Since 1998, David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker and has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Bruce Springsteen and more. He also hosts the magazine’s national radio program and podcast, “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” He joins live at the On Air Fest to talk about his legendary life and career.
Debbie Millman:
David, I understand that you are planning to title the last book you ever write Basically Fine?
David Remnick:
No, I think I’m going to title it Home By 10.
Debbie Millman:
Well, tell us the story of Basically Fine.
David Remnick:
I have no idea what basically fine is.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was when you interviewed Kenzaburō Ōe and you sent the article to-
David Remnick:
Oh, my God. How do you remember these things? I’m going to confess to you, and this is going to be a problem for you. If I wasn’t married to the woman I married to, I would not remember any of my life. The nature-
Debbie Millman:
Fortunately, I know your wife.
David Remnick:
Yes. Anything before my wife, I have no idea. So we’ll struggle here for the next some minutes, but I’m not kidding around. Kenzaburō Ōe, like a lot of stories for journalists, is somebody that … Kenzaburō Ōe won the Nobel Prize, Japanese author, I think just died very recently. I was assigned to write a profile of Kenzaburō Ōe when I was a writer for The New Yorker and Tina Brown was the editor. I really struggled with this piece. His English was about, it’s better than my Japanese, but it was not great. I came home and I did not have what I like best in this world other than my friends and family and peace and love and understanding, which is a full notebook. A half-filled notebook is hell on Earth, and yet I wrote the piece anyway because that’s what one does. I went into my editor, Jeff Frank’s office, and I saw the note from Tina Brown and it said, “Jeff, I guess Remnick’s piece is basically fine.” Let me just say in the annals of editor reaction, basically fine sucks.
Debbie Millman:
You might not remember anything.
David Remnick:
It sucks really bad. I tried to put it out of my mind, but you thankfully now have reinserted it.
Debbie Millman:
Just to prepare you, that might be happening a few more times. You were born in New Jersey in what you-
David Remnick:
I was, deepest, darkest.
Debbie Millman:
No, I’m going to be bringing up a lot of things that you’ve said before.
David Remnick:
That’s all right.
Debbie Millman:
I need you to know right now that you can trust me that the sources are good. You’ve described your upbringing as an East Coast version of what is seen in the film, American Graffiti, marching bands, football teams, and very middle class in a blue collar Springsteenian way.
David Remnick:
That’s right. No ocean.
Debbie Millman:
You went to kindergarten in a yeshiva. That doesn’t feel particularly Springsteenian.
David Remnick:
Well, from where I come from it is. My parents sent me to a religious school for a year because I was large and impatient and I missed the cutoff date. Do they still have cutoff dates for kids? So I missed the cut-off date, so I was a little on the old side to be waiting yet another year. So they sent me to a yeshiva in Patterson, New Jersey and it was called Yavne. I had my mouth washed out with soap by Mrs. Wool.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
David Remnick:
She should rot in hell. I think I-
Debbie Millman:
Very yeshiva-like.
David Remnick:
By the way, not just any soap. You know that lava soap, which is combination soap and a stone?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
David Remnick:
It was that. I think I said a bad word of some kind like tuchus. That would get you to skip a grade now. Got my mouth washed out with soap.
Debbie Millman:
You were a newspaper junkie as a child and began reading The Village Voice at your neighborhood 7-Eleven.
David Remnick:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
I didn’t even know 7-Eleven sold The Village Voice.
David Remnick:
Well, I didn’t, strictly speaking, buy it either. I would sit on the floor of the 7-Eleven and read it cover to cover and that’s what I thought I’d do with my life. I thought even as I got older, I think The Village Voice really had two big moments. When it was first invented, it was invented as a product of the ’60s, obviously. In fact, it’s a new book about … The Village Voice is said to be very, very good. I haven’t read it yet.
Debbie Millman:
It’s covered on today’s New Yorker website.
David Remnick:
I don’t read it. I hear The New Yorker website is excellent, and the magazine is said to be good too.
Debbie Millman:
It’s pretty good.
David Remnick:
Funny cartoons and whatnot. No photographs on the cover though.
Debbie Millman:
Caption contest.
David Remnick:
They have that too. I should subscribe.
Debbie Millman:
I’m really actually hoping you’re going to give me some tips.
David Remnick:
Unsubscribing? Oh, I’ve got a lot of tips on that.
Debbie Millman:
No, no, no, on how to get to the top three in the caption contest. That’s a bucket list item for me.
David Remnick:
Okay. Can I just digress from The Village Voice for a second? Occasionally, I’m invited to a fancy thing, and not very often and once in a while I’ll go because curiosity killed the cat. So I went to this thing and I was introduced to then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and he says, “Hello. Hello.” I was very polite, well brought up in New Jersey and whatnot. He said, “I’ve tried to win the cartoon caption contest dozens and dozens of times and I’ve never won.” Now prior to this conversation, I had had what my dearly departed mother would call a big drink. So I said, “Wait a minute, you’re the mayor of New York. You are the richest person in New York and you want to win the fucking caption contest too?” He just didn’t find this funny at all and he said, “Yes, yes.”
