Episode 59: The Koch Brothers and Boxing Champion Heather Hardy

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour – Episode 59: The Koch Brothers and Boxing Champion Heather Hardy

Date: December 2, 2016
Host: David Remnick | Produced by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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Overview

In this multifaceted episode, David Remnick leads listeners through three in-depth segments:

1. Jane Mayer on the Koch brothers’ political influence and the repercussions of her investigative reporting.
2. A vivid profile of boxing champion Heather Hardy, capturing her struggles within the male-dominated boxing world and a fight night drama.
3. Junot Díaz reflects on his complicated relationship with the Dominican Republic, immigration, memory, and the creative process.
   Humor, drama, and hard-hitting journalism intertwine, offering a window into American politics, sports, and culture.

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1. Jane Mayer Versus the Koch Machine (00:29–16:50)

Investigating the Koch Brothers

• Jane Mayer recounts her experience reporting on the Koch brothers’ funding of the Tea Party and the hidden world of dark money in politics.
• She describes the tense, even paranoid, atmosphere when talking to former Koch employees, many of whom feared repercussions.
• “People were saying they play hardball, watch out... some of the ones I was able to talk to were literally looking over their shoulders the whole time...” — Jane Mayer (01:52)

Smear Campaign: The Plagiarism Accusation

• Remnick receives a tip from NY Post’s Keith Kelly: a right-wing blogger is about to accuse Mayer of plagiarism in retaliation for her Koch exposé.
• Mayer scrambles to respond: “If you want to take down a reporter, there’s pretty much nothing more lethal than charging them with plagiarism.” (03:24)
• The story collapses after Mayer gets exculpatory statements from the supposedly plagiarized reporters.
• The experience reveals how opposition research teams sometimes manufacture stories: “If they couldn't find it, they'd create it.” — Jane Mayer (05:15)

Koch Brothers: Methods and Motives

• Mayer traces how the Koch brothers built a business empire and developed an ideological crusade for economic freedom and minimal government.
• Notable quote: “[Charles Koch] set out to create a movement to, quote, destroy the current paradigm.” (07:48)
• The Kochs wield enormous financial influence through “dark money”—undisclosed political donations—fueling campaigns to serve both their ideology and business.

Striking Back Against Critics

• The Kochs’ retaliatory tactics predate Mayer’s reporting; a Senate investigation in 1989 spotlighted Koch Industries for oil theft from Native American reservations.
  • Ex-FBI agent Jim Elroy recounts being surveilled by an armed private investigator — “Go back and tell Charlie Koch that the next guy he sends out to run a surveillance on me, they go home in a bag.” (12:28)
• The Senate’s report concluded Koch Industries stole millions in oil, and a culture of intimidation surrounded investigations.
• Wick Sollers, a former federal prosecutor, said: "We don't know who sent them, but someone hired private investigators to dig up anything they could." (14:10)

Aftermath

• Mayer describes burning her draft notes for safety, humorously noting: “…they’d make incredible kindling. And so I took the pages and put them in the firebox … my family got to enjoy, you know, toasting marshmallows over them.” (15:55)

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2. In the Ring With Heather “The Heat” Hardy (19:36–30:57)

Daily Struggle and the Pull of Boxing

• Profile of Heather Hardy, undefeated boxer and WBC International Super Bantamweight Champion.
• Hardy balances grueling training, single motherhood, and multiple jobs. “My daughter’s 11. She’s so unimpressed by me. It’s not cool when your mom does it.” (20:24)
• She discovered boxing during a tough period in her life; the first victory was addictive: “To have that feeling of victory, it was like drugs for me, and I just kept going back.” (21:20)

The Reality of Women’s Boxing

• The scene: local fights in small venues, with fighters paid according to how many tickets they sell.
• Hardy describes the pressure: “All these people came here to see you … you have to beat the [explicative] out of this girl. So … I did just that.” (22:41)
• On health risks: “There are definitely times, like, I feel I forget. … That gets scary sometimes because … is this, like, some kind of damage I’ve suffered in my head?” (23:31)

Fight Night Drama at Barclays Center

• Hardy’s biggest fight so far—complicated by missing weight (due to period timing), causing her purse money to forfeit to her opponent.
• Lou DiBella, her promoter: “She’s not the greatest female fighter in the world, but she’s one of the more exciting.” (26:00)
• Despite setbacks, Hardy refuses to withdraw: “I’m gonna beat this girl like she just stole my money.” (29:52)
• After a grueling match, Hardy wins by unanimous decision: “And still undefeated, from Brooklyn, New York—Heather ‘The Heat’ Hardy!” — Fight Announcer (28:24)

The Reality: Fighting for Nothing

• Hardy explains that, as a woman, “sometimes it’s harder for you to make your weight... So because I didn’t make weight, my opponent took my whole purse.” (29:19)
• Facing pressure from all sides, she fought that night for no money, only pride and her fans.
• “I worked so hard for this. So I was really, before I walked in the ring, prepared to fight for nothing. … At the end of the day, I didn’t come in on weight, and I was willing to pay the price.” (29:52)

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3. Junot Díaz: Immigrant Memory, Critique, and the Ghosts of Home (35:32–46:37)

Home and Disillusionment

• Díaz discusses being stripped of his national honor from the Dominican Republic due to his fierce critique of the country’s anti-Haitian policies: “It’s not with the Dominican Republic. It’s with this political party that’s engineered a retroactive change to the Dominican Constitution.” (35:32)
• Reflecting on the immigrant’s memory: “There was real memory. There was sort of fantastic memory. … When you grow up in an immigrant enclave … there’s more continuity than you would have expected.” (38:02)

On Cultural Alienation

• Díaz describes moving to the U.S. at age six—likening it to a science fiction story—where his world was “gone … it’s like Superman’s Krypton being just exploded.” (38:53)
• He also recounts learning about American racism early: “I think I learned all the racist terms for Asians in those first 12 months because of that kind of trauma and that history that America had vis a vis Vietnam.” (39:58)

