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Official YIFY movies site:
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This is The Daily Show!
I'm Jon Stewart.

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We've got a great one for you tonight.
David Remnick will be joining me.

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He is the editor
of The New Yorker magazine.

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What an erudite crowd.

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Celebrating their 100th year
at The New Yorker,

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and we'll be discussing the difference
between umlauts and diaereses.

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I can't believe you have to do the walk.

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It'll be great. Are you going to wave?

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Yeah.

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Please welcome David Remnick! Sir!

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A hundred years of The New Yorker.

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And this, a special treat.
I don't know if you can see this.

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It is their, uh, swimsuit edition.

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Mr. Dewey, Truman Capote
from The New Yorker.

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-The New Yorker?
-Yes, The New Yorker.

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Everyone loves the cartoons
in The New Yorker.

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New York City
I like New York City

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New York City…

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As hundreds of newspapers
and magazines struggle to survive,

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The New Yorker is doing just fine,
thank you very much.

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It's only 100 years old?
Look what it's done.

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The New Yorker won
the Pulitzer Prize yesterday

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for long-form investigative journalism.

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An article by a young chef
named Anthony Bourdain

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is rocking the restaurant world this week.

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Pauline Kael's reviews
didn't just change movie criticism,

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they changed movies.

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Like it

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Like it, I like it…

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The New Yorker.

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Oh, I get it. That's kind of funny.

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For people like me from the Midwest,

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pick up The New Yorker magazine
and get a window into being a New Yorker.

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I'm a writer for The New Yorker.

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-It's a magazine--
-I'm familiar with The New Yorker.

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New York City…

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Tonight, the Defense Department
is on the defensive.

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It denies a report
in this week's New Yorker magazine.

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Controversy today

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over the cover of the new issue
of The New Yorker magazine.

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For the first time, The New Yorker
is endorsing a candidate for president.

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An editorial in this week's edition…

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My home in New York City…

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All you'll have for entertainment is
that giant stack of New Yorker magazines.

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Oh, come on.

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You and I both know I'll never read those.

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In this New York City

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Emily, how are you? You're alive.

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Hey, Louisa. How's everybody?

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All right, we have a lot,
so we should go with some quickness.

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There have been a spate of stories
about how rich people's favorite asset,

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um, are dinosaur fossils.

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Since 2022, there has been
a major Adderall shortage.

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I think we should do
a profile of Koji Murata,

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the inventor of the first ever
wooden satellite, that is…

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Every great story
we've done over the past 100 years

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starts with a great idea.

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Our writers follow these ideas
wherever they may lead.

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Our editors,
working with their writers, of course,

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then pick apart and polish
every single sentence, every single word.

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"…but there wasn't
much editorial interference,

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comma, at first."
Do we need the comma after that?

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Then the piece gets sent
to our fact-checking department

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and goes through a process
once compared to a colonoscopy.

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We say that the cats' names
are Tiger, Lover Boy, and Gummy Bear.

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Um, is that correct?

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The New Yorker is a miracle, okay?

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The New Yorker is a publication

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that publishes a 15,000-word profile

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of a musician one week,

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or a 9,000-word account
from southern Lebanon

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with gag cartoons interspersed in them.

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Never a photograph on the cover, right?

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Not a bikini, not a movie star.

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And yet it succeeds.

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The fact that this exists and is thriving,

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and I insist that it's going to thrive
not with one century but two and three,

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that's amazing.

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Jazz Age, New York.

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A city buzzing
with financiers and flappers,

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big bands,

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Babe Ruth,

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and over 30,000 speakeasies.

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Enter Harold Ross,

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the unlikely founder of The New Yorker.

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A chain smoker
with a talent for profanity,

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Ross fell in with a group
of semi-employed writers and humorists

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who met daily at the Algonquin Hotel
for liquid lunch and witty banter.

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"All the things I like to do are
either immoral, illegal, or fattening,"

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one of his cohorts quipped.

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And it was there that Ross
and his wife Jane Grant

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hatched the idea
for a new kind of humor magazine.

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It would be a weekly
for Manhattan sophisticates,

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they told people,

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and not for the little old lady
in Dubuque.

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The irony was that Ross himself
was a high school dropout

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from a Colorado mining town.

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But he recruited his clever friends
to write cheeky articles

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and cartoons about society and culture.

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He hired a designer
to create a distinctive typeface

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and a mascot that poked fun
at the magazine's refined air.

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They jokingly named
this pretentious dandy Eustace Tilley.

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And The New Yorker was born.

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The 100 years that followed
have been a story of survival,

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of stubborn resistance,

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bold changes,

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and some of the most
influential journalism,

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fiction, and cartoons of the century.

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So our 100th anniversary issue
is coming up in a few months

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and we have to find
something special for the cover.

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Until you have the cover, you don't know
what the personality of the issue is.

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You know, it's not something

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that you can just slap on
at the last minute.

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A cover needs to speak to the moment,

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but also be a timeless piece of art

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that should be able to be framed
and put on a wall.

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Frankly, chasing that week after week
keeps me up with anxiety,

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even after 30 years.

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Before I came to The New Yorker,

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I ran a graphics magazine
with underground cartoonists.

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I love working with artists
who have each their strong point of view,

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each a different style,

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each different stories
that they want to tell,

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and that's what I'm trying
to bring to The New Yorker.

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For the 100th anniversary,

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David Remnick came to me and said,

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"We have to use Eustace Tilley
from the first cover."

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I had to bite my tongue
not to say, "Oh, no!"

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You know.

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I understand the impulse,

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but I want to do something innovative
and not done before.

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So obviously,
I have to figure out something.

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-We'll see how this goes, man.
-It'll be good.

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The Talk of the Town
is the beginning of the magazine.

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It whets your appetite.

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They're short pieces.

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They're little vignettes
or little reported pieces.

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Each one tells a little story.

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Maybe I go shoot pool with a rock band

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or hang out
with John Belushi's photographer.

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Usually, these pieces
are very self-contained,

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but the one I'm working on now
is more open-ended.

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Okay.

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You might have noticed that politics are
really pulling people apart these days,

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so I thought I'd go out
and take the temperature of the city.

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It's kind of a fishing expedition.

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You never know.
You go out and pound the pavement and…

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see what the talk of the town is.

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-It's Mark. Nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.

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-I'm a writer for The New Yorker.
-All right.

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I'm with The New Yorker magazine.
You know it?

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Once I turn on this mode
where I'm looking for people

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and interesting things in New York,

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it's almost like I've been drugged
or something.

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Every person looks interesting to me.

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It's just-- It's like a marvel.

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-That's your grandson.
-Grandson.

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-His little adorable face.
-He's adorable. Yeah.

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Can I talk to you for a bit about stuff?
You want to talk to me?

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-No.
-You don't want to talk?

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-No. Sorry.
-You sure? Come on, man!

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Flop sweat. Let's go.

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I'm a writer for The New Yorker magazine.

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You want to talk?
Can I ask some questions?

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I speak a little bit English.

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What's your language?

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-Mandarin.
-I don't have any Mandarin.

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-Hi, my name is Nick.
-Hi.

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I'm writing a piece
about all the stress we're experiencing

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over the political situation.

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So, uh, what's your vibe?

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How's your mood? You sleep at night?

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Not really.

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Do you have a divided household,
by any chance?

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Well, interesting you bring it up
because we are…

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I was talking about the guest list
for Thanksgiving.

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You just walked into my talk piece.

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"How you feeling, NYC?"

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"Will we tear ourselves to pieces,

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or go on living imperfectly
as we have done so many times before?"

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We're really squeezing the stone, but…

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I think there's a piece in it.

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For our 100th anniversary,
we decided to do a series of videos.

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We're having different writers,
artists, um, thinkers come in

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and get a personal history

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through their experience
of The New Yorker.

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We have a chair from our original office.

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It's from an original office table.

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Ooh, nice.

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They built them to last, boy.

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This is one of the most comfortable chairs
I've ever been in.

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You see, we lost this art.

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We lost the art
of carving ass shapes into wood.

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See, that's why this is so comfortable,
but this is a lost art now.

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No one can do this anymore.

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Do you happen to have a favorite cartoon

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that you particularly love
from over the years?

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All of Emily Flake's cartoons.

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My favorite, it's a woman in a circus

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and she's reaching across
and on the other side is a lion.

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And I feel like it encapsulates
my early twenties.

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Like, every guy was this lion.

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One cartoonist I really like
is Zach Kanin.

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He has one, Sisyphus in the workplace.

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It's just so funny to think of Sisyphus
in the context of an office,

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and he probably never completes the job.

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The New Yorker cartoons
always make you feel

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like it's a bit smarter than you are.

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The cartoons are always
a little bit like this, right?

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Oh, I love Roz Chast.

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God, I love Roz Chast so much. I love her.

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She touches me so much.

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Oh, brother! Do you hear her?

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Look at that bird!

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"Look at that bird!"

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This is a little baby bird.

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She likes The New Yorker.

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She does.

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It chews well.

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Oh, these are posters, um…

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They come from Ghana.

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Yeah, that was… I think
that might have been a wedding present.

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Here's Charles Addams' scarf. Um…

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It's, to me, just extraordinary.

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He was the first cartoonist
that I fell in love with as a child.

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I'm very drawn to things
that are very dark but also very funny.

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Imagine today if they did it.

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You'd get like,
"This is completely unacceptable."

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"I don't see why it's funny.
It would hurt. It would burn."

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"I know somebody
who got burned by boiling oil."

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"There was nothing funny about it."

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I never thought
about doing anything else except drawing

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from the time I was maybe three or four.

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I think you don't do this job
unless you really can't do anything else.

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Just needs to be one person over here.

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So I write ideas down
all throughout the week.

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They're like half--

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They're just what I'm drawing.

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Usually I get, I don't know, uh…

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"Monkey clanging cymbals, hobby farmer,

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debt ceiling, que sera sera,

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uncanny valley, throuple."

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I mean, they're just, uh, you know, ideas,

246
00:14:20,776 --> 00:14:22,736
half-baked ideas. Um…

247
00:14:23,320 --> 00:14:25,197
That's what I'm looking for.

248
00:14:27,575 --> 00:14:31,996
I guess I draw, to a large extent,
to make myself feel less alone.

249
00:14:33,163 --> 00:14:36,876
Like, I'm not the only one
who finds this so depressing

250
00:14:36,959 --> 00:14:39,879
that I can barely get out of bed
thinking about it.

251
00:14:49,305 --> 00:14:51,640
I get up very early in the morning,

252
00:14:51,724 --> 00:14:53,684
throw down a cup of coffee,

253
00:14:53,767 --> 00:14:56,437
start listening to a podcast or three…

254
00:14:56,520 --> 00:14:58,522
Hello and welcome to the Haaretz Podcast.

255
00:14:58,606 --> 00:15:01,358
…and get some exercise so I don't die.

256
00:15:04,612 --> 00:15:06,071
I'm 65 years old.

257
00:15:06,155 --> 00:15:08,407
When my feet hit the sidewalk
in the morning,

258
00:15:08,490 --> 00:15:12,870
I feel like Fred Astaire.
It makes me instantly happy.

259
00:15:13,996 --> 00:15:16,999
I grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey,
across the river,

260
00:15:17,082 --> 00:15:20,961
and I looked to New York growing up
with a sense of yearning.

261
00:15:22,171 --> 00:15:26,383
It was so tantalizingly close
and yet so far away.

262
00:15:28,761 --> 00:15:31,513
Some have called him
the Michael Jordan of journalism.

263
00:15:31,597 --> 00:15:34,350
He began his career as a staff writer
at The Washington Post,

264
00:15:34,433 --> 00:15:36,936
where he later served
as foreign correspondent in Russia.

265
00:15:37,019 --> 00:15:39,563
Before becoming
the fifth editor of The New Yorker,

266
00:15:39,647 --> 00:15:42,191
the Pulitzer Prize winner made
a name for himself

267
00:15:42,274 --> 00:15:45,778
writing in-depth profiles on subjects
ranging from the Pope,

268
00:15:45,861 --> 00:15:48,989
to Mike Tyson, to Bruce Springsteen.

269
00:15:49,073 --> 00:15:50,908
Okay, let's do it. Yeah.

270
00:15:50,991 --> 00:15:53,994
So a typical day might be
planning meetings,

271
00:15:54,078 --> 00:15:57,247
ideas meetings, meetings about politics.

272
00:15:57,331 --> 00:15:59,541
The polls are up-to-date
on Michigan for that piece?

273
00:16:00,167 --> 00:16:02,628
Finance, personnel,

274
00:16:02,711 --> 00:16:06,799
meet with one editor or another
just to kibitz about a piece,

275
00:16:06,882 --> 00:16:09,051
and making lots and lots of phone calls.

276
00:16:09,134 --> 00:16:12,221
You weren't, at four in the morning,
on Bourbon Street throwing up?

277
00:16:12,304 --> 00:16:14,139
Checking in with writers.

278
00:16:14,223 --> 00:16:16,517
Oh, my God. What would Hunter Thompson do?

279
00:16:16,600 --> 00:16:18,727
1:30? I think
I have 13 things before then.

280
00:16:18,811 --> 00:16:20,521
Yeah, between now and then.

281
00:16:20,604 --> 00:16:23,107
Oh, Phil Montgomery. I have radio pickups.

282
00:16:23,607 --> 00:16:24,566
Fucking God.

283
00:16:24,650 --> 00:16:26,944
Snyder says that he has learned…

284
00:16:28,153 --> 00:16:29,905
Came in just a tiny bit high.

285
00:16:29,989 --> 00:16:32,950
Today on The New Yorker Radio Hour…
My voice sucks.

286
00:16:33,033 --> 00:16:35,869
And of course, we have
the 100th anniversary in February.

287
00:16:35,953 --> 00:16:39,164
So there's a lot
that needs to be figured out.

288
00:16:43,711 --> 00:16:45,379
I think this is my favorite.

289
00:16:45,462 --> 00:16:47,423
This one actually made me laugh out loud.

290
00:16:47,506 --> 00:16:49,883
-This is…
-It's really, really funny.

291
00:16:49,967 --> 00:16:52,803
-Okay, it's gotta go. It's gotta go.
-Yeah.

292
00:16:52,886 --> 00:16:54,596
On a Tuesday morning,

293
00:16:54,680 --> 00:16:59,476
I get anywhere between 1,000
and 1,500 cartoons in my inbox.

294
00:17:00,060 --> 00:17:04,106
And then we end up buying
anywhere between ten and twenty.

295
00:17:04,189 --> 00:17:06,191
So 1,500 to ten.

296
00:17:10,320 --> 00:17:13,115
David constantly reminds me
that I don't work in a coal mine,

297
00:17:13,198 --> 00:17:15,159
so I'm not allowed to complain.

298
00:17:15,242 --> 00:17:19,288
It's generally a mind-numbing task.

299
00:17:20,164 --> 00:17:25,919
There are waves of amusement,
delirium, depression.

300
00:17:26,003 --> 00:17:29,465
Arms outstretched, repeat once more.

301
00:17:30,132 --> 00:17:32,676
Sometimes at cartoon 800,
I have to take a break

302
00:17:32,760 --> 00:17:36,638
and do Japanese calisthenics
for three minutes and 30 seconds.

303
00:17:39,099 --> 00:17:42,144
"I feel better
since I stopped watching the news."

304
00:17:42,811 --> 00:17:44,188
He needs to buck up.

305
00:17:44,772 --> 00:17:48,025
David, in the cartoon meeting,
picks ten to twenty

306
00:17:48,108 --> 00:17:51,028
out of the 50 to 60 that I've brought him.

307
00:17:51,653 --> 00:17:54,031
I come up
with all these psychological strategies

308
00:17:54,114 --> 00:17:57,284
on how to manipulate David Remnick's mind.

309
00:17:57,367 --> 00:18:00,204
Uh, I don't know that they actually work,

310
00:18:00,287 --> 00:18:04,541
and I would not necessarily recommend them
to be peer-reviewed.

311
00:18:04,625 --> 00:18:08,796
But, you know, I'll put a cartoon
I know he's not going to like

312
00:18:08,879 --> 00:18:11,131
in front of a cartoon
I think he might like.

313
00:18:11,215 --> 00:18:12,716
What?

314
00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:15,260
So you set the bar low,

315
00:18:15,344 --> 00:18:17,387
and then suddenly,
he's like, "I love this."

316
00:18:17,471 --> 00:18:19,973
And I'll be like,
"Genius. You're so right."

317
00:18:20,557 --> 00:18:24,061
"Finally, we're together,"
says the woman to her dog.

318
00:18:24,144 --> 00:18:26,730
"And I didn't know
you were so handy with a…"

319
00:18:27,314 --> 00:18:29,775
-Oh, Jesus.
-Wait. I don't under--

320
00:18:29,858 --> 00:18:32,486
-What? The dog killed the father.
-Oh, and that's…

321
00:18:32,569 --> 00:18:35,614
You're meant to encounter
the cartoons in the midst of long articles

322
00:18:35,697 --> 00:18:39,993
that are often devastating, or slogs.

323
00:18:40,077 --> 00:18:41,036
No offense.

