Episode Two: Amy Schumer, Jorge Ramos, and the Search for a Lost Father

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode Two: Amy Schumer, Jorge Ramos, and the Search for a Lost Father

Date: October 30, 2015
Host: David Remnick, WNYC Studios & The New Yorker

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Overview

This episode weaves together an eclectic mix of humor, social commentary, personal history, and investigative storytelling. Editor David Remnick leads insightful conversations with comic Amy Schumer—the year’s standout comedic voice; anchors a profile interview with pioneering newsman Jorge Ramos (by William Finnegan); and continues the search for a lost father in the intertwined lives of writer Jill Lepore and her friend Adriana Alti. Interludes featuring New Yorker cartoonists Matt Diffie and Drew Durnovich add lightness and behind-the-scenes perspective.

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Key Segments and Insights

1. Behind the Scenes with New Yorker Cartoonists

[00:29]–[02:07], [18:12]–[19:24], [31:38]–[33:20]

• Cartoon Drafts and Creativity:
  Matt Diffie and Drew Durnovich share how cartoon ideas evolve, riff on half-baked jokes, and commiserate over creative block and last-minute inspiration.
• Notable Quotes:
  • “Sometimes the end of the week, the desperation helps.” — Matt Diffie [01:59]
  • On pitching odd jokes: “Maybe it’s not even funny at all.” — Drew Durnovich [01:36]
• Cartoon Marketplace Realities:
  Selling to the New Yorker involves batches of ideas; often, the strangest ones end up as reader caption contests rather than traditional picks.
  • “It’s sort of like getting accepted and rejected at the same time.” — Matt Diffie [32:30]

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2. Amy Schumer: Comedy, Family, and Responsibility

[02:07]–[17:19]

Personal Comedy Rooted in Family and Pain

• Schumer connects her comedic sensibility to deep family experiences: her father’s MS diagnosis, financial struggles, and the solace/survival mechanism of humor.
  • “The only way I can deal with it is to find a way to laugh about it.” — Amy Schumer [03:26]

Evolving as a Performer and Writer

• Schumer discusses evolving from punchline-driven stand-up to material with “an agenda,” blending laughs with meaning.
  • David Remnick presses her to define her agenda:
    • “To make people laugh and feel better.” — Amy Schumer [07:10]

Satire, Feminism, and Political Comedy in “Inside Amy Schumer”

• Breaks down the “I’m Sorry” sketch about women’s apologetic behavior:
  • “We were talking about just how women say ‘I’m sorry’ so much… but we gotta do a scene about that.” — Amy Schumer [08:16]
• Describes the collaborative writers’ room and contrasts stand-up with TV sketch writing.

Navigating Public Criticism and the “PC Police”

• Defends her boundary-pushing jokes, adapts as her audience and sense of responsibility grows.
  • “If there’s a part of you that’s sensitive to that, it’s probably because there’s a little truth in it.” [13:05]
• Acknowledges evolution away from some older material as her platform and responsibilities expand.

On Not Taking Over for Jon Stewart

• Schumer details her reasons for turning down the Daily Show:
  • “I’d have to be in that same building every day for five years.” [14:22]

Future Plans & Artistic Fearlessness

• Wants to try new, riskier projects, possibly directing, and keep growing creatively.

David Remnick’s Final Take

• “The indomitable Amy Schumer… just this past weekend, she appeared yet again in support of gun control legislation with her cousin, Senator Chuck Schumer.” [17:22]

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3. Jorge Ramos: Journalism, Advocacy, and Political Dissent

[19:24]–[31:27]
*Interview by William Finnegan

The Advocate Journalist

• Ramos doesn’t hide his passionate defense of immigrants, contrasting himself with “neutral” U.S. broadcast journalists.
• On Rubio and Cruz not backing undocumented immigrants:
  • “It’s incredibly unfair and sad that these two politicians are closing the door… behind their parents.” — Jorge Ramos [21:10]

Standing Up to Trump

• Recalls being thrown out of Trump’s Iowa press conference:
  • Plays audio of confrontation; emphasizes the importance of remaining calm under pressure due to decades of experience (and yoga):
    • “[Yoga] helps me… with breathing, it’s amazing what you can achieve.” — Jorge Ramos [24:00]

The Ann Coulter Interview and the Power of Silence

• Ramos interviews Coulter despite her incendiary views, explains the effectiveness of silence in exposing extreme rhetoric.
  • “I made the conscious decision of not talking… it didn’t matter what I would ask. It would be weak in comparison to what she had just said.” [25:49]
• On confronting ideology:
  • “We have to talk with those who don’t agree with us. That’s the only way for them to get to know us.” [26:40]

TV as “Exaggeration of Life”

• Behind TV antagonism is professional performance, not personal enmity.

Reflections on Mexico, Risk, and Legacy

• Grew up under censorship; recognizes freedom—and peril—in U.S. journalism vs. Mexico, where “more than 80 journalists… have been killed.” [30:00]
• Final advice to his 25-year-old self:
  • “I would tell him to slow down a little bit… I should have enjoyed… but didn’t know how. Don't be stupid. That’s not the most important thing in life.” [31:14]

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4. The Search for a Lost Father (Part II)

[33:20]–[50:30]
*With Jill Lepore & Adriana Alti

A Personal and Societal Story

• Adriana, adopted and raised in nearly all-white New England, never knew her biological father.
• Dramatic funeral encounter with her birth mother, “Nina”, jumpstarts questions of origin, identity, and race.
• Nina’s stories—connections with poet William Brown, claimed ties to Bob Dylan—sound mythic, but send Jill Lepore down a research rabbit hole.

Changing Social Contexts

• The history of transracial adoption in America: shifting attitudes, protest by Black social workers (1972), and evolving social policy and culture.
• “There’s just this moment, this little window… where what happened to her could have happened.” — Jill Lepore [44:22]

The Search Intensifies

• Using old and new clues (including the nickname “Big Brown”), Lepore hits on a 1965 Washington Square Park photo.
• Artistic profile: Brown as a public street poet, described by photographer Leroy Henderson:
  • “He was really quite vocal and quite… big guy, huge guy.”
  • “I think that shows that this guy saw something beyond being a black man… that probably would have been too limiting.” [49:20]

Resonance of Art and History

• The segment highlights both personal longing and the sprawling unpredictability of real-life detective work.

