Jia Tolentino on the Rise and Fall of the Internet

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Jia Tolentino on the Rise and Fall of the Internet"

The New Yorker Radio Hour, August 27, 2019
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Jia Tolentino

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Overview

This episode centers on a conversation between David Remnick and Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. The discussion explores the evolution of the Internet from a place of surprising discovery to a space often characterized by self-performance, social media pressures, and polarization. Tolentino reflects deeply on her own relationship to the Internet, the resulting impact on identity, and the broader societal implications for her generation and beyond. The episode also touches on the nature of literary essay writing, public engagement in the era of online trolling, and the search for clarity in a tumultuous digital landscape.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Early Internet: Freedom and Discovery

• Tolentino describes her first experiences online as "generative" and liberating, allowing for private exploration without scrutiny.
  • Quote: "It was like what it felt like to me was a neighborhood that you could walk through and you could just go into these houses that would be decorated with, you know, all of these things you'd never seen before, and then you could leave." (Gia Tolentino, 02:46)
• Early internet culture was typified by personal blogs and sites curated out of fascination, rather than self-branding.

[00:10–03:24]

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2. The Shift: Monetization and Performance

• Tolentino traces how the rise of social media has transformed the Internet from a place of authentic self-expression to one demanding constant self-curation and personal branding.
  • Discusses the transition from blogging as a "hobby" to a "readily monetizable practice and a career." (03:52)
  • Notes the corrosive impact of systems (capitalism, patriarchy, the platform economy) which, while providing her benefits, are fundamentally punishing and deeply flawed.
  • Quote: "It's been this sort of civically corrosive... it's this nightmare at the center of our culture and life. At the same time, it's the only reason I have a job." (Gia Tolentino, 05:22)

[03:24–06:07]

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3. Navigating Personal and Public Selves

• Tolentino reflects on her own tactics to retain sanity and pleasure online by minimizing exposure and filtering what she engages with.
  • Discusses leaving the relentless pace of Jezebel to recalibrate her digital habits and attention span.
  • Quote: "You are going to keep this to a daily minimum, and you'll interact with the Internet through a lens of pleasure... This is the only way you're gonna, you know, survive being a writer in this day and age." (Gia Tolentino, 06:34)

[06:07–07:25]

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4. The Literary Form as Internet Reflection

• The conversation delves into how online culture has influenced Tolentino’s approach to essay writing:
  • Influences: Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, Ellen Willis, Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss.
  • Characteristics: Digressive, argument-with-self, inconclusive, multi-angled.
  • Quote: "It's a curvy journey. It doesn't really land anywhere. That was the animating impulse for the book: I want clarity... but I cannot ever reenter that place of certainty that I was in pre-election." (Gia Tolentino, 08:35)
• Remnick and Tolentino agree that arriving at definitive conclusions feels incompatible with contemporary reality.

[07:25–09:12]

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5. Facing Online Criticism and Trolls

• Tolentino distinguishes between standard trolling and more severe harassment (e.g., death threats).
• Her advice: Don’t feed the trolls or take the bait unless necessary, as engagement can be counterproductive and emotionally numbing.
  • Quote: "Don't take the bait... I try to do is understand, like, do I have more power than these people? Do I have more security than them? If I don't need to respond, I try not to take the bait." (Gia Tolentino, 09:32)
• She worries that hardening herself against online abuse could also lead her to disregard valid criticism.

[09:12–11:07]

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6. The Internet, Activism, and Viral Outrage

• Tolentino critiques how even righteous outrage, when systematized and monetized online (e.g., dunking on Trump on Twitter), can redirect attention and benefit the individual rather than effect structural change.
  • Quote: "Trying to get, like, it sort of incentivizes this thing where you have this response to Trump that goes viral and then... benefits you. The Internet creates a situation where opposition can sometimes serve us." (Gia Tolentino, 11:18)

[11:07–11:58]

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7. The Agony and Joy of Writing

• Tolentino loves not only the finished product but the process—its agony, uncertainty, and discipline.
  • Links the experience to her broader worldview and upbringing in the Southern Baptist church—valuing “uncertainty and agony and work and devotion, you know, and sustained attention.”
  • Quote: "I love the agony of writing... uncertainty and agony and work and devotion, you know, and sustained attention, I think that's a way that I want to be in the world." (Gia Tolentino, 12:28)
• Values the “miracle” of thinking about something in private before it becomes public.

