Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll start the show today with an invitation for you to do something on the air at the end of the show today, and that is-- Tell one joke that's based on a recent news story. That's right. We're inviting you to tell one joke, on the air, that's based on a recent news story. It can be a joke you make up or one that you heard or read somewhere.

Why are we doing this? Well, I confess that during the writers' strike, I've been missing those late-night talk show host monologues, the jokes about what we mostly cover seriously on this show. I don't usually watch them live, but I see them passed around the next day, the best of them. Now that the writers union is going back to work, hooray, we can have a little fun filling the remaining void without being scabs. Bill Maher, he was all ready to be a scab until he got shamed into not going through with it.

Drew Barrymore had some more guilt about it, apparently, but would have been the same result. No, you don't. No, no, you don't. Last night, the Writers Guild leadership gave the green light to go back to the joke writers' rooms, hooray. While we wait for the professional monologues to resume, let's fill the last bit of void with an amateur stage for you. We're inviting you to tell one joke that's based on a recent news story. Again, it can be a joke that you make up, or one that you read or heard somewhere.

We'll take your news jokes on the air for the last 15 minutes of the show, around 11:45 this morning, to give you time to decide on a joke to tell, or write one from scratch, and to practice the timing, because in comedy, timing is everything. Well, not everything. The joke has to actually be funny, but timing matters. You have time to rehearse in front of a mirror or something, from now until 11:45. Let's have some fun with the news if, for no other reason, to prove how much we need the real writers back.

There's no shortage of material to choose from, just from the news of today. For example, with another GOP debate tonight, that ought to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, or more something than a barrel of monkeys, and the House about to maybe shut down the federal government, who has a full faith and credit of the United States Government joke, a judge in New York shutting down the Trump Organization, easy target.

Lauren Boebert getting kicked out of a regional production of Beetlejuice, maybe the news is the joke, and Senator Menendez indicted over gold bars that mysteriously appeared in his possession just as he was allegedly doing favors for the people who allegedly gave him the alleged gold bars. We could do the whole segment just on your Menendez gold bars jokes. Go for it, folks. Write or repeat a joke based on current news, attribute it if it's not yours, when we open the phones for it around 11:45.

I guarantee, by 12 o'clock, we'll be so grateful that the real writers are coming back. OMG, I can't wait for that segment. Meanwhile, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour on WNYC, is here for real. That's no joke. David is going to preview this year's New Yorker Festival, which is coming up next weekend, October 6th through 8th, and to talk about some of his own recent work, like interviewing Bob Woodward about covering Donald Trump, and David's latest New Yorker comment article on what the headline calls The Washington Gerontocracy.

David, always great to have you on with us. Welcome back to the show.

David Remnick: It's a pleasure, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: I'm good. Thank you. Can I say-- The New Yorker Radio Hour just gets better and better. You have managed what maybe nobody else has, to turn one of the best ever weekly print publications into one of the best ever weekly radio shows, including, David, you, as a really master interviewer, which is a really different job than being a magazine editor. I just want our listeners to appreciate that.

David Remnick: Well, that is so nice of you, Brian. Thank you so much. Coming from a master, that's high praise indeed. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I'm curious how you approach integrating the print and radio New Yorker content, or if you just produce them as two separate entities. I'm sure the listeners would like to know.

David Remnick: Yes. I think about The New Yorker Radio Hour's relationship to the magazine, the way I do the festivals. In other words, they're absolutely related in their interests and sensibility, but they have to be their own thing. Even the interviewing, I've discovered through painful experience, when you're interviewing on radio, less is more. Brian, if anything, I've studied how you do it, and I've listened to people all my life, who are good at this, even in the days of--

Nobody will ever remember this, but Barry Gray, or people like that. Less is more, otherwise, you're stamping all over the other person. That's hard for me, because I'm a garrulous person, to a certain degree. As far as the festival is concerned, it's a matter of three-dimensionalizing things that might be in The New Yorker, but they're not written pieces. They are what they are. They have to be unique to the medium, otherwise, you fail.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to talk about specific things coming up at the festival, but to lead us to that, you heard my intro with a teaser for the listeners to come up with news-oriented jokes for later in the show, to celebrate the return of the professional joke writers.

