[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian there on WNYC. It's always great to have David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour on the show. David joins us today with a preview of the New Yorker Festival coming up this weekend and his take on some topics of particular interest to him in the news, especially Russia's war in Ukraine. David, if you don't know, has written two books about Russia, and was The Washington Post correspondent station there for four years David also has a recent piece, calling for a Nobel Prize for Salman Rushdie. Maybe you even heard his New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Roger Federer or recently re-aired on the occasion of the tennis greats retirement. Who knows what might come up. David, it is always great to have you on the show. Happy October.

David Remnick: Great to talk to you and Happy New Year to you.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you get to ask David Remnick a question? Anything you always wanted to ask The New Yorker editor in New Yorker Radio Hour host, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Can we start with the fun stuff, start the meal with dessert and you'll tell us a little about the New Yorker Festival coming up this weekend and maybe for the uninitiated, what is the New Yorker festival?

David Remnick: Well, The New Yorker Festival is something that we started more than 20 years ago and it's a weekend-long festival of discussion and politics and the arts and performance and comedy and it's really a three-dimensional version of what we do in the magazine and on the website, every day and every week and, like everybody else, these past couple of years, we've had to do things virtually and, that has its limits in many ways. What's wonderful about this year's festival is we are back on stage, we are back in three dimensions and there are tickets left, and we're selling quite well.

There's still many, many events that your listeners can certainly buy tickets to whether it's a discussion with Suzan-Lori Parks, the great playwright or Ben Stiller, were some of the people that had been on Saturday night live over the years who were talking with Susan Morrison is in any number of events that you still have access to, and you can get them on newyorker.com/festival. I'm really excited for this weekend.

Brian Lehrer: I see that your featured interview on stage will be with Bono. Why Bono?

David Remnick: Well, the funny thing is, a few months ago, I was sitting right here at this desk at home working on a Sunday and I get a call on my cell phone. It's Bono. Now, I got to tell you, Brian, I have a lot of Lucky accidents.

Brian Lehrer: Now you just name dropping, but go ahead.

David Remnick: It's kind of a trip and he said, "I finished this book, and would you like to read it?| I said, "Absolutely sure" and he said, "Well, I think you live not terribly far from me." He was in New York, "why don't you come over," and within an hour, I found myself in Bono's apartment with him reading me a couple of chapters from this extraordinary memoir that he's just written. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, we published an excerpt from Bono's book and I'll be interviewing him Friday evening at ethical culture.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, for people who have very strong backpacks or book bags, and want to read more than The New Yorker published excerpts, this memoir I see is 576 pages.

David Remnick: Well, it's been a rich life. What can I say, it's been a rich life.

Brian Lehrer: It's actually a little cooler that I think that you have him this weekend at the festival because, usually, we have a lot of experience with this. Authors won't talk about their books until the release date, which is in November, he will go there with you this weekend?

David Remnick: Well, I guess I got in on the ground floor for once in my life, that's nice. You're absolutely right. We've done this with other musicians. I've interviewed Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, and we've done any number of musicians at the festival. Sometimes they even play, so you never know.

Brian Lehrer: Does Bono want to talk these days more about politics and philanthropy or more about music?

David Remnick: Well, I think this book is built around his life, that our conversation will certainly start out about what I always find the most fascinating thing in any memoirs how somebody becomes themselves, how they create themselves and that's the case with Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Springsteen's Born to Run and all kinds of memoirs. I always find that incredibly fascinating.

They don't start out with even the same name and they just start out with a little some talent and a dream and accident and I want to get into that with Bono. I'm sure we'll talk about politics because that's part of what he cares about much but certainly, what puts him on the public stage in the beginning and keeps him there is this extraordinary musical talent.

Brian Lehrer: On politics, he gets it plenty from the right but also sometimes from the left, like he's undersized for doing photo ops with George W. Bush and Mike Pence, and also for giving credibility to other Christian Right figures, and occasionally for making Africa look like it needs white western saviors, is he politically complex as you see him or should I wait till after the weekend to ask you that question?

