Episode 199: Kathryn Schulz

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If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you've probably heard people say, can you go on iTunes and leave us a review or leave us a rating? Here's a secret. It actually is very helpful. We try not to badger you about it all the time, but I'm doing a quick, slight badger here. If you enjoy the show, please go to iTunes. Leave us a review. Leave us a rating. It's very helpful. If you do not enjoy the show, feel free to skip this opportunity. Either way, thanks for listening. Here we go. Hello, welcome to the Longform Podcast. I'm Max Linsky. I'm here with my co-hosts, Aaron Lammer and Evan Ratliff, gentlemen. Hello. Good summer day to you. Hot in the studio. Who's on the show this week? This week, Catherine Schultz, the New Yorker writer, Pulitzer winner, National Magazine Award winner. Best of Board this year. Yeah, the most prestigious one, best of the year, long form. A lot of Americans most made up of all of them. What kind of prize, what kind of trophy do you get for that best long form? You're going to get a t-shirt as soon as we get the samples printed and then we start printing the real ones. But there is, I can tell you, there is just a rigorous judging process. She won all those awards for a story called The Really Big One, which is about an earthquake that may happen anytime and also may destroy the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. It's an incredible article and we spent a lot of time talking about it. But we also talked about her career. She's a very, very smart, very thoughtful person and I really enjoyed talking to her. How about sponsors? We got one. Is it MailChimp? Yeah. Is it MailChimp related? No, it's just MailChimp. Oh, it's just MailChimp. Just that straight, straight, or GmailChimp? Unadulterated. Straight from the original stock MailChimp Classico. Simply the best way to send emails for your business or your project or whoever you need to communicate with. I'll tell you something of my favorite thing about MailChimp. You can start a list without even paying anything. You only start paying when you got a bunch of people subscribing. You just started a list. I did. I assume that soon many people will be subscribing and you will have to pay. That could happen. Yeah. But for now it's free. And thanks MailChimp. And now here's Max with Katherine Shultz. Katherine, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I should say we are recording this at the New Yorker office, around the 38th floor. And I was just ran to the bathroom before we started. And on my way to the bathroom, I ran into your boss. Which one? Would that be David Remnick? I do. Okay. Yeah. Basically I was like, what should I ask Katherine Shultz? And took him a while. He was like, thinking about it for a while. I'm shocked he didn't say. Ask her what she's working on and when she's going to turn it in. No, it was a much bigger picture than that. And it's a pretty intense place to start, but I'm going to start there. Because I feel like if David Remnick gives you a question, you just got to ask it. David Remnick would like to know, what do you want to do? That is a fascinating question from Mr. David Remnick. I suppose the first thing I should say is, man, I am so fortunate. Who's boss when asked to pose a question says, what do you want to do? I mean, what a lovely sentiment. I am being released into you. She also said, you have to ask her about the Pulitzer, but that's boring bullshit. No, in seriousness, I feel very lucky to work somewhere where the thing that is guiding my work is truly what I want to do. And I do feel that way here. Answering that question is tricky. What do I want to do? A lot of things. It's almost easier to tell you what I don't want to do. One of the things that's been really fun about writing in general, but certainly I would say since taking this job, I'm just famished. I want to do everything. I'm suddenly very motivated to try doing all the things I'm historically very bad at. And that's a long list, so that gives me a lot of things to do. I want to do more reported pieces. I find reporting terrifying. And it's kind of good in some ways to just kind of lean into that terror, like a sort of hurricane wind. What's terrifying about this? This will sound insane since I met you five minutes ago, but talking to strangers. I mean that. I'm actually, I love research. I'm very happy to lie on my couch and read things or do archival work. Being a book critic must have been sort of comfortable. Well, exactly. Being a book critic, right? Very seldom are you called upon to actually talk to the authors, many of the ones I like most are dead. It really removes that whole part from the equation. And science reporting I'm mostly fine to be comparatively really easy because most scientists are only too happy to have someone try to tell their stories for them and very generous with their time. I'm just not a kind of cold caller or a, you know, someone for whom it comes naturally to knock on the door of strangers. And it's been a real learning curve to teach myself to do that and remember, you know, my instinct is like, oh, there's a 500 page book. I could read for this piece that's due in 48 hours and, you know, a senior person will look at me and say, "Catherine, you're a reporter. Pick up the phone, call the author." So I've tried to trade into myself some of these instincts, but yeah, I'd like to report more. I've steered mostly very clear of the essay form, not out of any a version. I love it when it's done well, but part of me is kind of curious to some day sort of venture in that direction. I'd like to write another book someday. I'd like to try new subject areas. So the answer to what I would like to do is much too much. That's a good position to be in, but a little overwhelming. How do you train yourself to figure out how to go knock on doors and do their reporting, especially if you've gotten by for as long as you seem to have without figuring it out. You know, the honest answer to that question is you apprentice yourself to people who are better at it. I do that in a couple of ways. A lot of my colleagues, both in their immediate sense here at the New Yorker, but more broadly among journalists, are obviously exemplary reporters. And I read them and I see what they're able to do by virtue of being willing to actually knock on a door. I am very lucky in that my partner is a remarkable reporter and has taught me a huge amount about it. She's both fearless, but also very, very savvy about where to actually find difficult to find information. Likewise, one of my dearest friends, he's a very serious kind of shoe leather international journalist. So I have great models in my life of how to do it well and I try to be less like me and more like them. The other question that Remnikad was, is there a model out there? Is there someone, is there some writer who has balanced around, who's sort of path or career you want to emulate? I don't think it's quite as simple as that. I've met writers who have had a kind of guiding star like that. You know, Sontag or Diddy and or, you know, whoever, as someone sort of fixed for them an idea of what you could do on the page and in life as a journalist. I don't have someone like that. Moment to moment piece to piece, I encounter people, I really admire and wish I