David Remnick: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: I thought of having that call in during the strike, as a way to fill the topical humor void, like-- Mayor LaGuardia once read the funnies on WNYC during a newspaper strike a million years ago, but I decided that would be too scabby, or misunderstood as scabby, so we're only doing it now. It also got me thinking about humor in The New Yorker. My question is, what do you see as the place of topical humor in The New Yorker, which--

This time of very serious things, like insurrection, Putin's atrocities, and humanitarian crisis in Latin America leading to painful mass migration, and recently enough, mass death in the pandemic, and I could go on, and yet, you get funny in the magazine, with Roz Chast and all kinds of people?

David Remnick: I think, without being able to laugh, you'd keel over. You'd keel over. I think you're right, that humor is a big part of The New Yorker, as is politics, as is the environment, as is all all those extremely deadly, serious topics you mentioned, some of them even existential, but a huge part of the DNA is having our readers laugh, so much so that Harold Ross, the first editor of the magazine, called The New Yorker the comic weekly.

To be perfectly honest, I think the magazine got more serious during the Second World War. It thickened, in a certain way. It took on deeper reporting. Imagine how weird of an idea it would be in the modern world, to say that you would run gag cartoons throughout a long piece of political reporting about the war in Ukraine, or a profile of a serious politician, or something. It's a weird idea, and yet, that's what sustained us for, I hate to say it, coming on 100 years next year.

Brian Lehrer: Helps keep us human and helps, I think, keep us able to go on and fight the good fight, and not just get lost in despair.

David Remnick: Well, one thing informs the other too. This week, and I know it's controversial, this week we have an issue out, in print and online, in which the cover shows President Biden, President Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell in a political race, and they're walking along and using the signifier of a walker, which, when I saw it, and a lot of other people, produces a burst of laughter of recognition, because we know in our hearts that we have the danger of a gerontocracy.

These are not equal people, to be honest. We can talk about that. I think Trump is a unique danger to the republic, but the average age of the US Senate is 65. When I talk to young people, and I don't mean just my kids, but just a lot of young people of all kinds of political stripes, it is very hard for them to relate to politicians who are almost all uniquely advanced in years. They feel unheard, unseen, and unlistened to as a result, fair or not.

That's one way of handling. Inside the magazine, there's quite a serious, I hope, common piece by yours truly, about this phenomenon and how to think about it in this 2024 presidential race, which is giving us all the jitters.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in just to say that I read that piece, and that's going to be the main topic for you and I in the second half of our conversation here today, in fact, I see we already have a caller, Marvin, in Brooklyn, hold that thought for a few minutes, saying he's a longtime subscriber to The New Yorker, but he thinks that front page cartoon that you were just citing is the most ageist page that he's ever seen in the magazine. We'll come back to that. I want to continue this thread of comedy in The New Yorker, comedy at the New Yorker Festival.

David Remnick: Well, sure. If I could jump in, I would just say, look, we have a lot of funny people joining us at The New Yorker. Weird Al, Zi Wei, who's a funny young writer, Samantha Irby. At the same time, we have some extremely serious political conversations and people in the arts. Roz Chast talking with Adam Gopnik. Roz Chast is not a political humorist, though. What she's commenting on is just the way we live.

Brian Lehrer: I was thinking about that matchup. I was going to bring it up. Roz Chast talking with Adam Gopnik, two New Yorker greats together, next Saturday the 7th. Adam's latest New Yorker article is to fix democracy first, figure out what's broken, and you Google Roz Chast and come up with cartoons like Pigeon Little, and The Little Engine That Coulda Woulda Shoulda. How do they talk to each other?

David Remnick: We're people of parts. We're not just one thing. Roz Chast is not just yucks. I think the thread that runs through Roz Chast's work, or a lot of it, is the anxiety of being a human being in the modern world. The inner voice that's running through your head all the time. No, her cartoons are not, like, her block in the 60s, or something that's on-the-nose politics. She's not drawing pictures of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or as you like.

