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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, it's my pleasure to welcome back David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, which is made here at WNYC. We will talk mostly about The New Yorker Festival, which begins in a few days with a hybrid format of virtual and in-person events this year with an incredible lineup, and we'll get David's take on some things in the news as well. Hi, David, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to the show.

David Remnick: Always a pleasure, Brian. How are you?

Brian: I'm okay, thank you very much. Remind people, first of all, what is The New Yorker Festival?

David: Oh, The New Yorker Festival has been around for 20 odd years. When life is normal, we have just dozens of events that are put on live on stages around New York, whether it's panel discussions or performances about music or politics or whatever the subject might be. It tries to bring the New Yorker into full 3D on stages. We were hoping to do this. We didn't last year, for obvious reasons, but the Delta variant has made it more complicated. I think that as the phrase now goes endlessly out of an abundance of caution, we've decided to do a hybrid festival where we have any number of virtual events, but also some live events that are outdoor, that feel safe.

We have Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters who's going to perform and we have a drive-in movie, Stephen Karam's The Humans. Aimee Mann is going to be there and perform and so on. At the same time, they'll be things that are virtual, that you'll be able to access in the now all to a customed way with a seasoned path.

Brian: Your in-person events are outdoors. The other events are virtual. Lots of venues are open again. With vaccine mandates for indoor events, did you consider and reject including ones like that?

David: We thought hard about it. It also depended on who would come and do it and what kind of situation we were putting our audiences and our readers in, and how we could predict that ahead of time. It's just so tricky. As you see, with so many things, whether it's city workers or school or what have you, we sided on the side of caution. We didn't want to see anybody get sick and we wanted to be able to get as many talented and interesting people to come do this as possible and overcome any hesitation about that. That's what we decided to do.

I think it works. Ideally, next year, we're back on nothing but stages and and obviously, The New Yorker Festival isn't the only thing we want to see coming. Increasingly back to normal.

Brian: Now, one of the thing it's always interesting to me at New Yorker Festival events is your pairings of interviewers and interviewees. You have the legendary primatologist, Jane Goodall who's going to be interviewed, The New Yorker's legendary comedy writer, Andy Borowitz. Jane Goodall and Andy Borowitz, how does that make sense?

David: You didn't know this, but Jane Goodall is a famous standup comedienne. No, I'm kidding and nor is Andy Borowitz a primatologist, but he's really interested in her. That's what makes for the best interviews. You and I do interviews all the time and we're not experts in our fields, but we kind of bone up and we ask the questions that I think sometimes, they come from left field or right field that people don't hear all the time and it brings out the best in them. I think Andy's just intense interest in the subject will bring out the best in Jane Goodall. At the same time, you've got Thelma Golden who runs the-

Brian: Oh, wait. Before we go on the next one, I just want to say I was imagining Andy and Jane at the Bronx Zoo with Jane explaining the behavior of some of the primates there and Andy imitating them.

David: -[laughs] I can't promise you that.

Brian: That's not the idea, right?

David: As I say in Hollywood, good note, a good note.

Brian: Where is that one going to be, do you know?

David: Geez, I think that is virtual, but I have to find out. I'm not quite absolutely sure.

Brian: Good. Actually, I was going to ask you about-

David: Yes, that's virtual.

Brian: -Thelma Golden, curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem interviewing the artist, Kara Walker.

David: Thelma Golden is just one of the great minds about art in the city or anywhere. She's really developed an institution at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As you know, a new building is going up, which I think is one of the most exciting cultural developments in the city. She's also done a tremendous amount for African American art and African American artists, and she's going to be interviewing the great Kara Walker. I wouldn't miss that.

Brian: Another maybe unusual pairing, you mentioned Aimee Mann before, singer-songwriter, performing and talking with the New Yorkers, Atul Gawande who's a doctor, who writes medical articles. Where did that one come from?

David: Because Atul Gawande, in addition to being a surgeon, writing about medicine, and also helping in recent months with the vaccine effort, both in the United States and all around the world, is a fanatic indie music follower. He's done any number of events over the years at The New Yorker Festival. This year, he's really eager to talk to Aimee Mann.

Brian: That's great. Well, here's a must-see.

David: Can I make one last plug, if you don't mind? This week, a book comes out called The Matter of Black Lives edited by Jelani Cobb and yours truly. It is a pretty big anthology about African American life, about Black life in America, about politics and culture, and it's written by a huge range of New Yorker writers. It begins with James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which was published under a different title in The New Yorker in the '60s and goes all the way through last summer's events.

I'm really proud of this and proud to get this out into the world. As an extension of that, Jelani will be interviewing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Charlayne Hunter-Gault who's been writing for The New Yorker for so many years, and Jamaica Kincaid, the novelist who also writes non-fiction and about everything from gardening to politics. I think that'll be a really interesting discussion.

Brian: Does that anthology-- Were you saying that it has texts from writers over time?

