People resist reading about climate change because it seems less immediate than other pressing issues. Add to that the fact that the climate crisis doesn’t lend itself to narrative. So, then, how do you tell an ‘untellable story’ in a way that draws readers in and effectively reorients the way they see the world?
Henry Finder and David Remnick are the coeditors of The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Henry and David join Ross to explain what inspired the creation of this new anthology, discussing how they made decisions regarding what pieces to include and what makes writing about climate change such a distinct challenge.
Henry and David weigh in on their work as editorial director and editor at The New Yorker, sharing the process they use to conceive of and manage new projects and describing the magazine’s ongoing commitment to long-form writing. Listen in to understand how optimistic Henry and David are about our ability to address the climate crisis and learn how The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change through pieces by Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Jonathan Franzen, among many others.
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder
David Remnick at The New Yorker
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
The End of Nature by Bill McKibben
Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker
Bill McKibben on Reversing Climate Change EP095
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
‘Lake Chad: The World’s Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster’ in The New Yorker
Jonathan Franzen’s Piece on Antarctica
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me two guests, Henry Fender and David Remnick. They are the co-editors of The Fragile Earth, writing from The New Yorker on climate change.
Henry Fender is the editorial director of The New Yorker and has been for more than 20 years. Hi, Henry.
Henry Finder: Hello. Nice to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Hello. Welcome. Pleased to have you. And David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker, author of many books, a biographer of Barack Obama, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, Lenin’s Tomb, and the host of the podcast, The New Yorker Radio Hour. Hi, David.
David Remnick: Delighted to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Delighted to have you. Well, what led to this book and to the shape of it? I know that there are other New Yorker anthologies, but none so focused, you could say, on a specific topic quite like this rather than decades. How did this come about?
David Remnick: Well, Henry, you want to give that a crack?
Henry Finder: Sure. I think it, although I would be speaking to David, who I think that one of the things that David does at the magazine is not just to kind of put his head down and think about what we’re doing right now, but also look around and think about what we need to be doing in the future and thinking about what the most important issues are, the most important stories to cover. And the thing that struck him very forcefully is climate change. The climate crisis is no longer merely an issue. It’s not It is the singular, impelling crisis of our time, and that it was really time to have a kind of reckoning in anthology form, bringing together the stuff that we’ve published in the last few decades, following the story as it unfolds, exploring different avenues of it, bringing it together and getting a kind of specific gravity attached to this issue, because You know, our attention can easily be drawn to important issues that come on a day-by-day basis, but focusing on this thing that is kind of transcendent and that is going to be shaping the world that our children and our grandchildren inhabit, you know, was just such an important thing to do and ultimately kind of a test to the middle of a publication like The New Yorker itself.
David Remnick: Yeah, I think Henry’s got it exactly right, although he, as usual, undersells his own role in this. I mean, we’re co-conspirators. And, you know, we do all kinds of anthologies as the years go by. Sometimes they’re cartoon anthologies and, you know, or things that are fun or things that have a certain delight element. The central challenge, journalistically, for climate change is getting people to pay attention and not to defer their attention because of the nature of the problem. It’s so overwhelming and So complex and so seemingly in the future that people don’t want to read about it.
Well, of course, it’s not a matter of the future. We’re living the early chapters of the climate catastrophe already. And you know that by the orange skies over Northern California, you know that if you’re knee deep in water along shorelines from Bangladesh to the Gulf Coast, you know that for any number of other reasons in the most immediate way. And it did occur to us, and I guess it’s a point of pride, but it has nothing to do with me or even Henry, that in 1989, a very young journalist named Bill McKibben was actually paying attention in a way that few were.
As you know, James Hansen had given his prescient testimony in Congress about climate change, and almost no one listened. And he got it exactly right. One of the few who were listening were Bill McKibben, who was this young writer at the New Yorker, as I say, who was a kind of a preternatural talent who, you know, wrote half the talk section every week and wrote about this, that, and the other thing. And he had written about his own apartment as a matter of almost urban ecology. You know, where do the pipes go?
Where does your garbage go? Where does the water come from? How do we live in And what effect that has on the world. And then he heard the Hanson testimony. And that led him to write a piece called The End of Nature, which a very long piece, and to my mind is every bit as important, if not more so than anything Rachel Carson published in The New Yorker because of the scale of the problem as well as the scale of the piece. And He posited that we no longer live in an age that man is absent from, that our effect on the future of every species on Earth, on every ecological system, was now a matter of grave danger and a grave responsibility.