She's drawing pictures of us, or ordinary human beings and the ups and downs that we experience. Adam Gopnik is a writer who is capable of writing about the great political actors of history, whether it's Napoleon or the theorists, he just has a great mind for this. He's also capable of being very funny. He's written about comedy before for The New Yorker, in the past. He wrote a wonderful essay about Jewish jokes. I think the headline might have been, "I got a million of them." I hope your listeners do.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] That's right. That's an hour and a half from now, folks. Don't call up with them now. Luckily, our listeners seem to listen closely enough that at least they could tell that I was saying that that'll be at 11:45, because nobody's calling up with them yet. If I'm reading this right, the New Yorker Festival opens next Friday, October 6th, with you interviewing Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Is that the first event?

David Remnick: Yes. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who herself is a comic hero, who probably first came into all of our consciousness with Seinfeld, and to a lesser degree, Saturday Night Live. She's also become a terrific dramatic actress. You saw that recent movie where her husband doesn't like-- She overhears her husband not liking her novel. Her dramatic performances get better and deeper all the time. She's got a new movie coming out called Tuesday, I believe.

She's really quite something. She's also had a difficult bout with cancer recently. We can get into most of this. The one little glitch in the festival this year is the strikes. Now, the writer strike is over, but the actor strike is still ongoing. There are parameters in these discussions, because they don't want to be seen, as it were, rhetorically crossing a picket line. It's actually complicated and weird.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Another funny, but also serious person you'll have at the festival on Sunday the 8th, Rachel Bloom, interviewed by The New Yorker's Rachel Syme. I'm a big fan of Rachel Bloom's TV series from a few years ago, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Really hilarious musical comedy, but dealing with serious things, like borderline personality disorder, at the same time. I know Bloom is currently in a theater run in the city.

Any thoughts about a Rachel Syme take on Rachel Bloom? Can she talk about Crazy Ex now, with the after-strike still going on?

David Remnick: I have my strict instructions about what I can and cannot talk about with Julia, and who the hell knows. It would be lovely to see that strike finally come to a satisfying settlement before the festival late next week. We'll see. I think it depends on the political circumstances. Rachel Syme is a terrific skilled writer and interviewer. She just had a wonderful profile of the designer Thom Browne, which I'm going to be honest with you, I never expected to be super interested in, and I was completely captivated by that profile.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned Weird Al Yankovic. He'll be interviewed by Andy Borowitz, I see. That's hard in another way. One of them has to be the straight man. No?

David Remnick: Conversations can be unpredictable. Andy Borowitz, I've seen be insanely funny in dialogue with somebody, but he also knows how to do the other thing. Some people, they're both a performer, but they also know how to let the guest take the stage. That's an important thing to do. There's a link with writing too. Sometimes you have a writer with a hugely powerful voice writing a profile, but you don't want to completely eclipse the subject that you're ostensibly writing about. It's a bit of a dance.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I know Andy's work well enough, he's been on the show enough, and I did a stage thing with him one time, that he is so good at being both serious and funny at the same time.

David Remnick: Brian, didn't he sub for you?

Brian Lehrer: I don't think so. Maybe that was on another show on the station.

David Remnick: No, no, no. Andy has done some subbing on NYC, and pretty good about it.

Brian Lehrer: I think. Yes, I'm sure he was great. I didn't hear it. I think it was on a different show.

David Remnick: I do want to say that we have some fiction writers who are particularly-- I just think are astonishing. Judy Blume and Curtis Sittenfeld talking together. Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead, two distinctly New Yorker writers in conversation. Lauren Groff, a wonderful young novelist talking with Jesmyn Ward, who, I think everybody's heard, is going to be in conversation with Paul Segel.

Those conversations about fiction, about books, which tell us about, really, how we live today in the deepest sense, are also an important dimension of The New Yorker and the festival.

Brian Lehrer: You're interviewing Spike Lee at the festival next Saturday, the 7th. I'm curious, David, are you going to indulge your sports fandom as well as your movie fandom with him?