Debbie Millman:
We take it very seriously.
David Remnick:
I think he take himself very seriously. So anyway, I worshiped The Village Voice because it was … The New York Times is the weather and it was the establishment word and all that, and The Voice was this other thing and filled with writers who wrote about themselves. There were different spots in politics and there was feminism. What was that? There was all this stuff about race, although there were very few Black writers, God knows a condition not limited to just The Village Voice at that time. Even in North Jersey, you don’t feel like you’re sitting here in Williamsburg or Manhattan or whatever. It feels a million miles away. So to listen to WBAI or WNEW FM for music or the Caribbean station or this, that, and the other thing, radio is a big part of this imagining another life.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you were a child insomniac and you’ve described yourself as an adolescent, no sleeper, all night listener, and eyes wide open, ceiling-staring dreamer.
David Remnick:
That wasn’t cocaine at work. It was just a sense of wanting to be elsewhere and knowing that there was this world across the river. Now, a person with a real imagination, someone like John Updike or name your favorite writer-
Debbie Millman:
Roxane Gay.
David Remnick:
Yeah, would certainly have had the imagination to know that Hillsdale, New Jersey had its own emotional depths and interests as Updike made of his Pennsylvania. I did not. I did not. New York City was where I wanted to be from the time I began going with my parents to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn and great grandmother in Coney Island and in Trump houses, by the way.
Debbie Millman:
Wow. Are you still an insomniac?
David Remnick:
Pardon me?
Debbie Millman:
Are you still an insomniac?
David Remnick:
Oh, no. I sleep like a rock because I live here. Mission accomplished.
Debbie Millman:
You started writing for your high school newspaper-
David Remnick:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
… The Smoke Signal when you were 13. From what I understand, none of your classmates were interested in contributing to the paper.
David Remnick:
No.
Debbie Millman:
So you wrote and edited the entire paper by yourself. Is it true you made up different bylines so it wouldn’t seem as if you were writing it on your own?
David Remnick:
I still do. Are you a fan of Rachel Aviv?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
David Remnick:
That’s me. She’s good, isn’t she? She’s really good.
Debbie Millman:
She’s my favorite.
David Remnick:
Patrick Radden Keefe? Me too. Me too.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you put this together yourself via old-school layout and paste-up techniques on your kitchen table. How was it printed? Was it mimeographed?
David Remnick:
Well, let me tell you how paper was. You printed it out and you cut it and used scissors and glue. It was a big [inaudible 00:09:20] It was a big deal and it was a terrible … First of all, beginning with the title. It was called The Smoke Signal because we were the Pascack Valley Indians. They aren’t anymore. I think they’re like the Warriors or something, and The Smoke Signal became the I don’t know what else, but that came-
Debbie Millman:
The Signal, right?
David Remnick:
… 30 years later, not The Signal. That would be the CIA newspaper. I didn’t do it completely by myself, but nobody was really terribly interested in this. That could have been the first signal that the newspaper business was in trouble.
Debbie Millman:
You also got a job for what you’ve described as, quote, “writing stupid little articles for one of the community giveaway papers-“
David Remnick:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
“… featuring information about school board meetings,” but you also described it, and I love this, as the most romantic thing ever.
David Remnick:
Well, I left my house and I asked people impertinent questions and they answered them. In other words, I think reporters discover this very early on or anybody that has a medium that they can put between themselves and the world, a canvas, a notebook. It’s a form of permission. It’s a form of permission, and to have that permission at a preposterously young age and to have what seemed like ancient important people like 40-year-old school board members answer your questions, it was very suggestive of something exhilarating.
Debbie Millman:
You also started to play guitar around that time.
David Remnick:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
I believe your first instrument was something you called a gazinta guitar.
David Remnick:
A gazinta guitar would mean a bigger healthy guitar. No, I had a crap guitar, but remember, what was the guitar? The guitar was like a notebook. The guitar is a way to be a part of this thing that was happening that you wanted to be a part of. I wouldn’t have picked up a flute, well, unless you wanted to be Jethro Tull.
Debbie Millman:
I was going to say Ian Anderson.
David Remnick:
Yeah, Jethro and Ian Anderson, but I just desperately wanted to … Look, I grew up in very, in all seriousness, what struck me as a very dull, conventional, hemmed in environment with a mother who was quite ill, who had very serious MS, and how she managed to this day I don’t know, and a father who soon would be quite ill and not be able to work when he hit about in his 50s. There was a certain desire to be another, to enter the big world however deceptive that might be. That certainly was the animating spirit of everything I did.
I learned about that other world through various mediums. One of them was very early bumping into the obvious music, most particularly Bob Dylan, and then you’d listen to that and then that would throw you to reading Allen Ginsberg or, or, or, or, and it happens to a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of people in this room at a certain age, something sparks you, whether you read or listen or you have a friend that leads you in some way. So all these things were very important to me.
Debbie Millman:
How did your parents’ illnesses impact your ambition?