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5. Birdsong and Tech in Prospect Park

[51:08]–[54:34]
*Reported by Carolyn Corman

• Field test of Bird Genie, an app that identifies bird calls, emphasizes nature and technology intersection and citizen science.
• “Maybe 85% of the time… you’re hearing the birds way before you see them.” — Tom Stevenson [51:54]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “You just shouldn’t have to see your parents this vulnerable, and we would find a way to laugh about it, always. The whole family. There was nothing that was off-limits.” — Amy Schumer [04:00]
• “We have to talk with those who don’t agree with us. That’s the only way for them to get to know us.” — Jorge Ramos [26:40]
• “TV is an exaggeration of life… the intensity that you see on TV… that’s not real life.” — Jorge Ramos [27:51]
• “I started trying ‘Big Brown’ … and he pops up, and then he’s kind of everywhere.” — Jill Lepore [47:23]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• New Yorker Cartoonists’ Workshop: [00:29–02:07], [18:12–19:24], [31:38–33:20]
• Amy Schumer Interview: [02:07–17:19]
• Jorge Ramos Profile: [19:24–31:27]
• Search for William Brown: [33:20–50:30]
• Bird Genie App Field Test: [51:08–54:34]

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Tone and Original Flavors

The episode blends the quick-witted banter of Amy Schumer (“Night, Hill”), Remnick’s frank yet thoughtful interviewing style, Ramos’s passionate advocacy, and Jill Lepore’s gentle but persistent curiosity. Even the most serious discussions are laced with humor and candor, giving the episode a vibrant, intellectual, and deeply human tone.

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For First-Time Listeners

This episode provides an immersive experience in what makes The New Yorker distinctive: the collision of art, politics, history, and personal storytelling. You’ll laugh; you’ll feel; you’ll likely Google William Brown yourself.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Adriana Alti]

Floor 38.

[Amy Schumer]

It's very exciting to be having a.

[Jill Lepore]

Conversation with someone when they have that.

[Adriana Alti]

Revelation like the interview.

[David Remnick]

How does this work as a national.

[Adriana Alti]

Story.

[Amy Schumer]

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]

I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. You know, every week it's my pleasure to sit down with the cartoon editor and the managing editor, and we go through about 50 or 100 rough drafts of cartoons. They're called roughs. It's a lot. So we thought we'd check in with some of the artists here who spend their week churning out those cartoons. Here's Matt Diffie and Drew Darnovich.

[Matt Diffie]

So, hey, it's Matt Diffie, cartoonist of the New Yorker. Every week we have to turn in ideas. So we have to do our batch of cartoons this week. I'm gonna call Drew Durnovich and see what he's got cooking. Hello. Hey, what's up Saturday, Checking in on your progress. Yep, I've been working on my batch. Anything coming? Coming together for you. There's a giant wave. Two surfers are riding it. One of them has a wetsuit, but there's a bow tie top of the wetsuit, and he's saying it's a rental. But what have you been doing the past couple days? Any new ideas? Well, I've got just sort of a bunch of sort of areas where I'm pretty sure there's a joke and I haven't figured it out. One is the fact that hipsters, suspenders and some sort of old style hat and a beard. As time goes, they're getting closer and closer to Amish people. But I've still got the turtleneck briefs. I honestly don't know if that's a cartoon or if it's just something that. Maybe it's not a cartoon. Maybe it's something you actually make and wear yourself. Maybe it's not even funny at all.

[William Finnegan]

Well, we've still got three days.

[Matt Diffie]

Yeah, sometimes the end of the week, the desperation helps. Right? Happy cartooning.

[David Remnick]

We're gonna hear from Drew and Matt a little later in the show. If there's one comedian who's everywhere these days. In fact, I think I just saw her on the side of a bus. It's Amy Schumer. She's running her own Comedy Central series. She wrote and starred in her first feature film. She hosted MTV's Video Music Awards, and just recently, HBO released Amy Schumer Live at the Apollo. Amy's comedy is a mix of the political, the raunchy and the scathing. And it also has an undercurrent of sadness. She's very good at making you squirm too. Amy, I can't help but ask this question. I grew up in a household that sounds, I can't begin to tell you, very similar to mine.

[Amy Schumer]

Really?

[David Remnick]

You bet. I had a mother with multiple sclerosis and eventually a father who lost his business. He was a dentist because he had Parkinson's. You don't want a shaky handed Parkinsonian dentist.

[Amy Schumer]

No, you don't.

[David Remnick]

It's kind of like a bad Buster Keaton movie. Yeah, it sounds like there was a lot of tumult, but a lot of humor where you were growing up and in your house. Can you kind of give us a picture of that?

[Amy Schumer]

Sure. Is that how you guys dealt with it too?

[David Remnick]

With insane humor? Yeah, but between brothers more than.

[Amy Schumer]

Right? More than to the parents. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, my, my siblings and I are close. I have a younger sister, she's three and a half years younger. And my older brother is four years older. So I'm right in the middle. The first sort of horrific thing that happened was that his. My brother is a different father than us. And his dad died. And I remember he told me he was 12, I was 8. And he told me, he said, my dad died. And I just smiled. Like I had the biggest smile on my face because I was so uncomfortable. And I didn't know how to process that emotion. So it just went to like, you know, the ultimate sadness just went to like a smile. And he just looked at me like I was insane. And I felt horrible, you know, And I think that that's probably in some ways still in him. And the shame of that is still in me. But that's been my reaction to real tragedy. The only way I can deal with it is to find a way to laugh about it. And I'm better now. You know, I was 8 years old. Now somebody gives me bad news, I react like a human being. But My dad got Ms. And I was 11. And it came on loud and strong. And I'm the middle child trying to keep everybody laughing. And I really did. We all really did. It would be like, you know, seeing your dad that vulnerable and human. It's so awful, you can't believe you're seeing it. So it becomes funny. You're like. Like no one should ever have to see their. Their parents weak. Weak and themselves at JFK airport. Like you just shouldn't have to See your parents this vulnerable, and we would find a way to laugh about it, always. The whole family. There was nothing that was off limits.

[David Remnick]

Including your father?

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. Still with my dad, he still has.

[David Remnick]

His wits about him.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. He's got some dementia. Like, he forgets a lot. He'll call me three times in a day and be like, why haven't I talked to you? And I'm like, we've already talked.

[David Remnick]

How does it become something that you're not just funny in front of your family at dinner or cracking wise in the back of a classroom in Long island or wherever, and it's something that you begin to see as a possibility to be and become and to shape. And how did that happen for you?

[Amy Schumer]

It was. My brother and sister were my favorite people to make laugh, and then my parents and then the kids at school, and I just. I loved it. And I loved it because it was fun for me. It wasn't this need for approval. Like, I. Cause I'm ornery, you know, I just. I liked making myself laugh and then did plays. And then, you know, I tried stand up. I just tried it. I never thought I would ever be a comedian. I just. I liked it. And I was like, I'll do it again. And I kind of just did it, kind of.

