Through the Children's Gate | Adam Gopnik | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's Authors at Google event featuring Adam Gopnik. It's my pleasure to introduce Adam today. He's the winner of three National Magazine Awards and he's been writing for the New Yorker for the past 20 years on a variety of subjects. Just to give you an idea of his range, just over the past few months he's written about subjects stretching from Zinedine Zidane to Charles Darwin. I first encountered Adam's work during the late 90s when he and his family were living in Paris and he was writing the Letter from Paris for the New Yorker. And those essays were collected in 2000. I believe it was 2000 in the book Paris to the Moon. I was living in France at the time and remember recommending or buying this book for every American I knew who had lived in Paris, was living in Paris, had thought about living in Paris. I just, I love his work. And his excellent new book, through the Children's Gate, looks at the experience of returning to New York with his family after that time in Paris. And the Children's Gate, which is this entrance to Central park, strikes me as an appropriate metaphor for Adam's work. Not because he frequently invokes his children Olivia and Luke in his writing, but because he's constantly approaching his subjects with fresh eyes, like those of a child, and without anything else. I'd like to introduce Adam Gopnik.

Thank you, thank you. I'm Mike Gopnik. Thank you and thank you for coming. I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to be here. It is the first time in the 12 years of his existence that my son Luke has ever been impressed by anything his father has done. And that is no exaggeration. I have lectured at the Louvre, I have lectured at the Metropolitan Museum. I have been on television on Charlie Rose many times, and he is totally uninterested in any of those things. But when I told him I was coming to Google for lunch, he genuinely thought I had finally accomplished something in life. He is one of the Google youth. In fact, he's a child like every 12 year old alive today, whose whole life has been shaped in a way that mine was not. In a way, as I look out over you, half of yours was and half of yours was not by the presence of the Internet, by the idea of a search engine. And my last book was called the King in the Window and it was an adventure story for, I like to say, adults of every condition. But I particularly wrote it for Luke. And did anyone see it? Perhaps not someone back There. Well, what it was about was about this confrontation between a 12 year old boy living in Paris named Oliver and the most evil creature not just in this cosmos but in the entire multiverse because it was a whole many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Was one of the plot gimmicks in it in fact called the Master of Mirrors. And not to give it away because I hope some of you will read it someday, but the basic idea was that the master of mirrors who used to steal men's souls when they stared into mirrors, had converted his entire cosmic operation to computer screens. And now he was stealing men's souls as they stared into computer screens. And Oliver, the 12 year old boy had to rescue his own father's soul and all mankind from the threat of the Master of Mirrors, who in his new guys came from Seattle, by the way. And it was sort of, I hope not an allegory, but certainly a fable about the predicament that I think every parent finds now that is, it's. We're in a constant daily struggle with the screens for our children, which we also recognize to be in many respects absurd. And I thought if you, if, if it would be all right, I'd read you a little bit from my new book from through the Children's Gate, just about that, about how that affects your role as a parent and all of the ironies attended on it. And then after that I wanted just to tell you a story about new communication and fathers and sons. This is from a section of the book called Four Thanksgiving Propensities. The book is all about coming home to New York and living in New York in the last five years. And when I came back to New York in 2000 after six years in Paris, I thought that I would be writing nothing but the comedy of manners of contemporary life and the absurdities of New York. Of course life took a very different turn. And so the book ended up being much more about hope, the loss of hope or the fracturing of hope. And then how hope gets put back together again and how it gets renewed essentially through children's insistence in my case on going on living. And I wrote, our children live in mazes made of cards and screens and pages. A description of the new reality in Doggerel. The children do live in a maze of cards and screens and pages. And half our job as parents seems to be to guide them through it, particularly we think to keep them away from the screen, turn them towards the cards and help them end up in the pages. The path from video addiction to book reading is a thorny one. A parental pilgrim's progress for our time. This weekend, for instance, Luke and his friend Theo had a double sleepover Friday night at Theo's family's loft in funky downtown, then Saturday night up here, proceed to uptown. Theo's dad Peter, and I decided, along with the boys, that it would be a no screen weekend. Of course, when I say that we decided altogether, I mean that the parents decided, and the children, not yet having the weapons to contest it, accepted the decision and pretended that they had helped to make it. Families remain autocracies with the saving grace of all autocracies. Not dictatorships where anything goes, but authoritarian centers that keep a jumpy and watchful eye on the mob which will someday rule. No computer games, no video games. The boys looked hurt as much as offended. No, nothing, we said. They spent too much time staring at screens. This would be the weekend to do something energetic and creative. What are we going to do? Luke asked, not indignant, just curious. What were they going to do? Play music, do sports, we said. They looked dubious. And then they went downtown. When the boys came back to our place after the first half of the sleepover late on Saturday afternoon, their faces and eyes were alight. So what did you guys do? I asked semi warily. We played pool, they announced in unison, and then explained that Peter had taken them to a local pool hall called, in deference to Wall street, faux proletarian sensibilities, soho Billiards, but still a pool hall, and taught them how to use a cue and rack them up. Then Peter had left them there among the slant eyed sharks and they had filled the afternoon learning the game. We got good, luke said. Eyes alike. I think we have become, you know, like pool hustlers and all that. I really do, you know? You know what I mean? The kind of people who make you think they don't know how to play and then they really do. New York has made him into a high talker, ending every statement with the intonation of a question. I beamed with pleasure and relief. They had played pool. Pool hustlers. What could be better than learning how to adjust a cue to strike a ball into a pocket as compared to another meaningless two hour session in front of a screen doing mindless hand eye coordination games? No, they were not druggishly indulging in a cynically engineered entertainment. They were in touch