David Remnick:
Well, it suggested that at a very peculiar age early on, and I know I’m not alone in this and I’m far from in the global sense or even in the metropolitan sense, the most disadvantaged, but it suggested that the future would require me to help them. I was the older of two kids. My father struggled on for a while, but he was a dentist and he had very, very small dental practice. At a certain point when he was, I don’t know … I think he lied about it for years because he had a tremor in his hand. His wife is sick, he has two kids to support and he’s screwed in the conventional making-a-living sense. I think he lied about it for a while, but patients, I think you all know as dental patients, we all have an identity as dental patients, that a dentist who comes at you with a shaking hand is not a good prospect for future business. It’s like a bad Buster Keaton movie.
So by the time I came back from Moscow in my late 20s or 30, whatever I was, they were all in debt and things collapsed. Again, I’m not weeping about this except I think back at them and they were much younger than me and they were probably terrified, but in my egomaniacal teenage imagination, I knew that I had to make a living.
Debbie Millman:
How did that impact the choices that you were making about what you wanted to-
David Remnick:
I couldn’t be a novelist. I couldn’t say, “You know what? My parents are going to stake me a little bit and I’m going to move into a tiny apartment with a roommate. I’m going to be the next pick your favorite novelist.” ‘That was not … I needed a job.
Debbie Millman:
What gave the sense that journalism would be a more secure option?
David Remnick:
Let’s just let that sit in the rest of my-
Debbie Millman:
I love that people laugh at my jokes, but that wasn’t really a joke.
David Remnick:
Well, first of all, the journalism business, even though I didn’t know it at the time, was fat and happy in those days. I’m sensing that there are some people here in the audience who are in a state of, when they think about the journalism business or the podcasting business, what’s the word we now use constantly, precarity, which I think became a word three years ago, I’m not sure before.
Debbie Millman:
Along with unprecedented.
David Remnick:
Exactly. As somebody who now is ostensibly in charge of a lot of people, I’m thinking about this all the time. In other words, I’m 65 years old, but I’m working with a lot of people who are 27 and 34, and they want to have an exciting, interesting, engaged life. That’s why they got into journalism and didn’t go work for Goldman Sachs. It wasn’t for the dough. They deserve to make a living, but the whole business model has exploded.
Back to your question, I was so lucky that right out of college, having had internships at Newsday and the Washington Post, I stuck around at the Washington Post. There aint many Washington Posts left anymore. A lot of my friends went to the Miami Herald, which was this terrific, flawed but terrific place to learn and to write and maybe spend your whole career there. There’s barely a Miami Herald.
Debbie Millman:
Do you feel that choosing journalism over becoming a novelist or a poet, I know you also wrote poetry, was a compromise?
David Remnick:
That would’ve really filled the coffers for my parents. They collected elegies.
Debbie Millman:
You could really raise a family on that income. Do you feel like it was a compromise?
David Remnick:
I did at the time. The self-proclaiming of oneself as a novelist, just, first of all, there was no fiction around. It’s not as if I had written anything. I always hear all the time people who say, “I’ve always wanted to write. I want to write,” and I would never answer this way because there’s a certain cruelty in it but, “Then write.” If you’re going to do that, you will find a way. You have to find a way. There are all kinds of writer biographies about how people found a way. Graham Greene was a night copy editor at a newspaper, I presume not making a hell of a lot of money, but enough to eat and house himself. He got up early and he pushed himself and he wrote novels and got started and he was good at it. There is no law that at any given moment there are going to be the world is going to treat you the way you want to be treated. That’s the fact. I needed a job.
Debbie Millman:
You went to Princeton University, which you said getting in was a miracle.
David Remnick:
To this day, I don’t understand it. If I presented the SAT scores that I did have now, there’s no way, and the high school I went to, nobody went to these places. Again, I don’t get it. There must have been some mistake.
Debbie Millman:
You studied-
David Remnick:
I’m not kidding around. I really don’t, I don’t get it. I was top of my class. There were other people at the top of the class and I don’t get it.
Debbie Millman:
They never reached out to you and asked you to come back?
David Remnick:
You know what? I had some stupid nervous interview with a Thai and I don’t know.
Debbie Millman:
You studied Russian and French, majored in comparative literature. Your parents thought that majoring in comparative literature was weird.
David Remnick:
My father asked me, “What are you comparing?”
Debbie Millman:
What are you comparing?
David Remnick:
Good question. Smart guy. I was comparing it to dentistry as it happens and Tolstoy won. Concerning how I made my life later in the Russia biz a bit, here were the grades that I got in Russian, C plus and D, and then I got out of the Russian business. What happened was I had had some in high school. The only interesting course that my high school offered was Russian. I think some-
Debbie Millman:
Really?
David Remnick:
I don’t know. We this wonderful man named Frank Falk. I don’t know how he washed up at this high school, but he was teaching Russian. I thought, “Wow, cool.” I took it for four years, and when I got out after four years, I could say those boys are crossing these bridges or something like that and that was it. So I thought third year at least, right? I took the test they sometimes give you, the aptitude test, and Veronika Dolinko said to me, she’s the teacher, she said, “David, I think you should start from beginning.” I said, “Well, surely. Second year then,” and she said, “It is your funeral,” and so it was, and so it was, but I started all over again years later.
