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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. How often have you heard this, "When I was your age, we had to send letters, we had to wait to get photos developed". There was such thing as getting them developed. "We had to look for a payphone. We went on blind dates without seeing their pictures first or reading about their dreams". Every technological innovation that offers new conveniences also takes with us with it an old way of doing something. An experience, a bygone human moment that's hard to explain to a younger generation. If you do, you're in danger of as my next guest puts it, sounding like a grumpy old man.

In her new book, Pamela Paul leans into that role and pushes past it bringing us an ode to a recently departed world of pre-internet habits, experiences, and ways of doing things. Pamela Paul, in her day job, yes, it's that Pamela Paul is editor of the New York Times Book Review. Her new book is called 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. We will also talk, and I'm looking forward to this part of our conversation, about the 125th-anniversary edition of the Book Review coming this weekend, including with pull quotes from old reviews of classic books. Pamela, welcome back to WNYC.

Pamela Paul: Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Some people may be listening to this thinking right off the bat, that you hate technology or that you're resistant to innovation or to change. This book isn't really about that. Maybe you could describe the genesis for this project.

Pamela Paul: Sure. Look, it's impossible to hate the internet. Even if you just think about this past year, when we were under lockdown in COVID, how would we have survived the pandemic if it hadn't been for the internet? A very basic level just having access to the health information, to be able to connect with our family members and our friends, for those of us who are lucky enough to be able to work remotely and many of us are still working remotely now. It's the way that we got by, that we were able to make a living. It's impossible to 100% decry the internet or technology. In my day job, which you mentioned, I am very happy to have the internet and as well as in my personal life.

It's impossible to talk about any innovation without also thinking about what you lose when you pick up a new habit. That's really what the internet is all about, it's about habits that we formed, that then change the way we used to do things. Also, I think the news this week is really emphasizing this with all the revelations about Facebook, it's a business. Every time we adopt a new technology, we're being sold a product, and it's a very effective sell. If you decide not to sell to buy the product, you're a Luddite, but that's really marketing.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go through some of these because it's a pretty interesting list. I mentioned blind dates, in the intro, that's on your list. I mentioned that that was on the list to a 30-year-old, I know yesterday, talking about that we were going to have a segment. They said with all seriousness, "What's a blind date?"

Pamela Paul: Oh, my God. [laughs] It is really crazy to think about it, that you were not able to Google someone before you met them. Not only for dating, which of course was maybe the most nerve-wracking encounter, anytime you meet someone new. What do you do before you meet in person or even talk on the phone? You Google them. It's natural.

When you have a job interview, you Google them. You know what the person is going to look like. We have so much information about any given person before we meet that we already feel like we know them. In fact, how many times do you meet someone today? We're like, "Oh, it's nice to finally meet in real life. I feel like I already know you."

Brian Lehrer: Right. Some of the things you write about are physical losses like the TV Guide, as a printed thing and others are emotional losses like feeling like the only one. What does that mean, feeling like the only one?

Pamela Paul: Well, it's interesting. I can actually tie those two things together because TV Guide, it was a physical thing. When you went to the supermarket, even if you weren't a TV Guide reader, you'd always look at the cover to see what was on the cover because TV Guide represented a cultural consensus. It was what was going on in the culture at that time because the culture was very monolithic. We all were on the same page. There were only four networks on public television. There wasn't a huge fragmentation of the media. TV Guide let you know where everyone was at once.

Then, feeling like you're the only one, it's flipping that coin a little bit, because no matter how particular or individual or idiosyncratic either habit you have or a feeling that you have about yourself, or an illness that you might have or condition-- There's someone else out there who has the same thing, likes the same thing, hates the same thing as you and all you have to do is go into that search bar to find that person. That's all you have to do is to connect with them. That actually, that's a very powerful thing.

It has its good side and its bad side. It's nice to know that there are other people like you going through experiences and to be able to connect with them. You can also really easily see that there's a downside to that because sometimes connecting with other people over a habit, or a tendency or something that you love isn't always healthy. One of the things that again, was in the news recently was the fact that kids today, teenagers today, often connect on social media around eating disorders. You definitely don't feel alone if you're suffering from anorexia or bulimia.