David: Oh, yes. From the '60s-- In fact, there are some much earlier pieces and tries to get at any number of cultural figures through profiles. You've got the late Stanley Crouch on Sonny Rollins, Kelefa Sanneh on Jay Z, these big pieces. You also have Calvin Trillin doing an extraordinary short profile of Martin Luther King as Calvin Trillin was flying to a civil rights demonstration and watched as King got into an intense debate with a white racist on a plane and how King handles this, it's almost like a little play that Trillin captures here. Toni Morrison is represented in this anthology a couple of times and, of course, Jelani himself, a really wide range of writers [inaudible 00:08:27].

Brian: Well, that's an all-star session, to be sure. Jelani Cobb with Jamaica Kincaid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, that's great. Jelani has such a good eye for the historical word. I'm excited to hear about the book that this anthology that the two of you edited together, he was just here recently to talk about his recent book. That was an edit of the Kerner Commission Report from the late 1960s, after the urban riots of the '60s, and the very telling introduction that he gave to that. It was really great, the way he looked at a historical document and put it in contemporary context.

Brian: Jelani's a man of parts. He's a trained historian, got his PhD in history at Rutgers where he studied with David Levering Lewis who's the biographer of WEB DuBois. I didn't really know Jelani's work very well. He had written about a lot about hip hop here and there, he had written for the Washington City Paper a bit, and we were on some panel. I think it was at the Schaumburg Library years ago, and I just found myself in awe of this guy and began publishing him right away. He's been with us, I think, 10 years at least.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with New Yorker Magazine editor and New Yorker Radio Hour host, David Remnick, stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with New Yorker Magazine editor and New Yorker Radio Hour host, David Remnick as we preview some events from and talk about some ideas related to events taking place at The New Yorker Festival which will be October 4th through 10th this year. Some virtual online and some outdoors in person. One of the more obvious-

David: The outdoor things are at the skyline drive-in. Have you ever been there?

Brian: -no. Where is it?

David: No, it's kind of great. We're showing that movie, The Humans there too.

Brian: All the events are going to be at that venue?

David: The outdoor ones are in Brooklyn on Oak Street.

Brian: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer interviewing the United States Attorney General, Merrick Garland. Now, Jane has been so great reporting on the financial and strategic infrastructure of the radical right, among other things, including the ecosystem that feeds the big lie of a rigged election. What do you think she wants to ask Merrick Garland about?

David: Well, not only Merrick Garland only, but Letitia James as well.

Brian: Oh, together on that panel? Okay.

David: Yes. It'll be interesting to see, and I'm sure Jane will try to tease it out where the various investigations of Donald Trump are going. She is a master of this and equally, Merrick Garland can be a master of discretion at the same time because of his job, whether it was somebody who was a Supreme Court justice in waiting or a more successfully attorney general. It would be interesting to see what he has to say and what Letitia James has to say about the state of play there. Interesting to see what she has to say about the former governor as well.

Brian: The United States Attorney General meets the New York State Attorney General with Jane Mayer. Here's a must-see. The panel of women cartoonists moderated by your cartoon editor, Emma Allen. Now, everyone-- Well, Roz Chast and others, right?

David: Roz Chast, Liza Donnelly, Liana Finck, and Amy Hwang. I have to say, Emma Allen, who's been our cartoon editor for a while now, has done a an amazing job of also diversifying New Yorker cartoonists. It was white and male for a very long time and some brilliant, talented people and some real exceptions like Roz herself or back in the day, Helen Hokinson and all the rest. Roz has done an amazing thing and Liza Donnelly, in particular, has taken a real interest in the history and development in women in particular in this field.

Cartooning is an interesting thing. It used to be, many, many years ago, that cartooning was something that you saw in all kinds of publications, magazines, and newspapers. It's gone in a different direction so the New Yorker cartoon and how you develop new cartoonist is a more complicated matter and where you get them from. Same with the covers. Françoise Mouly who's the cover's editor has done similar work in diversifying who we put on the cover and also, it takes a lot of chances in these images, whether it's graphically or politically or the rest. Those two editors have done some remarkable work over time.

Brian: Everyone is an individual, but do you find, as editor of The New Yorker, that women's and men's cartoons tend to be different in any kind of patterns?

David: I don't know. It'd be like saying are women's novels different from men's novels? I think I'd stick with your original caveat that art is an individual thing. It's influenced by all kinds of matters, whether it's politics or gender or the circumstances one is raised in, whatever. I really hate to overgeneralize. I think it's a kind of dangerous thing when it comes to writing, don't you?

Brian: Well, here's what I think. I think that you can find people, you could find feminists, I think it's fair to say on either side of this question, which is to say, "No, everyone's an individual and has to be taken as an individual and we don't want to essentialize anybody based on their gender or any other trait or identity group that they come from." On the other hand, there have been destructive biases that have been built into writing and government and everything else and the dominance of white people, the dominance of men. There would tend to be sensibilities, perceptions, whatever, that would come maybe not from biology, but from experience. Therefore, maybe there would be patterns that are important.