Debbie Millman:
I actually minored in Russian literature in English translation.
David Remnick:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
Just to avoid that whole scenario.
David Remnick:
That’s fine.
Debbie Millman:
While at Princeton, you joined the University Press Club, in 1979, you co-founded the student newspaper, the Nassau Weekly.
David Remnick:
Still exists.
Debbie Millman:
I know. It’s incredible.
David Remnick:
It is amazing.
Debbie Millman:
You also became a stringer for the New Brunswick Home News, the Asbury Park Press- … and interned at the Washington Post and Long Island News Day. Overachiever much?
David Remnick:
Yeah, I guess. I have one quality that I will fess to. I have what my grandparents would call zitsfleysh. I put in front of a task, I will complete it. If I have to write a long piece in three days, I won’t move from the chair. It might not be all that good, but I will complete it.
Debbie Millman:
How are you able to write that fast?
David Remnick:
I don’t know. It’s like … Again, I will fess up to that. The quality somebody else will have to fess up to, I don’t know. It’s like asking how does a seal know how to balance a ball on his or her nose. It’s just that that thing that I learned how to do. I think part of it is that I didn’t learn how to be a reporter by blogging at home, which is another generational thing, and I’ve nothing against that, different qualities come out of it, but I had this traditionalist training of covering police at night and having to do things very quickly. I was a sports reporter for two years at the Washington Post, and you would have to cover ball games at night and write an account of the game in 20 minutes. So you build muscles. Why does a dancer jump higher than we do? Because they spend all day long training. They just do training early on.
Debbie Millman:
You interned at the Washington Post and then stayed there after graduation until they told you to go away for a year.
David Remnick:
I did, and I taught in Japan knowing no Japanese at a Catholic university. So they had this Jewish kid from Jersey at a Jesuit school in Tokyo. The day I landed, the three priests greeted me and they said that I may not date any students. Of course, I’m a really good boy and I said, “Okay.” So I had a rather monastic Japanese existence and I read like a book or two a day. I couldn’t speak any language. I think they wanted me to stay for two years and I stayed six months and I traveled around all over Southeast Asia on $5 a day and all the hashish you could pocket and came back and started a job at the Washington Post for real.
Debbie Millman:
Well, actually, you made a stop in Paris.
David Remnick:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
Clad in a Leon Russell T-shirt and $9 Converse sneakers.
David Remnick:
Yeah, those were good.
Debbie Millman:
You made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the subway.
David Remnick:
It’s the earlier time, but yes, I was a busker. So next time you’re on the subway and somebody … I don’t know. What are the most common songs you hear on the subway being sung to you? Give the person a little dough because they need it, but I had a great time. It was really fun.
Debbie Millman:
You made enough money to survive doing the busking.
David Remnick:
Oh, if you stay in a hotel for $4 a night, it doesn’t take long to make that much money.
Debbie Millman:
You returned after you’re a year away where you worked at the Washington Post for the next 10 years. You worked with the legendary Ben Bradley who was the editor of the Post during that time, and you said that you and most-
David Remnick:
And legendary podcaster, Malcolm Gladwell as well.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, I’m going to mention that a little bit. You said that you and most of your young colleagues saw Bradley the way one might see a great orca in a fish tank.
David Remnick:
Right. So they had glass. It was the beginning of the glass office period. He was in his post-Watergate period, so he was already a celebrity and he was incredibly handsome in an old wasp way.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Jason Robards.
David Remnick:
Oh, my. Jason Robards didn’t come close to looking as good as Ben Bradley and all the presidents men. I’m sorry. He got the voice. He got the great voice and the whole thing and the cursing in fluent French. He had it all going on, but he was also in this late mannerist period. His accomplishments, the big accomplishments were a little behind. He was coasting a little bit, I’d say. He was enjoying it. He was enjoying life, but I was terrified of this guy and I had almost no contact with him. Even when half the hierarchy of the Washington Post came to Moscow, when I was there to interview Mikhail Gorbachev, Bradley just stayed home. He wanted no part of it. I think the jet lag was too much.
Debbie Millman:
What was the biggest thing you learned from him?
David Remnick:
Fearlessness in an editor is essential. If we can be serious for a moment, and I’ve been at this for a while now, and The New Yorker is many things, I hope. I hope it’s funny. I hope it has literary depth, but one thing it has to do is put pressure on power. It has to ask hard questions. It has to not pander to its audience in any way. It has to do hard work, and that’s not always … You don’t always sleep well. We have a lot of safeguards. Beyond the talent and the efforts of the writers, we also have an extraordinary checking department of really devoted people going over every, not just spellings and when So-and-So was born, but really beating the hell out of these pieces to make sure they’re right, but they also have to be fair.
We live in a world that is unbelievably confusing and difficult and contentious and polarized and mysterious, and it’s a high order to get things right. Bradley is among those journalists who knew that like in life, you wake up every day and you make one mistake after another and you have to proceed fearlessly. Otherwise, you’re just not going to have any value to the reader of the greater world.
