what I know about what makes a good story, I learned from him. So in a way, I think part of the reason my hit rate is better is that I sort of have a little editor in my head who I can already anticipate what some of the questions will be. So probably by the time I'm presenting things to him, you know, I've already given, I've already done the first few cuts of sort of editorial thinking on it, just because I sort of I can anticipate what he would say. But I think that in the way that you riff with anyone, it's, when you start to talk about a thing, it can kind of take on a, there's sort of a more than some of its parts element to

those kinds of conversations. You know, it can sort of take on a little bit of a life of its own. I was rereading your collection, Rokes, and I noticed you read a ton of stories out of Europe. What accounts for that? I don't know. I didn't even really notice that. I mean, I think I don't have a, I truly just kind of follow my nose.

If something, if somebody's telling me a story and I feel myself leaning in, that's a story I want to pursue. And so I never pick issues. I never, you know, when I wrote about the Sackler family, it wasn't that I thought, oh, I should write about the opioid crisis. And then I found the family. It was that when I stumbled on the story of that family, that was what intrigued me and pulled me in.

So, yeah, the Europe thing is probably just, I don't know, it's probably just sort of an accident of chance. How to explain your attraction to crime stories? So as a kid, I grew up reading a lot of detective fiction. That was my thing when I was young. I loved Sherlock Holmes. I loved Dorothy Al Say. I love Daggetta Christi. And it's funny because I don't read a lot of that kind of fiction now,

but in a way I think it probably shaped me on some level. So in terms of the sort of I like a good yarn, I like a good story that functions as a story. I'm very mindful of the fact that nobody's required to read the stuff that I'm writing. When I'm thinking about the person, the sort of abstract reader, in my mind, it's somebody who just got on the subway

and pulls the magazine out of their bag and flips open randomly to an article and they're only going to be on the subway for three or four stops and my job is to just grab them by the lapels and pull them in. And so there's a kind of, I think there's a sort of seductiveness on a narrative level that is appealing.

And then on a more, kind of moral philosophical level. I'm just, I'm interested in why people, I'm interested in the psychology of why people transgress. And, and the stories that they tell themselves about the bad things that they do. So I've always been really interested in denial

and self-delusion. And so it's not, I don't think of myself as a crime writer, but I, but I often end up writing in, you know, in one way or another about the bad things that people do. You had a great line about this in the long form podcast years ago. You said when you write about the bad guys, they don't think they're the bad guys. They think they're the good guys.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm so intrigued by that. Just the idea that the, I mean, it's a sobering thing to think about, right? That any of us are so capable of self-delusion. And I'm particularly interested in, like, like real kind of bona fide psychopaths are not that interesting to me. I'm interested in the ways in which we kind of incrementally, you know, it's like day one, you're behaving as a kind of more or less morally conventional human being.

Day two, you transgress, but just kind of by degrees, by a little bit. So you tell yourself a certain story about that. Day three, it's a little more. And then you kind of speed, you know, fast forward to a couple of. of the Sackler family members being hauled before Congress and and questioned by members of Congress. And they seem, they seem wildly out of touch. They see, like, it's like, they're so far off the path and they don't know it. They don't realize it. And so the question for me is like, how do they get there? Like, what were the stories they told themselves along the way before they

became this kind of grotesque sort of almost like circus act of a, um, you know, of a morally dubious person. It also strikes me that that turns the reader's expectations of a crime story on its head. You were taking whatever narrative, the bad guy, short-handed, is telling themselves. So that immediately puts us on different terrain, perhaps, than we were expecting when we're reading about a criminal or somebody who's transgressing, as you said. Yeah, I'm so glad you say that, because for me, there is a kind of, there's a thing that happens not just in writing,

but just in general, in the culture, where we look at somebody who's done a terrible thing. You know, and on some level, this is like, this is, none of this is new. This is the crucible. This is, this is,

you can go a long way back. But there's a kind of moral vanity and a sort of, there's a sort of sensation of comfort in like pointing at some terrible human being and saying, look at that evil person, I have nothing in common with them. There is an outlier.

