Episode 20: G.P.S. for Drunks, and Coming Home to Serbia

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour – Episode 20

Date: March 4, 2016
Host: David Remnick, WNYC Studios & The New Yorker

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Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour weaves together a variety of powerful stories: a satirical guide to navigating the city while inebriated, a musical portrait of an undocumented immigrant living in Texas, an in-depth conversation about the realities of sexual assault through the lens of the play "Slut", a colorfully recounted journey to reclaim a family mansion in Serbia, an explainer on the economics of cheap oil, and, finally, a crash course in electronic dance music. The episode balances humor, cultural critique, and deeply affecting testimony, always with an eye on the personal stories behind headline issues.

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Segment 1: "G.P.S. for Drunks"

[00:06–02:42]

• Content & Tone:
  A witty, performative skit written by Hallie Kanter, voiced with the dulcet, robotic tones of the real Siri (Susan Bennett), lampooning the experience of navigating New York City after a night of drinking.

• Highlights:

  • Humorous and relatable step-by-step "navigation," e.g., "carry your jacket because you are warm from alcohol and too lazy to do all that complicated stuff with your arms."
  • Social observations: “You're all just sailors on the sea of—oh, one of them is throwing up to the right.”
  • Touch of melancholy under the humor: “Vaguely wonder if you did anything embarrassing at the party. Enter an endless loop of anxiety in one minute. Hail a cab. Keep the windows open.”

• Notable Quote:

  • “If your head is down, you are invisible and therefore not rude.” — Hallie Kanter ([00:14])

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Segment 2: Michael Friedman’s "Undocumented" Song-Project

[02:42–10:12]

• Content:
  Composer Michael Friedman visits Texas during the presidential campaign to turn real interviews with locals into song—this time, focusing on Ramiro, an undocumented immigrant with a compelling and tumultuous life story.

• Key Points:

  • Ramiro’s background: separated from his mom for over 20 years, father deported, left to his own devices as a teenager.
  • Impact of Trump-era rhetoric and tangible fears within the immigrant community.
  • Internal dissent among Latino and Tejano Democrats in Texas.
  • Ramiro’s activism journey: from disillusionment to radical activism, including hunger strikes and political theater.
  • Dark humor and wisdom from years “fighting” the system.

• Memorable Moments:

  • Ramiro evades a police officer in Arizona by showing a Sam’s Club card instead of a license:
    • “Luckily in my wallet I had a Sam’s card... I showed him my Sam’s card, and it had my picture. The picture was blurry. And he took it and said, okay.” — Ramiro ([09:24])
  • Levity in the face of peril:
    • “If you buy in bulk, you must be American. You must be American.” — Ramiro ([09:48])

• Notable Quote:

  • “If Trump wins, I see like gestapo style raids, crazy stuff... If you're under attack, you can either run or fight.” — Ramiro ([08:18])

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Segment 3: "Slut, The Play" and Sexual Assault Testimony

[12:27–28:06]

• Content:
  David Remnick hosts playwright Katie Cappiello and actress Mary Miller for an honest, emotional discussion of the play "Slut", which confronts sexual assault, survivorhood, and community complicity.

• Key Discussion Points:

  • The play's structure: one side of the stage, Joey (the main character) gives her testimony; the other side, the community (gossip, judgement, rationalization).
  • Cappiello’s dedication to bringing authentic girls’ voices to the center—“Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out?” ([18:59])
  • The impact on young actresses: empowerment despite emotional exhaustion.
  • Mary Miller’s personal journey, playing a character similar to herself, offering hope and support to other survivors.
  • The ripple effect: many girls approaching Mary after performances, sharing their own stories, creating a rare sense of solidarity.

• Memorable Quotes & Moments:

  • “We so rarely get to hear that girl’s voice and her side of the story... and we wanted that girl's voice to be front and center.” — Katie Cappiello ([15:13])
  • “I wanted them to have what I didn’t get. I wanted that for them a lot.” — Mary Miller on supporting other survivors ([27:17])
  • “The girls will tell you this show has empowered them. It allows them to be at a house party on a Friday night and intervene...” — Katie Cappiello ([19:24])
  • “It's not like the only time I ever deal with rape is when I'm in the show... I'm kind of good at crying about it for a minute and then getting it together. You kind of have to be. That's how it goes.” — Mary Miller ([22:49])

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Segment 4: Coming Home to Serbia – The Odyssey of Bob Bozik

[28:06–41:22]

• Content:
  Nick Paumgarten profiles Bob Bozik, an iconoclastic, larger-than-life former bartender/boxer/bank robber, as he travels to Belgrade to reclaim a mansion expropriated from his family after WWII.

• Key Story Beats:

  • Bob’s tumultuous youth: foster care, homelessness, boxing career, brushes with crime.
  • The family mansion's saga: generations lost, communism, restitution, and bureaucracy.
  • Personal and psychological undertones: seeking a home and a legacy for his daughter Vesna.
  • The emotional and comic spectacle (showing off the massive, ceremonial "key", prepping to camp in the empty house, joking about a secret envelope and “the diamonds”).
  • Tense, unresolved conclusion as Bozik arrives to find himself without heat or electricity, waiting for the state’s final moves.

• Notable Quotes:

  • “Everything was just a preparation for the final fight. And this is my final fight.” — Bob Bozik ([35:09])
  • “I can't make sense of this life, so I’d like somebody’s interpretation.” — Bob Bozik ([40:01])

• Memorable Closing:

  • “So it begins. I got the decision last week... and now they've decided that, you know what, this guy, New York, we took the house in 1946, another few weeks in the dark and cold isn't going to hurt him.” — Bob Bozik in Belgrade ([40:45])

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Segment 5: Oil Economics with James Surowiecki

[43:03–48:20]

• Content & Insights:
  James Surowiecki, with guest Daniel Yergin, explains why cheap oil isn’t providing the expected economic boom. They break down the convergence of increased supply (notably from US shale), weaker global demand, and OPEC’s refusal to cut output, leading to a price collapse.

• Highlights:

  • US oil production nearly doubled (2008–2015) due to fracking.
  • OPEC’s strategic choice not to cut supply—a response to a changing geopolitical and economic landscape, especially growing production from Iran.
  • Cheaper prices cause job and investment losses in the U.S. shale industry, offsetting consumer savings.
  • The boom-and-bust cycle of the oil market is expected to continue, shaped by unpredictable geopolitical forces.