Science Fiction, Star Wars, and Writing

• Díaz is a deep sci-fi fan—especially Star Wars—and sees it as a core part of American mythology: “It is about boys and their fathers and male superpowers … all the basic building blocks of kind of American popular mythology have found their home in Star Wars.” (42:02)
• On his own process: “I have to generate a lot of crap to get anything good out. … The books you don’t write are simply opportunities for people to read other writers.” (45:32–46:37)
• Emphasizing the legitimacy of differing creative rhythms: “There are things that need to be written that can only be written by a slowpoke like me, and I sort of take comfort in that.” (46:29)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “If you want to take down a reporter, there’s pretty much nothing more lethal than charging them with plagiarism.” — Jane Mayer (03:24)
• “Go back and tell Charlie Koch that the next guy he sends out to run a surveillance on me, they go home in a bag.” — Jim Elroy (12:28)
• “All these people came here to see you ... you have to beat the [expletive] out of this girl. So … I did just that.” — Heather Hardy (22:41)
• “As a woman, you have certain times of the month where it’s harder for you to make your weight. ... So because I didn’t make weight, my opponent took my whole purse.” — Heather Hardy (29:19)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Jane Mayer / Koch Brothers: 00:29–16:50
  • Smear campaign/plagiarism allegation: 02:53–05:15
  • Senate investigation story: 11:00–15:38
• Heather Hardy Profile and Fight Night: 19:36–30:57
  • Hardy describes first victory: 21:20–22:12
  • On the pressure of ticket sales: 24:41
  • Fight night at Barclays and aftermath: 25:04–30:57
• Junot Díaz in Conversation: 35:32–46:37
  • On being stripped of Order of Merit: 36:07
  • On memory/immigrant experience: 38:02–39:49
  • Racism upon arrival: 39:58
  • Star Wars and mythology: 42:02
  • Creative process and writing struggles: 45:02–46:37

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Tone and Style

• The episode blends hard-hitting investigative journalism, lively human drama, and wry, candid humor. Remnick’s warmth and curiosity set the tone, while guests like Mayer and Hardy offer unflinching honesty and resilience.

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Listen Further

Find more on these themes and stories at newyorkerradio.org.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a rich, detailed account of this episode’s content, character, and insights.

Transcript

[David Remnick]

Floor 38.

[Heather Hardy]

I'm so excited to be having a.

[David Remnick]

Conversation with someone when they have that revelation.

[Jane Mayer]

Maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process.

[David Remnick]

Please. Okay.

[Sarah Nix]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today on the show, I'll talk with the writer Junot Diaz about his fiction and about his fierce criticism of the Dominican Republic where he was born. And we'll meet the toughest of women, a boxer who relishes combat so much that she fought a professional match with no prize money to fight for. The undefeated Heather Hardy talks with the New Yorkers. Kelefasaneh later this hour, we're going to start with another tough minded soul in a very different line of combat, Jane Mayer. Jane is an investigative reporter par excellence. She's covered everything from the Clarence Thomas hearings to the use of torture to dark money in politics. And in recent years, she's been researching the Koch brothers, the conservative activists who are the seventh and eighth richest Americans. Charles and David Koch, who have underwritten so many political campaigns before, sat out Donald Trump's campaign. But now a number of their allies have found their way onto Trump's transition team. And so the Kochs are bound to be jockeying for influence in the new administration. Back in 2010, Jane wrote an article about the Koch's funding of the Tea Party, claiming that the Koch brothers and some other wealthy backers were pulling the strings of that populist movement. And as Jane was burrowing away in her reporting, she started to notice that something very odd was happening.

[Jane Mayer]

I began to get warnings from a number of people who'd worked for Koch Industries, who I wanted to interview, that I better be careful. And you know, I tend to kind of laugh off such things. But people were saying they play hardball, watch out. And a number of them were unable to give interviews because they'd had to sign non disclosure agree. But some of the ones that I was able to talk to were literally looking over their shoulders the whole time that I interviewed them and didn't want to meet any place in public, didn't want to talk on the phone. I mean, it was strange. It seems humorous at first or at least overwrought. I thought it stopped being funny for me though. On January 3, 2011, David Remnick sent me a strange email saying, can you help me out with this?

[David Remnick]

I got an email from Keith Kelly, who's the new York Post's media correspondent and he's a good reporter and he writes this. Hi, we're hearing that a right wing blogger may be preparing to let fly some pretty serious claims against Jane Mayer. On the one hand, it might be seen as payback for her bring down of the Koch brothers in August 2010. And then Keith goes on to list a couple of these allegations about quote, borrowing heavily from one story. And you know, they're allegations of plagiarism.

[Jane Mayer]

If you want to take down a reporter, there's pretty much nothing more lethal than charging them with plagiarism. There was no way it was true. I mean, I've made my share of mistakes in journalism, but I've always gone out of my way to credit my colleagues and frankly, nobody's ever complained about this in my entire career. But when I looked at David's email, I froze. I knew I had to give a response by the next morning. False allegations like this can haunt reporters for years. People would think there must be something about it that's true. It was 4 in the afternoon. I had 16 hours. By the following morning, I'd reached the authors of the four stories that I'd supposedly stolen from. And luckily they were all stand up people who were willing to go on the record saying it was not true. I got their statements and I sent them to both the Daily Caller and the New York Post. And both organizations dropped the story when they read it. But to the New York Post's credit, they actually kept reporting. Now, Keith Kelly, the media reporter who had emailed David, looked at this and he thought, what's going on here?

[David Remnick]

My first sense was, oh, wow, great, a plagiarism scandal.

[Lou DiBella]

What could be better?

[David Remnick]

You know, this could be a big.

[Lou DiBella]

Scandal involving a major magazine.

[David Remnick]

But then as we checked it out, it turned out none of the allegations were panning out. So the suspicion was that there was.

[Lou DiBella]

Somebody behind it who was trying to.

[David Remnick]

Discredit a legitimate story for their own reasons.

[Jane Mayer]

He started writing a couple stories asking, who's trying to smear Jane Mayer?

[David Remnick]

Now, we never actually identified who that could be exactly, but you know, the list of suspects would be fairly short, I would imagine.

[Jane Mayer]

I have to say I wondered who was behind it too. But gradually I was able to piece together much of the puzzle. What I learned was that a so called opposition research team had been put on me in an effort to discredit my reporting and that they'd worked for months in an office building a few blocks away from the White House. I was told by one source that what they were looking for was dirt, dirt, dirt. And that if they couldn't find it, they'd create it. I was told that the operation was led by a couple of longtime Koch operatives and that they were working with a private investigator. That firm turned out to be Vigilant Resources International. When I looked up the firm, it was run by the Safer family. Adam Safer is its president. Howard Safer, its founder, is the former New York City Police Commissioner. Naturally, I wanted to know more about this, so I picked up the phone and I called both Adam and Howard Safer to ask them about it. Both said they couldn't discuss it. They don't talk about their clients, and they would neither confirm nor deny investigating me or planting the plagiarism story. It was unclear to me if the Koch brothers would have even known about an operation like this. But what was clear was that they hated my 2010 story about their political activities. They hadn't been able to find any errors in it, but they nonetheless tried to stop it from being nominated for a National Magazine Award.

