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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Virtual Reality, and the Politics of Genetics
00:55:28
In this episode, Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the intimate and global implications of genetic science, and we look for the Orson Wells of VR.
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- [00:02]
Reggie Watts
Virtual reality seeks to allow us to interact with the computational world as a seamless thought sphere. Hi, my name is Reggie Watts, and you are listening to New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm here to talk to you about virtual reality. Virtual reality should be a lot of fun. Virtual reality should be weird and colorful, emotional, demoralizing, not distracting. Every single human being that has ever been born and has died. Something really strong and sincere candy bar that really satisfies, yet feels as though I'm being healthfully rejuvenated. Well, a thought sphere is human consciousness, whether it's synthetic or organic. Collective consciousness continues to evolve collectively agreed upon as functioning in a certain way. Virtual reality should never ever be not in existence. Virtual reality should never at all costs, nor ever or ever try to. Never, in avoidance of trying to become stronger than what it is. Never, ever should it, never would it. It's already strong enough. Never, ever would be. Should virtual reality be about subject matter like root, small people or rock formations? To me, that's kind of the point.
- [01:45]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Whoa.
- [01:45]
David Remnick
The endlessly four dimensional Reggie Watts. Comedian, musician and virtual reality connoisseur. I'm David Remnick on this New Yorker Radio Hour. We're going to get a couple of different opinions on virtual reality today. If you follow technology at all. You've probably heard virtual reality hyped to death. And when it finally does arrive, will it be anywhere near as big as anyone says? I don't know, but we're going to look into it. Now, I don't think you can possibly overhype the work of Siddhartha Mukherjee. His book about cancer, the emperor of all maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize and for really good reason. It's a huge sweeping book that it's as well. It's as good a science book as I've ever read. It really is. And his new book is called the An Intimate History, and if anything, it ups the ante. Every aspect of the life sciences today involves genetics, and our understanding of what it means to be human is largely based on the principle of the gene. Mukherjee seems to engage all of it. I'd like to begin as the book begins, which is personally, you have mental illness running in your family. There's no other way to put it. And you've got a cousin who suffers from mental illness and two uncles who did as well. Do you worry sometimes about your own mental health? And how big an issue was this, your family history, when you were getting closer to your now wife Sarah? It's an enormous looming issue, obviously, in your book and in your life.
- [03:25]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
I began to discover it as a child myself. Like most Bengali families, my family had elevated denial to a high museum grade art form. So we didn't talk about it very much. One of my uncles lived with us. He was quite ill mentally, so he had to live with us. So it was there in your face, but not talked about why we would have a grown man living in your family, unemployed, unable to carry a job, often unable to carry out a full conversation. And then of course, I knew later when my cousin first visited, it was also clear that he was quite ill. I describe an episode in which he comes in. We're about to go see a film. It was actually Spider man, if I remember correctly. One of the first early releases just come to India and he couldn't be found anywhere. And he had gone into the bathroom upstairs and he was curled up in the bathroom and my grandmother had to pull him out of the bathroom. So that was clear. And then the final piece of it became clear over time. And that was when I figured out that the other uncle who had died. All of these are of course blood related. They're related to my father's side of the family.
- [04:39]
David Remnick
And he died in a kind of manic episode.
- [04:41]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
He died in what was clearly a manic episode. And he was a larger than life figure in the family. He was so big. My grandmother used to call me by his name, which was at first I thought was a slip of her tongue, but in fact she was actually living that fantasy that I had been reborn as him. He died several years before I was born. So all of these pieces were sort of loosely floating around the great unspoken in the Mukherjee family. Until I began to study medicine basically and realized that this was the reality of the illness that had run through the family. There was a genetic component to this illness.
- [05:20]
David Remnick
Sid, you call the gene one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of all of science. It seems to me that our pretty recent genetic knowledge coming out of the Human Genome Project and all the rest is maybe even greater both in its potential and its dangers than the splitting of the atom.
- [05:43]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
And in fact, I draw a formal analogy between those two moments. The splitting of the atom really opened up the possibility of controlling energy and matter. So that opens up an immense technological possibility full of promise and perils. The promise being nuclear technology, the peril being Fukushima. But the genome also opens up that idea of promise and peril. So the promise being the curing of deadly diseases, the early diagnosis of breast cancer, the capacity of being able to Predict in our children those that will carry devastating mutations that will make them potentially have lives of extraordinary suffering. But the peril is also questions like identity. What if we learn, and we are going to learn about maybe not one gene, multiple genes that govern sexual identity. What if we learn about genes that predispose to illness but don't cause extraordinary suffering? What should we do about those?
- [06:42]
David Remnick
And the decisions to abort or not abort that would come along with it?
- [06:45]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
That's right. And just to give you one example, this is not fantasy in India and in China based on very crude genetic diagnosis of whether you're a boy or a girl. That phenomena is already in action and has skewed the selective abortion of those diagnosed genetically as female or maybe potentially some infanticized has skewed the gender ratio in India and China to something absurd. 700 women to 1000 men in some parts of India and similarly in some parts of China.
- [07:16]
David Remnick
So in a sense, the tragic mistakes are already being made at an early stage.
- [07:20]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
That's right. The tragedy is not tomorrow's tragedy, it is today's tragedy. In fact, it's yesterday's tragedy. Those societies have already been destabilized by genetics.
- [07:29]
David Remnick
Your readers know you well from your first book on cancer and genetics is a part of your work as a researcher as well as a doctor. Was the impulse to write this book on the gene and genetics, its history, an intimate history, you call it, propelled mainly by the family story, or you thought this was the next place to go as a science writer?
- [07:51]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Really, the three threads that come into this book. The first thread is the family story. It was undeniable. The second was cancer. So while this was happening in the background, while I was explaining to my would be wife that there was this taint that ran through the family, that we should know about it and talk about it, I was also training as a cancer researcher. Cancer is a genetic disease, a disease unleashed by mutations in genes. And we were trying to figure out what genes cause cancer, why they cause cancer. And the last thread was that in the last four to five years, we have begun to invent technologies that allow us to change the human genome. And there's no other way to say it. That's the limit of the technology.