[David Remnick]

Because the reward is right there.

[Amy Schumer]

And then, yeah, it was like, if you're. You know, you do plays your whole life, and then you're in college and you get to perform and you're doing, and then all of a sudden, it's just like, boom, you're waiting tables and you want to perform, and it's. It's a really good way to get. To get on stage and perform.

[David Remnick]

Amy, at what point do you think that your work is a collection of jokes and decent performing skills and all the rest moves to something more. Not elevated in a kind of pompous way, but more serious that you. There's an idea behind what you're doing. There are ideas behind what you're doing.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. Well, I think you just evolve as a comic. I was just jokes. I was just set up punchline. And you're just trying to get laughs. You're trying to get better. You're figuring it out. So I used to play a character, really kind of like a deranged, just like, white, rich party girl, maybe Republican. I don't know. But I do have an agenda now, and it's.

[David Remnick]

How do you describe it?

[Amy Schumer]

My agenda?

[David Remnick]

Yeah.

[Amy Schumer]

To make people laugh and feel better.

[David Remnick]

To make them feel better.

[Amy Schumer]

Mm.

[David Remnick]

So inside. Amy Schumer And I consume the show the way I think a lot of people do. Maybe most people do, which is to say I watch.

[Amy Schumer]

Most people don't.

[David Remnick]

But in terms of one sketch at a time instead of watching it on the. On the network. But there was one that was just stunning. It's called I'm sorry, and it's four women on a. Doing a panel discussion.

[Matt Diffie]

You know what? Just for time, I think we'll take an audience question. Sir, in the back.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, my question's for the first broad there.

[Matt Diffie]

You do Pepsi and. Right.

[Amy Schumer]

Oh, I work with neuroprotective peptides. So our team.

[David Remnick]

Forget it. I thought you could help me with my stomach and whatever.

[Amy Schumer]

I'm sorry, I should have made it more clear. You're in pain. You want me to get you something for your stomach?

[Matt Diffie]

Yeah, it'd be nice.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. I'm gonna run out. Does anybody need anything or.

[Adriana Alti]

No, sorry.

[Carolyn Corman]

No.

[Jill Lepore]

Okay.

[Matt Diffie]

Amy, why don't you just stay here? I mean, we can send someone out, but you're part of our panel, so.

[Adriana Alti]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Amy Schumer]

Sorry.

[David Remnick]

Well, I want to know how this sausage is made. How the process. When you're a stand up comedian, you're doing this by yourself.

[Amy Schumer]

Right. We were talking about just how women say I'm sorry so much. You know, it's not like revolutionary stuff. People know that happens. But I was like, we got to do a scene about that on the show. And then I pitched it in the writers room. And then we figure out what could it be? Like a panel and people like, oh, yeah, like a panel. Like a. And then we came. It was like women's innovating woman. Like, we just came up with some horrible name that could be real. And then how many people are in the room? Seven people, plus a writer's assistant and a dog. And we. And it's nice. It's totally different than stand up.

[David Remnick]

Do you prefer it now?

[Amy Schumer]

No, no. I love the different things. I like writing a lot. I love collaborating.

[David Remnick]

You make a joke out of yourself about your body, about your sex life or your fictionalized sex life or whatever it is, and that's a price to pay. And it's also. There's a price in that a lot of people don't get it.

[Amy Schumer]

I'm surprised by how many people do get it. But the people who don't get it are not.

[David Remnick]

Why do you say that?

[Amy Schumer]

I think I've had a low opinion sometimes of. With the way I've seen our country, which is dirty comedy clubs. For 10 years, I was so Happy when Obama won, I just was like, oh, there's no way this country. Like, we're just too. People are just too stuck in old ways and they're too racist. But I'm pleasantly surprised by America all the time. But if someone doesn't get what I'm doing or misinterprets it for the truth, if I say something like really ignorant, and it's clearly I'm making a joke about a person that would say that, then I'm like, well, that's not someone I would ever want to have a conversation with or want them to be in my audience. If somebody hears that I support Hillary Clinton and that makes them not want to come see me live, we'll get good. Then don't.

[David Remnick]

Then don't come.

[Amy Schumer]

There's so many other comedians that you can go see.

[David Remnick]

How are you feeling about her right now? Love her just straight up, uncritically. No problems?

[Amy Schumer]

No, I'm not like, no problems.

[David Remnick]

So what do you wish she'd get better at?

[Amy Schumer]

I mean, she's struggling with the millennials right now, which is who she should be cleaning up with.

[David Remnick]

What's your contact with her?

[Amy Schumer]

We call each other every night before we go to sleep.

[David Remnick]

Really? Milk, Cookies and Hillary.

[Jill Lepore]

Night Hill.

[Amy Schumer]

No, we've just met once, but I hope. I mean, I plan on being involved with her campaign.

[David Remnick]

What will you do?

[Amy Schumer]

Whatever they want. However I can be most useful. You know, I think. Which will probably be very sparingly. Nobody wants me to be the face of her campaign. But, you know, just.

[David Remnick]

But did you. Last time around, did you. It seemed to me, and I'm not the only one, that she was scared of feminism as a forward issue in the campaign. She didn't. The cliche was she didn't want to make too big a deal of being a woman. Was it?

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. Because that scares off men and women alike because they still don't know what that word means. Because when she's honest and she's just, like, firing stuff off, you're like, oh, she's a badass.

[David Remnick]

You know, I was on a show one night, Seth Meyers, and I'm sitting next to, as if in a dream, Jerry Seinfeld. And he went into a long rant that he feels uncomfortable about telling a certain kind of joke because he's going to get attacked by what he sees as the PC police.

[Amy Schumer]

Sure.

[David Remnick]

On the other hand, what he sees as being PC also is make sure that we don't say some really ugly things and hurt a lot of people. How do you feel about that issue? Do you find that there's a lot of pressure on you not to do things, not to say this, and a condemning atmosphere? You think he's right?

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah, it's such a gotcha society. But I feel like the minute I really am worried about that and I don't want to say something that I think is really funny, then it's like you're dead in the water.

[David Remnick]

When we're punching up, punching against power, punching against bigotry.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

All bets are off. Great.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

But when you're punching down.