[11:58–13:23]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "In the beginning, the Internet seemed good... and now... this feverish, electric, unlivable hell." (David Remnick summarizing Tolentino, 00:10)
• "I was blogging, love to blog." (Gia Tolentino, on 10-year-old self, 02:38)
• "Being on the Internet constantly had done something to me. And that was when I was like, okay, you are going to keep this to a daily minimum." (Gia Tolentino, 06:34)
• "I wanted to be a little more sensitive... I was afraid that brushing off unfair criticism would make me brush off fair criticism." (Gia Tolentino, 10:06)
• "The fact of having time to think about something in private before it becomes public still feels like a real miracle to me." (Gia Tolentino, 13:23)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:10–03:24 — Remnick & Tolentino discuss how the Internet felt in its early days, personal blogs, and discovery.
• 03:24–06:07 — The transition to social media, self-branding, and the corrosiveness/benefit paradox; monetization of attention and identity.
• 06:07–07:25 — Tolentino describes changing her relationship with the Internet to preserve attention and pleasure.
• 07:25–09:12 — Reflections on literary influences and the fragmented, digressive essay form.
• 09:12–11:07 — Strategies for dealing with trolling and abusive feedback online.
• 11:07–11:58 — The complex role of viral activism and performative outrage in internet culture.
• 11:58–13:23 — Why Tolentino loves the agonizing process of writing and how it connects to her worldview.

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, self-reflective, and suffused with Tolentino’s trademark wit and complexity. She and Remnick share a warm rapport, diving deep into the ambiguities of online life and literary craft without offering easy answers—embracing uncertainty as both a necessity and a virtue in contemporary culture.

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Summary prepared for listeners who seek a nuanced understanding of Jia Tolentino's critique of internet evolution, selfhood, and the essay form.

Transcript

[Host/Announcer]

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

[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Gia Tolentino became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 2016 after writing and editing at the website Jezebel. I think she's helped to shape the modern New Yorker voice far more than the New Yorker has helped shape Gia's, and I'm very grateful for that. The range of her reference is so wide, it's a little hard to characterize. Culture, political issues, all kinds of obsessions. But one of Gia's big topics is what it's meant to her as a 30 year old to have grown up on the Internet. And she tracks how our digital world has evolved from the early freer days of the web into one dominated by social media giants. Gia Tolentino writes about all of this in in her new collection of essays called Trick Reflections on Self Delusion. The book appears in the number two spot for nonfiction on the New York Times best seller list. So the first sentence of the first essay begins like the Bible. In the beginning, the Internet seemed good. And now you describe the Internet in the very same essay as this feverish, electric, unlivable hell. And we're becoming, as you say, increasingly sad and ugly on the Internet. Tell me a little bit about that, because I did not grow up with the Internet. Why does that change consciousness and everything else?

[Gia Tolentino]

But were your first experiences of the Internet as a place that could surprise you? I think that's where that, you know, my early experiences with the Internet and I was like, you know, a fifth grader or whatever, but it seemed like this place where you were free to discover things and you could discover things in private and there was just pleasure and it was generative and it was, you know, it was this, this zone of, of a new type of freedom. We were, you were sort of free to be yourself. And increasingly, as the Internet evolved to be around, revolved, to be constructed of social networks that revolve around personal identity, it began to seem like, like the feeling changed. The Internet no longer became a place where things would surprise you. The Internet became a place where everyone was looking at the same stuff and it was miserable and everyone was sort of chained to themselves rather.

[David Remnick]

Well, let's go back to the beginning. You write that when you were 10 years old that you had something called an angelfire page, something, I'm not quite sure what the hell that is. And you wrote something called the Story of how Gia got her web addiction by Gia. I was blogging, age 10. You were already blogging?

[Gia Tolentino]

I was blogging. Love to blog.

[David Remnick]

But what were the specifics? What were the specifics of the things that you were getting at 10, 11?

[Gia Tolentino]

Well, you know, I was 10, so I was like, oh, I heard this smash mouth song on the radio. Let me look up the lyrics, you know, or just the idea that you could discover a website dedicated to something like trees or Ricky Martin or, you know, or like Lord of the Rings. Right. Like you could just. The Internet seemed to contain. It was like what it felt like to me was a neighborhood that you could walk through and you could just go into these houses that would be decorated with, you know, all of these things you'd never seen before, and then you could leave.