- [08:34]
David Remnick
What's called CRISPR technology.
- [08:35]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
CRISPR is the forefront of them. There are waves that are following that. There's a whole family of technologies that allow this to happen. But yes, CRISPR is the centerpiece of that. And my lab began to work on CRISPR to understand cancer genes. And we're still doing a lot of work on crispr.
- [08:50]
David Remnick
And what does that mean? What are you actually doing?
- [08:52]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
So what you're doing is that, that very simply speaking, you're exploiting an ancient, ancient bacterial immune defense system that was invented to cut up the DNA of invading viruses. Now, what's important about that is that it doesn't cut up that invading virus DNA at random. It basically identifies a specific series of sequences that the virus carries the code in the virus, it targets it. It targets it and then chops it up like a pair of molecular scissors. But what was discovered in 2011, 2012, is that you could piggyback on that system and basically cut up any part of the human genome that was number one. And number two is that the genome would try to repair itself. And in doing so, you could make it repair itself in whatever direction you want. Now what does that mean? That means that you could take a mutant cystic fibrosis gene and you could say, I'm gonna use this bacterial system and re engineer it and now correct that mutant gene and make it the normal gene.
- [09:55]
David Remnick
And the cystic fibrosis disappears.
- [09:58]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The gene would disappear or be repaired and corrected. And not only would we disappear and correct it, if you did this in, for instance, embryonic stem cell or an embryonic cell, it would disappear permanently from your genetic lineage. It would vanish.
- [10:12]
David Remnick
You have a great phrase that I have to think is a generative phrase for the book itself. At one point in the book, you call the human genome unsettlingly beautiful. What do you mean by that?
- [10:22]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
I mean the human genome, if you read it, if you were to put it in a book. I describe it as a 66 volume encyclopedia. Right. So it would be 66 volumes of the full Encyclopedia Britannica set.
- [10:33]
David Remnick
Unique to each being.
- [10:35]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Unique to each being. That's right. But if you were to open that volume, it would be totally inscrutable. It would look like gibberish. It's written in a code that is not easily understandable to humans. It's written in four letters and it's written continuously like this for 3 billion letters. Now, what's unsettlingly beautiful about the human genome is that it takes that code, such simple code act gctttcc and it makes you and me out of that code. And obviously there are certain things from the environment that we inherit, but it still creates this unbelievably complicated, adaptive, sly, beautiful creature that can paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and adding to.
- [11:21]
David Remnick
The picture, adding to the picture of our fate As a physical being, as a mental being is the factor of environment. Environment and random factors can change genetic outcome. Epigenetic switches can play a role in tripping off cancer, mental illness, many other diseases. Can you explain that?
- [11:42]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Yeah, it's a very important discussion because it can become very polarizing. I mean, just take for instance, the autism debate or the mental illness debate. You know, how much is gene, how much is environment? So let me just explain some very important terms. The first distinction is obviously between genetic information, the code that's written in act, GCC and so forth, and a term that's being thrown around very loosely now called epigenetic information. So let me just explain. Epigenetics is a very simple idea. Epigenetics is a mechanism to alter that information without altering the sequence. So the sequence remains the same, so it does not change actc, ggcc, and so forth. But you can package the DNA differently. So imagine again, your genome is a long string. Well, you can tie knots in the string in certain places and that would carry information. If you tied knots along a certain string, you wouldn't change the string itself. All you're doing is tying three dimensional knots.
- [12:37]
David Remnick
But it would alter outcome.
- [12:38]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
It would alter outcome in what way?
- [12:39]
David Remnick
For example?
- [12:40]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
For example, you know, if you were subjected to an acute starvation, it turns out that we now know that your gene sequence may not change when your body undergoes starvation. But in fact, it's possible that your epigene sequence or the way that the genome is knotted up changes.
- [12:57]
David Remnick
At one point in your book, amazingly, your grandmother, who's not a scientist, blamed the stress of the partition of India for her own son's mental illness. And given what we know now about epigenetics and what you're just explaining, I wonder if, in some sense, not just metaphorical, that she had a point.
- [13:15]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
And we know that there's a point there. We know that from formal studies, not the ones that carried out with my grandmother, but formal studies. You know, the best example of that is that you take two identical twins and you ask the question, what is the incidence of schizophrenia in both those twins? And the incidence of schizophrenia is around 50%. So what does that tell us? It tells us, number one, that there's a strong genetic component that's about 50 fold higher than the general population. So there's clearly a genetic component. But on the flip side, you could ask the question, why did the other twin 50% of the time not have the disease? Well, the answer is either it's because of some environmental trigger that was Missing. Maybe it was random chance, but still a random environmental trigger that was missing that made it possible in one twin and not in the other twin. And so the point of the book is that we're realizing that what we used to call fate or destiny is really a combination of random chance and environmental triggers impinging on the genome.
- [14:17]
David Remnick
That even comes to the point of sexuality. The book discusses the hunt for the so called gay gene. What's the latest thinking on that? Because I know that that's come up any number of times in the last 15, 20 years. And how did the publicity around that debate shape the course of gay rights in this country?
- [14:34]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
So one question that we keep coming back to over and over again in the book is that, you know, you might think naively that genetics is a scientific problem or a scientific question. The point here is that genetics is reorganizing in a radical way. The way we think about race, the way we think about sexuality, identity, you know, transgenderism, all the stuff that is raging, the divisive debates that are raging in the political realm, that are seemingly a cultural debate, that are seemingly cultural debates, are political debates, are really debates about human beings and identity. And if they are debates about human beings and identity, then they have to be debates about genes. There's no, there's no. It's ipso facto there are debates about genes. So coming to your question about the gay gene, as you know, it's a big deal in the 1980s and 1990s to figure out the extent to which sexuality was genetically determined or whether it was a choice. We know quite a lot about those answers now. Well, the first thing that we know, and the most important thing we know, is that if you look at it again at identical twins, there is a strong concordance which would clearly suggest that there is a genetic component.
- [15:41]
David Remnick
It must frustrate the hell out of you to listen to the current discourse about any number of these issues, whether it's identity or sexuality, because it always seems to leave out the scientific component.
