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- [00:01]
Tonya Moseley
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from npr. Before we start the show, you may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to npr. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Millions of people, people like you, depend on the NPR network as a vital source for news, entertainment, information and connection. We are proud to be here for you. And now, more than ever, we need you to be here for us. It's time to join the movement to defend public media. Visit donate.NPR.org and if you are already a supporter via NPR or other means, thank you. Your support means so much to us. Now, more than ever, you help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you. This is FRESH air. I'm Tonya Moseley. Today I am joined by Amanda Hess. She's a journalist, cultural critic and now author of a new memoir titled Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. The book starts with a moment every expecting parent dreads, a routine ultrasound that is suddenly not routine. When Hess was 29 weeks pregnant, doctors spotted something that indicated her baby could have a rare genetic condition. What followed was a spiral of MRIs, genetic testing, consultations with specialists, and, like many of us would do, a late night dive into the Internet for answers. That search led her down a rabbit hole into fertility tech, AI powered embryo screening, conspiracy theories, YouTube birth vlogs, the performance of motherhood on Instagram. And threaded through it all, an unsettling eugenic undercurrent suggesting which children are worth having known. For her commentary on Internet culture and gender at the New York Times, Hess turns her critique inward, asking herself, what does it mean to become a parent while plugged into an algorithmic machine that sorts scores and sells versions of perfection and what's considered normal? Amanda Hess, welcome to FRESH air.
- [02:40]
Amanda Hess
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:43]
Tonya Moseley
You opened this book with a moment that I mentioned soon to be parents fear. That's a routine ultrasound that shows a potential abnormality. And at the time you were seven months pregnant. What did the doctor share with you?
- [02:59]
Amanda Hess
He told me that he saw something that he didn't like. And that phrase has really stuck with me. But what he saw was something that when I saw It I thought was cute, which is that my son was sticking out his tongue.
- [03:13]
Tonya Moseley
And.
- [03:13]
Amanda Hess
And that's abnormal if the baby is, like, not just bringing the tongue back into the mouth. Although, of course, I didn't know that at the time. After several weeks of tests when I was about eight months pregnant, we learned that my son has Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome, which is an overgrowth disorder that, among other things, can cause a child to have a very enlarged tongue.
- [03:40]
Tonya Moseley
One of the things you do in your writing that's really powerful is you integrate the ways that technology really infiltrates every waking moment of our lives, including this particular moment when the doctor looked at your ultrasound. And I'd like for you to read about this moment just before you receive that news from the doctor. You're on the sonogram table. You're waiting for the doctor to arrive. And as you're lying there with that goo that they put on your stomach to allow for the ultrasound wand to glide over your pregnant belly, your mind begins to race. Can I have you read that passage?
- [04:16]
Amanda Hess
Sure. The errors I made during my pregnancy knocked at the door of my mind. I drank a glass and a half of wine on Mark's birthday. Before I knew I was pregnant, I swallowed a tablet of Ativan for acute anxiety. After I knew, I took a long, hot bath that crinkled my fingertips. I got sick with a fever and fell asleep without thinking about it. I waited until I was 35 years old to get pregnant. I wanted to solve the question of myself before bringing another person into the world. But the answer had not come. Now my pregnancy was in the language of obstetrics geriatric. For seven months, we'd all acted like a baby was going to come out of my body like a rabbit yanked from a hat. The same body that ordered mozzarella sticks from the late night menu and stared into a computer like it had a soul. The body that had just a few years prior snorted a key of cocaine supplied by the party bus driver hired to transport it to medieval times, this body was now working very seriously to generate a new human. I had posed the body for Instagram, clutching my bump with two hands as if it might bounce away. I had bought a noise machine with a womb setting and thrown away the box. Now I lay on the table as the doctor stood in his chamber, rewinding the tape of my life. My phone sat on an empty chair six feet away, smothered beneath my smug maternity dress. It blinked silently with text messages from Mark. If I had the phone, I could hold it close to the exam table and Google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers. I could consult the pregnant women who came before me, dust off their old message board posts and read of long ago ultrasounds that found weird ears and stuck out tongues. They had dropped their babies fates into the Internet like coins into a fountain. And I would scrounge through them all looking for the lucky penny for the woman who returned to say it turned out to be nothing. Trick of light.
