Ari Shapiro: The Best Strangers in the World

Ari Shapiro is an award winning journalist with one of the most recognizable voices in the land: He’s the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” In his tenure, he’s covered war zones, mass shootings, the White House—and also so much more, using his microphone to tell deeper stories about who we actually are. He recently published a debut memoir—The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening—where he uses his own life as the scaffolding to tell many of these stories. I cried…maybe 10 times as I followed Ari across the globe.

Like me, Ari is from small town America—he was born in Fargo, North Dakota before his parents moved to Portland. Like my brother, Ari is gay—and came of age at a time when that was a dangerous thing to be. Like me, Ari grew up listening to Nina Totenberg and Susan Stamberg make sense of the world. And like me, he went to Yale. The point of Ari’s book is exactly this: We all have so much in common, regardless of where we are born. Telling these stories brings us closer together. In our conversation, he shares his insights on what makes valuable journalism and we discuss the importance of exploring diverse perspectives to gain a broader understanding of the world around us. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

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The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening

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TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity).

ELISE LOEHNEN : My brother's middle name is Ari, but no one ever told him how to say it, so he always thought it was awry, which is hilarious.

ARI SHAPIRO: Wow.

ELISE: Yeah. And you know, small Jewish community in rural states, which I know you're very familiar with.

ARI: What brought your parents to Montana?

ELISE: My dad is a South African Jew who did his residency at the Mayo Clinic, and my mom is a recovering Catholic from Des Moines, Iowa, who went to a defunct nursing school, was working in the psych ward at the Mayo Clinic, and met my dad sort of through improbable circumstances.

ARI: The Mayo Clinic is not in Montana?

ELISE: No, that's in Rochester, Minnesota. And then my dad had been in the calvary as a medic and fell in love with horses and had these fantasies about owning a ranch in Montana. He did not have the finances for that at all, but they decided to move to Montana, the small liberal college town, so that they could ski and have horses. It's funny, Anna Winger, who's a show runner, she did Unorthodox and Trans-Atlantic

ARI: Right. Yeah.

ELISE: And she is convinced that my dad and she talked to him for something she was developing because she was convinced he is was a freedom fighter and that he has the perfect cover as a country doctor in Montana. But I know, I know. I'm sure everyone says this to you, but then my life was, my days were bookended by Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and Nina Totenberg, and Susan Sandberg.

ARI: I mean, same.

ELISE: I went to see her at the University of Montana. And I was like, these are the people who are explaining the world to me. And that's how my book starts, is talking about those two.

ARI: I mean, yeah, I was a listener long before I was a journalist.

ELISE: Yeah. Did you watch any TV? We never did.

ARI: Oh, yeah., it wasn't on every night. It wasn't like, you know, 6:30 or whatever time hits and you turn on the TV news. But yeah, occasionally it wasn't routine the way that All Things Considered was routine.

ELISE: Yeah. It was just the sound of my childhood and driving back and forth from town to home listening, it's like every night. I went to Yale actually.

ARI: What college were you in?

ELISE: Berkeley.

ARI: Oh wow. I was in Davenport. What year did you graduate?

ELISE: I graduated in 02.

ARI: Okay, I graduated in 2000. So we definitely overlapped. Wild.

ELISE: Were you in Ron DeSantis’ class?

ARI: No, my roommate, Krupa Desai was, and I know that because in The Facebook, the actual book, they were right next to each other cause Desai, Desantis.

ELISE: Yeah, you had a much more exciting college career than I did. I don't know what I was doing in college, like not hanging out with anyone, although I did go to Toads sometimes and I remember seeing, it was funny, I wasn't that aware of everyone in school, but I remember seeing Ron DeSantis cause he was just a thing. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. Like, I was aware of him, not in like a compelling way, but I think he was like the baseball star, right. Anyway, but yeah, I feel like your college career was much more exciting than mine.

ARI: I don't know. It's all relative. I don't know enough about yours to say.

ELISE: I dated a guy for three years and that I followed to college. It gave me an excuse not to really make that many friends. Yale is big. It lets you get lost. And then similarly, I moved to New York and I fell into magazines and, I loved the way that you talked about a friend essentially telling you her dream of working at NPR and you were like, oh.

ARI: Yeah, sounds good. I'll give it a try.

ELISE: I didn't have that dream for myself either. But similarly, curiosity was the primary driver of everything that I did. So I love that your curiosity just led you into your profession.

ARI: Did you do journalism at Yale?

ELISE: No, it's funny, do you know Clarissa Ward at CNN?

ARI: Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, not personally, but of course. Yeah. I got to know Michael covering the Romney campaign. He and I were sort of like buddies on the bus together.

ELISE: And now you go toe to toe. Right? I guess he does a slightly different vARIation.