You're also connecting with other people who may be feeling like, not only are you not alone, but maybe it's not so bad and maybe it's actually good. You've formed these communities, but they're not always necessarily healthy communities.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Although we should say in some cases, they really are healthy. I'm thinking about all the stories we did a while back, meaning a whole bunch of years ago by now, of isolated gay and lesbian teenagers in small Midwestern towns, who really felt like they were the only person in the world who felt like they felt. The internet was a godsend for them, right?

Pamela Paul: Absolutely. That's actually in the book. If you're a gender-fluid teenager living in a very conservative family and a conservative community, out in the Midwest somewhere, and you find out that there are other kids like you going through the same feelings and situations and can talk to them and connect with them, that's really powerful. If you are suffering from a rare genetic disorder or have a family member who is dealing with an ongoing chronic illness or a rare condition, you can find other people, you can exchange information. You can just have someone to vent to and to lean on and to get advice from. That's really powerful.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have a few minutes for you to throw your favorite one on the pile here. What's an experience or activity that the internet killed? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. This can be lighter or this can be heavier? Do you think about not being able to look up every little thing on your phone, getting lost when you got off the subway and having to ask people for directions, grimy payphones, the TV Guide, being able to be unreachable for hours? What experiences has the convenience of the internet taken away? Do you miss that thing or is it a fair trade-off?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review and now the author of her own book called 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. See if the one that you call up with is on her list or maybe you've got thing 101. Here's one, younger listeners might not know about the emergency break-through on the telephone. What is that and did you ever use it?

Pamela Paul: I did. I'm guilty? I know this seems like positively Neanderthal to kids today. It used to be that of course, there was a busy signal that you would get when two people were on the phone, you couldn't get through until call waiting came along. Before call waiting came along, and even that people might be like, "What are you talking about? Isn't that the three buttons on the phone that says end call, hold call and accept or reject call?" That you used to hear a little sound, you could flip over to another line.

The emergency breakthrough was one step further and this was used mostly by teenagers. You could call up the operator and you could say you had an emergency. Really what it was supposed to mean is that you were on a country road, in the middle of nowhere and someone was dying. What it often meant was your two best friends are on the phone without you or so you suspected, you didn't know, you just had busy signals each time you called either one of them, and you really wanted to get in the middle of that conversation and make sure they weren't talking about you or interrupted in some way.

You could persuade the operator that you had an emergency. If you were the person on that call, it was really creepy and nerve-wracking. Suddenly, the operator would break into your phone call and say, "You have an emergency breakthrough call from so and so, do you accept?" Of course, to reject that call within, was just the worst thing you could do to someone to reject an emergency breakthrough.

Brian Lehrer: Another phone loss that you cite is the voicemail. People might think, well, no, we still have voicemail. We leave voicemail on cell phones, but I guess what you're getting at is we really don't. I know if I call somebody and they don't pick up, I would be much quicker to text them than to leave a voicemail. Presuming I think it's a cell phone I'm calling because they're just going to see it. It's going to be more convenient for them than to have to retrieve a voicemail. Is that why you put voicemail on the list, even though it still exists?

Pamela Paul: Yes. You're even going a step further than most people. They won't even text. They'll just say, "Oh, well, they'll see the missed call." To leave a voicemail is incredibly passive-aggressive because it requires that someone actually listen to it. That's too much of a lift for many people. It sounds crazy and it sounds rude, but if you think about it, when you get a voicemail, now you're like, "Oh, I have to listen to this." Chances are, it's a telemarketer or a doctor, or some kind of bot call. Nobody leaves voicemails anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Here's somebody calling in, in your profession who has something that he wants to cite. Martin in West Windsor you're on WNYC with Pamela Paul editor of the New York Times Book Review section. Hi, Martin.