• Notable Quotes:

  • “The increase, the surplus in the oil market today is less than 2%, but it's been enough to drive oil prices down 70%.” — Daniel Yergin ([43:52])
  • “It's a story that has no ending in sight.” — Daniel Yergin ([48:20])

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Segment 6: Dance Music Politics & Kygo

[48:59–54:17]

• Content:
  Kelefa Sanneh introduces host David Remnick to the world of contemporary EDM, focusing on Norwegian DJ Kygo, whose “tropical house” sound has led him to a billion Spotify streams.

• Key Points:

  • Kygo’s tracks are slower than mainstream EDM and are described as “chilled out.”
  • The democratization/remixing of hits: Kygo gained fame through unauthorized remixes posted online.
  • EDM as “the new disco”—scorned by critics but beloved by fans.
  • The evolving genre landscape, with UK’s PC Music and other producers taking dance-pop in new directions.

• Memorable Moments:

  • David Remnick on the driving pulse of Kygo's music: “This is spinning class heaven here.” ([52:01])
  • Kelefa Sanneh: “Any song is always ripe for remixing or reconsideration and these categories really are unstable.” ([54:11])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:06] G.P.S. for Drunks (Hallie Kanter, Susan Bennett)
• [02:42] Michael Friedman's Song Project – Ramiro’s Story
• [12:27] “Slut, The Play” – Sexual Assault, Testimony, and Community
• [28:06] The Bozik Mansion – Bob’s Serbian Adventure
• [43:03] Economics 101: The Oil Glut (James Surowiecki & Daniel Yergin)
• [48:59] Dance Music Politics – Kygo and EDM (Kelefa Sanneh)

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Concluding Notes

This episode is notable for its wide thematic range, yet a constant through-line of individual experience—be it in the face of prejudice, assault, economic systems, or personal legacy. Stories are delivered with The New Yorker’s characteristic intelligence, wit, and humanism.

End of summary.

Transcript

[Katie Cappiello]

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Mary Miller]

How do I get out of here?

[Hallie Kanter]

I can help you with that. Stumble downstairs. In 20ft, a cluster of smokers will be on your right. You will not feel like saying goodbye to more people, so continue walking with your head down, because if your head is down, you are invisible and therefore not rude. As you exit, carry your jacket because you are warm from alcohol and too lazy to do all that complicated stuff with your arms. Begin walking in the general direction in which you feel the subway station may be situated. In 100ft, pull your phone out to look at a map. Make a slight detour to scroll through Twitter while standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Forget why you took your phone out. Continue walking. Depending on traffic, yield to crowds of other drunk people. They are different from you in tighter skirts and higher heels, but in another sense they are the same. You're all just trying to squeeze as much experience out of your youth as possible. In a sense, you're all just sailors on the sea of oh, one of them is throwing up the right. In 500ft, turn left into a bodega and proceed to wander aimlessly through the aisles for 10 minutes. Pause to make prolonged eye contact with a bodega. Catch. Really feel a connection with the animal. Are you drunk enough to justify a cab? Mentally retrace your steps to figure out how many drinks you had. Once you figure out you had that many drinks, vaguely wonder if you did anything embarrassing at the party. Enter an endless loop of anxiety in one minute. Hail a cab. Keep the windows open.

[David Remnick]

GPS directions for getting home drunk, a piece by Hallie Kanter. The Role of Siri was performed by Susan Bennett, who actually is the voice of Siri on the iPhone. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour today. We need to sober up now because we're going to be talking this hour about global politics and sexual politics and dance music politics. But let's start with domestic politics. Michael Friedman is a composer of shows on and off Broadway. Right now he's traveling around the country covering the presidential campaign. In his own very distinctive way, Friedman is visiting big primary states, interviewing people about what's on their minds, and making songs from those interviews. So it's sort of a campaign art project. Friedman was in Texas recently, and he was particularly interested to talk with immigrants about the rhetoric of the campaign. The New Yorker's Sarah Larson is following Friedman's progress. Hello, Michael.

[Sarah Larson]

Hi, Sarah.

[David Remnick]

How are you doing?

[Sarah Larson]

I'm pretty good. How are you doing?

[David Remnick]

I'm good, thanks. So the song that we're gonna listen to today, this is based on an interview you did in Texas.

[Sarah Larson]

Yes. At a barbecue joint in Dallas, Texas, in Oak Cliff with this amazing guy, Ramiro. He's one of the Dreamers, which is the group of sort of undocumented activists. He's 30, and so he's 30 years documented.

[Nick Paumgarten]

My story echoes the story of many immigrants. I was separated from my mother for 20 years because she stayed in Mexico as a nurse while my dad stayed as an undocumented construction worker. At the age of 13, my dad got deported again. I was living only with him.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

So I know what it feels like.

[Nick Paumgarten]

To have your family torn away. Like, immediately you come home to an empty house because your dad is no longer there.

[David Remnick]

Michael, who did he live with after his dad got deported?

[Sarah Larson]

He basically lived on his own resources. He had some family in the neighborhood. He went around different places, and he's kind of been on his own resources since he was a teenager, which is impressive to say the least.

[David Remnick]

Did you happen to ask him about Trump's the Great Wall of Texas?

[James Surowiecki]

The.

[David Remnick]

Trump's plan to build a wall?

[Sarah Larson]

Yes. His point was that he didn't believe that anyone could build such a wall.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Sarah Larson]

But he was legitimately concerned that if Trump or some of the other Republicans were elected, that there would be a real mass exodus to Mexico from Texas, Arizona, and bordering states. That was sort of the feeling was legitimate fear from his constituents. And we're talking of hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people. The other thing I learned about many activists in the Mexican American community in Texas is there's a lot of dissent among them. For example, the Latino Democrats do not speak to the Tejano Democrats, which are two different political. And they refuse to talk to each other because they have some kind of falling out. So, as always, there's internal dissent.

[David Remnick]

There are plenty of ways to disagree with all kinds of people, even people you like. People like you. Yeah. So let's hear your song.

[Sarah Larson]

Great.

[Ramiro]

So my story is this. Born in Mexico, raised in the United States, undocumented. I grew up in South Oak Cliff, which is the poor part of Dallas. Moved around a lot to a lot of places. Separated from my mother for 21 years, she stayed in Mexico to be a nurse, while my dad stayed here to be an undocumented worker. When I was 13, dad got deported.

[Bob Bozik]

You come home.

[Ramiro]

To an empty house. He's no longer there. He's no longer there. But each time I come back to Dallas, I come Back to Oak Cliff and I move to a better side. I was making pretty good. So what I did was I found the most expensive apartment in Oak Cliff and I took it. It was nice, but from time to time you'd hear gunshots and go, ah, yes, it's still Oak Cliff. At the age of 18, I got my first job. At 20, I got fired. At age 22, same thing. I got fired again cause my documents didn't match up. I decided I was going to to port myself cause I was tired of.