[Amy Schumer]

Sure. Well, like Jim Norton right now, who's one of my favorite comedians, he talks about how, like, what is. What are we not allowed to talk about right now? We are not allowed to talk about Caitlyn Jenner. You know, like all the late night shows. Everyone's like, nothing. No humor to be found here. And he's like, well, I'd like to take a shot at it, you know? And it's like, I support Caitlyn. I support Caitlyn. But Jimmy's like, I support. I've been supporting transsexuals for years.

[David Remnick]

What kind of reactions do you get?

[Amy Schumer]

People love it, and it feels good to be like, yes, why are we all pretending?

[David Remnick]

How did you react? You got criticized about the question of race and making jokes about race.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah. It didn't hurt my feelings.

[David Remnick]

It did not.

[Amy Schumer]

No. Because I feel like if there's a part of you that's sensitive to that, it's probably because there's a little truth in it. Nothing works 100% of the time except Mexicans. Yeah. That's a joke. I. It's old. It's an old joke of mine. I wouldn't write it now just because that's not the stuff I'm doing. I don't think it's particularly brilliant. The punch of that is supposed to be like, oh, that's a horrible thing to say. And that's why we're laughing, because it's horrible. I don't apologize for that joke. You know any jokes. I have so many. Like, part of my character was being. You ever had any obituary thinking, oh.

[David Remnick]

Maybe that one is. That doesn't work.

[Amy Schumer]

I wouldn't do any of my old jokes now.

[David Remnick]

Because they feel stale or because you thought they were offensive or off in some way.

[Amy Schumer]

Because they feel stale. And I have a bigger audience now, and it's. More people are looking to me, and I have become in some ways a role model, and so I have more responsibility. But I didn't. I Didn't.

[David Remnick]

Then you had a choice a while back. It's no longer a secret. Wasn't a secret for very long that the Jon Stewart people came to you and said, we'd like you to do this show or think, at least think about it.

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

You didn't want to?

[Amy Schumer]

I thought about it a lot, but yeah, I didn't want to.

[David Remnick]

What was the thought process about it and why did you come to the conclusion it wasn't a good idea for you?

[Amy Schumer]

I'd have to be in that same building every day for five years.

[David Remnick]

Were you tempted?

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah, I thought about it. I thought, okay, I can actually, I can give everyone my family jobs and I can really, I mean, just like the, you know, the stuff like that and it's New York and it's. Yeah. I just kind of didn't want to know what I was gonna do for the next half a decade.

[David Remnick]

And your horizon now has to be limitless. How do you look at it?

[Amy Schumer]

I just wanna do stuff that scares me.

[David Remnick]

And what is that?

[Amy Schumer]

Directing bigger things scares me and excites me. I've been enjoying being on camera less and less. Maybe it's cause I'm aging poorly, but I'm like a stay in your lane type of girl. I mean, you know, we all like, will humor people when they', like, oh, I play the tuba now and I'm going on the road with a band and I only want to talk about the tuba. And people are just like, okay, but can you tell two jokes? You know, I'm not that, like, I'll do dramatic. I know I'll go back to doing plays.

[David Remnick]

And now is there any concern that your life is going to get so good that it maybe is not comic material? I noticed that the, you know, you.

[Amy Schumer]

Were not at all.

[David Remnick]

I watched you at the Apollo and I realized she's telling a story about having courtside seats at a Laker game.

[Amy Schumer]

Sure.

[David Remnick]

And. But you know what I mean, if your life becomes private planes and courtside seats, is there a price to pay in your work?

[Amy Schumer]

I think so. Not the level I'm at, especially because this is my first time having courtside seats and it did not go well for me. And things always backfire, you know, just. It's always like, I think I have my foot in the door and like, am I really. Yeah. And I just get ripped right back down.

[David Remnick]

You know, we have trouble when we publish fiction every week it's fiction. Some of it. Some of it. And there's. For most writers, after a certain age, they stop Writing short stories because the market is telling them novels. We want other things. And so it's very rare that you get a Jhumpa Lahiri or Alice Munro who keep writing short stories to the end of their careers and lives. A lot of comedians stop doing stand up the minute they can for whatever economic or creative reason. You want to put that behind you with this performance or you wanted to keep doing that?

[Amy Schumer]

No, I'm working on my next special. I'm hitting the road hard. I'm out there.

[David Remnick]

You're writing new material all the time?

[Amy Schumer]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

Thematically, is it different, or do you find that you're digging the same?

[Amy Schumer]

It is different. It's because I'm living life. And so I have a niece now, and I'm a woman in Hollywood now, which, you know, I don't feel like that, but I can speak to it at least.

[David Remnick]

And you're not gonna move, are you?

[Amy Schumer]

Ew.

[David Remnick]

That's the reaction I wanted to hear. Amy, thanks so much for coming.

[Amy Schumer]

Thanks for having me.

[David Remnick]

The indomitable Amy Schumer. Just this past weekend, she appeared yet again in support of gun control legislation with her cousin, New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Coming up, William Finnegan sits down with the real hardest working man in television news anchor Jorge Ramos, who went toe to toe with Donald Trump and came out on top. No, you don't. You haven't been called. Go back to Univision. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio.

[Matt Diffie]

Hello? Hey, how are you? I'm doing all right. Go time here. I'm gonna turn stuff in tomorrow. I think I've got mine pretty well worked out as far as the final 10 for the batch, but what do you got? I was thinking about cameras. So I have a guy standing on the street looking like a director with a backwards baseball cap, and he's got three legs, and of course, he's holding a camera. And then some onlookers who are saying he literally was born to make movies. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. So what do you got? I've got one. Tell me if you think this is insensitive or inappropriate. I do. You haven't even told me, and I heard that. So you know how parents of toddlers, they do the spoon and they're like, oh, here comes the train or here comes the airplane. So I just have a guide in that pose doing the flying spoon. But he's saying, oh, boy, Here comes an MQ1 Predator drone. So we'll see. I'm optimistic about that one. All right. Well, you've got another, what, 20 hours if you don't sleep. Great. Who's counting? All right, well, good luck. We'll talk, I guess, after Bob's looked at everything and he's picked his pics. Right. All right. Bye. Bye.

[David Remnick]

I'm not really sure I should be hearing these conversations, to be honest. I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. We'll hear more from Matt Diffie and Drew Diernovich in a few minutes. People sometimes knock me or tease me for being a workaholic, but even with this new radio show, I'm pretty sure I've got absolutely nothing on Jorge Ramos. He's the co anchor of the Nightly News on Univision. He's written a dozen books, he hosts a Sunday morning show and a weekly news magazine, and he writes a syndicated column. I'm not even sure that's the whole list. For Spanish speakers in this country, Ramos is like Diane Sawyer, Bill Moyers, and Walter Cronkite rolled all into one. But Ramos has often been criticized for the way he approaches journalism. He doesn't pretend to dispassionately cover issues that concern Latinos. He is their advocate, and he wants to mix it up with people like Donald Trump. Staff writer William Finnegan recently published a profile of Jorge Ramos in the magazine, and he recorded this conversation with him from Univision's headquarters in Miami. They started right off by talking about politics.