[David Remnick]

The senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries, Mark Holden, said in a letter to the ASME board members, the association of Magazine Award, that it's, quote, inappropriate for Jane Mayer's piece to be considered for the National Magazine Award because her article was biased. And given these facts, it would be inappropriate for asmi to give Ms. Mayor's article and award in reporting. But it was very clear in the aftermath that the ASME officials behaved properly and didn't cave in.

[Sarah Nix]

One of our nation's largest private companies is proudly built on American value and skills. Koch Industries started in the heartland and has expanded to nearly every state.

[Jane Mayer]

The Koch brothers themselves used to joke that they were the biggest company that nobody had ever heard of.

[Sarah Nix]

That means more than 60,000American jobs. We're still branching out into new fields.

[Jane Mayer]

They've got pipelines, refineries, chemicals, tar sands. They even own Georgia Pacific Company, which makes household products like Dixie cups. They make Stainmaster carpet. They make Lycra. It's really a phenomenal business that they've got together. We are Koch. The Koch brothers, Charles and David. They have tremendous financial interests at stake in American policy, and they want to influence that government to serve their business. But that is not the only reason they're donating. They are ideologues of extraordinary intensity, particularly Charles Koch. And from the start, really beginning more than 40 years ago, he set out to create a movement to, quote, destroy the current paradigm.

[Junot Diaz]

Theory and history have overwhelmingly demonstrated that.

[Jane Mayer]

The best way to Help the poor.

[Junot Diaz]

And for that matter, the rest of society is through a system of economic freedom.

[Jane Mayer]

That's Charles Koch receiving an award at the Philanthropy Roundtable in 2011. He really believes that, as one of his mentors said, government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. After the Citizens united decision in 2010, many critics thought that corporations would pour money into American politics. But what happened was actually kind of different. Instead, a number of hugely wealthy individuals like the Kochs tapped their fortunes to become political donors, many of whom had political agendas that helped their own bottom lines. Political reporters call this money dark money. It's money that comes from undisclosed donors. Millions and millions of dollars sloshing through the American political system from people who really want to influence our democracy but don't want any know who they are. Some of this reporting, it seems like these days, requires not just a law degree, but an accounting degree just to figure out what the rules are and to try to follow the money. Many of us have found ourselves at the end of the day looking not just over the tiny amount of disclosures that have to be made to the IRS and publicly, and you look over these forms and you look for names and you look for sums, and they have often an address or two, and you go to the address and it's nothing but a post office box. Now, in the course of reporting this story about the Kochs, I had stumbled across a kind of strange pattern that they had, which was when outsiders tried to challenge them in ways that they found threatening to their interests, they struck back hard. For instance, in 1989, there was a Senate investigation into the Kochs, into Koch Industries specifically, and whether or not it was stealing oil from Indian reservations.

[Jim Elroy]

My name is Jim Elroy. I'm a retired special agent of the FBI.

[Jane Mayer]

Jim Elroy was an FBI agent who had worked in Oklahoma, who became an investigator for the Senate committee that was looking into allegations that Koch Industries was stealing millions of dollars worth of oil from Indian reserv. So Ellroy started working for the committee and he started to feel that somebody was watching him and that there was some kind of intimidation coming, he thought, from Koch Industries.

[Jim Elroy]

I was back gauging oil sites, meaning I'm double checking, watching the Coke industries employees gauge oil. And then I'm gauging it and I'm determining that they are not telling the truth when they're indicating how much oil they're taking, that they're stealing oil. I was up in north central Oklahoma. I went to the home of the employee to Interview this person to determine who taught them to do this and why they were doing it. And when I left the interview, I saw a car parked down the street. I thought I'd seen the car before, so I surmised it might be a surveillance. And I got in the car and started to drive. I started making a couple of turns, and the car stayed with me, so I was sure it was a surveillance. So I pulled up at a convenience store, got out of the car, went in, went out the back, doubled back down the block, and came up behind this guy. I took out my credentials and my gun and told the guy, FBI, put your hands up where I can see him. I could see the butt of a what turned out to be a.45 caliber semiautomatic pistol sticking out of his waistband. So he put his hands up on the steering wheel. I reached in, I pulled the gun out of his waistband. I got him out of the car and shook him down. So he just said he was a private investigator and he was hired to determine which Koch employees that I was interviewing. So I took the magazine out of his gun and ejected the cartridge out of the chamber and threw the gun back in the car and told him that you go back and tell Charlie Koch that the next guy he sends out to run a surveillance on me, they go home in a bag. So I didn't seem to have any more surveillances on me at that time.

[Jane Mayer]

At the time, a spokesman for Koch Industries denied spying on Elroy. The Senate did release a damning report, though, which concluded that the Kochs were stealing millions of dollars worth of oil from Native Americans in Oklahoma. It also noted that oil workers said they felt pressured by their superiors at Koch to use what was called volume enhancement.

[Jim Elroy]

In fact, this particular system was known throughout the industry as the Koch method of gauging oil.

[Jane Mayer]

The report also noted that a committee investigator's ex wife said she was questioned by a Koch employee about their divorce. Now, that's not a common thing to see in a Senate report. When I read it, I realized I'm not alone. As I did more digging, I found people like Wick Solers, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Senate investigation, and he later became managing partner at the blue chip law firm King and Spaulding Solar, said that several other staff members believed that someone was going through their garbage. He told me that we don't know who sent them, but someone hired private investigators to dig up anything they could. He said he'd never experienced anything like it before or after in his law practice. And he added, I'm not political. But it was troubling. The oil theft saga went on and on. It continued for at least another decade. The Senate report led to a federal investigation, but no charges were brought. Jim Elroy retired from the FBI, but he then went to work for Bill Koch, the estranged brother of Charles and David. And Bill Koch brought his own whistleblower lawsuit against his brothers with the same charges having to do with the theft of oil, and won. After all this, Elroy retired for good, and now he spends most of his time sailing.

[Jim Elroy]

I'm going to do some sailing off the coast of Italy. I'm not sure how to say that Koch Industries might come after me there. So.