David Remnick: No, I think you're absolutely right and I think when it comes to George Bush, it's in any way supporting a lot of Bush's foreign policy. [00:06:19] I think the feeling about Bush comes from PEPFAR and AIDS and I think on that one issue. They are very aligned and with good reason.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, looking at the rest of the list for the New Yorker Festival. One of the things I noticed is that you've got a good helping of comedy this year. Maybe you always do but you mentioned that Saturday night, live alarm. I see you have Hasan Minaj and Phoebe Robinson together Jerrod Carmichael, and I mean, comedy isn't all a lot of these people do but their little bios in your press release mentioned comedian. For all of them. You want to make people laugh at the New Yorker festival because the world is giving us many reasons to cry these days.

David Remnick: Yes, the world is too much with us but I'd look there's plenty of politics and serious literature and all kinds of things and even the comedy too is inflected with politics of a kind. Look at comedian and filmmaker Jerrod Carmichael was talking with Andrew Marantz. He brought his own coming out into the clear, as part of his not only part of his act but also part of his, the way he deals with the world and I think that will be at the center of their discussion, not just jokes. Jokes have their political valence too.

Brian Lehrer: Is it an issue in editing the magazine these days, the seriousness of our times, like there seem to be many political and cultural emergencies, that you have new judgments to make as an editor compared to 10 years ago or more about how much you can put in there. That's just really interesting. We're just really funny.

David Remnick: I think it would be incredibly irresponsible, even if I can say this immoral for The New Yorker to overlook all the serious issues that face us and, I don't mean just an average election, I mean, existential issues like what we face environmentally. That's why we have Betsy Colbert and Bill McKibben and others, just hammering away at this and dedicating their writing lives to writing about this in a deep level.

The same goes with the war in Ukraine, we've had several correspondents going in and out of Ukraine, and look, I'm not a fool. I know that sometimes dessert is more popular than as you call it but I want to look back at what The New Yorker wrote about and accomplished and got to the depths of with some sense of pride that we engage our times properly, and with all our might, and we do it it's enormously expensive and really risky.

Having correspondents in the center of a war, but I couldn't be prouder of Luke Michelson, Masha Gessen, Joshua and Caesar people who the photographer's that have gone with him and all the rest. I'm aware that may be on a given week, that's not the most, traffic or whatever, I don't care. It's important and those people that affects, it affects them deeply. People ask me about fiction too.

The magazine comes in parts and different parts of the magazine and this site appeals to different people and at different levels. The people that read the fiction, for some of them, it's the most important part of The New Yorker and so, therefore, it's important to me. If we just aim for popularity and what the highest number we'll read and we can now track these things online, I think we would diminish The New Yorker in every sense. It's not what we're here on earth to do.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with David Remnick including taking your calls for him. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. In fact, I see the caller on line one has the same first question I was going to ask you after the break about whether-- Well, I'm going to save it for after the break, and Janet in Brooklyn, I'm going to let you do it. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC with New Yorker Magazine editor, New Yorker Radio Hour host here on the station, and previewer of the New Yorker Festival live on stage around town this weekend, David Remnick. Janet in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hey, Janet, thanks for calling in today.

Janet: Good morning. I was just talking with my son about the war in Ukraine, and I was saying that you have to stop fascism. I wonder if the draft going on in Russia right now, maybe the Russian people will be more aware of the war and maybe push Putin to stop the war sooner. Dictators are usually not very smart. Thank you, bye-bye.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. David? For people to know, David has a big Russia expertise. He's been stationed there as a reporter in the past and written two books on Russia. What do you think? Is the draft going to be Putin's undoing?

David Remnick: The difficulty there and Janet asked the million dollar question, or the million billion rubal question, is that as, as bad as politics are here and it is bad. We are in a struggle against authoritarian leaders and inclinations that we see all over our society in the political scene. We're in a real struggle. That shouldn't be discounted any day. In Russia, you have authoritarianism solidly in power, and as a result, you don't have politics as we understand it. One man who's created this system in the last 20 years, that depends entirely on his say-so, on his power, and his circle, it's very uncertain how that gets changed other than him dying to be frank.

How he would possibly get overturned, who would take over for him is something that is almost a black box. It's very hard to see into that if we're being honest with ourselves. Yes, there are thousands and thousands of Russian families and young men who don't want to have any part of conscript conscription, that do not want to fight this war.