with America, with history, with Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman and the hustler. How wise we had been to make the screens off limits, for it had led them to the billiard table and the pool hall. This is going very well, I thought, and I told my wife, Martha, about it. She looked puzzled. Wasn't pool sort of like the video game of 19 ought 3? She asked. I mean, isn't that what they get so exercised about in the Music Man Trouble right here in River City? Trouble with a capital T and it rhymes with P and it stands for pool or wherever the hell that goes. It sounds to me like instead of letting them do mindless crap, you're getting them to do dated mindless cr. Yes, I conceded, but this was different. I couldn't say how, but I was convinced that it was. That evening, staying in our house, the boys disappeared into Luke's room where we keep the piano and the guitar. I heard banging and playing of various kinds, and the next morning when Peter came to pick up Theo, they invited everyone in to listen. We all trooped in. Listen to this, dad, theo said. They sat down, Luke on piano, Theo and guitar. They're both about 11 at this time. Nods and mature headshakes, and then a solid, slightly out of order but utterly rocking version of Purple Haze emerged from their fingers in their throats. They got it all, the stuttering bit at the beginning, the swoop in the middle, and the key slurrings of pronunciation so that Excuse me while I kiss this guy becomes Excuse me while I kiss this guy. Theo sang it right too, stone sounding but not too stoned. Peter and I looked on, delighted, our heads bouncing to the old remembered beat. You see what you guys can accomplish when you don't spend your whole day wrapped up in some screen? I asked sapiently. Yeah, you were right, Luxit. Hey, dad, he added at last, what's that song all about? What do you mean? Like what's it all about? I mean, Purple Haze all in my brain. Why? Why is there Purple Haze all in his brain? Still high with the pleasure of the weekend. Hendrix and pool instead of gamecubes and computers, I said unguardedly. Oh, it's a drug song. It's an acid song. Purple Haze was a way of referring to acid, peter corrected with a scholarly tilt of his head. You know, actually, I think it's a psychedelic song, Adam. Not really an acid song. It was a trippy kind of pod, I think. I think they started by calling that stuff Purple Haze, after the song was well known. I nodded. Good point. Yeah, I think you're right. Anyway, I said pedantically, it's about an acid trip. It's an attempt to evoke the inner world of an acid trip. The boys looked back at us. You mean it's a song about drugs? Theo asked. Yeah, exactly, I said. You know he was an addict. Is he dead? Luke asked. I nodded. What did he die of? Asked Luke, a New York child obsessed with questions of mortality. Oh, he died of a drug overdose. He's buried in Pere Lachaise, I added with a pedantry growing lamer every moment. He isn't, of course. I had the wrong dead rock star. How old was he? Luke asked. I don't know, I said. 28, 29. What kind of drugs did he die of? I'm not sure. I think it was heroin. But a speedball, crystal meth, something like that. Hey, play it again, I said weakly. You guys are great. What kind of drug was he taking? Theo repeated, more maturely evaluating it. Speed, I think, peter said. We looked at each other. EA Sports Madden NFL was looking more creative every moment. Reruns of Gilligan island were looking more creative every moment. Why did he die of a drug overdose? Luke asked. And in principle, with my general principle of giving every one of his straight questions a straight answer, I explained what I could about musicians and their demons and their demands. You see all the fun, creative stuff you can do if you're not staring at a screen, I added lamely as a coda, and the boys went back to Hendrix. I see. Of course, I then go on to say, the absurdity and the comedy and the hypocrisy of our parental struggle against the screens. The screen addiction is hateful to us because it is an addiction and enslavement, but mostly threatening to be truthful because it is not our addiction. Though many of our best memories are staring at screens in our sometimes aimless and druggy adolescence, the thing we fear most for our kids is that they will end up druggy and mixed up adolescents staring at screens. Our screens, we tell ourselves virtuously, were the screens of film societies and old television shows, which we now recycle to their bafflement. But the addiction in truth, was the same, or exactly like. Yet though I sense the absurdity, I still think there is an honest core, something worthwhile at the heart of our struggle. Our job as parents is still first to center our children constantly, to make them believe that they are uniquely valuable sons within a solar system of other people on whom they shine every day, that the light they cast is always welcome daylight on another planet. But then our job is also continually to to decenter them, to make them understand that theirs is not the first nor only nor most important consciousness in the world. And that half of life involves signaling to others that we recognize this fact, even if we don't quite believe it. They may be suns, but they exist in nebulae and galaxies of billions of other suns. Screens, video games and computer games and online chat rooms center them quite literally by giving them the role of Gandalf manager of the Yankees God. It is perfectly true, as the contrarians insist, and I'm sure many of you have read these books, that video games teach them a good deal, that they encourage the kids to improve their pattern recognition, their hand eye coordination, and whatever else. But that's exactly the problem. Not that they don't learn anything from the screens, but that they learn too much too quickly. They earn a certain kind of limited mastery without interference from others. Really mastering something means learning it from someone else. You can't be a master without first having been an apprentice. So the pleasure Peter and I felt as we watched the boys give up the new screens for the old vices was not, I think, completely, unforgivably wrong headed. The strongest decentering force we have in life is the past. When the children come into contact, however briefly or absurdly, with something that is outside themselves. The first notes of Are you experienced? Or a pool cue? And the hard stare of real pool players, it at least suggests to them that life is not a universe with the self at the center, but a river running through time into which you are lucky to dip your hand and come up with minnows or diamonds or old Coke cans, tattered sheet music or cue chalk. A boy with a pool cue in his hand is doing himself some good just by standing in a long invisible line of other boys with pool cues stretching out the pool hall door into the American past. The truth is, we don't really want them to practice the eternal virtues. Or rather, we do want them to practice the eternal virtues. But short of that, we'll settle for the older vices. The older vices are our secret name for the eternal virtues. The older vices at least are old. You have to learn them from your fathers. That's one little bit in the book about the struggle we have and the absurdities and ironies of the struggle we have as parents with the screens. Now let me tell you