Debbie Millman:
Given the state of politics in the US right now and the potential futures that may unfold, how worried-
David Remnick:
Again.
Debbie Millman:
Again. How worried are you about the validity of the news being questioned?
David Remnick:
I think it should be questioned.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in terms of what-
David Remnick:
You mean us being questioned?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, us being questioned as fake news, the whole way in which the news has been in many ways seen as false, lies, untruths.
David Remnick:
I think there’s one thing that we need to, at this late date, recognize, concede and deal with is that it’s not so much that Donald Trump is a, because that’s what you’re talking about, not only, but part of it, that Donald Trump is not just an autocrat and a demagogue, he’s also very talented demagogue and very … I’m not sure how talented an autocrat he is, but certainly a talented demagogue that other people trying the same stunts, we’ve seen them in American history and they haven’t been as successful. Our history is filled with demagogues and would-be autocrats and worse, racists, misogynists, and so on, but his ability to lock in to a certain base, psychology and comedy and a sense of arousal at a visceral level is astonishingly effective, maybe not in this room, I’m assuming not in this room.
Debbie Millman:
I’m hoping.
David Remnick:
I’m assuming fairly unanimously, but in the greater world, it is an astonishing thing that you have a president of the United States you can object to whatever particular issue you might have, whether it’s the Middle East or economics or immigration, whatever it is, but to compare one to the other and know that they are in a tie is I think that’s another thing that’s very, very hard for our writers and our readers to make sense of and understand is, how this could possibly be? How it is that we live in the same country that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and, in fact, many of the same voters then voted to elect Donald Trump president? That is an astonishingly complicated piece of business to understand. I think that we do our best and fail all the time and then have to wake up and try again.
Debbie Millman:
You were in Russia during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years. You returned to the US in 1992. You wrote your first book, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. You received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the George Polk Award. After writing over 150 major stories on everything from the Soviet dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky to the Indianapolis 500, you left the Post to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and you were hired by then editor Tina Brown. This was not your first attempt to work there. Can you tell us about the queer letter you sent editor William Shawn when you were still in college?
David Remnick:
This was really ballsy. So William Shawn … The New Yorker was a very, from the outside at least, a very insular special institution. I should say the one advantage of being a dentist’s son is that dentists have waiting rooms and waiting rooms at least then were filled with magazines. On Saturdays after my father closed up shop, I’d go in and read all the magazines. One magazine that I was not especially interested in was The New Yorker. It seemed not for me. It seemed not of the ’70s. I was interested in Rolling Stone, which now seems like of another time.
Debbie Millman:
No. Then it was a Bible.
David Remnick:
The invention of the insight of Rolling Stone was that it discovered that the counterculture was the culture. That’s a profound insight. Think of everything else, what you will or Jann Wenner, whatever, but that was an insight. It was a business, but it was exciting, certainly to a 16-year-old imagination and sitting in New Jersey. So I wasn’t interested in The New Yorker. Then I got to college. I had this teacher, a writing teacher named John McPhee, who, by the way, wrote about stuff that didn’t innately excite me, geology. Then I got into it and it was magnificent. It was like discovering Renaissance painting or something. I just, “Oh, how did I miss this all my life?”
Also, he was a writer as a teacher. He wasn’t a scholar of literature. He was an actual practicing writer. This was enormously influential to me and exciting. That’s what I wanted to do. So The New Yorker became more enticing. I wrote a query letter to William Shawn, who was a gnomic, genius, odd, distant figure. It was like writing a letter to Buddha, and you expected about the same result.
Debbie Millman:
Dear Buddha.
David Remnick:
Dear Buddha. “Dear Mr. Shawn, I’d like to write a profile of this guy Tom Page, who was a squash champion, who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, first family of Dayton Ohio, weirdly rich but had a squash court in his backyard. When he broke his right arm, his strong arm, he played with his left arm and he beat everybody anyway. He took an enormous amount of drugs, and it turned out he’s also quite disturbed and died very young, but he seemed like the profile of a deeply eccentric, interesting person.” I got back the following letter, “Dear Mr. Remnick, Mr. wind covers racket sports for us.” I loved the Mr. Wind part.
Debbie Millman:
love the racket sports part.
David Remnick:
I’m like, “Who the fuck is Mr. Wind?” and then it says, “Sincerely yours, William Shawn,” and that I don’t have this letter kills me to this day. Mr. Wind turned out to be Herbert Warren Wind, who wrote very, very, very, very long pieces about golf tournaments. The structure of the piece would be we came to the first hole.
Debbie Millman:
Go on.
David Remnick:
There would be many columns, which brought us to the second hole, which was a dogleg left of 343 yards, par four. People ask me, “Why are the pieces in The new Yorker so long?” and I say, “You should have seen it back when.” We used to do four-part series on literally on grains. Of course, there were four part series that were brilliant, Janet Malcolm or whatever, McPhee, but there’s a sociology to this too. So why are Dostoevsky and Dickens’ novels so long? There’s so long because in the 19th century, literary magazines were middle-class entertainment and Crime and Punishment being published in the Bell [inaudible 00:34:20] or Dickens being published in Blackstones. This was entertainment for the ascending middle-class audience that was going to read a novel, and they were entertaining and they were episodic and they were realist, and they went on. There’s a sociology to the art question.