ARI: Yeah, it's been a long time since I've chatted with him, but we're still, I mean, we're friendly. We're, you know, we got to know each other early in our careers.

ELISE: I loved, I thought, I think it's very relatable the way that you described, cause I think, I don't know, there's still so much myth making around growing up with an idea of who we're supposed to be in the world and the fact that you had no idea and continue to explore, right? Like you're a constantly evolving like pink martini, like all of it is fascinating to me. And how do you have the time? I just, I have to ask, and I know you don't have children.

ARI: Well, right now I'm on a two month sabbatical for the first time ever, which is great. And so I use that sabbatical to do the book tour and do two weeks at the Cafe Carlisle with Alan Cumming. And, generally speaking, I use my vacation time to tour pink martini and then if they have a show on a weekend in a city that I can get to without taking time off, I'll just fly out and join them for.

ELISE: But do you ever rest?

ARI: Yeah, I rest a lot. I sleep at least eight hours a night and I like naps.

ELISE: Thank God. Me too. I don't get to take them very frequently. I thought it was really beautiful when you talked about your early reporting, and I think it was the World Trade Center where you're talking about journalism and reporting and I actually, I remember walking, doing that tour at Yale, I don't know why I remember this. I think I remember it because Claire Danes was in my class and I feel like she was in the same group and the person walking us through old campus was talking about all of the different affinity groups on campus and they were listing them off. And a white guy was like, but what about the one for white people. And I just remember we were all like, do you not understand the world? Like the world is a club for white men and you talk about your awakening. And you write, “maybe I didn't care too much about the world to be a reporter. Maybe cARIng about the world was instead a reason to pursue journalism. That moment was part of an awakening for me, a realization that whether or not journalism already had space for people like me, I could make space and may then maybe I could carve out space for others.” And you talk about, I think it was 911, of the families, right?

ARI: Yeah, and I actually, what's crazy is that I was doing an interview in Los Angeles with somebody who told me that right around the corner from her was a park with a dedication to that three-year-old kid, which I had never heard that before. So this was right after my internship at NPR and I was a temp editorial assistant on Morning Edition, working the overnight shift. And so it was kind of the end of my workday when 9911 happened and we didn't know what was happening at first. For several days after that, I would come in at 9:00 PM and stay and work until noon each day. And one of my tasks was to write short remembrances of people who had died in the attacks. And it would be 30 seconds to a minute just sort of text for the host of Morning Edition, who was then Bob Edwards, to read if a segment came in a little bit short. And as I was writing those, I came upon the story of this couple and their son, their son was three years old. These two dads were returning from a vacation on Cape Cod. And in the short remembrance that I wrote about them, I described them as a family and I remembered thinking that somebody else might have chosen a different person to write about, or they might have described them in a different way.

In 2001, referring to a same-sex couple and their kid as a family was not common. But this was more than 20 years ago. I remembered feeling like whether or not journalism had a place for me, maybe this was an opportunity for me to try to make journalism a more welcoming place for people like me. And I think it's different from activism. I think it's inclusion and when I now sit around the editorial meeting table every morning and we on All Things Considered, decide what's gonna be on the show that day, I realize the importance of having people around that table with a range of different experiences. And that doesn't just mean religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality. It also means rural, urban, conservative, liberal because as we're all pitching story ideas and talking about how to reflect the world in that day's show, if we don't have people around the table who are interested in sports. If we don't have people around the table who follow science publications, then we're not gonna be actually reflecting the world as it is. We're gonna be reflecting a small slice of the world, and the title of the show is All Things Considered. So, we wanna reflect the world as it is in all of its complexity and difficulty and joy and surprise.

ELISE: Yeah. And it's a beautiful ambition, and I thought you wrote so wonderfully about the idea of press and this idea also of objectivity and that it’s of course, an ideal, but it's not a reality, right? Like we all see the world through different lenses. You as a gay kid from North Dakota, you know me as someone from Montana, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about that when you're writing about how there's just no such thing as an absence of identity and how you find that balance?

ARI: For me, my identity is as often being an American or being white when I'm out reporting on a field as it, I mean, my identity is all of these things, but the most salient part of my identity oftentimes is not my status in any marginalized group. When I'm in Zimbabwe on a reporting trip, the fact that I'm white is the most relevant part of my identity. Everybody there sees me as a white person. Everything else is secondary. When I am in Iraq, the fact that I'm Jewish is relevant. It's way more relevant than the fact that I'm gay or when I’m in Turkey reporting on the Syrian migrant crisis, the fact that I'm an American, the fact that I grew up in the us, the fact that, you know, I live in this country that has an ocean on either side of us and has not had a war fought on our soil in more than a century, that's the most relevant thing.