- [06:36]
Tonya Moseley
Thank you so much for reading that, Amanda. I think that every soon to be mother, every mother can really identify with that. And I think just in life, like we've come to this place with our relationship with technology, that we can kind of Google our way out of tough moments. You write about receiving that first alarming warning of this abnormal pregnancy and how even before getting a second or third opinion that clarified this diagnosis, your mind didn't jump to something you did, but to something that you were. And that moment seemed to crystallize kind of this deeper fear about your body and how it's surveilled and judged, especially in pregnancy. Can you talk just a little bit about how technology also kind of fed into your judgment about yourself?
- [07:26]
Amanda Hess
Yeah. You know, I started to think about writing a book about technology before I became pregnant, not sort of planning to focus it on this time in my life. And then instantly once I became pregnant, my relationship with technology became so much more intense and I really felt myself being influenced by what it was telling me. I'm someone who, you know, I understand that reproduction is a normal event, but it really came as a shock to me when there was a person growing inside of me and I felt like I really didn't know what to do. And so I also, you know, early in my pregnancy, didn't want to talk to any people about it. So I turned to the Internet. I turned to apps. Later, when my child was born, I turned to gadgets. And it was only later that I really began to understand that these technologies work as narrative devices and they were working in my life to tell me a certain story about my role as a parent and the expectations for my child.
- [08:36]
Tonya Moseley
I want to go back a little bit to deepen what you're saying here to that undercurrent of, I think you used the term in the book, maternal impression that creeps into modern medicine. This notion that your thoughts and feelings and anxieties can physically mark your child. In your case, as you are on the Internet, you're reading, you're Connecting with other would be mothers and mothers. Your medical chart flagged this single dose of Ativan that you took early in your pregnancy as teratogen exposure with that root terada, meaning monster. And Ativan, I should know, is this anti anxiety medicine that you took during this month moment when you were really stressed out with work? You wrote, actually, when I decoded its medical terminology, it said that I had created a monster. Now, two things that stood out to me about this. First, I hadn't considered how blame and guilt are almost baked into the medical system just through terminology. And I also wondered, once that doctor said that thing to you at seven months when you're on the table, did you have to convince yourself that you didn't cause your son's condition?
- [09:48]
Amanda Hess
I mean, I think I just assumed I did until much later when I started to feel as if it didn't really matter how it happened, that I had created my son and he was wonderful and I was capable as his mother. But I carried that idea with me for such a long time. I think what was so clarifying about looking up the medical terminology was that hundreds of years ago there was this idea of the maternal imagination or the maternal impression, which is a pseudo scientific idea that a pregnant woman can, you know, see a monkey in the zoo and her child will come out with ape like traits, or that she could see some kind of monstrous thing and that her child will come out to resemble a monster. And this was an explanation for birth defects. And I found that even though all of those ideas had been, you know, discredited, there was still this undercurrent of blame that was really palpable to me. And I even found that at a certain point, you know, after my pregnancy had been flagged as high risk and fetal abnormalities had been found in my son, it was me and my pregnancy that became the thing that people with normal pregnancies were advised to avoid. So I would read anti anxiety books that said, you know, you know, don't spend time thinking about pregnancy complications because they're quite rare.
- [11:42]
Tonya Moseley
As if you could do that. Right.
- [11:44]
Amanda Hess
So I too had anxiety and I also had pregnancy complications. And so I felt sort of like I had been brought along on this journey, this highly feminized journey that was supposed to like bring all pregnant women along and tell them what to do. And then, you know, suddenly I had been cast out and I had to sort of scurry over to a different part of the Internet.
- [12:12]
Tonya Moseley
You encountered though, on the Internet that pseudoscience with these fringe theories. You actually encountered this influencer who suggested that your stress in life, or you figuratively biting your tongue might have actually caused your baby's enlarged tongue.
- [12:31]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, that's true. There's certainly still pseudoscientific practitioners working, maybe, you know, more so this week than last week. I don't even know. But I did find someone who believes that things like cancer, even like the flu Covid, are caused by internal conflicts. And there was something about that. Even though that's completely false and total nonsense, understanding that that was a cultural idea that this person was crystallizing and promoting really helped me to forgive myself. Because when you put it that way, like, it's completely ludicrous. I know that my son's genetic condition was not caused by something I thought during pregnancy, but at the time there was this sub rational part of myself that really felt that that was true.