And the reaction to the piece was mixed. No less than the editor of Harper’s Magazine, Louis Lapham, thought that Bill was being a bit hysterical.
Ross Kenyon: I think Bill Stoll gets some of those reactions too. Probably less so these days though.
David Remnick: Oh, it’s got to be less so these days, but there are doubters to the end. There are doubters to the end, but that was an important piece and that’s what begins the anthology.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t know that Bill’s, he’s been on the show before too, I didn’t know that he had such a strong New Yorker connection, that’s my failure of not knowing that, but it’s really funny to trace the origins of that reportage to now, You document it quite skillfully in your foreword. And you end the book with an afterword from Elizabeth Colbert. Do you think in some ways she’s picking up where he started? Or am I reading too much into that?
David Remnick: No, not at all. I think those are the two central writers, both not only in the anthology, but for at least for the New Yorker on the subject, you know, Elizabeth came to the New Yorker. I brought her to the New Yorker thinking she was going to write about city politics of all things. She was going to inherit the mantle of Andy Logan. Who covered City Hall for decades for The New Yorker. And Betsy, as she goes by, covered City Hall with, I think, a great measure of frustration. Whether it was Giuliani or Bloomberg.
And I said, what do you really want to write about? What makes your heart sing? What is the subject that you feel most attached to? And she said, well, I’d like to write about, I don’t even know if we called it climate change at that point. Obviously about what was going on. Global warming, I guess, was the phrase of the moment. And she went off and... In her inimitable way, approached it both as a current event, as a science problem, and as a matter of history. And she said, I think I have three pieces that I’d like to publish over time.
And I said, well, why don’t we just do it all at once as a series, which is a habit The New Yorker had gotten out of, really, the series, for a number of reasons. It was collected in a book called, I think it’s called Notes from a Catastrophist, which describes Betsy’s sensibility well, and she’s accurate about that. And she was off to the races from there. And she’s really written about that for the most part for the New Yorker for the last, oh, I don’t know, every bit of 15 years at least.
Henry Finder: Yeah. Those field notes that she did, I mean, part of it was Remnick inviting her to Just do the most ambitious piece she possibly could and be as fully expressed as she possibly could on an issue that she thought was of, you know, unparalleled significance. But it was also a writer who was so practiced and so skilled raising her own game and taking on the biggest subject of them all, you know, and doing it in this kind of inimitable manner of voice that she’s perfected.
Ross Kenyon: I’m a writer, nowhere close to as skilled as Elizabeth is. And she’s dangerous for me to read because she makes it look so easy the sixth distinction, writing about the history of geology forming as a discipline in the academy. Fascinating, graceful. I could do this, but she hides the craft so well. And I think she’s a tremendous author. And I believe she’s featured most prominently in your editorial selections here. So clearly you must agree with me to some extent.
David Remnick: Well, of course we do. But I’ll tell you this, if she were here, she would tell you that the last thing writing is for her or anybody else at her level is easy. Betsy is the only writer that I know, or there are very few, that when you say, what do you think, about 4,000 words, she’ll agree to that. And then it comes in at 3,500 words and not one more. And you think, well, you know, and usually with writers, it’s the reverse. Her sense of discipline is And kind of the razor sharpness of those sentences, she’s fully in control of.
And it means a lot. You know, again, I can’t emphasize enough our self-consciousness about the way writing about this subject, people resist it. Not because they’re bad people, not because they don’t care, but they don’t want to care that minute. It’s just, it’s too hard. You can read about Trump Because Trump is not only a threat to democracy and a threat to the environment and all the things we know, but it’s also there’s a, he’s a big, colorful, grotesque figure and there’s not enough adjectives that can be hurled against the wall and everybody tries and we try to outdo each other in our metaphors for him and comparisons and all the rest.
Regrettably, there’s almost a certain, not sport to it, but a kind of There’s a reason that cable television network ratings are so high with Trump. I don’t think that would be the case with climate change. People resist it. And Betsy is such a good writer, such a compelling writer, such an artful and original writer that people read her, I don’t want to use the word for entertainment, but they’re drawn in, in a way that they wouldn’t be with many others.