David: I'd agree with the generality and you look at legislative body, for example, you look at the Senate, although it's changing somewhat, but you can help thinking that certain issues and certain concerns, enormous concerns and issues are overlooked or shunted aside or worse, largely because of the makeup of that body or court or whatever it may be. It's also individualized as you see on the Supreme Court and when it comes to the abortion issue. Certainly, Trump went out of his way to find a woman who was incredibly conservative on the abortion issue on the court. It's both things can be true at once.

Brian: I just want to make sure to mention the panel that I gather you're going to be hosting. I'm not even sure if this is in the festival or if this is a separate thing on Afghanistan with Anand Gopal, Eliza Griswold, and David Rohde?

David: That's an event-- It is different. It's New Yorker Live and that's later this week for subscribers. I believe that's Thursday evening. We've had a number of those events. It's Thursday. Anand Gopal recently had a remarkable piece of reporting coming out of Afghanistan where he went out into the provinces, which is obviously complicated to do, speaking to people who were not in the capital where life is very different, and got a sense for the reader just days after the fall of Kabul, by the way, when we published, of why the Taliban has the hold it has on so many people.

I have to say, one of the most striking things in what he published and then we subsequently had a interview, a conversation together on The New Yorker Radio Hour, one of the most striking things he made clear. When we talked, it was around the anniversary of 9/11, is how few members of the Taliban rank and file have any notion of what 9/11 was. Some of them kind of knew there was some sort of attack, but the resonance that it has in the United States across the political spectrum was completely absent from the vast majority of people he was talking to because they're so young, so distant, and living in such different circumstances and a different information universe.

Brian: They don't think it has anything to do with enabling global jihad in the sense of things like flying airplanes into the World Trade Center?

David: Much like that, yes.

Brian: There was also that the disturbing references in that piece to rural Afghan women who support the Taliban despite the severe limits on their own lives?

David: Well, I'm afraid the effects, the negative effects of foreign military presence, to put it mildly, in their day-to-day lives. Bombings, battles, they've seen people in their own families and villages killed in these things from the sky and elsewhere, and it doesn't help the propaganda war. At the same time, obviously, many, many women's lives have been changed in recent years and how that's going to play out, not only in the cities, but there is a big divide between urban life and rural life in Afghanistan in so many ways.

Brian: Let me just touch on domestic politics for a minute or two with you before we go. I remember that one of your books was about the early life of Barack Obama written around when he was first elected president. I'm curious if you have any comparisons, maybe comparisons isn't the right word, but observations at a similar early point in their presidencies with Joe Biden and how he's starting in his first year compared to Obama back then. One of the things I'm thinking about is that they both came into office in these times of hair-on-fire crisis, right? The financial crisis of 2009 and the COVID crisis this year.

David: I think what Joe Biden is also facing is a crisis, prolonged crisis of democracy, which can not be underestimated. I think that on the last election day, there was honking of horns in a lot of cities and towns in the United States, "Ding-dong, Trump is gone." We see his dominance persist among Republicans, and maybe just as important, we see his influence persist on the way Republican politics is played out. It has tragic consequences to my mind, if you don't mind expressing my opinion, and also, we're watching the Republican Party in Congress resist the voting rights reform that is necessary to carry out a proper working democracy.

You have a party that's not just against the Democratic Party, but it's, in many ways, anti-democratic. That danger, which seems so part and parcel of a four-year presidency, has persisted to this day.

Brian: The big struggle right now within the Democratic Party is between the so-called moderates and progressives over the physical and human infrastructure bills. Each side is threatening to tank the whole Biden New Deal-style reform proposals if they don't get their way on certain aspects. How do you see what's going on with that?

David: Well, I hope it doesn't lead to tragic consequences, which is a complete collapse. You keep hearing from within the Democratic Party, assuring noises that things will work out. By the way, first, they have to get past the debt ceiling pseudo crisis, which amazingly and I think rather cynically, has been put in the way of everything by the Republican Party.

Then, you have the possibility of an infrastructure bill, and then an even more ambitious bill collapsing under the weight of division in the Democratic Party. Joe Biden's powers of persuasion on Capitol Hill are really put to the test.

This is always what he advertised as his distinguishing feature, his ability to broker positive, forward-looking, and even transformational deals in a complex Congress because of his experience there. A lot of people were suspicious of that for a variety of reasons that we know, and a lot of people were encouraged by that. This is a very, very big week, I'm sure, in the history of his presidency.

Brian: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, here on WNYC. Curator, is that the right word, of The New Yorker Festival, which we'll be October 4th through 10th. How can people get information about those outdoor, in-person, and virtual online events?

David: It's a cinch. I think if you go to our website, go to newyorker.com, it'll make your life easy. You can find out about the events, about tickets, about whatever. Whatever your heart desires will be there for The New Yorker Festival. We really are grateful for your support and hope to see you there in one way or another.

Brian: David, always a pleasure. Keep it up.

David: You too, Brian. You're just the greatest. It's an honor to be with you anytime.

Brian: Thank you very much, David Remnick.

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