David Remnick: I don't think I'll be able to resist. Spike, I hope he won't mind if I reveal this, but every time we run a cover that's a sports theme, sometimes even a New York theme, simply, I get a text from Spike at six in the morning, "Can I buy the original art too?" I remember the Aaron Judge cover, by Mark Ulriksen. Bang, he is on it. I once went to his place in Fort Green, where he does a lot of filming and a lot of his business.

I have never seen-- It's like a fantasy land of sports memorabilia, of jackets, shirts, jerseys, and art. It's unbelievable. There is no bigger New York sports fan than Spike.

Brian Lehrer: I'm not surprised to hear that about his place. It's funny, I googled Spike this morning, just to get ready to talk to you about him and see what's really current Spike Lee stuff that's out there. There was one reference to something he said recently, about Do the Right Thing. All the other things that came up from this month were how he was nervous to meet basketball great Larry Bird in person, and how he almost caught a tennis ball that bounced into the stands off a Coco Gauff smash at the US Open.

I guess just don't talk about the Knicks, if you want everybody to stay in a good mood, right?

David Remnick: Well, I'm ardent to bet the Knicks too. There's no one more loyal than Spike, to the Knicks. He's also doing a documentary about Colin Kaepernick. I think that'll be incredibly revealing, because I know, as an editor, we made many attempts to speak to Colin Kaepernick. He was very-- For all the attention that that situation got, he did not give many interviews. When he did, he was rather-- I don't know about withholding is the word, but he certainly didn't spill his guts.

He kind of let the situation speak for itself, largely. I've got to think that Spike Lee, who spent a lot of time with him and interviewed a lot of people about this, about the situation with race, sports, and football. I think that I haven't seen it. I don't know anything much about it other than talking briefly with Spike about it. I've got to think that'll be a really interesting film.

Brian Lehrer: You know there's Colin Kaepernick, New York News, I don't know if you saw this yesterday. When Aaron Rogers went down with that injury for the Jets and then the backup, Zach Wilson, wasn't cutting it. Somebody tweeted at me. "I have an idea for the Jets. It rhymes with Haepernick.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Then, just yesterday--

David Remnick: It's rough. He's now 35, and he hasn't played in the league for seven years.

Brian Lehrer: That's the problem. It's reported that he said yesterday that he's asked the Jets to give him a tryout.

David Remnick: Yes, I think the request was to practice with the practice squad.

Brian Lehrer: That's right.

David Remnick: You have extra players on the team to fill out your practice sessions during the week. Man, that Jets thing, that was a heartbreaker. It's just been one heartbreak for the Jets after another since I was 10 years old and they won the Super Bowl.

Brian Lehrer: Enough plugging the New Yorker festival. We will--

David Remnick: No, no. Let's go on.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Actually, well, I'll tell you what-- You want to do one more of your choice, and then we're going to turn the page and talk about your article on the Gerontocracy.

David Remnick: Well, I think people would love to go see Judy Blume, and I'm dying to see her. I've read them, and my kids have read her. I'm really curious to see what she's like in conversation. I'm just dying to see that.

Brian Lehrer: Hello, God, it's me, David. Let me see Judy Blume in person.

David Remnick: Yes, and David Byrne. There's a whole lot of stuff. Anyway, you go on our website, you find the schedule, you buy the tickets, you go have a good time.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We'll take a break and then talk about your latest New York article, which did surprise me a little after one of your New Yorker Radio Hour interviews about ageism that I'm actually going to excerpt and playback to you. Listeners, also, now we're going to open up the phones for anything you always wanted to ask David Remnick but never had him over to dinner. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we continue after this.

[music]

Brian Lehrer, on WNYC, with us is David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. David, as I mentioned earlier, David's latest comment in the New Yorker is a piece with a headline, The Washington Gerontocracy. Then it says, "The prospect of a presidential election as a contest of the ancients is not a heartening one, and the anxieties it provokes cannot be dismissed as ageism." David, would you address that subhead right away? We already have callers who want to say, "Hey, that's ageism."

