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from New York Times opinion this is the

Ezra Klein

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show one thing we've been exploring more

on the show this year is taste I have

this view that the taste is becoming

more and more important

in this age of so much being algorithmic

so much being served up to you AI moving

to this world we're creating a

derivative version of anything is that

much easier knowing what what you like

what you think is good what you think is

bad what you respond to that that really

matters that is a a way to maintain both

humanity and the capacity to do great

things but after taste there is this

work of getting the thing to where you

want it to be right if you know

something is bad you feel it's not there

yet how do you get it to where it needs

to go the thing you are trying to do

there is editing I think we have an

overly narrow description of what

editing is we think of it as marking up

the grammar of a sentence with a pen but

great editors and I've worked with a lot

of great editors they're Mystics of A

Sort they're not

technicians they see something that that

isn't there yet whether of their own

work or your work and not really knowing

how to get there they help you get there

not really knowing how to get there they

helped themselves get there so this is a

thing I've been wanting to explore cuz

it's fuzzy we don't have very good even

language for it but there are really

great editors out there Adam Moss is one

of them he's considered by many

considered by me to be one of the truly

great magazine editors of his generation

in his 20s uh this is back in 1988 he

begins thisav very storied publication

called 7 days it survives only two years

and wins a national magazine award for

General Excellence he comes to the New

York Times he remakes the New York Times

magazine uh it becomes a a key home for

great narrative journalism for great

essayists he goes to New York Magazine

which he just turns into one of the

truly great magazines that still is

today under his successors in 2019 M

steps down from New York Magazine he

spends more time painting and becomes

interested in how artists get from

something fine to something great so he

begins asking them and the result is his

new book the work of art how something

comes from nothing which tracks

alongside 43 artists

some great piece they did be it a visual

art a piece of music a piece of

Journalism from where it began and he

gets them to turn over their drafts

their sketches their notes and tracks

Where It ultimately goes and and and how

they get it to there so this is a

conversation really about editing about

him as an editor about these artists as

editors and about how we can all become

better at editing how we can all even

understand when it is that we are

editing obviously in the conversation we

discuss some visual art that doesn't

translate that well into audio so we

will link the images of those works in

the show notes they are very much worth

following up on and checking out as

always my email ascin show atny

times.com Adam Moss welcome to the show

thank you Ezra I had a rumor that this

book had an an earlier title there was

something like on editing is that true

close just called editing yeah just

called editing yeah oh I'm so glad that

was

true because that that was the thing I

kept thinking about in the book thing I

think about with your career what does

it mean to edit I think any editing is

just a heightened level of sensitivity

to reaction I think you're

just being super

sensitive to the way in which your mind

is reacting or your heart is reacting

and you know it's not just an

intellectual thing it's also very much

an emotional thing Bob got Le in that

Caro documentary described editing as

reacting

and that is pretty good definition I

think but it's not just reacting right

it's trusting the reaction yeah it's

trusting the reaction and then there's

another part which is kind of separate

which is figuring out what to do about

it I would write all over manuscripts

and sometimes I would have Solutions but

often it would just be a reaction spent

a lot of time

praising the stuff that I thought was

good and kind of

withholding what I didn't think it was

good so instead of saying this is bad

people could just read yeah you just G

cold exactly horrible right you must be

fun to be in a relationship

with I was an editor for a long time was

editor and chief of Vox I'm still an

editor on this show in a way and I think

it took me at least a decade maybe more

to even come to the idea that I should

trust my own reaction yeah one thing

that I think happened to Media somewhat

destructively in the same period is that

editors stopped doing that and writers

stopped doing that you began to look at

social media for the reaction you began

to look outside right you know we we

knew what people cared about because

they were reading it we knew what and

one thing that I think held in in New

York Magazine and is held even since

you've left is it feels like it is for

somebody not decided by

everybody and i' I've started to

understand that it's more radical and

more

necessary but it's also a tremendous Act