There is the other. There's nothing ever, no set of circumstances that could take me from where I'm sitting today to where that person is. And to me, A, I think that's, it's just simply not true

if you look at, if you look at history. And B, I don't know that there's much value in writing that does that. Like I had a point where I really, a number of stories about the Trump administration and then I had a point there was a I was I was

in the middle of a big investigative piece about Jared Cush, Jared and Abanka, Jared Cushner, and Ivanka Trump. And I pulled the plug at a certain point because I felt like there was no, there was something on the wholly was happening in terms of the way people were writing about the Trump administration and the way readers were reading it. And I just felt like this isn't going to help anyone. Like I'm going to describe a lot of kind of corruption and and, and, um, And these people are going to come out of it looking pretty grotesque. And the people who hated them already are going to say, yeah, aren't they awful? And I'm not going to change anybody's mind.

And I was just sort of wondering what's the point. And so for me to, like, Chopper Guzman is an awful guy. And I'm not suggesting that I want to humanize him to the point where I'm whitewashing over the thousands of deaths that he's responsible for. But the interesting thing for me is he's somebody who tells himself a certain story about how he got to where he is. His version of the story, like he's the victim actually in the story. You mentioned the piece about Sinaloa and the New York Times Magazine too, and that strikes me as another way you do this. The business of being El Chapo, the business of being an arms dealer. So we as readers are learning something about this illicit industry that then gets us away from the very simple idea.

of, oh, here's the bad guy, and here's what the bad guy did. Yeah, that was very deliberate with that piece because I was, I mean, I had already written, my first piece with The New Yorker was about a human smuggler, and it was about how she operated her business. And she, too, thought that she was, she sort of saw herself as a Robin Hood figure. So I've always been interested in the kind of, that kind of weird, the dark mirror of the illicit economy. And the thing about somebody like Chopin-Gusman was that we, to the extent that he had any public profile at all in 2012, it was as this kind of murderous drug cartel guy, which is true. But what was interesting to me was

he's also the CEO of a multi-billion dollar cross-border commodities business. And it functions as a business, right? Like it's responsible for a huge fraction of the massive flow of drugs that comes into the United States from Mexico. So how does that work? Like, how do they use corruption? How do they resolve disputes? When do they resort to violence? When do they not. Why is it that they will, that when they think about their business, they will move drugs as far as like a wholesaler in Chicago, but then they don't want to get into retail drug dealing, like they're like further downstream. They're like, we'll leave that to someone else. Somebody said to me, it's like a, it's like a liquor wholesaler who doesn't want to own a bar. You know, you can think of all sorts of reasons why. Even though the markup is bigger on the street that you wouldn't, and all those kinds of questions. I thought of it as like a Harvard business school case study of a Mexican drug hotel. Yeah, he has to be Bob Eiger at some. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. In the era of the Netflix true crime documentary, do you ever think there are too many crime stories in the world? Yes. Yeah, I think there's a, listen, I mean, the first thing I guess to say is that there's a, there is a, the reason that there are so many is that there is an apparently unquenchable, unquenchable appetite for these stories.

Which I don't fully understand. I mean, I think podcasting is really bad for this. And yet, part of the reason there are all of these true crime podcasts is that there are listeners who will, to me, there is a kind of sameness to a lot of these stories and a kind of deadening repetition to it. And then sometimes there are these stories that get told again and again and again. I mean, recently, I was thinking about the Netflix did that Jeffrey Dahmer series, which was relatively well done as these things go, but like a story that has been told. and told and told again. I could tell it myself. Like, it's just, it's so familiar.

And it was one of the biggest things ever on Netflix. And now, Ryan Murphy, who did it, is apparently doing, he's going to do more. There's going to be like a kind of Marvel cinematic universe of like, of actual serial killers. And I don't, I don't understand that. I find it kind of grisly and exploitative, but most of all just kind of dull and reductive and predictable. to me the so that is just like a fact of the marketplace i don't know why it is that way i mean i know the reason that all this stuff gets made it's because there's an audience for it i don't really understand why the audience is um so happy to listen to like episode 175 of my favorite murder um

for me the in terms of the work that i do and the work that i would read the price like the the kind of the sort of table stakes like what you know, if you're going to do this, there has to be something more, some kind of sociological or anthropological point that you can make, some way in which looking at this particular crime through the prism of, you know, if you're looking at it decades later, like what is it, through the prism of right now, does it tell us something about the moment we're in? Are there big unanswered questions?