David Remnick: No. Believe me, let me just say this, as someone who's about to turn a certain age that allows me to get a cheaper ride on the subway. We all grow older. We all grow older in different ways, but toward the same end. This is reality, and being young is no guarantee of being wise. None of these things are guaranteed. John F. Kennedy had great qualities. He also stumbled into the Bay of Pigs. Was that because of his callow inexperience, or what? It's hard to say.

This piece, I should point out, concludes with saying, "Given the choice we have, Joe Biden has been, in many ways, an excellent president." I think when it comes to economic policy, legislation passed despite ferocious opposition, I think his handling of foreign policy, particularly the Russia's invasion and war against Ukraine, has been skillful, mature. There's a lot of things to be said about Joe Biden, and in the end, if the choice is Joe Biden and Donald Trump, to me, personally, personally, there is no choice.

You have Donald Trump who fomented insurrection, to say nothing of all kinds of illegalities, lunacy, hatred, and bigotry. There's just no comparison. You have one choice that's unimaginably horrible. Then the other choice, where the downside is the uncertainty, that's not personal to me. I'm not making this up. Joe Biden is going to be 82 when the [laughs] election rolls around. That is of a great concern to a lot of people. Young people, in particular, are alarmed by that, and many of them are alienated by that.

We see that reflected in the numbers. This is not David Remnick making this up. It's 70%. The statistics are in the piece. The polls, insofar as they're reliable, are in the piece. That's the conclusion. I just think it's something we have to wrestle with. We have to wrestle with this. I think our political culture is so toxic and so unattractive to so many young people, that you don't have a lot of young people that want to get into this.

Brian Lehrer: I am--

David Remnick: It's something that needs discussion, and really wrestling with.

Brian Lehrer: I'll get in a minute into your analogy with the waning days of the Soviet Union. Let me play one minute from a New Yorker Radio Hour interview that I heard you do earlier this year. I was listening, 10:00 AM, Saturday morning, and on came your interview with gerontologist Jack Rowe, you were talking about Biden, and we pick it up with one of your questions.

David Remnick: When Biden mistakenly asks if a deceased congresswoman is in the audience,-

Joe Biden: -including bipartisan, elected officials like representative government, Senator Braun, Senator Booker, representative Jackie, you here? Where's Jackie? I think-- She was going to be here.

David Remnick: -or he appears to doze off at a meeting, he falls off his bike, or trips while boarding Air Force 1, and on and on and on. Yes, you think, "What the hell, that's irrelevant."

Jack Rowe: I think that's what 80-year-olds do. Am I surprised to see that? No. Would I put him in the rehab unit? No. I don't believe that what we see, which is attributable to his age, is likely to importantly impair his function as president of the United States. I think he probably has some other attributes that certainly mitigate any adverse effect of what we see. On balance, I think he's a very successful and fortunate 80-year-old.

Brian Lehrer: Probably the first time that gerontologist Jack Rowe had a bass in a synth track under one of his comics. In that interview, I felt like you were buying Jack Rowe's take. Now you're saying to be concerned. Maybe you just explained it in your previous answer, but are they consistent?

David Remnick: I think they are consistent. I would say then, in the same Radio Hour, Jane Mayer, who's in her 60s and who writes for The New Yorker, and Jill Lepore, whose age I don't know, but she's, I don't know, late 40s, I think, had different things to say. It is not for an individual-- Look, Jack Rowe is telling you the science, and what he's saying is that if you are fortunate enough to come from a well-to-do background, meaning good medical care, educated, so on and so forth, and your demographic allows you to get the optimal healthcare--

Which, of course, is a separate conversation, and the disgustingness of those inequities. If you reach 80 in decent health, as Joe Biden has, your chances of becoming 90 are excellent. We're talking about the presidency, we're talking about everybody watching every step you take, we're talking about perception as well as reality. We're talking about a political race in which perception means a lot, as well as reality. That doesn't mean that I therefore conclude that Joe Biden should get the hell out of the race.