- [15:53]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
It's not only frustrating, it is dangerous.
- [15:56]
David Remnick
How so?
- [15:56]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Well, just to take the debates around race, you know, you. In this last cycle of elections, the word race has been thrown around on a daily basis. Well, first of all, let's ask ourselves, what do we know about race? Well, we know quite a lot actually about race in a genetic or biological sense. We know, for instance, that if you look genetically at intraracial diversity, that is, if you take Africa as a continent and you ask the question, what's the genetic difference between a man from Namibia and a man from Egypt say that genetic difference we know is greater than the genetic difference between Africans and Europeans, not by a small amount, but by a vast amount.
- [16:35]
David Remnick
Why would that be?
- [16:36]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Well, that's just the way that human beings have evolved. The evolution of human beings allowed certain dispersals of humans, and race follows the lines of those dispersals. And so the interracial diversity within continents or so called races exceeds the interracial diversity. And so therefore you can actually say very little about what the word race means. So let me just finish up by one important comment, and this is the point that it's very important to drive home in this debate. I can look at your genome and tell with quite a great degree of accuracy whether you were born, whether your ancestors were born in a particular place in Eastern Europe and what their racial geography might have been. The point is you can't do the opposite. In other words, you cannot take a racial geography, you can't say Eastern Europe and make very much sense of the people who descend down that lineage because it's so diverse. So as I say in the book, the genomic geographer goes home Happy, the racist has nothing to ask for or to say for it.
- [17:38]
David Remnick
Well, let's go back to the idea of genetic engineering and our ability using CRISPR and things like it, to potentially edit the human genome as we see fit. This is, as you've said, an enormously powerful moment in the history of science. And yet, do you think our politics, or anybody's politics are capable of grappling with something this consequential?
- [18:00]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Well, you know, it's very much in the zeitgeist. So just to give you one example, there was a moratorium that's been placed in the United States against the interventions on the human genome in embryonic cells or embryonic stem cells or embryos using CRISPR technology. So the scientists have said, you know, we don't know very much about this. Let's hold off until we figure out some of the ethical.
- [18:20]
David Remnick
It's kind of an intellectual and ethical break.
- [18:23]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
It's an intellectual and ethical break. But just to give you one example, it's not clear whether the Chinese scientists are interested in that same break. It's not clear whether the Korean scientists are. Someone is going to do proof of principle experiments in which they say, in principle, in a human embryo, you can change the genome in a directional manner. You know, it's kind of creating a designer genome.
- [18:44]
David Remnick
But is there a human being alive who is not constricted by religious considerations? Say, that wouldn't want to make this leap. You have relatives that suffer from mental illness. I have a child with autism. I have to think that everybody, we know, everybody has something like this in their lives.
- [19:01]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Yes, but I'm the human being, I think, and maybe you are too. I think we should all be. Who are human beings who are so concerned about what's happened in the past that we need to define moral red lines.
- [19:13]
David Remnick
But how will we be able to resist?
- [19:15]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
How will we be able to resist.
- [19:17]
David Remnick
Considering the suffering that we both know in this room and that is in the world in general?
- [19:22]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
I think we'll be able to do this by having a frank discussion about what those moral red lines would be. I propose in the book that it should be a triangle. That the triangle should be, on one hand, extraordinary suffering. So in other words, we need to decide what genetic illnesses, what genetic blemishes cause truly extraordinary suffering so that we're not, for instance, trying to make blonde babies or blue eyed babies.
- [19:49]
David Remnick
No, but there's a great in between. We now live in a world in which there's a discussion of difference rather than suffering. So we have a community, for example, people who are deaf.
- [19:57]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Yes.
- [19:58]
David Remnick
Argue that this is a different way. Some of them that this is merely a different way of being rather than an imperfect form of quote, unquote normalcy. You have it with any number of conditions.
- [20:08]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Absolutely. And so the point being that as long as, as long as those debates are raging, and if they're illegitimate, if we find them even within the boundaries of reason, which, for instance, I do in the case of deafness, then those are open for discussion.
- [20:24]
David Remnick
Are those national debates? Are they international debates? How are they conducted?
- [20:28]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Well, let's start with at least them being national debates. I mean international, as I said already, you know, cultures like the Chinese, famously the Chinese, flatly, some scientists in China said we don't want the moratorium. We don't care about this moratorium. We have different values. We don't think the embryo is that sacred. Not because we're evil human beings, but because we just don't. Our values are different, our systems of belief are different. And most importantly, we want to cure terrible diseases.
- [20:52]
David Remnick
It makes you think, even if you're a child of enlightenment and science and rationality, that the responsibility inherited by discoveries like the atomic discovery or the genetic discovery is almost too much for the fragile human intelligence and moral structure to absorb sometimes.
- [21:11]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Well, I would hope not, because we have to absorb it. But there's no choice, that there's no choice. I think we are Facing right up to it. This is a human debate. This is a debate that lies in the humanities as much as in the sciences. It lies in politics as much as in the sciences. You cannot say, oh, you know, scientists will solve that problem. You have to solve the problem. You have to find out. That's why you need the vocabulary. You need the vocabulary of genes. You need to figure out what race means. You need to figure out what epigenetics means. You need to figure out all of this stuff. And if you don't, you'll be left out of this debate.
- [21:49]
David Remnick
Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, researcher, and one of the great science writers of our time. His new book is the An Intimate History. In a minute, we're going to take a look at the state of the art in virtual reality. The almost sci fi technology that exists now is mind boggling. But now comes the much harder part, figuring out what to do with it. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
- [22:39]
Andrew Morantz
And I'm Andrew Morantz. In 2015, a filmmaker named Chris Milk gave a TED talk about a project he created with the United Nations. The project was the story of a Syrian refugee girl named Sidra.
- [22:51]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
My name is sidra. I am 12 years old. I am in the fifth grade. I am from Syria in the Daraa province in Hill City.
- [23:01]
Andrew Morantz
So it was a virtual reality project. Virtual reality, or VR, it's loosely defined because people are sort of still figuring out what it means in practice. But basically, VR is anything that you can play on a device where it totally takes over your field of vision and it tracks your head movement so anywhere you look, there's something for you to look at in a full 360 degrees.
