Best of Design Matters: David Remnick

0:00This episode of Design Matters originally dropped in April of 2024. for. Part of what shaped me is when I was a young reporter, the world was a very promising, it was 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.

0:36From the TAT Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:44For 19 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, David Rimnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine, talks about his life and career and tests the limits of his memory. Look, the story I'll tell you may be completely false.

1:12Debbie's interview with David Grimmick takes place in front of a live audience at the On Air Fest on March 1st, 2024 in Brooklyn. David, I understand that you are planning to title the last book you ever write, Basically Fine. No, I think I'm going to title it Home by Ten. Well, tell us the story of Basically Fine. I have no idea what Basically Fine is. Oh, it was when you interviewed Kenzaburo Ore and you sent the article to... 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'm married to, I would not remember any of my life.

2:01The nature... Fortunately, I know your wife. Yes. And anything before my wife, I have no idea. So we'll struggle here for the next some minutes. But I'm not kidding around. Kenzabura Owe, like a lot of stories for journalists, is somebody that... Kenzebura Owe won the Nobel Prize, a Japanese author, I think just died very recently. And I was assigned to write a profile of Kenzebura Owe when I was a writer for The New Yorker, and Tina Brown was the editor. And I really struggled with this piece, and his English was about as, it's better than my Japanese, but it was not great. And 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.

2:50A half-filled notebook is hell on earth, and yet I wrote the piece anyway because that's what one does. And 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. And let me just say, in the annals of editor reaction, basically fine sucks. It sucks really bad. I tried to put it out of my mind, but you thankfully now have reinserted it. Just to prepare you, that might be happening a few more times. Yeah, yeah. You were born in New Jersey. I was. Deepest, darkest. Now, I'm going to be bringing up a lot of things that you've said before.

3:41I 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 sort of way. That's right. No ocean. You went to kindergarten in a yeshiva. That doesn't feel particularly Springsteenian. 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 cutoff date.

4:24So 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 Yavna. And I had my mouth washed out with soap by Mrs. Wool. Why? She should rot in hell. I think I... Very yeshiva-like. By the way, not just any soap. You know that kind of lava soap, which is combination soap and a stone? Yeah. It was that. I think I said a bad word of some kind. You know, like tuchus. That would get you to skip a grade now. Got my mouth washed out with soap. You were a newspaper junkie as a child and began reading The Village Voice at your neighborhood 7-Eleven.

5:13I did. I didn't even know 7-Eleven sold The Village Voice. 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 kind of 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. It's said to be very, very good. I haven't read it yet. It's covered on today's New Yorker website. I don't read it. I hear The New Yorker website is excellent.

5:52And the magazine is said to be good, too. It's pretty good. Funny cartoons and whatnot. Yeah. No photographs on the cover, though. Yeah, caption contest. Yeah. I have that, too. Yeah. I should subscribe. I'm really actually hoping you're going to give me some tips. On subscribing? Oh, I've got a lot of tips on that. No, no, no, no. On how to get to the top three in the caption contest. That's a bucket list item for me. Okay, can I just digress from the Village Voice for a second? Occasionally, I'm invited to, like, a fancy thing. and not very often, and once in a while I'll go, because curiosity killed the cat.

6:31So I went to this thing, and I was introduced to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And he says, hello, hello. I was very polite. I'm, you know, well brought up in New Jersey and whatnot. And he said, you know, 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. And so I said, wait a minute, you're the mayor of New York. You're the richest person in New York. And you want to win the fucking caption contest too? And he just didn't find this funny at all. And he said, yes.

7:21Yes. Well, we take it very seriously. I think he'd take himself very seriously. So anyway, I worship the village voice because it was, you know, the New York Times is the weather and it's the, you know, it was the establishment word and all that. And the voice was this other thing and filled with writers who wrote about themselves and they were at different spots in politics. And there was feminism. What was that? There was all this stuff about race, although there were no very few black writers. There's a, God knows, a condition not limited to just the village voice at that time. And it was, it just, you know, even in North Jersey, you feel, you don't feel like you're sitting here in Williamsburg or Manhattan or whatever.

8:05It feels a million miles away. And so to listen to WBAI or WNEW FM for music or the Caribbean station or this, that, and the other thing, radio was a big part of this. And imagining another life. Well, you were a child insomniac. And you've described yourself as an adolescent, no sleeper, all night listener, an eyes wide open, ceiling staring dreamer. Yeah, 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. Roxane Gay. Would have, yeah.

8:56Would it certainly have had the imagination to know that Hillsdale, New Jersey had its own emotional depths and interest 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. Wow. Yeah. So. Are you still an insomniac? Pardon me? Are you still an insomniac? Oh, no. I sleep like a rock because I live here. Mission accomplished. You started writing for your high school newspaper, The Smoke Signal, when you were 13.

9:43And from what I understand, none of your classmates were interested in contributing to the paper. 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? I still do. Are you a fan of Rachel Aviv? That's me. She's good, isn't she? She's really good. She's my favorite. Patrick Raddenkief? Me too. Me too. Now, you put this together yourself via old school layout and paste up techniques on your kitchen table. Yeah. How was it printed? Was it mimeographed? well let me tell you how paper is you you printed it out and you cut it and used scissors and glue it was a big mitzi it was a big deal and it was a terrible first of all beginning with the title was called the smoke signal because we were the Pasquak 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.

11:00But that came 30 years later, not the signal. That would be the CIA newspaper. And 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. You also got a job for what you've described as, quote, writing stupid little articles for one of the community giveaway papers featuring information about school board meetings. Yeah. But you also described it, and I love this, as the most romantic thing ever. Well, I left my house and I asked people impertinent questions and they answered them.

11:41You know the 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. You also started to play guitar around that time. and I believe your first instrument was something you called a Gesundheit guitar. A Gesundheit guitar would mean a bigger, healthy guitar.

12:31No, I had a crap guitar. But remember, what was the guitar? The guitar was like a notebook. The guitar was 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 flu, unless you wanted to be Jethro Tull. I was going to say Ian Anderson. Ian Anderson. But I just desperately wanted to, look, I grew up in a 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, you know, when he hit about, you know, in his 50s.

13:25And it was, there was a certain kind of desire to be another, to enter the big world, however deceptive that might be. That certainly was the animating spirit of everything I did, you know. 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.

14:13And so that all these things were very important to me. How did your parents' illnesses impact your ambition? 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, you know, in the global sense or even the metropolitan sense, the most disadvantage, but it suggested that the future would require me to help them. I was the older of two kids, and my father struggled on for a while, but he was a dentist, and he had a very, very small dental practice, and 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, it, he's screwed, right?

15:07In the conventional making a living sense. And 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. And so he, you know, by the time I came back from Moscow in my late 20s or 30, whatever I was, they were all in debt and, you know, 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.

15:50But in my, you know, egomaniacal teenage imagination, I knew that I had to make a living. How did that impact the choices that you were making about what you wanted? 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, and I'm going to be the next pick-your-favorite novelist. That was not... I needed a job. What gave you the sense that journalism would be a more secure option?

16:21Let's just let that sit. I love that people laugh at my jokes, but that wasn't really a joke. 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. Along with unprecedented. Exactly. And, you know, as somebody who now is ostensibly in charge of a lot of people, I'm thinking about this all the time.

17:02In other words, I'm 65 years old, right? 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. I mean, they deserve to make a living, but the whole business model has exploded. But back to your question, you know, 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. I mean, there ain't many Washington Post 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.

17:48There's barely a Miami Herald. Do you feel that choosing journalism over becoming a novelist or a poet, I know you also wrote poetry, was a compromise? That would have really filled the coffers for my parents. Yeah. The collected allergies. You could really raise a family on that income. Yeah. Do you feel like it was a compromise? 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. You know, 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.

18:29But then write. If you're going to do that, you will find a way. You have to find a way. And 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. And he got up early and he pushed himself and he wrote novels and got started and he was good at it. And 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. You went to Princeton University, which you said getting in was a miracle.

19:10To 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. And again, I just don't get it. There must have been some mistake. I'm not kidding around. I really don't get it. I mean, it was a top class, but there were other people at the top of the class, and I don't get it. They never reached out to you and asked you to come back for it? I had a stupid, nervous interview with a tie, and I don't know. You studied Russian and French, majored in comparative literature. Your parents thought that majoring in comparative literature was weird.

19:54My father asked me, what are you comparing? What are you comparing? Good question. Smart guy. I was comparing it to dentistry, as it happens. and Tolstoy won. You know, 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... I don't know. We have this wonderful man named Frank Falk. I don't know how he washed up at this high school, but he was teaching Russian.

20:36I thought, wow, cool. Okay. And 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. That was it. So I thought, third year at least, right? And I took the test they sometimes give you, the aptitude test. And Veronika Dolinka 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 kind of started all over again years later. I actually minored in Russian literature, in English translation.

21:27There you go. Just to avoid that whole scenario. That's fine. While at Princeton, you joined the University Press Club. In 1979, you co-founded the student newspaper, the Nassau Weekly. Still exists. I know. That's incredible. It is kind of amazing. You also became a stringer for the New Brunswick Home News, the Asbury Park Press, and interned at the Washington Post and Long Island Newsday. Overachiever much? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I have one quality that I will fest to. I have what my grandparents would call zitzflesh. If I put in front of a task, I will complete it. All right? I mean, if I have to write a long piece in three days, I won't move from the chair.

22:20It might not be all that good, but I will complete it. How are you able to write that fast? 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 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 kind of traditionalist training of covering police at night and having to do things very quickly.

23:10And 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. You interned at the Washington Post and then stayed there after graduation until they told you to go away for a year. Yeah, 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. And the day I landed, the three priests greeted me and they said that I may not date any students.

24:01And of course, I'm a really good boy. And I said, okay. And so I had a rather monastic Japanese existence and I read like a book or two a day. I couldn't speak any language. And I think they wanted me to stay for two years, and I stayed six months, and I traveled around all over Southeast Asia, you know, on$5 a day and all the hashish you could pocket, and came back and started a job at the Washington Post for real. Well, actually, you made a stop in Paris. I did. Clad in a Leon Russell t-shirt and$9 Converse sneakers. Yeah, those were good. You made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the subway.

24:37It was an 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 and you made enough money to survive doing the bus oh if you stay in a hotel for$4 a night it doesn't take long to make that much money 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. He was the editor of the Post during that time.

25:14And you said that you and most— And legendary podcaster Malcolm Gladwell as well. 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. Right. So they had glass—it was the beginning of the glass office period. And he was in his post-Watergate period, so he was already a celebrity, and he was incredibly handsome in an old wasp sort of way. Yeah, Jason Robards. 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.

25:59He had it all going on. But he was also in this kind of late mannerist period. His accomplishments, the big accomplishments, were a little behind him. He was kind of 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. And 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. What was the biggest thing you learned from him? Fearlessness in an editor is essential.

26:40If 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, that's, you know, you don't always sleep well. And 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.

27:32But they also have to be fair. And 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. And 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. Given the state of politics in the U.S. right now and the potential futures that may unfold, Again. Again. How worried are you about the validity of the news being questioned?

28:29I think it should be questioned. Well, in terms of what... You mean us being questioned? No. Yeah. Us being questioned as fake news, the whole way in which the news has been in many ways seen as false lies. And truths. 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 a very talented demagogue. and a 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.

29:27Our 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. I'm hoping. And 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.

30:37How 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. And I think that we do our best and fail all the time and then have to wake up and try again. You were in Russia during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years. Right. You returned to the U.S. 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 Sharansky 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.

31:36This was not your first attempt to work there. Can you tell us about the query letter you sent editor William Sean when you were still in college? Yeah, this was really kind of ballsy. So William Sean, the New Yorker was a very, from the outside at least, a very insular, special institution. And 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. and 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.

32:13It seemed not for me. It seemed sort of not of the 70s. I was interested in Rolling Stone, which now seems like, you know, of a time. No, then it was a Bible. But the invention of the, the insight of Rolling Stone was that it discovered that the counterculture was the culture. So that's a profound insight. Think of everything else what you will or Jan Wenner or whatever, but that was an insight. It was a business, but it was exciting, certainly to a 16-year-old imagination sitting in New Jersey. So I wasn't interested in The New Yorker. And 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.

32:59Geology. and then I got into it and it was magnificent. It was like discovering Renaissance painting or something. It's just, oh my, how did I miss this all my life? But I will say 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 and I wrote a query letter to William Sean, who was a kind of gnomic, genius, odd, distant figure. It was like writing a letter to Buddha. And you expected about the same result. Dear Buddha. Dear Buddha.

33:41And I, dear Mr. Sean, 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. And when he broke his right arm, his strong arm, he played with his left arm and he beat everybody anyway. And he took an enormous amount of drugs. And it turned out he was also quite disturbed and died very young. But he seemed like the kind of profile of a deeply eccentric, interesting person. I got back the following letter. Dear Mr. Remnick Mr. Wind covers racket sports for us I love the Mr.

34:28Wind part like I who the fuck is Mr. Wind and when it said sincerely yours William Sean 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. And the structure of the piece would be we came to the first hole.

35:00Go on. And there would be many columns. And then, which brought us to the second hole which was a dog leg left of 343 yards, par 4. People ask me, why are the pieces in The New Yorker so long? And I say, you should have seen it back when. I mean, we used to do four-part series on literally on grains. And of course, there were four-part series that were brilliant, you know, Janet Malcolm or whatever, McPhee. But there's a sociology to this too. So why are Dostoevsky and Dickens' novels so long? They're so long because in the 19th century, literary magazines were middle class entertainment and crime and punishment being published in The Bell in Corkle or Dickens being published in Blackstones.

35:48This was entertainment for the kind of 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 Sean's, one of his biggest challenges 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. Well, when you took over in 1998, the magazine had lost an estimated$170 million since the Newhouse family had bought it in 1985.

36:41This was not the only precarious time in its history. I believe you are in possession of a letter from co-founder Raul Fleischman to a colleague stating that they needed to shut the magazine down in May of 1925, just three months after the debut issue. That was before the word precarity was around, but there it was. It took three years. But the magazine has actually been profitable since 2001. 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.

37:33the nature of of advertising has changed and is completely and utterly dominated by google and facebook and they they i don't know what the real numbers are but something like 75 of the ad market is to to that and the rest is scraps and the result has been in addition to other factors like craigslist and so on has been the decimation of mid-level newspapers I mean, 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.

38:16The only other alternative that I know of at the moment is subscriptions. The same thing that television has discovered. And 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. And The New Yorker, in fact, gives you a great deal more per day, per week than when Mr. Sean 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.

39:03You've all woken up and go, wait a minute. I have Netflix. I have Paramount+. And then there are even apps now to get rid of or shave down your subscriptions. Which was the original cable system. Exactly. So, you know, 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, right?

39:41You know, we have the New Yorker Radio Hour with my colleague David Kras 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 know, you wake up and something terrible's happened. And I'm determined, you know, 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 in 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.

40:18So I think about that kind of thing all the time. 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? Because, you know, it's like, you know, I'm not saying we're Michael Jordan, but, you know, when Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls to go play baseball, that was kind of, one could argue it was both galling and a little stupid and like, why are you doing that? I think it's actually kind of interesting.

40:53As my son, I once said, you know, 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. And sometimes places that expand and suddenly start serving, you know, something else, fail. I just think it's enormous fun. And I also think it reaches other people. Is there an underlying principle or philosophy that is guiding the continued expansion into podcasts? That would be good. And they have to make their own way.

41:35The latest one, well, two things have started of late. There's a culture podcast with Alex Schwartz and Vincent Cunningham and Nomi Fry, which is extremely fun and funny and smart. and 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, you know, they stayed in Minnesota, and 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.

42:19These are serious reporters. And 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. And there's an editor at The New Yorker named Willing Davidson who works with them, and Chris Bannon, who does heads of podcasts and audio in general at Condé Nast, is in deep contact with them. But they're really ambitious. They're shooting for the moon. They also had a kind of mini season that took a New Yorker piece by Heidi Blake called The Runaway Princesses. And I thought it was terrific. So I have – look, I just listen to a lot of audio. It's always meant a lot to me, podcasts and radio.

43:00And 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 with ourselves, a noble failure. It wasn't embarrassing, but it didn't take off. It didn't garner the attention and it didn't quite work. How long do you give something before you make that decision? 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 cereal, like any number of other things, that's more expensive to do.

43:43In a recent episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, you interviewed a meme mixologist. Yeah. And I'd never heard that job title before. God knows I hadn't either. Can you share what that actually is for the audience? No, I can't. No. I really, have you ever had the feeling, and maybe you're having it right now, that you were interviewing something and the producers said, you know, we're going to interview a meme mixologist. And you say, okay, 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. Yeah. Fair enough. But no, I'm not experiencing that, thankfully.

44:20The last thing I want to talk to you about is music. In your latest book, Holding the Note, Profiles in Popular Music, you state that there's no one who has meant more to you than Bob Dylan. The passion... I don't think I'm alone in that. Yeah. Anybody here? Okay, well, older crowd perhaps. This passion was first ignited in 1966 when you first heard the song, I Want You. Yeah, it was a 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 novel named Harold Brodke, and he wrote a novel called The Runaway Soul.