[Jane Mayer]

After the whole plagiarism ploy, I, you know, I began to wonder how worried I should be. And when I finally had drafts of the book that were not perfect yet and that I didn't really want out in public, I thought I ought to make sure they weren't just thrown out where anyone could see them. So I didn't have a shredder at home, and I wasn't sure what to do. And then, you know, I realized, well, gosh, they'd make incredible kindling. And so I took the pages and put them in the firebox. And when we next had a fire in the living room, my family got to enjoy, you know, toasting marshmallows over them.

[David Remnick]

Jane Mayer, her book Dark Money, is a history of the Koch brothers and their political influence. You can find her writing on the Koch brothers, the Trump administration, and a whole lot [e-mail] coming up. In a minute, we'll pay a visit to a boxing gym and then to a playground where things get very weird very fast.

[Sarah Nix]

Share the slide, honey bear. We have to share because if we don't, society will collapse and we'll be no better than animals.

[David Remnick]

That's all ahead on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and thanks for tuning in. Right now, it's hard to turn your attention from the news in Washington, but if you've seen any headlines about Venezuela, you know that what's happening there is absolutely terrifying. The country is in an economic collapse. The government seems powerless. Basic food and medical supplies are nearly impossible to come by, and some Venezuelans are depending on care packages sent from their relatives abroad. Bill Finnegan has been reporting on the crisis, and he paid a visit to a friend here who was putting together a box of survival goods to ship back home. This is a big bag of pre.

[Jane Mayer]

Cooked white cornmeal which is used to make arepas.

[David Remnick]

This wine you cannot find there.

[Junot Diaz]

And it costs like $3 there.

[Jim Elroy]

$4.

[Junot Diaz]

But for them, $3 is 4,000 bolivares.

[David Remnick]

3,000 bolivares.

[Junot Diaz]

When you have a salary of 15,000 bolivares a month for a family of three, it's not much, but it's a lot. There.

[David Remnick]

That's amazing that you're sending that from here. Bill Finnegan on care packages to a nation in crisis. That's next week. If I took you to Gleason's Boxing Gym in Brooklyn, you'd think you were on the set of the Harder They Fall or any old boxing movie. This place is the real deal. It's got that very distinctive and slightly disgusting smell that only 80 years of sweat and blood can provide. Kelefasane went to Gleason's last year to talk with a fighter named Heather Hardy. A woman trying to make it professionally still faces an uphill battle in boxing, especially with newer sports like mixed martial arts stealing some of boxing's thunder. Kelefer went to hear about it from a real contender.

[Heather Hardy]

My name is Heather hardy. I'm the WBC International Super Bantamweight Champion. Undefeated 14 0. Stop leaning back. Don't pull it back. Slow it down. Good, good.

[Junot Diaz]

Up, up, up, up, up.

[Heather Hardy]

Fun Jamar work 10 seconds.

[Kelefasaneh]

Is your schedule today? Pretty much like what your days are like.

[Heather Hardy]

I'm in the gym every day by 6am sometimes 5. 30 and 2. 30 and 3 is when I walk over to get my daughter back and forth to school. But outside that, I'm either sparring and I just finished training. After you guys leave, I'll have to get my daughter from school and then bring her here.

[Kelefasaneh]

She must be fascinated by the whole boxing thing, right?

[Heather Hardy]

No way. My daughter's 11. She's so unimpressed by me. It's not cool when your mom does it.

[Kelefasaneh]

When Heather says that she's training at Gleason's Gym, she might mean that she's getting ready for a fight and she has a big one coming up at Barclays center, the arena in downtown Brooklyn. But she might also mean that she's training someone else. Heather's day job, when she's not a boxer, is training clients, some of them aspiring boxers themselves, some of them just looking for a workout. We're walking back to her office, which is hidden behind some barbells and weight benches. It's cluttered. There's a couch and a drum set because her trainer is teaching her daughter to play the drums. Heather's listed at five' five, and she's a little thicker and more muscular than your average boxer. She looks like she could be an MMA star. And she, in fact, did a little kickboxing earlier in her career. Let's talk about how this started. Did you have a reputation as someone not to be messed with?

[Heather Hardy]

Not really. I mean, like, I had gotten into some little street fights when I was a kid. And, you know, my mom's big thing was, nobody's gonna beat you like your mom. So I've always been really tough, but I've been through some really hard times in my life. Like, some really hard, really hard times. And I was going through a divorce, living with my sisters. The two of us had two kids, neither one of us getting child support. I was working, like, six jobs, and they opened up this little karate school. So my sister was like, listen, you literally are working, like, around the clock. You need an hour. Just go. And within three weeks, I had my first fight. And there was probably over a thousand people in this little venue, and I won my first fight. So to have that feeling of victory, it was like drugs for me, and I just kept going back.

[Kelefasaneh]

Heather found herself sucked into the New York boxing scene. It's a world that hasn't changed much in 50 years, except now there are women like Heather Hardy fighting alongside the men. The big fights usually happen in arenas, but just about every weekend, there are smaller fights, many at rock clubs, with local fighters being cheered on by fans from their neighborhood. Fans might pay 50 bucks at the door, and fighters will get paid based on how many people they could get to show up.

[Heather Hardy]

I was in Roselyn Ballroom, big place, my pro debut. All these people came out and saw me, and I got caught with a straight right hand and fell and hit the floor. And I got up and I heard the ref, and I had eight seconds, because the first two seconds, I was, like, still kind of out of it. And in eight seconds, I told myself, all these people came here to see you. Everyone believed that you are gonna win this fight. You have to beat the out of this girl. So right after I got up, I did just that. I beat her, like, within an inch of her life, and I won the fight.

[Kelefasaneh]

One of the things that every, every boxer tries, thinks about is whether it's possible to do this and escape, you know, without suffering some sort of brain damage. I mean, how do you think about those longer term risks?

[Heather Hardy]

I was just at the Boxing hall of Fame and got to see all them old Timers, and none of them really talk so good. And it was like, wow. You know, there are definitely times like I feel I forget. I forget everything. But something happened with, oh, my phone password. I totally forgot. So that gets scary sometimes because I'm like, you know, I have this twitch in my eye and I'm always wondering, like, is it just a twitch or is this, like some kind of damage that I've suffered in my head?