- [23:22]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
I think I was a stronger baby than my brother. So it's a machine. But through this machine, we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and ultimately.
- [23:37]
David Remnick
We become more human. And that's how I think virtual reality.
- [23:41]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Has the potential to actually change the world. Thank you.
- [23:47]
Andrew Morantz
So there were some pretty grandiose claims in what he said, but basically the context for that TED talk is that there was this huge wave of VR hype that had kind of taken over Silicon Valley and L. A the year before. In 2014, Facebook had acquired a VR company called Oculus for $2 billion.
- [24:04]
Monica Ratchic
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the idea is to extend virtual reality capabilities beyond gaming into areas like communication and education. So joining us now is Dan.
- [24:16]
Andrew Morantz
When I started reporting on VR earlier this spring, I was trying to find the Orson Welles of VR. And the thing is, that person doesn't exist yet, because even though the technology is there, the storytelling part is still coming into focus. One person who's been a theorist of this for decades, since before it really even existed, is named Janet Murray. She's a professor at Georgia Tech.
- [24:39]
Monica Ratchic
Right now, we're at this really tantalizing moment with VR. We haven't invented the storytelling format that suits this medium. Right now, it's just a technology that is the equivalent of inventing the movie camera. But inventing the movie camera is not the same thing as inventing the movies.
- [25:04]
Andrew Morantz
In the late 90s, Janet Murray had this book called Hamlet on the Holodeck, which sort of became a cult classic in the tech world. The book argued that the future of storytelling was in interactive, immersive narratives. So stories that could include animation or video games or visual art, but it wouldn't be reducible to any one of those things. One team in Brooklyn is making some of the first steps toward that kind of narrative. They're working on this really exciting VR project because it has a computer rendered environment, but they're putting real people inside it. The project is called Blackout. James George is the creator, the technical director, the executive producer. He sort of does everything.
- [25:46]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
So we're working on a virtual reality experience that takes place on the New York subway. And in this experience, you're on the subway surrounded by strangers, and the train breaks down, and the train drops into darkness, and you're surrounded by suspicious murmurs, fear and confusion from people not knowing what's happening. You realize in that moment that in virtual reality, you can look at the different passengers and actually hear what they're thinking.
- [26:18]
Andrew Morantz
Blackout is very much still in development. But even right now, even when the people are blurry and the software is glitchy, it still feels like a cool superpower to be able to turn your head and look at a person and all of a sudden hear their innermost thoughts.
- [26:35]
Justin Cohn
I shouldn't bite my nails. It's disgusting in a train.
- [26:39]
David Remnick
Have I touched anything?
- [26:41]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Somebody does definitely smell one. Well, maybe it's just the.
- [26:45]
Monica Ratchic
All of the couples on this subway look exactly alike. There's two people over there that have the same face.
- [26:54]
David Remnick
Just one has facial hair and one doesn't.
- [26:56]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
You're a homeless person.
- [26:57]
David Remnick
You never know.
- [26:58]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The people that have the most don't ever want to give. But the people with the littlest, always giving and giving and giving.
- [27:05]
Andrew Morantz
Being able to look at someone and hear their thoughts. It's a simple kind of interaction, but it feels very cool in the context of real actors. Most of the things you see in VR that have real actors in them are just pre recorded 360 video. So it starts playing and you can watch it and it's in all directions around you, but it's the same every time. What Blackout's trying to do is make something with real actors in it that's different, depending on where you look or what you do, or where you go within that space. VR nerds like to talk about this as the passive versus interactive distinction. I talked to Justin Cohn, who is the founder of the media blog motionographer.com and he's been covering VR for a long time, and he's gotten very good at explaining the technical stuff.
- [27:48]
Justin Cohn
So what I think people have been searching for, especially in recent years, is some kind of holy grail that unites the best of passive storytelling with the best of interactivity. The things we've learned from video games. So the team behind Blackout is taking some of the first steps around this new united pathway between these two worlds. They are building a world that, like a video game, is fully interactive. It's a world you can walk around. But then they have these pre recorded three dimensional real people that they've captured and put into this experience. And that is much more like filmmaking, right? These are actors who are performing, and it may or may not work. I don't know, it may or may not be what they think it's going to be, but one thing's for sure, it's headed the right direction.
- [28:43]
Andrew Morantz
So part of what the Blackout team has developed in order to do this is a software and filmmaking technique called DepthKit.
- [28:50]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
DepthKit allows you to film in a way where you're catching people from every angle, which means that a viewer is actually the camera person. You're literally walking around inside of this movie. We think of it as a piece of science fiction software.
- [29:04]
Andrew Morantz
Okay? So you're not literally inside the movie, but you are literally walking around these images of these actors. And in order to do that, you need to surround these actors with multiple cameras. And then you need to combine those shots into this full 3D stitching of that person. And then when you have this full 3D rendering of the person, then you plop her into this interactive world and then the audience can walk around her and she'll still look real.
- [29:30]
Justin Cohn
This is hugely important to Hollywood because Hollywood wants to create these experiences that extend the intellectual property they already have.
- [29:40]
David Remnick
Right.
- [29:40]
Justin Cohn
So how cool would it be if in virtual reality, you could interact with a live action Rey from the new Star wars movie.
- [29:50]
Andrew Morantz
I'm fine with passive experiences. I don't mind just sitting back and watching something like, you know, I think Citizen Kane is pretty good. And that's totally passive. But if you do want interactivity, it's much easier to do it with computer animation. As soon as you start to use real people, it gets tricky. So the Blackout team is doing these things with technology like Depthkit that have never been done before. And from the outside, that seems really cool, but from the outside, the problem is there's no precedent for the kind of storytelling they want to do. They have to have all these really difficult internal conversations to try to figure out how to tell the story. They have these viewers who will never have seen VR before. So how do you teach someone to watch VR as a form at the same time that you're letting them experience your particular story?
- [30:35]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The genuine thing we want to get these people to do is move through the space. And moving through the space becomes a metaphor for overcoming suspicion.
- [30:43]
David Remnick
So.