45:07The novel opens with his own birth. And Harold claimed that he really remembered it. And it was important to him, this kind of 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. It could be a memory of a memory. Exactly. Because I'm a journalist, when I read memoirs, I read them in this spirit, all of them, including Bob Dylan's memoir, by the way. We'll get to that in a minute. Yeah. When I was seven, something like that, my mother got sick. she had the first serious attack of multiple sclerosis. And my father and my brother at that time must have been four.

45:59My father was not able to go to the hospital. I guess I was past the limit. And my father took me to the hospital, and it was very scary. Seeing your mother in a hospital bed, seeing your parents doing anything other than be in the kitchen is scary. The primal scene, let's not even think about that. Yeah. But Sick is really, that I really do remember. And as I recall, I heard this, we played the radio. My father liked music too, and he had good taste. You know, R &B, jazz, classical, I don't know. And someone was on the radio singing with a voice like, this was not Paul Revere and the Raiders.

46:46this was not your average pop music this was not chad and jeremy this was the guilty undertaker's size of lonesome organ grinder cries and what the fuck was he singing about and i was seven years old and it was thrilling and i was not yet at the age where i was allowed to buy albums and there was a store called ej corvettes a department store not a high level one it was out on i don't know Route 17 or Route 4, somewhere in Jersey. Corvette with a K. There you go. And 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.

47:31And it was okay. And then there was that song. And it was$1.99, I think, the album. So I bought other Bob Dylan albums going backwards. so that would have been the time of Blonde on Blonde and then Highway 61 revisited going backwards and backwards until then he was nothing but an acoustic guitar and a harmonica and that was a revelatory thing at a very young age 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. And to this day, I mean, I think the last time I saw Bob Dylan was four months ago with one of my children, who's now 32.

48:24And they've all, well, certainly Alex and 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. 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. Yeah, I got screwed with my pants on. Dylan wanted the cover. Dylan wanted the cover of The New Yorker. 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 a kind of, I don't know, surrealist experiment.

49:23And I was summoned. I said, well, send the manuscript to the publisher. He said, I can't send the manuscript. It would be like sending the Dead Sea Scrolls to my apartment. So I went to the Dillon 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. And you go up there, and it's just Dylan everything. Dylan tote bags and Dylan albums and Dylan this and Dylan that. And if I had gone when I was 16, my head would have exploded into a thousand pieces. And they sit me in a little room with a bare table and a manuscript and a glass of water.

50:01And I sat there and read the book straight through, Chronicles, volume one. And it was terrific. And 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. And we made an agreement. And we made a handshake agreement. Okay. And it still pisses me off. I know. As 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. And it got to the summer, and they called and they said, okay, we're about to publish it.

50:48And 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 and Bob doesn't necessarily have to be completely involved and so on and so forth. Whatever, whatever shit I was slinging, I thought I just thought everything's going to be great. And then they said, Bob wants a cover. I said, Bob wants a cover. We have like dogs on the cover or a bowl of fruit or a joke or Barry Blitt making fun of whatever. We don't have, we don't do that. We don't have photographs in the cover. and I thought I'd changed their mind, and there was a pause, and they said, Bob wants a cover.

51:32And it was like talking to your parents at your worst moment. 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. And they went to Newsweek, and by that time, Bob kind of looked like Vincent Price, you know, with a little mustache and a cowboy hat. And I thought, they're never going to put Bob Dylan on the cover. It's the middle of the presidential race. They put him on the cover, and they ran this excerpt, and apparently Bob Dylan survived the experience of not being published in The New Yorker. And then another thing happened.

52:08I saw that he had these paintings. He's a painter. He also makes whiskey and iron gates. A man of parts. He's got range. He's got range. and these paintings, some of them are kind of good and there was one, a painting of Katz's Delicatessen, right? 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. You think? Yeah. Malcolm Gladwell is here today to receive the 2024 Audio Vanguard Award.

53:03And you worked together at the Washington Post. Did I come in second? I'm just asking. 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. 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 in what was going on was singular and the news and the interest in the very topics of what was 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.

54:13I could go to my mailbox in the morning, my mailbox, and come up with a story just by reading my mail. Well, you could. I don't know that. 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. I mean, 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.

55:08And by the way, in the world. You know, part of what shaped me is when I was a young reporter, the world was a very promising place. It was 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. and for all kinds of reasons 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 prism for somebody of my vintage.

56:00And 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.

56:51And 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. 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. That's immensely generous. Thank you so much. David Remnick. Thank you so much. Design Matters is produced for the Pet Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Production. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world.

57:34The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland.