I do feel like we are witnessing
several sea changes, which I
couldn't have honestly said that,
you know, 15 years ago or 20 years
ago. I mean something, you know,
something has changed and it's,
some things have clearly changed,
changed for the worse, and maybe,
maybe there's a silver
lining to this chaos,
but I would be hard pressed
to find it at the moment.
One of the things that I'm starting to
think about is I'm doing a little bit of
retrospective work trying to
think about where our world,
our country is. We're going
into another electoral cycle.
And I just think this is the
most bizarre age imaginable.
It doesn't behave like any previous time.
And I hear that we're at
peak this and peak that,
but I don't see any signs of at the,
what I increasingly see is
the incoherence slowing down.
Are you also perceiving a world that is
kind of intellectually unraveling or are
you seeing new kinds of formations that
give you the idea that something is
actually filling the voids that have been
opening up when it comes to coherence?
Well, I,
I worry that this is a kind of cognitive
delusion that th the thing that the
time you're in is always sort of newly
chaotic or incoherent or you know,
the civilizations on the brink in some
new way in your time. But I, but I,
I'm taken in by it. You know,
you gotta be kidding me. This,
this has never happened. No,
no. I mean, this, this is,
but there's gotta be some name for this
where it's just, you know, it's, it's a,
some kind of recency effect or, I mean,
clearly there have been periods in history
where things really have been on the
brink and in some new way. So I don't
mean to suggest that like this is,
I mean in general, no, I don't mean
like world war II is about to happen,
you know, world war three is about having,
but the I do feel like we are witnessing
several sea changes, which I
couldn't have honestly said that,
you know, 15 years ago or 20 years
ago. I mean something, you know,
something has changed and it's,
some things have clearly changed,
changed for the worse, and maybe,
maybe there's a silver
lining to this chaos.
But I would be hard pressed to
find it at the moment. Well,
so when I was trying to think about
what kind of chaos where we're,
we're in and using the fact
that you and I agree on a lot,
which I think makes our disagreements
more interesting because I don't like the
ground level. He said, she
said kinds of disagreements.
I don't think they're
that interesting. For me,
the big thing that's really new is that
I can't think of a single institution I
trust. There's no place that
I can go to for ground truth.
This is an example.
So you take the New York times and you
and I whinge about the New York times a
fair. I've been watching you
transition. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've grown pretty dark about the paper
record. Yeah, yeah. Five years ago,
you were somewhere else.
But I guess I'm wondering whether the
cohort before us 20 years ago had this
same litany of complaints about the New
York times or whether it's something
fundamentally has shifted while I was on,
I've been on the New York
times since the eighties. Okay,
so you were early to this party that
was very early to this party for,
but something has changed. So is
this, is this worse than the eighties?
It's a good question. It depends. Worst
isn't the right word in my opinion.
The way I would play with
it is I'd say that it's,
problem has always been the same,
which is narrative driven journalism.
And the first clear indication I have
of this I think was a story about
Woodstock in which the paper told
the reporter, how old are you?
You're not that much older than me. I was
in my diapers. No, no, no, no, no.
I don't remember this as
three old, 69 or no, no,
it's not that I remember
reading. I will clarify.
I remember reading a story
about the journalist being
sent who was sent to cover
Woodstock by the times being told right
about the filth and the hippies and the
unkempt firmness. And strangely,
that's a bias that I now share.
I, at one point, I had a, the,
the I, there was a point in my life in my,
in my twenties where I
kind of recapitulated the
sixties for myself and had
nothing but you know, nostalgia
for the sixties that I missed.
But now I have a fairly Joan
Didion look at you know,
th th slouching toward Bethlehem
moment that was w it just the level of
dysfunction and the non acknowledgement
of dysfunction it was pretty shocking,
so
I'm not going to come back and
get declined. Okay. Okay. The,
what I recall of the story was,
is that the times that told the reporter
what sort of story to file, right.
And the reporter called up
the times and said, I refuse,
I'm seeing something different.
I'm seeing something inspiring and heart
opening and I'm not going to file that
story. So if that's what you
want and I have cholera of color.