[Bob Bozik]

All of the bull.

[Ramiro]

Like this one time I saved $5,000 to buy a new car. I ended up spending it on getting my papers fixed by an attorney. Within three weeks, that attorney had $3,000. I never heard from him again. And eventually you get tired. But then there was this big march and that kind of ignited the idea of like, hey, there's a lot of us. I more radical work. Hunger strikes, planned arrests. Until people were saying, oh, this guy's kinda crazy. I started doing small campaigns, but campaigns, you know, are flawed by design. The people are just a means to an end. When a politician says, I want to get out the Latino vote, they just want us to vote for them. And I've sold myself to the highest point bitter before, but now I'm like, to hell with that. I'm going back to my roots. If Trump wins, I see like gestapo style raids, crazy stuff. Maybe people who don't give a who the president is will wake the hell up. Like I say, if you're under attack, you can either run or fight. Oh, Arizona. My mentor called and said, do you want to fight the sheriff in Arizona? And I was like, I have to go to school. And he was like, to hell with school. And I was like, hell yeah. We did all kinds of crazy things against him, sabotaged his events with, you know, with a political theater. We took live chickens into his office. But Arizona was, it was scary. I wouldn't drive in Arizona. I would be so scared. They can pull you over. Scariest thing, we were canvassing, they pulled us over. I'm not driving. The other guy next to me is driving. They asked for his license and registration. Then the cop asks me for the same. I'm like, I'm not driving, I'm from Texas. And he's like, yeah, but we still need your license and registration. And I'm undocumented, have my Mexican passport, which is something you're never gonna show a policeman. And luckily in my wallet I had a Sam's card. And so that's What? I showed him. I showed him my Sam's card, and it had my picture. The picture was blurry. And he took it and said, okay.

[James Surowiecki]

Yeah.

[Ramiro]

If you buy in bulk, you must be American. You must be American.

[David Remnick]

Oh, Michael, that's so great. I like that there's some levity at the end of that story.

[Sarah Larson]

I think if you're undocumented in Arizona, you have to keep a sense of levity or you will die.

[David Remnick]

Yeah.

[Sarah Larson]

So that was the most fun part of getting to know him, was his sense of humor, given all that he's been through.

[David Remnick]

Yeah. So now you're in Colorado.

[Sarah Larson]

Yep. And then I'm going to, let's see, Missouri, as my father would pronounce it, California. Oregon. And then at the end, I'm gonna do Pennsylvania and Ohio for the conventions because it's sure looking like the Cleveland convention might actually be something.

[David Remnick]

Yeah. Well, it is a delight talking to you. Good luck.

[Sarah Larson]

Always a delight talking to you, too. Thanks. I will keep you posted about Colorado.

[Mary Miller]

Great.

[David Remnick]

Take care. Bye.

[Sarah Larson]

Bye.

[David Remnick]

That's Michael Free. His song Undocumented is taken verbatim from an interview with a man named Ramiro in Dallas. He spoke with the New Yorker Sarah Larson, and we'll hear from him again in a few weeks. Coming up on the New Yorker Radio Hour, a former boxer and bartender who's laying claim to a mansion in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. It's a crazy story, so stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The other night, I saw an amazing play. Vital, moving and absolutely necessary, but not an easy night out, I have to admit. By the end of it, I was full of emotion and tears were streaming down my face. The cast is made up entirely of teenage girls, acting students of the director and playwright Katie Capiello. But this isn't kids theater, not at all. The topic of the play and some of the language are intended for, as they say, mature audiences. If you have some younger kids listening with you right now, maybe this isn't for them. The play is about a teenage girl who is raped by friends. It's fiction, technically speaking, but it's inspired by experiences that are very much a part of daily life for the girls in the cast. It's called Slut, the play. The main character, spends the bulk of the show alone on one side of the stage giving her testimony about what happened to her, while on the other side of the stage, we hear everything that's being said about her as the news gets around.

[Mary Miller]

Okay. Joanna Grace Delmarco. I'm 16 years old and I live at 545 East 14th street, apartment 3.3F. What? Oh, sure. I am agreeing to give this statement without my parents present. Is that what you mean? My mom's still here, right?

[David Remnick]

No.

[Mary Miller]

Oh, my God. No. I don't need them to come in or anything. I actually really don't want to talk about all this stuff in front of her again right now. Or my dad. I'm sorry. I actually don't feel that well. Could I have some water or something? Would that be okay? If it's too much trouble, that's totally fine. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sure I'll feel better after I have some of this. I'm just starting to feel sort of shaky. So should I just start from the beginning?

[David Remnick]

That's Winifred Bonjean Alpert in the role of Joey. Katie Cappiello is the playwright and director.

[Katie Cappiello]

So the character is Joey del Marco. She's 16. She is fierce and confident and kind of a badass. And finding herself. Right. She's at that great stage in your teenage years where things are really confusing, but also really exciting. And she is coming into her womanhood. And that's where you meet her. And we follow Joey through the course of the night. And she is pre gaming with three of her closest guy friends from her life and they cram into the back of a taxi to go uptown to a friend's house party. And that's when those three friends proceed to rape her.

[David Remnick]

Yeah. And the bulk of the play is the aftermath in which you have. On one half of the stage, you have Joey in isolation, testifying, a kind of extended testimony and soliloquy. And then on the other side of the stage, you have the Village.

[Mary Miller]

I've known Joey since kindergarten. She loses control sometimes. She's done weird before. And honestly, I totally think that night she got home with Jane and her parents were there and she just started lying. Yeah. And she really screwed over the whole school. I'll say. I'm admittedly promiscuous. I hate that word, promiscuous. So that, like, implies what then? That I couldn't have been raped then? That cancels out the possibility of rape to people. That's so crazy.

[Katie Cappiello]

I wanted you to get both at the same time. I wanted you to get her rationale where she was coming from, her experience, from her voice. At the same time that you were hearing the way we as a culture dissect everything these girls do. Because here's a really interesting thing. When you Think about rape cases. When you think about the ones that we've heard about the case of St. Paul's the case of Steubenville, Daisy Coleman, you so rarely hear from the girl. We so rarely get to hear that girl's voice and her side of the story for. For a lot of reasons. For her own safety, legally. And we wanted that girl's voice to be front and center. And at the same time, we wanted you to realize who you are in this story. Who are you? Who are you in the community? What role do you play when this girl comes forward and this story comes out?