And so when we talk about objectivity, I think it's important for listeners to be able to imagine themselves standing in my shoes when I'm out reporting, when I'm out telling a story. If a listener comes away from the story thinking about me, I've done it wrong. I'm not supposed to be the focus. And so I do think it is important to be objective, to be thorough, to be aware of our blinders, to be aware of our prejudices and biases. And also, I think wherever we go, we carry our history with us. And so I'm gonna tell a story in a way that is unique to me. As is every reporter out there. I don't think there is such a thing as the view from nowhere. That's not to say objectivity doesn't exist. That's not to say objectivity is irrelevant, but these two things exist in tangent.

ELISE: Yes. And as you write: “The view from nowhere that earlier generations of journalists aspired to was never actually from nowhere. It was from a straight, white, Christian, male perspective, not coincidentally the perspective of people whose power is built into existing systems.” If that's what's normal, everything else is deviant, right? Like that's the standard.

ARI: Yeah. You know, somebody the other day asked what I thought about the decline of the sort of authoritative three news channels that everybody listened to every night when people had a shared truth, a shared reality, a shared set of facts, and then they could disagree about what to do with those sets of facts. And certainly, I think the decline of a shared consensus about what is real and true is of great concern, but the decline of those three voices being the three voices everyone listened to means that now people who were previously not heard, because the gatekeepers kept them out, can be heard and voices can flourish, that previously were kept on the sidelines. And so, while there may be a lot of things to lament about the media landscape today, I'm really glad that today we're no longer limited to the perspective of the three folks who have been anointed by the network TV bosses, who presumably see things very much the same way as those bosses themselves.

ELISE: Yeah. And this I this nostalgia that we have for this quote unquote, simpler time is inherently sort of not accurate. Right? And I think, and this is, maybe this is murky ground, but the way that we conflate truth and facts, and yes, there are facts, and then other people perspective informs our truth or understanding of a certain situation in a way that's annoyingly complex and complicated.

ARI: This is one reason that I say in the book that I learn more about the world through fiction than I do from interviews. You know, when I talk to artists, when I talk to authors, when I talk to musicians and playwrights and directors, I learn more about the world than when I interview CEOs and policy makers and cabinet officials because those people are reflecting the world back to us in a way that is true, if not factual. You know, they might be making up the facts, they might be making up the characters and the circumstances, but they're getting at something that is an underlying truth that I find really valuable and illuminating, and helps me better understand the conversations I'm having as a journalist.

ELISE: Yeah, I thought that that discussion at the end was so beautiful. Your book actually made me cry multiple times.

ARI: I don't wanna say I'm thrilled to hear my book made you cry, but it's so meaningful to me to hear that it had an emotional impact on you because obviously I sat alone with these words for a really long time having no idea where or if they would land with any readers. And so that really means a lot to me.

ARI: Thank you.

ELISE: Yeah, and I was talking to your editor who I have known for a long time cause when I posted your book, he was like, I edited that.

ARI: He’s the best.

ELISE: The best. So lovely. And you know, I was saying to him, I love memoir. I love memoir, but I also love memoir when it's in service to other stories. And I love the way that you used your life as a scaffold for telling about other people in a way that like, it was a very beautiful braid, Ari. Like, it just was really a nice way to read about the world.

ARI: Thank you so much. I, you know, as a journalist, I'm used to telling other people's stories. I'm not as accustomed to telling my stories, but the way I thought of this book was as an exploration of, on the one hand, how the stories I've told have shaped the person I am. And on the other hand, how the person I am shapes the stories I tell. So, you know, we talked about the role of identity, history and lived experience, but I also realized that for me, covering the news every day with a two hour show, five days a week, it's like a rushing river flowing downstream where you can't keep track of any one branch or twig. But every now and then, something going by kind of snags on me. And sticks around and actually shapes the way I view the world and shapes the person I am. And those are the people who populate this book. And in that way, I thought in part, this is almost like a memoir told through the stories of others. And I wasn't sure I got the balance quite right, how much of me and how much of others should be in it.

I've been told I shouldn't read my Amazon reviews, but I find them so delightful and hilarious and most of them have been very kind. But there was a great one-star review that was like, I wanted more strangers. There was another one star review that said, I don't like the paper. This is printed on, I'm returning it to Amazon and getting a copy from my library. And then the review literally said they don't make 'em like they used to. It had nothing about the content of the book whatsoever. It was so great. I mean, as you know from reading the book, I love hate mail and hate reviews are sort of like the next best thing. I like imagining the pull quotes from the reviews. Like there was one on good reads that said “A good balance of ego and insecurity.” I was like, okay, I'll take it. Like if I, if it's a good balance of those two things, that's great. Although frankly, I think pretty much any memoir could be, or any decent memoir could be described as a good balance of ego and insecurity. Anyway. I really like that one.

ELISE: I loved that hate mail, Dear Ari, please butch up. I find a daily dose of your personality annoying. I am a person too.