And to me, that's like, the price of admission. It's not that way for everybody. Other people can do what they do, but there has to be some more for me. There is something depressing about an AI tool serving us up another murder. You liked Dahmer. Did you like another serial killer? Like another murder? There you go, pal. Absolutely. Into infinity. Yeah. And listen, to go back to what I said earlier about the crucible, like, I do think some of this is probably that there is a kind of, um, I mean, to take to analogize, think about disaster movies, right? And we've all certainly, I mean, you know, certainly going back to the 1990s,

but even that, before that, in the 1970s. And I, you know, I think about the kind of when I was a kid, I would watch these like, kind of like they were, they were like, it was like serialized black and white, 1950s, alien invasion type stuff. There was a thing for any of you who grew up in or near Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s on Saturday mornings. They had this thing called creature, double feature. And at like 10 a.m., they would play these great kind of Twilight Zone-y type sort of B movies from the 50s. So we've always had this, the kind of the disaster movie thing. And then what I was so struck by was when COVID happened,

a lot of the remarks that people, like people kept comparing it to disaster movies, which is also just so weird, right? Because it's like in disaster movies, nobody's ever just kind of sitting online. And like talking about how it reminds them of disaster movies. But I think it's a similar thing where there is a comfort as we sit on our computers in our, in our, you know, insured homes and watch the worst thing imagine will happen to somebody else. There's a kind of comfort in doing that. And weirdly feeling safe by kind of vicariously looking at the experience of people who aren't. And so I tell myself that's what's driving it.

But yeah, I don't know that it speaks all that well of our, of our human nature. It says something about this moment in media time, too, that we can just be served up another version of whatever it was that we liked. You mentioned the age of magazines way back in the 90s. If I liked a Patrick Radden-Keefe story, it would take me some time to go find another one. I'd either have to wait for another one to come out in the magazine

or I have to go buy a book that you wrote. Now we can just be served up another thing that's kind of like the thing we just watched. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's, it's very strange as a consumer because it does take, it takes the hunt out of it and it takes the kind of conversational thing. I mean, it's funny because like there's nothing I love more. Somebody writes books for a living and, and relies on independent booksellers, right?

It's like, there's nothing I love more than getting into conversation with, I mean, a really good bookseller who will sort of quiz you about what you liked and suggest something. somehow that seems pure to me in a way that an algorithm is not. But when you automate that, yeah, to me it takes some of the fun out of the discovery. The other kind of interesting question, right, is like what does it do to modes of production? Like how does it affect people who are creating things?

I had this fascinating conversation with somebody the other day where I was talking about this Netflix show Baby Rainier And I was saying, I didn't know how I felt about it, but I had to keep watching. And part of the reason was that it just felt very original to me. And they said, oh, it's not original at all. It's actually just the love child of Fleabag and I may destroy you. So there's this kind of, in a weird way, we've sort of inherited this algorithmic thinking, right? Which I think is pretty interesting.

You write in rogues that you've made a minor specialty of write-arounds or listeners who are not writing magazine profiles themselves. What is they write-around? So a write-around is when you don't have access to the person you're writing about. Either, you know, in some cases because they're dead or they're in prison and unable to speak, but often because they don't want you to be writing about them and they won't cooperate. And so you write around them. So you have to talk to other people who know them.

You have to find other sources of information. And I've always done this. My first piece for The New Yorker was a write-around. I think editors, I personally, I think editors put too much value on access. I think there's too much of a premium on access. And I often would prefer to read or write around. It sounds strange, but prefer to read a write around of somebody

than a story that had a lot of access. Because you know the journalist worked harder and dug deeper to get more information. Yeah, and because I think that a lot of interviews are just bullshit. I think that particularly if it's somebody who's media savvy or a repeat player or wealthy or powerful, if it's a CEO, if it's a sports figure, my God, if it's an athlete, a musician,

a movie star, you know, generally speaking, it's not just like you and me, it's not a conversation like this, right? Where you can ask me anything you want, and it's just me here. It's all been prearranged. There's a lawyer in the room. There's PR people in the room.

You can't ask about the boyfriend. You can't ask about the stint in rehab. the, I wrote this big piece about Mark Burnett, the creator of the apprentice. And Mark Burnett was giving interviews and would have given interviews to me on the condition that I not ask him anything about Donald Trump. And I was just, I'm not going to, you know, no, I'm not going to which is what you wanted to ask him about. And I wasn't going to do a thing where I sat down with him and asked him about whatever assinine new reality show he had. Um, and then got to the, got to the thing that everybody wanted to know about. And he said, well, we, we agreed that's off

the table. So in that case, I had to talk to all these people who'd worked on the apprentice. And Mark Burnett's case specifically, he had two ex-wives, spoke to them. And I'd kind of in some, you know, in some instances, I'd prefer to do it that way. X-wives are a fantastic resource. X-wives are an amazing source. Yes. Is it funny when you embark on a ride-around, do you ever feel at some level that you failed? Because you've written so many New Yorker pieces where you've gotten people to talk to you somewhat remarkably. I think a loaded gun, which you won the National Magazine Award for in 2014. You got Amy Bishop to talk to.