Ross Kenyon: I absolutely think that’s the case. I don’t know. How has that shaped your thinking about how to edit a periodical like the New Yorker when it seems like our attention span is slipping? Is that... Go ahead.
David Remnick: In fairness, we do both. We do have a web presence. It’s quite strong. We publish anywhere from 15 to 20 pieces a day. The New Yorker of 2020 is not the New Yorker of 1985. We’re that and then more in the same way that we have podcasting and... We have quite a mature, by my mind, and don’t judge by my adjectives, but excellent website that writes in shorter forms and different forms than we were using. In the old days, we had one comment a week. In fact, in the older days, it wasn’t even signed.
Bill McKibben wrote plenty of comments unsigned. Then they became signed. Now we have at least one or two or three comments every day. On a range of subjects, The New Yorker has evolved no less than the world.
Henry Finder: Yeah, there’s definitely an increase in volume and in velocity. But at the same time, and this is something that Remnick often notices, many of the most trafficked online pieces are long and intricate. So there is a thirst for pieces that may be Slower in the brewing, longer in the work, deeper in the reporting. It’s a kind of appetite that is not easily met elsewhere.
David Remnick: I’m just looking at this. There’s a thing called Parsley, which monitors if you’re crazy enough to look at it. If you’re crazy enough to look at it, it’ll tell you what’s getting what number of hits and all the rest. And I try not to look too often because I don’t want it to distort my judgment at all. And the top posts of the day are a profile of Andrew Cuomo, 12,000 words, a piece from last week by Paige Williams on the Lincoln Project, probably 7,000 words, and a piece on Facebook by Andrew Marantz, that’s 6,000 or 7,000 words.
And by any lights, those are pretty long pieces.
Henry Finder: People spend months writing those pieces.
Ross Kenyon: I bring it up as a way of saying don’t ever change. I hope you’re not chasing Twitter too hard. I’m glad to hear it’s yes and not switching it out because I think if we lost the New Yorkers long form approach, I think that would signal bad things for civilization as a whole.
David Remnick: You have my promise. Okay. And Henry’s too.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m relieved. Let’s dig into this book a little bit. You have a partition. There’s three different sections and there are many great pieces in here. I don’t know how many ended up on the cutting room floor, but I imagine it’s a wasteland in there. How did you even begin to wrap your head around this?
Henry Finder: Well, I mean, there was an enormous stack that David went through initially, handed it over to me. So then the Towering Inferno became a less Towering Inferno, but still a lot. Decisions had to be made in terms of coverage, writers, angles. We needed to have a measure of variety. And there are all sorts of just terrific pieces that we knew we just were not going to be able to get between covers. But we definitely wanted something that was representative, not comprehensive, but representative of the ambitions of the New Yorker over this period of time.
David Remnick: I think that’s exactly right. And we also did not want you to leave the project was a sense of music to commit suicide over. I thought it was incumbent, and Henry thought it was incumbent, on us to find the pieces that gave some inkling of a way forward, whether it was bioengineering, which we know is a highly controversial solution, or a fresh look at the way New York City in some way is a more ecologically sound environment than many others. We wanted to pose the problem. Bring you to places on the globe that illustrated the problem and illustrated the politics of it, which are harder and its effect on our fellow brothers and sisters on the earth.
And also, you know, again, a sense of the science that gives us a sense of the possible as well as the politics of the possible. We can’t get to every corner of the globe. There’s no piece on Bangladesh or we can’t remember each corner of the globe that was slighted in this way. A sense of origin, urgency, and possibility.
Ross Kenyon: I think it achieves that goal successfully. I have a bit more of a quotidian editor type question, which is how do you decide which of these pieces, which you’ve mentioned some of them take months to compose, how do you choose something like the emergency? I imagine going to Chad and living there is an expensive proposition and one that takes a lot of time to wrap your head around. How do you choose that over an alternative? How does it work to choose that at The New Yorker?
David Remnick: You try to pick the best pieces you can and also have a representative selection of the writers. I didn’t want the anthology to be all Betsy Colbert. First of all, it wouldn’t be fair to her. Or Bill. You know, Michael Spector is writing about science for us, as has Burke Bilger and any number of Christine Keneally, you know, as somebody who’s in Australia and can give us a sense of geography. And then you get these kind of freakish pieces that you didn’t really have any sense that you’d get. So Jonathan Franzen, who’s, you know, best known as one of our fondest novelists, also comes by this, you know, as a citizen and as a birdwatcher, is...