- [13:33]
Tonya Moseley
Can you describe this part of the Internet that you felt relegated to once you received your son's diagnosis?
- [13:41]
Amanda Hess
Yeah. You know, I spent the beginning part of my pregnancy using an app called Flo. And Flo presents you with this CGI kind of fetus poppet that looks like a. A very cute pre baby and is floating around in this like ethereal mist. And again, it sounds so ludicrous, but when I was holding that in my hand, it felt on some emotional level like I was looking at my baby. And then, you know, once doctors began to find some abnormalities on the actual medical portal to my body in the ultrasound, I realized that of course this image that Flo had promoted to me was a lie. It has no special insight into the baby inside of me, obviously. And I also came to understand that it promotes this idea to all of the hundreds of millions of people who use it during pregnancy that that is what their baby ought to look like. That is what they should expect their baby to look like. And once I realized that wasn't the case, you know, I wanted to see images of people like my son. I wanted to understand what his life would be like, and I wanted to understand what my life would be like as a caretaker for him. So I started like deep Googling Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome. And what I found was a lot of tabloid news of the weird reports about children born with extra large tongues. I found Reddit threads from people who were quite cruel about the very existence of these babies. I found parents of children who had the condition who were asking for funds for medical care or presenting their children's lives, trying to raise awareness of it and look for acceptance. And I found the Response to those people ranged from appreciation to disgust. And it was not until my son was born. I remember two minutes before my son was born, my doctor finally recommended that I have a C section. And after, like, 24 hours of labor or something, I was ready for it. But I cried. And I realized that I was crying because I was afraid. I was afraid to meet my son. And the minute I did, like. And he was a person finally, who I had a real relationship with. All of these imagined images of him and potential lives for him dissolved. And it was really only at that moment that I realized how disability can be so divorced from its human context through these technologies and how, like, I really needed to just meet this baby in order to put it back there.
- [17:02]
Tonya Moseley
This part of the book was really moving to me, because what you're really grappling with as well is, like, the value of information now at our fingertips. Because on one hand, you receive that scary ultrasound and these tests, and then you were able to dig through the Internet and find all of these cases, which I'm sure when you talk to doctors about them, they would say, like, well, those are the most extreme cases. That's why people are writing about them on the Internet. But then it puts you in kind of, like, this really profoundly tough position to be in because it's divorcing you from that innate part of motherhood that comes with acceptance and understanding. And then you being able to move into motherhood with the knowledge that, you know. Did you ever wonder if you had known, say, like, at 10 weeks or earlier, might you have felt the pressure to make a different choice of not to move forward with your pregnancy?
- [18:09]
Amanda Hess
I've wondered that many times. One of the technologies that I write about in the book is the nipt, which is a blood test of the pregnant person that can be done very early in pregnancy, as early as nine weeks. And there are now consumer versions of this test that are used to screen the blood for the potential appearance of certain genetic changes. And BWS is so rare, it's found, I think, at this point in about 1 in 10,000 births, that it really wouldn't make sense to test every person for it. But I remember asking a doctor, you know, could you do this really early in pregnancy? And she said, yeah, like, technically you could. And I really fear thinking about who I was as this very scared, newly pregnant person who felt insufficient to the job of parenting, that I would be influenced to consider abortion. And later in my pregnancy, I had an even scarier prenatal test that suggested that it was possible that the genetic abnormality in my child was catastrophic. And I was steeling myself for abortion at that point, too. It was not catastrophic. There was not a brain abnormality like I had feared. I was so grateful that there were just a few places in the United States that I could have sought an abortion had I needed or wanted to. And so nothing about this experience has made me question my feeling that abortion should be available to any person who needs or wants it in any context. But I do have this new understanding of the context in which these decisions are being made. And I think that context is really lacking. And so it's not the availability of abortion. It's not even the availability of some of these prenatal tests. Ultimately, I was really glad that my son was diagnosed before he was born because it meant that his doctors could be waiting for him right when he came out. But I also understood only then that these choices are being made in a culture that highly stigmatizes disability and that expects women to sacrifice everything about themselves in their body in the pursuit of creating a healthy, which I think is a euphemism for normal child. And it's that context that I hope we can challenge.
