The New Yorker Editor David Remnick: 'There's No Time to Despair'

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2023

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He joins us this week to discuss his latest dispatch from the Middle East (9:50), reporting on the aftermath of October 7th (18:09) in what has become the Israel-Hamas war. He also shares the personal story of Avichai Brodutch, how he imagines this conflict may resolve (25:10), and our ‘failure to communicate’ in this increasingly polarized moment (29:35).

Then, we turn to Remnick’s personal history: from the art that influenced him growing up in New Jersey (35:05) to his pathway to journalism at Princeton University (42:28) and his start at The Washington Post under the tutelage of legendary editor Ben Bradlee (48:00). On the back-half, we talk about Remnick’s early days running The New Yorker (56:45), the state of journalism today (1:00:30), why he cautions against despair as we head into 2024 (1:07:00), and a tribute to the creative longevity of musician Joni Mitchell (1:17:10).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Frig, journalist, and editor David Remnick.
0:46.5	Remnick has been at the helm of the New Yorker since 1998 and the staff writer since
0:51.3	1992. Before then he was a reporter at the Washington Post
0:56.1	under the tutelage of the late great Ben Bradley. His work as a foreign
1:00.7	correspondent in Russia chronicling the end of the Soviet Empire
1:05.0	would result in the Pulitzer Prize winning book Lenin's Tomb in 1994.
1:10.0	In the 25 years since taking over the New Yorker, Remnick has continued to write.
1:15.6	He's published books on Muhammad Ali, Barack Obama, and most recently musicians with
1:20.6	a certain kind of creative longevity.
1:23.6	That book, titled Holding the Note,
1:26.2	includes profiles of Paul McCartney, Patty Smith,
1:29.3	and Leonard Cohen.
1:30.6	We discuss his love of music, his early days in the newsroom, and most importantly the state of journalism in Act 2 and 3 of this episode.
1:40.0	But first, in Act 1, we start with his latest piece from the Middle East, a region he's reported on since
1:46.1	the 1990s. This new article in the New Yorker, titled In the Cities of Killing, begins with a pretty strong admission.
1:54.4	The only way to tell this story, he writes,
1:57.2	is to try to tell it truthfully
1:59.2	and to know that you will fail.
2:01.5	It's an admission that I'm going to make right here as well. Since the war began on
2:06.4	October 7th, I've watched, as I suspect many of you have, a stream of reports chronicling an amount of suffering that's almost too much to bear.
2:17.2	At the time of recording this, more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed. The Palestinian Territory's Health Ministry reports that
2:26.3	another 46,000 have been wounded. U.S. state officials project that nearly two-thirds of the victims from Israeli bombings
	...

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