So I think that the narrative aspect of
the New York times has been both it's
structural reason for its importance
and the fatal flaw that in essence it
carries these very long narrative
arcs that come from the editor,
the editorial function at the times.
And that those are written in some
sense before the facts are known.
And so the facts, so then
fit to the narratives.
And then when the
counter narratives occur,
the times really either
doesn't report the story as,
and they really couldn't handle the,
the situation that happened with my
brother because it was exactly counter
narrative or then they distort based on
the idea that they need to push things
back into the narrative. So I
think that has always been present.
And there are particular kinds of stories
that the times writes that I find.
Absolutely. I mean,
I'll go so far as to say borderline evil.
And what they do is they crowd out
whatever natural inquiry process would be
happening. Hmm. So I'm happy to get
into a couple of examples about that,
but I would say bye.
I think that the problem has been
there at the New York times all along.
There are some new things
that I see as happening there,
like a conflict between the old line
journalists with the new line of sort of,
you know, Brooklyn based writers who are
telling us how to, how to think. Yeah.
what do you make of, I don't know if
this the time is maybe an exception here,
but I think generally what's
happened in journalism,
there's just been a clearing out
of real journalists, right? I mean,
the business has gotten so bad and again,
the T the times and the
post and the Atlantic,
there's a few outliers here that are
doing well in the age of Trump, at least,
you know, sort of, well Trump is saving
their business. Yes. Yeah. I mean,
they were actually there. They
weren't doing great before Trump,
but now they're doing okay.
But the rest of journalism
has been gutted.
And now we basically have
the blogosphere and you know,
it's kind of what the Huffington post did
to the landscape where you just have a
lot of people blogging
for free propping up a,
a a, an ad based clickbait
business model. Sure.
the ability, again that the idea, I
guess what I want to play with is,
is there some, I think
special about institutions,
imagine that you can get all
of the interesting articles
that you like somewhere
and somebody's saying something
interesting, you can piece them together.
But the fact that there is
no institutional home where
you can trust that like,
you know, the office of management
and budget or something or,
but what I'm saying about for
journalists about journalism in general,
is that what you think of as the
institution? I mean, just like the veneer,
the front facing website is not even an
institution in many cases it's like a,
it's a hard to differentiate what is a
blog and what is an actual journalistic
resource that has editors and
fact checkers and copy editors.
And you know, for certain
sites the distinction is
it's apparently nonexistent.
I mean, so like, you know,
people used to think salon was real
journalism or out with the guardian.
I mean the guardian has like a kind of
the blog side and the the guardians and
you can't tell the difference. You're
just reading what somebody wrote and well,
and you find the same people on Twitter
and then everyone is not on Twitter,
whatever their reputation, right. Really
is, you know, or should have been.
You could just see there their bias,
like they're not hiding it on Twitter
and then they hide it when they're in
their journalistic frame. While
I would argue that you know, I'm,
I'm fairly forgiving on that point because
I feel that Trump has made the hiding
of one's so-called bias,
a irresponsible, essentially
it's like you, you can't,
you can't pretend that this is a normal
president doing normal things and you're
going to be a normal journalist without
an opinion. While I agree with that,
although I would say you and
I are very split on this,
so just put a placeholder.
Maybe we'll get back to it.
Maybe not that I'm more worried about the
loss of things like nature and science
than I am the New York times. I'm
now worried that there is nothing,
and even in the hard sciences almost
that can stand up to the onslaught of
political pressure creeping in to
everything that has to be able to say no,
that we've lost the ability to tell
people to screw off if they're wrong.
Well, it's certainly been creeping
up on us in the life sciences.
It's been true of the social sciences
for a very long time. Yeah. It probably,
you know, physics and math are
going to be the last to go,
but I've even seen a little
bit of it in roads there.
And so I find the loss of nature and
cell and the university's terrifying
differently from the New York times.
Like this is, this is a few layers,
a deeper and more dangerous.
Do you not perceive that? Oh,
I think it's just different problems. I
don't know, which is more consequential.
I think the
I think that the failure to have a fact
based discussion and the incentives to
avoid one. I think that's it.
Just the scariest thing we
have going apart from the true,
the true monsters of, you know, pandemic
and nuclear war and things like that.