ARI: I love that one. I'm talking to you from my home office, but if I were at NPR in my work office, I could actually show you that postcard that I have framed on my desk where it has sat for like more than a decade.

ELISE: It's interesting, so my book is part memoir. Similarly, it's just like relating to the concept so that then I can get into cultural criticism, other people's stories, history, et cetera. And I was talking to Maggie Smith, who I know you interviewed cause my mom called me, this is my favorite, my parents always call me to tell me who they've heard on NPR, and I'm like, I interviewed that person last week. But thank you for listening to my podcast.

ARI: You don't mean Dame Maggie Smith, the actress?

ELISE: No, the novelist, didn't you interview her?

ARI: I'm sure I did, but remember what I said about the river running downstream and any given leaf like disappeARIng from sight. What was the name of her novel again?

ELISE: You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Was that you?

ARI: I don't think it was, I don't think that was me.

ELISE: My mom told me it was you, but anyway.

ARI: I don’t wanna contradict your mom. I often, I mean, this is so embarrassing, I should not admit this, but I sometimes will hear a name and think, huh, that sounds really familiar. How do I know that?

ELISE: It was Miles Parks.

ARI: You know, I've been told his voice and mind sound similar. Often it is not unreasonable that I might have just forgotten interviewing somebody. Like I'll be listening to an album by an artist and I'll think, wow, this is great. Who is this person? Why does their name sound familiar? And then I'll Google them and realize like, oh, right, I interviewed them.

ELISE: All right, so we'll pretend you're Miles Park. But she wrote a memoir and she talks about how she hopes the material is of service to people, and it's a beautiful memoir. She's a poet and she breaks the format. And we were having this conversation where she was like, but isn't it kind of fucked up that our instinct is like, how do I make my story useful to other people? Like how do I make it more palatable? It's like so self-involved, right? And you know, you're a journalist, to expect other people to be interested in your life. And so I think it's an interesting sort of caveating and I felt that way as I was emailing about your book, where I was like, I also don't want ARI to think that it has to in service to be a value.

ARI: But I also, you know, I did an event not too long ago with Fran Liebowitz where like I asked her questions for 30 minutes and then she took an hour of questions from the audience and she was just brilliant. Of course, that's her job. It's her reputation, it's her life. It's who she is. But at some point, somebody asked her about memoir. This was like a few years ago, as I had just started writing my book, and she said, “Everybody is writing memoirs these days and most people's lives just aren't that interesting. That was Franz's take on memoir.”

ELISE: She might have a point.

ARI: I was thinking to myself like, well, yes, I have been to war zones and aboard Air Force One and sung at Carnegie Hall and all of these other things, but is my life really interesting enough to justify a memoir and partly because that was in my head, partly because of the great editing of Rakesh, Satya, your friend of mine. I did find that each chapter sort of took its first form in draft one as a list of things that happened in order, and then I would go back and reread the chapter and realize, oh, this is actually about democracy or identity or objectivity, or whatever.

And then I would rewrite the chapter weaving that theme more vividly through it, because I kind of do think a memoir should be of service. I think otherwise it's pure self-indulgence. I mean, I as a reader want to get something more out of a memoir than just, Hmm, sounds like that person's life was whatever it was, you know? And so like, that was my big hope, my wish, my concern, my fear. And one of the things that was so incredible about the book tour that I just finished was, you know, I did an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where I talked about an interview she had done 30 years ago when I was 15 years old, and I still remember it. And it was with a memoirist named Paul Monette, who died of aids at an early age. I talked to Terry about how much that interview from the 1990s meant to me and how much it stuck with me. And when I went to do a book event in Dallas, somebody showed up at the book event with a first edition copy of Paul Monette’s book and the postcard Paul had sent in response to a fan letter from this guy, and he had kept the book on the postcard All those years of.

Paul could never have imagined, or maybe he did imagine, I don't know, that 30 years later we'd be sitting here talking about him, that his words and his work would have that much of an impact on people. But it just gives me so much delight and joy to think of the possibility that the words that I've written may someday in some way that I will never know, surface in someone's life, in a way that is meaningful, that creates connection, that provides insight. That's the dream, you know? And so to be able on my book tour, to see the way Paul's memoir is doing that today, 30 years after he wrote it, makes me just kind of fantasize about, well, wouldn't it be incredible if 30 years from now, the words that I've written somehow find their way into someone's life in a way that's meaningful.

ELISE: And I would say that so much of your life is this living legacy, just in choosing. And I know that this is a complex dance for you and you talk about  theism as you're, as you've moved around the world and seen so many people in crisis, but telling Mohamed’s story, or, I loved the last section where you're sort of like, I can't leave without telling you about these three people, but what an incredible thing.

