← Traveling Through with David Prior
Traveling Through with David Prior
David Remnick on Notebooks, Reporting, and the Stories That Shape Our Time
00:50:06
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- [00:06]
A
Pushkin. Not all travel requires a passport. Some of it requires a pen. That's the world of David Remnick. As editor in chief of the New Yorker for 27 years, David Remnick has dispatched the finest writers of our time to the the farthest corners of the globe, and he's read and refined every word they've reported back. David himself has reported from Moscow, in the final days of the Soviet Union, on campaign trails, and from the tour buses of the greatest musicians. He spent his early years moving to where the story took him, but in recent decades, the stories have come to him instead. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the great editors of his generation. However, despite his great knowledge and intellect, he never condescends to those he's in conversation with, whether it's in his pages or in person. Today, I want to ask him not so much about where he's been, but what the magazine has uncovered and continues to reveal about the world. Here's my conversation with the great David Remnick. David Remnick, it's an honor. I'm so grateful.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
Yeah, well, thanks. I wanted to start off referencing a particular article that was a real problem for me as an owner of a travel company which came out, I guess, in 2020.
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B
It was bad for business.
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A
Well, you know, at least I had people questioning, but it was just really on the. On the other side of the pandemic when things were kind of exploding. It was revenge travel and all those things. But the article was the case against travel.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Which I imagine that, like, because travel is so close to the heart of so many people and they're so interested in it, it kind of exploded online. And I remember reading it. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about it, because the premise, I guess, is that travel can destroy places, that it doesn't necessarily add to curiosity, and it doesn't enrich your life. So I wanted to say, like, why did we publish that at the New Yorker?
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B
Well, I publish things that I disagree with all the time. Otherwise it would be a very boring magazine. Look, I take her point about destroying places, and there are a lot of reasons for that that preservationists work very hard to reverse in this country.
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A
Or that.
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B
But I know in my own life that it's absolutely true that a lot of my impression of the world and its peoples and its landscapes come through reading or watching movies. But I also know in my own experience that having gone to certain places a lot and even some places once or twice changed me Immeasurably. First of all, I think she was being provocative.
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A
Of course.
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B
Yeah. And it worked because here we are years later talking about it.
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A
No, no, no, I enjoyed it, actually, I have to say, because there were points in it.
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B
I can't imagine that anybody canceled that trip because they read Agnes Keller's Feast.
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A
It was in jest. And there were some really good points in that. And I think because the title was so provocative, it had people think about travel can destroy places.
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B
It's like Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation when she spent an entire life interpreting things. So titles can have that effect.
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A
You mentioned some places that have changed in returning. What are some of those examples for you?
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B
Well, the most transformative for me is the one place that I lived. So it wasn't really even travel, but I lived in Moscow from the beginning of 1988 until the end of 1991, and then thereafter went back and back and back and back. And unfortunately, I think I'll never be able to go there again unless I want to wind up in deep trouble. But I went as a correspondent. But it was unforgettable. Look, I'd go anywhere.
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A
So you moved there in 1988. Was that something? Was that like a long held ambition to have that post or.
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B
No, it was an accident of fate. You know, I grew up in a family. We didn't have much dough and my parents were disabled. We didn't go anywhere. For us to go to Cape Cod for a week in a car and stay in a little salt box cabin, that was. That was. We never. I don't think my parents and I ever went together anywhere on a plane, ever. We once drove to Florida. That was it. And I lived in a very dull New Jersey town, kind of like Springsteen north, you know, just without an ocean. All I wanted to do is get the hell out of there. And I wanted to live here. I wanted to live in New York City, which was the great. You know, it was like Emerald City across the river. It was only 30 minutes away. And I also wanted to travel. And I was very, very lucky in that. My first real crack at it was when I was in college. And I was kind of stumbling. I was doing okay, but not great. And I did something by middle class standards, very bold. I told my parents that I was going to learn French at the Alliance Francaise. I didn't know what that was and my parents didn't know what that was either. And it was a complete lie. And I took my Yamaha guitar and I got on a people's Express flight for, I don't know, 75 bucks to Paris. And I lived in an incredibly crappy, cheap, hippie hotel. And every morning played in the metro. I was a busker and I made my living that way. So that to me is travel, it's not tourism. Because I stayed there for months and I stumbled along in the language and you know, had friends and girlfriends and went to endless movies and pretended that I was in a Nouvelle Vogue film. You know, it was 19 years old. It was fantastic. So of course I'm not against travel. It woke me the hell up. And then I went back to university and I was different.
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A
I think also some of the most curious people are the ones that obviously didn't get to travel as children or teenagers. And that was effectively the same. I'm from Brisbane, which is like at that point a conservative town, pretty closed. And so all I ever wanted to do was get out.
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B
Well, the next big trip I took was after college. And it was a very Australian thing to do.