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Katie Cappiello]

How are you tearing her down? Right. Like, how are you poking holes in her story? Because you probably are.

[David Remnick]

Katie, what is the origin story of the play itself? How much does real life inform what you've written about here?

[Katie Cappiello]

Everything. You know, I was a teenage girl, and those memories are so vivid for me. And I would say most women that I talk to would say the same. That what you experience when you are young and female follows you the rest of your life. It stays with you. And when I work with my girls, with my students, and they tell me the things that they've experienced, it is impossible for me not to write about that. Right. I want to find some way of capturing it and putting it up on its feet that maybe will lead to healthier dynamics or maybe it leads to a conversation or maybe just give somebody a better idea of what it is like to be a teenage girl. Because it is not easy. And it's not easy to be a teenage boy either.

[David Remnick]

Well, in fact, you do a play with teenage boys.

[Katie Cappiello]

Yes.

[David Remnick]

This came later than slut.

[Katie Cappiello]

It did.

[David Remnick]

What did you discover about teenage boys that you might not have known through the research for it or the writing of it?

[Katie Cappiello]

Oh, just how really loving they are and really confused. And I was not expecting that. I never. I did not think they were going to be as open as they were, as honest about the degree of confusion that they experience day in and day out in their relationships with each other, with their parents, with girls, but confusion.

[David Remnick]

That causes them to be aggressive and worse.

[Katie Cappiello]

Yeah. I would tie that confusion into pressure, too.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Katie Cappiello]

You know, standards of masculinity are pretty intense.

[David Remnick]

How do you help from having at least some hostility toward the purveyors of this sexual violence? Because it does seem to work in one direction.

[Katie Cappiello]

Um, I guess at the end of the day, I care about them. I know that maybe that sounds trite, but that's, I guess, how I went into this process of working with these Guys was that I care about them. And the reality of the situation is this. As much as I don't want my female students to get raped, I don't want my male students to rape them.

[David Remnick]

And look, the young women, the girls that you're working with here, they're all actresses and students that are exactly the age of their characters. They're 14, they're 15, they're 16, they're 17. You're asking them to go into incredibly difficult emotional territory on stage in front of, you know, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and up. What's the effect of that? How does that dynamic work? What have you seen happen?

[Katie Cappiello]

You know, it's interesting. I feel like people ask that all the time in a very accusatory way of just how could you do this? How could you let teenage girls get up on the stage and talk about sex and sexuality and sexual assault? And my answer is always, but this is what they're living every day. So who better to talk about it? Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out? And the reality of the situation is they can handle it and they want to handle it. And the girls will tell you this show has empowered them. It allows them to be at a house party on a Friday night and intervene when maybe before they started working on this play, they didn't know that they could or didn't know how to. How they should.

[David Remnick]

We also have here a remarkable young actress who goes to St. Ann's High School in Brooklyn named Mary Miller, who was in a play, and she plays a character who, it seems, is almost the wise woman. She comes in late in the play by way almost of giving advice to these slightly younger girls in the play. She relays an experience that Mary, that maybe you could tell us about.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, so my character, she hears online, she sees online basically all the things that have been going on in Joey, the main character's life. And so she reaches out to her to try to have a moment of camaraderie between the two of them, because Sylvie is a survivor of rape herself and has never come forward about it, did not go through the process that Joey goes through. And so Sylvie reaches out to her to tell her that she believes her, but also she wants to have another person in her life. So I. Yeah, I do see that.

[David Remnick]

Because she's feeling isolated as well.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah. Because she didn't tell anyone.

[David Remnick]

How did you two meet? How did you come together?

[Mary Miller]

She babysat for my mom's best friend's kids.

[David Remnick]

It's true.

[Katie Cappiello]

That's true. I babysat for everybody.

[Mary Miller]

I just want to say that I.

[Katie Cappiello]

Was a nanny, you know, as I was building this company. And I feel like I babysat for all of Brooklyn.

[David Remnick]

How did you encounter the play?

[Mary Miller]

So I saw the play when I was, I guess the summer before my sophomore year.

[David Remnick]

Where'd you see it?

[Mary Miller]

I saw it the first time it ever was on. I saw it at the Fringe Festival.

[David Remnick]

What was your emotional reaction to it the first time you saw it?

[Mary Miller]

I remember wanting to cry and not really knowing why, but I didn't. I didn't cry.

[David Remnick]

You resisted it?

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, I remember wanting to, but not really knowing why I did.

[David Remnick]

You know what I noticed when I saw the play? Half the girls at the end of the play are in tears. Half of them, Katie. Is that a common thing?

[Katie Cappiello]

Yeah. You mean the girls on the stage?

[David Remnick]

An incredible. And then I turned around and the rest of us were in puddles.

[Katie Cappiello]

Oh, yeah.

[Mary Miller]

Oh, yeah. I love it when people cry.

[Katie Cappiello]

I mean, these girls are going through it, right? I mean, what we tell them is that the way that it is going to most move the audience and most leave the audience changed is if they really go through something on stage, it's not their job to get up there and role play. It's their job to get up there and experience something in front of everybody, in front of everybody in that theater. And that's an incredibly hard thing to do. And it's emotionally draining for these girls.

[Mary Miller]

And so I oftentimes like, it'll take me. It'll take me a minute sometimes.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, a minute. I think half the audience was a basket case into the next day. Right.

[Mary Miller]

But you get good at it when you do it all the time. And especially if you're me, who's someone who I don't. It's not like this.

[David Remnick]

You have to go home and do homework.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, I have to go home and do homework. But also, it's not like the only time I ever deal with rape is when I'm in the show. Like, I'm kind of good at crying about it for a minute and then getting it together. You kind of have to be. That's how it goes.

[David Remnick]

Now we find out, because you were honest enough and brave enough to say so in the talkbacks afterwards, that the experience the character has, where she goes to visit a college and at a party, is assaulted, is raped, is similar to something that happened to you.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Remnick]

And tell me about what that was like. The first time to get up on a stage with an audience Filled with people, with strangers, and talk about this. Was it terrifying? Was it helpful? Was it some.

[Mary Miller]

Oh, God, it was a lot of things. So, yeah, I have some similar experiences to my character. Not the same story, by any means, but that distance from me to Sylvie is what turns what you would assume to be a really, really hard thing to do, just to get up on stage and talk about rape into something that was actually not so hard because it wasn't me. I'm not me when I'm talking. I'm this other girl. I'm not telling my story, I'm telling hers. That part of it made it a lot easier and allowed me to accept my similarities to Sylvie and present them in a way that was ultimately very cathartic for me, but also maintain some distance and, you know, it's not.