ARI: One of the reasons I waited so long to write a memoir as I describe in the book is that like I was terrified about the permanence of it, you know, and not just a memoir, a book, like I live in a world of, I don't wanna call it fast casual, but everything I do has a short shelf. I do things that you enjoy and then they're gone. Like, I love to cook. I like to make music live on stage with a band and make a radio program where we start with a blank slate every day, and I was kind of afraid of the permanence of a book that it would sit on a shelf and stare at me for years. Just as right now over my shoulder, the book is sitting on that shelf and staring at me. But I now think about how wonderful it is that some of these radio stories that meant a lot to me that might have otherwise just disappeared, now do have longer life. And you mentioned the fear of vampirism a journalist. And the flip side of that is something that Audie Cornish, who was my co-host for many years on All Things Considered, said to me that I've really taken to heart, which is that in a crisis when people are on the worst day of their lives, whether it's a war or a natural disaster, or  a mass shooting, of course there are people who don't want to talk and I respect that, but there are also people for whom being able to tell their story and being able to have somebody truly listen to them can be healing and can be a gift, and can be an act of love. And so when I go into those situations, I'm not going in as an emergency relief worker. I'm not going in as an aid worker. I'm going in as a listener. I'm going in to give people an opportunity to tell their stories and to be there to listen to them, and I've realized that that also has value and that that can be important.

ELISE: No, it's incredibly important. And then to share, you know, we sort of moved away from our conversation about truth and facts, but I don't know if you're familiar with Amanda Ripley's work, but she's a journalist. She wrote this book called High Conflict, and she spent a lot of time thinking about telling the news as a way to not continue to enforce these binaries but how you actually start to break it down. And it's really a book about listening and conflict mediation. It's an interesting read and she talks about all the data, like one of the things that drives me nuts and maybe this is particularly as a woman being marketed to throughout my life and sort of being witness to it in the industries I've been in where there's always this instinct—it’s never been the instinct at any place where I've worked— to minimize the intelligence of the audience and lowest common denominator, whatever that means, but create some target idea of what someone is capable of understanding. And it's really patronizing and paternalistic and not of service. And I think for women, we're constantly spoken to as though we can't make up our own minds. We're not capable of parsing information and figuring out what's resonant. But that's the idea of the American public, right? Like we're essentially idiotic automatons.

ARI: I think we might be a little bit insulated from that. I think NPR might be a little bit apart from the pack. I like to think that we treat our audience with respect.

ELISE: You do.

ARI: We assume that they are intelligent and intelligent doesn't mean well-educated, necessarily. Intelligent just means able to understand complicated ideas without having to dumb them down.

ELISE: A thousand percent. And yeah, that's where I was sort of getting is that you guys do it differently. You've always done it differently. And the research essentially is that complexity and nuance is incredibly helpful for everyone, everyone, it's like a boon for all of us. We are not only capable of complexity, but it's the, actually the food that we need. I don't know the specific research, but I feel like the way that you guys have always done the news, is a testament to that and we need more of it. When you think about the media landscape and what ca has happened with cable news, how do you feel about that? And I know like Audie is at at CNN trying to bring complexity, right? Like complexity, nuance, the stories of real people. How do we move more of that into the world?

ARI: The thing that I am most worried about in the news landscape today is actually on the local level. I look at major cities across the United States, including Portland, Oregon where I grew up, where the local paper used to win Pulitzers and have a whole investigative reporting staff and have a team of people covering the mayor, the governor, the state legislature, and now many of those cities and states don't even have a newspaper that publishes seven days a week, let alone any team that is paying attention to the legislation that is going through the State House or the people who are funding the campaigns for the local fill-in the blank elected office. The thing that worries me most about the media right now is that the role of journalists as watchdog in a democracy is in so many parts of this country, just sort of shriveled up and gone.

I'm less concerned about the way this or that Cable News network covers congress or the White House because there's no shortage of people covering Congress and the White House in every conceivable way. It's the State House in, you know, Montana, where you grew up, or in Salem, Oregon where I grew up, there's just not one the kind of scrutiny there was when we were kids.

ELISE: Yeah, certainly, and I think people are starting or maybe becoming more alive to the fact that state legislatures like that's where it's at. I mean, I think maybe I'm more attuned to it or or paying more attention, but it feels like there is growing cognizance of the fact that whether it's gun safety laws or abortion, certainly as these issues become state issues, no one, I don't think, and not no one, but not enough people have been paying attention to local governance, local government. And it's probably partly, as you said, because we're losing our hometown journalists. There's just not the resources, right.

ARI: And in many of those places, the reporter for the public radio station really is the only beat reporter who's there on a daily basis tracking all of that incremental stuff.

ELISE: Yeah. Do you have any predictions about what you think will happen to the state of that type of reporting?