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A
Right.
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B
I didn't get a job that I thought I was gonna get at the Washington Post, cause the other paper in town closed. I was an intern and I was doing reasonably well. And I thought I was gonna get this job. They said go away for a year. That's exactly what I did. I taught English in a. SO at Sophia University in Tokyo. And I was not a Japanophile, but that was what was available. I grabbed it. And then the other six months I traveled on, I don't know, five bucks a day at most, like in Southeast Asia, in India, in Nepal, blah blah, blah, blah.
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A
Do I have to apologize for my people?
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B
And they're all Australians.
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A
Yes, exactly.
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B
Australians, Israelis, French, heroin addicts. What else did you encounter? Some Germans, white people. Abroad there was this kind of slightly hippie colonial thing going on.
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A
Well, there's also like, I think with Australians as well, you know, they think of themselves as great travelers. I think that Australians have a kind of naivety and therefore a curiosity and sense of awe around travel. So they come as in a kind of very open hearted, open minded way.
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B
I think any traveling you do, as you're there, you're mentally, it's overlaid with all the things that you've read about the place or seen in films or imagined. And it's almost like the actual place, if you don't watch it, is a backdrop for your own fantasy. And so you're here but not here, and there but not there. And that's going on all the time. I remember traveling to India what did I want to see? I wanted to see where the Beatles had gone. Right. Because that was an epical event in my childhood.
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A
The Beatles, where did they go?
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B
The Beatles go to India, to the ashram and all that kind of stuff. In a way, it's silly and has nothing to do with Indian life or actual India. There is this interplay, especially on shorter trips, between. And maybe this Agnes gets at this too. Between the actual place and the place in your head.
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A
Well, I think that social media has really changed that as well, because people kind of put themselves as their best version of themselves in a particular place that they've seen someone else. You know, I remember reading this story about a influencer that was on, like, a swing looking out into the horizon in, I guess, Bali or something like that, and she actually had dysentery at the same time, but wanted to get that shot that everyone had. You know, I think that good for her. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that, like.
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B
But as you can imagine, you know, as the camera will reveal, I'm not 28, and so I don't care about any of that. And it seems silly and I hope it goes away at some point, but obviously it won't because it just. It ruins it. I'd be maybe not against travel, but against Instagram.
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A
Right. No, I think that's fair. But I do think that, like, there is nothing wrong, I think, to your point of having a sense of romance in your head about a particular place and then marrying it to the reality. Sometimes that kind of. If you get to that Nexus, it's a great trip. You know, there's a place in Seville, for example, that's the Museum of Flamenco. Right. And you would think, oh, I want to find that little bar at three in the morning where the flamenco starts up. And yes, you can find that, but that's sort of a very mercurial thing. And so sometimes I recommend people go to this Museum of Flamenco, and at first they go, well, why are you sending me to this tourist place? And in fact, it just happens to be where you can see the best, and you don't want to go to Seville without experiencing that. So I always think that's like. You figure out ways in which to pull out the idea of a place for people and then you match it with the reality.
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B
I just feel as silly as all of this can be, it's still. If you're privileged enough to be able to do it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because travel is, in a sense, a privilege.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Even if you're doing it very cheaply. You're still able to dislocate yourself from where you live and so on. That's real privilege. I think of people that come to the city that I know the best, the one that we're sitting in now, New York City. And you see where people line up and they kind of like a herd of sheep find themselves headed to Times Square. For what reason, I do not know. And it's not like they have tickets to shows that they just feel that because everybody is there, they must be there. I think, like, Piccadilly is a little bit like this. You go to Piccadilly in London, it's like, why the hell is everybody here? There's so many better places in London they can be.
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A
But nevertheless, nevertheless, I completely agree with you. And actually, if I want to feel uplifted, sometimes it's just the most charming thing to see a family that's come to New York, they're in awe or of Times Square. It's like. I think it's, you know. Yes, it has its negatives, and New Yorkers go there rarely unless they go into the theater. But there is something uplifting about that. And I'm also, you know, it might be the only trip that they do as a family. And I think it's. Yeah, I think it's an inspiring thing to see, for sure.
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B
Look, I would do this more. I was glad I did it when I was young. In other words, now the places I stayed when I was 20, there's no way in the world I would stay in now. No way in the world. Rat infested, 20 people in a room, slabs instead of beds, all that kind of stuff. Does that still exist on that?
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A
You know what? That's an interesting. Yeah, it does, for sure. For sure. There's like a Backpacker track that continues. I think it's, like, evolved from then and probably for the worst in a lot of ways.
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B
But I guess the older I get and the more time makes its presence known in your psychology, I tend to go to the same places to know them better, rather than to tick off boxes of places that I haven't been.
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A
What are some of those places?