[David Remnick]

So it's very different from, say, a therapeutic environment.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, it's different for me. I mean, I started doing the show in North Dakota. It was my first show.

[David Remnick]

You gotta open somewhere.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah, right. And I. I didn't know anyone from the entire state, so that's a very different thing to do. And probably the best way for me to start doing it was to be doing the show in front of people that I had never met and would never see again in my life. I got to be open and truthful about my life in North Dakota before I ever did it at home. And I came back the next week and I started to do it at home.

[Katie Cappiello]

And I just have to say, North Dakota, after the workshop that we did, Mary did a really powerful storytelling. And then after the performance, there were teenage girls, like, in a line, waiting to talk to Mary. That's true, because so many girls out there who have had this happen to them, who've experienced sexual assault in whatever form, having no one to talk to about it.

[Mary Miller]

I sort of met my Sylvie, in a way, in North Dakota. You did? After I.

[David Remnick]

That's amazing. What happened?

[Mary Miller]

So we did this workshop, and I wrote this thing in addition to the play. In addition to the play, we did a workshop, and I wrote down what had happened in my life. And I'd never written it before anywhere. I'd never really said it anywhere except for my therapist's office. And, you know, I told it to everyone, including the cast. They didn't really know either. And afterwards, this girl came up to me and said, essentially, me too. And that had never happened to me before. I had no one. And all of a sudden, you've never.

[David Remnick]

Told any friends or they.

[Mary Miller]

I mean, it's different. It Is different to tell someone who you know knows what you're talking about. You don't even have to say it all. So I had that for the first time. But, yeah, no, and it happens pretty often after shows, too, where girls will. Will come up to me.

[David Remnick]

That's a big responsibility for you.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Remnick]

Is it sometimes too much.

[Mary Miller]

I definitely went through a phase where I was mad because I had never gotten to be that girl who had someone to go to. I had never gotten that. And all of a sudden, I was landed in the other seat of having to be that person for someone else. When I never got that, it was heavy.

[David Remnick]

Did you ever push it away and say, you know what? Enough. I don't. I can't be that person for you all the time. For a line of girls?

[Mary Miller]

No.

[David Remnick]

You took it all on.

[Mary Miller]

I did, because I wanted them to have what I didn't get. I wanted that for them a lot. And the more I did it, the more I realized that actually it was serving a purpose for me too. And, I mean, it's a privilege now and one that I take really seriously and that I carry with me all the time. So. I love those girls. I love them even when they don't say anything, Even when they just don't know what to say. And they hug me and they say, like, thank you. They don't have to say anything other than that. Cause you already know, and I know, and they know.

[David Remnick]

Katie and Mary, thank you so much, and thank you for the gift of the play.

[Katie Cappiello]

Oh, thank you for having us.

[David Remnick]

Mary Miller, a member of the Castle, and Katie Cappiello, artistic director of Arts Effect and director of the play. On March 6, the play will run in tandem with now that We're Men, Capiello's play with a cast of teenage boys. There's some information about [e-mail] Finelli's is a bar in SoHo in Lower Manhattan. It's been a fixture in the neighborhood for nearly a century. A lot of tourists somehow find their way there, too. One of the big draws till recently was a bartender named Bob Bozik. He wasn't reputed for his drinks especially, but he was a big personality with a huge number of stories, and he was very generous with those. Bozik retired this year, and here's his retirement plan. Move to Serbia, the Bozak family's homeland, where he doesn't know anybody or speak the language, and reclaim a mansion in Belgrade that his family lost 70 years ago. It sounds a little maybe Quixotic. Is the word. But let's let Nick Pamgarten, a staff writer at the New Yorker, take it from here.

[Nick Paumgarten]

So on December 30, just before New Year's, I got a text from Bob. First in a while. It read, since you were in the beginning of this parade, I leave January 11th for four months in Belgrade. Moving into my house around January 15th. The Balkans. Best to you and yours.

[Bob Bozik]

How the hell did you get in here?

[Nick Paumgarten]

I got waves.

[Bob Bozik]

Hey, I'm Bob. Eric. Didn't I say goodbye to you already?

[Nick Paumgarten]

I was introduced to Bob by a colleague who thought he'd make a good story. Actually, it was Bob who thought that he, Bob, would make the good story. Here was a New York character who wanted me to write about him. We get a lot of those.

[Bob Bozik]

Yeah, you look like a tourist.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Anyway, so we met up and went to some Brazilian place and ate and had a couple of beers. And I'm thinking, this guy is full of it.

[Bob Bozik]

So we're driving through the Kurdish territory of Turkey. So we're eating, but I like to eat. They have kebab, lamb kebabs. Most people eat one, some eat two. Oh, I had three. And then the leader of the whole thing says he goes, order more. I eat so many goddamn kebabs. Some guy had a couple kebabs. Just to emphasize the point being Bob, I reached over, took his last ones off his plate and stuck them in my mouth.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Bob can out talk anyone you've ever met. But the crazy thing is, his stories are actually true. They check out. Bob's father was an inventor, rich, successful, connected. But after the Second World War, the communists accused him the father of collaborating with the Germans. And the Boziks fled to Canada. So Bob was born in Ontario in 1950. But his father split just a few days later. He left the family. His mother couldn't take care of the baby, so she gave him away to a foster family.

[Bob Bozik]

And I lived in a foster home until I was nine. Then my mother took me back. I didn't want to be there, so I was furious. So I obviously became who I became. During that year, I decided, we're all alone from that day on. You couldn't discipline me.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Bob ran away from home, or whatever home was when he was 14. Lived on the streets of Toronto, homeless, stealing baloney and checking payphones for change.

[Bob Bozik]

End up in Toronto. A gangster met me. He happened to own a boxing gym. Turns out I could fight. And then I became a fighter.

[Nick Paumgarten]

All this checks out too. The gangster's name was Bertie Mignaco. And he's the one who found Bob on the street and took him in. Bob started working for the guy, running numbers, collecting debts. He also began boxing and soon was working his way up the ranks.

[Bob Bozik]

My nickname was Landlord in boxing. Did you know that?

[Mary Miller]

I didn't know that.

[Bob Bozik]

Oh, my Landlord. Because I was sparring with Kenny Norton. Remember Ken Norton?

[Nick Paumgarten]

Yeah, of course.

[David Remnick]

Yeah.