of Faith in

yourself against the whole world right

how do you come to trust yourself your

reaction as

valid it's like trusting yourself in any

context which is that you get a little

courageous and you venture out and you

try something and I do think just you

know if we're going to get on the

subject of Journalism a little bit one

of the reasons that the thing that

you're describing it is true is that

magazines have been

so newspapers everything has been so

disaggregated it was much more necessary

for the whole to be tied together with a

single

sensibility now you know many people

when they read listen to anything when

they take in media they don't

necessarily even know where it was from

so that I think that people have

surrendered a little bit of that thing

which I also value tremendous amount the

feeling that it came from somewhere

someone something that I can feel and

identify so you are considered by many

considered by me to be one of maybe the

great magazine editor of your generation

yeah you're I know see you're going to

do that so I've listened to interviews

with you I know you don't like that okay

so what you then do is you say well I've

just worked with a lot of great teams

that's true I know so it's very hard for

people to say why their judgment is good

MH but somehow the thing you did at 7

days which was the magazine you did in

your late 20s to 30 the won the national

magazine award as it closed down then

did it New York Times magazine at New

York these were different teams yeah I

have tried to hire editors in fact I

have hired editors successfully they've

worked for me it is extraordinarily hard

to hire editors writers you can see what

they write y so if it is just about your

great teams which I don't fully believe

but it's clearly somewhat true MH you

clearly hired great teams at a bunch of

different places I'm a very good hirer I

will give myself what do you look for in

editors how do you find good editors you

talk to them but we all do that but but

maybe you listen for different things

than what you listening for I listen for

confidence but not too much confidence I

listen for just an interesting mind

usually I'll ask fairly banel questions

and see where they take them I would

kind of just keep proding

them to see how the gears of their mind

work and if I was bored I would Tire

them if I was excited by the

conversation um if I learned something

from the conversation and if they seemed

like decent people which is not small a

lot of people come in and they're they

show signs of being the kind of editor

that I think is destructive rather than

constructive which is to say that

they'll run rough shot over the writer

Talent or the visual Talent or whatever

they're in charge of and there needs to

be a certain humility in an editor but

also they need to have a really

interesting mind did you have goto

interview questions I would ask them to

try to form story ideas on the

Fly of whatever happened that day in

either news or their own experience and

in part that question was to see how

alert and well read they were but also

how fast their mind worked in

formulating the Raw data of experience

into story into narrative into essay and

then I listen to my own reaction was I

excited by this person did I want to be

in their company it's not really unlike

you're sitting in a dinner party and

someone's interesting to you or they're

not but you not worry about being misled

by

Charisma I think charisma's big part of

it actually so yeah I could be misled by

Charisma but I I'm pretty good Charisma

detector um cuz some people are

great fun to talk to but they're not

great at doing the thing I I've run into

this yeah you get that and the flip is

I've known people who are actually not

great fun to talk to they're introverted

they're nervous in the interview but

they're amazing at do the thing and I've

known editors like that too yeah I have

too although I think I'm pretty good at

getting shy people to relax they have to

be able to have the conversation no

matter what their basic personality

inhibitions are and then in terms of

doing the thing there are tests and

stuff like that that you give them that

you evaluate that but also I really

think that you can

teach people how to do the thing and you

can't teach people to think I agree yeah

I think that is the hardest part of

hiring yeah so I want to go back to

something we were talking about a minute

ago about this theory that editing is

about reading your own reaction and

being able to work with that reaction so

you have this great interview with David

Mandel showrunner of vep a show that I

love and the two of you talk through a

single joke on that show and the way

Mandel hears all these Alternatives and

uses his own reaction to guide to the

final form of the joke so can you just

talk through that joke first one of the

is for the book was that I um went to

the set of vep I was invited by Frank

Rich who was a both a friend of mine and

executive producer of the show and uh he

just you know just as a lark said hey

come I was in Los Angeles come visit so

I did and um I sat there behind Dave and

watched him it was just some stupid joke

that landed on a Jewish