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B
Well, and I rarely go anywhere without a notebook on my hand. I go to work. And that's largely also the way I see the world, for better or for worse. So if I'm being honest, and we kind of get beyond the surface of this conversation, if my life were different, I'd probably go on more trips as such, you know, for fun. But it's not Different. I have an autistic kid at home and I can't just easily leave her, you know, she's 26 years old. So when I do go, it's when other people are taking vacations and I do things like go to the Middle east in an unpleasant time. And so the last trips that I've made since October 7th are four prolonged trips to Israel and Palestine. And I don't think you'd mistake those trips for tourism. It's not like I'm on the beach, right? So I gave something psychologically at some point, both having to do with travel and other things. The whole business of vacation as such. Tourism I just don't do. Not because I'm such a great fella, but because life hands you what it hands you and you try to, you know, do the best you possibly can. I'm at a certain point in life where I'm not. Nobody's going to send me for four years to a new place. I just. That's the arithmetic is not in that direction. And I have a job. As much as I'd like to go to Congo or Hungary or wherever, I know that I can't stay there long enough to do anything other than to write something very shallow. And it makes me very sad that I can't go to Russia anymore because I can get around there or I could get around there. I have every intention of going to Crane soon, where I have been many times. So I do go to Israel quite a lot. A because it's at the center of a lot of attention and I know my way around. I know people. I don't have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks getting up to speed. And quite frankly, there's a linguistic advantage. While I don't speak Hebrew or Arabic, the prevalence of English language speakers there is very, very high. So you start making your arithmetic calculations after a while. And that's a form of humility too. I would absolutely love to go to Peru with a notebook in my hand or otherwise, but I don't know the first thing about it. So I'm happy to read Daniel Alarcon from Peru or any other, you know, in this analogy holds for any other country I can think of.
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A
Well, I think many people are happy and grateful that you feel that way because you transmit that to the world then.
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B
So I mean, other than like a long four day weekend to go to, you know, Martha's Vineyard because somebody invited me there once a year, that's it. Any other time that I'm not cutting a groove between the Upper west side, at my apartment, to my office, you know, at the World Trade center and doing other things around New York. It's with a notebook in my hand. And that's a very, very different existence. At one point, my wife and I thought this was absurd. We'd gone year after year after year after year. We hadn't gone anywhere together, certainly not for fun. And she, all on her own, made reservations at a place in Barbados. I said, darling, is this a very expensive place? I innocently asked. And she said, don't you worry. And there's this thing called the Internet. You can look up anything. It's really an incredible device. And I looked it up and I realized that Tiger woods had been married there. So I took a wild guess and thought it was expensive, but okay, goddammit, we're gonna do it.
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A
We're gonna do it.
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B
So we get on the airplane, we fly into Barbados, we get there, it's a very beautiful day, get to this ritzy resort, it's, you know, six kinds of ridiculous, but okay, and you know, the balcony that's looking out on the sea and blah, blah, blah, 4,000 inch television, go down to the beach, starts to get a little gray. All right, it's fun. What followed was five. We have a five day trip. Five days. The first hurricane in Barbados in, I don't know, decades. And then when it's time for our flight to leave, the hurricane subsided, there was a glint of sunlight and we went home. And I thought, I'm never doing this fucking thing again. And that was the last time ever. It just seemed ridiculous.
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A
This episode of Traveling through is sponsored by Capital One Capital One. Cardholders are passionate about unforgettable experiences. Together we partner to connect these curious travelers to world cultures through expert guided journeys. From the peaks of Machu Picchu to the grand architecture of Vienna, these once in a lifetime trips take you somewhere truly off the beaten path. Through Capital One Entertainment, eligible cardholders can book exclusive experiences and so much more, all while earning elevated rewards. Saver cardholders earn 8% cash back and Venture X earns 5x miles. Thanks to Capital One, your dream getaway is one step closer. The reason I wanted to talk to you as well is that you're actually extraordinarily well traveled and you become a conduit to however many subscribers and readers, including myself. And know an extraordinary amount about destinations because you're commissioning constantly articles that are the doorway into places, people, moments in time.
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B
Yes and no. So one of my distant predecessor and probably the greatest editor of the 20th century was William Shawn. William Shawn never went anywhere when he was a young man. He went to Paris once. That's it. And I think a lot of it had to do with various phobias that he had that he was. That were, I'm sure, very painful to flying, traveling, whatever. I think in the summers they used to rent a house in Westchester, and it was very painful for him to even go over the bridge to get there. So this is a man who spent his entire professional life at the New Yorker, which probably spanned 50 years, dispatching other people to experience the world, essentially for him. Because one of the dirty secrets of being an editor, or at least in my position, is that you're satisfying your own curiosity in this kind of attenuated way through somebody else. You know, sometimes, if I'm being really honest, I'll say go somewhere to some reporter. And I'm extremely jealous.