[Kelefasaneh]

The point of boxing is simple. You keep winning, you win Golden Glove tournaments, maybe eventually you win an Olympic gold medal. Men's professional boxing is prize fighting. The idea is to collect a big paycheck. Floyd Mayweather Jr. Is the highest paid athlete in the world, even though most people don't watch boxing at all. For Heather, it's more complicated. In order to have an audience, she goes out to bars to convince people she knows or sees to take a chance on her. And so when she gets in the ring, she's always conscious that there are people who paid to see her and that she has an obligation to entertain them.

[Heather Hardy]

I feel that kind of pressure every single time I get in the ring for the tickets I sell, for the people who help me, for the people who've been there for me. I don't feel animosity. I don't have to gear myself up for it. This is my job. Same way you go to the office, go and get your 9 to 5 in the best you can. That's how I feel when I fight.

[Kelefasaneh]

It's fight night at Barclays center in Brooklyn, the arena that's home to the Brooklyn Nets. And it's Heather Hardy's fourth fight of the year. She's fighting as part of a show that includes 10 different fights. The doors open at 4:30pm Although the main fights, which are going to be broadcast on Showtime, don't begin until 9. While we were waiting for sat down with Lou DiBella, a former HBO executive who's now a boxing promoter. He promotes Heather Hardy and he was putting together tonight's fights.

[Lou DiBella]

Well, I mean, I signed Heather because I promoted her first fight and it was like World War three. There was this cute, you know, blonde, like, Irish girl from Brooklyn, but she had this rage in her.

[Kelefasaneh]

Is there interest in showing women's boxes?

[Lou DiBella]

I'm starting to get through and okay, one of my fighters just scored a knockdown. So that's why I just stopped myself. Sorry.

[Kelefasaneh]

It was ruled a slip.

[Lou DiBella]

It was ruled a slip.

[Jim Elroy]

Well, that's too bad.

[Lou DiBella]

No, I think that Heather has a lot of charisma. You know she's not the greatest female fighter in the world, but she's one of the more exciting.

[Kelefasaneh]

Yesterday at the weigh ins, Heather comes in four or five pounds heavy. Was that a surprise to you?

[Lou DiBella]

Yeah, which shouldn't have been. She should have told me what was going on before yesterday morning. What was happening is Heather was expecting her period this week and it didn't come on the date it was anticipated. And she simply couldn't make weight physically. And to be honest with you, it has me a little bit worried about tonight. And I gave Heather the opportunity if she wanted to pull out of the fight, and she insisted she was ready, she was going to win.

[Kelefasaneh]

About 8,500 tickets have been sold, most of them to people who want to see the main event, a battle between two middleweights, Daniel Jacobs and Peter Quillen. Heather has spent weeks selling tickets to this fight, and you can tell which section is hers. It's the one full of people who start screaming when she comes out of the tunnel and walks into the ring.

[Lou DiBella]

Ladies and gentlemen, up next, Noemi Vosquez and Heather the Heat Hardy.

[Kelefasaneh]

Heather likes to start her fights as if she's angry, she's aggressive. Watching Heather fight can be a little bit misleading. She throws with conviction, but in fact, she's not a particularly hard puncher. At one point, she throws two lead uppercuts. That's a dangerous maneuver, both for her opponent and for her.

[Junot Diaz]

Don't stand there, watch her when you're punching.

[Kelefasaneh]

She pulls away in the second half. As the action slows down, the referee calls a quick time out so the doctor can examine a cut that has started to bleed above Heather's right eyebrow. Some fighters are comfortable in a defensive crouch, but Heather likes to stand straight and get close to her opponent, even though that's not always the wisest move in sports and often in life, we like to think that hard work pays off. And we accept the idea that often the most rewarding achievements will be the most difficult. Boxing magnifies that idea. The appeal of the sport is inseparable from its brutality. Often the thrilling moments are the violent ones, the times when a fighter gets hit and gets hurt and comes back. By the eighth round, Heather looks red faced and exhausted, but she's been dominating her opponent.

[Lou DiBella]

Ladies and gentlemen, after eight rounds here at Barkley center, we go to the judges. Scorecards by unanimous decision and still undefeated, from Brooklyn, New York, Heather the Hippie Hardy.

[Kelefasaneh]

So it's finally over. We thought you were gonna be fighting around 7pm tonight or 6pm tonight.

[David Remnick]

No.

[Kelefasaneh]

And you fought around 11pm what was it like for you? The in between time?

[Heather Hardy]

It was very exhausting, to be honest. The up, down, up, down. You know, any fighter will tell you once you get ready and you're ready to go out there, and then they pull it back, it's like, oh, you know, So I was really nervous because I was so tired. My muscles were, like, going to sleep.

[Kelefasaneh]

Tell me about this week.

[Junot Diaz]

It's.

[Kelefasaneh]

It seems like it was a rough week for you.

[Heather Hardy]

Yeah, it was a tough week. The end weeks are always pretty tough for me. Finalizing ticket sales, running around, doing that, collecting money. You know, as a woman, you have certain times of the month where it's harder for you to make your weight. So because I didn't make weight, my opponent took my whole purse. So my boss was nice enough to give me a nice little bonus. So it covered everything, you know, but that was a lot of stress.

[Kelefasaneh]

And the rule is, if you can't make weight, your opponent basically has the right to renegotiate the contract. So she took the prize money even though you won the fight, we have.

[Heather Hardy]

To renegotiate the contract. She can either not fight or leave. And it was pretty much like, well, either I take all your money or I don't fight. And I had sold $24,000 in tickets. I worked so hard for this. So I was really, before I walked in the ring, prepared to fight for nothing. But at the end of the day, I didn't come in on weight, and I was willing to pay the price. And my boss wanted to scratch the fight, and I was like, I'll do okay. I'll take my money, take everything. I don't care. It's like. Like, I think I tell you this story. My mom said, if a black belt in karate stole your wallet, would you give a. That they have a black belt in karate? Hell, no. Lou asked me, you gonna be all right? You gonna beat this girl? I said, I'm gonna beat this girl. Like, she just stole my money.

[Kelefasaneh]

Thanks so much, Heather.

[Heather Hardy]

Thank you. My name is Heather hardy. I'm the WBC international super bantamweight champion, professional boxer. 15 0.

[David Remnick]

That was Heather Hardy with the New Yorker's kelefasane. And here's the update. Since they spoke, Hardy had three more wins and putting her at 18 0. There's more to come on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. And this. This is Playground Purgatory.

[Anna]

Is that your little Guy over there?

[Sarah Nix]

Yeah, that's Sebastian.

[Anna]

What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide.