[William Finnegan]

Two Latino US Senators, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, are in the national spotlight running for president. Neither of them defends the undocumented. I've heard you say that you'll be thrilled if a Latino becomes president, even if it happens to be one of those two men. Isn't that complicated for you?

[Jorge Ramos]

First of all, I have to say that I hope that at some point in my career, I'm going to be able to go to the White House for the inauguration of the first Hispanic president or the first Latina presidenta. Marco Rubio's parents, both Cuban Americans, were immigrants. The father of Ted Cruz is an immigrant. And many immigrants in this country cannot understand why the sons of immigrants in this country are not supporting other immigrants. And it is incredibly unfair and sad that these two politicians are closing the door or trying to close the door behind their parents.

[William Finnegan]

Have you been shocked personally by the extent of Trump's appeal?

[Jorge Ramos]

Yeah, I think we all are. I thought that the era in which we would see a candidate attacking immigrants openly and suggesting that it is possible to deport 11 million, I thought that era was gone. I Just read a fantastic article from the Pew Research Center. They were saying that by 2055, and I'm going to be 97, and I don't even want to ask you, Bill, how old were you going to be in 2055? But I'll be 97. If everything goes right by then, the white population will become a minority. And to suggest that you can rule in this country with only one part of the population, I think it is wrong and it isn't going to happen.

[William Finnegan]

Many of our listeners became aware of you for the first time when Trump threw you out of a press conference in Iowa in late August for standing up and asking a series of questions and refusing to sit down until you got answers.

[David Remnick]

Okay, who's next? Yeah, please. Excuse me.

[Adriana Alti]

Sit down.

[Jorge Ramos]

You weren't called.

[David Remnick]

Sit down. Sit down. Sit down.

[Jorge Ramos]

Go ahead.

[David Remnick]

No, you don't. You haven't been called.

[Jorge Ramos]

I have the right to ask.

[David Remnick]

Go back to Univision. Go ahead.

[Jorge Ramos]

You cannot deport 11 million people.

[William Finnegan]

I was sitting directly behind you when that incident occurred, and I was struck by how calm you were, you know, with Trump interrupting you and snarling at you. And then when this bodyguard, who was a huge guy manhandling you out of the room, you didn't seem nervous, you didn't raise your voice. Do you remember how you felt when that was going on? And also, what do you think the upshot of that incident was in terms.

[Jorge Ramos]

Of being calm and not reacting violently? Well, you have to remember, Bill, that I've been on TV for more than 30 years. Of course you get nervous, but I've been trained for 30 years to be on camera when those moments happen. I've covered very difficult moments in our national life. I was on the air for hours and hours on 9 11. And of course, what you want to do in those moments is to react emotionally, to cry, and to do things that you would only do in private. But I had to remain calm. And maybe because I'm also taking yoga, and yoga helps me, and with breathing, it's amazing what you can achieve.

[William Finnegan]

Speaking of people who shout and scream for a living, Ann Coulter's latest book is a tirade against immigration in general and Latinos in particular. I mean, she basically makes her living by saying outrageous, offensive things. And yet you had her on your show.

[Jorge Ramos]

You've said that Americans should fear immigrants more than isis. Yes, most immigrants are not terrorists nor criminals.

[Amy Schumer]

I have a little tip.

[Jorge Ramos]

No one, no one is biologically predisposed. If you don't want to be killed.

[Amy Schumer]

By isis, don't go to Syria if you don't want to be killed by a Mexican. There's nothing I can tell you. Very easy to avoid being killed by isis. Don't fly to Syria.

[Jorge Ramos]

Are you really saying that we're talking about 40 million immigrants who live in this country?

[Amy Schumer]

I thought you were just disputing that.

[Jorge Ramos]

No, no. 40 million immigrants who live immigrants. I'm not talking about undocumented immigrants. Overall immigrants legally here and those who are not here.

[Amy Schumer]

40 million with illegals.

[William Finnegan]

Jorge, I'm sure you remember that moment. One of the things that was striking about it for me was not just the incredibly offensive thing that Coulter said, but the kind of silence that followed. I've heard you say that silence is death on tv. You know, you gotta keep the conversation going, keep things happening, which I'm sure is a good rule of thumb. But in that moment, you didn't reply. And then Colter tried to fill the silence. I thought it was so powerful and the audience was so quiet. I'm just in front of a live audience, I assume a mostly Latino audience in Miami. And it was an amazing moment.

[Jorge Ramos]

When I first heard her saying that, I thought of two things. First, I was honestly shocked that she was saying such an outrageous statement. And then at that moment, I made the conscious decision of not talking, of just staying silent, because it didn't matter what I would ask. It would be weak in comparison to what she had just said. So I let the moment hang. And the more that she would talk, the more outrageous and the more offensive and more out of place that it became.

[William Finnegan]

That was quite powerful. Do you worry that giving somebody like Ann Coulter a platform just increases the availability, even perhaps the acceptability of her far right wing and anti immigrant ideas?

[Jorge Ramos]

No, I. I do that all the time. I go to Fox News frequently. I invite her to talk to us. I just recently went to talk to Joe Arpaio. I think I've talked to him three times in Arizona. I am completely convinced that we have to talk with those who don't agree with us. That's the only way for them to get to know us, for them to know that we are not criminals, nor rapists, nor terrorists, and also to advance the idea that it is possible to legalize immigrants in this country and that we are part of the United States.

[William Finnegan]

There was a moment when we were in Iowa where we ran across Ann Coulter. She was there to introduce Trump. And you guys caught each other's eyes as we were passing and you swerved and each of you sort of gave a silent Fist bump?

[Jorge Ramos]

Yeah.

[William Finnegan]

That's probably not your favorite part of my piece. My interpretation at that moment was that you guys were both working and that you were just saying hello, acknowledging each other. But it was striking because of the great political and personal differences between you. I mean, I doubt you guys go out and drink beer together. I could be wrong. Was my interpretation wrong or of that moment?