[David Remnick]

You've got a quote from Jason Kotke, who was an early voice on the Internet and one of the original celebrity bloggers, and he writes, the web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those things elsewhere seems absurd, unquote. Now, the personal essay was not invented by the Internet. Personal writing, the writing about the self was not invented by any of these things. What is he getting at here?

[Gia Tolentino]

Right. So right around the time that he was writing, that was when blogging began its transition between being a hobby and being kind of a foundation for, you know, a readily monetizable practice and a career. And I think. And that's something that I think is interesting. Right? Like the Internet, the way we. The way we render ourselves for other people on the Internet, it's not that different from how we render ourselves for each other in real life. Like talking about ourselves, thinking about our narratives, self presentation in general, it's certainly not Internet specific. But that transition and the monetization of that transition, it's sort of like to put these thoughts elsewhere, but where you could monetize them starts to feel absurd, I think. I think that's sort of the underlying thing in that.

[David Remnick]

Is that what you're experiencing now as a bestseller, do you think that the reason that you're. That it's a best seller. It's not for the old conventional reasons, but at least in part because of a social media, I don't know, presence or voice.

[Gia Tolentino]

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly because that.

[David Remnick]

Seems crazily self deprecating to me. These essays are so good and they've obviously connected to an audience. And you obviously, with Presence in the Hairpin and Jezebel and thank God the New Yorker I don't. It's hard for me to believe that just because you're amusing or otherwise on Twitter that you're amusing on Twitter. That's the reason this book is taken off.

[Gia Tolentino]

Yeah. I mean, I would hope it's because I have, you know, consistently been a writer that people are down to read. But it's also, you know, I don't. The thing about the Internet, right, It's been this sort of civically corrosive. It's this, you know, it's this nightmare at the center of our culture and life at the same time. It's the only reason I have a job. You know, I don't think I would have ended up in at all if it wasn't for the Internet. And I think that's, you know, it's a question of. I think this is a question that I just think about so much. Generally. It's how systems that are corrosive. How many corrosive systems have benefited me and how they continue to like capitalism and patriarchy. Right. Like systems that are punishing and horrible, but that I have somehow managed to benefit from in some way.

[David Remnick]

Did you ever consider radically changing your relationship with the Internet and kind of walking away from it or something? Something different, because it's starting to get its tentacles around you too much.

[Gia Tolentino]

I'm actually not that uncomfortable with the way I use the Internet because a couple years back, actually, when I started working at the New Yorker, I no longer had to monitor the news cycle in the same way. Cause I didn't have to be interested in everything.

[David Remnick]

Right. And you were writing 72 times a day.

[Gia Tolentino]

Yeah, I wasn't writing 72 times a day. I wasn't editing 500 things a day. And I deliberately. I could feel at the end of Jezebel, I mean, which was one of the reasons that I was like, wow, this job offer a miracle. Because I could feel that my attention span was just. It was corroded to nothing. I could feel that I couldn't calibrate what I actually cared about from what was, you know, what everyone was talking about. I just. Being on the Internet constantly had done something to me. And that was when I was like, okay, you are going to keep this to a daily minimum. And it'll still be more than what is probably humanly appropriate. But you are going to keep this to a minimum, and you're going to interact with the Internet through a lens of pleasure. And, you know, this is the only way you're gonna, you know, survive being a writer in this day. And Age and a writer of your, you know, demographic and cohort, you know, that's the only way.

[David Remnick]

Well, are there writers in your reading experience and in your spiritual experience that were the model for you in some way?

[Gia Tolentino]

There are a lot of essay writers that. There's. Of course, there's like, you know, like Sontag and Didion. And I loved Ellen Willis's Village Voice criticism. And I love Rebecca Solnit and Zadie Smith and Leslie Jamison and Eula Biss. Actually, Zadie in particular. I remember reading her first collection of nonfiction and being so struck by how forceful she was as an intellect, but how clear it was that she understood that she could be wrong about anything she was saying. And that was a real. Like, that really did something to me.

[David Remnick]

Neither one of you. Well, maybe she More Than you concludes in a given essay all the nine essays in Trick Mirror. They don't set out a thesis, tease it through, and then conclude in a standard way, as you say. They take the rock and put it under the light and look at it from all angles. And you argue with yourself. You digress, you joke, you come back, you tell a story. It's a curvy journey.