[Sarah Nix]

Oh, she's so sweet.

[Anna]

I feel like I've seen you here before. I'm Anna.

[Sarah Nix]

Yeah, you look familiar. I'm Sarah.

[Anna]

This place is such a lifesaver.

[Sarah Nix]

Total lifesaver.

[Anna]

We're here, like, every day. Sometimes twice.

[Sarah Nix]

Tell me about it. We were here for 10 hours yesterday.

[Anna]

I'm always so happy when I'm here and never feel strange or despondent.

[Sarah Nix]

Me, too. So happy. The sound of all the kids laughing and screaming is so joyous. It doesn't sound like nails on a chalkboard at all.

[Anna]

I've never cried behind that tree.

[Sarah Nix]

Me neither.

[Junot Diaz]

No, they broke it.

[Anna]

Tessa, Tess, Come on over here and put on your coat, okay? Sweetheart, it's chilly out and you need to put your coat on, okay? Your coat needs to go on your body. The fabric needs to cover your torso to help you maintain a proper internal temperature or you'll die. Okay, pumpkin? Is that your little guy over there?

[Sarah Nix]

Yeah, that's Sebastian.

[Anna]

What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the side.

[Sarah Nix]

Oh, she's adorable.

[Anna]

Wait, did I already ask you that?

[Sarah Nix]

Did you? I don't think so.

[Jane Mayer]

I don't know.

[Anna]

I feel funny sometimes.

[Sarah Nix]

Sometimes when I'm in the sandbox, I can feel myself sinking, like something's pulling me down. I can feel the sand slowly suffocating me. And it feels good. We should totally do a play date sometime.

[Anna]

Oh, my God, it would be so great to do a playdate.

[Sarah Nix]

Maybe I'll buy us a bottle of Pitot Grigio. Nothing wrong with moms playing a little play date, right?

[Anna]

Nothing wrong at all.

[Sarah Nix]

Hey, I don't know if you're into it, but I bet I could dig up a little pot in the back of a drawer somewhere. It might be really old, but it could be fun.

[Anna]

Ooh, no, that would be fun.

[Sarah Nix]

Great.

[Anna]

I could probably score a line or two of Coke if you wanted. We totally don't have to.

[Sarah Nix]

Oh, I am definitely down for a bump or two. Is that applesauce on your shirt?

[Jane Mayer]

This?

[Anna]

No. Tessa threw up on me. But applesauce are throw up. What's the difference, really? They're both just things that get on your shirt that you lose the will to wipe off after a certain point. I mean, either way, you're gonna give yourself a haircut with a kitchen knife, right.

[Sarah Nix]

Sebastian? Share the slide, honey bear. We don't own the slide, okay? We have to share, because if we don't, society will Collapse and we'll be no better than animals. This playground and everything around it will deteriorate into a dystopian war zone. And you know what? Dystopian war zones don't have slides.

[Anna]

I love her outfit.

[Sarah Nix]

It's so cute. I want to tear her arms off.

[Anna]

Such a beautiful day here today.

[Sarah Nix]

It's perfect.

[Anna]

Not a cloud in the sky.

[Sarah Nix]

Never is.

[Anna]

I'm Anna, by the way.

[Junot Diaz]

No, no, no.

[David Remnick]

Last time. Down Playground Purgatory by Colin Nissen. Performed by the New Yorker Radio Hour's own Sarah Nix and Julie Sharbutt. When Junot Diaz started contributing to the New Yorker around 20 years ago, his stories were a shot of adrenaline. Fast, vivid and racy, but also a kind of education in their language and in their politics. They provided an introduction to the culture of Dominicans in the United States. Diaz is a fierce critic of his home country, the Dominican Republic, in particular its treatment of workers and immigrants from the neighboring country of Haiti. In the past, he's compared rules about deporting Haitians to something out of Nazi Germany. I spoke to Juno early this year, and I asked him about his argument with the Dominican Republic.

[Junot Diaz]

Well, it's not with the Dominican Republic. It's with this political party that's engineered a retroactive change to the Dominican Constitution. You know, you're only a Dominican if you can trace your Dominicanness to parents before 1930s. And it was basically this reading was engineered to target Haitian Dominicans, Haitian as part of a larger kind of policies and larger politics to isolate, marginalize and menace the larger Haitian immigrant community in the Dominican Republic.

[David Remnick]

Judah, you were, you're a favorite son of the Dominican Republic. You were born there in 1968. You've won all kinds of awards. In 2009, you were awarded an Order of Merit by the Dominican Republic, by the government. And now you were stripped of that Order of merit.

[Junot Diaz]

Well, I mean, I wouldn't describe a writer as a favorite son of any country. Certainly not.

[David Remnick]

But there has to be enormous national pride that you've risen to such prominence as a novelist and a writer of short stories here.

[Junot Diaz]

Well, I think, again, I think you have to understand the kind of culture of the Dominican Republic. If I was a baseball player and a vaccatero, I think that you would have a wider. The country would have a wider sense of who I am. Again, I'm very minor figure. And I'm not just saying that I have humility. It's true. Very minor figure. But we're talking about a political elite that I have Tried everything possible to stay as far away from. And I'm not surprised that suddenly these very folks who gave me a medal, which I never claimed, suddenly discovered that they hadn't read anything I'd written. Because certainly if they'd read anything I'd written, I would be the last person that they would be trying to give. These politicians would be trying to give awards to.

[David Remnick]

You know, the late John Updike said that in a writer's early career that you're able to almost easily work off the memory of your life. You left at 6 years old, which is a very critical pivot time in any person's life. What the motherlode of memory from the Dominican Republic was that you were able to retain before six years old is, for some people at least, pretty slim. How much of it was real memory of life lived there and how much of it was kind of received through lore and your mother or other relatives and the rest?

[Junot Diaz]

Yeah, I think it was multiple. I think there was a real memory. There was sort of fantastic memory. Certainly one of the things that ends up helping is that when you grow up in an immigrant enclave, when you grow up in a Dominican sort of milieu, there's more continuity than you would have expected. So, of course, I'm sitting surrounded by all these Dominicans in New Jersey, many of them who don't speak English, many of them who, even if they've been living in the states 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years, you would think that they had just gotten here from the Dominican Republic. And in some ways, it kind of helped focus my recollections of the Dominican Republic. I think part of what ended up happening with me, David, was that I was a kid whose father was in the United States while I was living in the Dominican Republic.

[David Remnick]

He preceded you here by some years, right?