324
00:18:41,120 --> 00:18:46,875
Uh, but it's meant to be this thing
that cuts through it and surprises you,

325
00:18:46,959 --> 00:18:50,129
and offers this brief moment
of respite and delight.

326
00:18:50,212 --> 00:18:52,131
He sees ghosts.

327
00:18:52,214 --> 00:18:53,090
This is good.

328
00:18:53,173 --> 00:18:57,678
Okay. Half a gallon of milk
plus cereal equals a psychopath.

329
00:18:58,470 --> 00:19:00,973
Cereal plus the milk equals okay.

330
00:19:01,056 --> 00:19:02,474
Order of operations.

331
00:19:02,558 --> 00:19:04,309
By the way, true.

332
00:19:04,393 --> 00:19:06,395
-Yeah.
-You can't add cereal to milk.

333
00:19:06,478 --> 00:19:08,981
Who would put milk in the bowl first?
That's literally…

334
00:19:09,064 --> 00:19:12,067
-I'd divorce Alex if he did that.
-You know who would? Psychopaths.

335
00:19:13,777 --> 00:19:16,029
It's amazing this is our job.

336
00:19:30,377 --> 00:19:32,421
During its first two decades,

337
00:19:32,504 --> 00:19:36,341
The New Yorker became
the successful humor and literary magazine

338
00:19:36,425 --> 00:19:39,803
that its founding editor Harold Ross
had dreamed of.

339
00:19:41,597 --> 00:19:44,516
From its dingy offices on 43rd Street,

340
00:19:44,600 --> 00:19:48,145
he published essays
that were fizzy and wry,

341
00:19:48,228 --> 00:19:50,814
cartoons that were risqué and winking.

342
00:19:53,483 --> 00:19:56,403
But everything changed with World War II.

343
00:20:09,041 --> 00:20:10,834
After the bombing of Hiroshima,

344
00:20:10,918 --> 00:20:13,962
the U.S. government banned
the publication of any photographs

345
00:20:14,046 --> 00:20:15,881
that showed civilian suffering.

346
00:20:17,174 --> 00:20:19,343
So Americans were mostly in the dark

347
00:20:19,426 --> 00:20:21,887
about what the people there
had experienced.

348
00:20:23,263 --> 00:20:26,808
But a young writer named John Hersey
suspected there was a story

349
00:20:26,892 --> 00:20:28,477
that needed to be told.

350
00:20:29,186 --> 00:20:31,438
I had talked with William Shawn,

351
00:20:31,521 --> 00:20:34,900
who was then the second-in-command
at The New Yorker,

352
00:20:34,983 --> 00:20:38,654
and we had talked
about doing an article on Hiroshima.

353
00:20:39,363 --> 00:20:42,908
At that time, most of the writing
had been about the power of the bomb

354
00:20:42,991 --> 00:20:47,663
and how many buildings it could destroy
and what a huge area it devastated,

355
00:20:47,746 --> 00:20:48,956
and so on.

356
00:20:49,039 --> 00:20:52,542
And so I went to Japan

357
00:20:52,626 --> 00:20:57,714
and I began to look for five or six people
whose paths crossed each other,

358
00:20:57,798 --> 00:21:00,592
whose experiences had been vivid.

359
00:21:01,885 --> 00:21:05,180
The piece he produced
revolutionized journalism.

360
00:21:05,847 --> 00:21:07,432
It was nonfiction,

361
00:21:07,516 --> 00:21:11,311
but written with the intimacy
and drama of a fictional story.

362
00:21:11,979 --> 00:21:16,525
I think that fiction
is much more powerful for readers

363
00:21:16,608 --> 00:21:20,404
in looking at grand or terrible events,

364
00:21:20,487 --> 00:21:24,741
because the reader can identify
with a character.

365
00:21:25,450 --> 00:21:28,453
Hersey wove together
the stories of six individuals

366
00:21:28,537 --> 00:21:30,455
who were on the ground that day,

367
00:21:30,539 --> 00:21:34,876
including a priest,
a doctor, a factory worker.

368
00:21:36,128 --> 00:21:39,131
"At exactly
15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning,

369
00:21:39,214 --> 00:21:41,008
Miss Toshiko Sasaki,

370
00:21:41,091 --> 00:21:44,428
a clerk in the personnel department
of the East Asia Tin Works,

371
00:21:44,511 --> 00:21:46,763
had just sat down
at her place in the plant office

372
00:21:46,847 --> 00:21:50,100
and was turning her head to speak
to the girl at the next desk."

373
00:21:50,809 --> 00:21:54,187
"There was no sound of planes.
The morning was still."

374
00:21:54,271 --> 00:21:56,148
"The place was cool and pleasant."

375
00:21:56,773 --> 00:22:00,193
"Then a tremendous flash of light
cut across the sky."

376
00:22:03,196 --> 00:22:07,159
The article was long, 30,000 words.

377
00:22:07,242 --> 00:22:08,702
But it was so extraordinary

378
00:22:08,785 --> 00:22:13,749
that Ross and Shawn decided to dedicate
the entire issue to that one story.

379
00:22:14,499 --> 00:22:19,046
No cartoons, no fiction, no witty essays.

380
00:22:20,630 --> 00:22:23,008
It sold out within hours.

381
00:22:23,091 --> 00:22:28,138
Albert Einstein requested 1,000 reprints
to send to leading scientists.

382
00:22:29,139 --> 00:22:31,892
It was read live
without commercial interruptions

383
00:22:31,975 --> 00:22:35,062
on American radio and around the world.

384
00:22:35,812 --> 00:22:39,358
"At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00
in the morning on August 6th…"

385
00:22:39,441 --> 00:22:42,110
"At exactly
15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning

386
00:22:42,194 --> 00:22:43,695
on August 6th, at the moment…"

387
00:22:43,779 --> 00:22:46,323
"100,000 people
were killed by the atomic bomb."

388
00:22:46,406 --> 00:22:49,284
"They still wonder
why they lived when so many others died."

389
00:22:49,368 --> 00:22:51,078
"…when so many others died."

390
00:22:52,204 --> 00:22:56,083
Harold Ross, not known
for showering his writers with praise,

391
00:22:56,166 --> 00:22:57,167
gushed to Hersey,

392
00:22:58,126 --> 00:23:01,588
"Those fellows who said
that Hiroshima was the story of the year

393
00:23:01,671 --> 00:23:03,507
underestimated it."

394
00:23:03,590 --> 00:23:08,053
"It is unquestionably
the best journalistic story of my time,

395
00:23:08,136 --> 00:23:09,846
if not of all time."

396
00:23:11,390 --> 00:23:13,809
Hersey's piece radically altered the way

397
00:23:13,892 --> 00:23:16,770
people around the world
viewed nuclear weapons.

398
00:23:16,853 --> 00:23:20,941
And it also helped transform
The New Yorker from a light humor magazine

399
00:23:21,024 --> 00:23:25,320
into a serious journalistic player
on the world stage.

400
00:23:36,206 --> 00:23:38,959
There's something about,
"History is happening,

401
00:23:39,042 --> 00:23:42,796
and it's happening in your backyard,"
that I guess I'm just a sucker for that.

402
00:23:48,135 --> 00:23:52,514
I've always been interested in why
people believe what they believe, always.

403
00:23:52,597 --> 00:23:56,810
I don't know if "enjoy" is the word,
but I do find it really compelling

404
00:23:56,893 --> 00:23:58,353
to go meet people

405
00:23:58,437 --> 00:24:00,647
who I sometimes have
very little in common with.

406
00:24:00,730 --> 00:24:01,898
I know he's gonna win.

407
00:24:01,982 --> 00:24:04,359
He won already twice.
He's gonna win again.

408
00:24:04,443 --> 00:24:06,903
Whether they give it to the man
is a different story.

409
00:24:06,987 --> 00:24:10,824
I went on the road
to see Tucker Carlson do his road show.

410
00:24:10,907 --> 00:24:14,411
I went to Budapest to go to CPAC there.

411
00:24:14,494 --> 00:24:19,332
I went to Southern California to hang out
with some alt-right meme peddlers.

412
00:24:20,041 --> 00:24:22,669
I do think the job is to collect

413
00:24:23,336 --> 00:24:26,506
the best version of their story
that I can.

414
00:24:26,590 --> 00:24:29,134
-All right.
-Have you guys been doing it since 2016?

415
00:24:29,217 --> 00:24:30,218
Uh, no.

416
00:24:30,302 --> 00:24:34,681
To a lot of people,
The New Yorker means kind of hoity-toity.

417
00:24:34,764 --> 00:24:38,143
You know, you're just this snobby thing.

418
00:24:38,643 --> 00:24:41,855
For example,
The New Yorker has a style guide

419
00:24:41,938 --> 00:24:46,234
that dictates that you have
to put the accent on the E in "élite."

420
00:24:46,318 --> 00:24:50,614
And so I… …often find myself in places

421
00:24:50,697 --> 00:24:52,991
with people who will give me quotes

422
00:24:53,074 --> 00:24:56,495
like, "All you elitist motherfuckers,
you don't understand the first thing

423
00:24:56,578 --> 00:24:57,579
about this country."

424
00:24:57,662 --> 00:25:00,248
I'll write the quote,
we'll say "élitist motherfuckers,"

425
00:25:00,332 --> 00:25:03,543
but we'll put a little accent
over the E in "élite."

426
00:25:04,252 --> 00:25:09,758
And I'm like, "I think that we've proved
their case a little bit," you know?

427
00:25:17,974 --> 00:25:24,481
I think one thing that people who really
viscerally despise Trump never understand

428
00:25:24,564 --> 00:25:28,193
is the fun,
the community, the camaraderie.

429
00:25:28,902 --> 00:25:32,447
People are going to those shows
like they're seeing Phish or something.

430
00:25:35,492 --> 00:25:40,121
Are you ready to make history tonight
and make some Liberals cry?

431
00:25:40,872 --> 00:25:42,749
I don't want to lose sight of the extent

432
00:25:42,832 --> 00:25:48,171
to which politics is about making people
feel stuff at a really simple gut level.

433
00:25:48,255 --> 00:25:52,050
USA! USA! USA!

434
00:25:52,133 --> 00:25:54,261
I think part of the goal

435
00:25:54,344 --> 00:25:58,348
is to give readers some kind of portal
into what it feels like

436
00:25:58,431 --> 00:26:00,559
to be at a Trump rally.

437
00:26:01,393 --> 00:26:04,271
Ideally, maybe you can transcend that
and say not only,

438
00:26:04,354 --> 00:26:07,607
"What does it feel like in the room?"
but "What does it mean?"

439
00:26:09,526 --> 00:26:13,405
So one of the challenges with reporting
on the Madison Square Garden rally

440
00:26:13,488 --> 00:26:15,365
was the specter of this Nazi rally

441
00:26:15,448 --> 00:26:18,535
that had happened
at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

442
00:26:19,494 --> 00:26:21,705
And that's just a challenge as a reporter

443
00:26:21,788 --> 00:26:25,750
to go, "Okay, I'm in a room
with tens of thousands of people

444
00:26:25,834 --> 00:26:27,711
who are really enjoying this show."

445
00:26:27,794 --> 00:26:30,463
If I then write about it
in the context of a Nazi rally,

446
00:26:30,547 --> 00:26:32,299
am I calling them all Nazis?

447
00:26:32,382 --> 00:26:36,136
I don't see no stinking Nazis in here.

448
00:26:36,219 --> 00:26:38,597
If I don't write about the context
of the Nazi rally,

449
00:26:38,680 --> 00:26:43,059
am I letting everyone off the hook
for this context that should be there?

450
00:26:44,352 --> 00:26:46,563
"On February 20th, 1939,

451
00:26:46,646 --> 00:26:50,734
the German-American Bund,
a pro-Nazi group based in New York,

452
00:26:50,817 --> 00:26:53,320
held a rally at Madison Square Garden."

453
00:26:54,154 --> 00:26:58,325
"They billed it as a mass demonstration
for true Americanism."

454
00:26:58,408 --> 00:27:01,911
"The backdrop behind the stage
was decorated with American flags

455
00:27:01,995 --> 00:27:04,623
and a floor-to-ceiling portrait
of George Washington."

456
00:27:05,582 --> 00:27:10,128
"Trump's 2024 rally wasn't a reenactment
of the 1939 rally."

457
00:27:10,211 --> 00:27:11,963
"History doesn't repeat."

458
00:27:12,047 --> 00:27:15,133
"But when a nativist demagogue
talks about 'an enemy within'

459
00:27:15,216 --> 00:27:18,428
and 'foreigners poisoning
the blood of our country,'

460
00:27:18,511 --> 00:27:21,431
it would be strange
if no one drew the comparison."

461
00:27:22,891 --> 00:27:26,895
It was a really big deal in our house.
We actually didn't have very much money,

462
00:27:26,978 --> 00:27:29,105
but we did have a New Yorker subscription.

463
00:27:29,189 --> 00:27:33,693
I think the first time I heard
about The New Yorker was on Seinfeld.

464
00:27:33,777 --> 00:27:34,986
They had a great episode

465
00:27:35,070 --> 00:27:38,031
where Elaine did not understand
one of the cartoon captions.

466
00:27:38,114 --> 00:27:40,784
This cartoon in The New Yorker.
I don't get this.

467
00:27:40,867 --> 00:27:41,910
Me neither.

468
00:27:41,993 --> 00:27:44,371
And you're on the fringe
of the humor business!

469
00:27:45,789 --> 00:27:50,460
You know, I grew up in New Jersey
and was very starry-eyed

470
00:27:50,543 --> 00:27:51,961
about all things New York.

471
00:27:52,045 --> 00:27:53,922
The first time
I ever heard of The New Yorker

472
00:27:54,005 --> 00:27:56,758
and understood it to be
this important magazine

473
00:27:56,841 --> 00:27:59,386
was in an episode
of the animated show The Critic.

474
00:27:59,469 --> 00:28:03,765
I think you media jackals
are a pack of filthy, muckraking scum.

475
00:28:03,848 --> 00:28:05,767
I hate you all,

476
00:28:05,850 --> 00:28:09,521
except for you good people
at The New Yorker.

477
00:28:09,604 --> 00:28:11,314
Bravo, Mrs. S.

478
00:28:11,398 --> 00:28:12,816
"Bravo, Mrs. S."

479
00:28:12,899 --> 00:28:14,526
And I remember just thinking,

480
00:28:14,609 --> 00:28:17,445
"Oh, that's The New Yorker.
It's this important thing."

481
00:28:17,529 --> 00:28:20,115
I don't know how I knew about it,
but it's just there.

482
00:28:20,198 --> 00:28:22,325
It's just one of those institutions.

483
00:28:22,409 --> 00:28:25,120
It's like, "When did you hear
about the Statue of Liberty?"

484
00:28:32,127 --> 00:28:35,922
Dude, some of these records
are so nostalgic to me,

485
00:28:36,005 --> 00:28:38,842
but it's not the ones
people would think. It's this!

486
00:28:38,925 --> 00:28:40,844
Japanese Noise was my shit in high school.

487
00:28:40,927 --> 00:28:42,637
And now it's so hard to find.

488
00:28:42,721 --> 00:28:47,100
There's a famous flexi disc limited run
where they burnt them all on the beach.

489
00:28:47,183 --> 00:28:49,436
So I started my career as a music critic,

490
00:28:49,519 --> 00:28:52,188
but in 2008 when I came
over to The New Yorker,

491
00:28:52,272 --> 00:28:54,399
I didn't really have a beat.

492
00:28:54,482 --> 00:28:57,569
It was just, "We think you could write
interesting stories for us."

493
00:28:57,652 --> 00:28:59,738
And I remember that first Monday,

494
00:28:59,821 --> 00:29:03,950
and going into the office,
which at that time was in Times Square,

495
00:29:04,033 --> 00:29:08,580
and sitting down
and being like, "Shit, now what?"

496
00:29:09,998 --> 00:29:13,293
My only job is to be interesting.

497
00:29:13,960 --> 00:29:16,796
One of the blessings of writing
for The New Yorker is the idea

498
00:29:16,880 --> 00:29:23,011
that you have a curious readership
that's willing to go where you take them.

499
00:29:25,889 --> 00:29:28,016
The story could be about anything.

500
00:29:28,099 --> 00:29:30,727
And part of the bargain
with the reader is,

501
00:29:30,810 --> 00:29:33,396
"I'm going to make this fun,
so stick with me."

502
00:29:35,106 --> 00:29:37,567
So tonight I'm going to do
what I often do,

503
00:29:37,650 --> 00:29:39,277
which is go see some music.

504
00:29:43,615 --> 00:29:46,201
The main things I cover
at The New Yorker are things

505
00:29:46,284 --> 00:29:49,537
related to science, medicine, health care.

506
00:29:50,455 --> 00:29:54,793
Today, I'm working
on this space medicine piece in Utah.

507
00:29:54,876 --> 00:29:57,796
As more and more people
are going to space,

508
00:29:57,879 --> 00:30:00,465
what do we know
about what happens to their bodies?

509
00:30:01,299 --> 00:30:03,551
You're gonna want
to have your straps on tight.

510
00:30:03,635 --> 00:30:08,473
I was trying to figure out a way
to make some of the issues of space health

511
00:30:08,556 --> 00:30:09,557
come to life.