- [21:28]
Tonya Moseley
Our guest today is author and cultural critic Amanda Hess. We're talking about her new book, Second Having a Child in the Digital Age. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Moseley, and this is FRESH air. Tariffs, recessions, how Colombian drug cartels gave us blueberries all year long. That's the kind of thing the Planet Money podcast explains. Sarah I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and on Planet Money, we help you understand the economy and how things all around you came to be the way they are. Para que sepas. So, you know, listen to the Planet Money podcast from npr. Imagine, if you will, a show from NPR that's not like npr, a show that focuses not on the important, but the stupid, which features stories about people smuggling animals in their pants, incompetent criminals and ridiculous science studies. And call it Wait, Wait, don't tell Me, because the good names were taken. Listen to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me. Yes, that is what it is called. Wherever you get your podcasts, this message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. No idea where to sell. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Once you've Reached your audience. Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. Go to Shopify.com NPR to take your business to the next level. Today I want to talk a little bit about how tech elites are investing in ways to optimize babies. And you actually began to see threads of this early on with that app that you mentioned earlier called Flow, which you started using as a period tracker. And then it evolved to become a pregnancy tracker which had message boards kind of operated like this place for perfect pregnancies. It sounds like.
- [23:29]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, I think there's a mode that these apps are working in which is habituating people to having their bodies and their reproductive activities tracked in order to ostensibly improve them in some way. So as I was using Flo, you know, not only did it present me this idealized, cute, able bodied fetus, it was feeding me information about what I ought to do, the actions I should take, the things that I should eat in order to ensure that I had this ideal pregnancy.
- [24:15]
Tonya Moseley
And when you tried to talk about your son's condition, though, what did you encounter on those message boards?
- [24:21]
Amanda Hess
In particular, as soon as I had an abnormal ultrasound and my pregnancy was recategorized as high risk, I started searching for those terms within flo's message boards and. And they said, I'm sorry, please try searching for something else. And so I felt like even in this subtle way that the app was programmed, I was being told that like, my pregnancy had no space in that community.
- [24:59]
Tonya Moseley
Is there something inherently different about an app and us being able to hold these technologies, you know, in the palm of our hand and constantly have access to them? You know, I'm thinking about when I was a pregnant person and I just had all the books around, what to expect when you're expecting and other types of text, that some of them were written by men, some of them were written by pseudoscientists, all of these things. But I saw them as resources, but not places of fact and understanding. Is there something inherently different about our relationship when it is presented to us in the form of technology that has a different effect on us?
- [25:41]
Amanda Hess
I think so. I had books too. And, you know, the first difference I noticed is that I wasn't carrying this like, big pregnancy book everywhere I went, but my phone was always there. And so even if I did not intend to bring my pregnancy app with me, it was there constantly. And so I found myself looking at it again and again. Also, a book is a set document. It covers a limited number of scenarios and there's, like, a real limitation to that, but it also means that it can't be sort of, like, tweaked and engineered so that it serves you some seemingly new piece of information, like, every day or every few hours. I found myself looking at Flo during my pregnancy, like, 10 times a day, even though I think this is so sick. But I was not looking to Flo for actual advice or real information. I wasn't taking that information and changing my diet or my movements. I think I was looking for reassurance that I was doing okay. And so even if I wasn't doing exactly what this app had said, I wasn't missing something major. And there was someone, it really felt like, along with me, who was keeping track. And so there became this real intimacy to our pseudo relationship that I didn't have with, like, an informational pregnancy book.
- [27:20]
Tonya Moseley
That sense of reassuredness, too. I wanted to talk a little bit about, like, the privilege in that, because on the face of it, it's like the ability to know and understand that all seems positive. I'm thinking about, like, some of the big technologies that are. That are coming into fruition now or already there, like OpenAI, Sam Altman's funding of the genomic prediction, which is supposedly going to offer embryo tests predicting everything from diabetes risk to potential IQ of a baby. But you point this out in the book that there is a growing divide, because on one side, there are these affluent parents who have access to this kind of screening, and then on the other, many parents can't even get basic access to prenatal care. How did your experience kind of help you reflect on those extremes?