You got her parents to talk to you. So how do you feel when the person says, no, I'm not doing it? I don't think of it as a failure. No. I mean, I think people have many reasons for not wanting to talk. And I would never, I never hold it against them. You know, I tend to think that it almost always makes sense to talk. It's funny. I wrote a big profile last year of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, who's like an incredibly canny guy. Whatever you think of Larry, he's an incredibly canny, smart guy. And I anticipated that it would be a write-around because he's, I mean, people say that he famously is media shy, which is, yes, he's given hundreds and hundreds of interviews, but he's a little like Mark Burnett. Like he kind of picks and chooses he'll talk about this in the strategic way. And because I'd written some pretty unflattering things about some of Larry's big.

clients. So I thought it would be right around. And then they said, oh, no, we'd love to cooperate with this piece. Like, Larry will talk to you as much as you want. And actually, for me, that was kind of unsettling. I sort of had, I was like, boy, what do I do here? Am I cheating? Is it like, should it be this easy?

And I ended up writing the piece that I wanted to write. But the, I think he very smartly realized, I mean, what I always say to people is the train is leaving the station. You can get on the train or you can not get on the train, but if you don't get on the train, you're not going to stop the train from leaving. And I think he sort of figured that out. So, no, I don't feel too bad about it when people don't. That's the power publications have.

This piece will be published, whether you talk to us or not. Yeah, and I think, I mean, on some level, I benefit enormously from the fact that I'm, you know, even in these diminished times for magazine journalism, I'm writing for a big publication and I've been there a long time. You do your research. You sit down to write and you've said before you want to achieve a bloodless state when you sit down to write. Is that the state you're most comfortable in or is that the preferred state of the New Yorker?

I mean, I don't know about others at the New Yorker and I would assume it's probably different for others. I guess when I use that phrase, what I was trying to get at was that there are these two very distinct phases. So when I'm, I like to think that I'm a pretty empathic person. And part of what I love about the job is that you go out and you meet all kinds of different people. Literally, it's like one day it's a, you know, one day it's an MIT professor. The next day it's the National Security Advisor. The next day it's a lieutenant for the Sinola dark cartel. And I'm always trying to find some common ground and try and understand the way they see the story.

And sometimes because of the stuff I write about, I'm dealing with people who've experienced great trauma or grief or loss. And in the moment of that conversation, my job is to be just wide open to them and kind of suspend judgment in the conversation and hopefully bring out the truest version from their perspective of what they've gone through. The trick is when I sit down to right, I have to remember that I, you know, my real allegiance is to the truth. And so at that point, I'm not suspending judgment anymore. And my job is actually not to be a ventriloquist for the person that I'm writing about. You know, it's, I had this conversation with with Gagosian at one point because a number of painters have painted him. And I said, you know, I'm not taking

like an airbrushed picture of you here. This is more like a portrait where it's like it's you, but it's filtered through my eyes, how I see you. It's kind of inherently subjective in that way. So it won't be like however the piece turns out, it's not going to be exactly the way you see yourself. And to suggest otherwise would be, I think, to be kind of dishonest about it. You'll occasionally write a story that's a little bit different from some of the stuff you typically do. I think of Scott Frank last December or the long profile of Anthony Bourdain, which is back in 2017.

What's it like for you writing that kind of story versus your usual beat? I mean, different pieces, but in the case of Bourdain, it was one of these sort of ridiculous things where that was supposed to be. I had written some very dark stories, and then that was supposed to just be cake. It was supposed to be fun. David Remnick said, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to travel with Anthony Bourdain. And I spent a year on the piece, which is way more time than I, strictly speaking, probably he did to spend. And we had a blast and then he killed himself.