another story, if I may, about something that's related, but it's more about the problem of miscommunication and about certain opportunities for intimacy that the new world that you all create have made for the rest of us. It's the last story in the book, but I prefer telling it as a story to reading it as a reading. As any of you know who have children and most of you look too young, but someday you will. There's a moment when your kids reach adolescence, the first stages of adolescence. And if you haven't had it as a child, you've experienced it as an adolescent. When, however close you've been to your kids, there suddenly begins to be breaking apart, there suddenly begins to be a push apart. And it's necessary and appropriate and inevitable and very painful for the parent who not only loves the child but is also in some ways befriended the child. The child's intimacy has been a very important part of their life. And I had always felt that way with my son Luke, who I've written about a great deal. And then about a year ago we sort of entered into the inevitable tragedy of 3:15pm and you have all been there on one side of that door or another. I work at home mostly and the doorbell rings at 3:15 and the 12 year old is there and you open the door and there's like a chorus, Greek chorus of dead parents hanging over your shoulder saying, don't ask that question, don't say it. But you cannot help yourself. And so you say, how was your day? And the 12 year old shrugs like this and goes like. And then he walks into his room and shuts the door and you can't help yourself, you say, how was your day? Or how was school? It's an unanswerable question. You remember how unanswerable it was from your own past, but you ask it anyway. And I felt the pain of it. I understood it, I knew that it was inevitable. I understood that. I remembered I had done exactly the same thing, but it was still painful. Well, I would go back into my own office and go back to work on my computer as I knew he was working on his computer, but I knew that what he was doing in fact was IMing all of his friends because like every 12 year old, he's become a demon. Imer he lives on instant messages and that's his. And he has six or seven or eight or nine going at the same time when I'm trying to get him to do his homework. And it's utterly silent in there and there's some part of you in the previous story that's wishing that you could hear, you know, the sound of adolescent groping or the smell, the healthy smell of marijuana or something because all there is is the utter silence of electronic communication going on on the other side. And I find instant Messaging really weird, because it seems to me it's all the 12 year olds, 11 year olds, 10 year olds want to do now. It's how they live. And what seems to me so strange about it is that if the instant message had been invented first and the telephone call second, it would be so clear that the telephone call was the great communications breakthrough of our time. We had been instant messaging each other for the past hundred years, in fact. And then Steve Jobs invented the telephone. It would be the headline news in every paper that you'd see in there holding up the beautiful white thing. You actually can talk to the people you're engaged with. They can hear your voice. You no longer have to work the computer screen. It would be the greatest technical breakthrough. And yet kids have no interest in making phone calls and they live on instant messaging, which is a suggestion to me that technology isn't just a history of improved solutions, but there's also an element of fashion in it. It's the newest, not necessarily the best or the most efficient. In any case, he's a demon imer and he had compelled me to download AIM on my computer. I never used it because I'm of that generation. When you reach 40, you'll find that whatever was in place when you turned 40 is the outer limit of your technological abilities. If you were 40 when the fax came in, you still send people faxes and get bewildered looks. My own parents are just up to the edge of the long distance phone call. In fact, they still speak quite loudly when they're on a long distance phone call. But the cell phone baffles, but they never turn it on, in fact. And I'm just at the edge where I can handle email, I live on email. But I can't go one step beyond, I thought, to instant messaging. But I'm sitting there working and it's about 3:20 by now, and suddenly I hear a ping on the edge of my screen. And I look down, there's an instant message for me. And I look at it and it's from Luke. It's from my son who's 15ft away in his own room. And he types in hey dad, what's up? And I nothing much. What's up with you? He says, oh, nothing. I think, well, I'll try. I say, how was school? And he comes right back. It was great. You know what I did today? I'm really annoyed with my chemistry teacher. And right away I get in instant message form the account of everything that had happened that day that he wouldn't Tell me five minutes before. And this becomes a ritual in our house. It's almost Japanese. Every day at 3:15, the doorbell rings. I open it, don't say anything. He sort of notices I'm there. I notice he's there. He goes into his room, shuts the door. I go back into my office, I shut the door and 90 seconds later it's Bing. Hey dad, what's up? And we do a lot of our talking on instant messaging. Even like when we're sitting on the same bed in our bedroom watching the baseball game. He's got his computer, I've got my computer. I think, you know. Don't you think you should go to bed soon? No, just one more inning. Okay, one more inning. We're this close. And I realized why he would much rather instant message me than actually talk to me. It's because he controls it. It's about autonomy. When he has no objection to being closely engaged with me, but he wants it to be under his control and not under my control. If he answers me when I greet him at the door, then he's obeying me in some way. If he IMs me when he's sitting in his room, it means that he is initiating the conversation and he's controlling the exchange. So I understand that and it's great. So I fall in love with IMing this for me. I suddenly joined my time and I started instant messaging everyone. And Luke teaches me the language of instant messaging. The language. The telegraphic language of abbreviations and instant messaging, which you all know. Brb. Be right back. You too, gtg. Got to go. And there's one he doesn't have to teach me because its meaning is so obvious and touching to me, because it occurs at the end of every one of the messages he sends me. And that's lol because it obviously means lots of love because he puts it at the end of every one of his instant messages. Even when I'm sending him sort of sententious things like you just do the things you have to do and then you can do the things you want to do. And he says, OK dad. Lol, Luke. And I think it's so touching. He sends lots of love. So I write right back, okay, glad you got it. Lol, dad. And we keep and every day that's how we end this exchange. And I think this is such a beautiful thing. Lol. I think it's like the beautiful signature of our time. So I start sending it to everybody that I know who's in trouble or in need of A kind of electronic hug. In fact, my sister lives here was getting divorced. So I sent her lol. I said her misfits.

Lol.