[Bob Bozik]

I kept pushing Kenny. I didn't like Kenny, so I kept pushing him in the corner and he kept nailing me. I could hear his knuckles hit my skull, you know?

[Nick Paumgarten]

Eventually, Bob won the Canadian National Amateur Heavyweight Championship. And then he went pro and he fought some big bouts. He fought Larry Holmes, Madison Square Garden.

[Bob Bozik]

When I was fighting Larry Holmes, I realized, I'll never be this good.

[Nick Paumgarten]

He was beaten badly, and that was the beginning of the end of his boxing career and the beginning of the next chapter.

[Bob Bozik]

I look down the board, Madrid. I'll go to Madrid. What's the difference? So I went to Spain, started a whole life. So I lived in Europe. I ended up in Istanbul. That's when I started driving trucks to Afghanistan. I met some people who hooked me up with some people. And then, because you're in the Kurdish territory, remember talking about the kebabs.

[Sarah Larson]

I.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Once asked Bob if there were any unknown unknowns, things I should know about, like if he'd ever got in trouble with the law, hemmed and hawed a bit. And then he said that he'd robbed banks. Well, then he said, wait, I robbed one bank. Because he'd only been busted robbing one bank. So he was caught robbing one bank. He was unarmed, but almost in apology, he gave the teller a pair of tickets to see Oklahoma on Broadway. This was in the police report. And then, after all that, he lands at Finelli's, a saloon in lower Manhattan. For the next 25 years, he tended bar. Meanwhile, communism fell, Yugoslavia broke up. Serbia became a country. And Bob got an idea. How are you flying over tonight? What are you.

[Bob Bozik]

I'm flying to Vienna, and I got extra legroom.

[Nick Paumgarten]

I met Bob at Finelli's one last time. He quit his job, moved out of his apartment in Brooklyn, and he was getting on a plane for Serbia later that night. So, Serbia. Almost a hundred years ago, Bob's father invented an air brake system that revolutionized train travel. The Boziks had a yacht, apartment complexes, a timber farm, a coal mine, a cook, a nanny, a driver, and this house on Krunska Street, Belgrade's Fifth Avenue. Really, it's more of a palace than a house. Anyway, the communists took it in 1946, and for the last 10 years, Bob has been trying to get it back. Describe the house.

[Bob Bozik]

Okay. It's four stories high. It's 7,400 square feet. It's got a beautiful atrium in the back. Got two gates. It's limestone. There's a stairway, two stairways rising to a terrace.

[Nick Paumgarten]

There's a big emotional element to all this. It's the house he never had, a connection to, the father who abandoned him, to the old country he never really had any connection to except in name or maybe in his stories. It's a homecoming to a home that never was. So how is this even possible for a bartender, ex boxer, convicted bank robber, to lay claim to one of the nicest houses in Belgrade? Politics, Global politics. Serbia has been trying to join the European Union. To do so, it has had to follow restitution laws regarding property taken, quote, unquote, illegally by the Communists.

[Bob Bozik]

The courts have given me back the house. The one in charge called the restitution. They're fighting everybody now.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Bob is a tenacious dude. That's what made him a good fighter and what has made him so dogged at pressing his case with the Serbians, who haven't exactly been eager to say, here, take it, it's yours.

[Bob Bozik]

They've had to deal with me. I've been at them every few years. Everybody. Why do you keep doing this? You know, because this is what I do. You know you want to. As Larry said, I broke my nose, knocked my teeth. I kept coming because that's what I do. I keep coming. You know, everything was just a preparation for the final fight. And this is my final fight.

[Nick Paumgarten]

But what do you know? He's done it in the last few months, he's gotten almost all the necessary approvals from the various levels of government. Almost all the Serbs seem to come up with new hurdles every day. So you're going to go over there, you're going to land, and you're going to land at the airport.

[Bob Bozik]

I land at the airport.

[Nick Paumgarten]

The first thing you're going to do.

[Bob Bozik]

Go to my small hotel. Then the first thing I'm going to do is meet my lawyers. They're.

[Nick Paumgarten]

They're Serbian lawyers.

[Bob Bozik]

They're both Serbian lawyers. And one, I hired a new lawyer whose mother was the mayor of Belgrade a few years ago with the Democratic Party. The ones who were in the house who are leaving by today. Today, they're supposed to be out by today. That's my agreement.

[Nick Paumgarten]

For a while. The house on Krunska street was the Iraqi Embassy Starting in the late 90s and until the end of last year, it was the headquarters for the Democratic Party, the center left faction in Serbia that plotted the defeat of Milosevic. For a time, the Bozik house was the seat of power in Belgrade. So there's a lot of public sentiment surrounding it. It's more than just a nice house. And here's Bob, an American, essentially kicking the Democratic Party out. So the idea is you're going to get there and supposedly there's going to be a ceremony or something where they're going to turn it over to you.

[Bob Bozik]

Yes. You saw the key, right?

[Nick Paumgarten]

No, I haven't seen the key.

[Bob Bozik]

You want to see the key?

[David Remnick]

Yeah. Let's see.

[Bob Bozik]

Here's the key to the house they're going to present to me and I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Is it the actual key or is it like ceremonial?

[Bob Bozik]

Wait a second. Jeez, Nick, here's this. There is what they're presenting me with. That key.

[David Remnick]

That key.

[Nick Paumgarten]

That key ain't gonna open the door.

[Bob Bozik]

It looks like confectionary chocolate coated with.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Candy, like a tennis ragon.

[Bob Bozik]

They're gonna give me this key to my house.

[Nick Paumgarten]

I mean, let's say they let you in the house. You're gonna move in?

[Bob Bozik]

Yeah, let's say. Yeah, I'm gonna buy a bit. Bed, lamp, chair pillows and everything. Or a tent.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Where are you gonna be?

[Bob Bozik]

Oh, I'm gonna be on the front floor, right at the front door. Because you know what I bought, I bought. First time for years I bought pajamas. Wait a second. Vesta. Vesta.

[David Remnick]

Here.

[Bob Bozik]

Jose. Back here. Alex, what are you doing? Get over here.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Vesna, Bob's daughter and Alex, Bob's ex wife, come to say goodbye. Vesna is everything to Bob. He tears up just saying her name.

[Mary Miller]

Hi.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Alex is Vesna's mother. Alex was also Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend in college. The Serbians, not surprisingly, have made a big deal out of this. But anyway, miraculously, Alex and Bob are still close. What do you think of his going away to do this?

[Mary Miller]

I think it's something Bob felt that he has always wanted to do and had to do.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Are you worried for him?