- [28:12]
Amanda Hess
You know, I think after the particular circumstances of my pregnancy, I became really interested in prenatal testing and how it was advancing and interested in the fact that it was so. It seemed like such an exciting category for all of the male tech leaders that we know so much about now. And, you know, it was only through, like, reading about them a little bit that I came to understand that this new ascendant technology that offers what they call polygenic analysis of embryos. So, you know, different outlets promise to find different characteristics, but they're offering everything from screening that predicts an increase in IQ points that screens for hereditary cancers. All of this stuff is something that you can only use if you're going to go through ivf. And so after paying for this embryo screening, which is a few thousand dollars, you're also choosing to go through in vitro fertilization, which is not only just a really difficult experience. For many people, but extremely expensive and out of reach for most people. And as I was reading one story about this, I was really struck by a woman who founded one of these companies who told one of her investors that instead of going through IVF herself, she should simply hire a surrogate and have her do it for her. And that, to me, really crystallized this idea of like a reproductive technology gap. I think the thing that worries me the most about these technologies is, again, there seems to be so much interest and investment in understanding what certain children will be like and trying to prevent children with certain differences and very little investment in the care for those children, research that could help these children and adults. And so I really found myself on both sides of this divide where I had access to what was at the time, you know, some advanced prenatal testing, but was also able to see after my child's birth that, you know, he was being born into a world that is not innovating in the space of accommodating disabilities in the way that it is innovating in the space of trying to prevent them.
- [31:07]
Tonya Moseley
Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking to author Amanda Hess about her new book, Second Having a Child in the Digital Age. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR on the Indicator from Planet Money podcast. We're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs.
- [31:28]
C
It's called in game theory, a trigger.
- [31:31]
Tonya Moseley
Strategy, or sometimes called grim trigger, which.
- [31:33]
Amanda Hess
Sort of has a cowboy esque ring.
- [31:36]
Tonya Moseley
To it to what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's the Indicator from Planet Money on the next through line from npr for the presidency, I'm indebted to Almighty God. I'm in charge of the country and I need to serve all the American people and not just the political machine, the origins of the modern civil service. Listen to Throughline wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk a little bit more about our presentation online and also kind of this idea of surveillance. So your work as a cultural critic, you often touch on surveillance, both state and personal. And in this book, you describe how new parents also surround themselves with surveillance tech. So baby monitors and nursery cameras that are constantly watching. And of course, in our daily life, we're all under so many forms of surveillance. How do you think this surveillance culture is affecting us? Or how did it affect you in those early days as a mother when you've got that baby monitor in your Baby's room. Like, are we habituating our children to be watched 24 7?
- [32:53]
Amanda Hess
I think we are. I mean, I had this experience of during pregnancy, habituating myself to some external authority watching my pregnancy. And then after my child was born, I became the authority who was watching him and surveilling him. And I think there's this way that surveillance can become confused with care and attention and love. And I had this experience with my kids where I'd installed this fancy baby monitor that I was testing out for the book. And the video was uploaded to some cloud server so I could watch it from anywhere. I could watch them if they were taking a nap in their crib, but I was at the coffee shop down the street or whatever, and somebody else was there with them. And it could make it seem as if I were close to them because I would see my adorable children and have this experience of being able to just watch them sleep peacefully, which is so different from the experience of dealing with them most of the time. But it wasn't until one night when the camera was set up and I laid down with my son in his bed and. And I sensed this presence in the corner of the room, these, like, four red glowing eyes that I really understood.
- [34:15]
Tonya Moseley
I could see it from his perspective.
- [34:16]
Amanda Hess
That I could really see it from his perspective. And, like, he's not seeing, you know, this beautiful, like, smiling image of me watching him. Like he's seeing four mechanical eyes. And I spoke with my friend who had used a camera with her kid, who eventually she asked for it to be taken out when she was three years old or something, and could articulate this because she didn't want the eye, as she called it, to be watching her in her bedroom. And I think, you know, so many times these technologies are purchased by parents before their kids are even born, and they want to do what's right and they're scared, you know, and they want to make sure that they have everything they need, like, before the child arrives. And so we're not even giving ourselves a chance to really understand what it is we're getting and whether we actually need it.
