What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2021

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the 2017 Booker Prize; and his nonfiction work has empathy and insight that leave pieces from more than a decade ago ringing in my head today. His most recent book, “A Swim in A Pond in the Rain,” is a literary master class built around seven Russian short stories, analyzing how they work, and what they reveal about how we work. I’ve wanted to interview Saunders for more than 15 years. I first saw him talk when I was in college, and there was a quality of compassion and consideration in every response that was, well, strange. His voice doesn’t sound like his fiction. His fiction is bitingly satirical, manic, often unsettling. His voice is calm, kind, gracious. The dissonance stuck with me. Saunders’s central topic, literalized in his famous 2013 commencement speech, is about what it means to be kind in an unkind world. And that’s the organizing question of this conversation, too. We discuss the collisions between capitalism and human relations, the relationship between writing and meditation, Saunders’s personal editing process, the tension between empathizing with others and holding them to account, the promise of re-localizing our politics, the way our minds deceive us, Tolstoy’s unusual theory of personal transformation, and much more. What a pleasure this conversation was. So worth the wait. Recommendations: "Red Cavalry" by Isaac Babel "Stamped from the Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi "Dispatches" by Michael Herr "Patriotic Gore" by Edmund Wilson "In Love with the World" by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche "Loving; Living; Party Going" by Henry Green "Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey" by Hayden Carruth "Tropic of Squalor" by Mary Carr "They Lift Their Wings to Cry" by Brooks Haxton "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes and Louis Slobodkin "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Ezra Klein. Welcome to the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23.9	So before we get to the conversation today and God will a pleasure. Today's conversation
0:28.2	is a very quick announcement. We are hiring for an associate producer for the show. And
0:32.5	I always like to announce this on the podcast itself because I always hope we'll get somebody
0:36.2	from inside the show's universe, somebody who knows what we're about and loves the show
0:40.9	and wants to be part of it. But this is a position that's going to be involved in cutting
0:44.6	tape on these episodes. It's going to be a position involved in researching and booking
0:48.8	guests and putting up transcripts. It's a little bit jack of all trades. You can find
0:52.4	the listing in the description for this episode, the show notes. You can also find it if
0:56.3	you go to nytco.com and go to their careers page. But check it out. You do need two years
1:02.2	audio experience to apply. Don't apply if you don't have that because your application
1:05.9	won't be looked at. But if you do have it, go take a look if this is a job of interest
1:10.0	to you. So this conversation with George Saunders is long in the making. I saw George
1:16.0	Saunders speak when I was in college. And it never left me. There was such brilliance
1:23.1	and such a deep humanity and kindness. It just everything he said, it just infused for
1:29.6	the way he thought, extemporaneously on his feet. It made this very long standing impression
1:35.4	on me. And I've wanted to talk to him ever since. He has obviously written a slew of amazing
1:41.0	books since then. The brain dead megaphone is a book of his nonfiction essays came out
1:44.8	long ago. But it has changed how I think about media to this very day. He's obviously written
1:50.4	so many super powerful and influential short stories. Lincoln in the Bardot his novel
1:55.5	is just a remarkable piece of work. One of the things I always think about Saunders is
2:00.3	it's old Abraham Joshua Hashell quote, which is when I was young, I admired clever people
	...

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