holiday and uh most LED his people to

the land of Hanukkah Kanan Rabbi shut up

nille stupid hat is too small for my

head fine stupid hat is too small for my

yamak it's okay y conversion to Judaism

is about a commitment to the Jewish

lifestyle oh good cuz all this learning

is giving me a yamak ache so you don't

even focus on that whole routine right

you might think of that routine as an

object but but no just that that first

it's just one word one tell only one

change variable in it so there's this

thing okay there there's a thing that

they do called alts where they actually

take most jokes and they try to squeeze

them as much as possible to get the most

juice as they can get one of that's one

of the things when I was beginning to

think about the book that I watched with

such awe admiration I don't know this

moment is like 3 seconds in the show and

they take hours on it even though it

just Zips right past most viewers

wouldn't even pay any attention to it so

what were some of the alts so the alts

in this case said scripted and shot

Jonah saying that land is called New

York Hanukkah that's the one they used

they also wrote Egypt miloni is that

it's like a yish name anyway these were

the various ones they did shoot New York

and Hanukkah and Hanukkah is the one

that they finally used New York would be

kind of funny too yes it would so tell

me about what Mandel is doing there what

is the the edit happening how does he

make the decision between them

he describes making the decision

purely by reading his own reaction and

that it happens in the editing room it

also happens on the set because they

only shoot some of them he fusses around

himself with the joke and then people

feed him various other Alternatives and

he he is just evaluating and he's

evaluating not in a way that feels

conscious at all but he's trying to

understand what makes him laugh there

are in my view three stages of of making

art one of them is the imagining and the

final one is the shaping but in between

there is the judging which is kind of

what we're talking about here the

editing and imagining gets a lot of

space on YouTube videos and books that

help you free your up your imagination

which is very important and then the

shaping gets a lot of attention because

it's about craft and technique and how

you make the thing that is at least

close to something in your head what

kind of never gets any love is this

Middle Ground which is the judging and

uh after your imagination has spewed

whatever it is that it is spewed there

is has to be a kind of functioning

intelligence that is not intellectual

necessarily but is nevertheless your

mind operating keenly making sense of

what you've done and then figuring out

how you can best put it to use and you

know all of this is so subjective

everything is so sub objetive there is

no objective explanation of this word

will work better than that word but in

his case he just sits in the eding room

and he laughs or he

doesn't we should say here that the

book's in some ways motivated Yeah by

you have gotten more deeply into

painting yeah and the distance between

what you think is good and what you're

able to do is vast and seems to

Fascinate You Yeah it fascinates me and

frustrates me and did actually motivate

my I felt like well okay

artists may look at the world

differently than I

do and there was a way of thinking that

I didn't seem to have so I went to talk

to other people about how they thought

and that's kind of what the motivating

thing in the book is a number of the

artists in your book talk about this

idea of listening to the body twia Tharp

says that when she's drafting a piece

and she's a great choreographer she says

okay brain catch up with the body Carol

Walker who made the sugar baby sculpture

in the Domino sugary ref

said she had to quote put some paper on

the floor and let my body do the work

tell me a bit about the sense of the

tension between the cerebral and embod

and the physical yeah it happens

actually really unbelievable number of

places in the book and also there's this

other very strange thing that happens in

the book which

is over and over again people describe

being most creative when they're in

motion so whether they put themselves in

motion when they're running or swimming

or something like that or biking or even

just on a train or an airplane just

moving the body physically in space

moving seems to unleash something in

them but I feel this way I don't know if

do you do things other than your sort of

Journalism life because I do find that

in my own painting it's a physical

sensation it's a physical high and it's

one of the really satisfying aspects of

it I'm considering this do I do first do

I do anything aside from my journalism I

I do I like to think that I have a full

a full life well I didn't mean that in

I'm joking I miss that state which I

think I used to achieve more

often and I think one reason I used to

achieve it more often is that when I

started out as a blogger there weren't

that many notifications competing for

your attention you didn't have slack and

not that many people emailed me and I

find I break concentration much more now

uhhuh the place where my body leapt up