William Shawn’s, one of his biggest challenges as an editor, and all editors have peculiar challenges to the time, one of his biggest challenges is, “I need to have enough editorial matter to go next to the gazillion ads I am publishing.” I don’t have that problem. I have a different kind of business.
Debbie Millman:
Well, when you took over in 1998, the magazine had lost an estimated $170 million since the Newhouse family had bought it in 1985. This was not the only precarious time in its history. I believe you are in possession of a letter from co-founder Raoul Fleischmann to a colleague stating that they needed to shut the magazine down in May of 1925, just three months after the debut issue.
David Remnick:
That was before the word precarity was around, but there it was.
Debbie Millman:
It took three years, but the magazine has actually been profitable since 2001.
David Remnick:
Look, I will say this, our business changed a lot. The old style of all magazines was subscriptions were very cheap so that it would get in a lot of hands, and so advertisers would reach as many people as possible of a certain kind of audience depending on what the magazine was or newspaper or television network or whatever it might be. The nature of advertising has changed, and it’s completely and utterly dominated by Google and Facebook. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but something like 75% of the ad market is to that and the rest is scraps. The result has been, in addition to other factors like Craigslist and so on, has been the decimation of mid-level newspapers.
There’s really only a few exceptions to this and magazines, and it’s tragic. It’s tragic. Not that every publication that’s been lost or diminished is perfect, but the changed landscape is deeply, deeply, deeply worrying for all kinds of reasons that we can talk about. The only other alternative that I know of at the moment is subscriptions, the same thing that television’s discovered. Luckily enough, fairly early, we changed our emphasis and we basically said to you, readers of the New Yorker, without saying it, that, “I can’t give this away anymore. You have to pay more than a cup of coffee a week to have this extraordinary thing in your hands or on your phone or whoever you choose to read it.”
The New Yorker, in fact, gives you a great deal more per day, per week than when Mr. Shawn was editing it, but the subscription model, now that we’ve had a lot of success with it for a while, now the subscription model is facing challenges too because you’ve all had this discovery. You’ve all woken up and go, “Wait a minute, I have Netflix, I have Paramount+, I have …” and then there are even apps now to get rid of or shave down your subscriptions.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, which was the original cable system.
David Remnick:
Exactly. So we’re in a time of real flux, and editors spend a lot more time thinking about business than they probably, if they’re being honest with themselves, would like to. They want to be thinking about writing and graphic design and all kinds of things, but if you don’t have your eye on business, and this goes with public radio or look at what’s happening in the podcast business. We have The New Yorker Radio Hour with my colleague David Crass now. We have a terrific time doing this. We’re thinking about how to develop it, make it better all the time, but we also have to pay attention to economics. Otherwise, you wake up and something terrible has happened, and I’m determined.
We’re going to celebrate 100th anniversary next year, The New Yorker. I don’t want that to be an occasion for us to show off at a museum of ourselves. There’ll be some of that to be sure, but I want people in this room and their children to be reading The New Yorker that is a lot better than the one that we have now in the future. So I think about that kind of thing all the time.
Debbie Millman:
When you first made the announcement of your expansion into podcasts, you stated, “While I readily admit to the gall of it, we come to this project with a deep respect for the history and creative range of the medium.” Why did you feel it was galling to expand into the podcast world?
David Remnick:
Because it’s like … I’m not saying we’re Michael Jordan, but when Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls to go play baseball, that was, one could argue it was both galling and a little stupid and like, “Why are you doing that?”
Debbie Millman:
I think it was actually interesting.
David Remnick:
I once said, “Maybe I’ll write a novel.” He said, “Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane.” I don’t believe in necessarily staying in your lane, but there is that instinct toward, “Okay. You know how to do this. You know how to make hamburgers. Make hamburgers.” Sometimes places that expand and suddenly start serving something else fail. I just think it’s enormous fun, and I also think it reaches other people.
Debbie Millman:
Is there an underlying principle or philosophy that is guiding the continued expansion into podcast?
David Remnick:
That’d be good, and they have to make their own way. The latest one, two things have started of late. There’s a culture podcast with Alex Schwartz and Vincent Cunningham and Naomi Fry, which is extremely fun and funny and smart. We purchased a podcast that you probably know called In the Dark, and In the Dark was being run out of, I think, Minnesota Public Radio for a while, and they stayed in Minnesota. This is a reporting and narrative podcast, more like in the mode of serial, say, and it’s really hard to do, and they work a long time on their reporting. They’re working on their third season and they’ve been around for some years. These are serious reporters. I felt that they were kindred souls and so did the head of Condé Nast. So we don’t see them a hell of a lot.
There’s an editor at the new Yorker named Will Davidson who works with them, and Chris Bannon, who heads podcasts and audio in general. Condé Nast isn’t in deep contact with them, but they’re really ambitious. They’re shooting for the moon. They also had a mini season that took a New Yorker piece by Heidi Blake called The Runaway Princesses. I thought it was terrific.