So, you know, it was one of those things where it's like my story I was trying to do that would be light and fun. Even when I was working on the story, if you read the story, it came up before his death, but you can see that he was in a dark place during that time. Scott Frank was just a blast. Over the years, I've done a fair amount of screenwriting myself. And I have sometimes been frustrated by the way in which mainstream media coverage of Hollywood doesn't really get into the kind of nuts and bolts of the business and the way. way it works. And so I was always really intrigued by Scott Frank. And I wanted to write a piece that was kind of long on craft and just what it looks like to be the, you know, the premier script doctor of the last 25, 30 years. And it felt almost too easy, though, to be honest with you. Because there was no, like, there's no dark side to find there. You know, it was just a guy

like spending time with and generally admired and think has a really fascinating story. And he was happy to tell it. How did Bourdain respond to your piece? He liked it. We, I said something to him afterwards. I said, we were texting and I said something like, I hope, you know, I know you're not going to, the thing with Bourdain has been written about a thousand times. And he was also a slightly tricky source because he, or he was subject, because he was a writer himself. He's a very generous guy. So I'll tell you a story. This kind of illustrates this. I'm in, I'm in Hanoi with Bordane. He, he was a writer himself. He's a very generous guy. So I'm He had just had dinner with Obama and Hanay.

It was an amazing time to be there with him. He had finished up doing this shoot at this little restaurant. I was kind of killing time across the street because these shoots take forever. And he kind of ambles over to me. They said, hey, you want to go for a ride? And the production had gotten him a VESPA. So I'm like, do I want to go for a ride in Hanoi on the back of a Vespa? Anthony Fordane. Yes, I do.

Hell, yes. So he's only got one helmet. He gives it to me. He gets on the front. I get on the back. We kind of zoom off into Hanoi. And he loved, he loved Hanoi. And he particularly loved the kind of freedom of being on a scooter in Hanoi, where there are millions of these scooters. And so we're zooming around.

And it was amazing, but I also have this kind of meta conversation happening in my head, which is, you know, I'm the greatest journalist ever. Like, how did it? Here I am on the back of a, this is going to be so amazing in the piece. Should this be my opening scene? Should this be my closing scene? Can I call back to this more than once in the piece? Is that greedy?

You know, as we're sort of zooming along, I'm taking it all in, and I'm just thinking about how great it's going to be. And feeling like I've, this is like my coup, because I've got my scene. And eventually I get back to the hotel and I go off to bed. And as I'm lying down, it suddenly occurs to me. that Bourdain, who was himself a writer, and this very generous guy, had known that I needed a scene.

And he gave me this scene very deliberately, which is sort of a weird one, right? Because it's, you don't want him to write the piece, and yet he was a sophisticated enough guy that he sort of creates this moment for me. And I'd been sitting there patting myself in the back, like thinking I snookered him, but in fact he completely snookered me.

That's very funny. You mentioned he dies a year and a half thereabouts after you write that piece. Did you find yourself going over your encounters with him or what you'd written after his death? I did. So he and I stayed in touch after the piece came out. We continued to hang out. We did a big New Yorker festival event. He invited me to this other thing.

There was a night when he and my wife and I closed down Old Town Bar. But he was obviously a strange and dark time for him. I was as shocked as anyone was when he died. I started getting a lot of calls for comment, which was weird to me because it's a specific kind of friendship when you write about something. I just didn't feel equipped. I think I gave one interview. And then I just said no to things because it didn't, I didn't feel like I should be somebody

to eulogize him really. But yeah, I mean, I, listen, the piece, as I mentioned, got pretty dark. and I played a lot of stuff back, but I have to say, I knew he was a depressed guy, and I knew that he was in, I mean, his marriage fell apart while I was working on the story,

but I didn't have any inkling, that it was as bad as it was, and I think I was just talking, I just saw a dear friend of his over the weekend, and we were talking about it, and I think if he had, this is often the case with suicide, right?

But it's like, I think if he had survived that night, there's a very good chance he'd still be alive today. I think that sometimes these things sneak up on people very quickly in a very, very dark moment. I mean, it could not be the case. He could have attempted it again, but I had no, I couldn't have predicted what happened.

Do you have a chance to read Charles Learson's book about him that came out a couple years ago? That's the, what's it called? It's called, it's the one, it's the sort of unauthorized, I think, was the operative. Its own kind of right around. Yeah, I did.

I thought it was interesting. I mean, I don't, you know, it's the stuff that was really revealing and was the, he had the texts, somebody gave to him. Yep. And stuff from his computer as well.

Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of people really angry at Tony after he died. And, And this is one of these tricky ones where the part of me that's a reporter feels like everything's fair game. In his situation, I would have done exactly the same thing.