when you were talking

was the plane mhm I find I achieve

completely different mental States on

planes and I think it's because there is

so little distraction and so when you're

talking about painting I mean I assume

you don't paint on a screen I assume you

paint on on canvas and I do think there

is a tension between

the body that that kind of embodied Flow

State and distraction and Interruption

it takes time to get there and I think

it is difficult to stay there sometimes

and at least for me I remember being

there more often when I was younger yeah

interesting well people describe it as

one of the

rewards of creating is to get themselves

into this thing that we've all come to

know is the Flow State this sort of

period of utter absorption where all of

the distractions in life just disappear

and I think that is real I've even as a

terrible painter I've even experienced

it but people actually seek a kind of

physical sensation as well as a total

absorption I mean I have this one

chapter in the book of Ian Edelman who

is this crazy magnificent sand castle

maker and that's why I wanted to talk to

him I want to talk to him about making

this thing that would that he has one

day to do and then perishes at the end

of the day I thought that was something

quite beautiful and he described tries

making sand castles not just in terms of

the kind of crazy almost Supernatural

Focus but also in terms of its physical

sensation and describes it Compares it

to the feeling he has on a bicycle

riding in traffic in New York City

dodging cars and that just seemed like a

fantastic metaphor because he's moving

forward in motion he's dodging

people you know when you make something

in a way it's like a you know this is

just totally not true but I'll say in

anyway it's like a video game you know

things are coming at you you're try you

have to deal quickly with them you have

to make decisions about what you're

going to do with them on the way to

something else what do you think about

the relationship here

between speed and this kind of

creativity or intuition because there

are people here working very slowly and

then something that comes up again and

again is the power of the deadline yeah

the thing they did very quickly yeah

well I mean I think the people are

different right Bob Dylan for instance

famously said he wrote all songs and 15

minutes 20 minutes half an hour I have a

piece of stationary in the book the book

is filled with process artifacts of all

kinds it's a very visual book and this

is just a written record of him writing

blowing in the wind and inverting a

stanza um or a verse and some people do

their best work really fast and some

people take forever doing it but it's

important to remember that those people

who do it very fast they're able to do

it very fast because they have just

getting back to the body like an athlete

they have um kind of body memory they

have skills so ingrained in them that

that their impulsive decisions are

informed by a lifetime of

experience I think another example of

this just spitting the work out at least

at the beginning

is the the chapter of Steven Sim so can

you talk a bit about that process for

him there was a situation that it's from

the musical company and there was a

situation that the playwright wrote in

which a bride is flipping out having a

full-blown anxiety attack and it starts

and I have it in the book uh it starts

as this monologue of

her having a kind of nervous breakdown

um it's great little monologue um and he

thinks of this as a song and he writes a

song called The Wedding is off and its

function is to recreate this nervous

breakdown in music and it's kind of a

disaster the singer can't sing the song

The rhythm's all wrong it's jaggedy it

doesn't build the the he's made a bunch

of mistakes and it becomes absolutely

clear that

thing has to go and just ruthlessly just

ruthlessly he goes boing and just ejects

the song right out of the show and

because he is Steven stime the new song

had different rules and so the new song

would have to be started essentially

from scratch um and uh he was able to

write the song which is called getting

married today in a week which is crazy

listen everybody look I don't know what

you're waiting for a wedding what's a

wedding it's a prehistoric ritual where

everybody promises Fidelity forever

which is maybe the most horrifying word

I've ever heard and which is followed by

a honey where suddenly he'll realize he

settled with a nut and want to kill me

which he should thanks up Bunch but I'm

not getting married so go have lunch cuz

I'm not getting married you've been

grand but I'm not getting married and

don't just stand there I'm not getting

married and don't tell Paul but I'm not

getting married today when you listen to

this song which it's well known to be

maybe the most dense fastest song in all

of musical theater and also one of the

most difficult to sing you will see its

incredible complexity it's it's really

one of the great theater songs of all

time and he was able to do it in a week

because he had solved all the the

problems the first

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time the Amy Silman chapter is the one