512
00:30:11,643 --> 00:30:16,314
I love figuring out how to tell the story
of something that's very complex

513
00:30:16,397 --> 00:30:19,317
in a way that is going to be appealing
for the reader,

514
00:30:19,400 --> 00:30:22,779
that they learn about these things
almost by accident.

515
00:30:22,862 --> 00:30:24,823
There's a lot of moisture in the sand,

516
00:30:24,906 --> 00:30:27,617
so it creates
that crinkly look right there.

517
00:30:33,790 --> 00:30:34,791
Hey!

518
00:30:34,874 --> 00:30:36,709
I think part of The New Yorker's identity

519
00:30:36,793 --> 00:30:40,672
is that you can send someone
into some other world and report back.

520
00:30:41,172 --> 00:30:43,758
For me, that goes back
to growing up as a punk rocker,

521
00:30:43,842 --> 00:30:47,804
and that was the first thing
I really loved when I was 14 years old.

522
00:30:47,887 --> 00:30:50,390
The idea that you can go
through a trap door

523
00:30:50,473 --> 00:30:51,850
and there's this other world

524
00:30:51,933 --> 00:30:56,312
where other people are doing other stuff,
that's an intoxicating feeling to me.

525
00:30:56,396 --> 00:30:59,524
Are you guys ready
to freaking party, baby?

526
00:31:00,191 --> 00:31:03,987
I've always loved that The New Yorker
has this highbrow reputation,

527
00:31:04,070 --> 00:31:06,155
that it's supposed to be a fancy magazine,

528
00:31:06,239 --> 00:31:08,658
because that makes it more fun
for me to come in

529
00:31:08,741 --> 00:31:12,287
and write about Jay-Z
or boxing or country music,

530
00:31:12,370 --> 00:31:15,540
and they're going to set it
in that New Yorker typeface.

531
00:31:15,623 --> 00:31:19,794
And so part of the goal is to figure out
how to keep that fanciness

532
00:31:19,878 --> 00:31:23,464
while also keep the magazine
from seeming too old-fashioned.

533
00:31:30,263 --> 00:31:34,475
"Punk taught me to love music
by teaching me to hate music, too."

534
00:31:35,143 --> 00:31:37,186
"It taught me
that music could be divisive,

535
00:31:37,270 --> 00:31:40,148
could inspire affection or loathing

536
00:31:40,231 --> 00:31:42,942
or a desire to figure out
which was which."

537
00:31:45,028 --> 00:31:47,655
I had always wanted
to write for The New Yorker.

538
00:31:47,739 --> 00:31:49,198
This is the black bean burger.

539
00:31:49,282 --> 00:31:51,951
The idea that you'd put ideas
out into the world

540
00:31:52,035 --> 00:31:54,996
and that would change the way
that someone thinks about a problem,

541
00:31:55,955 --> 00:31:57,624
that is very appealing.

542
00:31:58,124 --> 00:32:02,712
We have cilantro here, dill, parsley.

543
00:32:02,795 --> 00:32:05,173
My primary job is I'm a physician.

544
00:32:05,256 --> 00:32:10,845
I was practicing in New York City
during the pandemic

545
00:32:10,929 --> 00:32:13,556
and basically wrote
a series of dispatches.

546
00:32:16,768 --> 00:32:18,728
Since the pandemic has waned,

547
00:32:18,811 --> 00:32:22,523
I've really been able to expand
the types of things that I write about.

548
00:32:23,358 --> 00:32:26,819
"A freezing wind howled
as we drove over rough terrain."

549
00:32:26,903 --> 00:32:28,571
"I squinted into the distance,

550
00:32:28,655 --> 00:32:31,115
imagining the vast expanse
of untouched land

551
00:32:31,199 --> 00:32:33,660
that the first humans on Mars will find."

552
00:32:36,245 --> 00:32:40,375
I think almost everyone who works
at The New Yorker is obsessed in some way,

553
00:32:40,458 --> 00:32:44,003
and I felt drawn in by that obsession.

554
00:32:48,800 --> 00:32:53,471
I've probably watched a movie a day
for the last 40 years.

555
00:32:55,765 --> 00:32:58,351
You know, in a way, it's kind of simple.

556
00:32:58,434 --> 00:33:02,313
You know, there's something banal
about criticism,

557
00:33:02,397 --> 00:33:04,649
which is you watch a movie
and you write about it.

558
00:33:04,732 --> 00:33:05,733
Um…

559
00:33:06,567 --> 00:33:08,653
But I never know what I'm going to write.

560
00:33:09,570 --> 00:33:11,447
Hey! Hey, look out!

561
00:33:11,531 --> 00:33:14,492
Once the movie is rolling,
I have no idea where I am.

562
00:33:14,575 --> 00:33:18,746
The movie takes possession of me
and the audience doesn't exist.

563
00:33:18,830 --> 00:33:21,582
I don't exist
for the duration of the film.

564
00:33:22,333 --> 00:33:24,335
What kind of place is this that I…

565
00:33:26,087 --> 00:33:27,797
They won't let me see him.

566
00:33:27,880 --> 00:33:31,384
While I watch a movie,
I take notes furiously.

567
00:33:32,093 --> 00:33:34,887
The problem isn't taking them,
it's reading them afterward,

568
00:33:34,971 --> 00:33:36,931
after having written them in the dark.

569
00:33:40,727 --> 00:33:41,894
When a movie is over,

570
00:33:41,978 --> 00:33:44,480
the last thing I want to do
is to talk with people.

571
00:33:44,564 --> 00:33:47,275
I run out of the theater
with my coat over my head

572
00:33:47,358 --> 00:33:49,777
so that I don't have to talk
with my fellow critics.

573
00:33:49,861 --> 00:33:53,239
I want to hold the experience in,
not even think about it.

574
00:33:53,322 --> 00:33:55,742
I just want to have it work on me.

575
00:34:00,663 --> 00:34:04,751
They say that people who drink
three cups of coffee a day

576
00:34:04,834 --> 00:34:07,086
prolong their lives by a decade.

577
00:34:07,170 --> 00:34:11,382
I think I'm verging on immortality
with the amount of coffee I drink.

578
00:34:12,717 --> 00:34:14,927
Without coffee, nothing gets done.

579
00:34:17,472 --> 00:34:21,392
I wish I never had to write
a negative review,

580
00:34:22,643 --> 00:34:25,938
and I am always conscious
that there are people involved.

581
00:34:27,023 --> 00:34:30,276
I always say that it takes
two years to make a movie,

582
00:34:30,359 --> 00:34:31,986
it takes two hours to watch it,

583
00:34:32,070 --> 00:34:35,156
and two minutes to demolish it,
or, on Twitter, two seconds.

584
00:34:35,239 --> 00:34:37,909
And so I feel a fundamental need
to be respectful.

585
00:34:39,619 --> 00:34:43,790
"The heart of the review is emotion,
the stirrings of the soul."

586
00:34:43,873 --> 00:34:46,793
"It's not a matter
of critics taking themselves seriously,

587
00:34:47,460 --> 00:34:49,504
but of taking art seriously."

588
00:34:53,341 --> 00:34:56,010
There's a lot I liked about it,
but it's right on that borderline

589
00:34:56,094 --> 00:34:57,762
of being like ten other stories…

590
00:34:57,845 --> 00:35:00,389
-Yeah, I'm not sure--
-…in terms of what happens in it.

591
00:35:00,473 --> 00:35:03,309
Yeah, I'd be kind of borderline in favor.

592
00:35:04,936 --> 00:35:06,229
In the course of a year,

593
00:35:06,312 --> 00:35:10,942
we get somewhere between seven
and ten thousand submissions,

594
00:35:11,025 --> 00:35:12,360
and we publish 50.

595
00:35:13,152 --> 00:35:15,822
They're coming from agents.
They're coming from publishers.

596
00:35:15,905 --> 00:35:19,659
They're coming directly from writers.
They can come any way.

597
00:35:19,742 --> 00:35:22,787
You know, it's not very hard
to find my email, apparently.

598
00:35:24,455 --> 00:35:28,668
It's a pretty rare thing
that magazines even remotely like ours

599
00:35:28,751 --> 00:35:30,378
have fiction.

600
00:35:30,461 --> 00:35:35,424
And I'm perfectly aware that there is
some portion of our readership

601
00:35:35,508 --> 00:35:38,344
or our subscribers
who don't look at the fiction at all.

602
00:35:38,970 --> 00:35:41,931
Fine. But I also know
that there's a portion of our readership

603
00:35:42,014 --> 00:35:44,433
that that's what they care about the most.

604
00:35:45,059 --> 00:35:47,520
About a year and a half ago,

605
00:35:47,603 --> 00:35:50,982
David Remnick came to me and said,
"For 100th anniversary,

606
00:35:51,065 --> 00:35:55,153
how about we do an anthology of fiction,
short stories? What would you put in it?"

607
00:35:56,404 --> 00:35:59,323
There are more than 13,000 stories

608
00:35:59,407 --> 00:36:02,618
published in the lifespan
of The New Yorker,

609
00:36:02,702 --> 00:36:05,288
and this book contains 78.

610
00:36:06,080 --> 00:36:07,790
EB White, Dorothy Parker…

611
00:36:07,874 --> 00:36:09,458
John Updike, Philip Roth…

612
00:36:09,542 --> 00:36:12,086
JD Salinger, Jamaica Kincaid.

613
00:36:12,170 --> 00:36:16,174
It just keeps going. I actually could read
any name on this list

614
00:36:16,257 --> 00:36:18,050
and it wouldn't elicit a reaction.

615
00:36:18,134 --> 00:36:21,262
-David F. Wallace, Eudora Welty…
-Shirley Jackson, John Cheever…

616
00:36:21,345 --> 00:36:24,348
-Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith…
-Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow…

617
00:36:24,432 --> 00:36:27,435
-Haruki Murakami, Junot Díaz…
-Annie Proulx, George Saunders.

618
00:36:27,518 --> 00:36:31,480
The writer whose work we feature
in our upcoming anniversary magazine

619
00:36:31,564 --> 00:36:34,025
is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

620
00:36:36,110 --> 00:36:42,491
"I have always longed to be known,
truly known by another human being."

621
00:36:42,575 --> 00:36:46,495
To celebrate The New Yorker's 100 years
of being a magazine,

622
00:36:46,579 --> 00:36:50,750
they will publish an excerpt
from my new novel, Dream Count.

623
00:36:50,833 --> 00:36:55,838
"Because it was during lockdown
that I began to sift through my life

624
00:36:55,922 --> 00:37:00,051
and give names to things long unnamed."

625
00:37:00,134 --> 00:37:04,847
Fiction is the most glorious form
of all the arts.

626
00:37:04,931 --> 00:37:07,058
I'm not biased, of course.

627
00:37:07,141 --> 00:37:08,392
"But what did…"

628
00:37:08,476 --> 00:37:09,769
Literature makes it possible

629
00:37:09,852 --> 00:37:12,230
for us to know
there are multiple points of view.

630
00:37:12,313 --> 00:37:16,901
This kind of imaginative leaping
into somebody else's experience,

631
00:37:16,984 --> 00:37:17,818
because it just…

632
00:37:17,902 --> 00:37:21,572
Sometimes I feel there's something
apocalyptic about the world we live in,

633
00:37:21,656 --> 00:37:27,203
and I think that literature
is that small beam of hope.

634
00:37:27,286 --> 00:37:29,163
Writing fiction is the love of my life.

635
00:37:29,247 --> 00:37:32,291
It's the thing
that gives me meaning. It's…

636
00:37:32,375 --> 00:37:34,877
It's the reason I'm here.

637
00:37:35,503 --> 00:37:38,923
When I came to the U.S.,
very quickly, it became clear to me

638
00:37:39,006 --> 00:37:42,426
that The New Yorker was
where you wanted to be published.

639
00:37:43,010 --> 00:37:45,763
Yeah, I mean,
The New Yorker is The New Yorker.

640
00:37:45,846 --> 00:37:48,349
And The New Yorker knows
that it's The New Yorker.

641
00:37:49,392 --> 00:37:50,268
So…

642
00:37:50,351 --> 00:37:54,313
People accuse The New Yorker of elitism.

643
00:37:54,397 --> 00:37:57,692
But I think conversation
about things being considered elitist

644
00:37:57,775 --> 00:38:01,028
leans into a kind of anti-intellectualism

645
00:38:01,112 --> 00:38:04,031
that is sweeping across this country

646
00:38:04,115 --> 00:38:06,534
and is bad for this country
and is bad for us.

647
00:38:07,535 --> 00:38:10,538
What are we saying?
Are we saying that it's so elitist,

648
00:38:10,621 --> 00:38:15,209
it should not write about art
and literature and politics

649
00:38:15,293 --> 00:38:17,753
in a way that is complex and thoughtful?

650
00:38:17,837 --> 00:38:20,423
If that is elitism, then we need more.

651
00:38:20,506 --> 00:38:21,632
We need more.

652
00:38:30,141 --> 00:38:31,183
Hey, Bruce.

653
00:38:31,767 --> 00:38:34,020
I've been here 46 years.

654
00:38:34,103 --> 00:38:37,148
It's a long time, but not long enough.

655
00:38:39,025 --> 00:38:40,401
What's your job here?

656
00:38:40,985 --> 00:38:43,571
If the electricity goes out,
if the air is not on,

657
00:38:43,654 --> 00:38:45,239
all of that is run through me.

658
00:38:45,323 --> 00:38:49,618
If a person needs a piece of paper
or a printer, that's all on me.

659
00:38:49,702 --> 00:38:52,455
If a person needs a computer fixed,
that's all on me.

660
00:38:52,538 --> 00:38:53,748
And that's me.

661
00:38:56,500 --> 00:38:58,377
Right there with the long black hair.

662
00:38:59,837 --> 00:39:02,882
We started at 25 West 43rd.
That's the first New Yorker.

663
00:39:03,716 --> 00:39:07,511
It had this really old feel to it,
like the 1950s.

664
00:39:07,595 --> 00:39:10,556
There was a very old group
of gentlemen here.

665
00:39:12,141 --> 00:39:14,852
The walls were stained
with cigarette smoke.

666
00:39:16,604 --> 00:39:19,357
Couches that you sat on,
and the dust comes up from them

667
00:39:19,440 --> 00:39:20,733
when you sit down, right?

668
00:39:22,234 --> 00:39:23,736
When we moved the first time,

669
00:39:23,819 --> 00:39:26,572
we went to the basement
and found what was down there.

670
00:39:26,655 --> 00:39:29,241
It was loaded
with old papers and material,

671
00:39:29,325 --> 00:39:32,828
old proofs and old fiction edits.

672
00:39:32,912 --> 00:39:37,124
It was like the world had forgotten
that people had worked on these pieces,

673
00:39:37,208 --> 00:39:38,250
but here's the work.

674
00:39:38,834 --> 00:39:40,586
And I started to just hoard

675
00:39:41,670 --> 00:39:44,924
any material that people were discarding
that I thought we should keep.

676
00:39:46,550 --> 00:39:49,053
I'm not a pack rat.
I just didn't want to get rid of it,

677
00:39:49,136 --> 00:39:51,305
because I thought
there was history in here.

678
00:39:51,389 --> 00:39:53,641
It's the first adding machine
from The New Yorker.

679
00:39:53,724 --> 00:39:55,476
It's basically a Buick.

680
00:39:56,936 --> 00:40:00,231
These are all first editions
of New Yorker writers.

681
00:40:00,314 --> 00:40:03,359
And the spots are the little drawings
that you would see on a page.

682
00:40:03,442 --> 00:40:06,737
So basically pieces of art
that artists did.

683
00:40:06,821 --> 00:40:10,116
The detail and the work in it
is crazy good.

684
00:40:10,616 --> 00:40:11,575
Okay.

685
00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:19,375
I worked with four out of the five editors
at The New Yorker so far.

686
00:40:20,209 --> 00:40:22,545
But did not work with Ross.

687
00:40:28,759 --> 00:40:31,095
In the years following World War II,

688
00:40:31,178 --> 00:40:33,180
The New Yorker entered a new era.

689
00:40:33,848 --> 00:40:37,643
Its hard-charging founder, Harold Ross,
died of lung cancer

690
00:40:37,726 --> 00:40:39,895
after 26 years at the helm…

691
00:40:41,021 --> 00:40:44,400
and was replaced
by his deputy, William Shawn.

692
00:40:45,609 --> 00:40:47,361
Though painfully shy,

693
00:40:47,445 --> 00:40:49,822
Shawn was fearless as an editor.

694
00:40:50,364 --> 00:40:53,951
Some staffers called him the Iron Mouse,

695
00:40:54,452 --> 00:40:57,788
and he pushed the magazine
to report stories that were controversial

696
00:40:57,872 --> 00:40:59,915
and confronted the powerful.

697
00:41:01,333 --> 00:41:04,295
One day in 1958, Shawn got a pitch

698
00:41:04,378 --> 00:41:08,174
from an award-winning writer
and biologist named Rachel Carson.

699
00:41:08,966 --> 00:41:11,927
She wanted to figure out
why thousands of birds had died

700
00:41:12,011 --> 00:41:14,847
after the spraying of the insecticide DDT.