Look, I just listened to a lot of audio. It’s always meant a lot to me, podcasts and radio, and I just thought it was an experiment worth trying. We’ve had failed experiments too. In video, we did a thing with Amazon that I think if we’re being honest, it was a noble failure. It wasn’t embarrassing, but it didn’t take off. It didn’t garner the attention. It didn’t quite work.
Debbie Millman:
How long do you give something before you make that decision?
David Remnick:
Well, sometimes economics will dictate that. Economics might tell you. Quite frankly, audio is less expensive to do, although In The Dark, because it’s so intensively reported, like serial, like any number of other things, that’s more expensive to do.
Debbie Millman:
In a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, you interviewed a meme mixologist. I’ve never heard that job title before.
David Remnick:
God knows I hadn’t either.
Debbie Millman:
Can you share what that actually is for the audience?
David Remnick:
No, I can’t, no. Have you ever had the feeling, and maybe you’re having it right now, that you were interviewing something and the producers have said, “We’re going to interview a meme mixologist,” and you say, “Okay, that that’s fine,” and you get through the interview as if in a haze, and at the end you say, “I really don’t know what that is.”
Debbie Millman:
Fair enough, but no, I’m not experiencing that, thankfully. The last thing I want to talk to you about is music. In your latest book, Holding the Note: Profiles and Popular Music, you state that there’s no one who has meant more to you than Bob Dylan. The passion first-
David Remnick:
I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Debbie Millman:
Anybody here?
David Remnick:
Okay. Well, older crowd perhaps.
Debbie Millman:
This passion was first ignited in 1966 when you first heard the song I Want You.
David Remnick:
That’s right. So weird experience. Again, I don’t remember much. Look, the story I’m about to tell you may be completely false in the sense that it was a novelist named Harold Brodke, and he wrote a novel called The Runaway Soul. The novel opens with his own birth and Harold claimed that he really remembered it, and it was important to him this self-mythologizing at some level because there’s no earthly way that he remembered his birth. I do think this is true. So I want to be honest because-
Debbie Millman:
Well, it could be a memory of a memory.
David Remnick:
Exactly. Because I’m a journalist, just when I read memoirs, I read them in this spirit, all of them, including Bob Dylan’s memoir, by the way.
Debbie Millman:
We’ll get to that in a minute.
David Remnick:
When I was seven, something like that, my mother got sick. She had the first serious attack of multiple sclerosis. My father and my brother at that time must have been four, my father was not able to go to the hospital. I guess I was past the limit. My father took me to the hospital and it was very scary seeing your mother in the hospital bed. Seeing your parents doing anything other than being in the kitchen is scary.
The primal scene, let’s not even think about that, but sick is really, that I really do remember. As I recall, I heard this … We played the radio. My father liked music too and he had good taste, R&B, jazz, classical. Someone was on the radio singing with a voice like this was not Paul Revere & the Raiders. This was not your average pop music. This was not Chad and Jeremy. This was, “The guilty undertaker sighs. The lonesome organ grinder cries,” and what the fuck was he singing about? I was seven years old and it was thrilling.
I was not yet at the age where I was allowed to buy albums. There was this store called E. J. Korvette, a department store, not a high-level one. It was out on, I don’t know, Route 17 or Route 4, somewhere in Jersey.
Debbie Millman:
Korvette with a K.
David Remnick:
There you go. I bought this album because kids can’t decide, that Beatles album or that. So I bought something called Best of ’66, always hedging my bets, and it was okay. Then there was that song. It was $1.99, I think, the album. So I bought other Bob Dylan albums going backwards. So that would’ve been the time of Blonde on Blonde and then Highway 61 Revisited and going backwards and backwards until he was nothing but an acoustic guitar and harmonica.
That was a revelatory thing at a very young. I knew what the Beatles were. Even in the minivan taking us to yeshiva, kids wore Beatles wigs with a yarmulke on top. It’s a great look. It’s a great look, but this was something completely mysterious. To this day, I think the last time I saw Bob Dylan was four months ago with one of my children who’s now 32. They’ve all, well, certainly, Alex Noah have gone with me any number of times. I don’t know whether they’re indulging me or not. I can never quite tell.
Debbie Millman:
In 2004, you were hoping to get an exclusive excerpt of his recently published memoir in The New Yorker. You almost had it in the bag.
David Remnick:
I got screwed with my pants on.
Debbie Millman:
Dylan wanted the cover. Dylan wanted the cover of The New Yorker.
David Remnick:
Let’s just say that Bob Dylan has remained unmoved by and unimpressed by my hero worship. It doesn’t keep him up nights. Apparently, I’m not alone. So what happened was I had heard that he was writing a memoir and that it was good and that it wasn’t like Tarantula, which is, I don’t know, a surrealist experiment. I was summoned. I said, “Well, send the manuscript to the publisher.” I said, “I can’t send the manuscript. It would be like sending the Dead Sea Scrolls to my apartment.” So I went to the Dylan office, I won’t even tell you where it is, but you have to press a button that says, I don’t know, AB Cube Carpets. It’s like a CIA thing. You go up there and it’s just Dylan everything, Dylan tote bags and Dylan albums and Dylan this and Dylan that. If I had gone when I was 16, my head would’ve exploded into a thousand pieces.