- [30:43]
Andrew Morantz
So their original idea had been, at a certain point, a bunch of subway dancers called the Waffle Crew. They were gonna jump up and freeze in midair.
- [30:50]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Here we go, folks. Do not blink your eyes. You might miss something.
- [30:57]
Andrew Morantz
As a viewer, when you see that, you start to get the sense that you're in this altered reality where all kinds of weird things are about to happen, like hearing passengers thoughts. But when I visited them, they weren't sure anymore that the freezing in midair thing was the best way to do that transition.
- [31:11]
Monica Ratchic
Right. So my worry is, like, the part with the Waffle Crew is very, like, performative in it. Learning the rules could be. I don't know. There are ways we could help them without being so on the nose, where there's different versions of when you, like, enter a portal and you begin to learn the rules. And this is just very often happens in children's books or in sci fi. I think we can just think about, like, what we want to do for that. And I just. I guess for me, because I always would prefer to do something that is a little more slower and exploratory. Like, you're right. But they could figure this out, and it could be like. And then they'll feel like they figured it out, and that would be so.
- [31:42]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Wonderful success if that works. It's just hard.
- [31:46]
Sarah Nissan
That always felt really clunky to me.
- [31:48]
David Remnick
And so I'm just like, it's just dismantling. No, no, I believe you. I trust you. I know. I Want to listen.
- [31:54]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
It's just dismantling so much of what we've been building that it's. It's frustrating for me.
- [31:59]
David Remnick
I mean, we get description of life where, like.
- [32:04]
Andrew Morantz
At some moments, the people on the Blackout team are really focused on pushing technical boundaries, and other times, that all goes out the window, and all they want to talk about is how to tell a good story. And that distinction can get blurred by all the VR rhetoric.
- [32:18]
Monica Ratchic
There's so much conversation around things like VR that are like, oh, you just get in there and you just feel empathy for your fellow human being. And it's not really like that. It's a very strange, in a lot of ways, isolating experience. It's just you, right? Like you're on your own with a headset strapped to your face.
- [32:35]
Andrew Morantz
There's been a lot of talk about VR as an empathy machine, and it's usually focused on things that are happening very far away. And this is like, we're literally across the street from the subway right now.
- [32:45]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The sort of suggestion is that we can do a lot to understand those people and to take a moment to give them the benefit of the doubt. And blackout is a moment where we create this paused time where you actually get to do that.
- [33:04]
Andrew Morantz
And do you think that that is possible because VR is an empathy machine or because you guys are good storytellers?
- [33:11]
Justin Cohn
Hopefully the second one.
- [33:13]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
I mean, honestly, I don't.
- [33:14]
Andrew Morantz
It's hard to say that it is anything.
- [33:16]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
It is a weird thing that you put on your face is the safe description of what it is currently.
- [33:20]
Andrew Morantz
So there when he says it's just a thing you put on your face, I think what he's talking about is there's a difference between the hardware and what you use that hardware for. VR technology is already here. There's a huge amount of money being invested in it that's not going anywhere. But the Blackout team also, at the same time, has to solve a different problem, how to tell stories in this new medium. And personally, that's much more interesting to me. Not just that we can make newer and cooler computer platforms, but that this can become a whole new way to make stories and art. It might take a few years, but I'm really curious to see what the Orson Welles of VR comes up with.
- [34:02]
David Remnick
That's Andrew Moranz from the New Yorker's editorial staff. Now, Reggie Watts is. I don't know how to describe him. He's a beatboxer, a comedian, an actor, and he's also a bit of a virtual reality impresario. He released a surreal comedy VR experience called Waves. And he was in a movie about virtual reality called Creative Control. So he's the guy to help us really understand VR.
- [34:40]
Reggie Watts
Well, the difference between reality, reality, reality squared versus virtual reality, I would say that reality, real reality is much better than virtual reality at being real reality. It's the original reality or nothing is better than real reality itself. When it comes to reality, real reality, it's just been around so long. So I'm like, oh, yeah, right, here we are. Real reality isn't virtual in the classic sense. Virtual reality is the complete immersion in technology seeks to simulate real space, space and time. The single most convincing version of virtual reality, reality reality. Virtual reality is definitely full tech simulation. Reality reality is nature, tech life stuff, immersive nature, quest for life, Real reality, reality is, some people would say reality is a form of virtual reality is incredibly elusive and something that's virtual, it's always better, way better than the real thing. We are in a simulation, interpreting, creating the reality that we exist in simulation. So in the future, virtual reality will become reality and we'll realize that, oh, that was the reality we had to fight so long and so hard to get there.
- [36:11]
David Remnick
Reggie Watts, the one of a kind comedy and music reformer. Now, let's stay for just another minute on this theme of entertainment in the digital age. But instead of technologies we might be using next week or next year, let's talk about some things you can enjoy right now. My colleague Monica Ratchic is the multimedia wizard of the New Yorker, and she's got some suggestions for us. Monica, what's the first one?
- [36:36]
Monica Ratchic
Well, the first one is from archive.org this nonprofit archives a lot of things around the Internet. You know, documents, music, images. But for a while now, they've been really amping up their efforts to store software.
- [36:48]
David Remnick
So what would I find in there?
- [36:50]
Monica Ratchic
So you're going to find operating systems, different applications, you know, the very beginning of Apple II software.
- [36:56]
David Remnick
So for a tech person, this is like going back.
- [36:58]
Monica Ratchic
This is like Mecca.
- [36:59]
David Remnick
It's like going back and hearing songs.
- [37:00]
Monica Ratchic
Of the 50s, songs from the 50s. This is real nostalgia here.
- [37:03]
David Remnick
Great doo wops.
- [37:05]
Monica Ratchic
But more than just storing tens of thousands of items of software, what they've actually done is they've created an emulator called JS Mess, so you can actually access video games and arcade games from decades ago.
- [37:16]
David Remnick
So you can get Pac Man. No problem.
- [37:18]
Monica Ratchic
You can get Pac Man. And I just love going to this site and finding these weird little gems.
- [37:23]
David Remnick
So you find your technological child hood back there.