[Junot Diaz]

Exactly. And so I spent my first six years of my life dreaming of another place. I was always thinking and dreaming about this father in America. Well, what ends up happening is that I come to the United States and suddenly my entire Dominican world is gone. It's vanished. It's like Superman Krypton being just exploded. And suddenly I just swapped from sort of longing and trying to imagine and trying to connect with an America that was distant to. I started doing the same for the Dominican Republic. It was linked to relatives like my grandparents, who I loved. It was linked to a time of safety. You know, being an immigrant is incredibly hard. You know, being in America was for many years a source of great pain. The pain of, you know, acculturation of Learning language, of that shock of American xenophobia and racism. And so of course, that my mind would. My heart would ca itself back to the Dominican Republic and that I would have these muscles that would enable that.

[David Remnick]

What were your experiences of racism as a kid? What are the incidents? How to describe it to somebody who's not living the same life as you?

[Junot Diaz]

My first experience is that I came over in December 1974. So, of course, in the first six months that I was in the United States, I watched the last remnants of the American imperial project in Vietnam collapse.

[David Remnick]

And you're aware of it at age six?

[Junot Diaz]

Well, because you're learning English and you have the TV on, and all that is on television is Vietnam. I always tell my friends, I'm like, the first word I learned in English was Vietnam. And it was amazing. Some of the kind of racial. Just madness that, you know, that was, you know, just part of the kind of vocabulary of America in that time around Asians and around Asian Americans. I mean, I think I learned all the racist terms for Asians in those first 12 months because of that kind of trauma and that history that America had vis a vis Vietnam.

[David Remnick]

Well, it's funny, you just mentioned before that the experience of being plopped down here was almost a science fiction kind of experience. From one world to the next. And part of your early reading and sometimes your attempts at writing are in the science fiction vein. Now, I'm a bit older than you, but we grew up with one science fiction thing in common. You love it. I've seen them all, but I cannot fathom it. I don't understand them. Please explain to me the importance of Star wars to you.

[Junot Diaz]

Yeah, you know, it's funny because when one thinks about.

[David Remnick]

I have no idea. I have to tell you, I have no idea what's going on. I go, I see them multiple times. Galaxies are exploding because people are searching for a map to see Mark Hamill. I have no idea what's going on.

[Junot Diaz]

Yeah, well, you know, if you've seen the latest movie, even those of us who have a lot of literacy on Star Wars, I think it would be a far stretch to actually make sense of what's going on.

[David Remnick]

People love this one.

[Junot Diaz]

It's kind of a straightforward parable of masculinities and conflict. It is about boys and their fathers and male power and male superpowers. All the different ingredients of boys adventure stories, swords, medievalism, bad dads, space travel. You know, it's. In many ways, I'm telling you, all of the basic building blocks of kind of American popular mythology have found their home in Star Wars.

[David Remnick]

I gotta tell you, Juno, the more I listen to you, the more it sounds like you wanna write one of these sci fi epics.

[Junot Diaz]

Oh, go no, not in that vein. I think I recognize their hold they have on me, but I don't. I would not want to write them in that vein now.

[David Remnick]

A few years ago you published a story in the New Yorker and it was a story called Monstro. And you were thinking about turning that into something longer.

[Junot Diaz]

Yeah, I'm still wrestling with it. You know, it's kind of my take on zombies and monsters, you know, on the island where zombies and new world monsters first went into circulation. And so it was kind of my attempt to bring the, the kind of post colonial zombie monster home to the Caribbean. But it keeps just kind of derailing. So I'll keep trying. I just keep have this idea of what would happen if the world ended in a country where the world has ended multiple times, where that's something in fact that we're quite used to, the United States. The world ending would be this singular tragedy in the Dominican Republic. It's just a return to the normal.

[David Remnick]

How do you mean?

[Junot Diaz]

Well, I mean, Jesus, how many times has the world ended in the Caribbean? You know, you had the poor world ending for all the indigenous people when the Europeans came over and colonized and sort of through disease and through slavery and violence, trade. Yeah, man, it's the apocalyptic core of the Caribbean is really, really deep. It's really deep.

[David Remnick]

You know, do you know, maybe this is complicated question to even ask, much less to answer, but when I got to the New Yorker, the ur writer here was somebody we didn't see very often, but wrote with incredible regularity, and that was John Updike. Every year there'd be a new book, every several weeks, a perfectly honed critical essay. The fertility and the stream of work just began in the, in the 50s and ended with a book of poems, literally from his deathbed. It's intimidating. That kind of notion has to be intimidating to all other writers. You've had your ups and downs with this. You've talked some about difficulty of getting a book launched or getting one launched for as long as a year or two. And then setting aside, to put it politely, how do you deal with that? Do you feel it's a matter of block or it's just a matter of that's who you are and that's how you're going to create and, and that's how you're going to go about it.

[Junot Diaz]

I think it's important that we have that kind of diversity. I think that I laud the Updikes and the George Carol Oates, the Samuel R. Delanys. We need people who live through their writing, but we also need the folks who are, you know, they kind of dwell in deep, deep places and emerge with pearls only, you know, once every few decades. And again, I think that the.

[David Remnick]

How do you see your own life in those terms?

[Junot Diaz]

I think I see my life as someone who has to generate a lot of crap to get anything good out. It happens, man.

[David Remnick]

And it doesn't get easier.

[Junot Diaz]

I don't think it has. I think what I've come to learn is that one book or 40, the books that you don't write are simply opportunities for people to read other writers. And that helps, man. I mean, I'm slow, and I've had to kind of, you know, fight with that. My lust and desire, my longing to write faster, but the slow dawning that we have, the rhythm that we need to create the art that matters to us and hopefully to other people. You cannot wish another rhythm on yourself. You can maybe work to try to get it, but I've learned to understand and begin to appreciate that I was given this rhythm for a reason. There are things that need to be written that can only be written by a slowpoke like me, and I sort of take comfort in that.

[David Remnick]

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, he just wrote an essay for the New Yorker about what Donald Trump's victory means for him as an immigrant. And you can find that and everything else he's published for us at New York. Next week on the show, Michael Chabin stops by to talk about some of the things he's been into lately. And it turns out we've got a mutual interest in a show called the Crown, a sort of biopic about Queen Elizabeth II that, in his words, is like watching an aquarium. After watching the first episode, I said, you know, this is so boring. I don't know if I want to keep doing this. And yet, as soon as we start to watch the second one, I was so grateful to be there because nothing happens. The episode that really made me fall.