[Jorge Ramos]

No, I think what you described was exactly what happened. And what many people don't understand is that sometimes when you are on TV and you only have five minutes, not only to express your point of view, but also to attack your opponents and to try to defend your positions, you have no time to be pleasant right from the beginning. So the intensity that you see on tv, the confrontations that you see on tv, that's not real life. TV is an exaggeration of life. So after you do those interviews, they know that it is not personal. In other words, that I don't have any personal animosity against Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly. And at the end, we can have a normal conversation like two human beings. And no, we've never had a beer together.

[William Finnegan]

You grew up in Mexico in the bad old days of the Pre. The perfect dictatorship, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, known as the Pre. You worked briefly as a TV reporter there right out of college and had trouble with censorship and had to leave. But you came around as a Univision anchor and were able to interview Carlos Salinas, the president who was perhaps the most feared in recent times in Mexico.

[Jorge Ramos]

You can't do that. Salinas de Gortari governed from 1988 to 1994. He was incredibly smart, but also his government was very corrupted. And the election in which he supposedly won. There were thousands of places where 100% of the population went to vote that day and nobody got sick. And 100% of the people voted for him. It is funny because it was a major fraud. So if I were a reporter in Mexico, I wouldn't have been able to ask those questions. But after he left power and I had the chance to talk to him, I confronted him with the fact that he made a huge fraud to become president. He made another huge fraud to decide who was going to be the next president after him, because many Mexican journalists cannot do that. More than 80 journalists, reporters have been killed in Mexico. And I always wonder what would have happened to me had I stayed in Mexico City.

[William Finnegan]

Well, I'm glad we're taping him, because I don't know what else to say.

[Jorge Ramos]

Finish with a personal question. Bill, what would you tell yourself to your own Bill Finnegan when you were 25?

[William Finnegan]

Ah, can I steal that?

[Jorge Ramos]

Yeah, I'll use it too. You know, at 57, I think I would tell him to slow down a little bit. I lived so intensely for the last 30, 35 years in this country that I don't know how to stop now. I realize that I should have enjoyed a little bit more certain moments in my life, but I think I didn't know how to do that. You know, there's a beautiful sign that I kept with me for a long time that said, it's only television. And those of us who work on TV sometimes think that television is the most important thing in life. Well, what I would tell him is that don't be stupid. That's not the most important thing in life.

[William Finnegan]

That was Jorge Ramos, co anchor at Univision. Hi, I'm William Finnegan and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[David Remnick]

And I'm David Remnick. Let's check in with our cartoonists now and see if they finally made their deadline.

[Matt Diffie]

I did not sell a cartoon this week from my back. Oh, yeah, well, you know, it happens more often than people realize. Right. So did you sell. He didn't buy any of the ones that we were talking about, but I submitted a one that was a couple years old that I just kind of tossed in there at the last minute. And he bought that one, but he bought it for the caption contest. So it'll be published in the back of the magazine with no caption. That's sort of like getting accepted and rejected at the same time. Yeah. What was your actual cartoon? The whole thing. So the cartoon was a multi car pileup on the highway. It was actually a stack of cars and the person who's sitting in the car at the very top of the pyle is saying, should I say the captions? Am I allowed to do that? That helps. I guess so. Okay. He's on the phone and he's saying, so how does that, how does that make you feel? They took your idea and took your caption off. Half the time I'm actually excited to see what other people will say. You know, I drew it, but I don't think it's the funniest thing in the world. And you know, I like seeing what other people who haven't seen the image before can come up with when they see this. And another interesting thing is for a small percentage of ones that have been in the caption contest, the winning caption that's submitted by the readers is almost identical, if not to the language, then to the idea that I submitted. So it's kind of validating in a way. Doesn't that make it even more annoying that they didn't just buy your cartoon to start with? I mean, we can always draw more the next week. That is true.

[David Remnick]

That's Matt Diffie with Drew Duranovich. New Yorker cartoonists and valiant warriors in the art of cartooning. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And still to come, the search continues for a man named William Brown. That's just ahead in the New Yorker Radio. I'm David Remnick. Last week on the show, we heard the first part of a story about a woman's search for the biological father she never knew. If you didn't hear it, you can find the [e-mail] but to bring you up to speed, the story is about Jill Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard, and her best friend, Adriana Alti. Adriana was adopted and grew up one of the few people of color in a small town in New England.

[Adriana Alti]

To tell you how white it is, there is a statue of the lamb, a white lamb in the town common, and that is because Mary Sawyer of Mary had a little lamb from that town.

[David Remnick]

White families adopting children of color was a new development in the mid-60s when Adriana was born, and her parents didn't really know what to do with the complications.

[Adriana Alti]

But I am different, though. And they're like, no, you're not. And I said, but I look different. And they're like, well, you're just the same. You're just the same. And it doesn't matter if you're what color you are. You could be orange. You could be blue. You could be Latin. I'm like, well, I'm not orange or blue. I'm this other color.

[David Remnick]

Adriana knew very little about her birth parents until she was grown. We'll let Jill Lepore pick up the story here.

[Jill Lepore]

When we were graduating from college, we were both 22. Her father died, and at his funeral, her biological mother showed up.

[Adriana Alti]

You know, she's white, and she had two small, like, small children who were, you know, my color. And I was with a college friend of mine, Ed, and it was a very weird thing where I looked and I said, oh, Ed, I know who that is. He said, who? Who is that? I said, oh, it's not. It's not good. It's not a good thing. And he said, what?

[William Finnegan]

What?

[Adriana Alti]

Who is it? I said, ed, I think. I said, I think that's. I think that's my birth mother. And he said, what? And I said, no, I think it is. And I remember saying this, and he's like, how do you know Why? I said, I don't know, but that's what I think. And I was thinking, oh, my God, like, what is she doing here? Like, this is not a good thing, what's happening? And she said, hello. And I said, hello? And she said, you know, I'm your mother or whatever. And I said, okay. I was like, I know who you are.

[Jill Lepore]

I was mainly appalled at this woman for showing up at Adriana's father's funeral. But her story behind that was that she had tried to go to the house over the years to see Adriana, maybe even to steal her or talk to her or something. But Adriana's father told her not to come back, to just respect the family.

[Adriana Alti]

So she saw in the paper that he was dead. So I guess she figured, well, he's dead.

[Matt Diffie]

I don't know.