- [37:25]
Monica Ratchic
Well, these were actually made before I was born, but all right, don't rub it in. But still, what do you got here? So what I have here is something called Mr. Dew's Wild Ride, which is from the Internet arcade collection on archive.org and let's do player one. Oh, I'm actually doing really well, huh?
- [37:45]
David Remnick
This is one of the dumbest games I've ever seen.
- [37:47]
Monica Ratchic
So dumb. But it's actually. Oh, okay. All right, all right. I just died.
- [37:53]
David Remnick
So what else you got?
- [37:55]
Monica Ratchic
The Internet can be a frenetic, overwhelming place and so sometimes you need a little bit of a break. And this website called Crossframed.com is a break from all of that. There are over thousands of selected clips from movies hosted on this website. And you get a random film clip every time you go to this site. And there's everything from classic films to little snippet from really popular films. This one I love from Ghostbusters 2.
- [38:26]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Do re.
- [38:32]
Andrew Morantz
Gone.
- [38:37]
Monica Ratchic
I like seeing the clips in isolation. It's a little bit mysterious, but I kind of like that mystery.
- [38:41]
David Remnick
And you end up going to see the full film after seeing the clip Sometimes.
- [38:44]
Monica Ratchic
Sometimes, yeah. And what I like about it is that it's like a little cinema espresso. I get a little culture fix in the middle of my afternoon.
- [38:50]
David Remnick
So who does this?
- [38:51]
Monica Ratchic
So he's actually an anonymous guy. He's an anonymous contributor. And I reached out to him and I was like, who the heck are you? I really like your site. He's this designer in Portugal who actually is just a huge cinema fan. And for years he was calling little clips from movies and uploading them to a livejournal. This was before YouTube even existed. And then a few years ago he was like, you know what, maybe I should put this on a site. And he just uploads a new one. And now it's up to over 1300 clips.
- [39:17]
David Remnick
You know, I think this is going to be very healthy for everybody. This is what people do instead of smoking cigarettes now take a three minute break and watch a movie classic fix that way. And what's the third one?
- [39:28]
Monica Ratchic
I recently saw this wonderful documentary at the New York Turkish Film Festival called Remake Remix. Rip off. The Turkish equivalent to Hollywood in the 60s and 70s was producing hundreds of films annually. But because of financial and governmental restrictions, which meant limited resources for filmmakers, coupled with the fact that there was actually no copyright law in Turkey at the time, meant that all of these filmmakers were creating fantastic mashups and remakes and in some cases taking clips from contemporary Hollywood films and splicing them into their own films directly.
- [40:00]
David Remnick
And how do I get this?
- [40:01]
Monica Ratchic
So you can see many of these films on YouTube, and one of the more popular ones is the man who Saves the World, or also known as Turkish Star wars, and we can see a clip of it here. So here we're seeing a pilot who's wearing a motorcycle helmet and a giant.
- [40:19]
David Remnick
Egg is floating through outer space. Look at that.
- [40:21]
Monica Ratchic
They actually stole the reels of Star wars from a local theater overnight so that they could screen the Star wars in the background and film their actors in front of the Death Star.
- [40:34]
David Remnick
Not in a million years could I have found this for the few people that missed the Turkish Film Festival in New York and didn't go to the Batman movie. You can get this all on YouTube without a problem.
- [40:43]
Monica Ratchic
You can get much of it on YouTube without a problem, but the documentary will hopefully be on streaming soon.
- [40:49]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's Monica Ratchich there's more to come this hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Mary Lavin isn't so well known today, but she was a writer of classic short stories. She published more than a dozen of them in the New Yorker starting in the 1950s, and she has a major presence in Irish literature, when there were very few women writing fiction. One of Ireland's great contemporary writers, Colm Toybean, knew Mary Lavin when he was at the University of Ireland. She often lectured there, and he became friends with her daughter. On the New Yorker's fiction podcast this month, Toybean talks about Lavin's work and reads her story in the Middle of the Field, which was published in the New Yorker in 1961. It's about a widow who hires a man to do some work on her land, and who then very awkwardly, tries to make advances on her.
- [42:08]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Tell me, he whispered, his words falling over each other. Are you never lonely at all? What did you say? She said in a clear voice, because the thickness of his voice sickened her. She had hardly heard what he said. Her one thought was to get past him, he leaned forward. What about a little kiss? He whispered, and to get a better hold on her, he let go the hand he had pressed against the wall. But before he caught at her with both hands, she had wrenched her arm free of him and ignominiously ducking under his armpit. She was out next minute in the lighted hall out there because light was all the protection she needed from him, the old fool. She began to laugh. She'd only to wait for him to come sheepishly out. But there was something she hadn't counted on. She hadn't counted on there being anything pathetic in his sheepishness. There was something actually pitiful in the way he shambled into the light, not raising his eyes. And she was so surprisingly touched by him that before he had time to utter a word, she put out her hand. Don't feel too bad, she said. I didn't mind.
- [43:31]
David Remnick
That's Colm Toy Bean reading from Mary Lavin's story In the Middle of the Fields. You can hear the whole story and his conversation with fiction editor Deborah Treisman@newyorker.com podcasts Now we're going to take a little trip here with my colleague Henry Finder. Henry is the editorial director of the New Yorker and maybe a little less important, but very important to me, my editor at the New Yorker. And recently he went out to New Jersey to visit someone in show business. Henry, who was it?
- [44:10]
Justin Cohn
His name is Marco Costenzo.
- [44:13]
David Remnick
What does he do?
- [44:14]
Justin Cohn
He's a sound effects guy, I think. I was reading a profile about somebody who's a big sound producer in Hollywood and we heard that there is a person who has what he called a sound castle in New Jersey.
- [44:28]
Marco Costenzo
Watch what their movements are doing and you do it in sync with them.
- [44:31]
David Remnick
So what kind of sounds is he making? Give us an example.
- [44:34]
Justin Cohn
In a movie, any effect you hear in a movie, it could be a, a punch, it could be a footfall, it could be somebody being stabbed. It could be somebody drinking a cup of tea. But it's this giant space just heaped and heaped and heaped with things.
- [44:51]
Marco Costenzo
A wall of little props. That is my command center right here.
- [44:55]
Justin Cohn
I don't know. This is like a child's look. It's like a round. That is a green.