Deeply interested in matters of the environment. And if I remember the story right, he had a relative who died, maybe it was his uncle, and he left him some money. And John decided that what he was going to do with that money is go on some trip on a place he’d never go ordinarily, and he went to Antarctica. And so there you’re getting a piece that’s through a novelist sensibility as opposed to a science writer sensibility, as opposed to a more literary critic sensibility like Katherine Schultz writing about the way weather appears in literature.
We want you to just have a sense of variety, really. In an anthology like A Meal, you want a sense of the buffet of voices.
Ross Kenyon: Well, my question is almost one step ahead of that.
David Remnick: You asked about Chad and the expense of sending people there. You’re 100% right. This is a commercial magazine. Even as high-minded as some might find it, it’s also a commercial magazine. And the benefit to that, if we’re running ourselves sensibly, is that we spend money wisely on things like airline tickets to Chad and Whatever expenses are incurred, that’s much harder for a nonprofit to do or a quarterly to do. And I feel it’s part of our duty not just to be on earth to fill the coffers of an owner who’s quite generous, but to spend that kind of money wisely and do what very few publications can afford to do.
I mean, really, how many publications are there around that can do this kind of work? Not only as a matter of talent, And writers or broadcasters or what have you, but simply to spend the resources to go in search of stories that take some doing.
Ross Kenyon: Another basic question, which is, how do you two distribute the work between you? I don’t understand the distinction. And even in getting your titles right, I’m wondering, could you fill me in on how that works?
David Remnick: Well, maybe I should answer that one, but there’s a lot of work that goes around and we are hardly the only two that do it. We have a lot, a lot of colleagues who work extremely hard and the work is divvied up. There’s a lot of it all the time. The fun part is the conceiving pieces, the editing pieces, the managing writers, conceiving new projects, figuring out the future of the New Yorker. We’re an enterprise that until very recently published I would say a dozen pieces a week, cartoons and a cover.
That’s what The New Yorker was. And I by no means underestimate the achievement of that and the complexity of that. Part of the reason I don’t underestimate it is because that was my life and Henry’s life for quite a long time, participating in that. Me as a writer at first and then as an editor, and Henry always is an editor. And with the modern world technologically, we’ve expanded. And I think that was the right decision to I think if we had obstinately stayed the way we were, I fear that we would have overlooked and underserved a modern audience.
And by the way, it’s not easy. It’s probably easier to start a new website from nothing than to be a more traditional publication that was a print matter and then add on to yourself this new dimension. It had all kinds of psychological and editorial implications. But in terms of your question... There’s a hell of a lot of work to go around. And Henry is a magician as an editor with text and also with the human beings that he’s working with. And in thinking about all kinds of questions, intellectual, artistic, there are few elements of the New Yorker that are more essential than Henry Finder.
And so to do a book like this with him, you know, was a great joy. And we’ve done them before. And we have colleagues, you know, Dan Zalewski, Dorothy Wickenden, and people who are much younger than us as well, who promise a great future to The New Yorker.
Henry Finder: Yeah, I would say it’s a team with, it’s a singular array of very talented people. It’s like a terrific orchestra filled with brilliant instrumentalists. But at the end of the day, you need a conductor who can keep everybody together playing what they should be playing and playing as they should be playing. And so we’ve been incredibly fortunate in that regard.
Ross Kenyon: For these first two sections, they certainly are frightening. And then I’m happy to see the third part, changing the weather, what we can do now as having a sort of an optimism that there is something that can be done. There is agency still available to be seized by humanity. So it sounds like maybe both of you are somewhat optimistic about our ability to grapple with climate change still. Is this just wishful thinking here? What is this section?
Henry Finder: You know, I think Betsy would say it’s about, I mean, that mitigation is important and it’s critical to mitigate, to avoid the worst outcome. We know that we cannot get the best outcome. It’s too late for that. But there are a level of disaster that can be averted and Through a variety of methods and disciplines and institution building, there are definitely ways to give us a gentler course than we would otherwise face.