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A
Really?
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B
Oh, all the time.
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A
What's the last one that you were most jealous of?
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B
Well, I send Josh Jaffa going to Ukraine, John Lee Anderson going everywhere. The best traveled person I know, who's been a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker certainly since I began as editor, which is now 27, 28 years ago. What he does is he goes somewhere, he takes home full notebooks and he writes, and then he thinks about the next place and, you know, and he goes to nasty places. Iraq during the war. If he could get into Iran now, he'd be there.
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A
What do you think it is in the psychology of people that want to be in conflict places?
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B
I think it would be insulting to say that they crave danger.
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A
Right.
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B
In fact, I was with John Lee in New Orleans during the horrible flood. What was so interesting to see John Lee do and watch him in action was how he knew exactly what to bring, what equipment, what, you know, kind of plugs. The guy knows what to do. It was really like watching, you know, Michael Jordan knows what to put in his gym bag.
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A
Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I know you're very interested in music.
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B
I am.
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A
Are there opportunities where you've traveled or seen musicians in certain places? Like, what's some memorable examples?
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B
So I took this crazy trip with Bill Clinton. So after he was president, he would find some rich person who had a plane. Let's discuss that another time.
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A
Yes, exactly.
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B
It wasn't his plane.
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A
Right.
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B
It was some Vancouver mining magnate's plane. And in the plane, in the back of the plane, the nice bit was Clinton the rich guy, and maybe his senior couple of people. Then in the middle of the plane, were the secret Service people. And in the front of the plane were the five or six hacks that were going along with him, the reporters. We caught up with Clinton for a World cup final game in Berlin. Watched the game. Fantastic. Germany against France. When Zidane was thrown out of the game. Sudan, how you say?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then we got on a plane that night, landed briefly in God, Sudan. And by the next morning, we were in South Africa. And he went all around Africa to see his good works, you know, the Clinton Foundation. And I do remember one night we were in Ethiopia, in Addis. After having a dinner with Clinton and a few reporters and a couple of other people, they went home to bed and the reporters went out. And we went to this club that was the size of this room. And it was the most fantastic music.
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A
Jazz?
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B
No, it was distinctly. It was indigenous music. And the dancing was almost. I'd never seen anything like. Was astonishing.
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A
And there was a huge club and cafe culture in Addis, for sure. And the. The jazz tradition, especially.
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B
It was fantastic. And really, somebody knew somebody who knew. Go there.
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A
When you're writing a profile on a famous musician, have you gone and seen them or been on tour even for a couple of days at all, you
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B
go where the story is. And I was going to do a profile of Aretha Franklin, who was not friendly to reporters and very suspicious of writers. And so where did she happen to be performing? She was at a casino in Ontario. Not exactly. You know, you fly to Detroit and it's.
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A
What year was this then?
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B
I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that. She was still alive, obviously, but, you know, not in a good. She was already sick. But the geography had nothing to do with it. She lived in this enclosed world. And I got to her dressing room and there was Aretha Franklin. And in front of her were these stacks of hundred dollar bills. Why? Because like a lot of black musicians in this country, they grew up when they would get ripped off by promoters all the time. Chuck Berry was notorious for this. The way Chuck Berry performed is that he'd show up alone. He didn't have a band. He'd show up in your town, he'd take out his guitar, he'd insist the promoter fill the guitar case with his fee. And there would be a local band, you know, kind of what's, you know, the best gunslingers in town would be there to be his backing band. No rehearsal. Bruce Springsteen did this. Bruce Springsteen, famously, early in his career, was the backup band for Chuck Berry. One night in New Jersey, and Bruce said to Chuck Berry. Well, what are we gonna play? And Chuck Berry said, we're gonna play Chuck Berry songs. And that's exactly what they did. Because, you know, if you don't know the canon of Chuck Berry songs and you're in a rock and roll band, you don't know shit, right? If you don't know how to play Carol, Johnny B. Goode, et cetera, et cetera, get another job. All you need to know is what key and off you go. So you go where the story is. Mavis Staples, I went to see her in Chicago because that was her scene. Buddy Guy, too. Buddy Guy is somebody who, in many ways is the last great blues musician still alive in his 90s. And his epical trip was the epical trip of all or most black American musicians of a certain generation, which was to be grow up in the Deep south, often in the Delta, Mississippi Delta, and make your way to Chicago. That's where it all was. So I spent a lot of time in Chicago with Buddy Guy. So if you're doing profiles like that, geography can be helpful. Unfortunately, most magazine profiles are 45 minutes at some table and then you, quote, unquote, do something with the subject. You've seen this a thousand times where you're talking to Jen Lawrence or whatever, and she's charming, and you talk for 45 minutes and the tape recorder is going. And then she does something like, relatable, like get the laundry or see a friend. It's just. Yeah, it's the bane of my existence.