- [45:01]
Marco Costenzo
I don't know what kind of child you hang out with, but that's a dog toy, a cat toy. That's a little fell. But you could use it as a teething ring, I guess, for a kid.
- [45:09]
Justin Cohn
So what's this thing here?
- [45:10]
Marco Costenzo
You know what this is? This box is full of all little.
- [45:13]
David Remnick
Plastic toys and things.
- [45:15]
Marco Costenzo
Okay, so it's. I'll just take it down and I mean everything makes a little bit of a.
- [45:19]
Justin Cohn
This, this is a little like a little cat toy, cat toy, chew doll, I don't know what.
- [45:24]
Marco Costenzo
Or a child toy.
- [45:26]
Justin Cohn
It's a pig.
- [45:27]
Marco Costenzo
This guy, his arms go crazy.
- [45:29]
Justin Cohn
That's a little.
- [45:33]
Marco Costenzo
It's a lizard figurine, which is only about 5 inches tall and its appendages make a great noise.
- [45:42]
Justin Cohn
You got a syringe here?
- [45:43]
Marco Costenzo
I have a lot of syringes we're working on.
- [45:45]
Justin Cohn
This is a real syringe.
- [45:47]
Marco Costenzo
Most of them are real. And that one doesn't have any needles protruding. And you're lucky.
- [45:52]
Justin Cohn
Yeah. Biohazards right next to Child's Toys.
- [45:58]
David Remnick
So he's got a. For example, a lizard figurine kind of chew toy thing. What sound is that gonna make?
- [46:04]
Justin Cohn
It squeaks in just the right way. And sometimes there's a scene where you need something to squeak just like that.
- [46:09]
David Remnick
A squeaky window in a horror movie or something.
- [46:11]
Justin Cohn
Yeah. And this guy is in incredible demand. He's worked on more than 500 movies. He's had a career that spans 30 years. And he's worked on movies everyone's seen working on movies like Ice Age. You've got ducks, and they're walking on funny surfaces. And in order for that to work, he had to equip certain gloves with actual dried duck feet.
- [46:37]
Marco Costenzo
What we did is went to Chinatown. And you know how you see all the ducks hanging in the windows?
- [46:41]
Justin Cohn
Yeah.
- [46:41]
Marco Costenzo
Well, if you go into those stores, they'll have a box of. Or a bin of duck feet. So we took everyone, 10 of them, and I. Or actually, yeah, I got 10 of them. And we put these duck feet on each finger. So now that I've got more of a surface that has little hooks so that you'd hear it on branches, you'd hear it on, you know, wherever they were stepping on the rock. It wouldn't be just like a single tap. It would be these sloppy feet that we were trying to create for dodo birds.
- [47:06]
Justin Cohn
Actual edible duck feet.
- [47:08]
Marco Costenzo
Oh, yeah. Well, they dried.
- [47:11]
Justin Cohn
He uses all sorts of very unconventional objects to make these everyday sounds. Or sometimes he makes these not so everyday sounds. With Hannibal Lecter, you have the challenge of producing the sound of Hannibal Lecter biting off somebody's face. Now, you might not know what that sounds like.
- [47:31]
David Remnick
It's not an everyday sound you hear every day. No.
- [47:33]
Justin Cohn
Right. But you'd probably know if it didn't sound like that. You just intuitively have that strong sense, you know. Life of PI, the Ang Lee movie. You've got a kid who is on a raft, and there's a giant tiger on the raft. And he's in the middle of the ocean and a lot of adventures are gonna befall him.
- [47:52]
Marco Costenzo
And all of a sudden they're about to. Either the tiger's gonna launch or the kid's gonna stab the tiger. And the kid gets hit in the face with a flying fish. Then all of a sudden, they're in a storm of flying fish that are going over the bow and hitting them. The tiger's biting at him, and it's like a cheap shot. It comes out of nowhere, and then it just scares you. So now we have to do a thousand flying fish in the. In the water.
- [48:15]
Justin Cohn
So how do you make the sound of a flying fish?
- [48:17]
Marco Costenzo
Well.
- [48:17]
Justin Cohn
Or being hit in the face by first thing.
- [48:19]
Marco Costenzo
Well, that would be a chamois cloth or something that was wet. You don't have to use a fish or anything. You need something that's going to give you a wet sound. Because it's a. It's.
- [48:28]
Justin Cohn
Now, why. Why chamois cloth? Why not. It holds water. Okay.
- [48:31]
Marco Costenzo
I mean, I can get you chamois cloth and give you a quick demo.
- [48:34]
Justin Cohn
Okay, do that.
- [48:39]
Marco Costenzo
If you're just doing, like, impacts. Knife into a body, in and out. Now, of course, if I was to do a larynx, I'd have to throw some celery or carrots in there. And then I would do a, you know, like a. But got.
- [48:52]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Throw a little.
- [48:54]
Justin Cohn
Unlocking this Louisville Slugger here.
- [48:57]
Marco Costenzo
That's been in a lot of films. And I think when I first used it was on Goodfellas and for them beating the heck out of someone in a trunk. And then they came back and said, nah, it was aluminum bat. So I was like, okay, I got aluminum. I had two. So we gave them a different quality sound after that.
- [49:19]
Justin Cohn
Did it involve chamois cloth?
- [49:21]
Marco Costenzo
The knifing in the back? Sure did.
- [49:24]
Justin Cohn
This box that's marked magic.
- [49:27]
Marco Costenzo
Yes.
- [49:27]
Justin Cohn
What's that?
- [49:28]
Marco Costenzo
I used to do magic tricks as a kid. Marco the magician. That's probably full of a lot of old tricks.
- [49:35]
Justin Cohn
When did you stop doing magic?
- [49:37]
Marco Costenzo
I still make balloons, so I haven't given it up. Totally.
- [49:42]
Justin Cohn
So did you just, like, stumble into this?
- [49:44]
Marco Costenzo
Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, totally. I never knew what a Foley was. I met people that were in the film business. I was introduced and like, wow, you guys do this and you get paid for that.
- [49:53]
David Remnick
What? Huh? What?
- [49:55]
Marco Costenzo
I had the eye hand coordination. Being a magician.