ARI: I have neither publicly nor privately. I have never predicted the future, and it drives my husband crazy because any presidential election, he'll be like, what's gonna happen? And I say, I don't know. We'll find out. Just wait. And he is like, no, no, no, no, no. But you know, like you've got information, you're an insider. And the truth is, I don't have some secret prediction that I'm not sharing. I truly just, I don't think I'm particularly good at forecasting, and I don't find it useful to make a prediction that will as likely as not be wrong. So I know why people ask, and I know why they're frustrated when I don't have an answer. But if I were to make up something, I would literally just be rolling the dice and being like, oh, it's a four. Well, I think it's gonna be a four.

ELISE: I'm excited for you to open yourself up to your more woo-woo nature. I had to laugh when you write: “I'm very good at holding two contradictory ideas in my head at once. After all, I'm Libra and I don't believe in astrology, and so I do not believe people come into our lives for a specific reason. Also, I believe that Ryan Offit entered my life for this specific moment.”

ARI: Elise, can I tell you, that is my favorite thing I wrote in the entire book, and you were the first person to have singled it out, because it is so true. I am good at holding two contradictory ideas in my head. After all, I'm a Libra and I don't believe in astrology. When I wrote that, I was like, God, that is me. That is who I am. That is the most true thing I've ever written about myself. And so the fact that you singled that out really means a lot to me. Thank you.

ELISE: It really made me giggle and also, I love the sensibility and I'm excited for you to explore astrology and prophecy and Tarot.

ARI: Oh my God. The number of people who are like, okay, no, but really, here's why you should believe in astrology. Everybody who knows me, like as they're getting to know me, guesses that I'm a Libra. I am through and through a Libra in every way. Also, I don't believe in astrology, but I mean, look, I'm a journalist. I see both sides of every story. For five years, I was the justice correspondent. The scales of justice is literally the symbol of Libra. Like I get it. I am a Libra also, I don't believe in it, but I can hold both ideas in my head at once. I also think it's fun to pull a tarot card and see what it said. Look, my grandmother was a fortune teller. She would read poems, cards, coffee grounds, tea leaves, anything you want. She worked in a carnival. It runs in my family. My great-grandmother was legendARIly psychic. I'm not about to say that nonsense. I don't not believe in it…

ELISE: I think you can predict the future.

ARI: But now I think it's fun to pull a card and be like, oh, oh, so you're saying I should be able to say what the future of media is based on the psychic talents that run in my family. Is that where you're going with this?

ELISE: That's where I'm trying, I'm trying to move you to, I want you to have the donning awareness in this moment.

ARI: Then actually, if I just look deep enough, I will have the answer.

ELISE: You're highly psychic. Yes. I'm sure your empathic understanding, your ability to read people is probably off the charts.

ARI: You know, I think there is something to that. I think what my grandmother did in her readings was tap into something in people that is not surface level. And as a journalist, as somebody who is trying to understand people and ask questions that will elicit good stories and vibrate on the same wavelength that they're at, whatever that may be, I think I'm doing the same kind of thing that my grandma was doing. She's just doing it in service, a fortunetelling, and I'm doing it in service of journalism. But I really do think there is a commonality.

ELISE: A thousand percent. And even as you're paying attention to the world, the information that you're picking up is at a different level, I think, probably, than just a random person walking into Pulse, for example. I mean, that section was so beautiful. Will you tell us a little bit about Pulse and will you tell us a little bit about Eddie, in that statement? You can't kill me. I'm an idea. I'm timeless.

ARI: well, I had been based in Florida for nine months in 2004 on a temporary contract as a reporter for NPR filling in for somebody who was on a fellowship. So I was all over the state during that year and at some point I had a reporting project in Orlando and I had a night off and I went to a gay bar and I met these bartenders who were just so nice and friendly and warm, and the next night it was their night off. And so they took me out with them and we just had a great time running around Orlando. That was 2004. Fast forward to 2016, and I'm a host of All Things Considered, and I hear about this mass shooting at this gay club in Orlando, and I thought, you know, I should go cover that because there are stories that I approach as an outsider, but also there are stories where my experience helps me as a journalist, and in this case I know what gay bars mean to people.

I had been bar hopping in Orlando specifically, so I basically spent all week reporting on the nightclub shooting, and at the end of that week, I was interviewing the editor of the Free Gay Weekly called Watermark. He's since passed away, but his name was Billy Mains and I was making small talk with him ahead of our interview. And I said, oh, you know, I actually went bar hopping in Orlando and there were these bartenders and they were so nice and da da da da da. And he said, what bar was it? And I said, well, it was 12 years ago, I don't remember the name of it. I'm sure it's closed. And he said, well, you know, I've lived in Orlando a long time. What did it look like? I'll tell you which bar it was. So I described, you walk in and there's a dance floor to your left and there's a bar area to you're right. And he said that was Pulse. And I don't know why, it never crossed my mind, but I looked on my phone. One of the bartenders was in my phone with an email address that said pulse.com and one of them had moved to Chicago and taken a different job. One was still a bartender at Pulse, but was not working there that night, and over the course of that week, I think, you know, a lot of my colleagues were also reporting on the massacre. We had a huge team there and they did great work.