that sticks with me most and it is worth

the price of admission on the book just

for that so to give a little bit of

background abst painter mhm and you have

36 or 37 39 39 39 of the iterations this

one painting went through mhm and it

transforms

utterly but it is never clear to me

exactly why and you have some of her

reasoning but she is also very honest in

saying it's not very convincing her

reasoning right not at all and but she

ought to she says in a way that others

don't absolutely it's not clear that

this have been any worse if I had

stopped at number seven right or number

starts saying you know the first one was

the best I shouldn't have changed

anything and I actually could have done

she has about a hundred over a hundred

iterations of this I could have

basically devoted the entire book to the

path of this painting and so there is

this question then is what you're

listening

to editorial Intuition or

Neurosis well there might be the same

thing I mean it's part of her

I don't know what you call it I guess

you know her own self-description that

it doesn't actually matter where she

stops that the important thing in the

making of the painting is the making and

destroying and making and destroying

that that's actually what the whole

thing is about I use this phrase It's

almost like a game of musical chairs

where she decides to stop in that what I

think is a fairly neurotic process but I

don't mean neurotic in a bad way she is

performing a kind of artistic ritual and

it happens to be that a great painting

usually is the thing that she ends up

with but also let me just tell you

because you can't really fully grock it

until you see it there's so many

beautiful paintings on the way that she

just ruthlessly erases she doesn't

really even think twice about it and she

doesn't have a particular regret about

it in fact as she puts it at one point

regret

is kind of what the work is all about

one of my very favorite chapters Cheryl

Pope using felt in this absolute gutting

piece of art mother and child on blue

mat I found it extraordinarily moving

can you say who she is what that work is

she's a Chicago based artist um she

works in lots of different media um

she had been

deeply

upset while making this work which of

course interested me and she was a just

absolutely wonderful person but the

story here is that she had

three consecutive

miscarriages and she

really very much wanted to be a mother

wanted to give birth to a

child and she said she felt almost

deranged to in a sense create the child

in an artwork to have the artwork be the

motherhood that she couldn't have

physically and so she created a work on

felt in which

she visualized the child in fact at one

point two children then one child at one

point the child and the mother had no

faces

because she was afraid giving them faces

would be

too well specific for an artwork but

also too painful for

her and eventually she decided she

needed to give them faces and after the

work was finished she regretted that

decision it's possible this is actually

said in the chapter but just while we

were talking about it the reason the

felt is so

affecting is it's something children

make artwork out of yeah it's not said

in the chapter but I think that's true

the other thing that I felt about the

felt was that it looks like yarn I

should say yeah it does um is that she

has to punch through it so the physical

act we talked before about the way that

physical action factors into the making

of the art but in this case the punching

through since this was built on so

much anger and upset also moved

me one thing the book is very interested

in is tools MH and something I noticed

was how seldom a digital tool was

mentioned I feel like the only people

who used a digital tool were the

musicians recording Into The Voice Memos

app of their iPhone yeah almost

everybody else was using paper of some

sort or another the the notebooks were

paper the sketching was paper it it felt

like people were really pushing

themselves particularly in the editing

process in the idea generation process

onto paper first is that right and

second why well it's not entirely right

there's a whole chapter that the

exception to that which is about a guy

named Tyler Hobbs who's a generative

artist and why I like that chapter so

much is that the machine is super

important it becomes the hand he creates

algorithms gives it to the computer the

computer spits stuff out he reacts to it

the same way that a painter might react

to whatever they've painted with their

hands and then he changes the algorithm

and just keeps going that way well he's

in a way become the editor of the

machine absolutely which I think I have

a a thing that is going to turn us much

more into editors cuz we're going to

have to know if the thing that is

spitting at us is correct and evaluate

it yes the generative artist you

mentioned whose work is very cool MH he

has to be working in code because he is

trying to get the computer to create

more interesting work right but the

people for whom the question is how do

they get themselves to create more

interesting work felt to me almost

ostentatious

oriented towards paper paper yeah and

that included the young ones I didn't

notice a large age Gap here it wasn't

like the young people were all you know

typing away on an iPad and and and so

what is it about paper why are they

doing that well paper for one thing

um is something you can throw away so

there is a a thing that a lot of artists

and Writers Do which is they create a

first pass that is perishable that is

meant to be be disposed of so they write

in long hand as opposed to type

something they paint like in the Amman

example and mean to paint it over George

Saunders um who did such a great episode

with you that I listen to actually all

the time George sers gives himself six

months to just totally screw around as

the way to make the thing so there is a

kind of built-in failure stage very

important I think and pretty

universally expressed

um well my theory the thing the

hypothesis I am testing here to see if

it comes up okay is that it is easier to

achieve certain kinds of states with

paper so I I did an episode some time

ago now with Marian wolf who's a great

scholar of how people read and the

reading mind and the point of a lot of

her work is that different things happen

in your mind reading on paper reading on

a screen reading on different kinds of

screens what is happening with

distraction I mean it it just changes

form does change content it certainly

changes the reception of content yeah I

think you're more focused when you're

working with paper I mean I find at

least in my own experience and I you

know I'm a focus group of one that my

mind wanders more when I'm reading on a

screen I mean even just thinking about

the smoothness of a computer screen

versus the texture of a page one has a

kind of scratchiness there's a lot in

art there's a lot of preoccupation with

what the what the surface feels like the

toothiness of the surface um in fact you

know my book is is sort of smoother than

I would have wanted it was the the

smoothness was a compromise in order to

get the image reproduction to be so good

so and the image reproduction is really

good but I would have rather it had a

kind of um almost

mountainous kind of texture which the

cover does yeah the cover does the book

is a I really want to say this and and I

want people to hear it it's a piece of

art itself it's a beautiful object I

mean I I enjoyed its physical form more

than I've enjoyed the physical form of a

book in a long time oh that's nice and

that was clearly highly intentional yes

yeah the um the cover is

a the image on it is a PR manuscript in

which he had crossed the whole thing out

with these GI blue x's and then to

actually get penguin to agree to do the

book in this cloth cover reproducing

those X's it just felt like okay that's

that really is the book I'm trying to

make here and and they were generous

enough to do that I like this topic of

the way the feel of a thing or your

relationship to a material or a tool

changes the way you think you have a

great chapter with the musician rosom

mhm and I want to play a bit of the song

you talk about in a river

f l of the

Stars so you

[Music]