- [49:57]
Justin Cohn
Yeah. I recently reread this famous passage in Proust where he talks about the madeleine and how it cues these memories from his childhood in Cambrai. And looking at it again, though, it's about the madeleine. It's about the tea being poured and he's dunking the madeleine. He's soaking a little bit of the madeleine in the tea and he's slurping. The tea. And we always focus on the sensory experience of eating the madeleine. But it's also clearly the whole soundscape here. It's the sound of tea plashing into the cup. It's the sound of this little pressed cake dunking. They didn't have Dunkin Donuts then. Dunking into the tea. There's. I mean, for him, there would have been that whole acoustic experience. And you wonder whether that's also part of bringing back his childhood.
- [50:45]
Marco Costenzo
What came to mind is when you said dunking, it was like, I probably could make the sound of that. The liquid absorbing into the cake or the cookie. Really?
- [50:52]
Justin Cohn
How would you do that?
- [50:53]
Marco Costenzo
I mean, I might have to get, like, a Rice Krispie cake, maybe. Maybe a wet sponge squeeze. And then you have a little liquid, and then you hear the sucking up of the liquid through the sponge. That might give you that impression.
- [51:07]
Justin Cohn
That's a great idea.
- [51:08]
Marco Costenzo
I'm available.
- [51:16]
David Remnick
Marco Costanza, sound effects expert, talking with the New Yorker's Henry Finder. And that's almost it for this week. Now, next week, we're devoting the entire hour to China and how that country is angling for a much larger role on the world stage. Evan Osnos, who was there for years, will explore how the Trump administration is approaching China. And I'll sit down with the dissident artist AI Weiwei. Jiang Fan talks with young Chinese women about Ivanka Trump, who's kind of a role model there. Be sure to join us. And before we finish up today, though, we're going to get out and enjoy the weather with playground purgatory.
- [52:00]
Sarah Nissan
Is that your little guy over there?
- [52:01]
Monica Ratchic
Yeah, that's Sebastian.
- [52:02]
Sarah Nissan
What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide.
- [52:05]
Monica Ratchic
Oh, she's so sweet.
- [52:07]
Sarah Nissan
I feel like I've seen you here before. I'm Anna.
- [52:10]
Monica Ratchic
Yeah. You look familiar. I'm Sarah.
- [52:12]
Sarah Nissan
This place is such a lifesaver.
- [52:14]
Monica Ratchic
Total lifesaver.
- [52:15]
Sarah Nissan
We're here, like, every day, sometimes twice.
- [52:18]
Monica Ratchic
Tell me about it. We were here for 10 hours yesterday.
- [52:22]
Sarah Nissan
I'm always so happy when I'm here and never feel strange or despondent.
- [52:27]
Monica Ratchic
Me, too. So happy. The sound of all the kids laughing and screaming is so joyous. It doesn't sound like nails on a chalkboard at all.
- [52:39]
Sarah Nissan
I've never cried behind that tree.
- [52:41]
Monica Ratchic
Me neither.
- [52:45]
Sarah Nissan
Tessa, Tess, come on over here and put on your coat, okay? Sweetheart, it's chilly out, and you need to put your coat on, okay? Your coat needs to go on your body. The fabric needs to cover your torso to help you maintain A proper internal temperature or you'll die. Okay. Pumpkin.
- [53:02]
Monica Ratchic
Run.
- [53:03]
Sarah Nissan
Is that your little guy over there?
- [53:04]
Monica Ratchic
Yeah, that's Sebastian.
- [53:05]
Sarah Nissan
What a cutie. That's my Tessa on the slide.
- [53:08]
Monica Ratchic
Oh, she's adorable.
- [53:09]
Sarah Nissan
Wait, did I already ask you that?
- [53:12]
Monica Ratchic
Did you? I don't think so.
- [53:13]
Sarah Nissan
I don't know. I feel funny sometimes.
- [53:18]
Monica Ratchic
Sometimes when I'm in the sandbox, I can feel myself sinking. Like something's pulling me down. I can feel the sand slowly suffocating me. And it feels good. We should totally do a play date sometime.
- [53:32]
Sarah Nissan
Oh, my God. It would be so great to do a playdate.
- [53:35]
Monica Ratchic
Maybe I'll buy us a bottle of Pitot Grigio. Nothing wrong with moms playing a little play date, right?
- [53:39]
Sarah Nissan
Nothing wrong at all.
- [53:41]
Monica Ratchic
Hey, I don't know if you're into it, but I bet I could dig up a little pot in the back of a drawer somewhere. It might be really old, but it could be fun.
- [53:47]
Sarah Nissan
Oh, no, that would be fun.
- [53:49]
Monica Ratchic
Great.
- [53:51]
Sarah Nissan
I could probably score a line or two of coke if you wanted. We totally don't have to.
- [53:55]
Monica Ratchic
Oh, I am definitely down for a bump or two. Is that applesauce on your shirt?
- [54:04]
Sarah Nissan
This? No. Tessa threw up on me. But applesauce or throw up, what's the difference, really? They're both just things that get on your shirt that you lose the will to wipe off after a certain point. I mean, either way, you're going to give yourself a haircut with a kitchen knife.
- [54:15]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Right.
- [54:17]
Monica Ratchic
Sebastian? Share the slide, honey bear. We don't own the slide, okay? We have to share, because if we don't, society will collapse and we'll be no better than animals. This playground and everything around it will deteriorate into a dystopian war zone. And you know what Dystopian war zones don't have? Slides.
- [54:37]
Sarah Nissan
And mushrooms. Her outfit.
- [54:39]
Monica Ratchic
It's so cute. I want to tear her arms off.
- [54:44]
Sarah Nissan
Such a beautiful day here today.
- [54:46]
Monica Ratchic
It's perfect.
- [54:47]
Sarah Nissan
Not a cloud in the sky.
- [54:49]
Monica Ratchic
Never is.
- [54:50]
Sarah Nissan
I'm Anna, by the way.
- [54:59]
Monica Ratchic
Colin Nissen's Playground Purgatory was performed by Julie Sharbet and me, Sarah Nissan. 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. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.