[Adriana Alti]

There's a good and a bad sort of interpretation of it. On the one hand, she wanted to, like, pay respects, but also, you could say, well, oh, so he's dead now, so now you don't have to respect his wishes anymore. You don't have. Now he's. Well, now it's fine. Very first day that I met her at the wake, and she asked me to come back to her house. She also asked me to come work for her. And she was actually. Published these magazines, and she probably thought it would be a good way for us to, you know, get to get to know each other. Just seemed like it was. She had this plan, and it just sounded like, you know, sounded good. Even though I was a little. I was a little leery. But I'm like, well, how can I not do this? I mean, it's just. It works, you know, I did end up working for a time. So when we were working, like, during the day or at the office, we were doing the thing of, like, trying to get to know each other a little bit. She used to say to me a lot, you think you know everything. You don't. I don't think I know everything. And I didn't think I knew everything then, but I said, why do you. She says, but I know you. She says, like, I know you because I knew I knew your father.

[Jill Lepore]

The story that Adriana's birth mother told.

[Adriana Alti]

We'Ll call her Nina, but that is not her real name.

[Jill Lepore]

The story that Nina told is a really surprising. 1.

[Adriana Alti]

One of the first things Nina told me was that Bob Dylan really loved your father. And what you should do is. And it so happened that there. I guess the reason she thought to say this is that there was. There was going to be a concert somewhere or something. And she said, you need to. You need to go. And you need to, like, go backstage and, you know, introduce yourself to Bob Dylan and say you're Brown's daughter and he will love you. He may even know something about where Brown is, you know. And so, of course, I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, well, no, I mean, I'm not. This is not the sort of thing that I would do even if I believe it to be true. And at that point, I. You know, I wasn't sure that I did.

[Jill Lepore]

If you're traveling in the north country.

[Amy Schumer]

Fire.

[Matt Diffie]

Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline.

[Jill Lepore]

Remember me to one who.

[Amy Schumer]

Lives there.

[Adriana Alti]

For she he once was a true love of mine.

[Jill Lepore]

Nina, in 1965, had gone to New York from Worcester. She was a Jewish woman from a very traditional, ordinary family in Worcester. Kind of conventional. But she wanted to see the world like you'd want to see the world in 1965. And the place you'd go is Greenwich village, which in 1965 is just an incredibly interesting scene to be dropped in the middle of the. It's an interesting scene poetically and musically and artistically. And when she was there, she fell in love with this street poet, a guy named William Brown.

[Adriana Alti]

She said, well, he would walk through Washington Square park. And she saw him one day, and she just decided, you know, that she was gonna have him. She just thought he was great.

[Matt Diffie]

What the hell is going on here? See, we have a sort of a situation here.

[David Remnick]

I fell in love with your daughter. And as incredible as it may seem, she fell in love with me. And we flew back to San Francisco to see if you or Mrs. Straiten would have any objections if we got married.

[Adriana Alti]

I guess they had their own version of Guess who's coming to dinner, Guess who's not staying for dinner kind of thing.

[Jill Lepore]

So Nina brought Brown from Greenwich Village. They went up to Worcester to meet Nina's parents, but it didn't go well. Not everyone is Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. And Nina's parents got really terribly upset. And it sounds like maybe even got a bit violent.

[Adriana Alti]

Particularly her father. She said. He said to me, your father is in a lot of pain, so I'm gonna leave. You need to stay here. You need to stay and be here. With him, but I need to go. You know, of course, the one interpretation is, well, you know, he, you know, he ditched her, but that isn't the way she was saying it. And I think the point she was trying to make was that this man, like, you know, basically attacked him and was, you know, angry and got violent with him. And his response was, you know what? He's in pain and he's having a hard time, so I'm gonna, you know, go.

[Jill Lepore]

That's the last time that Nina ever saw Brown. She found out she was pregnant, and her parents decided she couldn't keep the baby and convinced her that she should give the baby up for adoption. They spirited her away to lying in hospital in Boston. And this would have been May of 1966. Nina gave birth, and when it came down to that moment, she couldn't give the baby up. She just couldn't do it. She was also really ill at the time. And so Adriana was put into foster care. It was an unusual placement, actually, before about that time, in the middle of the 1960s, that kind of placement, interracial placement, putting a mixed race or a black child in a white family, that would have been incredibly unusual.

[Sheila Frankel]

My name is Sheila Frankel. I work for the Department of Children and Families, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and my job title is adoption search coordinator.

[Jill Lepore]

Sheila Frankel worked for the state in the early 1970s, and the social worker who trained her is the social worker that went to that lying in hospital in May of 1966 when Adriana was born and brought her to her foster family.

[Sheila Frankel]

In the 60s, there was a lot of shame connected with adoption for all members of the adoption triad.

[Jill Lepore]

By the adoption triad, Sheila means the birth mother, the adoptee, and the adoptive parents.

[Sheila Frankel]

Social workers try to match the physical characteristics of the child with the adoptive parent and also the race and the ethnicity. But Clayton Hagan was the head of adoption for Lutheran Social Services. And more than transracial adoption, he had an idea that adoptive parents could figure out what they wanted and what they needed, what they could do. And if they wanted to adopt a child from another country or race, we should let them do it. We shouldn't ask too many questions. I don't think there was a lot of preparation for what went on. We actually, our agency placed many black and mixed racial children because of his influence. But I think it was 1972, the National association of Black Social Workers protested this practice, and they came out with a position paper.

[Jill Lepore]

And so after that, there was a whole new concern about whether this was the Right thing to do to place these black and mixed race kids in white families. I mean, think about this moment like the Black Panther movement has come to power. Muhammad Ali is talking about black is beautiful. There's a kind of notion of racial pride that's suffusing the whole culture. And then you have the adoptee rights movement with people looking back at their childhoods and saying, maybe this wasn't the right thing. So after 1972, it's just a different conversation. I was really struck as a historian when I think about that time that before 1966, when Adriana was born, or after 72, when she was finally adopted, there's just this moment, this little window in the middle of the 20th century where what happened to her could have happened. In May of 2015, Adriana was visiting. She visits a lot. She's really close to my kids. And. And I was in the middle of working on a New Yorker piece that I'd been really obsessed with all spring, where I was trying to track down this long lost, forgotten African American artist from the Harlem arts movement who happened to have been a sculptor. And Adrienne is an artist and an amazing artist. And so I had a thousand questions for her about sculpting. How do you cast in bronze? And what does it mean to work in Plazder? And she was really patient with all my questions. And finally she just told me to stop.

[Adriana Alti]

I said, well, you need to, you know, can't you help me? You need to help me find my father. And I said it like that because, you know, she finds things, she gets things done. And I also knew that this sounded like something she should be very interested in.

[Jill Lepore]

So I was really interested. You know, I tried before and I hadn't had any luck. But the thing is that so much has changed. There's so much is on the Internet that wasn't on the Internet even just like month by month, week by week, new stuff is up there. There's like digital newspaper collections that weren't there, recordings. So I said, all right, so, okay, I'll try. I will take a look at.