701
00:41:16,307 --> 00:41:19,852
At the time, DDT was used indiscriminately

702
00:41:19,935 --> 00:41:23,856
on crops, lawns, and even inside homes.

703
00:41:25,608 --> 00:41:28,694
Its manufacturers insisted it was safe,

704
00:41:29,278 --> 00:41:31,489
but Carson wanted to investigate.

705
00:41:32,239 --> 00:41:35,743
With Shawn's support,
she began conducting field studies,

706
00:41:35,826 --> 00:41:37,536
interviewing experts,

707
00:41:37,620 --> 00:41:40,080
and digging into the complex science.

708
00:41:41,081 --> 00:41:44,502
But as she worked,
Carson kept a secret from the world.

709
00:41:45,044 --> 00:41:47,046
She was dying of breast cancer.

710
00:41:48,422 --> 00:41:52,384
Multiple surgeries and painful treatments
sometimes left her in a wheelchair.

711
00:41:53,219 --> 00:41:55,346
But she pressed ahead with her work.

712
00:41:55,429 --> 00:42:00,392
And finally, after four years,
she submitted a draft to Shawn.

713
00:42:02,853 --> 00:42:06,398
When "Silent Spring" was published
as a three-part series,

714
00:42:06,482 --> 00:42:10,653
Carson's prose transformed
science into literature.

715
00:42:11,445 --> 00:42:15,533
"Over increasingly large areas
of the United States," she wrote,

716
00:42:15,616 --> 00:42:19,620
"spring now comes unheralded
by the return of the birds."

717
00:42:19,703 --> 00:42:23,624
"And the early mornings,
once filled with the beauty of birdsong,

718
00:42:23,707 --> 00:42:25,584
are strangely silent."

719
00:42:27,127 --> 00:42:31,382
It was published as a book,
became an immediate bestseller,

720
00:42:31,465 --> 00:42:34,343
and sparked a national debate
about the danger of chemicals

721
00:42:34,426 --> 00:42:36,428
to humans and animals.

722
00:42:36,512 --> 00:42:38,764
Have you asked
the Department of Agriculture

723
00:42:38,847 --> 00:42:40,349
to take a closer look at this?

724
00:42:40,432 --> 00:42:43,394
Yes, and I know that they already are.

725
00:42:43,477 --> 00:42:47,773
I think particularly, of course,
since Ms. Carson's book, but they are.

726
00:42:48,357 --> 00:42:50,484
But it also sparked a backlash.

727
00:42:51,277 --> 00:42:54,572
Carson was attacked
by powerful chemical companies.

728
00:42:55,281 --> 00:43:00,119
The major claims
in Ms. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring

729
00:43:00,202 --> 00:43:03,038
are gross distortions of the actual facts.

730
00:43:03,122 --> 00:43:07,835
Carson, by this point
wearing a wig and barely able to walk,

731
00:43:07,918 --> 00:43:10,963
defended her work
before Congress and the press.

732
00:43:11,046 --> 00:43:13,674
Unless we do bring these chemicals
under better control,

733
00:43:13,757 --> 00:43:16,635
we are certainly headed for disaster.

734
00:43:17,553 --> 00:43:20,180
Some companies
threatened to sue The New Yorker,

735
00:43:20,264 --> 00:43:22,266
but Shawn refused to back down.

736
00:43:23,350 --> 00:43:28,022
Carson died less than two years
after the publication of Silent Spring.

737
00:43:28,105 --> 00:43:29,898
But though she never got to see it,

738
00:43:29,982 --> 00:43:33,193
her work would help bring
about the Clean Air Act,

739
00:43:33,277 --> 00:43:35,112
the Clean Water Act,

740
00:43:35,195 --> 00:43:38,198
and the birth
of the modern environmental movement.

741
00:43:39,450 --> 00:43:40,868
Years later,

742
00:43:40,951 --> 00:43:45,039
Shawn would articulate
the magazine's simple philosophy this way.

743
00:43:45,122 --> 00:43:47,625
We say what we think about things.

744
00:43:47,708 --> 00:43:49,627
This is what we truly believed.

745
00:43:49,710 --> 00:43:53,631
And if this is what we believe,
we should say so.

746
00:44:02,640 --> 00:44:04,183
Hey, Valerie.

747
00:44:04,266 --> 00:44:06,977
Would you be able to forward us
that Harris campaign thing

748
00:44:07,061 --> 00:44:08,729
about Puerto Rican turnout?

749
00:44:08,812 --> 00:44:11,315
-I'll Slack it to you now.
-Okay, thank you.

750
00:44:11,398 --> 00:44:13,400
I didn't want to bother you while…

751
00:44:15,486 --> 00:44:18,155
Ah!

752
00:44:18,739 --> 00:44:21,909
Okay! Let's get some people drunk.

753
00:44:24,203 --> 00:44:25,913
-Hey there.
-How's it going?

754
00:44:26,497 --> 00:44:27,956
It's okay. Um…

755
00:44:28,040 --> 00:44:32,544
In Dearborn, it's a hardship assignment
'cause it's hard to find a beer,

756
00:44:32,628 --> 00:44:34,004
but there is a lot of hookah.

757
00:44:34,088 --> 00:44:36,131
Can you not drink too early
in the evening, please?

758
00:44:36,215 --> 00:44:40,302
-I'm just saying hypothetically.
-Okay. What are you hearing?

759
00:44:40,886 --> 00:44:43,263
Nobody knows anything, you know?

760
00:44:43,347 --> 00:44:44,765
We're very prepared.

761
00:44:44,848 --> 00:44:49,353
We have a live blog
and lots of people all over the place.

762
00:44:49,436 --> 00:44:50,854
But what we don't know,

763
00:44:50,938 --> 00:44:53,357
it's one of those hinge moments
in history.

764
00:44:53,440 --> 00:44:56,360
We don't know what will happen.
Certainly not at this hour.

765
00:44:56,985 --> 00:45:01,031
If she wins,
we have this from Kadir Nelson.

766
00:45:01,115 --> 00:45:04,910
Inscribed in her jacket
are Obama, Shirley Chisholm,

767
00:45:04,993 --> 00:45:08,455
Martin Luther King Jr.,
Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass,

768
00:45:08,539 --> 00:45:12,292
all kinds of figures
that arguably are resonant

769
00:45:12,376 --> 00:45:14,712
in that progress of history.

770
00:45:14,795 --> 00:45:18,507
And when it comes to Trump,
the mood is rather different.

771
00:45:21,760 --> 00:45:24,847
There's Trump being inaugurated
by Hulk Hogan.

772
00:45:25,556 --> 00:45:26,682
And, uh…

773
00:45:27,766 --> 00:45:30,227
here's an incredibly cheerful sketch.

774
00:45:31,311 --> 00:45:35,691
And Elon Musk crashing
into the Oval Office.

775
00:45:35,774 --> 00:45:37,359
And here's one.

776
00:45:37,443 --> 00:45:41,238
"Take one tablet by mouth
once a day for four years."

777
00:45:49,288 --> 00:45:51,749
Here is
the electoral vote count at this hour.

778
00:45:51,832 --> 00:45:54,877
Donald Trump has 90 electoral votes.

779
00:45:54,960 --> 00:45:58,589
Kamala Harris has 27 electoral votes.

780
00:45:59,256 --> 00:46:03,010
Okay, Florida is not happening.
Have we realized that now?

781
00:46:03,761 --> 00:46:05,095
He's leading.

782
00:46:05,637 --> 00:46:07,222
I don't know if it's a miracle

783
00:46:07,306 --> 00:46:10,768
that she would win at this point,
but she'd really be…

784
00:46:10,851 --> 00:46:12,686
She's down a couple of touchdowns.

785
00:46:16,315 --> 00:46:19,735
Trump is now
the projected winner in Michigan.

786
00:46:19,818 --> 00:46:22,738
NBC news projecting
that Wisconsin was won by Donald Trump.

787
00:46:22,821 --> 00:46:25,866
Donald Trump will win
in the state of Pennsylvania.

788
00:46:29,870 --> 00:46:32,748
All right, let's work on that.
Okay. Thank you.

789
00:46:36,168 --> 00:46:39,338
It's not what I expected for tonight,

790
00:46:39,922 --> 00:46:42,382
but he chose this.

791
00:46:42,466 --> 00:46:43,383
Mm.

792
00:46:44,510 --> 00:46:46,011
It's hard to believe,

793
00:46:46,094 --> 00:46:48,639
but we can't shape reality.

794
00:46:48,722 --> 00:46:50,849
We can only reflect it.

795
00:46:54,520 --> 00:46:56,855
…Carolina.
Demographically, they're very similar.

796
00:46:56,939 --> 00:46:57,940
You can even say…

797
00:46:58,816 --> 00:47:02,736
"After the tens of millions
of Americans who feared Trump's return

798
00:47:02,820 --> 00:47:04,947
rise from the couch of gloom,

799
00:47:05,030 --> 00:47:07,991
it will be time to consider
what must be done."

800
00:47:08,075 --> 00:47:11,370
"One of the perils of life
under authoritarian rule

801
00:47:11,453 --> 00:47:15,040
is that the leader seeks
to drain people of their strength."

802
00:47:15,541 --> 00:47:17,751
"A defeatism takes hold."

803
00:47:19,461 --> 00:47:23,674
My concern the second time around
is that people feel defeated.

804
00:47:24,633 --> 00:47:27,427
I don't think somebody in this job,

805
00:47:27,511 --> 00:47:30,013
much less the more important job
of citizen,

806
00:47:31,849 --> 00:47:33,642
can give in to that.

807
00:47:34,351 --> 00:47:36,270
Despair is the unforgivable sin.

808
00:47:36,353 --> 00:47:37,938
So, no.

809
00:47:38,730 --> 00:47:40,315
No!

810
00:47:41,191 --> 00:47:43,026
That's not, um…

811
00:47:44,319 --> 00:47:45,737
That's impermissible.

812
00:47:49,199 --> 00:47:51,952
We're about to watch
the assumption in office

813
00:47:52,035 --> 00:47:55,289
of a president who will try
to reset the world.

814
00:47:57,791 --> 00:47:59,084
Everything else feels…

815
00:48:01,336 --> 00:48:03,046
sort of inconsequential.

816
00:48:04,631 --> 00:48:08,969
And it will inform so much of what happens
in other countries. So much.

817
00:48:10,888 --> 00:48:11,805
Yeah.

818
00:48:13,849 --> 00:48:16,310
Jon Lee.

819
00:48:16,393 --> 00:48:18,186
-How are you, babe? Super.
-How are you?

820
00:48:18,687 --> 00:48:20,480
-It's been too long.
-I know. It has.

821
00:48:20,564 --> 00:48:24,026
So I haven't read about South America,
but I will, right?

822
00:48:24,109 --> 00:48:27,905
Yeah. We have a draft
and I'm doing some adds.

823
00:48:27,988 --> 00:48:28,947
It's Milei.

824
00:48:29,031 --> 00:48:30,198
-Yeah.
-Crazy guy.

825
00:48:30,282 --> 00:48:31,992
And how was he with you?

826
00:48:32,075 --> 00:48:35,370
In the 26 years now
that I've been with The New Yorker,

827
00:48:35,454 --> 00:48:38,582
I've been the war guy,
or, you know, one of them.

828
00:48:38,665 --> 00:48:41,668
And I was in a lot of the conflicts
we've seen.

829
00:48:41,752 --> 00:48:45,047
You know, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria.

830
00:48:46,423 --> 00:48:48,175
My father was in the Foreign Service.

831
00:48:48,258 --> 00:48:53,055
And I grew up in nine countries,
a lot of them fairly edgy places.

832
00:48:54,640 --> 00:48:58,602
It's what led me into journalism.
I wanted to live the history of my time.

833
00:49:01,396 --> 00:49:04,066
What's on your mind for doing next?
There's like…

834
00:49:04,149 --> 00:49:07,611
-Mm.
-I have to tell you, we're in a state of…

835
00:49:07,694 --> 00:49:10,280
Suck?

836
00:49:11,406 --> 00:49:15,410
You know, we have to cover the world
and pick our spots and pick them well.

837
00:49:15,494 --> 00:49:17,037
So tell me what's on your mind.

838
00:49:17,120 --> 00:49:20,540
The New Yorker doesn't have
a budget like The New York Times,

839
00:49:20,624 --> 00:49:22,459
we have a much smaller budget and staff.

840
00:49:22,542 --> 00:49:25,170
But David has always
been supportive of the idea

841
00:49:25,253 --> 00:49:29,466
that we get out into the field
and witness history with our own eyes.

842
00:49:33,720 --> 00:49:36,640
Dictator Bashar al-Assad
fled Syria this week,

843
00:49:36,723 --> 00:49:38,809
as rebels swept into Damascus,

844
00:49:38,892 --> 00:49:41,436
ending his family's 54-year reign.

845
00:49:46,441 --> 00:49:50,862
"Two days after the Syrian
despot Bashar al-Assad fled his palace,

846
00:49:50,946 --> 00:49:54,825
I arrived in Damascus to witness
the beginning of a profound reckoning."

847
00:49:56,994 --> 00:49:59,496
"A long campaign of internal violence

848
00:49:59,579 --> 00:50:01,123
had suddenly given way

849
00:50:01,206 --> 00:50:03,583
to an edgy, surreal peace."

850
00:50:06,712 --> 00:50:08,630
When I report a story,

851
00:50:08,714 --> 00:50:11,842
I like to smell it, feel it, taste it,

852
00:50:11,925 --> 00:50:13,719
and convey that to the reader.

853
00:50:14,511 --> 00:50:16,555
That's the reporting I like to do.

854
00:50:16,638 --> 00:50:17,723
Assalamu alaikum.

855
00:50:19,933 --> 00:50:21,768
"One afternoon in Damascus,

856
00:50:21,852 --> 00:50:24,771
I visited one of Assad's
most notorious prisons."

857
00:50:27,733 --> 00:50:29,526
I miss you, my love.

858
00:50:31,111 --> 00:50:32,821
"We met a young man

859
00:50:32,904 --> 00:50:36,283
who spent 15 months
in the military intelligence prison,

860
00:50:36,366 --> 00:50:40,162
and he reenacted one
of the horrific experiences he endured."

861
00:50:45,792 --> 00:50:48,920
"The guards seemed to have made
no effort to hide their abuses."

862
00:50:50,964 --> 00:50:55,594
"I came across a huge pile of photographs
taken by prisoners after interrogation."

863
00:50:56,386 --> 00:51:01,308
"For many, it was likely the last image
of them before they died."

864
00:51:05,437 --> 00:51:09,399
It's not so hard to rip apart a society
if you set your mind to it.

865
00:51:31,004 --> 00:51:33,340
What do you think
of having different artists

866
00:51:33,423 --> 00:51:35,801
draw different kinds
of 100s for the spots?

867
00:51:35,884 --> 00:51:38,970
Or do you prefer just a classic Eustace?
Maybe this is better.

868
00:51:39,054 --> 00:51:42,682
I will say that I love this progression.

869
00:51:42,766 --> 00:51:45,519
-Eustace from cradle to grave.
-Yeah.

870
00:51:45,602 --> 00:51:48,522
The core
of understanding The New Yorker

871
00:51:48,605 --> 00:51:53,151
is that there's always this tension
between the past and the present.

872
00:51:53,235 --> 00:51:57,322
The magazine has its finger on the pulse
of what's happening now,

873
00:51:57,405 --> 00:52:00,742
but the magazine itself
really hasn't changed much visually

874
00:52:00,826 --> 00:52:01,910
since 1925.

875
00:52:02,702 --> 00:52:07,332
I remember when I came here,
I wanted to introduce non-lining numbers.

876
00:52:07,874 --> 00:52:10,043
Non-lining numerals mean
that, for example,

877
00:52:10,127 --> 00:52:12,671
when you publish a number "1926,"

878
00:52:12,754 --> 00:52:15,465
the nine is going
to loop down a little bit.

879
00:52:15,549 --> 00:52:18,718
It won't be all lined up,
so it feels a little more elegant.

880
00:52:18,802 --> 00:52:22,597
But it took weeks to convince
the powers that be

881
00:52:22,681 --> 00:52:24,224
that that was a good shift.

882
00:52:24,307 --> 00:52:25,725
-Look at this.
-Oh, look!

883
00:52:26,351 --> 00:52:30,814
So a lot of this you've seen already.
Maybe just like start from the front.

884
00:52:30,897 --> 00:52:34,276
The magazine has a style guide about…

885
00:52:35,443 --> 00:52:36,570
all kinds of things.

886
00:52:37,237 --> 00:52:41,491
Where and when to use the diaeresis,
and how to use commas,

887
00:52:41,575 --> 00:52:44,953
or our own sometimes unusual spellings.

888
00:52:45,453 --> 00:52:46,663
Sit, sit, sit.

889
00:52:46,746 --> 00:52:50,625
With the 100th anniversary coming up,
it seemed like a good idea

890
00:52:50,709 --> 00:52:51,877
to open up a discussion

891
00:52:51,960 --> 00:52:54,296
about some of the issues
that have accumulated,

892
00:52:54,379 --> 00:52:57,799
like barnacles to the side of the ship.