[Lou DiBella]

In love with the show because it.

[David Remnick]

Was so meaningless on some level, was called Windsor. And one of the main plot points in this episode was, would the children.

[Lou DiBella]

Once Elizabeth has become queen, would the.

[David Remnick]

Children adopt the royal family's name of Windsor? My wife taking my name as the law.

[Heather Hardy]

It's the custom, not the law.

[David Remnick]

A custom practice so universal it might as well be the law. You can't do this. Am I to be the only man in the country whose wife and children don't take his name?

[Lou DiBella]

You can't do this to Dickie.

[David Remnick]

It will devastate him. You know that. You know how important it is to him. I've told him the royal house Mountbatten is in the bag.

[Jane Mayer]

That was a mistake. It's not.

[Lou DiBella]

The name has to be Windsor for stability.

[David Remnick]

It's like Game of Thrones with no sex, no violence, and instead of dragons, there are corgis. You can't have everything. Michael Chabin joins us next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Okay, now we're going to close with a refresher on the big news of 2016, the really big news. It happened not in November, but back in January. Millions and millions of miles away in January, scientists told us that we have company in the solar system. A ninth planet. Now, remember, Pluto lost its planet status a few years back. It was voted off the island by astronomers. So this new planet would bring us back to nine again, even though so far nobody claims to have seen it. But the evidence, they say, is solid. And astronomers published new research in October to build their case. The New Yorker's Alan Burdick, who writes a lot about science, talked with the astronomer behind this new, seemingly invisible planet. And the irony of it is he's actually the guy who demoted Pluto in the first place.

[Lou DiBella]

I'm Mike Brown. I'm a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. I love trying to figure out how the whole solar system put itself together and what got the Earth and all the other planets to be the way they are today.

[Junot Diaz]

And you are the guy who killed Pluto. Am I right? You have a book called How I Killed Pluto and How It Had It Coming. What's up?

[Lou DiBella]

Yeah, I guess it's kind of hard to hide if I have a book called that. So, yeah, so I am the guy who killed Pluto. Or what really happened is that I found the first object in the solar system that's more massive than Pluto. When we found that, you know, the question no longer is, is Pluto a planet? The question becomes, what is this new thing? And that's what finally led astronomers to really step back and look and say, are we really going to add yet another thing that doesn't actually make sense and call it a planet? Or should we reassess what we think planets really are? And I give astronomers a lot of credit. It was a hard decision to make, and it was the right one to say all these things that I found and Pluto are not planets. Only the big gravitationally dominant things are really planets. And when all this happened 10 years ago, people would ask, so are there any other planets out there? And I would say, nope, that's it. They're just eight planets and we'll never have any more.

[Junot Diaz]

Well, now, just last December, though, there was this flurry of excitement about Planet X. Various people had claimed to discover Planet X. And you were the Debbie Downer.

[Lou DiBella]

Yeah, that was almost embarrassing for our field, I would say. The problem is that it's very easy these days with the Internet for any random person to say they have done anything without much vetting, and there was no double checking. And it was. It was just not true.

[Junot Diaz]

I love the language. In your paper, you and a colleague have published a paper with the title Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System. You say we motivate the existence of a distant eccentric perturber.

[Lou DiBella]

Yes. So in the paper, it is the distant eccentric perturber. When we're actually talking about it, we actually call it Planet nine. This would be the real ninth planet in the solar system and the one that I didn't think existed 10 years ago when I told everybody that eight planets was what we had. And eight planets is all we're ever going to have. We are pretty convinced there's a ninth one out there waiting to be found.

[Junot Diaz]

And it is, in your mind, a planet.

[Lou DiBella]

Yeah, I think that's unambiguous. So it all started with this object, Sedna, that was on a strange orbit that couldn't be explained. And we have tried for nearly 15 years now to try to explain the orbit of Sedna. And in that time, more objects were found, sort of like Sedna. And it turned out that all of these objects, when they go on their very eccentric orbits, when they go very far away from the sun, they all go in the same direction. There's no reason they should all go in the same direction. They should all be randomly scattered around the sky going off in different directions. And when one we realize this, it's really started us scratching our heads. And after a long analysis, a year and a half of back and forth and back and forth, we realized the answer is that there is a giant planet which is sculpting the orbits of these objects. This giant planet that's very far away in the very outer part of the solar system. In many ways, you could argue that this is more of a planet than anything else in the solar system. It is gravitationally dominating a region that is that is orders of magnitude bigger than the whole rest of the solar system put together. It's forcing all these other Kuiper Belt objects into their orbits.

[Junot Diaz]

How long would it take us to.

[Lou DiBella]

Get there if we were able to get there? Oh, I love this question. Because even before we were starting to think about the existence of a planet out there, I've been working with a group who are trying to think about how to get as far as we can. It would take 20 years to get to Planet Nine. If it's at its closest approach, I want us to go there. I want to know what this thing looks like. If it's out there. I almost don't say if. When we find out where it is, I want to get those rockets ready to go as fast as possible.

[Junot Diaz]

What are the odds, do you think, that you yourself will find this?

[Lou DiBella]

We could probably find it in 10 years. It takes a long time to cover all the parts of the sky that it might be in. And so 10 years might be at the probability that we are the ones who find it is not high. And I'm a little sad about that. I would love to be the one who discovers it. At the same time, I just. I want to see it. I want to know it's there. I'm just going to jump up and down, even if it's not me who finds it.

[Junot Diaz]

Your colleague told me that you sometimes call it George.

[Lou DiBella]

Only because Neptune was originally supposed to be George's planet. I'm sorry, Uranus was George.

[Junot Diaz]

Do you have other nicknames?

[Lou DiBella]

We really actually call it Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the single most common name in my family tree for a male child. And I always thought Jehoshaphat was a great name as long as we use the nickname Fatty for it. So in fact, we actually call it Fatty when we're just talking to each other.

[David Remnick]

Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, he spoke earlier in the year with Alan Burdick. And you can find some articles about Planet nine or Fatty or whatever you want to call [e-mail] I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week we'll take a look at the political turmoil in Washington and the economic turmoil in Venezuela. Please join us till then. I hope you have a great week and see you soon.

[Sarah Nix]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Baron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfiel, Maitha Lee Rao and Steven Valentino. With help from Emma Allen, Becky Cooper, Casey Holford and Susan Morrison. With additional scoring this week by Paul Schneider. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.