[Mary Miller]

I mean, I am a little bit. I don't think it's the safest place. And then the idea of Bob in a big house with no furniture but a mattress and some sheets and a lamp and his books and pajamas.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Bob had said he wanted me to stay in touch with him in case something were to happen. I'd be the one to bear witness. He even told me how it might go down. A mugger or whatever, a shady character might rob him in the street, kill him, and then a cop would kill the shady guy. If that happened, Bob told me we'd then know he'd been assassinated. Sort of a Jack Ruby thing. You have imagined scenarios. You've even told me how it would go down if it were to go down.

[Bob Bozik]

He's got the story.

[Mary Miller]

You must be nervous, too. Because you gave me an envelope to not be open.

[Bob Bozik]

Bess, now don't look like that. Nothing's gonna happen.

[Mary Miller]

What's in the envelope? I don't know. It's addressed to you, but it's not to be opened in case. Unless what? You die?

[Bob Bozik]

No, not die. In case. I insult some people, you know, and I hurt their feelings. Bessa, you'll be fine. Don't worry. You're my diary. You grew up.

[Mary Miller]

Okay. This is the first I'm hearing of it. I have no idea what it is.

[Bob Bozik]

Just a lot of things. I'll tell you where the diamonds are, and then you stop. Don't let your mummy hear this.

[Nick Paumgarten]

That's what's in the envelope. It's a big pile of diamonds. Bob may joke about the diamonds, but the real treasure is that house. If and when he gets it. And while his pursuit of it has been about his heritage, his journey, closure and all that kind of stuff, the house is also a heck of a piece of real estate. He may just turn around and sell it. He's not a big money guy. He's never really owned anything. Except for his life stories, if anything. But he'd like to leave something for Vesna. And here's the house where his story began. Or maybe even where he'd like it to end. He's already started talking about other places. He has this fantasy, this image of himself sailing off into the sunset on a boat full of books.

[Bob Bozik]

I'm leaning toward Nova Scotia, also between northern Morocco. Get a boat. Get all my books. There's tons of books. I want to live someplace where I can finish up making some kind of sense. I can't make sense of this life, so I like somebody's interpretation.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Once you're out of New York will.

[Bob Bozik]

Never be the same sigh of relief. Where are we going for breakfast?

[Katie Cappiello]

Lunch?

[Bob Bozik]

You want to go to egg shop or you want to go to dim sum? Egg shop's a nice steak place.

[Nick Paumgarten]

So that was on a Monday. He left that night on Tuesday, almost as soon as he'd landed in Serbia. He started sending me voice memos, sometimes several a day. Bob's Belgrade diary.

[Bob Bozik]

So I went out for dinner tonight, took myself for a nice dinner, a little wine, sat there in a nice cafe, was gonna go home and read my books. And they've turned off the electricity and the heat. Ah, so it begins. I got the decision last week in our favor after five months of thinking about it, and now they've decided that, you know what, this guy, New York, we, we took the house in 1946. Another few weeks in the dark and cold isn't going to hurt him. Just to let him contemplate, let him know exactly who he's dealing.

[Sarah Larson]

With.

[David Remnick]

To be continued. That was Bob Bozik voice messaging from Belgrade. He spoke with Nick Paumgarten. We'll find out what happens with the mansion and Bozik in the coming weeks. Coming up, James Surowiecki explains why cheap oil is bad for you. And I'll get schooled in electronic dance music. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Let's do a little Economics 101 for a moment. We know that low oil prices are supposedly great for the economy. Cheap oil stimulates manufacturing, goods become cheaper, people travel more, and so on. Higher oil prices equals recession. It turns out that cheap oil doesn't seem to be delivering an economic boom. All you have to do is look around and the picture is much more complicated. James Surowiecki is the New Yorker's explainer in chief on anything related to the economy. And he called up Daniel Juergen, an energy consultant and the author of a Pulitzer Prize winning book on oil politics and history. James wanted to know how oil got so cheap and what that means today.

[James Surowiecki]

Three things have come together to bring down the price of oil. The first thing that happened was this incredible surge of supply from the United States. Since 2008 till the middle of 2015, US oil production almost doubled and supply was coming up from other places too. At the same time, the world economy was slowing down and not growing at the rate people had expected. And in particular, China was slowing down. And that meant weaker demand while supply was increasing. And then the third critical thing that happened was the OPEC countries got together and instead of doing what kind of markets expected them to do, cut their supply. They decided to, well, let the market manage the market. And that's when this dramatic price decline collapse really began.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[James Surowiecki]

You know, the increase, the surplus in the oil market today is less than 2% but it's been enough to drive oil prices down 70%.

[Mary Miller]

That's amazing.

[Nick Paumgarten]

The boom in US oil production that you're talking about is essentially the result of shale oil.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Nick Paumgarten]

This new technology that's allowed us to access reserves that previously had essentially not been available to us.

[James Surowiecki]

Yeah, yeah. If you went back to 2008, 2009, people would have thought the idea of shale oil, it couldn't work. But then it started to work, and it really worked, I think more rapidly and in terms of volumes, much more than anybody had anticipated.

[Nick Paumgarten]

So we have this huge glut of oil. So why is cheap oil not translated into more of a stimulus, more of a boom for the US Economy?

[James Surowiecki]

The reason is that we had this tremendous growth of the shale industry, and it was, you know, the major source of job creation in the years after the financial crisis. Basically every state in the country was benefiting from this, but because of whether they manufactured steel or information technology, computers, you were getting sort of a dramatic increase in capital expenditures going into equipment and into job creation. Added a couple of million jobs to the economy. So with this downturn now company after company has cut its budget. If it's an oil and gas company, people are losing their jobs. The suppliers who make equipment, make steel have lost business and they too are being hit and are having to lay off people. So you've had that loss. At the same time, you have more money in motorist pockets, but they don't get it all at once where they then say, I'm going to go out and buy something big. So one place where you've actually seen a big jump in spending is in convenience stores at gasoline stations that are up 6 or 8% over the last year or so. But cumulatively, for consumers, this is a very significant positive.

[David Remnick]

Got it. So one of the interesting questions is.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Why do you think opec, instead of trying to cut back production to hold up prices, just kept pumping the oil and as a result, we now have had this really big glut of oil on the market.