cross so he starts off playing the

mandolin there and then he switches to

the guitar which is such an unusual

transition and it just changes the tone

of the song completely and what's Wild

to me in your interview with him is that

rosim didn't know how to play the

mandolin before composing that song at

all and this just comes up repeatedly

where people are using new materials for

work that becomes really important like

Carol Walker using sugar to make that

massive

sculpture what's going on in this

confrontation with new tools and

materials and approaches what does it

unlock for these artists who really know

something really well to then move into

using something they don't know that

well well I think the artist is drawn to

things that will excite them and I think

that artists like anyone get bored doing

the same thing over and over again and

so they they sync new adventure um one

of my incredible frustrations as a

painter even today and my painting is

just very very tight and conservative

and I just decided about two weeks ago

that I would just put away all the

brushes I had wouldn't touch them and

then I would just make paintings using

whatever materials I have around pallet

knives sure but scissors any ruler

anything that I had so that I could

smear the paint so that it wouldn't have

the kind of

fastidious relationship to the thing

that it really is in real life and I

wanted to just allow myself a little bit

of Berserk so I'm myself trying new

materials in order to produce something

different and actually it's kind of

working I was really struck by all that

too that how many time in the Cheryl

Pope chapter for instance she just keeps

changing media and she doesn't know she

she tells me that she goes into Home

Depot and she asks the

salesperson how do you actually do that

how do you use glue this way or how do

you use felt this way what is the device

I should buy

and they just continue to do it the the

the point I would emphasize here because

I found it both reassuring and

frustrating to hear this over and over

again was

that the reason they're able to do this

the reason they're able to work in a

different medium that they don't know is

because of their training and one of the

things that training does the rosom

example rosam I mean as he describes

playing the mandolin is just playing the

guitar upside down and he has gotten a

really rigorous early musical education

which has enables him to be able to do

the thing that I couldn't do I don't how

to play the guitar I would certainly not

know how to play the mandolin so anyway

there's that just it's a basic thing

that kind of has to be said that the

training really helps there's not a lot

of shortcutting that goes on but the

other thing is just we had talked about

this a little bit earlier is um faith is

that once they learn they can actually

succeed using new materials

they're moved to New use new materials

again and again it made me think of

Steven Johnson's book were good ideas

come from and one of his arguments in

that book is that great ideas often come

from adjacency somebody knows a lot

about a domain and then looks over into

the next domain and applies it yeah and

that's what I see happening often here

which is adjacency rostom knows a lot

about I assume the guitar and other

things looks over into the mandolin and

can feel something yeah well I would say

that this whole book is exactly that I

never wrote before I've hate writing and

I have been a terrible writer for most

of my life because I had this idea of

how to write that there was a way to

write and so that way to write was

pretentious and I couldn't stand it and

so the draft process was really teaching

me how to write it was like using my

editor skills that I had honed in a lot

of years and applying it to myself and I

kind of found I was a pretty good editor

of myself and I was able to strip this

thing down strip this thing down strip

this thing down into something I could

stand I still like doing it but I'm not

horrified by what I produced as a writer

I functionally cannot start writing

until I can see the entire thing yep so

many of the writers I know they write a

little piece for here they start in the

middle they go to the end non-fiction

writers I know tons of non-fiction

writers who they they're very able to

the put together the pieces where they

know what this scene they have this

argument and then they begin stitching y

for me I will just be stuck until the

entire structure reveals now that might

not be the final structure the Beast has

things can change in in the

edit but I need the whole thing there

yeah I think I'm more like you um but

people are different that's that's the

point here you know there's 43 chapters

in the book and there's 43 different

ways that people make art that's not to

say there isn't anything that unites

them I mean I do think that um they are

a little bit unusually a collection of

freaks and that is that

they have a kind of superhuman drive

that enables them there's a great quote

that I found early on by James Baldwin

saying Talent is insignificant what

matters

are love discipline luck and most of all

endurance and that's what people who are

really talented at things say really tal

well I think it's really I mean you know

having done a kind of data set of these

43 that is seems to be true these things

take a long time they're hard work

ultimately they need to go the distance

they need to not give up when pretty

much everyone else would give up so

we've been talking a bunch here about

artists who who edit a lot but I want to

think about the other side of that too

those who go out more raw so let's hear

a clip by this performance artist Grady

West who invented a character named

Adena Martina do you have good salads

very good oh good then I'd like a small

cesarian

oh but does it have Glutton I really

don't want Glutton I'll have your

Glutton I'll have her Glutton you will

yeah just get it on the side oh that's

great yeah just have him put the Glutton

on the side and dorine I think I'll hand

things off to you is your Red Bull in a

can or is it fresh in a can oh that's a

shame do you have any breakfast

wines so gry West is voicing the

cesarian lady there that's Dina Martina

how did that act that persona come

together okay so he goes to this Cabaret

and he doesn't think about it for one

second the night before he finds a wig I

think and he smears this makeup on his

face and he goes out with nothing

scripted and just starts to talk and

calls himself Dina Martina this all

happens without any forethought

whatsoever and he does have a very

particular sense of humor we were

talking before about taste sense of

humor seems to me the same operates

under the same wavelength he has now

ridden Dina Mora for decades I think

three decades into an international

stage act in lots of different places I

know him from Province Town where he's

kind of in Residence over the Summers

but it is an hour of a character

completely oblivious to how anyone else

would see him it has a bunch of

characters one of them you heard Dorene

Dorene is the heir to the CeX Fortune um

he has a child named F which is a puppet

um the thing is insane it's just

completely unhinged and it's perfectly

intact in terms of a Bizarro world that

he has created there's no cracks in it

and he developed it in 1 second in 19

what have you into a sort of alternative

Cabaret context it's amazing and then he

now yeah he writes it now it's honed to

a 55 minutes but basically it's still

Anarchy

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one thing I enjoyed about the book is