The part of me that knew Tony and knows he has a daughter. You know, I mean, listen, I didn't, I mean, I didn't love any of the things that were written. I didn't love the documentary. I felt as though the, it was all very, in some ways I feel like it would be helpful to have the passage of time before people are able to kind of really evaluate him. But I think there was a lot of anger at him and at others that animated a lot of the,

not so much the writing, but just the reporting, like the stuff that people were saying and that was quoted. Yeah, so it was a tricky one for me. A couple quick ones before we go. You mentioned the magazine piece being an ideal literary, form in a lot of ways. Has that changed, do you think, at all, since we started reading magazine stories online for the most part? Yeah, I mean, well, listen, I still think it's an ideal literary form. I will tell you this. The New Yorkers, there are many, many, many people who get the New Yorker as a print magazine and read it the way I first encountered it. There's also a very large number of people who read it online or who increasingly listen to the articles.

When it comes to that latter group, we unfortunately, for better for worse, we have metrics on how long they read. And I do have moments where, like, I give a huge amount of thought to kickers. The ending of my pieces are, in some ways, the most important. I mean, it's beginnings and endings, right? And I'm always thinking about what the final image or the final line will be. And it's thrilling for me if I spend six months reporting something to kind of hear somebody, sometimes somebody will say something. And as they're saying it, I'll star it in my notebook because I know that's it. You just said the last line of the piece. And then you look at active user engagement on the piece when it's published online. And you realize it's like if you watch a comedy,

a movie, and they do the, you know, they run through the credits. And then at the very end of the credits, there's like the final gag. But at that point, most of the people have left the it's just like the guy sweeping a popcorn, you know, left in the theater at that point. I sometimes feel like this is, I invest so much energy in my kicker. And at times I wonder, you know, who's still around for this? I comfort myself that the, that it's average user engagement. And many people do go right to the end. And then particularly with the, with the physical magazine, they do. But it's a thing that I struggle with, that we, we do the work that we do now. for a consumer who is inundated,

who's getting alerts on their phone the whole time, you know, who has a kind of, and if you don't have your phone in your hand, it's like a, it's like phantom limb syndrome. You're kind of reaching for it. And so you're trying to get people to concentrate, and you're really up against it. In my more optimistic moments,

what I tell myself is that that kind of deep concentration and the satisfactions that you can get, get by immersing yourself in something that takes a little longer. We'll always be there. We'll always want them. And maybe there will be a kind of correction in which we decide that we don't all want this kind of elective ADD that we have. Your colleague Rachel LeVee's piece is a good example of that this week.

It's a great example. And I mean that's, and the thing is a ton of people are reading that piece. And I think Rachel's the best in the game. I always like to hear writers on other writers. and you and I are here at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, and David Grant is also here. What stands out to you about David Grand Stories? I mean, David's another one who I can tell you where I was the first time I read a David Grant story.

It's a pizza place in New Haven, Connecticut, and his first piece for the New Yorker, the old man in the gun came out. And I was just like, what is, who is this guy? What is this piece? and that was another one where I kind of took it apart and I had when I first got an office at the New Yorker was of the old time square offices and this is back when David used to come into the office

and he was next door to me and for me as a young journalist working on my own kind of thorny complicated narrative pieces the like it's a little bit the kind of of I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here thing. You know, it's just like the idea that I could, I would occasionally hit a snag and I could go next door and say, hey, David Graham. Hey, Mr. Narrative journalism. I have a question for you. You know, what would you do? When I, my, when I was writing my book

Say Nothing, I'd been working on it for four years. And it was a, it's a story about a murder that happened in 1972. And I figured out who did it. And I, it was this crazy thing. I hadn't anticipated that I would. And then I needed to figure out, well, what do I do with this now? I have this kind of explosive thing. And I called David up and I said, let me explain to you the situation. And I need your advice. And it gave me great advice. Which was?

Well, what he said was, it was interesting because at that time when I initially made the discovery, I was sort of 95% sure I was right, but not 100%. And I worried that it would be an awful thing. This person had never been accused before they were still alive, the person I was going to identify. and I thought that it would be a kind of malpractice to accuse somebody, you know, on paper of such an awful crime unless you're 100% sure. And so David said- Well, more than a kind of malpractice. Yeah, it would be actual malpractice. Yeah, indeed.