At the same time, you have to understand that the official channels of information, mainly television, are flooded with a kind of propaganda that makes-- It's Fox News on steroids, to put it lightly. It's very hard to penetrate that. Even in communist times, when Khrushchev was overthrown in the mid-'60s, there was actual politics in the Soviet leadership. It was invisible to most of us, but it did exist. You don't have that kind of leadership now. It's so centered on one person.

Brian Lehrer: The draft that the caller referred to is not quite a draft as I understand it. It's calling up 300,000 reservists, however, who may have thought they were done with any kind of frontline service. One staff that I heard this weekend is that 200,000 Russian men have left the country since the call-up announcement of those 300,000 reservists to help fight the war in Ukraine. 200,000 Russian men as an Exodus, if that's really happening and the protests that are breaking out in multiple Russian cities, you think they're all for nothing?

David Remnick: No. There's a huge degree of chaos in Russia right now, and you're also seeing voices getting on television and on Telegram, the encrypted app, Telegram, that are very angry at Putin. Those are not voices that you would like, Brian. Certainly not ones that I would like. These are voices from his right who think that Russia should go all the way as it were, even use tactical and nuclear weapons.

Now, people on his left, so to speak, have either left the country, are in jail, or are silenced. When a dissident writes about Putin's failures from a human rights point of view, from a point of view of a democratic voice, that article tends to appear in The Washington Post or elsewhere in the Western press, not in the Russian press,

Brian Lehrer: Are you saying that the demonstrations in the streets around Russia now are, go big, nuke Kyiv if you have to kinds of demonstration?

David Remnick: No. I'm not saying that. The demonstrations that we've seen have been anti-graft. The demonstrations we've seen are anti-graft and the people that are doing that are showing enormous courage. I'm talking about official media. Official media and a lot of what appears in these encrypted apps is something else. It's come from Putin's so-called right.

Brian Lehrer: Jack in Rockland County, a retired marine, you're on WNYC who says his wife is from Russia. Hi, Jack.

Jack: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I've called in several times. How in the world did you know I was a retired Marine? I don't think I said that, but--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I don't know.

Jack: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you said it to my screener.

Jack: Oh, maybe I did, but thank you. I've got a question for you guest. I've traveled to Russia several times over the last decade. Was blown away by how rich and beautiful the culture is. Me and my wife after 17 years, she hadn't been back. We thought Putin was incredible, the things he was doing. Of course, now a different story, we're horrified. Question. Sometimes in warfare, you have to concede, and I think I heard over the weekend that Putin was grudgingly willingly or maybe going to go to the bargaining table if Zelensky, the president of Ukraine would go there.

Of course, they are angry and will be angry for the next 1000 years. Sometimes you have to concede, and I thought a viable option for the Ukrainians would be to say, "Okay, you got one up on us, you can have this territory now. We're going to drop an iron curtain, join NATO and we're gonna be hostile for the next 1000 years. Congratulations, Putin, you're encircled by NATO." Your thoughts, please. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Jack.

David Remnick: I think the Ukrainians see that as surrender. I think the Ukrainians and I think the West joins them in believing that a invasion first of Crimea, then of Eastern Ukraine, why should that territory, why should that population be seated to Russian power? To them, it makes no sense. That would be tantamount to surrender. Now I--

Brian Lehrer: This came up a lot at the beginning of the war too, where a lot of people were saying, "Look, he wants the eastern region where there are a lot of pro-rush people in the population anyway. Let him take that and then he'll leave the rest of Ukraine alone." Not just Zelensky, but the people of that region, Staunchly said no to that idea and showed how much they're willing to die to stave off that idea. I think it's been either an inspiration or at very least, a lesson to people who don't know Ukraine very well for the rest of the world.

David Remnick: I think we make of a very serious mistake if we buy into Putin's propaganda, Putin's misbegotten analysis that somehow because certain people in Ukraine speak Russian that they are pro-Russian, that they are inviting the invasion of their own country. That is just simply not the case. We saw that analysis in the '30s and in the '40s from Germany. Again, I really loathe to say that one thing equals another. The World War II experience equals exactly this experience, but we should learn from history when that is staring us in the face.

Brian Lehrer: Just to follow up on what you just said, the latest development in the war really is Ukraine recovering Lymon in the eastern part of the country. That exact part where Putin claims to have won a referendum by the people to become a part of Russia. I don't know how many people actually voted or were allowed to vote honestly? Did you have an eye on that referendum or do you think this military development of taking back a key strategic area in the exact eastern part of the country that he thinks is more rightly his or where he thinks he's got some popular support? He's going to matter militarily.