893
00:52:57,883 --> 00:53:00,594
But what are the things
that we're secretly…

894
00:53:00,677 --> 00:53:03,430
we've come around to
and we accept as tradition,

895
00:53:03,513 --> 00:53:06,016
that maybe is worth reconsidering?

896
00:53:06,099 --> 00:53:09,227
Well, one that comes up
a lot is "teenager."

897
00:53:09,311 --> 00:53:11,479
-Yeah.
-The hyphen in "teenager."

898
00:53:12,063 --> 00:53:14,065
The spelling-out of numbers.

899
00:53:14,149 --> 00:53:16,818
I would argue capitalizing "Internet."

900
00:53:16,902 --> 00:53:19,779
We are an outlier,
and it makes us look antiquated.

901
00:53:19,863 --> 00:53:23,450
One subject that has come up for decades
and decades is the following.

902
00:53:23,533 --> 00:53:27,078
"I'm worried that I won't be able
to write in my voice."

903
00:53:27,162 --> 00:53:29,831
When I have very occasionally
had that experience,

904
00:53:29,915 --> 00:53:31,458
it's 'cause they're bad writers.

905
00:53:33,418 --> 00:53:36,755
So this ended up on the front page
of The New York Times.

906
00:53:36,838 --> 00:53:38,381
They couldn't resist.

907
00:53:38,465 --> 00:53:40,634
Why is it on The New York Times?
I couldn't say.

908
00:53:40,717 --> 00:53:42,677
Maybe it was a slow news day.

909
00:53:44,137 --> 00:53:46,556
I think The New Yorker to me is still

910
00:53:46,640 --> 00:53:51,519
this awe-inspiring,
impenetrable institution in my head.

911
00:53:51,603 --> 00:53:54,147
Like, even having had stuff in it,

912
00:53:54,231 --> 00:53:57,734
I still feel like, "Ooh, me? Thank you."

913
00:53:57,817 --> 00:54:00,320
First time you see your name
in the New Yorker font,

914
00:54:00,403 --> 00:54:03,615
it's the biggest ego trip.

915
00:54:03,698 --> 00:54:07,577
I would say that I was
more excited about that

916
00:54:07,661 --> 00:54:11,581
than I could ever be
about, like, winning an Academy Award.

917
00:54:12,207 --> 00:54:16,461
Although I haven't won an Academy Award,
so maybe I'll get back to you on that.

918
00:54:16,544 --> 00:54:20,840
I felt so honored
to be included in the magazine.

919
00:54:20,924 --> 00:54:23,885
These writers are the writers
that are at the forefront

920
00:54:23,969 --> 00:54:28,556
of thought and literature in our culture.

921
00:54:28,640 --> 00:54:29,849
Then I laugh a little bit,

922
00:54:29,933 --> 00:54:32,519
'cause I can't believe
I got a piece in there

923
00:54:32,602 --> 00:54:35,105
about Marv Albert, the sports announcer.

924
00:54:35,897 --> 00:54:38,358
It was my first piece
published in The New Yorker.

925
00:54:38,441 --> 00:54:42,362
It felt like I'd won a Make-A-Wish thing.
Like, "We're going to publish your piece."

926
00:54:42,445 --> 00:54:46,199
It all felt like, "Maybe I'm very sick
and no one's telling me."

927
00:55:01,548 --> 00:55:04,884
I take a guitar lesson every Sunday.

928
00:55:06,678 --> 00:55:10,307
It's something I do really badly
and I don't care.

929
00:55:11,308 --> 00:55:13,018
It's a complete escape.

930
00:55:13,101 --> 00:55:15,854
It's not writing, it's not reading.

931
00:55:15,937 --> 00:55:18,106
It's not being an editor.

932
00:55:19,733 --> 00:55:21,985
It's just-- That's a vacation for me.

933
00:55:29,409 --> 00:55:34,748
My father was a dentist,
had a small dental practice in New Jersey,

934
00:55:34,831 --> 00:55:38,084
and got quite sick in his fifties.

935
00:55:38,168 --> 00:55:42,172
He got Parkinson's
and was unable to continue practicing.

936
00:55:42,255 --> 00:55:44,007
And my mother, Barbara,

937
00:55:44,090 --> 00:55:47,427
unfortunately got sick
when she was very young with MS.

938
00:55:47,510 --> 00:55:51,139
And so I had two disabled parents
pretty rapidly.

939
00:55:51,973 --> 00:55:52,974
Um…

940
00:55:54,434 --> 00:55:55,685
I miss them.

941
00:55:55,769 --> 00:55:57,812
Yeah. I love that picture.

942
00:56:00,106 --> 00:56:04,861
I've had incredible strokes of luck
and incredible strokes of bad luck.

943
00:56:04,944 --> 00:56:08,114
And I think that's probably
the human condition, if you're lucky.

944
00:56:08,698 --> 00:56:12,160
Professionally, the gods
have treated me well.

945
00:56:12,243 --> 00:56:15,413
But yeah, my parents were disabled

946
00:56:15,497 --> 00:56:22,045
and my daughter, our youngest,
is profoundly autistic,

947
00:56:22,128 --> 00:56:23,797
and, um…

948
00:56:28,009 --> 00:56:30,720
…and that can't help but shape

949
00:56:31,638 --> 00:56:33,515
the person sitting in front of you.

950
00:56:35,350 --> 00:56:37,685
How that affects the way
I look at The New Yorker?

951
00:56:37,769 --> 00:56:44,484
I guess there's no question
that it's shaped my temperament.

952
00:56:45,151 --> 00:56:49,072
Well, I want The New Yorker
to be two things.

953
00:56:49,656 --> 00:56:51,032
I want it to be great.

954
00:56:51,825 --> 00:56:53,576
I want it to be humane.

955
00:57:07,632 --> 00:57:10,552
Roughly four decades after its founding,

956
00:57:10,635 --> 00:57:13,638
The New Yorker was publishing
a range of voices,

957
00:57:14,931 --> 00:57:18,685
but it managed to ignore the lives
of over a million New Yorkers

958
00:57:18,768 --> 00:57:22,397
who were living alongside
its acclaimed writers and editors.

959
00:57:24,357 --> 00:57:28,027
The magazine had published some pieces
by Langston Hughes

960
00:57:28,111 --> 00:57:30,864
and one story by Ann Petry.

961
00:57:31,364 --> 00:57:32,657
But for the most part,

962
00:57:32,740 --> 00:57:34,784
when Black people appeared
in the magazine,

963
00:57:35,368 --> 00:57:36,786
it was as servants,

964
00:57:36,870 --> 00:57:37,996
porters,

965
00:57:38,079 --> 00:57:40,123
and racist caricatures.

966
00:57:41,708 --> 00:57:43,501
In 1961,

967
00:57:43,585 --> 00:57:46,212
the civil rights movement
was gaining momentum,

968
00:57:46,296 --> 00:57:50,008
and The New Yorker's editor William Shawn
asked a young novelist

969
00:57:50,091 --> 00:57:53,511
named James Baldwin to write
something for the magazine.

970
00:57:54,012 --> 00:57:59,726
The entire weight of the republic
teaches you to despise yourself.

971
00:58:00,727 --> 00:58:03,062
Baldwin handed in
one of the most powerful essays

972
00:58:03,146 --> 00:58:05,190
ever written about race.

973
00:58:05,940 --> 00:58:08,943
The piece was searing
and unflinchingly honest.

974
00:58:10,528 --> 00:58:12,322
"I became," he wrote,

975
00:58:12,405 --> 00:58:14,240
"during my 14th year,

976
00:58:14,324 --> 00:58:16,993
for the first time in my life, afraid."

977
00:58:17,619 --> 00:58:22,290
"Afraid of the evil within me
and afraid of the evil without."

978
00:58:24,250 --> 00:58:27,462
The essay revolved around
his visit with Elijah Muhammad,

979
00:58:27,545 --> 00:58:31,049
leader of the Black nationalist
Nation of Islam.

980
00:58:31,132 --> 00:58:35,720
The Caucasian people,
but their real name is the devil.

981
00:58:38,056 --> 00:58:40,183
Baldwin explored the complicated swirl

982
00:58:40,266 --> 00:58:43,937
of rage and pride and pain
he felt as a Black man,

983
00:58:44,020 --> 00:58:47,774
and he confronted the magazine's
mostly white readers directly.

984
00:58:48,775 --> 00:58:52,570
He wrote, "The brutality with which
Negroes are treated in this country

985
00:58:52,654 --> 00:58:55,281
simply cannot be overstated,

986
00:58:55,365 --> 00:58:58,451
however unwilling
white men may be to hear it."

987
00:59:00,078 --> 00:59:02,455
The response was explosive

988
00:59:02,539 --> 00:59:05,124
and letters of praise poured in,

989
00:59:06,459 --> 00:59:08,253
but one writer expressed disappointment

990
00:59:08,336 --> 00:59:11,673
that the essay ran
alongside a Virginia whiskey ad

991
00:59:11,756 --> 00:59:13,716
showing a racist tableau.

992
00:59:16,302 --> 00:59:20,974
Baldwin's article became the foundation
for his classic book, The Fire Next Time,

993
00:59:21,057 --> 00:59:24,102
and it catapulted him
into the national spotlight,

994
00:59:24,185 --> 00:59:28,690
making him a leading voice
in the fight for racial justice.

995
00:59:33,987 --> 00:59:36,906
"Twenty-two years ago, when I was 14,

996
00:59:36,990 --> 00:59:39,742
I was given James Baldwin's
second collection of essays,

997
00:59:39,826 --> 00:59:41,327
Nobody Knows My Name."

998
00:59:42,453 --> 00:59:45,373
"The dust jacket of the book featured
a photograph of Baldwin

999
00:59:45,456 --> 00:59:50,336
wearing a white t-shirt and standing
in a pile of rubble in a vacant lot."

1000
00:59:51,004 --> 00:59:54,340
"I had never seen an image
of a Black boy like me."

1001
00:59:54,966 --> 00:59:59,262
"Baldwin looked as if he could
have been posing in my old neighborhood."

1002
00:59:59,345 --> 01:00:04,559
"In fact, I began to pretend
that the photograph of Baldwin was of me,

1003
01:00:04,642 --> 01:00:10,231
and that the book's contents were a record
of the life I had longed to lead."

1004
01:00:13,818 --> 01:00:17,905
I was first exposed to The New Yorker
through one of my gay mentors

1005
01:00:17,989 --> 01:00:21,743
who gave me a subscription, and, um…

1006
01:00:23,244 --> 01:00:25,955
it was the thing that I waited for.

1007
01:00:27,332 --> 01:00:32,211
It was a variety of voices
about not only the city I loved,

1008
01:00:32,295 --> 01:00:34,464
but the world
that I didn't know anything about,

1009
01:00:35,048 --> 01:00:36,341
and I was hooked.

1010
01:00:37,884 --> 01:00:41,638
It was just something for me, actually.
It felt like something for me.

1011
01:00:41,721 --> 01:00:42,847
Um, and…

1012
01:00:43,514 --> 01:00:47,101
that experience for a kid is singular.

1013
01:00:49,020 --> 01:00:51,773
To see my name in The New Yorker,

1014
01:00:51,856 --> 01:00:53,232
it's stupefying,

1015
01:00:53,316 --> 01:00:56,152
because you're suddenly looking

1016
01:00:56,235 --> 01:00:59,864
like the language
of all these people that you've loved.

1017
01:00:59,947 --> 01:01:01,824
You know, I was hooked.

1018
01:01:03,368 --> 01:01:06,954
I see about two,
maybe three art shows a week.

1019
01:01:08,915 --> 01:01:10,083
This is the Bowery.

1020
01:01:10,750 --> 01:01:11,751
I love these…

1021
01:01:13,670 --> 01:01:15,129
figures of the children.

1022
01:01:16,964 --> 01:01:19,467
What I love about art and art-making

1023
01:01:19,550 --> 01:01:23,096
is the wildness of spirit
and the unexpected.

1024
01:01:23,179 --> 01:01:27,600
So that requires a kind of optimism,

1025
01:01:27,684 --> 01:01:32,855
um, that, despite world events
and catastrophes,

1026
01:01:32,939 --> 01:01:36,275
that the human spirit will remain.

1027
01:01:49,205 --> 01:01:50,998
Throughout the city,

1028
01:01:51,749 --> 01:01:53,334
there's beauty…

1029
01:01:54,919 --> 01:01:57,213
if you're paying attention
and really looking.

1030
01:02:13,980 --> 01:02:15,815
That's a very beautiful Sempé.

1031
01:02:15,898 --> 01:02:16,774
It's signed.

1032
01:02:17,483 --> 01:02:20,945
To celebrate
the 100 years of the magazine,

1033
01:02:21,028 --> 01:02:24,574
we're installing the original art

1034
01:02:24,657 --> 01:02:28,077
for over 100 covers

1035
01:02:28,161 --> 01:02:32,373
to show how the artists themselves

1036
01:02:32,457 --> 01:02:35,877
catalyze what's in the air,

1037
01:02:35,960 --> 01:02:40,506
or, I suppose, capture
the moments when they happen.

1038
01:02:40,590 --> 01:02:44,343
So this is Kadir Nelson,
and it's an oil painting.

1039
01:02:44,427 --> 01:02:48,055
And he did this during COVID.

1040
01:02:50,057 --> 01:02:51,601
The best images,

1041
01:02:51,684 --> 01:02:55,730
they're a departure point for you,
the reader's emotion.

1042
01:02:55,813 --> 01:02:58,357
And that happened with the 9/11 print.

1043
01:03:02,904 --> 01:03:05,490
I was with my husband,

1044
01:03:05,573 --> 01:03:08,201
and we were actually on our way to vote.

1045
01:03:08,951 --> 01:03:11,120
And as soon as we stepped out,

1046
01:03:11,204 --> 01:03:13,873
we saw people running past us

1047
01:03:13,956 --> 01:03:17,543
that were covered in white ash.

1048
01:03:18,211 --> 01:03:21,756
And then we saw
the second tower just fall,

1049
01:03:21,839 --> 01:03:24,175
like, right in front of our eyes.

1050
01:03:26,177 --> 01:03:31,307
My assistant was like,
"Oh, Françoise, the office called."

1051
01:03:31,390 --> 01:03:34,644
"David Remnick wants to talk to you
about a new cover."

1052
01:03:35,478 --> 01:03:36,938
I was talking to another mother.

1053
01:03:37,021 --> 01:03:42,360
I said, "I have to go to the office
to find a magazine cover."

1054
01:03:42,443 --> 01:03:46,322
And Elise, my friend, also a mother,

1055
01:03:46,989 --> 01:03:51,285
immediate reaction was like,
"A cover? A cover for a magazine?"

1056
01:03:51,369 --> 01:03:55,623
"I'll tell you what to do for a cover.
Do nothing! Do no cover."

1057
01:03:56,123 --> 01:03:58,459
And that actually resonated with me.

1058
01:04:03,673 --> 01:04:07,385
I happen to be married
to Art Spiegelman, the artist,

1059
01:04:07,468 --> 01:04:10,638
and he said,
"You should do black on black."

1060
01:04:10,721 --> 01:04:14,976
"You should do the towers black
on a black background."

1061
01:04:15,059 --> 01:04:17,687
And I got to the office,

1062
01:04:17,770 --> 01:04:19,939
sat at my computer, drew it,

1063
01:04:20,022 --> 01:04:23,734
and as soon as I saw it,
I realized, like, that is the answer.

1064
01:04:25,069 --> 01:04:30,032
To signify what was lost
by showing the absence of it.

1065
01:04:44,463 --> 01:04:45,965
For the anniversary cover,

1066
01:04:46,048 --> 01:04:49,302
we've come up with an idea
that I think might work.

1067
01:04:50,177 --> 01:04:54,765
The only way to show you this
is to actually do it,

1068
01:04:55,391 --> 01:04:57,476
um, with dummies. So--

1069
01:04:57,560 --> 01:05:01,272
-That's why I smell the rubber cement.
-Exactly. I know you told me--

1070
01:05:01,355 --> 01:05:03,691
Kids in my school
used to get high on this stuff.

1071
01:05:03,774 --> 01:05:05,234
So what I'm suggesting to you--

1072
01:05:05,318 --> 01:05:07,028
Is not to get high on rubber cement.

1073
01:05:07,612 --> 01:05:11,073
We're going to use
the original Eustace on the outside,

1074
01:05:11,157 --> 01:05:14,368
and then have a variation on it,

1075
01:05:14,452 --> 01:05:17,204
and then have another variation on it.

1076
01:05:17,788 --> 01:05:21,918
I mean, it's more complicated
in terms of production, but…

1077
01:05:22,001 --> 01:05:24,462
-But that's not my problem, it's yours.
-Exactly.

1078
01:05:24,545 --> 01:05:25,588
Sold. Let's do that.

1079
01:05:25,671 --> 01:05:27,006
-Yes!
-I think that's more--

1080
01:05:27,089 --> 01:05:29,425
Why are you so, like…? Yeah, what a setup.

1081
01:05:29,508 --> 01:05:31,510
Um…

1082
01:05:32,345 --> 01:05:33,554
This is kind of fun.