[Gia Tolentino]

It's a curvy journey. It doesn't really land anywhere. But, yeah, it was. I kind of. I wanted that. Right? It's like that's how my brain feels now. Like, it's. I think that was actually the other. I mean, that was. The animating impulse for the book was I want clarity about the moment that we're in. I need it to function. It was like post election, I was just like, I need to understand the world clearer than I do. But I cannot ever reenter that place of. Of certainty that I was in pre election. Cause it's no longer correct to the world that we live in. And I was trying to figure out a way to do both at the same time. And I just never feel conclusive anymore. Do you know what I mean? Do you feel.

[David Remnick]

I do. I do. But, you know, I'm in the conclusive business sometimes. Cause I'm writing these political comments or we have to get a magazine out, and there's a conclusiveness to that. This is a different thing that you're doing. Tell me this as a person who's been trolled repeatedly online. What's the right way to deal with trolls?

[Gia Tolentino]

I think an important thing for online behavior is don't take the bait. You know, I mean, it's different. I think it's also, you know, there are different degrees of it Right. There are some women writers that get death threats constantly, you know, that get SWAT teams sent to their house, you know, who get, you know, letters sent to their parents house, all this stuff. Right. I don't get that. I just get emails calling me a bitch and, you know, sending me pictures of aborted fetuses and, like, saying disgusting stuff. That's okay.

[David Remnick]

That's okay.

[Gia Tolentino]

I mean, it's not okay.

[David Remnick]

Sounds horrible.

[Gia Tolentino]

As Whitney Houston said, it's not right, but it's okay. And it is horrible, but for better. This is, again, something that I worried about at Jezebel, that I got so used to this, and I worried about what that was doing to my heart. You know, if I have a heart that's hard enough to take this in my email every day and think it's okay, I didn't want that. I wanted to be a little more sensitive. And I was afraid that that would make me. I was afraid that brushing off unfair criticism would make me brush off fair criticism. One of the things that I try to do is to not take the bait. If I can afford to not to. Which, you know, if you're getting death threats, you have to take the bait. You have to report them. But if I'm just getting mean emails, one thing that I try to do is understand, like, do I have more power than these people? Do I have more security than them? Like, do I need to respond? If I don't, I try not to take the bait. And it's the same with like. Like Trump tweets on Twitter, right? Like, retweeting Trump. Like, sir, Mr. President, like, this isn't. It's like, we're taking the bait. You know, we shouldn't take the bait.

[David Remnick]

What do you mean we shouldn't take the bait? We shouldn't pay attention to when the President of the United States tweets in racist terms or misogynistic terms. What should we do about that?

[Gia Tolentino]

I mean, that's the question of what it is to be in this field right now. Right. But I do think that this idea that, like, I don't mean we shouldn't engage with what Trump is saying, but I do think that there's a certain thing that Twitter monetizes and systematizes where, you know, trying to, like, dunk on the president, you know, seems like a useful thing to do. Like, trying to get, like, it sort of incentivizes this thing where you have this response to Trump that goes viral and then, like, gets more attention to you and benefits you. And that is something I think the Internet creates a situation where opposition can sometimes serve us.

[David Remnick]

I've always thought in my job that I sense that there are some writers that love the activity of writing and a lot of people who like having written, which is to say they love the fact that there's this book, that it's done, but the act of doing it is so consuming, painful, boring, lonely, unsure that they hate the actual activity, love having done it. Where do you fall that?

[Gia Tolentino]

I'm 100% like, I mean, I guess I'm glad that the book is done. I'm glad that I wrote it, but I love the agony of writing. Right. I think, and like, this might be, you know, the sort of self flagellating holdover from having grown up in a, you know, the Southern Baptist church. But it's like, I think you saying that just now made me think that's kind of how I want to live in the world, you know, like uncertainty and agony and work and devotion, you know, and sustained attention. I think that's a way that I want to be in the world. And writing is the way that I can do that. The fact of having time to think about something in private before it becomes public still feels like a real miracle to me. And that's what I want, you know, like, that's this thing that I still crave more than anything.

[David Remnick]

Gia, thanks.

[Gia Tolentino]

Thanks. Bye.

[David Remnick]

Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and her book Trick Mirror is out now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been following the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians for many, many years. And I've spent time there as a reporter trying to understand what the conflict has done to the people who live with it every single day. I have not seen a depiction of the situation as complex and as deep as the 10 part series called Our Boys. A co production of HBO and the Israeli studio Keshet, Our Boys tells a horrible true story. In 2014, a Palestinian teenager named Mohammed Abu Kader was kidnapped, burned and brutally murdered. His body was left in the Jerusalem forest. The crime was an act of reprisal. Israeli extremists were retaliating for the murder of three Israeli boys by a Hamas linked group just weeks earlier. Our Boys thoroughly examines just about all of the forces that led to the death of Muhammad Abu Khader. It's not for the faint of heart. It just isn't. But if you want to understand the currents of extremism and violence. I really do recommend our boys to you highly. Two of the creators of the show are Haggai Levi and Topik Abouel. I reached them in Tel Aviv last week. Haggai, what was the starting point for this project? How did you come to tell the story of the death of Muhammad Abu Khadr?