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A
At the same time, though, I've read plenty of profiles in the New Yorker where someone is emblematic of a particular moment in a particular place. I'm from Australia. And there was a profile that you did about the Mona Museum, David Walsh, who's this eccentric kind of, I guess, guy that made a fortune in. In gambling and then started this really eccentric wild museum in Hobart, which, like, was the equivalent, you know, total backwater of. And that museum ended up changing everything for the entire state and certainly the city. And, you know, when you're from a smaller place like Australia and the New Yorker does a profile of that, it also becomes, like, affirming of what is happening there, if that makes sense to
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B
hear in a way.
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A
No, no, for sure. I mean, you know, it's very, very rare that a story would happen.
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B
But we want to take you places.
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A
Yeah, exactly.
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B
We want to take you places. And a perfect example of that is David. Granny. When David Graham came to the New Yorker, he had been at the New York Times Magazine, written very solid pieces. But I think the New Yorker and him working together with a wonderful editor named Daniel Zalewski, freed his imagination. And I remember David, who, when you see him physically does not exactly resemble, you know, a swashbuckling explorer. David got it in his head that he wanted to do a story about the lost city of Z in the middle of the Amazon. It's one of these mythological cities that apparently had been established at some point in ancient history and then kind of got grown over, but could be seen in space and all this kind of thing. Was it mythological? Was it true? Well, in the great tradition of English explorers, there have been attempts to go see it, and many people had died of all the horrible diseases you can get in the Amazon. So David not only did the archival work, which was really interesting, he went and he was gone for weeks. And David is, you know, he's a nice looking guy, but, you know, a nice Jewish boy. And he comes back and he's got a beard like this. He looks like Leo Tolstoy and he looks like he's been sleeping on the ground for weeks. And he had been. And the fact that he didn't get some horrible disease is a small miracle. But he continued coming to the office looking like this for many days. I think he was kind of proud of this vestigial aspect of his adventure. And he wrote one of the great travel pieces since, you know, and it's in the tradition of those travel books that you read about explorers to Antarctica, who they all die and that kind of thing.
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A
I did a story in the Amazon, going through the Peruvian Amazon to Iquitos, which is one of the more isolated cities, you know, Fitzcarraldo, the whole thing, years and years ago.
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B
One of my favorite movies.
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A
Yeah. Really? Yeah. I love that movie, Fitzcarraldo, which is, you know, the story of a very eccentric person going up the Amazon towards a place called Iquitos, which is, you know, one of the most isolated cities in the Peruvian Amazon. And so actually it is because of that movie that I decided I wanted to go into a story. It wasn't a destination per se. You know, I was working for a travel magazine.
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B
There's no Amman hotel.
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A
No, no, no, exactly. But I didn't, you know, it's not necessarily the thing that I'm super interested in, but I wanted to explore that a little bit. I had an idea in my mind around it. So we went to Iquitos and. And we did a bit of a boat situation, met a bunch of people. And then before I knew certainly what Ayahuasca is now, which is, you know, people go there on retreats. I. I did something with the local indigenous people that was somehow related to.
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B
Did you do the ayahuasca?
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A
Well, I don't know now, because it was.
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B
You don't know?
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A
I like to, you know, I sort of went, you know, I. Just going for it, naive.
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B
Did you throw up?
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was.
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B
Did you hallucinate?
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A
Yes.
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B
You did Ayahuasca.
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A
I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you the whole story, because, you know, it's not ayahuasca that you do over three days. It was some, like, dipping the toe in, because we were only there for a short amount of time. We did that. And then we were driving back because there's no roads to Iquitos anyway. But we had gone sort of outside there into the Amazon, and we were driving back from the river, we turned down a road and we went into a complete clearing. And it was a cemetery. But the cemetery was a field of umbrellas. This is like the strangest thing. So, so far it is. No, but I said, pablo, we've got to shoot this. This is crazy. There's like a Pikachu umbrella. There's like a wide umbrella. No, no. And then in the middle was, I guess the sort of mausoleum or something where there was a bathroom and of course, Pablo's battery diesel. Cause we've been out and about for days, and I don't know now if I hallucinated that, because then I went home and like, I think the Pikachu umbrella. No, I remember it vividly, but I. What? My guide, whose name actually was Marta Noosa. Made in usa. Yeah, that. Like these really wild stuff happening out there.
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B
I think you had ayahuasca.
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A
Well, maybe, maybe. But still, I've been looking ever since, and it's kind of one of those travel memories that.
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B
No, it's just travel to disaster. That's a great. But that's a great genre of travel memory and travel literature.
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A
Right.