- [35:10]
Tonya Moseley
Right. I mean, this goes back to, like, your ability to control the situation. I remember there was a time when I think our baby monitor went out in the middle of the night. So I woke up, like, from a deep sleep. It's 8 o' clock. I'm like, wow. We slept for, like, eight, nine hours. And I realized that the baby monitor had died.
- [35:30]
Amanda Hess
And that's happened to me.
- [35:32]
Tonya Moseley
I was completely okay. I was Completely free. Like, what if I missed, like, a catastrophe that happened? But then when you think back, it's like, okay, if that were the situation, I would have heard it. I mean, I have my senses. Do you feel like these technologies in many instances, kind of take us outside of ourselves from. We're, like, giving control over to the technology?
- [35:55]
Amanda Hess
Yeah. I had this experience with my son where I heard about a robotic crib called the Snoop. Before he was born, I got this secondhand version off of a parental listserv and set it up before he was born. So it was just sitting there waiting for him to come sleep in it. And the snu, you know, promises that SNU babies tend to sleep one to two hours more than other babies, which is such a tantalizing promise to a new parent. Like, one to two hours is so many hours for the parent of a newborn. And my son just really didn't take to the snu. And I spent such a long time, like, trying to troubleshoot the snoo to try to get it to work for my baby, until eventually I found that I was really, like, troubleshooting my child. And he had become so entwined with the technology that I really didn't know where the workings of the machine ended and where my son's, you know, sleep patterns began. And so this technology that's often sold as a tool to help us better understand our kids and get, like, data insights into them. In this case, for me, it actually made it more difficult for me to understand what was going on with him and, like, how he really wanted to sleep.
- [37:31]
Tonya Moseley
So now you're a mother of two. When you wrote this book, you started off with the pregnancy and birth of your first. This book is called Having a Child in the Digital Age. That's the subtitle. How are you feeling about the future of raising a child in the digital age? Do you see, like, any positive trends in digital culture for the next generation, or do you kind of worry about these issues that we've talked about? Will they only intensify? Where are you on this now?
- [38:00]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing that I don't want to think about is just that very soon my kids will have access to devices, whether it's at school or in our home, where they can just, like, log on themselves and see what's out there. It's something that I'm just, like, not prepared to deal with at the moment. There are, like, a couple of things that I was so grateful to have access to during my pregnancy that I Hope will be helpful for my kids. And one was, you know, groups that are dedicated to the particular rare disorder that my son has, where people who have this syndrome or family members who are caretakers can come together and just talk about their experiences. And just seeing the thousands of people who are members of these groups and seeing those numbers is so comforting to me because it reminds me that, like, my. My son is not alone. We were not alone with him. There is this whole community of people who have, you know, they look the same in some way. They experience some of the same social stigmas, they experience some of the same medical traumas and medical experiences, and they just don't exist in a geographical community because the condition is too rare. So these groups are a real reminder for me that the Internet can be such a balm to communities of people who can't access each other offline. And similarly, I think the disability justice community is such, like, a wonderful community that I hope that my son, whether he ends up identifying as disabled or not, has some access to. And that is really helped by just the accommodation of being able to meet online. And so I think there are so many ways that my kids could find solace there, but I really think we're just. We're so robbed of the ability to understand what good technology would look like, because technology is not, for the very most part, being developed for the betterment of human beings. It's being developed to drive profits. And so all of these, like, wonderful parts of online communities are embedded in that capitalist structure, and they're held hostage by it. And so I really think, to the extent, like, I don't think phones are the problem. I don't think the Internet is the problem. I think these devices are indicative, unfortunately, of much larger problems. And it's really going to take, like, the socialization of technology in order for us to really understand its potential as, like, something that's positive for us and our children.
- [41:19]
Tonya Moseley
Well, Amanda, I really appreciate you writing this book, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about it.
- [41:25]
Amanda Hess
Thank you so much.