[Haggai Levi]

So in the beginning we wrote a pilot for HBO and the pilot focused more on the far right wing groups in Israel like Hill Top Boys or Lehabah, you know, really the Hilltop Boys.

[David Remnick]

Being settlers who are particularly radical and living in the West Bank.

[Haggai Levi]

Exactly. Most of them teens actually, but very, very violent and very messiah ideology and so on. So in the beginning we took the Abu Dhdir case only as a starting point to go and explore those groups and actually to understand the connection to those radical groups to the more political leaders until all the way to the government. But I felt it wasn't real enough, it wasn't true. It was a fictional series inspired by certain reality and certain events, but it wasn't like true. So by the time I called Joseph Seder, the director, Joseph Seder, whom I knew, and Joseph asked me to explore more the case of Abu Ghdir itself. At that time, Trump was elected and you know, we were in shock. Well, not like you, but we were. And I felt that this is something different. It's not about very, it's not about religion or very extreme ideologies. This is what I thought at the time, but more about hate. And then we understood that what we want to do actually is to examine the nature of hate crime, you know, to make an anatomy of hate crime. And this is what we were trying to do.

[David Remnick]

You also brought in a third person who's sitting with you right now, Topfik. And Topfik, I should explain that you live within Israel, you don't live in the west bank, you are Palestinian. Israeli. And I wonder how complicated your decision to get involved was. Tawfik.

[Topik Abouel]

Actually it was like a story because usually I get calls from Israeli filmmakers or creators when they have something about Arabs. And all the time I say no. This time when Joseph called me, I just met him for a while and then I found myself traveling with him and with Haggai Levi to visit Abukhdir family, the parents of Mohammad Abukhdir Hussain and Soha. And suddenly I watch their pain, you know, they're like something you can't imagine you see, especially in the mom and Soha face. They were very nervous about the fact that Israeli creators are going to tell their own story. And just when they realized that I am the one who is going to tell their son story, and it's something changed in their faces. And I can't forget that, you know, it's like something. All the tension they had, it suddenly became like something, you know, even sweet in their faces when they realized that I'm the one who is going to tell their own story. And after that, I had a lot of pressure from Palestinians, activist Palestinians, not to make this serious because it's an Israeli production, it's Israeli creators, and I'm not regular to this kind of pressure because I don't deal with direct politics. And it was very hard for me. I hesitated, I almost left making this show, but I called Hossain, the father of Muhammad, Muhammad Bukhdhar, and I just told him about my hesitation. And I remember he told me, if your consensus is clear, do it. If not, don't do it. He was so calm, you know, and then I understand that my own problems, it's like very tiny for him, for such a person who passed such a tragedy. And I decided to make it, you know, despite all the difficulties and the pressure I had.

[David Remnick]

So what was the collaboration like? The debates you had, the arguments you had in trying to conceive and write the story at such a deep level. The story not only features the three young religious men who committed the murder, it also is about the Palestinian family. It's about a woman who was a psychiatrist for one of the Israelis. It's an immensely complex story. And I wonder what your debates were like, your conversations, your arguments.

[Haggai Levi]

So we had to bridge not only artistic differences. So that was one part of the problem, I should say. And the other was to find the right narrative. I could bring the example of the interrogation of Hussein. Okay, so when Hussein, Muhammad's father, where he's brought to the police station.

[David Remnick]

The scene that you're talking about is remarkable. Hussein, whose son is missing and will eventually be found dead, beaten and burned to death, is interrogated by the police, the Israeli police, not in a sense of sympathy, but in a sense of suspicion. And this suddenly dawns on him. And throughout the series, he's constantly in the middle. He has forces on the Palestinian side who want him to not cooperate with the investigation and to become more politically radicalized and to be used as a symbol. And at the same time, he's a father, he's a husband, he's in the middle of so much in this drama.