David Remnick: But it’s going to demand a lot of us. And one of the ironies here is that people listening to your podcast, the people who are inclined to read a book like this, or read pieces in The New Yorker in general about this, is a self-selecting audience. And we’re hoping for the Extra dimension that it plays a part in influencing people who might have been on the fence. I have to believe that the greatest meaning of the last six, nine months is not the pandemic as such by itself, not George Floyd as such by himself and what he suffered or Donald Trump and what he has done.
But the degree to which we’ve illuminated To our pain, but our necessity, systemic problems in our society, whether it has to do with public health, the environment, law, race, and what have you. Systemic. And not little pockets of misery or bad apples or the like. That will be, if there is a Biden presidency, that’ll be the drama of the Biden presidency. To what degree will it be a kind of meliorist, Business as usual, making things a little bit better, or will it recognize the systemic aspects of not least climate change?
Because if you attack it merely as, okay, we signed back onto this treaty or that treaty, and we make 15% fewer business trips to Australia, and we recycle a little bit better, that’s not going to do much at all. And I think people have come to realize that the way we’re living now in this pandemic is but a fraction of the sense of deprivation and disjunction that would be caused by a maximal outcome in climate change. We’re already seeing maximal outcomes in places, California, Gulf Coast, you name it, wherever it might be, Sub-Saharan Africa.
Some people are inclined to laugh at the Green New Deal. Okay, fine. Fine. What’s your solution? Because if it’s just along the edges, we are in for a rupture in our lives or our children’s lives and certainly in our grandchildren’s lives that makes the pandemic look like a picnic.
Ross Kenyon: So optimistic a little bit, but nested within deep existential anxiety.
David Remnick: My optimism resides in the degree to which these problems have reached the mainstream. It is surprising to me that a majority of Americans were behind Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I would not have imagined that a year and a half ago with the phrase Black Lives Matter. It rang for, I suspect, for a lot of people as radicalism. And I think the pandemic has, if nothing else, raised the prestige of science, not for everybody, but I hope that the prestige of a person like Anthony Fauci, who seems to be emblematic of science these days, as opposed to this kind of denialism is embodied by Alas, the President of the United States and many others, that has taught us something that, you know, Michael Spector wrote a book called Denialism and all about the price that we pay for denying various aspects of science.
And I think people have learned with their lives, much less their livelihoods, the price of denialism, the price of a government that is just riven with inaction and cynicism and Tens of thousands of people have died as a result. And I think people see that. And I hope that the lessons of that not only affect the outcome of the election in a few weeks, and not only lead to greater and better and more decent and efficient action on the pandemic, but that those lessons carry over when it comes to matters of climate change.
Look, I like flying in airplanes, too. I like not thinking about where I throw my garbage. I like being sloppy with my life, too. That’s what I’m used to. That’s what we’re all used to. But the price of that heedlessness is consuming. It’s consuming. And it can’t be a fifth order political concern. It has to be a first order. And not now. It has to become one yesterday.
Ross Kenyon: I do want to ask about if there’s any pieces that you left on the cutting room floor that you’re still mourning, or have you made peace with it? Is there one that just haunts you that didn’t make it into the anthology?
Henry Finder: One death is a tragedy spirit. There are so many that couldn’t make it in that we can’t mourn them all. And in a way, I think our focus really is on the On the kind of work that we’ve been able to represent. And it’s also an encouragement for us in the future to keep the ambitions high, to keep the resourcefulness, keep the sense of inventiveness present so that we can deal with the fundamental challenge, which is on the one hand, no story is more important. On the other hand, it’s kind of not a story.
How do you narrate something that is by its nature not narrative? That’s been a challenge we met in the past, but we know that month after month and year after year, it’s a challenge we’re going to have to keep meeting in different ways.
David Remnick: I think that’s right. The easiest thing in the world with the magazine is to get people to write about food, for example. We all eat. It’s fun. It’s pleasurable. It leads you into aspects of culture and pleasure and all kinds of things. This is harder. The challenge of writing about this is, as I described before, really distinct. But I think we’re duty bound to do it, even if it at times, you know, leads to a certain degree of frustration. I think that’s a small price to pay for doing it. It’s got to be done.
The trick is that it doesn’t come out, you know, tasting like oatmeal, that somehow through narrative, through description, through all the Tools available to a writer, to an artist, that somehow you tell a story so compelling that the reader at the end is a little bit changed. A little bit. A little bit. Somehow they’re pointed in a direction that they weren’t quite pointed in before. It’s not a matter of, I changed your mind from liberal to conservative or the reverse in a 900 word op-ed column. That’s just nonsense. That just very rarely happens.
And this is a deeper thing. This is a reorienting of the way you look at the world, the way a novel can sometimes, or a film or, and I hope in a wonderful piece of writing. That’s the goal. It’s pretty ambitious, but it’s the ambitious every time out of the box.
Henry Finder: Yeah. And we have to give props to the writers. Editing is definitely a two-way street. Sometimes the editor has an idea for a story, goes looking for a writer who can execute it. Very often the writer has the idea and comes to the editor, and then maybe it’s given a certain shape, given certain contours in that process. But the ability of writers who are out there, who have experiences that we don’t have, writers who are thinking about this a lot and all the time, You kind of come up with ways of giving clothing, of giving a garb to this emergency, to giving us a change of venue, a scenario, a set of characters that we didn’t know about.
I mean, we are just immensely grateful to all those writers who say, you know what? Here’s an angle that we haven’t seen before. Here’s a story you hadn’t heard before. Here are some characters you really, I think our readers really need to meet. And that’s one of the things that keeps things continually fresh and helps us meet that challenge of, you know, narrating something that isn’t narrative of telling the untellable story. And we’ve been just immensely fortunate in that respect.
David Remnick: I have to say that’s the game at the New Yorker. I worked for 10 years at the Washington Post. And I would say, I don’t know, 75% of the time an editor came to me and I got an assignment. Go cover this. Now, I was young, but go cover this. Or you’re on a beat and the beat suggests to you what requires pursuit. At The New Yorker, the idea is that no writer at any time should be working on something that bores the hell out of him or her. If it’s going to bore them, you’re going to get a boring piece.
And the reason they come to The New Yorker is not just because there’s a lot of space, a lot of acreage to take up, but that they’re never at any one time working on something that doesn’t interest them. So when we come up with ideas, it’s a conversation. And very, very often, maybe it’s the majority of the time, it’s the writer’s own idea or initiative. Sometimes it comes out of a conversation editorial meeting. Sometimes it’s just coming out of a cup of coffee and the writer and the editor are talking.
However it happens, it happens. But the end result always has to be, at The New Yorker at least, that you’re always writing something that launches your boat as a writer.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great answer. I really like it. And I’m happy that you both focused on the narrative difficulty of climate change because I have, as we near the end, a rather self-indulgent question I hope you’ll oblige me with, which is on that same theme, which is, what was it like having Charlie Kaufman turn the Orchid Thief into adaptation?
David Remnick: You’d have to ask Susan Orlean.
Ross Kenyon: Did not expect that, did you?
David Remnick: You’d have to ask Susan Orlean. That’s a great question. It was bizarre because, you know, it’s not as if he did a literal rendition of her piece. The author became the character and we were off to the races. So I was very distant from that. I barely knew about it until I went to see it in the theater.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Was that the same for you, Henry?
Henry Finder: Oh, you know, I’m a big Charlie Kaufman fan. And so I took great delight in... This kind of deconstructed adaptation that he did.
Ross Kenyon: Well, if people want to support your work, I know subscribing to The New Yorker is always welcome and they should buy this book. How would you recommend they make sure more things like this happen in the future?
Henry Finder: The point about subscriptions is real. You talked about sending Ben Taub to Chad. The kind of coverage that we’ve been able to do really does depend upon this community of people who, in an age when we’re so used to reading things for free online, have given value and put a price on what we’re able to supply because it is costly. It’s very costly. And our ability to depend upon the loyalty of paying subscribers is what makes the entire thing possible.
Ross Kenyon: And this book is available online, I imagine. Have you made peace with Amazon or do you want me to recommend some other acquisition point?
David Remnick: I think Amazon is a fact of life. And I’d be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t use it all the time. But I also use local independent bookstores, which are wonderful. I’m very lucky to live in a neighborhood that has a few really good ones. So if those are in your neighborhood, by all means.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, links are in the show notes for all of these things that we’ve referenced here by the book. Support it. If you don’t support publications you like, they will write more and more clickbaity titles. And that’s all that we have. So please, if you can, support a publication that you enjoy that’s writing content that is actually good. And David and Henry, thank you so much for being on the show.
Unknown speaker: Well, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. My pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: It was mine too. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what we do here, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It certainly helps a lot. And thanks so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon.
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