David Remnick: We hear a word like referendum and our imaginations go to a referendum on our democratic ballot when we go to vote in November. That's not what happened. Vladimir Putin and his army invaded Ukraine, seized much of eastern Ukraine, and then at the point of a gun declared that there should be a referendum on voting whether these parts of Ukraine should become part of Russia.

People were forced in the ugliest way just to vote. Who was counting the votes exactly? It's a fraud on the most grotesque geopolitical level. Everybody knows it. Anybody with eyes on this knows that that's the case. It's just part of a hideous chapter in Russian history. I have to say, you said that I was a correspondent in Moscow.

It's absolutely true. It was in the late '80s early '90s when the world was full of possibility. It was never going to be easy for Russia to transition from 70 years of totalitarian communism and a thousand years of absolutism to the modern world and maybe a democratic world. That was never going to be easy and smooth. There were countless mistakes all over. Putin has been in power for 20 years. These mistakes, these evil deeds could put it starkly. This transition to authoritarianism or even fascism is on him. To complicate that matter I think is impossible.

Brian Lehrer: One other Putin question and then I want to ask you one salmon rusty question and then we're at a time. I'm curious what you think about Putin's implication recently that he would use nuclear weapons. I tend to think he would never do it but maybe my reasoning is too logical. You tell me. Putin wants a strong Russia.

He wants a superpower Russia that competes with the West over the long term. If he dropped even the smallest tactical nuclear weapon with the horrors that would ensue so morally acceptable to basically the whole rest of the world, he would make Russia even more of a pariah for a generation at least. Maybe he's not rational in that way. What do you think?

David Remnick: He has threatened many things and to our peril, we have not taken him seriously on his threats. When he was threatening to invade Ukraine this last time, even the Ukrainian leadership was not quite sure whether he was serious or whether he "go all the way."

There's no need to argue that out. I think if we fail to take his threats seriously we do so at our incredible peril. Do I think he will? Probably not drop a nuclear weapon. What value is that for me to say Probably not? None. We have to take these threats incredibly seriously, just as we would from a leader that we've grown used to thinking of as unstable in North Korea.

Brian Lehrer: Give me one thought before we run at a time from your September 5th issue of The New Yorker comment. "It's time for Salman Rushdie Nobel Prize his literary accomplishment, richly merit recognition from the Swedish Academy." How much does it have to do with the fact that he was brutally attacked recently?

David Remnick: The Swedish Academy has overlooked, it says countless writers of real greatness. We don't have to go through the whole list and has made some mistakes but prizes or prizes, there are going to be mistakes. Here's a chance to honor someone that is a writer of the most extraordinary level beginning with Midnight's Children, his second novel.

I could name any number of other ones that I think are extraordinary. That's just my opinion. At the same time, he has been designated for murder by the leader of a major state the so-called fatwa. We've now reached the point where someone has acted on it and nearly killed someone Rushdie on a public stage in the United States of America. The Swedish Academy foolishly did not come to issue a strong statement of support for Rushdie when the fatwa came out to their everlasting shame.

I think insofar as a prize can do anything, they can honor Rushdie who richly deserves it on every level, literary, political, moral. The Swedish Academy could do a little to redeem itself by awarding this award. If Rushdie were not the writer his I wouldn't have suggested it. I fully realized that me suggesting it is a drop in the ocean. I think it would be a great gesture of solidarity for the cause of freedom of speech which has suffered all too many blows.

Brian Lehrer: This is Nobel Prize season. They handed out the first one today which I think was in medicine and the rest will follow in the coming days, including in literature. Maybe they'll actually do it. We will see David Remnick editor of the New Yorker, host of course, of the New Yorker Radio Hour weekends here on the station. You want to tell people one more time how they can get tickets for the New Yorker Festival live on stage around town this weekend?

David Remnick: I think if you go to our website@newyorker.com you'll get there easily or New yorker.com/festival will make it real easy for you to buy tickets. See you there.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, David, always good to talk.

David Remnick: Wonderful to talk to you, Brian. Thanks so much.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.