It doesn't mean I conclude that I'm going to go for Donald Trump, who's-- What comes out of his mouth is so much, is not just the occasional forgetting of a name, but absolutely disgusting on a daily basis. Most recently, his wonderful comments about liberal Jews on Rosh Hashanah, [laughs] it's beyond outrageous. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that there is a political danger, a political danger without renewal. Younger people in politics, and this choice that we have, of Joe Biden--

Look, if Joe Biden were running with the same record and he were 15 years younger, he would be miles ahead of Trump or anyone else, based on his record. That's my conclusion, but he's not. He's not. The reason is not just because of the pullout from Afghanistan, which was a mess and was a big blow to his poll numbers. Some of it is concern about somebody who would be in his 86 at the end of a second term. That's just a fact. It's not something I'm making up. That's in every political discussion you have. Like it or not.

Brian Lehrer: To put this in the biggest think political context, not to diminish what you're trying to write. You used the last days of the Soviet Union as a touchstone. You wrote a book about that era. What's similar, that makes you concerned, not just about Joe Biden as an individual, but when you take the whole gerontocracy together, because I think this is your point, the McConnell, plus Pelosi, plus Trump, plus Biden, et cetera, you're concerned about the decline of the country in a way that's going to outlive those individuals.

David Remnick: Well, I think there are differences. In other words, first of all, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, who were in terrible shape, were also a good deal younger than Joe Biden and a good deal younger, by the way, than Donald Trump. Left out of this conversation, very often, is-- Donald Trump's just a few years younger than Biden, but because of his bombast, his undeniable energy, and because of all the other rotten things he does, we rarely talk about him, and age, or the physical condition, which doesn't seem to be necessarily optimal either.

It tends to focus on Joe Biden because of the way he walks, which is perfectly natural at 80, but there it is. There it is. It cannot be wished away.

Brian Lehrer: Marvin, in Brooklyn, you're on WYNC. Hello, Marvin. I mentioned earlier that-

Marvin: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: -you were calling to call The New Yorker cover with the gerontocracy cartoon the most ageist magazine cover you've ever seen. I'm curious, since I've already been talking to David for a little while about this, has he convinced you that this is legit journalism?

Marvin: No, it's convinced me that it's bad politics, and if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If you want to be concerned about stopping Donald Trump, the analogy I would use as a historian is not the decline of the Soviet Union, but the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, A man who also had previously tried to lead an insurrection against the Weimar Republic.

David does a wonderful job. I love The New Yorker almost as much as The Brian Lehrer Show, but he's treating this election as if it's a nominal election. Trump does not follow any rules, does not care about anything other than himself, and has half of the Republican Party acting as a cult.

Brian Lehrer: David's not going to disagree with you on any of that, I don't think. David, do you want to respond?

David Remnick: Look, with respect, Marvin, I appreciate your comments and also what you said about The New Yorker. With real respect, I don't think that's true. From the first day of Trump coming into office, I wrote a piece called An American Tragedy, which basically just described his election not as the triumph of conservatism over liberalism or Romney coming out ahead of Obama, had that been the reality at that time, but as a national emergency, and as an emergency.

I've written that so many times, I can't count them, and so have others in the magazine. I don't think this is normal at all. I don't. Our journalism has to-- Let's take that apart from the cover. We can talk about that in a second. Our journalism has to explore every reality and fact, and put it in its proper context. It can't hide from realities like polls that say that an alarming number of Americans are concerned about Biden and age. That just is. I didn't create that.

Brian Lehrer: You know what, I'm going to jump in on that. Marvin, thank you for your call. Keep calling us. I heard a stat the other day on one of the political shows that Obama was in similar territory in the polls, of course, for different reasons, this long before he was elected, pretty easily, over Romney, in 2012. The polls at this point, in 2011, were similar to Biden's as the incumbent, so we can make a lot too much of the polls, right?

David Remnick: Of course. Look, Brian, we're more than a year out from the election. The Washington Post Poll that just came out was such an outlier that even The Washington Post described its own poll as an outlier, which had Trump ahead by, I think, nine points, or something like that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's right.

David Remnick: Certainly, if we've learned anything in the last decade, it's been the diciness of polls. I think it is worth raising the alarm about the closeness of this. Here's a guy with four indictments, who fomented insurrection, whose racism, bigotry, skeezy business dealings, and, and, and-- All of it is a matter of public record, and yet he is, by all accounts, completely out-distancing the Republican race.