[Haggai Levi]

Absolutely. And he has his own journey from just a very simple merchant to become a political figure and to take his pain into the political field. So that was on that specific scene, I think Tawfik felt different and told us, I was there. I've been interrogated here and there in airports and so. And this is how it looks like. So that was kind of debate we had.

[David Remnick]

Now Hagga, you mentioned somewhere that there is a parallel between what happened in 2014 in Israel and the current political climate in the United States, especially when it comes to something like the El Paso shooting. What's the parallel that you see there?

[Haggai Levi]

So at a certain point I felt that we are dealing with hate crime, which is not necessarily particular to Israel. Hate crime. You know, this is. Something is going on all over America and Europe towards immigrants, towards, I don't know, gays, some, all kinds of minorities. What I try to understand is how what would cause this kind of hate crime and what kind of theory that we try to put here is that it's kind of a layered structure in a way that you have, you know, you know, you have someone with some psychological problem and some socio economical problems and he's from the suburbs and there is kind of even certain racism towards himself and some other problems. And if that kind of person meets with incitement at the right point, that could create the perfect storm for a hate crime. This is what we try to say.

[David Remnick]

You've gotten some good reviews in the left wing Israeli press and Haaretz most commonly quoted left wing Israeli newspaper. But in the right wing Jerusalem Post it said the series sins by encouraging the moral equivalency chorus. Have you gotten a lot of pushback on the show from critics both in the press and elsewhere?

[Haggai Levi]

I can understand that it is hard to understand our choice. You know, you could argue why would you do a series about Jewish terror when it's so rare comparing to Palestinian terror? It is a legitimate question. So.

[David Remnick]

Well, how do you answer the question?

[Haggai Levi]

Well, the answers are that I have, you know, I can speak for myself is that I always would like to dig into my own soul. This is what I'm, this is what I'm doing in everything I do. So it was very obvious for me to, to understand and to inquire my own personally, my own feelings of superiority, my own racism, all of these things. I felt that there is that I have some of them and by searching by dig in into this specific story, I felt like I dig into myself that I'm telling a very personal story. It is not a series about terror at all, you know, not a Palestinian terror Or a Jewish terror. It's not about terror. It's actually mainly about understanding the nature of some killer or some killers or some murder and to understand why, how could it happen and what are the circumstances that it could happen in. So this is not about terror. It's about something else that I felt. It's very personal for me.

[Topik Abouel]

I just want to bring my point of view about your question why you choose to make this story, you know, because it's, it's all the time, you know, the same question, you know, as I see it, you know, here, Israelis and Palestinians like live in their injury. So mostly a lot of people will judge everything if it's against us, if it's, you know, good for us. So you can't get away with, to satisfy everybody, you know, because from Palestinian point of view, the occupation itself is a terror. It's everyday terror, you know, like, you know, Jewish people or settlers, excuse me, I can't. It's not Jewish, you know, I prefer to use the word Israeli. Israeli people, it's. They don't need to do it, you know, because the system do it by itself. And so it's complicated. It's complicated for everybody. And what I think, you know, that the Syrian, you know, didn't mean to satisfy anybody. It just, you know, to like, like Haggai said, it's to dig in a story, to dig in a character, to dig in yourself and also to be critical about, you know, the, the situation and the society that you are dealing with.

[Haggai Levi]

By the way, to the Palestinian society as well.

[Topik Abouel]

Yes, the Palestinian society as well.

[Haggai Levi]

As we see in the series. Yeah.

[David Remnick]

What does the telling of this story do to its audience? What can it do and what are the limits of what it can do?

[Haggai Levi]

I'll tell you something. I come from a bereaved family. My brother died in the Lebanon war, in the first Lebanon War. And my sister, who just watched the couple of first episodes, said to me, it was amazing for me to see that Abu Khadir family is just a bereaved family as we are. This is the same agony, the same pain. As simple as it is. You don't use to think about the other, about their loss or their agony. You think you use, even if you are very liberal and self aware. And I think that's something that.

[David Remnick]

People.

[Haggai Levi]

Can see in that series, the pain in the other side and that and you know, and change just for a minute their position from, you know, and let the other be the victim for a moment.

[David Remnick]

Haggai and Topik, I want to thank you so much for, for the work and your time today.

[Topik Abouel]

Thank you very much.

[Haggai Levi]

Thank you so much.

[David Remnick]

Hagai Levy and Tophek abu. Well, the 10 part series Our Boys is on HBO now. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour today and have a great week.

[Host/Announcer]

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. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell and Stephen Valentino, with help from Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment.