Transcript
Stephen Dubner (0:00)
Foreign hey there, it's Stephen Dubner and I would like to remind you about two live shows that we are putting on soon. The first One is on January 3rd in San Francisco. The second is in Los Angeles on February 13th. We have got some excellent guests for both shows, so please come hang out with us. Tickets are@freakonomics.com liveshows one word again. January 3rd ticket in February 14th, San Francisco and LA. Meanwhile, today on the show, a conversation with someone I know quite well, or at least used to. Someone who is smart, shrewd, very good at his work, and someone who taught me a lot, even if not always on purpose. Why don't you just say your name and what you do?
Adam Moss (0:49)
My name is Adam Moss. That's easy enough. I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
Stephen Dubner (1:00)
For a long time, Adam Moss was widely considered the best magazine editor around. He was the founding editor of Seven Days magazine, a clever and slightly transgressive arts and culture weekly. From there, he went to the New York Times Magazine, and after many years there, he took over New York Magazine, which he radically remade for the digital era. He won all the awards an editor can win. He directly shaped the careers of hundreds of writers and editors. Indirectly, he did the same for millions of readers. He left New York magazine in 2019, still on top, but feeling a bit too old for the game, a bit burned out and ready for something new. The something new eventually took the form of a book called the Work of How Something Comes From Nothing.
Adam Moss (1:51)
The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product, with all that kind of torture in between.
Stephen Dubner (1:59)
Many people who know Adam Moss were surprised that he wrote a book. He was one of the few magazine editors who didn't either start out as a writer or want to be a writer or think of themselves as a writer. He was a full fledged editor. An editor is mostly backstage. There's a lot of power and a bit of risk. A writer, meanwhile, is out front, directly in the line of fire. You work on a thing for months or years, and then it goes out into the world with your name on it. So if people hate it, they know where to find you. That's why it was so intriguing that Adam Moss would write a book. So we will talk about that today, but some other things, too, especially his tenure at the New York Times Magazine, where he happened to be my boss. This was in the late 1990s. I was what's called a story editor, which meant I came up with ideas, assigned them to writers and then shepherded those pieces through the editorial and publishing processes. The Times Magazine was considered a great magazine during this era, and it was a thrill to be inside of that. Also terrifying sometimes, but mostly a thrill, and mostly because our boss was really good at his job and we all got to watch and learn. That said, I quit the Times after about five years. It used to be that when someone left that place voluntarily and was relatively young, I was in my 30s, that people would think you're crazy. I was doing well as an editor and an occasional writer. The bosses told me I might be a boss before long. That was the last straw. I didn't want to be an editor or a boss. I just wanted to be a writer and I wanted to work on my own, not with a within a hierarchy. So I quit and I went off to write books, which is how I ended up here talking to you. When Adam Moss's book came out in early 2024, I read it right away. For me and many others who worked for him, it was a bit like discovering his journal. Everything that made him tick as an editor, as a boss was right there on the page. At the time, I was trying to make a podcast series about mentorship. The idea was that mentorship is this standard and successful practice in many real realms in education and sports, the military, in the medical and legal professions, and yet in other realms there's no standard mentorship at all. I wanted to know why not and whether something should be done about that. But the mentorship series just never came together. We couldn't find a center of gravity and eventually we gave up. Which is fine, that happens all the time in this kind of work. But there was one interview we did for the series that I was not willing to ditch. This one, the one with Adam Moss. Was he in fact a mentor to me? Or maybe more like the master who teaches an apprentice? Or was he just an old fashioned boss trying to extract labor? That's what today's conversation is about. It's the latest in our series of one on one conversations to end the year. Even if you are not a big fan of magazines, even if you have never held a paper magazine in your hands, I suspect that you will benefit from hearing Adam Moss's perspective. Because all of us at some point try to make something from nothing. So you might as well learn from a good teacher like I did. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. The title of Adam Moss's book, the Work of Art is, of course, a double entendre. He is the kind of person for whom entendres rarely come singly. There is a layer and then another layer, and usually a few more. This book is ostensibly a set of interviews with a variety of makers. Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, David Simon, Samin Nosrat, Will Shortz. And their stories unfold on pages that are packed with sketches and graphics, sidebars, footnotes. It is very much a magazine in book form, which makes sense considering that Adam spent nearly 40 years making magazines and this is his first book. Some people end up in magazines by accident. Like me, I just wanted to write, and that's where the writing jobs were. Adam was different. He was in love with the magazine form. So I asked what first drew him.