This doesn't seem to be a contest there, unless something very, very dramatic happens. Nobody's going to watch this debate tonight except for a journalist, for God's sake. Very few people. In the general election, as it's shaping up now, it's alarmingly close, because the country is so alarmingly close. There's nothing to be blase about that, nor is it recent to treat it, as Marvin put it, as something normal.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more call in here. Our time has gone so fast. Steve, in the Hudson Valley, you're on WNYC. Hi, Steve.

Steve: Hey, Brian. Hi, David. David, I'm curious, you've got so much going on. I'm curious what your daily routine is. What's your process? How do you prioritize things? Do you make quick decisions? When do you get time to think, ponder?

David Remnick: That's what the middle of the night is for. I find taking walks, showers that are longer than absolutely necessary. I'm reading a novel now, by Jonathan Letham, who just had a wonderful piece about Boerum Hill, and he's going to be at the festival, as I mentioned before. Let my head go into some other area is a nice thing. I find time to think. When people talk about how they prioritize and have all these routines, I can't relate to it.

My day is a little more chaotic than I suppose I would prefer, but that's the way it is. In journalism, I'm not living a newspaper life, the way I did a long time ago, but because we have the web, we do pay attention to the news in a by-the-minute way, and you have to react to it. It's more chaotic than I guess I'd like to admit.

Brian Lehrer: We're at the end of our scheduled time. Let me extend by one question, unless you have an immediate appointment. One of the other interviews that you did recently, that I really like, was on The New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. You interviewed Bob Woodward, who-- We all know many of the things that he's done, including interviewing Donald Trump a bunch of times and then releasing, recently, what he calls the Trump tapes.

I wonder what Woodward's take is, and what yours is, on how the honest media should cover Trump in this election cycle, because on the one hand, we don't want to amplify lies and autocratic provocations by just repeating, "Oh, look what he said now," on the other, we don't want to ignore such a danger to the republic. On the third hand, about half of the American voters might prefer him to Biden, and can we dismiss that much of the public? How do you come down, and did Bob Woodward give you any insight on that?

David Remnick: I think Bob Woodward, who is just beyond description in what he does as an investigative reporter-- I think there's all those things that you can say can be true to some degree, at the same time. In other words, we have to cover what he says. We can't pretend that it is not happening, or buried under a rock. If you don't cover it with scrutiny, context, and rigor, then you're not doing your job. That's number one.

Number two, I think the hardest thing for a lot of us, and I would bet for a lot of your listeners, a lot of our readers, people that come to the New Yorker Festival or whatever it is, it's very hard for a lot of those people to even understand why so many of their fellow brothers and sisters in America are willing to look past Donald Trump's egregious characteristics, let's put it that way, and still vote for him.

Trying to understand that, and at the same time, not be namby-pamby about it, and to see what effect it's had on the rest of politics, particularly on the rest of the Republican Party and the Republican electorate, is also a big part of what we have to be doing, because there will be a day beyond Donald Trump, and Trumpism seems to be a fact of American life that will outlive him. Look at the contenders in the race now.

With rare exceptions, they're either trying to be more Trump than Trump, or exactly like him, with a-- As they used to say in Czechoslovakia, with a slightly more human face. That has been yet another deeply disturbing fact of American life, and we have to understand it. The last thing we can do, though, is somehow pretend it's not happening or not cover him, but it has to be done with intelligence, rigor, context, and a critical mind.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Festival will happen at various New York City venues next weekend, October 6th through 8th. You want to just tell people how to get tickets?

David Remnick: I think if you go on NewYorker.com, our website, it'll be a piece of cake to get to the festival website and buy tickets to your heart's delight. I just want to say thank you to everybody for reading The New Yorker in all its forms, and listening to The Radio Hour as well. Also coming to the festival, I think you'll have a good time.

Brian Lehrer: Always great to talk to you, David. Thank you.

David Remnick: Thank you, Brian.

 

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