They sit me in a little room with a bare table and a manuscript and a glass of water. I sat there and read the book straight through, Chronicles, anyone, and it was terrific. I said to the publisher and the Dylan guy, nice people, “I’m in. Don’t call Rolling Stone. That’s not your audience anymore,” I don’t know, whatever bullshit I told them. I was trying to get it for The New Yorker. I’m a competitive person. We made an agreement and we made a handshake agreement, and it still pisses me off.
Debbie Millman:
I know.
David Remnick:
This many years ago, it looked like John Kerry was running for president. Half the people here weren’t born yet, and it really pisses me off this thing. It got to the summer and they call and they said, “Okay. We’re about to publish it,” and I said, “Great. 7,000 words, the New York bit in the beginning, we’re all set and we’ll try to figure out what to do about fact checking and copy editing. Bob doesn’t necessarily have to be completely involved,” and so on and so forth, whatever shit I was slinging. I just thought everything’s going to be great.
Then they said, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “Bob wants a cover? We have dogs on the cover or bowl of fruit or a joke or Barry Blitt making fun of whatever … We don’t do that. We don’t have photographs in the cover.” I thought I’d changed their mind, and there was a pause and they said, “Bob wants a cover.”
It was like talking to your parents at your worst, “Bob wants a cover.” I said, “I can’t do it.” I said, “I’m sure we can find some way to work this out.” “Bob wants a cover,” and that was it. They went to Newsweek. By that time, Bob looked like Vincent Price with a little mustache and a cowboy hat. I thought, “They’re never going to put Bob Dylan on the cover. It’s the middle of a presidential race.”
Debbie Millman:
It’s election year.
David Remnick:
They put him on the cover and they ran this excerpt. Apparently, Bob Dylan survived the experience of not being published in The New Yorker. Then another thing happened. I saw that he had these paintings. He’s a painter. He also makes whiskey and iron gates, a man of parts.
Debbie Millman:
He’s got range.
David Remnick:
He’s got range. These paintings, some of them are kind of good. There was one, a painting of Katz’s Delicatessen, the pastrami capital of the world, and it’s pretty good, and it’s a good New Yorker cover. It’s a New York scene. I make an arrangement. We’re all set to go. Two weeks out, I get a phone call, “Bob doesn’t want to do it.” So I feel our relationship is not on an equal level somehow.
Debbie Millman:
You think?
David Remnick:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Malcolm Gladwell is here today to receive the 2024 Audio Van Gogh Award. You worked together at the Washington Post.
David Remnick:
Did I come in second? I’m just asking.
Debbie Millman:
Maybe next year. You worked together at the Washington Post, and he said this about you. “At the Washington Post, there was one day when David Remnick had three stories on the front page which I don’t think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.”
David Remnick:
Have I ever mentioned publicly how much I love Malcolm Gladwell? Look, that happened, the front page thing, because I was blessed. I was sent to Moscow at a time where American interest and what was going on was singular, and the news and the interest and the varied topics of what were going on every day were so fascinating and, thankfully, so fascinating to our readers at the Washington Post that I think it was the journalistic equivalent of holding out a bucket in a rainstorm and it just filled up with stories. I could go to my mailbox in the morning, my mailbox, and come up with a story just by reading my mail.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you could. I don’t know that-
David Remnick:
Any idiot could. No, no, no, I mean it. At that time, every single day in a newspaper, in a literary journal, something was being published that had never happened before. They’re publishing Anna Akhmatova or Solzhenitsyn or Nabokov or Orwell or, “Oh, my God, there’s the first report we’ve ever seen on the war in Afghanistan.” We forget, now that things are so dreadful in Russia and not only Russia, how dreadful they are, how incredibly promising it was to be alive in Moscow in 1989 or 1990 and, by the way, in the world.
Part of what shaped me is when I was a young reporter, the world was very promising, but it’s always filled with misery. We are half-conscious, crazy people doing the best we can and the worst we can all the time, but there was this moment of promise in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, in South America, democratic promise. I’m not saying heaven on earth, but promise.
For all kinds of reasons that we could spend many, many hours discussing, so much of this was squandered that it’s very hard not to view current times through that prison for somebody of my vintage. I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to go to my rest thinking that this country has given up on its democratic promise no matter how flawed we are even at our best or these other parts of the world. It wasn’t just the fact that I was 32 years old and you’re innately, although I don’t know that that’s the case now with people who are 32 years old, but there was some sense that the world could turn a corner for the better, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the idea that history could go backward so profoundly is instructive about the precarity of human arrangements and behavior and foolishness. That’s why I’m in this business not just because it’s so immensely fun and satisfying, but because I hope it helps somehow lead the other way.
Debbie Millman:
Well, what I can say is that with you at the helm of The New Yorker, it gives all of us hope that that’s possible.
David Remnick:
That’s immensely generous. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
David Remnick, thank you so much.