- [41:27]
Tonya Moseley
Amanda Hess is a journalist, cultural critic, and author of the memoir Second Having a Child in the Digital Age. Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Daniel Kellman's latest novel, the Director. This is Fresh air. Know that fizzy feeling you get when you read something really good. Watch the movie everyone's been talking about, or catch the show that the Internet can't get over. At the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, we chase that feeling four times a week. We'll serve you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, tv, music and more, from low brow to highbrow to the stuff in between. Catch the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from npr, npr. You're listening to the NPR Network, live from NPR News. I'm Lakshmi. A living, breathing record of your neighborhood, the country, the world, told by thousands of local journalists who live in the places where stories unfold, backed by a national newsroom that puts it all in perspective. Hear the whole country's story. Hear ways of thinking that challenge your own. Hear the bigger picture with npr. German born writer Daniel Kellman was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 for his novel Till. His latest novel, the Director, is largely set in Nazi Germany and raises questions about art and collaboration. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
- [42:50]
C
In the German Legend, Faust signs a contract with the devil, exchanging his immortal soul for vast knowledge and other earthly rewards. It's a cut and dried transaction. In Daniel Kellman's new novel, the Director. The demonic deal making is murkier, more drawn out. Little by little, a series of compromises eat away like acid at the integrity of a once great artist. Not only is Kellman's rendering of the Faustian bargain more psychologically plausible than the original, but but it takes its inspiration from a true life story. The Director is an historical novel based on the life of G.W. papst, the early film director who worked with actresses like Louise Brooks, Lottie Lenya and Greta Garbo. Papp's career moves were circuitous and puzzling, which makes him a tasty subject for historical fiction. He was born in Austria and worked in theater in New York as a young man. Then after World War I, he became one of the most influential directors in Germany. Pabst moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and was a temporary and less successful member of that emigre colony of filmmakers that included Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. On a trip to France in 1939 to make a film and visit his mother, Pabst was stranded by the outbreak of war and returned to Nazi Germany. Enter the devil in the form of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. In Kelman's Reimagining, Goebbels cunningly wields a stick and a carrot. He alternates the accusation that Pabst was a communist who belongs in a concentration camp with appeals to Pabst's ego, bruised by Hollywood's treatment of him as a highbrow hack in Germany. Goebbels promises Pabst will make artistic films sublime films, films that touch the German hearts of good, deep, metaphysical people, to oppose the American cheap commercial trash with a resounding no. It's an offer Papst feels he can't refuse. As a novel, the director itself joins the pleasures of commercial fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas. Kelman clearly has fun vividly invoking a sunsplashed Hollywood party where Billy Wilder cavorts in a cowboy hat and studio execs casually confuse the emigre filmmakers with one another. But comedy turns sinister and surreal in later sections where Pabst and his family return to their castle in Germany, where the caretaker, now the local Nazi party leader, relegates them to the basement. And then there's the absurdist scene where Pabst directs close Hitler confidant Leni Reifenstahl in an imagined film. As the extras shipped in from a nearby detention camp look on, Reifenstahl insists that Papst retake the scene some 21 times. Each time, Reifenstahl's performance is terrible, but Paps quickly catches on that it's dangerous to tell her anything, but it's perfect, just perfect again. Perhaps Kelman's greatest accomplishment is that he manages to raise larger themes through compact dialogues. Here, for instance, is a conversation about art and morality that he conjures up between Pabst and his wife, Trudi, who was an actress and writer. All this will pass, Pabst tells Trudi, but art remains. Even if it remains, Trudi asks the art? Doesn't it remain soiled? Doesn't it remain bloody and dirty? Pabst responds this way. And the Renaissance? What about the Borgias and their poisonings? What about Shakespeare, who had to make accommodations with Elizabeth? He adds, the important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. Referencing his film Paracelsus, Pabst says Paracelsus will still be watched 50 years from now, when this nightmare is long forgotten. When do compromises turn into full blown capitulation? How many accommodations can someone make with evil before they themselves become part of the evil? Do we forget nightmares, or is history just the reliving of them over and over again? The director doesn't answer these questions, cannot answer them, but it leaves them rattling around in our minds like a roulette wheel that never stops spinning?
- [48:19]
Tonya Moseley
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the Director by Daniel Kelman on tomorrow's show. R. Crumb, the king of underground comics, a famous eccentric and a musician caught up in the blues and jazz of the past. Crumb created zap comics and characters like Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat. He's the subject of a new biography. I hope you can join us. FRESH air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed Today's show with Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Moseley.