- [31:19]
B
I was addicted when I was traveling and not traveling to Paul Theroux's books and where he would take a train, and he's very train oriented, but he would take a train from the Panama Canal to the very tip of. Of South America or across China or there's this whole series of Pull Theroux. And what was interesting about him is that it was very solitary, very literary. It was based upon the avoidance of disaster and the hoping for comfort. He was never so happy as when he was in the train world is going by him out the window. And the train compartment was rather pleasant. And anything short of that would cause him at times to either be fascinated or to go into a kind of Vs Naipaul like irritation. And that was the whole drama of the book. It's not like you learn so much about China or South America or this, that or the other place. These books were about travel of a very certain kind. And I understand that. I totally understand that kind. Travel disaster can be interesting and travel comfort can be interesting. I remember the first time I ever went to then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, before I was ever a correspondent. Everything was incredibly cheap, incredibly cheap. And I had a room at the Astoria Hotel which would be like the Waldorfer story. It was incredibly nice, but just through in tourist. It wasn't expensive at all. And I remember the great pleasure of sitting in my room reading the Nose by Gogol. And outside the windows were St. Petersburg. Just the sheer comfort of that. You know, you can have St. Barts. That to me was Saint Bart's but also when you have a disaster, it's really uncomfortable in the doing. Whether it's in the search for a bathroom in the middle of a graveyard or a car breaking down in the middle of nowhere. Cause you don't know what's going to happen. You might die one way or another. And that is something. Even if it's hard to live through, it's never boring until you start telling the story to other people. And it can be a little boring.
- [33:56]
A
Right. Just to backtrack a little bit. You were talking about atmospheric stories and I think there was. I think that the New Yorker is really the only place that publishes that kind of travel writing. Now in a lot of ways. I remember there was Jonathan Franzen wrote a great piece about Antarctica that was.
- [34:17]
B
I think he'd inherited some money and he decided to spend it on a kind of, you know, first rate trip to the Antarctica.
- [34:26]
A
Yeah, I mean maybe, maybe tell, tell me a little bit about that. I mean I've read it. But it's an interesting thing of like
- [34:31]
B
how that happened again that comes through having a relationship with the magazine. Henry Finder is a wonderful editor at the New York. The New Yorker has worked with Jon Franzen for many years, as has Deborah Treisman, our fiction editor. And Jonathan. And this is rare now, fiction writers don't do as often what they used to do in the 60s and 70s and 80s. If you were to pick up Esquire in those days, for example, which was a great magazine at that time you would see Norman Mailer in Harper's covering the march on the Pentagon. You would see James Baldwin covering a fight, you know, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson. You'd see Sarah Davidson writing about women's liberation and so on. And so novelists, now, they do it sometimes, but if it's nonfiction, they tend to be memoiristic. Putting yourself in front of an event or an unusual landscape, or both. I really crave as an editor, because a novelist inevitably will bring to it something a little different than a journalist. Yeah, I mean, and I find that interesting.
- [35:41]
A
What's a couple of memorable. Of that nature, memorable stories.
- [35:45]
B
You mean novelists? Yeah, going places. Sometimes what you'll have is somebody who has the skills of both. And it's hard to say what they are even. Even if they aren't writing fiction. I think of somebody like Anango Paul who has the languages. He's not working through a fixer and a translator all the time. And he's working in Afghanistan and he's writing about the lives of Afghan women in wartime. Yes, it has journalistic qualities and accuracy and all the rest, but there's also a feel for the place that's. I don't know if I'd call it novelistic, but it's at a different level than someone can easily achieve when they're just arriving and going out on a flight two weeks later. That's something I think about a lot because I've done it. I've done the parachute thing we all have in journalism. The one time I really didn't was living in Moscow for four years. And I got to know that place, even despite the lack of true fluency in Russian. I mean, I can manage. I've experienced the opposite. I remember going to thinking I would go to Istanbul and write a story about censorship and political situation there. And I really struggled because it turns out they have a language all of their own. And I really struggled. Despite having the usual cadre of English speaking connections and phone numbers written in your book before you arrived. And the piece I did was not any good. I did the same thing in Egypt. It was okay. But there's a real amount of humility that I think is necessary in both foreign correspondence and even intelligent travel of any kind. The humility of what you're really getting to know and what you're not.
- [37:41]
A
I really struggle with this term cultural appropriation. I always think about it's less of an issue if it's cultural appreciation.
- [37:48]
B
I think if it's done with respect and you're. I Just think the banal version of cultural appropriation is bullshit. A travel writer like Fuchsia Dunlop, and we both know Fuchsia Dunlop, goes to the trouble of learning Chinese, of living in Western China, of essentially apprenticing herself to Chinese cooks, and not for five minutes, but for year after year, and so honors Chinese cuisine and Chinese culture by doing that. I look at. Think of a guy named, like the late Donald Keene, for example. Donald Keene was an American who learned Japanese and became the foremost translator of Japanese literature into. Into English. And he lived there for many, many years. Is that cultural appropriation? No, I think it's ridiculous.