1083
01:05:33,638 --> 01:05:36,140
-Isn't it nice?
-Yeah, it's not what I expected.

1084
01:05:46,275 --> 01:05:49,904
Some people think
that celebrity journalism is frivolous.

1085
01:05:49,987 --> 01:05:52,448
I mean, it's not war reporting.

1086
01:05:52,531 --> 01:05:55,576
But for me, how culture is made,

1087
01:05:55,660 --> 01:05:58,037
the myths that we want to tell
about ourselves,

1088
01:05:58,120 --> 01:06:00,289
how artists strive to get where they are,

1089
01:06:01,332 --> 01:06:04,293
those are stories
that are universal to me and interesting.

1090
01:06:04,377 --> 01:06:06,796
I love thinking deeply about those things.

1091
01:06:07,338 --> 01:06:08,172
Okay.

1092
01:06:08,714 --> 01:06:11,258
Some people say
The New Yorker created "the profile,"

1093
01:06:11,342 --> 01:06:14,261
that they actually came up
with the word "profile" to describe

1094
01:06:14,345 --> 01:06:16,389
this very specific kind of reporting,

1095
01:06:16,472 --> 01:06:19,100
where it's like one-on-one
with journalist and subject,

1096
01:06:19,183 --> 01:06:22,311
creating a mini-documentary
of their time together on the page.

1097
01:06:24,188 --> 01:06:26,565
I remember David sending me a text

1098
01:06:26,649 --> 01:06:29,443
that just said something
like, "How about Carol Burnett?"

1099
01:06:29,527 --> 01:06:33,781
Which, you know, the only answer to that
is yes, exclamation point.

1100
01:06:33,864 --> 01:06:37,159
She's certainly one of the funniest women
who ever came down the pike.

1101
01:06:37,243 --> 01:06:39,870
Will you welcome, please,
the hilarious Carol Burnett?

1102
01:06:42,289 --> 01:06:45,626
Carol Burnett, first of all, icon.

1103
01:06:45,710 --> 01:06:48,671
You're fun. What do you do
when you want to let your hair down?

1104
01:06:48,754 --> 01:06:50,548
-Assuming it is your hair.
-I take it off.

1105
01:06:51,674 --> 01:06:53,384
I am interested in women in comedy,

1106
01:06:53,467 --> 01:06:54,760
women in entertainment,

1107
01:06:54,844 --> 01:06:57,680
women who forge territory
that nobody has ever forged before.

1108
01:06:57,763 --> 01:06:59,306
Carol is all of those things.

1109
01:07:00,391 --> 01:07:02,518
-So nice to see you.
-It's good to see you.

1110
01:07:02,601 --> 01:07:04,562
So, Carol, I'm going to turn this on.

1111
01:07:04,645 --> 01:07:05,896
So you're on the record now.

1112
01:07:05,980 --> 01:07:08,357
-Okay.
-All right.

1113
01:07:08,441 --> 01:07:09,442
Um…

1114
01:07:09,525 --> 01:07:10,985
-We're at Lucky's.
-Yeah.

1115
01:07:11,068 --> 01:07:13,738
-How often do you come here?
-Once a week.

1116
01:07:13,821 --> 01:07:16,240
When you start writing a profile,
you go back and read

1117
01:07:16,323 --> 01:07:18,576
pretty much every interview
they've ever done.

1118
01:07:18,659 --> 01:07:22,038
Sometimes you'll read their memoirs.
And in so doing,

1119
01:07:22,121 --> 01:07:25,791
you find that there are certain anecdotes
and quotes that they've repeated

1120
01:07:25,875 --> 01:07:27,251
thousands and thousands of times.

1121
01:07:27,918 --> 01:07:32,048
And so I always try to find
follow-up questions to those exact things.

1122
01:07:32,131 --> 01:07:34,508
Something to push people
out of their comfort zones,

1123
01:07:34,592 --> 01:07:35,926
out of their grooves.

1124
01:07:36,010 --> 01:07:37,803
Did you ever go see an analyst?

1125
01:07:38,387 --> 01:07:39,680
No.

1126
01:07:39,764 --> 01:07:43,768
-Only once when my daughter was on drugs.
-Mm.

1127
01:07:43,851 --> 01:07:44,727
Yeah.

1128
01:07:44,810 --> 01:07:47,313
You can't think about
if they'll love it. You never can.

1129
01:07:48,064 --> 01:07:50,274
My mentors at the magazine
have always taught me,

1130
01:07:50,357 --> 01:07:54,487
"If you think they're going to love it,
then you're barking up the wrong tree."

1131
01:07:54,570 --> 01:07:57,448
Um, you hope that they find it accurate.

1132
01:07:57,531 --> 01:07:59,742
-Being a woman…
-Mm-hm.

1133
01:08:00,868 --> 01:08:04,080
I couldn't be Jackie Gleason,
I couldn't be Sid Caesar.

1134
01:08:04,163 --> 01:08:06,707
They would say, "This stinks. Fix it."

1135
01:08:06,791 --> 01:08:09,210
I would go, "Could you guys
come down and help me?"

1136
01:08:09,293 --> 01:08:11,253
"I'm not really doing this right."

1137
01:08:11,796 --> 01:08:12,630
Your wiles.

1138
01:08:12,713 --> 01:08:15,549
It was a way not to get them
to call me a bitch.

1139
01:08:15,633 --> 01:08:18,886
What would've been the worst to happen
if people called you a bitch, Carol?

1140
01:08:18,969 --> 01:08:19,845
Would have just…

1141
01:08:19,929 --> 01:08:23,224
-Well, I didn't want that reputation.
-Hm.

1142
01:08:23,307 --> 01:08:25,559
So much about
being an interviewer is listening.

1143
01:08:25,643 --> 01:08:27,895
You have to listen
for the words under the words.

1144
01:08:27,978 --> 01:08:30,356
What are they really trying to say,
what are they thinking?

1145
01:08:30,439 --> 01:08:31,857
What's preoccupying them?

1146
01:08:32,775 --> 01:08:35,736
Did you experience your mother
as being really witty and smart?

1147
01:08:35,820 --> 01:08:38,030
-She's very smart, very witty…
-Mm.

1148
01:08:38,114 --> 01:08:40,783
-And very sad.
-Mm.

1149
01:08:40,866 --> 01:08:45,246
She had all these dreams and, uh…

1150
01:08:46,455 --> 01:08:48,415
none of them really came true.

1151
01:08:50,584 --> 01:08:53,879
I find the writing process to be
the most difficult part of the process,

1152
01:08:53,963 --> 01:08:55,005
for sure.

1153
01:08:55,089 --> 01:08:58,926
I personally don't have any friends
who are writers who sit there

1154
01:08:59,009 --> 01:09:01,804
every minute of the day,
and they're like, "I love this!"

1155
01:09:01,887 --> 01:09:03,889
"I'm having the time of my life."

1156
01:09:04,849 --> 01:09:08,519
I am really terrified
that this looks like I'm Carrie Bradshaw.

1157
01:09:08,602 --> 01:09:11,564
Like, "Couldn't help but wonder,

1158
01:09:11,647 --> 01:09:15,067
was Carol Burnett
the funniest woman ever born?"

1159
01:09:15,734 --> 01:09:18,404
I really need a cigarette
if I'm gonna do the authentic thing.

1160
01:09:19,071 --> 01:09:21,574
I mean, Carrie carries
around The New Yorker.

1161
01:09:22,408 --> 01:09:24,785
In one of the movies,
her book gets a bad review.

1162
01:09:25,661 --> 01:09:29,290
"Until the talented Bradshaw
is better able to grasp

1163
01:09:29,373 --> 01:09:31,333
the complexities of married life,

1164
01:09:31,917 --> 01:09:37,256
she would be better advised
to explore the vow of silence."

1165
01:09:37,339 --> 01:09:40,509
Wow, that's gotta… That had to sting.

1166
01:09:43,179 --> 01:09:48,475
On Mad Men, we had a lot
of original magazines from the time.

1167
01:09:48,559 --> 01:09:50,603
We had Life magazine, Time magazine,

1168
01:09:50,686 --> 01:09:53,898
we had Newsweek, and The New Yorker.

1169
01:09:53,981 --> 01:09:57,318
And that was the glory days
of magazines, for sure.

1170
01:09:58,027 --> 01:10:01,155
The physical act of holding
and carting magazines around

1171
01:10:01,238 --> 01:10:03,908
in your tote bag
or your backpack is just gone.

1172
01:10:03,991 --> 01:10:06,702
And I don't see as many people
reading on the train.

1173
01:10:06,785 --> 01:10:08,370
I just see people on their phones.

1174
01:10:08,454 --> 01:10:11,415
Maybe they're reading The New Yorker,
but it's pretty upsetting.

1175
01:10:11,498 --> 01:10:15,628
Again, the wonder of magazines,
which is a bit lost in the digital era,

1176
01:10:15,711 --> 01:10:19,423
with the kind of doomscrolling now,
you don't have the kind of…

1177
01:10:20,049 --> 01:10:23,636
physical beginning and end of something.

1178
01:10:23,719 --> 01:10:25,596
With doomscrolling, there is no end.

1179
01:10:25,679 --> 01:10:29,099
I didn't invent the Internet.
If I did, it would have an end.

1180
01:10:38,984 --> 01:10:42,238
This is a very exciting event
at Film Forum.

1181
01:10:42,321 --> 01:10:44,240
To celebrate The New Yorker's centenary,

1182
01:10:44,323 --> 01:10:46,784
they're going to be putting
on a program of movies

1183
01:10:46,867 --> 01:10:49,036
that have some relation to The New Yorker.

1184
01:10:50,204 --> 01:10:54,583
The series includes Brokeback Mountain,
which was a short story in The New Yorker.

1185
01:10:55,084 --> 01:10:59,380
Addams Family Values is, of course,
based on the cartoons by Charles Addams.

1186
01:11:00,005 --> 01:11:04,051
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
is based on a story by Milan Kundera.

1187
01:11:05,219 --> 01:11:09,223
Adaptation, in which New Yorker writer
Susan Orlean is a character.

1188
01:11:11,141 --> 01:11:15,938
Another film connected to The New Yorker
is Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch,

1189
01:11:16,021 --> 01:11:21,819
in which actual New Yorker writers
are transformed into fictional characters.

1190
01:11:21,902 --> 01:11:25,364
Bill Murray's character plays
a version of Harold Ross,

1191
01:11:25,447 --> 01:11:27,283
the founding editor of The New Yorker.

1192
01:11:28,534 --> 01:11:31,287
A message from the foreman.
One hour to press.

1193
01:11:32,162 --> 01:11:33,038
You're fired.

1194
01:11:34,248 --> 01:11:36,292
And tonight,
they're showing In Cold Blood,

1195
01:11:36,375 --> 01:11:38,794
based on Truman Capote's famous work.

1196
01:11:39,336 --> 01:11:45,634
It is very hard to imagine the impact
that Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" had

1197
01:11:45,718 --> 01:11:49,430
on The New Yorker
and on literary life in America.

1198
01:11:50,014 --> 01:11:54,268
Truman Capote invented true crime writing
at the very highest level.

1199
01:11:56,437 --> 01:11:58,105
In 1965,

1200
01:11:58,188 --> 01:12:01,483
The New Yorker published
a blockbuster four-part series

1201
01:12:01,567 --> 01:12:04,069
that became a best-selling book
and a hit movie.

1202
01:12:08,449 --> 01:12:10,743
In Cold Blood.

1203
01:12:12,036 --> 01:12:14,204
It would be
one of the most celebrated pieces

1204
01:12:14,288 --> 01:12:16,665
ever published by the magazine.

1205
01:12:16,749 --> 01:12:19,001
But also one of the most controversial.

1206
01:12:20,127 --> 01:12:22,129
The author, Truman Capote,

1207
01:12:22,212 --> 01:12:25,007
had been hired by The New Yorker
when he was 17

1208
01:12:25,090 --> 01:12:27,426
to fetch coffee and run errands.

1209
01:12:28,302 --> 01:12:33,223
He soon became known around the office
for his charming gossip and bad behavior.

1210
01:12:33,849 --> 01:12:37,061
He was supposedly fired
for posing as a staff writer

1211
01:12:37,144 --> 01:12:39,772
and insulting poet Robert Frost.

1212
01:12:40,814 --> 01:12:44,401
But editor William Shawn
was impressed by his writing.

1213
01:12:44,485 --> 01:12:47,154
So years later,
when Capote pitched a story

1214
01:12:47,237 --> 01:12:50,407
about a gruesome murder
in a Kansas farmhouse,

1215
01:12:50,491 --> 01:12:52,076
Shawn got behind it.

1216
01:12:52,785 --> 01:12:55,496
This new adventure of mine,
this experiment,

1217
01:12:55,579 --> 01:12:58,582
is what I call the non-fiction novel.

1218
01:12:58,665 --> 01:13:01,251
A non-fiction novel being a genre

1219
01:13:01,335 --> 01:13:04,338
brought about by the synthesis

1220
01:13:04,421 --> 01:13:07,925
of journalism with a fictional technique.

1221
01:13:08,592 --> 01:13:11,845
Capote claimed that
he was combining the rigor of journalism

1222
01:13:11,929 --> 01:13:14,223
with the narrative style of fiction,

1223
01:13:14,306 --> 01:13:18,352
similar to what John Hersey had done
with Hiroshima years before.

1224
01:13:19,061 --> 01:13:21,772
But soon after "In Cold Blood"
was published,

1225
01:13:21,855 --> 01:13:25,526
some critics began
questioning Capote's reporting.

1226
01:13:25,609 --> 01:13:29,238
One local critic said,
"Capote has always been a fiction writer."

1227
01:13:29,321 --> 01:13:31,573
"He is still a fiction writer."

1228
01:13:31,657 --> 01:13:34,618
They doubted he could
have remembered the long conversations

1229
01:13:34,701 --> 01:13:38,414
he quoted word for word
without notes or recordings.

1230
01:13:39,206 --> 01:13:44,670
I have the auditory version
of a photographic memory.

1231
01:13:45,796 --> 01:13:48,090
William Shawn had flagged his own concerns

1232
01:13:48,173 --> 01:13:50,050
during the editing process.

1233
01:13:50,801 --> 01:13:53,762
Next to a passage
describing a private conversation

1234
01:13:53,846 --> 01:13:56,390
between two characters
who would later be killed,

1235
01:13:56,473 --> 01:13:59,685
Shawn had scrawled in pencil, "How know?"

1236
01:13:59,768 --> 01:14:02,563
"No witnesses? General problem."

1237
01:14:03,897 --> 01:14:06,608
Sir.

1238
01:14:06,692 --> 01:14:09,778
Capote faced questions
about his work for decades.

1239
01:14:10,821 --> 01:14:13,407
The really central question is,

1240
01:14:13,490 --> 01:14:16,410
are we supposed to read these things
as fiction or not?

1241
01:14:16,493 --> 01:14:19,079
You seem to have devised
a way to have it both ways now,

1242
01:14:19,163 --> 01:14:21,707
so that nobody really knows
how to have you, so to speak.

1243
01:14:21,790 --> 01:14:26,170
Are you meaning
that I'm taking something factual

1244
01:14:26,253 --> 01:14:27,921
and then fictionalizing it?

1245
01:14:28,005 --> 01:14:29,923
Because that's not what I'm doing at all.

1246
01:14:30,007 --> 01:14:33,093
-Hm.
-I don't fictionalize it in the least.

1247
01:14:34,219 --> 01:14:38,182
Capote eventually did acknowledge
he invented the final scene,

1248
01:14:38,265 --> 01:14:40,642
a graveyard conversation
between a detective

1249
01:14:40,726 --> 01:14:42,895
and the murdered girl's best friend.

1250
01:14:43,979 --> 01:14:47,441
Shawn later said
he regretted publishing "In Cold Blood,"

1251
01:14:47,983 --> 01:14:49,693
and over the next decades,

1252
01:14:49,776 --> 01:14:52,696
the magazine ramped up
its fact-checking process

1253
01:14:52,779 --> 01:14:56,158
to try to prevent this sort of thing
from happening again.

1254
01:15:01,455 --> 01:15:05,792
Okay. And so the morning
of the execution date,

1255
01:15:05,876 --> 01:15:08,378
two of you would be placed
in a holding cell

1256
01:15:08,462 --> 01:15:10,631
near the death chamber. Is that right?

1257
01:15:10,714 --> 01:15:15,886
We say you invited Jon Lee
over for a cup of tea.

1258
01:15:15,969 --> 01:15:18,263
Was it coffee or tea?

1259
01:15:18,347 --> 01:15:19,681
We have 29 people

1260
01:15:19,765 --> 01:15:22,184
working in the fact-checking department,
including me.

1261
01:15:22,267 --> 01:15:24,937
We're not just here
to get the names and dates right,

1262
01:15:25,020 --> 01:15:27,397
though that stuff is incredibly important.

1263
01:15:27,481 --> 01:15:29,149
We're here as a stand-in for the reader.

1264
01:15:30,317 --> 01:15:34,196
We are always thinking
about the context behind a story.