Martin: Hi. Yes, I was an editor with Parade Magazine for 34 years. I retired in 2009, but I could see a lot of our newspapers fold. We had fewer and fewer papers we appeared in and frankly, the New House-- Finally the New House family sold it to some guy in Nashville where it's operated now, but it's just a shell of what it once was. So many magazines have gone out of business because of the internet and newspapers too.

Brian Lehrer: Martin, thank you very much.

[crosstalk]

Do you want to say one other thing?

Martin: It's made it possible for fanatics around the world, to who never would've known where one another were to get together and cause a lot of trouble. They never would've been able to organize before that.

Brian Lehrer: Right? Absolutely. It's one of the central issues of our time. Pamela, where are you on the newspaper aspect of this? Because certainly, we know there's been a slaughtering of local journalism around the country for a variety of reasons, the internet among the chief among them. I imagine in your case, probably more people read the New York Times Book Review than ever did, because of the internet. Is it a double-edged sword, a quadruple-edge sword? What do you see there?

Pamela Paul: All these things are quadruple-edge swords. They're all really complicated. Chapter 71 is magazines. Are there still magazines? Sure, but there are a lot fewer. It's very rare for someone to start up a magazine. An actual print magazine is sadly becoming an artifact. I think something there really is lost. To answer your question, it is true that more people read the Book Review now than ever before. What we've lost is Book Reviews in newspapers all across the country, whether it's an actual separate supplement Book Review, like the New York Times has or pages devoted to books.

The reason is that arts coverage has dwindled as local news has dwindled. You can trade sat back probably to its origin with Craigslist, which really began to decimate the classified ads business in newspapers. Then, of course, the internet with, especially, the rise of Google and social media really chipped away the rest of the advertising business and fundamentally altered the picture for many local newspapers. What gets lost there is multifold. That feeds into like 20 chapters of this book because when you lose a community newspaper, you lose access to information about that community.

The internet is mostly about scale. Even in a newspaper that represents a city, it's not really, if they want to get a large audience they can only focus on the local community that much. That means that the little things that you use to be able to get in the newspaper like obituaries for your family members, there's no chance of them getting, unless they are incredibly famous, or well accomplished in a larger national or international newspaper or website, but they would be in your local paper.

There would be the Dean's list in the high school. There would be local sports. There would be reporters actively reporting on public servants and politicians in that community. When you lose the local news, you lose out on all of those things.

Brian Lehrer: A few of what people are calling and writing in with, have to do with music. Eli Paperboy Reed writes on Twitter, "I miss the communal experience of discovering music. Music has become such a solitary thing because of the internet. Before you could only discover new music by going to a place and talking to a person or better yet hearing about it from a friend, or a boyfriend or girlfriend." I think Nicole in Dyer Heights might want to build on that one. Nicole, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Nicole: Hi. I was just thinking that I remember being in high school and having a blank cassette piece ready in my stereo so that if a song came on the radio, I could quickly press record because if my parents wouldn't let me buy an album, that was the only way to get a recorded copy of a song.

Brian Lehrer: How about that one a time when-

Pamela Paul: Oh my God, totally. I used to sit there and you would time it and you would make mixtapes. You could make them off the radio for free. Even if you did a mixtape from home, that's really different from coming up with a playlist for someone on Spotify. It was an act of love and devotion to make a mixtape. Remember inviting someone over to listen to a record? You would never think to skip to the next song.

When you listen to music, especially with young people, they'll often get to three-quarters of the way through the song and they'll just hit the like forward button to go to the next song. They're like, "Oh, I've heard enough of that." You used to actually have to listen to the full A-side of a record. You didn't get up and move the needle.

Brian Lehrer: Melissa Perez on Twitter writes, "Calling my mom collect and yelling, "Pick me up" when prompted for my name". Collect calls, I guess, was a thing, because you had to pay for each individual call especially if it was long distance, that's really not the case anymore." Tea on Twitter rights, "I preferred old school blind dates because they were less superficial, not so focused on looks or filters. We talked to each other without texting under the table." You have one on your list of 100 things we lost to the internet, that's related to that. You say photos are too flattering now. Explain that.