At the end of it, my, you know, my parents who had been a bit ill when I sent them lol. All around America, people were getting instant messages from me, the new demon, instant messenger. And every one of them ended lol. And I was just sending out love, lots of it, across America. Well, one day, after about six months of this, I'm sitting in the terminal at LaGuardia in the lounge, and I have to travel a lot for my work. I go out to meet people, to promote books in plain English, but also to lecture a lot. I do a lot of that and I'm away a lot and I hate being away from home, but I have to be. And I'm sitting in the, in the lounge at laguardia and I've got my little WI FI connection and I'm saying goodnight to Luke on IM and I'm saying, you know, I hate being away from you and I want you always to know that it's really hard for me, but I have to do it so that we can live the life we want. Lol. Dad. Long pause. And then I get in huge capital letters across the screen as though it's like an incoming message from norad, dad, what do you think LOL means? And I write back, lots of love, obviously. Even longer pause. And then I get one of those blushing face icons on the corner and says, dad, it means laughing out loud. And I write back, no it doesn't. And Luke writes back, yes it does. And he's right, of course. And I realized that I had been ridiculing everybody I knew for the previous six months. And I realized that he had been laughing out loud at every sententious moralizing thing I had told him. And I hadn't known it. So I was going to have to repeal six months worths of LOLs to everybody that I had been laughing out loud at, in fact, in the midst of their suffering. And for a while I thought, well, that's the real moral, that's the real point, that's the real truth about the relationship between parents and kids today. We send them lots of love, they laugh out loud at us and we don't even know that it's happening. But then something interesting happened. After about a month of laughing out loud at my absurdity, I started sending LOL back to Luke again. And I would say, lol, you know what I mean, dad? And he would send back at the end of every instant message, say, lol, Luke. And we both knew that we meant both things at the same time. And here's the weird thing about this story. It's that for all the months that I was sending Luke lol, at the end of every message, he never complained until I did it at such an extreme level that he couldn't help but notice. He always assumed that I knew what I was saying, knew that I was writing. And if you think about it, there are very few cases in life when saying I am laughing out loud in your presence and saying that I love you a lot don't actually mean something sufficiently close to count. Not exactly the same thing, but something similar enough to be acceptable in communication. And it's exactly in those places of miscommunication, I think, that real human feeling gets known. And so now every night when I'm away here in California and he's in New York, or whether I'm in Texas or wherever I am, we. I am each other last thing at night. And we always end lol, Luke. Lol, dad. And it doesn't really matter what it means. It means what it means at that moment to us. And we don't apply its meanings like a decal. We turn off and on its meanings like a light. Thank you. And I'd love to take questions about anything that's on your minds today. Lady here. The Teeny Brown era at the New Yorker, for those of you who are too young to remember. And I see I've been working at the New Yorker for more than 20 years now, and we went through a rough patch in the late 80s. We were losing a lot of money in plain English and our corporate overlord. In fact, it's an. As with most corporate overlords, we try. We do. You know what's really weird is that very often in American life, instead, you know, it's the famous thing you're supposed to do, is you take a corporation and you turn it into an individual like Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker or something. And that's sort of an illusion. But very often what we do is we take an individual and we turn it into a corporation. So we say our corporate overlord. It's one man, Sy Newhouse, who runs, owns the whole thing. So he decided to bring in Tina Brown, who had been the editor of Vanity Fair, and make her the editor of the New Yorker, in the hopes of rejuvenating and revitalizing the magazine. It was a rocky time in lots of ways because the New Yorker was an institution at once rich in tradition and a little staid by the force of tradition and so on. And I was in Europe for most of it. I went off to Paris and did almost all of those years. I was in Paris until David, she left on a failed venture, Talk magazine, and David Remnick, my good friend, became the editor. The only thing I'd say about Tina Brown years, which were very good for me, it's when I got to go to Paris and really, I think, began doing my best work, is that there are many people who will say, well, David Remnick's New Yorker is superb. Better than hers, and David Remnick's New Yorker is superb. I think I've been there for 21 years and it's the best right now. I think it's the best the magazine has been in my lifetime and maybe in its history, but for lots of reasons, which I'd be glad to talk about. But all of the key people at the magazine now, including David Remnick. David Remnick, the second in command, Henry Finder, Dorothy Wickenden, the writers who you probably read most often, Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Larissa McFarquar, Philip Gurevich, were all people who Tina Brown hired. And she had an incredible gift for spotting talent, an amazing gift for spotting talent. She ran a very high pressure. Anybody remember Billy Martin, the great Yankees manager? Well, some people have an unbelievable gift for spotting talent. And then they often create an atmosphere of such high pressure that it's hard for the talent to always function at its best. And that's the point when you need a Joe Torre to come in who's a low, you know, who's not high pressure in that way. But if anybody ever speaks ill to you of Tina Brown, you say that almost every single person who shines at the New Yorker now was someone who she brought in. And she showed enormous courage in bringing in people like my friend Anthony Lane, the movie critic, who was a 25 year old kid right out of college in London writing for the Independent. And she spotted him and said, this guy is the most gifted and I don't care if nobody knows him in America, I'm going to make him my movie critic. Took a lot of balls to make that decision. And as any of you know who read Anthony, he's by far the wittiest and wisest movie critic in America, even though he still lives in England, in fact. So that's my take on that time. Yes. Do you feel confident you could tell today if New Yorker gets Staged again. That's a good. No, it's a good question. I'm pausing to think about it, obviously. Right. I'm probably the last person who would know. Right. Because I've been there so long that what looks fresh to me is exactly staid by definition. Anything that looks fresh to me is 20 years out of date. Right.

So.