But I think there was something different about my reporting, in the same way that, like it was Latin night when the massacre happened, and one of my colleagues who was covering Pulse, Adrian Florido is Latino, speaks fluent Spanish. He was able to tell different stories, not just because of his language skills, but because of his identity, history and lived experience in the same way that the stories I told were different because of my identity, history and lived experience. So you asked about Eddie, Eddie Meltzer was somebody who I met maybe halfway through the week, and he was Pulse but left shortly before the shooting started, and then he went back to volunteer as an interpreter for the FBI to translate for families who spoke Spanish but not English because it was Latin night. There were some people whose parents showed up wondering if their child was killed, but they didn't speak English. So Eddie was working as an interpreter, and when I met him he was really insistent that he had had a few of his friends killed that night. One friend was injured in the hospital and he said as soon as his friend was healed and recovered, they were gonna go out for martinis, they were gonna go out dancing. And it was this idea of resilience and the idea that, what he said is, you can't kill me. I'm an idea. I'm timeless. And I think so much of LGBTQ experience in the US and around the world is defined by not just surviving, but thriving in the face of adversity and insisting on joy in the face of a world that would want to stamp you out, that that was what I found really beautiful about talking to him.

ELISE: A stunning phrase: You can't kill me. I'm an idea. I'm timeless. You write about Sam Sanders and the NPR podcast, It's Been a Minute and this philosophy about the artificial divide between hard news and soft news, can you talk about that? Because I think it's so important.

ARI: Yeah, I think there is an a view in many newsrooms, which in my opinion is outdated, that stories about culture and arts and the way we live are like dessert and that you need to eat your vegetables and the main dish and you know, swallow your whatever, war, politics, business stocks, et cetera, in order to indulge with the light frivolous stuff. And Sam articulates better than I could, which is why I quote him at length in the book. The idea that the stuff that old school newsroom bosses dismiss as the light stuff, the desserts, the bonus, is so often the stuff that is about women and minorities and marginalized groups and furthermore, you can't understand the hard stuff unless and until you understand the so-called soft stuff. And I always sort of had that idea in the back of my head, but I never really articulated it until I heard him put that into words, and then I thought, oh yeah, that's right. That's right. That I absolutely agree with that philosophy. And look, I was a justice correspondent for five years. I was a White House correspondent for four years. I've done more than my fair share of covering wars and revolutions and climate change. I'm certainly not dismissing this stuff that often leads the show, but I think we do ourselves and our audience a disservice when we diminish the other things that make up the full texture of what life is.

ELISE: Well, and going back to what we were talking about earlier, it's in some ways the difference between facts and then the connective tissue, the truth of our lives and the way in for so many of us to what's happening in the world, right? Like as you write about novelists, like this is how we understand the world and relate to it, is through story and absent that, it's just a torrent of bad and sad information.

ARI: A guy at one of the book events I did, asked a question that I was really glad he asked it. He said, feels like the news used to be facts. And now the news is just a bunch of people asking, how do you feel? Why is that happening? And you know, can we go back to the way it was, was the implied question. And I said, look, if you're gonna do a story about cuts to pandemic food assistance benefits, there are at least two ways you can do that story. You can talk to the person who made the policy that says it's going from, I'm picking an arbitrary number here, $200 to $100 a month, and ask him: “Why did you cut it from 200 to 100? When does that take effect? What will the impact be on a family of excise? Like, just the facts approach. Another way to cover that story is talk to the family that has been getting by on 200 a month and is now gonna have to get by on 100 a month and say to the mother, What does this mean for you? What does this mean for your kids? And in so many words, how do you feel in both conversations? You're getting the fact that it goes from 200 to 100 a month in both conversations, you're getting the fact that it's gonna take effect on May, whatever. I'm, I'm making the facts up here, but how does it feel to me is arguably more important in that case and will help our audience better understand the impact of the policy and what this actually means in real world terms, even if the person delivering it to you is doing so in a subjective way because it is their firsthand experience. I think we understand a big story. We tell a big story by telling a small story. So it's one thing to say millions of Americans will be affected by this. It's another thing to say, here’s a single mother of four living in Reno, Nevada, whatever the case may be. And so far she's been doing this, and now she's gonna have to do that, and here are the decisions that she's having to make. That's a way that helps us really understand the story.

ELISE: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. As you think, you know, over the span of your career, it feels obviously like we're far more polARIzed than we've ever been. As you're out in the world talking to people. Is that true? How do you see us moving forward in less binary, less polARIzed ways outside of just doing what the work that you're doing and hoping more people do similar work?