- [38:38]
A
Travel is a privilege. And I think we both agree the New Yorker is an incredible way for people. I don't like the term armchair travel, but it is an interview. Okay, great. Well, I do. Well, then. Well, that said, and I think it's just.
- [38:51]
B
I think if we know what we're talking about, you're not going to be able to go everywhere. And there's endless libraries of books and pieces of people who take you to places, very specific places with a point of view, and do honor to those places. Or not or do something else. Well, I want the New Yorker to be a worldly vessel. The most famous New Yorker cover of all time was published in the 70s by Saul Steinberg. It was a joke about the way New Yorkers see the world, which was basically, they only see New York, and the rest of the world is like little slivers, Europe and then this little spot called Asia, but it's also.
- [39:36]
A
Australia is really not in that graph.
- [39:38]
B
Forget it, my friend.
- [39:39]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [39:40]
B
But it's also a joke about the blinkered aspect of being a New Yorker. I don't want that to be the case. I want. In fact, I think increasingly we want people who've actually lived in these places. So for years and years in this country, people covering the Israel Palestine conflict, as it's so politely called, have almost invariably been at the New Yorker. There was one Israeli, Amos Alon, wonderful writer, and Americans, very often American Jews. It seemed incumbent this time around, after much too long a delay, to make sure that the Gaza was covered by a multiplicity of voices. And hence we published Mossab Abu Toa, a poet, Palestinian Gazan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the New Yorker, for himself for his essays, and more recently, Mohammed Mawish, also from Gaza, a wonderful. More of a journalistic writer than Mossad, but has his own great qualities. And I think that's important. It's not imperative to have a Peruvian Write about Peru, A Congolese write about Congo, but it's something one should damn well consider as a value.
- [41:00]
A
Is there a region of the world like Ukraine, the Middle east, notwithstanding, that you're interested in right now?
- [41:09]
B
The list is limitless. I would say. The real difficulty these days in this age of increasing authoritarianism and censorship is that I can think of three huge places that are problematic to report. Not just those three. China is very hard to get a journalistic visa. There are some places that have bureaus, obviously the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, so on and so forth. But to get a journalistic visa and go report and without trouble, that's infinitely harder than it was 10 years ago. Russia, infinitely harder than it was, and even India, which we got so used to, really, which we got so used to calling the world's largest democracy. You now have a very different leadership and very wary of political journalism. If I tell their consulate or the embassy, this person's going to go do a piece about the environment or travel or something relatively benign, they'll get the visa. But if we in any way indicate that we're going to go do a piece that's considered problematic by the regime, by the government, that's hard. Those three places that I just mentioned take in immense billions of people and God knows how much land mass.
- [42:22]
A
So if you send someone as a tourist in a tourist visa and then wrote something that was then provocative, you're asking for trouble.
- [42:29]
B
But we have done that. I used to do that on my trips to Moscow because it's just a pain in the ass to get a job. But they knew me. It's not like I wasn't in the computer. But I wouldn't pull that stunt now. It would raise the danger level. If they felt like making an arrest, they'd say, oh, you were here practicing journalism. You were committing a crime. You know, you don't want to end up. Look, I'm friends with Evan Gershkovich, Wall Street Journal reporter who spent over a year in jail in Lubyanka. That's no picnic. That's not something to welcome.
- [43:00]
A
Okay, I'm going to get my revenge on you. David Remnick, when you interviewed me and Fuchsia Dunlop, our friend, at the New York Public Library. Library lunch several years ago, which was one of the more intimidating things I've ever done. Well, I mean, it's nothing to do with you. It's everything.
- [43:16]
B
To all colorful spring dresses.
- [43:19]
A
Yes, well, those. Those ones.
- [43:20]
B
That was amazing.
- [43:22]
A
Those ladies, I can manage. It was more you because I respect you so much, but thank you.
- [43:28]
B
Intimidate.
- [43:29]
A
No, no, no. Well, you asked the question which I. Which haunts me, actually, which was who would you most like to cook for? And I. We were talking a lot.
- [43:36]
B
Sorry, and who's your set?
- [43:37]
A
Well, I'm going to tell you, but we were talking a lot about slow food and how we could amplify good habits and regenerative agriculture and, you know, promote the idea of slow food. And I was very much in my head, well, who would be the biggest amplifiers? And I'm not a person that watches this particular show or, you know, it's fine if they do. But I said the Kardashians, which.
- [43:59]
B
You want the Kardashians to cook for you?
- [44:01]
A
No, no, not cook.
- [44:01]
B
The reverse.
- [44:02]
A
That you asked, who would you cook for? And I was thinking in this zone of, like, what would be the biggest pop culture amplification? So in my head, I thought it would play quite well in the audience, but it didn't, so it haunts me. So now I've got a lightning round of questions for you, which you can't be prepared.