1265
01:15:34,279 --> 01:15:35,989
Erica did not have any teeth,

1266
01:15:36,073 --> 01:15:39,201
I'm assuming because of just dental issues
in the jail.

1267
01:15:39,284 --> 01:15:40,118
Uh-huh.

1268
01:15:40,202 --> 01:15:41,828
Everything might be right,

1269
01:15:41,912 --> 01:15:44,081
but it might just feel unfair.

1270
01:15:45,415 --> 01:15:47,292
What you do is you print out the piece,

1271
01:15:47,376 --> 01:15:50,796
and you would underline
everything that could be a fact.

1272
01:15:51,380 --> 01:15:53,215
It ends up being almost every word.

1273
01:15:53,298 --> 01:15:57,803
I guess sometimes the verbs,
like "is," might not be checkable.

1274
01:15:57,886 --> 01:16:00,931
But then you're like,
"Oh, is this person still alive?"

1275
01:16:01,014 --> 01:16:02,724
Then it might have to be "was."

1276
01:16:03,308 --> 01:16:06,436
And then you'll reach out
to the subjects and the sources.

1277
01:16:06,520 --> 01:16:08,021
I wanna make sure we have right

1278
01:16:08,105 --> 01:16:10,440
the way you answer the phone
when someone calls.

1279
01:16:10,524 --> 01:16:11,525
I have, you would say,

1280
01:16:11,608 --> 01:16:14,236
"Good afternoon, Sparks Steakhouse.
How can I help you?"

1281
01:16:14,319 --> 01:16:15,445
Does that sound right?

1282
01:16:15,946 --> 01:16:18,240
We fact-check everything
published in the magazine.

1283
01:16:18,323 --> 01:16:21,410
Covers, cartoons, poems, fiction.

1284
01:16:21,493 --> 01:16:24,162
Yes, cartoons get fact-checked.

1285
01:16:24,246 --> 01:16:27,416
We had a cartoon that had a penguin,

1286
01:16:27,499 --> 01:16:32,963
and the caption was something like,
"We prefer the term Arctic-Americans."

1287
01:16:33,046 --> 01:16:35,048
Some people wrote in, fairly,

1288
01:16:35,132 --> 01:16:38,760
and said, "There are no penguins
in the Arctic, they're in the Antarctic."

1289
01:16:38,844 --> 01:16:41,847
It kind of ruins the joke
if there are no penguins in the Arctic.

1290
01:16:43,181 --> 01:16:44,850
One cover that, to my great shame,

1291
01:16:44,933 --> 01:16:46,768
I let an error slip through,

1292
01:16:46,852 --> 01:16:49,563
it's an image of a hot dog vendor
lying on a beach.

1293
01:16:49,646 --> 01:16:51,440
I was like, "Okay, I'll check and see

1294
01:16:51,523 --> 01:16:53,859
whether the shadow
of his umbrella is plausible."

1295
01:16:53,942 --> 01:16:56,737
"Yes, the shadow is plausible,
and I have exerted

1296
01:16:56,820 --> 01:16:59,197
all of my fact-checking ability
on this cover."

1297
01:16:59,281 --> 01:17:01,992
Cleared. Nothing wrong with it.
We publish it.

1298
01:17:02,075 --> 01:17:03,619
The guy's got two right feet.

1299
01:17:03,702 --> 01:17:07,080
Worse than two left feet because we could
have made a joke about that.

1300
01:17:07,164 --> 01:17:08,123
Just didn't notice.

1301
01:17:09,750 --> 01:17:10,751
Terrible!

1302
01:17:10,834 --> 01:17:13,420
People love to catch the fact-checkers.

1303
01:17:14,004 --> 01:17:17,591
What we will hear very often
is the same phrase,

1304
01:17:17,674 --> 01:17:21,678
is, "I never thought the New Yorker's
vaunted fact-checking department

1305
01:17:21,762 --> 01:17:23,347
would stoop this low."

1306
01:17:23,430 --> 01:17:26,642
I don't think I've ever seen
that adjective used anywhere else,

1307
01:17:26,725 --> 01:17:29,269
other than in a letter
complaining about an error.

1308
01:17:29,353 --> 01:17:31,647
Like, who uses the word "vaunted"?

1309
01:17:32,939 --> 01:17:36,568
Mouaz told Jon Lee
that an agent of the regime

1310
01:17:36,652 --> 01:17:39,363
had killed his family's pigeons.

1311
01:17:39,446 --> 01:17:41,615
The job definitely requires a thick skin.

1312
01:17:41,698 --> 01:17:45,452
You have to be able to deal with people
being unhappy with you.

1313
01:17:45,535 --> 01:17:48,580
And they've got good reason
to be unhappy, often.

1314
01:17:48,664 --> 01:17:51,708
They're about to be represented,
sometimes in an unfavorable light,

1315
01:17:51,792 --> 01:17:52,959
in a national magazine.

1316
01:17:53,043 --> 01:17:57,339
You said that if people come in
and talk shit about Trump to you,

1317
01:17:57,422 --> 01:18:01,510
you pull up a document that you've made
that goes through times when he's lied.

1318
01:18:01,593 --> 01:18:02,803
Is that right?

1319
01:18:02,886 --> 01:18:05,972
Certainly,
it's a bewildering time politically.

1320
01:18:06,056 --> 01:18:12,062
There's been a loosening of the idea
that politicians should tell the truth.

1321
01:18:12,145 --> 01:18:15,482
And that's made us redouble our commitment
to what we do.

1322
01:18:16,066 --> 01:18:18,568
Personally, I find it
incredibly galvanizing.

1323
01:18:18,652 --> 01:18:24,032
It feels like the best antidote
to the torrent of outrageous lying.

1324
01:18:24,116 --> 01:18:25,200
You know?

1325
01:18:25,283 --> 01:18:30,247
What better antidote than that
to really take care,

1326
01:18:30,330 --> 01:18:33,333
to pay attention,
and get our facts correct?

1327
01:18:35,794 --> 01:18:37,546
-Hello.
-Hey, how are you?

1328
01:18:37,629 --> 01:18:39,131
-How are you?
-What's going on?

1329
01:18:39,214 --> 01:18:41,133
-It's great to see you.
-Good to see you.

1330
01:18:41,216 --> 01:18:43,760
I stumbled into a relationship
with The New Yorker

1331
01:18:43,844 --> 01:18:46,346
as I was investigating Harvey Weinstein,

1332
01:18:46,430 --> 01:18:49,725
and had come to believe
that Weinstein was a serial predator,

1333
01:18:49,808 --> 01:18:52,227
but hadn't been able to get this published

1334
01:18:52,310 --> 01:18:55,939
because a lot of media outlets
had been intimidated.

1335
01:18:56,022 --> 01:19:00,610
But David saw my work and said,
"Yeah, you can finish the reporting here."

1336
01:19:01,445 --> 01:19:03,572
So I think we've got a logical slate.

1337
01:19:03,655 --> 01:19:06,491
We're going to do
these little updates on spyware.

1338
01:19:06,575 --> 01:19:08,952
Then I'm basically all Elon.

1339
01:19:09,035 --> 01:19:11,455
Are people near Elon Musk leaky?

1340
01:19:12,581 --> 01:19:15,667
Well, one of the interesting things
we're going to have to contend with

1341
01:19:15,751 --> 01:19:19,421
is the circle of people
who were leaky last time

1342
01:19:19,504 --> 01:19:21,506
are now going to be less leaky.

1343
01:19:21,590 --> 01:19:24,259
For me, my beat is power.

1344
01:19:24,342 --> 01:19:26,428
And right now,

1345
01:19:26,511 --> 01:19:31,933
vast political forces are handing power
over to tech billionaires.

1346
01:19:32,017 --> 01:19:35,979
Elon Musk… is the richest person
who ever lived,

1347
01:19:36,062 --> 01:19:39,191
and now he's going to be in charge
of, wait for it, efficiency?

1348
01:19:39,274 --> 01:19:40,108
Yeah.

1349
01:19:40,734 --> 01:19:42,944
There aren't that many places that do

1350
01:19:43,028 --> 01:19:48,158
this kind of super-labor intensive,
super-confronting journalism.

1351
01:19:48,658 --> 01:19:50,827
I mean, they're not activists,

1352
01:19:50,911 --> 01:19:54,372
but they are fearless
when the facts support it.

1353
01:19:55,499 --> 01:19:59,085
Hello there, it's Ronan.
Thank you so much for getting back to me.

1354
01:19:59,169 --> 01:20:01,922
I'm working on this follow-up
on Musk, and…

1355
01:20:02,005 --> 01:20:05,383
Right now,
in the current political environment,

1356
01:20:05,467 --> 01:20:09,638
there's a lack of respect
for the independence of the press.

1357
01:20:09,721 --> 01:20:15,769
And a willingness
to attack reporters for reporting.

1358
01:20:15,852 --> 01:20:18,772
That all contributes
to a really frightening atmosphere

1359
01:20:18,855 --> 01:20:21,191
for reporters and for sources.

1360
01:20:21,274 --> 01:20:24,945
So I would really appreciate
what you just discussed,

1361
01:20:25,028 --> 01:20:28,031
if you're game to send
some of those documents and thoughts,

1362
01:20:28,114 --> 01:20:29,241
off-the-record.

1363
01:20:29,324 --> 01:20:32,577
Being a source
in a high-stakes investigative story

1364
01:20:32,661 --> 01:20:37,165
is a difficult, serious thing
because it can be very dangerous.

1365
01:20:37,249 --> 01:20:40,544
I've had stories
where I have communicated with a source

1366
01:20:40,627 --> 01:20:44,047
only on a burner phone
that I purchased with cash

1367
01:20:44,130 --> 01:20:47,592
at an anonymous mall
far from where I live.

1368
01:20:47,676 --> 01:20:50,804
But the moment of getting
a big break in a story,

1369
01:20:50,887 --> 01:20:56,560
it's this… chef's kiss moment
that every reporter dreams of.

1370
01:20:56,643 --> 01:20:59,187
But also it's freighted with stress

1371
01:20:59,271 --> 01:21:03,733
because it does up the ante
for the need to get the story right.

1372
01:21:03,817 --> 01:21:06,236
Thanks again for this. I'll be in touch.

1373
01:21:06,319 --> 01:21:07,612
Okay, bye.

1374
01:21:08,113 --> 01:21:12,284
It is a brutal time
for investigative journalism.

1375
01:21:12,367 --> 01:21:18,790
But I still believe fiercely
in the power of information

1376
01:21:18,874 --> 01:21:23,545
because I think informing people
is the one hope we have.

1377
01:21:27,215 --> 01:21:30,385
I pride myself on trying to read,
go cover to cover,

1378
01:21:30,468 --> 01:21:35,307
because my goal is to learn
about stuff I didn't already know.

1379
01:21:35,390 --> 01:21:38,101
So it's like a very completist way of--

1380
01:21:38,184 --> 01:21:43,440
Yes, it's a completist way,
but I can never complete it.

1381
01:21:43,523 --> 01:21:47,152
The New Yorker is a tough…
You know, it's for smart people.

1382
01:21:47,235 --> 01:21:50,530
It's a lot of words. I don't know
if you've heard my thoughts on reading.

1383
01:21:50,614 --> 01:21:52,032
I like the idea of reading.

1384
01:21:52,115 --> 01:21:53,825
I even buy books.

1385
01:21:53,909 --> 01:21:56,745
But these books are the most words.

1386
01:21:56,828 --> 01:21:58,330
And they don't let up!

1387
01:21:58,413 --> 01:22:00,874
Every page, just more words.

1388
01:22:02,667 --> 01:22:05,420
How about you put
some blank pages in there?

1389
01:22:05,503 --> 01:22:08,673
Why don't you let me get
my head above water for two seconds?

1390
01:22:20,602 --> 01:22:23,271
As The New Yorker
entered the 1980s,

1391
01:22:23,355 --> 01:22:25,523
things were ripe for change.

1392
01:22:26,274 --> 01:22:29,277
William Shawn,
who'd been the editor for 30 years,

1393
01:22:29,361 --> 01:22:31,655
was now well into his seventies.

1394
01:22:31,738 --> 01:22:34,658
And people joked
about the magazine's stodgy style

1395
01:22:34,741 --> 01:22:39,329
and its 20,000-word articles
on things like the history of rice.

1396
01:22:40,372 --> 01:22:42,958
Readers were aging, sales were declining.

1397
01:22:43,041 --> 01:22:47,379
And in 1985, SI Newhouse swooped in.

1398
01:22:47,462 --> 01:22:50,256
It's official. A man named Newhouse
now owns The New Yorker.

1399
01:22:50,340 --> 01:22:52,759
He paid $168 million for it.

1400
01:22:52,842 --> 01:22:55,679
The directors of the highbrow magazine
have agreed to sell out

1401
01:22:55,762 --> 01:22:57,597
to S.I. Newhouse Jr.,

1402
01:22:57,681 --> 01:23:01,559
whose communications empire includes
29 newspapers, Parade magazine,

1403
01:23:01,643 --> 01:23:02,852
and Random House.

1404
01:23:03,728 --> 01:23:07,565
Twenty months later,
Newhouse shocked the literary world

1405
01:23:07,649 --> 01:23:09,651
by pushing out William Shawn.

1406
01:23:11,361 --> 01:23:15,699
And in 1992, he fired Shawn's replacement,
Robert Gottlieb,

1407
01:23:15,782 --> 01:23:18,493
and brought in a controversial new leader,

1408
01:23:18,576 --> 01:23:23,957
the brash, British, 38-year-old editor
of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown.

1409
01:23:24,708 --> 01:23:26,543
The editor of this magazine,

1410
01:23:27,377 --> 01:23:28,795
Vanity Fair,

1411
01:23:29,713 --> 01:23:32,966
has just been named
the editor of this magazine,

1412
01:23:33,925 --> 01:23:35,176
The New Yorker.

1413
01:23:35,885 --> 01:23:37,929
Critics worried
she would turn the magazine

1414
01:23:38,013 --> 01:23:40,682
into just another glossy tabloid.

1415
01:23:40,765 --> 01:23:42,726
I say to all those people who are worried

1416
01:23:42,809 --> 01:23:45,603
that The New Yorker
will lose its standards,

1417
01:23:45,687 --> 01:23:48,565
wait and see,
because you don't know me yet,

1418
01:23:48,648 --> 01:23:51,109
and you don't know
my commitment to quality, perhaps,

1419
01:23:51,192 --> 01:23:54,070
but you will find
The New Yorker only gets better.

1420
01:23:56,531 --> 01:23:58,825
The magazine threw flashy parties

1421
01:23:58,908 --> 01:24:02,454
and published issues
dedicated to movies and fashion.

1422
01:24:03,913 --> 01:24:06,166
They also broke serious news,

1423
01:24:06,249 --> 01:24:09,627
turning over an entire issue
to a harrowing exposé,

1424
01:24:09,711 --> 01:24:13,214
a massacre in El Salvador
by US-trained troops.

1425
01:24:14,299 --> 01:24:18,136
Brown said, "Our job is
to make the sexy serious,

1426
01:24:18,219 --> 01:24:20,138
and the serious sexy."

1427
01:24:20,764 --> 01:24:23,892
She recruited a new crop
of young journalists,

1428
01:24:23,975 --> 01:24:25,560
including Malcolm Gladwell,

1429
01:24:25,643 --> 01:24:26,978
Jane Mayer,

1430
01:24:27,062 --> 01:24:28,521
Hilton Als,

1431
01:24:28,605 --> 01:24:30,607
and a young writer
from The Washington Post

1432
01:24:30,690 --> 01:24:32,192
named David Remnick.

1433
01:24:33,735 --> 01:24:36,905
She changed the look
of the magazine as well.

1434
01:24:36,988 --> 01:24:39,574
For the first time,
they began running photographs

1435
01:24:39,657 --> 01:24:42,869
and hired one
of the world's most famous photographers,

1436
01:24:42,952 --> 01:24:45,246
Richard Avedon, onto the staff.

1437
01:24:46,748 --> 01:24:49,876
She made the covers edgier and urgent,

1438
01:24:49,959 --> 01:24:52,087
and she welcomed controversy.

1439
01:24:56,382 --> 01:24:58,384
In February 1994,

1440
01:24:58,468 --> 01:25:00,929
Brown committed an act of blasphemy,

1441
01:25:01,012 --> 01:25:02,764
replacing Eustace Tilley,

1442
01:25:02,847 --> 01:25:05,475
who'd been on the cover
of every anniversary issue

1443
01:25:05,558 --> 01:25:07,560
for nearly 70 years,

1444
01:25:07,644 --> 01:25:11,314
with a modern twist, drawn by R. Crumb.

1445
01:25:12,857 --> 01:25:14,526
Traditionalists were appalled,

1446
01:25:14,609 --> 01:25:17,570
but Brown insisted
she was just opening a window

1447
01:25:17,654 --> 01:25:21,032
and letting fresh air
into a stuffy institution.

1448
01:25:25,286 --> 01:25:26,329
This is Sorel.

1449
01:25:26,412 --> 01:25:28,915
It says, "For Tina,
who gave life to Eustace."