Pamela Paul: There used to be such a thing as bad photos. You did not get to preview a photo before you took it. You didn't have the ability. If you had a roll of Kodak film that was 24/36 exposures, you didn't have the luxury of taking like 40 pictures when you got people to mug for a shot. Then pick out the one best one. You would take one, maybe two. Inevitably at least three people would have their eyes closed in a group family shot. There were just a lot more bad photos, and film was expensive. You had to wait to get your film developed. By the time you went through all of that, chances are you weren't going to throw those away. Those were precious.

When you look through photo albums of the past, it's really like a glimpse into this kind of insane-looking spectacle where lots of the photos are blurry. People look grumpy. Someone is crying. People aren't quite as aware of how they're going to look in pictures. Another corollary to that is that kids learn really quickly how to vamp for the camera. It's really interesting to look at toddlers there, so used to being documented, to being filmed, to being photographed. That it's really hard to capture the kind of uninhibitedness of childhood that we used to have.

Brian Lehrer: I'll throw in a few more just to cap off this part of the conversation. Food for thought for our listeners. Another loss you write is, the view. Meaning not knowing what a destination would look like before you get there. You include really existential states of mind, like being bored and losing touch and getting lost. Literally getting lost. Do you miss getting lost because there's no GPS?

Pamela Paul: I do miss aspects of getting lost. Look, it's great not to get lost when you really don't want to, and your chances of being late somewhere are much lower when you actually have a good sense. You can check out what the traffic is before you get there. Again, you lose something, especially when you're traveling of trying out more serendipitous routes when you don't have a GPS that's constantly on your body.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Switching gears for our last few minutes, put on your New York Times Book Review editor hat. This week, we acknowledge it's the 125th-anniversary edition. Congratulations to you and anybody who's ever worked for the New York Times Book Review. This is fascinating. I've been going through a few of these already. You're publishing old reviews of notable books from Tony Morrison song of Solomon to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar-- Flannery O'Connor's Collected Short Stories, among many, many others. I'll read just a few of these because we have limited time, a few little snippets. Robert Sholes' review of the Bell Jar; "It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems. The kind of book Salinger's Franny might've written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in hell".

Dr. Joseph Collins on James Joyce's Ulysses; "I venture a prophecy. Not 10 man or women out of a hundred can read Ulysses through". That was probably true. James Baldwin, on Roots by Alex Haley. Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how people perpetuate themselves. How each generation helps to doom or helps to liberate the calming one, the action of love or the effect of the absence of love in times". I've always loved the writing in the Book Review section. Do you have favorites here?

Pamela Paul: Oh yes. James Baldwin's review, his language, it's really quite incredible. One of the amazing things from the archives was that James Baldwin reviewed Langston Hughes and Langston Hughes reviewed James Baldwin. Now that's actually against the rules of the Book Review, but I think that if we were to break the rule once, that's probably where it should have been broken.

Brian Lehrer: Any good examples, maybe even embarrassing ones, of times when a book got one review, as it was being published, and then came to have either a different critical reception short term or response over time?

Pamela Paul: It happened constantly and I don't actually think it's embarrassing. I think it's fantastic. I wanted to put together an entire special issue this year called We Were Wrong because that's what makes literature so vibrant, and enduring, and interesting is that everyone reads books a different way. There really is no such thing as a consensus view on any novel. The arguments that we have among ourselves at the Book Review, all the time over whether a book is great or not. We just finished picking out our 10 best books of the year, which will be announced next month and it was polarizing.

We did a thing where you could vote up and vote down. There were some books in which it was an even split because people's opinions of every book is different for every reader. What's so great, I think about the Book Review is looking back too, at the ways in which books were, and the judgments of those books were a reflection of their times and to see how some of them then grew and rescued and others just completely faded away.

Brian Lehrer: Pamela Paul is the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and now the author of 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Thanks so much for joining us for this.

Pamela Paul: Thank you for having me.

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