the age range of the artists profiled

mhm generalizing wildly what is

different what are the Hallmarks of

great art produced early in a career and

late in a career for the most part I

think that one very important quality of

a artist is is that have faith that they

can make the thing there's a there's a

great line that Michael Cunningham who

wrote The Hours um said to me at one

point he just I didn't even realize he

was saying it but I I was asking him how

it was possible that when he he'd

written a draft of the book he had to

throw away the draft and I kind of

probed him about that and didn't that

feel just really awful he said no

there's plenty more where that came from

and he just said it like that and that

is a a one- sentence description of a

thing that is absolutely essential to an

artist which is the faith that they can

keep doing it and those people as they

got older people had more and more faith

the flip side of that and one thing I

know from my own experience is that you

make kind of wonderful things when

you're young when you don't know any

better there was a magazine I did called

seven days when I starting out it was

really it broke every rule in the book

it just was like uh didn't have a middle

it was just all sidebars it was just it

was it was nutty that from the

perspective of someone who understands

how to build magazines it broke every

Rule and for no good reason and I would

never make that in my life now or in the

last 25 years I would have I just looked

at it and thought it's kind of

amateurish and

stupid and yeah it kind of worked it was

exactly the right thing for then and I

did something that I wouldn't be able to

do later look at uh Leaves of Grass by

Walt Whitman he wrote that book

throughout his life there's the young

man's version and there's the old man's

version and some of the language changes

as he gets closer to death and and

that's interesting and the poem is in

some ways better at the end but not in

all ways in some ways it was best at the

beginning I know writers and primarily I

know political writers and and and

non-fiction writers and my gloss on this

would be that pry in politics Young

Writers are arrogant and overconfident

and don't know what they don't know and

don't know what's going to fail and old

writers are way too cautious and know

too much what's going to fail and are

too locked into what the rules have been

and both sides are completely right in

what they're annoyed at in the other

yeah and the balance of that in any

given career is really hard it is and

it's not necessarily true that the

middle-aged person has it all together

no and I I really mean this and

everybody is right I've come to think of

the of this kind of thing and I think

there are many Dynamics like this you

have to think of it like an ecosystem

yeah we always want people to be the

right balance but ecosystems need to be

in Balance you need like young political

thinking that is kind of wild yeah and

doesn't know that we tried this and it

completely failed absolutely and you

actually need that just as you need the

old thinking and one is not better than

the other they need to both be there and

asking one person to embody it all is

not reasonable yeah no that's true I

mean I'll make I mean I just think is

correct in almost every context and just

to pull back to artists for one second

the essence of making art is having play

and rigor in pretty much equal balance

or child and adult in pretty much equal

balance so hard it's so hard to get the

equilibrium right you're too childish

and you can make a glorious mess but it

has no structure to it it becomes

unintelligible to another human being

too much adult and the thing has no fire

no um there's nothing animating it so

this crazy middle ground in all of these

cases that we're talking about is

somehow where you have to live and it's

very hard to be

there one thing that comes up a bunch in

the book is you'll know that people will

find a much earlier version of a piece

for you than they realize they had right

right a jotting a draft something else

and it's far before they realize they

were working on the thing they were

working on and you often you keep

repeating it was there it was already

there it it made me think years ago my

story of myself as a journalist it's the

whole thing about how I sort of learned

to be a policy journalist you know

writing about Healthcare at the certain

point in time and somebody brought me uh

some columns I had done for the

alternative school newspaper when I was

at UC Santa Cruz and this was before all

that

and it turned out I just sounded like

myself right I was writing about John

K's tax plan and I was shocked to find

out that I was writing about John car's

task but I didn't think I had that

interest at that point right and there

is something that may come out or it may

not come out but there there is often a

sensibility buried somewhere that is

trying to come out for for a long time

whether you can let it out is a question

and socially dependent and a million

other things but but but there is

something buried in in people that For

Better or For Worse it's often hard to

get away from yeah well okay so I just

two responses to that one is one of the

really fun things about the method of

this book was

to actually show the various

artists the early work or the early

version of the thing which would usually

Amaze them and it would get them to

speak truthfully and to remember exactly

how it went in a way different than

their memory has distorted it over time

second thing is that yes people have a

sensibility that is theirs that they

can't escape and this again this is a

