Hearby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Well with me, we're with a... Lannin Foundation. Boots. Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRw.com. I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is bookworm. Today we're talking to

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker magazine, and to the fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

The occasion is that our station, KCRW, is now airing the New Yorker radio hour. It's airing on Sundays at 10 a.m. Pacific time. And I thought,

this is the time to take a look at what's going on at the New Yorker.

I've read the issues from the beginning of the year, doing something I've never done before.

I've read them cover to cover. The magazine, David and Deborah, takes my breath away, and I don't know how you make

it appear every week. David, can you give me an idea of what the New Yorker feels like? Is it

hectic? How do you do it? Thank you, Michael. I mean, just to be on with you is a privilege, and I've listened to your interviews for so long

and with such pleasure that it really is a privilege to be here.

If you were to walk in the office of the New Yorker, it would not, I think, read frenetic to you.

I grew up in a newsroom, the Washington Post newsroom, at a time when it was post-typewriter, but still people making loud phone calls and yelling at each other and doing urgent things. And it felt not like the front page so much, but there was an air of the frenetic. I don't find

this to be the case at the New Yorker on the surface. People are in their offices. There are meetings,

there are anxieties, there are pleasures, there are all kinds of things, but it does not,

at least to my eyes, and I have, remember, I'm in a particular chair,

so maybe I'm hidden from some of these things.

...