It would be the kind of malpractice that is actual malpractice. And David said, I don't remember if he invoked Woodward and Bernstein or if I sort of attached this to it. But I always think of if you watch all the president's men, what they're doing a lot of the time is they'll knock on a door and they're not asking an open-ended question. They're saying, I know X. How do you respond to that? And basically what David said to me was, well, now you have a theory of the case. Like, you're in a totally different situation. I had already done six trips to Northern Ireland at that point. And he said, on all those other ones, you were kind of going in an open-ended way, you need to make a final trip in which you're going and saying, I know X. And you go back to everybody and say, I know X. You know that it was this person. How do you respond to that? And I did. At the end of the book, I write about that experience of going back. And it's really fascinating because it's like there's one person who wouldn't, there's one person who knew who the killer was. And I told me, I'm never going to tell you who the killer is.

And we sat down and we had a drink. And I said, well, I know that it was this person. And I'm going to publish that name unless you tell me some reason why I shouldn't. And this guy didn't confirm, but he didn't deny. This is a version of your get on the train conversation. Yeah, it's coming. Say Nothing is going to be a series on Hulu. Yes.

You're an executive producer of that series. What has it been like to see your book turn into television? Complicated. Thrilling in some ways. But I have been a producer on other things. There was a series on Netflix called Pain Killer that was sort of loosely based on, in part, on some of my Sackler reporting. And there, I was an executive producer, but I visited the set once. And I had very little creative involvement in that.

here I have less plausible deniability I'm like I'm pretty I've been pretty in it and it's been a real education I think the I think the show's good and I'm really excited for it to come out it'll come out in the fall I think the thing I have struggled with is that as an author

you there's like a tiny little patch of land that you control, but you're the absolute sovereign. And on a big TV series that, you know, 200 people are working on, even if you're an executive producer, your level of control is not absolute. It is something less than absolute. And so at times, that's been amazing because the, what people do with it is stuff I couldn't even imagine. couldn't have done myself and um it's been thrilling in that regard uh but i think that the

there's a kind of um you know you sort of need to make peace of the fact that this like the a series is going to be a different thing it's not the book it's it's its own it's its own special kind of creature it's a fictional product at least in part in part yeah i mean that's the thing is so when you're so when you're when you do the work that i do the north star is i mean the weirdness right of narrative nonfiction is that it was kind of born in sin in the sense that it you know the work that I do and David grand does like on some level it starts within cold blood but in cold blood we know now it's closely heavily fictionalized but it so it's incredibly important to me as I know it is for David to to not cheat and then but then the nature I I tend to think and I say this also as a

screenwriter who's adapted other people that a really faithful adaptation of a book is generally a bad adaptation of a book so you have have to kind of hold in your mind the idea like the book is its own thing and this show necessarily needs to be quite different and at times that means yes it means compressing you know uh characters it means inventing scenes and so forth all right two more why is your byline patrick radden keef instead of just patrick keef my two reasons my um my mother's name is jennifer radden and she was one of four sisters, no brothers, and so the name otherwise

would not continue. And she is herself a writer, she was a philosophy professor has published a bunch of books under the name of Jennifer Radden. And then it turns out that if your last name is Keith and you have a son, the statistical

probability that you will name him, Patrick is off the charts. So there are many, many, many, many Patrick Keeves. And these two things when I was first writing professionally, these two things dovetailed and I decided. I mean, I had Radin is legally part of my name, but I figured we would make it official. All right. Finally, Max Taney wrote a shit-stirring article in semaphore talking about what's going to happen when David Remnick

someday decides, maybe far into the future, someday decides to leave me. Someday and that day may never come. It may never come. And he wrote, before he was hired, Remnick hadn't been editor of a publication since editing his high school news paper. In that spirit, the company could hire one of its star reporters such as the narrative whiz, Patrick Raddenkief. Do you have any interest in being the editor of the New Yorker some day? Well, I should say, there were many, many names mentioned in that article. You were one of a whole roster and a G League roster. A lot of shit was stirred. Listen, I think David is, I think David is just an incredible editor. and leader and steward of the magazine.

And I hope he's not going anywhere anytime soon. Max Taney may know something I don't, but my sense is that he's going to be in the job for a while. And in terms of who comes next, I think it's a, I think it's a great and important magazine. and I think that these are somewhat perilous times. So there were actually, I'll put it you this way. There were a bunch of names that were mentioned in that article

who I think would be amazing, who I'd be really delighted if they were editors of the New Yorker. Okay, we'll have to do the right around to get some more, to get some franker answers on that question. It's wonderful, fun to talk to you. It was great to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.