1450
01:25:29,582 --> 01:25:30,708
And it shows me…

1451
01:25:31,835 --> 01:25:34,420
waking up Eustace Tilley from his slumber.

1452
01:25:35,296 --> 01:25:37,507
I never got
this whole Eustace Tilley thing.

1453
01:25:37,590 --> 01:25:39,884
I found Eustace Tilley
profoundly irritating.

1454
01:25:39,968 --> 01:25:44,973
I thought they should have jettisoned it,
you know, in 1935.

1455
01:25:45,682 --> 01:25:48,268
So these are all my bound copies,

1456
01:25:48,351 --> 01:25:51,646
and of course the first one,

1457
01:25:51,729 --> 01:25:54,190
October 5th, 1992.

1458
01:25:57,485 --> 01:25:58,736
The Ed Sorel cover.

1459
01:25:59,654 --> 01:26:02,031
I wanted my first cover
to be done by Ed Sorel.

1460
01:26:02,115 --> 01:26:05,577
I just said, "Do something
which announces that we're new."

1461
01:26:05,660 --> 01:26:09,289
And then he comes in with this picture
of a punk in a hansom cab,

1462
01:26:09,372 --> 01:26:11,666
and it was so clever.

1463
01:26:11,749 --> 01:26:13,251
It was what everybody thought.

1464
01:26:13,334 --> 01:26:16,129
I was this wrecker, the wrecking ball.

1465
01:26:16,212 --> 01:26:18,882
And they weren't actually wrong.

1466
01:26:18,965 --> 01:26:22,635
I let go of 71, I think it was, people

1467
01:26:22,719 --> 01:26:25,972
over the course of two or three years,
and I hired 50.

1468
01:26:26,639 --> 01:26:29,475
Tina hired me
when I was seven months pregnant,

1469
01:26:29,559 --> 01:26:32,687
which was also highly unusual at the time,

1470
01:26:32,770 --> 01:26:34,647
which was fantastic.

1471
01:26:35,148 --> 01:26:37,150
It was almost like a matriarchy.

1472
01:26:37,233 --> 01:26:40,236
This group of women,
we all had young children, actually,

1473
01:26:40,320 --> 01:26:42,030
so it was like a secret society,

1474
01:26:42,113 --> 01:26:46,409
in which we had
each other's backs, you know?

1475
01:26:46,492 --> 01:26:48,953
Like, I knew the names
of all their nannies.

1476
01:26:50,705 --> 01:26:52,916
Tina is, in some ways, a comet.

1477
01:26:52,999 --> 01:26:57,045
She comes in and she changes things.

1478
01:26:58,004 --> 01:27:01,591
It was controversial sometimes,
but mostly she was right.

1479
01:27:01,674 --> 01:27:04,677
The magazine needed desperately to change.

1480
01:27:05,637 --> 01:27:08,389
After six and a half years
at The New Yorker,

1481
01:27:08,473 --> 01:27:12,477
I felt that the business side
of The New Yorker was slow.

1482
01:27:13,186 --> 01:27:16,689
We needed to be expanding
in a lateral fashion.

1483
01:27:16,773 --> 01:27:18,608
And I remember writing to SI Newhouse

1484
01:27:18,691 --> 01:27:21,778
a note saying that we should
have a production arm

1485
01:27:21,861 --> 01:27:25,073
to do documentaries,
to do books and movies,

1486
01:27:25,156 --> 01:27:26,991
even maybe a radio show.

1487
01:27:27,575 --> 01:27:29,869
He just said,
"Tina, stick to your knitting."

1488
01:27:31,246 --> 01:27:36,334
I thought, "Okay."
That got me very irritated indeed.

1489
01:27:37,001 --> 01:27:40,088
I thought, "Well, maybe it's time
for me to move on here."

1490
01:27:42,715 --> 01:27:46,928
She got this offer
that was, in retrospect, lethal.

1491
01:27:49,097 --> 01:27:51,182
It was my idea to create a magazine

1492
01:27:51,266 --> 01:27:53,893
that could be a place
as a center of thought.

1493
01:27:53,977 --> 01:27:55,979
That's the best thing I ever came up with.

1494
01:27:56,062 --> 01:27:57,522
The rest of it is Tina Brown.

1495
01:27:58,690 --> 01:28:01,484
She got this offer
to go into business with Harvey Weinstein,

1496
01:28:01,567 --> 01:28:04,445
of all things,
to create this thing called Talk magazine,

1497
01:28:04,529 --> 01:28:09,200
which was not only going to be a magazine,
but it would produce movies and all that.

1498
01:28:10,910 --> 01:28:13,454
Thank you all for coming to open Talk.

1499
01:28:14,122 --> 01:28:16,249
It was probably the dumbest thing
I ever did in my life.

1500
01:28:17,041 --> 01:28:19,168
So she left suddenly, you know?

1501
01:28:19,252 --> 01:28:21,546
July of '98, gone.

1502
01:28:22,046 --> 01:28:23,673
And so there was no editor.

1503
01:28:24,674 --> 01:28:28,469
And so SI Newhouse
cast around very briefly.

1504
01:28:28,553 --> 01:28:30,346
They offered me this job.

1505
01:28:30,430 --> 01:28:34,350
And an hour later, I stood in front
of the staff and all my colleagues,

1506
01:28:34,434 --> 01:28:38,479
and they clapped a little bit,
and we went to work.

1507
01:28:39,439 --> 01:28:41,941
All right, let's do it.

1508
01:28:42,025 --> 01:28:44,527
Dexter's closing today.

1509
01:28:44,610 --> 01:28:46,612
-And Twilley today.
-And Twilley.

1510
01:28:47,196 --> 01:28:49,240
So today is, uh…

1511
01:28:49,324 --> 01:28:52,827
I have no idea what today--
Today's Thursday. Apparently.

1512
01:28:52,910 --> 01:28:56,497
We'll start closing pieces, in fact,
right now for the anniversary issue,

1513
01:28:56,581 --> 01:28:58,041
which is a week and a half away.

1514
01:28:58,124 --> 01:28:58,958
This is great.

1515
01:28:59,042 --> 01:29:02,045
It's a hell of a lot of work.
I hope everybody's still standing.

1516
01:29:02,128 --> 01:29:04,339
All right, thanks.

1517
01:29:04,422 --> 01:29:08,259
The flurry of closing will be
next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

1518
01:29:08,343 --> 01:29:10,803
And then it's got to be done by Thursday.

1519
01:29:11,304 --> 01:29:13,473
And things seem like they're on schedule?

1520
01:29:14,098 --> 01:29:15,600
Basically on schedule.

1521
01:29:17,602 --> 01:29:21,105
Okay, so I just tend
to go around person by person.

1522
01:29:21,189 --> 01:29:24,359
And I'll start, and then go to you,
and we'll just do it like that.

1523
01:29:24,442 --> 01:29:26,152
Every piece in The New Yorker

1524
01:29:26,235 --> 01:29:28,613
goes through a process
called the closing meeting,

1525
01:29:28,696 --> 01:29:33,034
where the editor and the writer sit down
with a copy editor, the fact-checker,

1526
01:29:33,117 --> 01:29:36,996
and go over the piece line by line.

1527
01:29:37,080 --> 01:29:41,584
I guess I just want to, um…
We have "TV's first collusion."

1528
01:29:41,667 --> 01:29:44,087
Should it be
"collision with the counterculture"?

1529
01:29:44,170 --> 01:29:47,173
I think "collision" sounds
like it was almost accidental,

1530
01:29:47,256 --> 01:29:49,342
whereas it was
a really market-driven thing.

1531
01:29:49,425 --> 01:29:51,177
It's a little bit like whack-a-mole.

1532
01:29:51,260 --> 01:29:54,347
You think you're done,
but little things keep popping up.

1533
01:29:55,056 --> 01:29:56,849
-Want to start?
-Yeah. Let's do it.

1534
01:29:56,933 --> 01:29:59,268
I didn't have much on the first page.

1535
01:29:59,352 --> 01:30:01,062
It can be a stressful experience.

1536
01:30:01,145 --> 01:30:03,523
Thinking about,
"Did I document this clearly enough?"

1537
01:30:03,606 --> 01:30:05,108
"Did I get every detail correct?"

1538
01:30:05,191 --> 01:30:09,612
"Mason suggests that humans
could one day modify their genes."

1539
01:30:09,695 --> 01:30:12,198
Just to make clear
he's not suggesting that we do it…

1540
01:30:12,281 --> 01:30:13,408
-Right now.
-…today.

1541
01:30:13,491 --> 01:30:16,494
Okay, I think we should say
who the secretary is at some point.

1542
01:30:16,577 --> 01:30:18,704
-Yeah.
-Um, but…

1543
01:30:19,414 --> 01:30:21,082
They can go for hours and hours,

1544
01:30:21,165 --> 01:30:23,668
and you sometimes have to order out.

1545
01:30:23,751 --> 01:30:25,503
It's not done till it's done.

1546
01:30:25,586 --> 01:30:29,257
In the checking section of the office,
there used to be this sign that said,

1547
01:30:29,340 --> 01:30:31,175
"Better perfect than done."

1548
01:30:31,259 --> 01:30:32,885
"Al Franken's mocking."

1549
01:30:33,636 --> 01:30:36,806
We need a goofier word there,
so I'd like to say "ridiculing."

1550
01:30:36,889 --> 01:30:41,144
When a closing is over,
I always have this enormous satisfaction

1551
01:30:41,227 --> 01:30:45,648
that we have this system,
this time-honored system that works.

1552
01:30:45,731 --> 01:30:46,899
We did it.

1553
01:30:46,983 --> 01:30:47,817
Nice job, guys.

1554
01:30:47,900 --> 01:30:50,111
-Congratulations.
-Really amazing.

1555
01:30:50,194 --> 01:30:51,654
All right, thanks, guys.

1556
01:31:07,712 --> 01:31:11,382
Okay, so fiction, that would be set up
like this, with a little header here.

1557
01:31:11,466 --> 01:31:14,177
So it's not doing the type on the image,
as we usually do,

1558
01:31:14,260 --> 01:31:16,262
but a more classic layout.

1559
01:31:16,345 --> 01:31:20,433
And then we'd love for spots
to do a history of Eustace Tilley.

1560
01:31:20,516 --> 01:31:23,978
How many thousands of Eustace Tilleys
are we going to have? Just wanna know.

1561
01:31:27,815 --> 01:31:30,776
-Should we do it in there?
-They wanna do it in your office.

1562
01:31:30,860 --> 01:31:32,570
It's 242 degrees.

1563
01:31:33,237 --> 01:31:34,780
The very last thing we do

1564
01:31:34,864 --> 01:31:38,075
before sending an issue to press
is review the dummy book.

1565
01:31:40,495 --> 01:31:42,079
Oh, this is great.

1566
01:31:42,163 --> 01:31:44,540
We check the graphics,
we check the layout,

1567
01:31:44,624 --> 01:31:48,503
and we get a chance to really see
what the magazine is going to look like

1568
01:31:48,586 --> 01:31:50,755
when it shows up in people's mailboxes.

1569
01:31:50,838 --> 01:31:54,175
You just want the clarity of the cartoon,
the clarity of that.

1570
01:31:54,258 --> 01:31:58,054
But it's also a moment
where you can take a nice deep breath

1571
01:31:58,137 --> 01:32:00,181
and appreciate what you've got.

1572
01:32:00,765 --> 01:32:03,184
It takes a lot. It takes a lot of people.

1573
01:32:03,267 --> 01:32:06,270
It takes a lot of argument.
It takes a lot of discussion.

1574
01:32:07,522 --> 01:32:10,024
But it's worth it.

1575
01:32:10,107 --> 01:32:11,943
Great. Well, that was easy.

1576
01:32:12,735 --> 01:32:14,487
Welcome to New York

1577
01:32:15,404 --> 01:32:16,989
It's been waiting for you

1578
01:32:17,073 --> 01:32:20,826
Welcome to New York
Welcome to New York…

1579
01:32:22,370 --> 01:32:24,455
In February 2025,

1580
01:32:24,539 --> 01:32:28,459
The New Yorker celebrated
its 100th birthday.

1581
01:32:29,126 --> 01:32:32,046
It marked the occasion
with a special double issue

1582
01:32:32,129 --> 01:32:34,966
destined to be read and reread,

1583
01:32:35,550 --> 01:32:39,220
or perhaps added
to that ever-growing stack in the corner.

1584
01:32:39,804 --> 01:32:43,099
This marks
The New Yorker's 100th anniversary.

1585
01:32:43,182 --> 01:32:44,850
The New Yorker is 100 years old.

1586
01:32:44,934 --> 01:32:48,020
…which is celebrating
its 100th anniversary.

1587
01:32:48,104 --> 01:32:53,067
People want to find out more
than just ridiculous tweets,

1588
01:32:53,150 --> 01:32:55,194
and they want to know what's going on,

1589
01:32:55,278 --> 01:33:00,157
and they want fairness and fact-checking
and a sense of decency,

1590
01:33:00,241 --> 01:33:03,911
and they also want some media outlets
that aren't knuckling under.

1591
01:33:05,913 --> 01:33:08,207
They gathered for a celebration.

1592
01:33:08,291 --> 01:33:12,128
These creative, curious, tenacious,

1593
01:33:12,211 --> 01:33:16,173
quirky, borderline obsessive individuals.

1594
01:33:16,757 --> 01:33:20,845
They gossiped and laughed
and toasted each other,

1595
01:33:20,928 --> 01:33:23,097
well aware that
they stand on the shoulders

1596
01:33:23,180 --> 01:33:25,016
of the giants who came before.

1597
01:33:26,809 --> 01:33:28,811
During the magazine's early years,

1598
01:33:28,894 --> 01:33:32,148
founding editor Harold Ross
was approached by a writer

1599
01:33:32,231 --> 01:33:33,691
who wanted to quit.

1600
01:33:34,609 --> 01:33:35,901
Ross responded,

1601
01:33:35,985 --> 01:33:40,656
"This thing is a movement
and you can't resign from a movement."

1602
01:33:41,532 --> 01:33:43,534
And I know exactly what he means.

1603
01:33:43,618 --> 01:33:48,873
It's not just… this thing that comes out
once a week or every day online.

1604
01:33:48,956 --> 01:33:51,000
It's… It has a soul.

1605
01:33:51,083 --> 01:33:55,546
It has a sense of purpose
and decency and quality.

1606
01:33:56,380 --> 01:34:00,593
It should be self-questioning.
It should learn from experience.

1607
01:34:01,093 --> 01:34:05,056
It should be capable of changing its mind.

1608
01:34:05,556 --> 01:34:10,144
But it is a movement.
It is a cause for high things.

1609
01:34:10,728 --> 01:34:15,733
If that sounds sanctimonious,
I do not care.

1610
01:34:15,816 --> 01:34:20,363
Welcome to New York
It's been waiting for you…

1611
01:34:20,446 --> 01:34:22,615
Hi. Hey, everybody.

1612
01:34:23,783 --> 01:34:26,160
-Diego, you want to go first?
-Sure.

1613
01:34:26,243 --> 01:34:29,080
I think we should do a piece
about the rise of the tax credit.

1614
01:34:29,747 --> 01:34:32,541
It's not quite sexy enough maybe
for a magazine?

1615
01:34:33,209 --> 01:34:37,129
Welcome to New York
It's been waiting for you

1616
01:34:37,213 --> 01:34:40,508
Welcome to New York
Welcome to New York

1617
01:34:41,258 --> 01:34:45,388
Welcome to New York
It's been waiting for you

1618
01:34:45,471 --> 01:34:48,849
Welcome to New York
Welcome to New York

1619
01:34:49,975 --> 01:34:55,606
It's a new soundtrack
I could dance to this beat

1620
01:34:55,690 --> 01:34:58,484
-Beat
-Forevermore

1621
01:34:58,567 --> 01:35:03,823
The lights are so bright
But they never blind me

1622
01:35:03,906 --> 01:35:05,866
Me

1623
01:35:05,950 --> 01:35:10,037
Welcome to New York
It's been waiting for you

1624
01:35:10,121 --> 01:35:13,374
Welcome to New York
Welcome to New York

1625
01:35:14,375 --> 01:35:18,421
Like any great love
It keeps you guessing

1626
01:35:18,504 --> 01:35:22,425
Like any real love, it's ever-changing

1627
01:35:22,508 --> 01:35:26,387
Like any true love
It drives you crazy

1628
01:35:26,470 --> 01:35:32,977
But you know you wouldn't change
Anything, anything, anything

1629
01:35:34,562 --> 01:35:37,064
-Welcome to New York
-It's a new soundtrack

1630
01:35:37,148 --> 01:35:39,567
-I could dance to this beat
-Welcome to New York

1631
01:35:39,650 --> 01:35:43,279
The lights are so bright
But they never blind me

1632
01:35:43,362 --> 01:35:45,322
-Welcome to New York
-New soundtrack

1633
01:35:45,406 --> 01:35:46,866
I could dance to this beat

1634
01:35:46,949 --> 01:35:49,493
-Welcome to New York
-The lights are so bright

1635
01:35:49,577 --> 01:35:52,204
-But they never blind me
-Welcome to New York

1636
01:35:52,288 --> 01:35:56,959
So bright, they never blind me