I think that this will sound like. Obviously, you know, there are empirical ways of studying such things, but I have a sort of gut response to it, which is that to an uncanny degree, to a degree that you might not even credit, except if any of you have been ever worked on a project that has a public will know that this is true. You sort of know what the public buzz is, what the feeling is, even just by feeling, just a kind of antenna. And it's a million little clues that you get. Do you see people reading it on the subway in New York, for instance? Do you get emails about things that have been in the magazine? And you can feel it. And it's not something you can quantify necessarily, but, boy, you know. And it's the same thing when I'm telling stories to groups of people, which is what I do. I'm like the last of the vaudevillians. I go around with my suitcase from place to place. And, boy, if you do it, you can instantly tell who's in, who's out, who's with you, who's not with you, who's enjoying it, who's not. And you can't explain it because it's all these little subtle nonverbal cues, but you know it. And the same thing is true. I think about a magazine. I was there when we sort of lost pressure, in fact, and I'm there when I think we have pressure. And you just have to monitor it, I think, at every moment. And I don't mean to make it sound too intuitive, but I do think it's a mostly intuitive thing and you have to be conscious of it. I'll tell you the thing that and this speaks to. We were just talking before I came out to speak about this. We're obviously like every other part of the old media. We're at a crossroads and we have to decide which way we're going to go. I choose to think, and this could be a delusion, that we're in some sense in a fortunate position. One of the things that's been striking in the past five years is that at a time when all of the great American newspapers have really gotten into a crisis and we could argue about whether that's an authentic crisis or a pseudo crisis. In other words, they say it's a disaster. That means they're making 10% profit every year rather than 25% profit every year. So I'm not sure how big a disaster it actually is. Nonetheless, not only. I mean, I sound like an ad man here, I don't mean that, but our circulation has been growing. But more than that, I think we've been playing a very useful role because we're one of the few places that do long form writing still. And the curious thing is that far from people dropping off, from that, people have a particular appetite for it. It's not 300 million people, God knows, but it's 2 million people in America have a hunger for that kind of long form writing. And weirdly, as the rest of the American media tries to move in a much more sporadic direction with shorter takes, tries to imitate the Internet, in some ways we do better by not imitating it, but by doing what we do. And that speaks to not the largest audience in the world, but an audience that's more than big enough to make a difference and to pay our bills. So the question is, which direction do we go? Do we put all of our content online, as so many places have done, and search for a model for how we're going to make money? Or do we think, no, the brand we have to protect is that the magazine comes to your house every Thursday and it's good. And you know, just as a business problem, I know one of the facts about the New Yorker, for those of you who read it, is you can never read the whole thing. And people are both in love with it and annoyed by it simultaneously. They love it for the things that they love, and then they're annoyed because they can never read the whole thing. So one of the things that can happen is if we put everything online is people will say, well, I don't really need then to subscribe to it anymore, right? Because I'll read the stuff I like online and I won't have to feel guilty about all the stuff I didn't read. So just as a business decision, I'm not sure that that would be good. But at the same time, we can't ignore the fact that my son Luke has spent most of his time staring at a screen. He has Google up and he's Googling for magic tricks. And he's those things too. And he's. We don't want ourselves to be the last generation of New Yorker writers and editors. So it's A terribly complicated problem. And, and to add one more curlicue to the problem and I'd be glad to hear anybody who has a view on it. The other thing is we thought, well, we can add blogs and journals. I'm out here in California, so I could do a week in California or I could write about it. But we have a certain standard of writing and of accuracy and of grammar and those things too, and they require a certain amount of time to do. We can't just put stuff up on the website and have it be of the same quality as what's in the magazine. And if we ever, if we ever made an error, if we ever made a big mistake, right, in something that we had online because we had put, because we hadn't gone through the same process, it would tell against our whole model. Everybody would see it as it would be much bigger even if it were a trivial error. It's sort of what happened to the New York Times with Jason Blair, if you all remember that case. If you actually look at what Jason, Jason Blair was just a kind of nut kid who was on drugs and he actually didn't write anything that did any particular harm. But the idea that the Times was publishing somebody who was making stuff up was hugely destructive to their image, brand self, sense of self, however you want to put it. So those are the kinds of problems that we're struggling with right now. So I think we're in good shape. But like everybody else, we're also having to think hard every day about what we're doing, what we're doing and how we're going to, what we'll be like in 10 years time? Yes. On this topic, in terms of places of block format, do you find that affects your writing, how you think about communicating fights is knowing there's a whole other world of interrupt driven media that's impinging on people's attention. When I'm writing or when I'm speaking, when I'm, when you're writing, particularly in the last five to seven years, I generally, I'm sort of like a middle distance runner. Give me five to 7,000 words or five to 10,000 words and I feel good. Less than that and I think I get out of breath and more than that and I really get out of breath. In another way, we persist in the belief, which may be an illusion, that if you do it right, you can still hold a significant number of readers for seven or 8,000 words. And what's more, I think is that you can. Exactly. Because the rest of the world has gone so much in that other direction. One of the things that's always stunning to me is that when the Internet first became visible, and my mother is a scientist, so she was on it 20 years ago just doing. She's a linguist and she had a Department of Defense grant, and she was just doing that stuff. And we all thought it's this weird thing mom does with the telephone and the computer. But everybody said it would be the ideal vehicle, medium of information. And you all work on that all the time. But the visible part of it, right, has been that it's been an unbelievably effective medium of opinion. It's been incredibly good for democratizing opinion. So if you know that, and that's one of the things that the blog Revolution has done, is that there's no real reason to read an op ed columnist anymore, because everybody's an op ed columnist and many of the amateurs are much smarter than the professionals. But that's not what we do, really. We're not a magazine of opinion and attitude, and I think highly of opinion and attitude as activities. We're a magazine of reporting and argument. So I choose to believe that if we. I did a long piece about Charles Darwin in the last week's issue, and it took me a long time to write it. And I felt, if you're interested, if I can get you to take a deep breath and say, this is significant and important, because who's more important than Darwin and what's more interesting than find out what he actually thought and how he actually wrote that, I can bring you in. And the only secret. It's not a secret, but the only strategy that I think you can use to do that is to remember that you're writing as a reader to other readers, not as an expert to amateurs. And that's what I always try to do, even if it involves a certain amount of disingenuousness. For instance, with that piece, I've been reading Darwin for years. I've always been interested in Darwin, and I was sort of waiting for an opportunity to pounce and. And do a piece about Darwin as a writer. But in crafting the piece, I wanted to have the feeling, at least that I had started reading Darwin two weeks, six months before the reader did, so that we were on the same position. We were going to explore something together. As I say, there's an element of disingenuousness there, but it's a kind that I think is healthy because it says to the reader, I'm another reader like you, and we can navigate through this stuff together. And I think that that, that works. And you know, the truth is that people who are drawn to it are drawn to it. And then there's a vast number of people who won't be drawn to it, who just won't have the time or the interest. But as I say, and somebody here can give me the name for what this model is. We don't need 10 million people, we need 2 million people who want that. And in an English speaking world of however many hundreds of millions of people, that's not an unrealistic, that's not an unrealistic goal and it's not a small number of people, it's not a small number of people in terms of affecting people's consciousness and views. Gentlemen, here, do you really think that IM is more popular because it's new or do you think it's because of what you said about looting autonomy? I honestly don't know. Yes, of course. I think it has more to do with autonomy and independence and so on. I am an obsessed emailer. Basically my whole life could be converted to pixels tomorrow. And I just live on email. So I think that's, that's so I do think that there is at least an element of. Because I see that kids and maybe my experience is peculiar, maybe it's partly shaped by New York that I. When I was 12 years old, I lived on the telephone talking to friends, trying to shine up girls, you know, all those things. I lived on the telephone. And there are advantages to a phone call. You hear people's voices, you can read their emotions, you don't have to put it in a emoticon to know what somebody is thinking, you hear them sigh and so on. So I do think that there's an element, I really do think if you do the thought experiment and say, imagine that Alexander Graham Bell had invented the instant message, which in effect was what the telegraph and the telegram was. But imagine you could have had a way to have a telegram, a telegraph receiver in every home and then somebody had invented the phone call. I think people would see, genuinely see the voice messaging. You would think that voice messaging would be superior in almost every situation. But what's striking to me is that for 11 and 12 year olds it's clearly not, it's their second choice. They don't like having. I mean, at least the ones I know don't like having phone calls. Yes, I'm sorry, I'll come back. Person was not the master anymore. More space that we. What they're going to Say rather than wording out the earth on being and the ability to ignore it and in all sorts of ways so it is optimal. And remember you got on the phone when you were 12 and your kid gets on his IM and what you do is you go over what happened in school today. Right, Something like that. In fact, you will go over what things that the people who were there saw also. Yes, yes. Anything they don't know. Rather, what you're doing is coming to a social consensus about what it means. That's very smart. Yes, I completely. May I borrow that? That's extremely. That's extremely smart. That's exactly what they do. That's why they have six IMs on at once. And if you follow it, they're exactly what they're doing. They're reaching a social condition consensus about an activity, a person, an event that has already transpired. And the telegraphic language helps them to do that because they can control it and compose it. And if you had a big party line, they wouldn't be able to do that at all. No, I think that's very smart. Yeah. Yes, that makes sense. This lady here I've always loved having always concept of Paris. I was wondering if you. And also your stuff, Paris and how we look back on it now as immovable feast or not. You know, for me, Paris has always, and I don't think just for me narrowly, but for Americans generally, Paris is always represented in our literature, in our movies, in our songs, an idea of happiness. It's a very powerful symbol of happiness for us. Now it goes without saying that it is no happier place than any other place. And in fact historically it's a terribly blood drenched and violent in many respects miserable place. But for us it represents an idea of happiness. And the book I wrote about, of Paris to the Moon is very much about happiness. It's more about happiness and the search for happiness in a certain sense than it is about Paris. And it's about search for happiness, disillusion when you discover that it's not where you live and then renewal of happiness through other means. New York, I always think, represents for most Americans an idea of hope that it's not a place you go to be happy, but it's a place where you go to make it a place where you go to remake your life, to go through a gate like in that terrible song. If I can make it here, I'll make it anywhere. And the trouble is I love Paris and at one time I very much wanted to make my life there. But the problem is that Paris is an old civilization in lots of ways, and it suffers from its own beauty. In a way, something that everybody in Paris talks about is what they call the Venetian temptation. That is the idea that Paris is slowly and inexorably on its way to becoming another Venice that is a museum city, a Disneyland version of itself, and so on. And the problem is that there's no way to escape that cycle, because if you try and break it, you lose exactly what it is that you love about it. But if you allow it to go on, then slowly all of these inexorable social forces will turn a city into a simulacra of itself. And there's a lot of sadness about that. And in some strange way, Paris, this very powerful image of happiness for us, has become in some ways, a sad place. I still love it. We go back every year. I try to write about it every month. Some of that sadness is tied into very specific and contingent problems with French politics and the French social system, which conceivably could be fixed and overturned by a more ambitious and imaginative and reformist government and so on. But I do feel that very much, whereas New York, with all of its difficulties and problems in the last five years of New York have been a lesson, a seminar in the difference between anxiety and fear. You know, everybody talks about anxiety and fear as though they're synonyms, but really, New Yorkers have always been anxious. New York has always been an anxious place. It's Woody Allen city, right? It's for people like me. Talk too fast or our hands move too quickly. We're anxious, folks. But anxiety is a very energizing emotion. You're anxious and it gets you to do things, gets you to do too much. Fear, which really only came to New York in the past five years, is a paralytic. It stops you, it slows you down, it makes you unable to take sane action. And I think that sense of paralysis was something very new and different. I think it's gone now. I think we've cured ourselves through simply, as I said a moment ago. And so that's what this book is about, through the sheer force of living. Because you either were going to leave or you were going to stay and live. And if you choose your life over your fear, you have no choice but to choose to hope and to make plans, because that's the nature of living for human beings. So this is a very long winded answer to say that I love Paris, loved my years there. It has a place in my heart which will never be Removed. But I also recognize that there is a kind of sadness in Paris and about Paris right now that all my young, all the Parisians I know who are under 30 are very eager to get out. Not all. Not everyone. They still believe that it's the ideal place and that they're the ideal people, but they are ready to go very often. And you know, the other reason for that too, which people don't reflect on since efficiently. Sometimes it's simply to do with language. Simply to do with language. We are all, as English speakers, we're the inheritors of this huge world swaddling common language as our Spanish speakers. In another way, in some ways, French was the. Was the international language of the world throughout the 19th century. And if you read any 19th century fiction, everybody speaks French. I was reading a wonderful book the other night about the great game that is the battle in Afghanistan in the 19th century between Russia and England for control of India. And the great Russian spy meets the great English spy, true story. On the top of a mountain. And they speak French to each other because that was the common language, just as the same two guys now would speak English. So that creates another problem. So if you're a French writer or a French speaker, there's a ceiling immediately over your head about how far you can go, about how wide you can spread your message, in fact. So all of those things, I think, mitigate against Paris ever being again what it has been to people in the past 200 years. Which does not mean I love it any the less. You know, there's this far more to be said for Hector in the Iliad than there is for Achilles. Hector is the hero of the Iliad, even though he's the one who loses. And Troy is the place that gets destroyed. Lady. Here, after a while, a lot of times, everybody that eyeglasses starts to kind of sound like him. We have a similar speech cadence pattern, and especially because one of my best friends and I are very similar in temperament and attitude. But he doesn't like the voice of the New Yorker. And I love it. And I was just curious. It made me think of how you control the voice. Like how when you're editing and collecting you hard find something. The voice of the New Yorker. It's a very thorny and vexed issue because of course, our official party line, which I will now parrot, is that there is no one voice of the New Yorker. That if you look at the range number of writers who have written regularly for the New Yorker over the past 75 years, James Thurber and S.J. perlman and A.J. liebling and Joseph Mitchell and John Hersey and John Updike and John Cheever. And then you look at the range of writers who write for it now, Malcolm Gladwell and Anthony Lane and myself. There's no what. Where is there any commonality amongst all of those radically different and singular people? But of course, that's not true. Or it is true to some degree, but it ultimately isn't true. There is a common voice, and the only way I can describe it. I will tell you a story of One of the greatest of all New Yorker writers was a man named Joseph Mitchell, who was long forgotten and has somewhat been revived since. He wrote amazing stories about New York, collected in a book called up at the Old Hotel, which is still in print. And he had stopped writing entirely for 30 years for complicated reasons. He'd written a great book called Joe Gould's Secret, and then he had stopped writing. But when I first came to The New Yorker 20 years ago in the old, old offices, my office was right next to him. It's his. And I could hear him typing all day. So I knew he was still working. So we would go out to lunch occasionally. And I asked him that question. I said, do you think there's anything that New Yorker writers actually have in common? New Yorker writers of your generation, the golden generation, the great generation? And he was a lovely man from North Carolina. And he said, no. He said, well, none of them could spell, and, you know, none of them really had any sense of grammar. And then he said, but each one, each one had a kind of wild exactitude of his own. That was such a beautiful phrase, a wild exactitude. And I knew at once what he meant. That is, that it involved constantly searching for the specific and the particular. We've never been a magazine of generalized ideas, you know, you never have read in The New Yorker 2025 a look ahead or the Next Thing. It's not about. Or analytic pieces about public policy. We don't publish those. We never have. We search for exactitude, and we hope that it will be wild. That is to say, that it will be witty or surprising or strange in some way. And if you think, if there is something in common between Malcolm Gladwell and Anthony Lane and so on, it is that they are masters, I think, of a wild exactitude. Nobody could be more precise and even scientific in his interest than Malcolm is, say. But he's also got a wildly original mind, and he will always come up with a perverse or contrarian conclusion, profoundly counterintuitive conclusion. Anthony is a wonderful wit, but he always is on the money about performances and faces and so on. So I do think a wild exactitude is what we search for or have in common. And that for people who are looking for and I don't mean this as a put down of your friend at all, but we're not very good at what should we do about the Middle East. Or in fact, the weakest thing we've ever run are think pieces. In fact, it's a term of operium in the magazine. It reads like a think piece to me. Or it reads like a thumb sucker, you say, and there's no worse thing you can say about a New Yorker piece inside the New Yorker, except it's a think piece. So people who like think pieces, and there's a lot to be said for think pieces will not like the New Yorker. People who like a certain wild exactitude or value it will like it. That's my own, my own take on it, gentlemen, here. My sisters wrote I come from an interesting family, I will say, and my sister and my mother. Yeah, I think it was accurate. There's six of us. I had dinner with my sister last night in Berkeley. She's a professor of developmental psychology there. My mom's an interesting woman. She was one of the generation of pioneering linguists who came out of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, along with Noam Chomsky and many others. And in fact, something I wanted to somebody here can tell me more about. She did in 1964, 65, what must have been among the pioneering work in machine translation in trying to do. She has a PhD in formal logic and in linguistics, and she was working on machine translation, which I gather is a problem that you folks have largely licked and have largely licked, if I understand correctly, not by finding an algorithm, but by studying probabilities and so on. She was searching for an algorithm and writing algorithms, and that turns out to be a bad solution to the problem, as I understand it, or an insufficient, not as efficient a solution. And then she went on to do work in the inheritance of grammatical features. And my sister's a psychologist and I was blessed to have a grow up in a family that argued and worried about things. I am, however, the maverick in the family. I am the only one without a PhD. I'm 24 years ABD now, and I wanted to do something a little bit different, in fact. But I do think my sister Alison, I have many sisters, I have five sisters. But that sister in particular writes about children and she has a wonderful book which I urge any of you who are going to have kids to read, called the Scientist in the Crib, about how children's minds develop. And we've ended up doing very similar