[Adriana Alti]

Well, I will if.

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah, but if you gather up everything.

[Adriana Alti]

That you've done, put together a memo.

[Jill Lepore]

But she sent me this lovely, tidy email with all the research she'd done over the years and every little scrap of information that she find out about the Sky William Brown, and a lot of it is stuff that we've heard before, like, this is gonna go newer. But then she sent the bottom of the email. There was a list of things that he was called and it was like around town with William Brown or like, they were just like a bunch of rhyming things downtown Brown. And one of them was Big Brown. So this seems like a made up character.

[Adriana Alti]

And that actually is another reason that it probably sort of failed to find him sooner is that there were other names. And also I was always just looking for, you know, William Brown is a pretty common name. I thought that she meant, like, that was something that she called him or that people friends of his called him. I think once we did have the Internet, I was like, it never occurred to me to like, look for Big Brown. I mean, he was like, well, people probably called him that, but that's not his real name.

[Jill Lepore]

Then when I started trying Big Brown and just like doing a basic Google search for like Big Brown and Bob Dylan, he pops up and then he's kind of everywhere. The first thing that was incredible was finding this photograph that was from 1965 in Washington Square Park. It's quite a dramatic and beautiful photograph he's wearing. He's a very large man, very strongly built, and speaking publicly before an audience. So you can see like a white college student sort of sitting at his feet and another student with a backpack is wandering by behind him. And he has his right arm outstretched and reaching upward and his index finger pointing. And if you follow the sort of sight line of his arm with the finger, it sort of goes up towards the American flag which is waving from the top of building in the background. I sent it to Adriana and she didn't get right back. I emailed her to her and she didn't get right back. So I texted it to her and I said, oh, my God, this is your father. Oh my God, this is your father.

[Adriana Alti]

And I said, well, why do you say that? You know, why?

[David Remnick]

Why?

[Adriana Alti]

Because he's big and he's brown. And I was kind of joking, but kind of not. She's like, no, that's not why. Because. Because I think it, you know, I think it looks good. She's like, I'm 100% certain. And I don't know, like I'm, you know. So I started to think, well, if I do see it now, am I like trying to see something because I want it to be true. But I. So I sent the picture to Nina. You know, she wrote back, oh, my God, where did you get that? That's him.

[Jill Lepore]

That's him. So after we found this incredible photograph, I looked up the photographer. It's this guy named Leroy Henderson, this.

[Leroy Henderson]

Guy Brown Big Brown, he would be out there reciting his poetry. And he was really quite vocal and quite. Big guy, huge guy. And so that picture of him and with him looming in the foreground like that, with that expression on his face and with his finger pointing in the air, that was. He was good for those gestures.

[Jill Lepore]

So what do you think it says about Brown? He could have been up in Harlem doing his poetry, but he's gone down in the Village and he's turned into.

[Leroy Henderson]

Like a. I think that's a sign of his vision. I think that shows that this guy saw something beyond being a black man. If he had stayed up in Harlem or eastern New York, Brooklyn or something, that probably would have been too limiting. And furthermore, I think the issues of concern in the black community were too intense to be concerned about this creative expression. We were worried about how to survive, how to pay them. You know, I mean, they were dealing with issues of. Of social justice and racial equality and all. And Brown, I'm sure, was too. And also, he might have felt that he had a message coming from a black man point of view that he felt that a white audience needed to hear.

[David Remnick]

That's Leroy Henderson talking with Jill Lepore. The search for Big Brown will continue next week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. I'm not exactly what you'd call an outdoorsy guy, but at this time of year, I guess I can't even complain about a trip to the park. So that's where we'll end up today in Prospect park in Brooklyn, where the writer Carolyn Corman went recently to try out a new app, Red Wing Blackbird.

[Carolyn Corman]

Cedar Waxwing.

[David Remnick]

That's right, an app.

[Carolyn Corman]

Red Wing Blackbird, for bird watching. Cedar Waxwing. Robin behind us. Those are robin. Those are frog.

[Jill Lepore]

I'm Carolyn Corman, and we're in Prospect park, very different Brooklyn.

[Amy Schumer]

I'm here with Tom Stevenson to do.

[Jill Lepore]

A field test on an app he's.

[Amy Schumer]

Been developing called Bird Genie. Shazam.

[Jill Lepore]

For birdsong.

[Carolyn Corman]

That's a good description. I like that. For most birders, knowing what the songs are around them is one of the most difficult parts of birding and in some ways the most important part of birding, because maybe 85% of the time, especially in migration, you're hearing the birds way before you see them.

[Amy Schumer]

Most birds you don't see unless you.

[Jill Lepore]

Have incredible quick eyes.

[Carolyn Corman]

I'm going to try to pitch this house wren to see if it stirs it up. It stopped normally in the spring that bird would just keep singing. That's a cardinal. Or I mean, a chipmunk over there doing that chipping. Let's see if we can get this robin. Okay, we got a dog there. So I just tapped it to start and I tapped it to stop, and here's the recording, and I can play it.

[Amy Schumer]

So that's the sonogram of what we just heard. It's a bunch of gray marks, like an abstract painting.

[Carolyn Corman]

You can see that there's a song and then a gap. And then I can say, all right, match that song. And there's Robin. And then I can go to Robin and I can say, all right, you can match that. Or was it Oriole? See how the pitches are slower and it's not as rhythmic? So. And then you could say, oh, I think it's a robin. Oh, yeah, it's Robin. There are the pictures of the robin. You can email it to somebody or you can put it on your Facebook and Twitter. I think tweets on Twitter. I'm not 100% sure if Twitter is implemented, but there's a way in the program. You can opt into anonymously sharing your recordings. And that will allow us, assuming that people adopt the program across the country, to develop a database of all the covered species all across the US that will be the first time that's ever happened. I'm going to record that warbling vireo here. There it is. Warbling vireo.

[Amy Schumer]

So right away.

[Carolyn Corman]

Yeah, because it was a little bit louder than. See how it was a little louder than the. So there's the sonogram of Orleans.

[Amy Schumer]

So quick.

[Carolyn Corman]

Yeah, it's all fast. And I was still walking around a little bit, so you can hear me clunking. We should go get the house rent with a rod singing in the background.

[Matt Diffie]

Here.

[Carolyn Corman]

See if we got it.

[Amy Schumer]

It looks a little quiet.

[David Remnick]

You can read Carolyn Cormont's piece about Tom Stevenson and about other nature apps@New Yorker.com I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be back next week with more stories. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Talk to us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio or you can reach [e-mail].