- [44:18]
B
So this is a form of revenge.
- [44:19]
A
It's my revenge. Exactly. It's my. I've been waiting for Revenge of the Kardashians. Exactly. Exactly.
- [44:24]
B
Who's your favorite Kardashian?
- [44:25]
A
I have no idea. That's the whole point of you don't
- [44:28]
B
know one from the other.
- [44:29]
A
I think it was because Timothee Chalamet was very much front of mine, and I was outraged.
- [44:33]
B
I don't get Timothee Chalamet, but that's a different situation.
- [44:37]
A
Completely different. I will die on the hill of
- [44:39]
B
Columbus, God bless him.
- [44:45]
A
So where would you always return?
- [44:47]
B
I grew up in New Jersey, and I looked across the bridge with the same kind of yearning that John Travolta did in Saturday Night Fever. I wanted to be here. I want to be in New York.
- [45:01]
A
Where would you never return?
- [45:02]
B
I have nothing against it, but I'm not eager to return to Hillsdale, New Jersey, where I grew up. Perfectly nice town, but it was where I wanted to leave nice people. But it's not my final destination, favorite
- [45:18]
A
or most memorable hotel.
- [45:20]
B
It's not a beautiful hotel, but I have great affection for the Hotel Voltaire on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. It was the first place my wife and I went on what was called Outs From Moscow. Moscow was considered a really hard place to live. And so the Washington Post and my wife at the New York Times, Esther Fine, would go out the minute we got to the hotel. It was very romantic. The bed was the size of the room. It's one of those hotels, teeny weeny place. And I proceeded to get to match your disgusting imagery from before. The worst case of food poisoning ever. So I have great perverse memories of that. But it was wonderful time.
- [46:06]
A
Museum or cultural institution?
- [46:08]
B
The most stunning thing I've ever seen. It's just in its sheer volume as well as quality, is the Rembrandts at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. It's just astonishing. But cultural institution. I want to be buried in the third row at the Film Forum downtown.
- [46:31]
A
I've never been film form.
- [46:33]
B
You got the third row that juts out. You got the great leg room. And yet the screen is not, you know, you don't have to bend your neck in half.
- [46:41]
A
Favorite or memorable meal? Restaurant or bite taste.
- [46:44]
B
So I've been in a lot of great restaurants all up and down the, you know, food chain. I had a meal with Evan Osnos and my son Noah and the Mexican ambassador to China, where we went to this great Peking duck place in Beijing. But I have to say, my favorite hangout is my neighborhood hangout, Barney Greengrass on 86th in Amsterdam.
- [47:10]
A
Fantastic there.
- [47:11]
B
I've been pretty good.
- [47:13]
A
Fantastic. Two last questions. One, forgetting work. Life. Complete fantasy. Where would you like to spend a weekend? A week, a month, a year?
- [47:26]
B
A weekend, a week, a month and a year.
- [47:29]
A
They're all different reasons. No?
- [47:31]
B
Very well said. I'd like to take another crack at Barbados after the hurricane incident. But just a weekend because I'm playing it safe. A week, a week is just enough. Beach. Just at about day four, I'm starting to get bored. And day five, I'm already making plans on how I'm going to get to the airport more quickly. So that's fine. I'm especially enamored of the beach of my childhood, which is Cape Cod. You know, the very end of Cape Cod. So Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, sort of thing. A month again? You want me to be far away?
- [48:11]
A
No, you can be wherever you'd like. I mean, if it's. A month is enough time to report something in depth or to a certain
- [48:18]
B
kind of depth, it is. I would, you know, I really would love to have a month in Moscow. And I say that with a kind of wistful regret that at age 67, it is very likely that I'll never be able to go again. The last time I was there was to cover the Winter Olympics of 2014. And the day after leaving, that's when Putin's first committed war against Ukraine, we forget against Crimea. So I would love to be able to go back to Russia, a much freer Russia, but, you know, and then a year, junior year abroad, every time I go to India, and it's only been a few times, I'm stunned by its multiplicity and how little I know of it and how fantastically interesting it is and how various it is, no less various in this country. So maybe that would be it.
- [49:11]
A
Yeah. So the last question is, you know, this is called Traveling Through. So I wanted to ask you what you're traveling through right now.
- [49:19]
B
Daniel Deronda, the second greatest novel of George Eliot. George Eliot is probably the smartest and the most intellectually various novelist in the English language. And, you know, people read Middlemarch, they write books about Middlemarch, they extol Middlemarch, and for good reason. Daniel Deronda is my current adventure. And it's a novel that I. Well, it seemingly won't end, but I don't want it to either.
- [49:45]
A
Okay. David, I can't thank you enough. It's a great honor and privilege.
- [49:50]
B
I really appreciate being here. David, bon voyage.
- [49:52]
A
Thanks so much.