[James Surowiecki]

Well, OPEC did not have a unified mind on this. The Saudis and the other countries, Arab Gulf countries, as they're called, did not want to cut production because they were the only ones who could actually or would actually cut production. And in particular, this all happened after the beginning of the nuclear negotiations between Iran, the United States and other countries. And they could see that as a result of this movement towards a nuclear agreement, the sanctions that had kept Iranian oil, about half the of. Of Iranian oil out of the market would be lifted and Iranian oil would come back into the market. So they in particular were implicitly saying, not explicitly, we're not going to cut back our supply in order to make room for additional oil from our greatest rival, Iran. Saudi Arabia has broken diplomatic relations with Iran. The Saudi embassy has been burned in Tehran. Normally that would have sent oil prices up. Doesn't even cause a twin, a twitch in the oil market because it's because of the real surplus that's there now. But if you have a tighter market and you have a disruption in some place or heightened geopolitical risk, that will show up in the oil price.

[Nick Paumgarten]

But the oil market historically has had these sort of boom and bust cycles. And when you think about what the future holds, what do you think is going to happen to oil production and oil prices?

[James Surowiecki]

Well, it's kind of amazing. The oil industry is a long term industry. People make investments now and you don't see the impact for 10 years or longer. And yet it seems every three or four years at least, the whole perspective, the whole outlook changes. There's a tendency wherever you are to think, well, it's a straight highway, a flat line from that. But this market is going to move in cycles, as it always has. It's so deeply involved with geopolitics. It's a story that has no ending in sight.

[David Remnick]

Daniel Juergen, the author of the Prize and the Quest, talking with the New Yorker's James Surowiecki. You can find Surowiecki's articles on oil and other [e-mail] I love talking about music with Kelef Hassaneh. He has very eclectic tastes and he knows stuff that I'm completely clueless about, like contemporary Nashville and electronic dance music. He listens to EDM while he writes. You can hear it faintly emanating from his office out into the hallway. And he just wrote a great profile of a DJ called Kygo.

[Mary Miller]

Come in.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Hey, how you doing? Sorry about my noisy door.

[David Remnick]

Your door sounds fantastic. It's like in a haunted haunted house.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Exactly right.

[David Remnick]

So you wrote about Kygo and he's. How has he set the world on fire in edm?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

I mean, it's pretty crazy. He doesn't have an album out yet. He kind of came up by posting tracks on SoundCloud and he became the fastest artist to get a billion streams on Spotify.

[David Remnick]

A billion streams?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

A billion streams.

[David Remnick]

So what sets him apart from Skrillex and all the other big stars of the form?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well, the most technical thing that sets him apart is that his songs are slower. Mainstream electronic Dance Music, or EDM, is around 120 beats per minute, and Kygo likes to stay closer to 100 bpm. They call what he does tropical house to sort of capture the idea that it's supposed to be kind of chilled out.

[David Remnick]

So he's the Jimmy Buffett of edm. Now he's worked with everybody, right? So he's.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well, yeah, it's funny when you say worked with, because a bunch of his remixes, especially in the early years, they're not collaborative efforts. Some of them are now, but some of the most popular ones, he would just grab tracks that he liked, that he heard and just add his own production to them.

[David Remnick]

Right, so let's hear some.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

This is a remix he did by a relatively obscure English singer called Kyla Lagrange. Her song is called Cut your teeth.

[David Remnick]

Ask you.

[Nick Paumgarten]

What is your.

[Katie Cappiello]

Cut your te.

[Bob Bozik]

I'm alive.

[Sarah Larson]

Come back home, don't feel the same.

[Katie Cappiello]

But I was on to page for you.

[Mary Miller]

You.

[David Remnick]

So can we hear something else?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Yeah. You know, when I talked to him about what influenced him, what. What inspired him to make music, I was expecting him to talk about, you know, tracks from the last decade.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Right.

[David Remnick]

So who does he listen to?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well, you know, he's not a music nerd. He's not the kind of person that has 10,000 records at home and he's learning the full history, you know, and he mentioned relatively recent artists, the people who inspired him. The most important was probably Avicii Caga's from Norway. Avicii is this star from Sweden who only emerged in the last five years or so. And Avicii's big hit is Levels, which takes a Etta James sample and is became one of the kind of defining tracks of the electronic dance music boom. You probably know this song, right?

[David Remnick]

Oh, yeah.

[Mary Miller]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

This is like. It's like spinning class heaven here. So in the piece, you talk about how this is the new disco, at least potentially.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Yeah, I mean, it's similar, not least because people who listen to this stuff really love it, and much of the rest of the world seems to kind of hate it. Similar to disco, this is music that came big without much help from the music establishment, with no help from music critics who tend to disdain it. And the funny thing is, you know, disco is marginalized and hated, but then it ends up creating all this. Other kinds of dance music and house and techno, and all these genres kind of come out of disco.

[David Remnick]

So is it headed somewhere interesting?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well, the interesting thing is that one generation's sort of like, uncool mainstream hit is something that the next generation might find inspiration in and might find a way to reclaim it. Right now there's this group of producers out of England called PC Music, and they're kind of rummaging around in what I would call turn of the century dance pop.

[David Remnick]

What does PC stamp?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

They don't say. And so, you know, all this stuff that was big, you know, 15 years ago, trans pop garage, and they're taking that and making it twice as psychotic as it was back then.

[David Remnick]

Sounds fantastic. What do you got queued up here?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

This is Awake For Hours by a producer called Danny L. Harle, and it's just about the least chill thing you could ever hear.

[Katie Cappiello]

Teardrops till I showers Teardrops till I.

[Mary Miller]

Showers Lying awake for hours Time stand.

[Katie Cappiello]

Still around me Time stand still around.

[David Remnick]

Me and what you viewers at home can't see are the bluebirds flying across the screen.

[Bob Bozik]

Oh my God.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

But it give me the feedback. Well, among many other things, it's a good reminder that any song is kind of always going to be ripe for remixing or reconsideration and that these categories really are unstable.

[David Remnick]

Kay it's always an education.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

It's always something, isn't it?

[David Remnick]

Good to see you.

[Nick Paumgarten]

Good to see you.

[David Remnick]

Kelefa Sanneh if you're intrigued by what you've heard, Kay has a playlist of tracks by Kygo and other artists all around 100 beats per minute. And that wraps up the New Yorker Radio Hour for the thanks for being here with us and let us know what you thought. Leave us a comment. A nice one, I hope, at newyorkerradio.org or look for us on Twitter ewyorkerradio. Next week, Julia Louis Dreyfus joins me to talk about playing the Vice President and then the president and how the real campaign has outstripped any satire they've cooked up on her show Veep. I hope you'll join us.

[Katie Cappiello]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a.

[Mary Miller]

Co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed.

[Katie Cappiello]

By Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards. The role of Drunk Girl was played by Ave Carrillo.

[Mary Miller]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.