things from totally opposite ends. That is, we're fascinated by, to put it a little pretentiously, but not, I think, inaccurately, the creation of consciousness. What is it? How does consciousness come into the world? How is it that you see this little creature suddenly emerging into the world and then you're aware of the fact that that creature's mind can encompass all of experience and add something new, recreate experience, reimagine experience in new ways? I have a story in this book about my then 3 year old daughter Olivia, who had an imaginary friend. And her imaginary friend's name was Charlie Ravioli, and he was a New Yorker. And the distinct thing about him was that he was always too busy to play with her. And she would hold her little toy cell phone up and say, ravioli Wavioli, can you come and play? Okay, call me. And then she'd hang up and she'd say, I always get his machine, in fact. And occasionally they would bump into each other and grab a cappuccino and go for lunch. And I asked Alison about this and she explained to me that 67% of 3 year olds have imaginary friends. But she'd never heard before about a child who had an imaginary friend who was too busy to play with her. But what she said and what Alice and I worked it out together is that what kids do with imaginary friends is the they make up fictional characters who sort of are prisons of their experience. If you're a kid growing up by the ocean, you make up an imaginary friend who lives in the waves. And if you're a kid growing up in New York, you make up an imaginary friend like everybody in New York who's too busy all the time to stop and play with the child who imagined him. And so in a funny way, we both are looking at the same thing. I'm looking at it from the point of view of a comic essayist, and she's looking at it from the point of view of a developmental psychologist. But really our interests converge. Very much so, no. I loved Ellison's piece in that book. And it's like every large family, if any of you know, you end up speaking a dialect that really only the other people in the family totally understand. And you can't get away with anything if you can't steal a joke or a reference or repeat yourself. Without everybody knowing it. So it makes you uneasy but honest when you're in their company. Thank you. Yes. How do you reconcile your views on Americans and American life that you had in Paris with your views now that you've moved back? Well, you know, Paris to the Moon. The book I wrote about Paris, in many ways, was about New York. I mean, it was about America. It was about stepping back from America, the ocean that I'd grown up in and trying to make sense of it. And you could see things at a distance that you couldn't see up close. There's a story in that book about how my son in Paris became addicted to videos of Barney, the horrible purple dinosaur. And it was only because I was away so far that I could see that actually Barney and Bill Clinton were exactly the same person, exactly the same figure, and that Bill Clinton was Barney for adults. In fact, it's the same physiognomy, the same approach, the same hug, the same. And I love Bill Clinton, but that's who he was. I think that coming home, for instance, here's one of the things I saw immediately. Coming home after six years abroad. There is an unbelievable amount of incidental sweetness in American life. And I mean that in two levels. One is, there's sugar in everything. And we forget it because we grow up with it. But if you've been away for six years and you haven't had any Heinz ketchup, and you think, well, I'll put a little bit on my burger or on my French fries, you're stunned. You say, oh, my God, it's like syrup, because it's so sweet. And you forget that when you're away. And that's true at a symbolic level, too. I couldn't eat just on. I couldn't eat Krispy Kreme doughnuts when we came home, which the kids love, because they're literally. You gag on them. They're so sweet. Now, I'm fine with them. But it's also true about American socialization, right? Americans are socialized to smile a lot and to be instantly warm. And French people hate it, right? Because they spot that it's totally phony. And it was very interesting the first day that my son was at school, in an American school, after having been at school, I said to him, how did it go? What did you think? It's a progressive school in New York. And he said, deep, deep worried breath, the teachers are too nice. And I said, what do you mean, the teachers are too nice? And he said, they said to all the kids, Draw a picture of yourself. And so I drew a picture of me on my scooter. And it was not good, Dad. I made the nose too big, the ears too big. But they took it and they said, it's wonderful. We're going to put it up on the blackboard. And he spotted, of course, that that was enthusiastic but insincere. I said, what would they have done in the French school? He said, oh, they would say, importequoi l' import a quoi, meaning no matter what we tell you, you do it all wrong. And they would. Their first socialized response is negative, right? And the first. In every situation, Americans are socialized to add incidental sugar to the exchange. Oh, in anything. And you have to relearn that sweetness. And you also have to learn that it doesn't go very deep. In fact, that it isn't. And one of the things that's difficult to learn in France, for instance, is that there's no incidental sweetness in human exchanges, but there is the possibility of genuine friendship. So something, for instance, that I forgot, it took me a long time to learn in France, is if someone befriends you, if someone takes you on as a friend, you have an absolute social obligation to them. In New York, at least, I think the same thing is true here. I know it's true here. If you have a good friend and you don't speak for three or four weeks because you're busy or working on a project or something, and you bump into them and they say, hey, I've missed you. What have you been doing? And you say, oh, I've just been so busy, it's instantly acceptable, right? Oh, sure. Okay, well, let's try. So have I. Let's try and get together. Can't do that in France, right? That's not an acceptable excuse. I've been busy, and therefore I've ignored a friend for three or four weeks. So there's much less incidental sweetness. But there's a sort of deeper level of caramel on the bottom of relations. So those two things have been striking. And then the third thing, to be perfectly honest, and it's more disturbing, is you are re educated in the insularity of most American opinions and most American notions. We remain very much an island. And it is stunning to see how little, even with globalization, even with the huge influx of Asian and European influences, how little most Americans know about the rest of the world. If you're living in Europe, you have to be conscious of some degree of German history, of English history. If you're living in France of Turkish history. So as you've often the question of the Turkish Armenian genocide is a living one, happened a hundred years ago in France. Now it's the way things are. We tend to be terribly insular and with the results one sees, in fact, that we don't adequately understand. I thought there was that fascinating thing in the Times the other day about the guy went around to all of the key foreign policymakers in Congress and said, could you define the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? And essentially none of them could do it. They had no idea what the difference was, if it was religious, if it was geographical, ethnic, racial, what it really was. And George W. Bush didn't know what the difference was before he invaded Iraq, as we learned in one of the books. So that insularity is much more powerful than I thought it would be. I thought that that would be crumbling, but I don't think that has crumbled, or at least not sufficiently. That's the worrisome thing about coming back.