refrain oh my God how many people said

you can't run away from yourself you

can't you are yourself that's it I mean

Gregory kuden who's a photographer who

makes these very unusual photographs

which are kind of like film Stills and

they're Giant and very beautiful he was

just apologizing in a sense over and

over again for the fact that all of them

inhabit a certain kind of common

sensibility which I thought was

marvelous um but he was he says you're

just constantly trying to escape it

Carol Walker you know when she was

making the sugar sculpture um called the

subtlety or The Marvelous sugar baby uh

she was tired of the annabellum

Silhouettes that had kind of made her

famous were not tired but she felt she'

exhausted them and she was trying to do

something different but how different

she says at one point you cara who are

you and that is kind of a question

they're all asking I kept you know

talking to Thomas Bartlett who was a

music producer and we were talking about

this record which was people doing

covers uh Martha Wayne or Justin Vernon

of Bon their own versions of covers of

Neil Young's Harvest I think and and no

matter what their intention was the song

would sound like them it would not sound

like Neil Young it would sound like them

and they were not trying this was just

something they couldn't get away from so

this I think obvious but still

impossible not to Marvel at fact is that

you are who you

are I I want to end with something very

related to this which is this

distinction or or

question of whether you're editing for

yourself or editing for for the audience

I found myself pulling a bunch of my

media diet back to magazines over the

past year huh one I think they they

remain in many ways my favorite form

they're just remarkable acts of curation

almost every single one of

them and I found myself once again in a

way I haven't been for some time just

sort of desperate to feel like somebody

actually liked this maybe I wouldn't but

somebody somewhere did they chose it

they they made an intentional decision

and I want to bring it back to New York

Magazine the magazine you edited I love

New York Magazine longtime subscriber

it's my favorite

magazine and the thing that has always

amazed me about it is that I cannot

describe why it all goes together but

the sensibility is very coherent and it

has survived you which is more

impressive right it has been great since

you've left which means that what you

did was not just you sitting there

telling everybody what to do that that

there's something that emerged you guys

do all or did do all kinds of Washington

DC

profiles but I know you would not really

profile Jake Sullivan MH but there's

another kind of profile you would do MH

I cannot extract out of it the

description of it so how were you

figuring out what went with what was it

an idea of the audience was it it just

you you were just editing for yourself

and you are the

audience who's on the other end of that

process certainly the latter I was

always editing for myself and the reason

I left the magazine is that I felt like

I was no

longer the audience for it and the

audience needed to be younger than I was

and they needed to have a certain way of

looking at the world that I didn't have

anymore so I left um it's very poignant

to me that the curator the editor the

decider has become of less importance in

um in these times but I don't know had I

never knew in all of my years as an

editor I never knew how to edit for

somebody else I had to edit for myself I

had to have this thing that we talked

about at the very beginning of this

conversation this thing that you trust

and the only way to trust it is to feel

it I think that's a nice place to end so

then always our final question what are

three books you'd recommend to the

audience okay um there are three kind of

related to this project but they books

they all three books I really like um

one of them is a book of interviews with

Francis Bacon by David Sylvester I think

there's nine of them I learned more

about art from reading these interviews

I'm not a wild fan of Francis Bacon's

art I am a wild fan of Francis Bacon as

a thinker about how art gets made and I

learned so much from that book that went

into this book that I wrote so that's

one um another book written by one of

the subjects of the book Amy s is a book

called faux PA she's a great painter she

is amazing writer and this book is so

much fun filled with her own area

Edition absolutely but also

illustrations chartlets it's just a fun

object and also really smart and

wonderful and then because nobody talks

about these when they come here I want

to throw in a purely visual book um it's

the sketch books of Richard deborn it's

just pages and pages and pages of years

and years and years of his SketchBook BS

his drawings of his wife himself some in

pencil some in ink I can just sit and

live in those pages imagining him as the

drawer which is kind of was what my

project was all about so there you

go Adam Moss thank you very much thank

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you this episode of the ecl show was

produced by Annie Galvin fact checking

by Michelle Harris our senior engineer

is Jeff geld with additional mixing by

Isaac Jones our senior editor is CLA

Gordon the show's production team

includes Roland who Kristen Lynn and

ammen sahota we have original music by

Isaac Jones audience strategy by

Christine seoi and Shannon Busta the

executive producer of New York Times

opinion audio is Annie Rose ster and

special thanks to Sonia Herrero Rachel

Baker and James Bernett

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