ARI: Yeah, I am sure there is a statistical answer to the, are we more polARIzed than we've ever been questioned, and I don't have the statistics at my fingertips. Of course, there are well-funded interests persuading us to retreat into our own bubbles, whether that is social media algorithms, or political parties or corporate branding. But I think that fundamentally what it takes for us to build bridges across chasms of difference is really simple. It's listening, and it's not a new skill that we have to learn. It's something that is innate, that is an ability that exists in all of us that is not that difficult to do if we choose to do it.

And so I think in all of the activities that make up my life, whether it's the Cabaret with Alan Cumming, or performing with Pink Martini or practicing journalism with NPR, my goal is to help people listen to one another and help people see the world through the eyes of someone who might seem different from them. And I'm in a privileged position that I have a platform where I can do that. But fundamentally speaking, like anybody can do that, it's not, it's not like learning acrobatics. It's not like learning to play the violin. It's a skill that we all.

ELISE: Yeah. I know that you read for work. Similarly, I read a lot for work. Before I let you go, anything that you've read for pleasure on the sabbatical that you can't stop thinking about.

ARI: No, the book that I can't stop thinking about is the last thing I read for work, honestly.

ELISE: What was it?

ARI: It's a novel called The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, which comes out in May and it's more than 700 pages, and I've been dying to go back and read his previous novel, cutting for Stone, which was a massive best seller and a cultural phenomenon. I actually have not read any books on this sabbatical. The reading I've been doing on the sabbatical is about six months worth of New Yorkers.

ELISE: I feel like you’re not just someone who collects New Yorkers and promises that you'll read them all, you're actually, you're actually making your way through them.

ARI: The truth is, it's not six months worth because I give myself every year. I consider the period between Christmas and New Year's to be magazine amnesty when I can guilt-free, recycle all of my unread magazines and just let it go. So the ones that I'm reading are only since the beginning of January.

ELISE: Still it’s four months.

ARI: I've read some in that time. I have read some, I just haven't kept up. And I'm not saying that I read it cover to cover every article.

ELISE: Yeah. No, my, one of my former bosses always said, he was like, when people are like, I read the New Yorker, he's like, you mean you get the New Yorker every week? You stack them and then you try and prioritize to motor through them.

ARI: So when Alan and I were doing our show at the Cafe Carlisle, Molly Ringwald came to see it and I got to meet her in person for the first time.

ELISE: I just met Molly, too!

ARI: And then I was flipping through a New Yorker from months ago, and I found a piece she had written about, the French filmmaker, Jean Godard, I think that's his first name, Jean Luk. Anyway, Godard, the French filmmaker and I was like, I'm so glad I hung onto this copy of the New Yorker. It was this great article and it was written by this person who I had just met for the first time. So hang on to him. You never know when you'll meet Molly Ringwald and then wanna read the article that she wrote in an issue for months ago.

ELISE: I love it. I feel like now, and maybe this is the universe, when someone's like back in your radar, you're seeing them everywhere. But, I just met Molly too, and I'm like  are we experiencing like the, the massive resurgence? Did she just translated a book from French? I don't know if she was just in the New York Times too. So here comes Molly Ringwald, guys.

ARI: Ready for a another helping of Molly.

ELISE: Yes, well, thank you for your time. Thank you for what you do, for all of us and for guiding us. Making sense. Navigating the world on your back. It is such a pleasure to talk to you and to listen to you more importantly.

ARI: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

ELISE:

I am an NPR nut, it’s really the navigational guide to my life. I grew up on it, I revere it, I rely on it, and even when the news is hard I feel like Ari, and I miss Audie, even though she has her own podcast now, and then certainly legends like Susan Sandberg and Nina Totenberg, just drop me right into my parasympathetic nervous system. At the end of the book, Ari talks about how he can’t close this book, and it’s really beautiful, he talks about Russia and Ukraine, and Syria, he really just goes all over the globe. He talks about these three people, one of whom is this guy David, a decorator at the White House over the holiday’s, and he decided to interview David who had been homeless. The interview changed David's life and Martha Stewart invited him on her show. He writes about him and some of these other people: “I don’t believe that suffering is inherently noble, or that misery is a prerequisite for greatness, but I look at David, formerly homeless, going toe-to-toe with Martha Stewart. I see Savah, wheeling flowers as a weapon against oppression and a tool to inspire. I remember the Whereas protecting one another as they sing sweet songs for tips at a night market. And I feel lucky to carry them with me as examples of how to confront life’s uglyness with beauty, how to meet horror with humor, and how to smile in the face of whatever might come back.” And then to go back to Eddy, from Pulse: “You can’t kill me, I’m an idea, I’m timeless.” I just can’t get over the beauty of that phrase.” Thanks so much for listening, we’ll see you next week.