could do what they have managed to do. I certainly have a kind of inner pantheon of writers who I think are truly remarkable and they stand as sort of bar setters, you know, places I'd like to, or levels I'd like to rise to. My own trajectory has been odd and I can't say, I'm sure everyone around me would be believed to know that they did not provide the model for it. The trajectory is pretty fascinating. You've reported from Chile, you're the book critic at New York Magazine, you ran grist for a long time, you've written books. And I'd like to talk about a lot of books. Hey, book singular, let's not overstate this. That one almost killed me so we shouldn't inflate the numbers. Well, I want to talk about that book for sure, but I feel like we should make sure to talk about the story that prompted me to email you, which was the really big one about the earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. I remember writing you that email. I like typed it just as I finished the story, terrified. I have a lot of family in the Pacific Northwest felt like I just watched some like terrible action movie except it was real. And it said you that email and since then that article did in fact win the Pulitzer and the National Magazine Award. It also got the probably the most prestigious of all of those titles. It was long forms best story of the year. But let's talk about that for a second. Let's start at the beginning. How do you find that story? How do you realize this is something I can dive into and then how do you dive into it? So I found it because I too have family in the Pacific Northwest and I live in the Pacific Northwest. out in Portland for a while and make it a habit to try to go back and visit fairly often. And I guess in 2013, I want to say, I was hanging out with a cousin of mine who's quite involved in city politics in Portland, Oregon. And she mentioned to me, "Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when the earthquake happens." And that's a question of what earthquake, what are you talking about? And she proceeded to tell me all about the Cascadia Subduction Zone. And I had never heard of it. And it was immediately apparent to me, "Look, I had lived in Portland, I had a family there, I had friends there, I happened to love geology, I'm a huge consumer of news." And I realized, if my demographic hasn't heard about this, then something is really wrong. I'm representative in the wrong way, which means there's very widespread ignorance. I feel like that was a big part of the reaction to that story. It was just kind of like, "How the fuck do we all know this?" Well, so it was kind of a two-part reaction, depending on where you were regionally, in the Pacific Northwest. It turns out it was actually more ignorant than the average person out there, partly because of course I don't live there, at least not full time and haven't for a long time. So within the region, a lot of people had at least some baseline awareness of, "Okay, well, there's a fall line here, there's some kind of seismic threat." I've vaguely heard about it or read a story once. Outside of the region, I think you're right. I think people truly, for the most part, unless you happen to have a little sideline in the seismology, people had no idea elsewhere in the country. I think there was just the sort of shock of, it's like learning about, what was that weird creature, like the snake mouthfish? What about that horrible scary thing that could crawl out of water and move across the land? I don't know, but I don't want to know about it. You don't want to know. Point is, it's like learning there's some terrifying thing that exists that you didn't even know about, like a cross between an elephant and a tiger or something. So there was kind of a shock factor that I think was frankly helpful to me as a journalist. Inside the region, I think people knew, but there was, as is so often, the case with sort of large, but not entirely imminent threats. There was a lot of denial. Talk me through it. So your cousin says, sort of offhand, everything west of I-5 could be toast. And what do you do next? Like, how do you start pursuing a story like that? Well, so this was one of those rare cases as a journalist. It was immediately obvious to me that I should write this story. I mean, within 10 minutes of conversation, I realized, okay, this is an incredible story. It's an important story. And it's a story I would like to tell. That's an unusual combination. Okay, so you knew immediately within 10 minutes of that conversation. This was a piece he wanted to do, then what? So first I got to go ahead from the New Yorker to go ahead and pursue it, which turned out to be the easiest pitch I think I've ever done. I literally sat in David of Mnex office and kind of explained to him how the fault line work and what would happen. And he just looked alarmed and said, "Why don't you go right into the thing?" And then I went back out to Oregon. And I mentioned earlier, science journalism is really pleasurable in a lot of ways. And in the case of this particular story, it was that rare story as a reporter where your sources are dying for you to tell it. I mean, they will absolutely, you know, there are a lot of people who are very in the know about this fault line and very, very worried and very frustrated that they hadn't been able to get the message out. And so I had the most helpful bunch of sources you could possibly imagine. And that is from local community planners all the way up to the Federal Emergency Management Association. People were just really forthcoming and really helpful. At the kind of information gathering stage, it was just fun. I mean, you know, I had a kind of seismology 101 Chris Goldfinger, the geologist who winds up being kind of the main character of that piece was very generous with me. It took me into his lab. Literally gave me sort of a condensed, you know, semester long geology course to ground to me before I got going. I went canoeing up in Washington State with Brian Atwater, the geologist who originally discovered the evidence for the 1700 earthquake along that same fault line, which is the most recent one that's happened there. So there's a lot of fun field work involved. There was a lot of fun, fun slash scary sort of sitting in FEMA bunkers, listening to them kind of walk me point by point through their emergency planning scenario for that earthquake. That's kind of like what I wanted to ask was, I mean, were you having the experience that readers had like, did it freak you out? I'm sure we're going to want to return to this, but I can tell you an absolute sincerity. I did not realize I was writing a scary story. So, I mean, obviously, I know the earthquake is going to be terrifying. And I know more to the point our lack of preparedness for it is genuinely really scary. But while I was reporting it, sure, I mean, as I think often happens as a reporter, you toggle between professional happiness, which is sometimes frankly even professional glee, you're just so thrilled you're getting what you're getting. And then the sort of more human and humane response, which is every time you really kind of set down your pen and think about what it is you're actually reporting about. So yes, of course, I found it very sobering. I love that region. I have spent time there. As I said, I have very, very beloved friends and family there. I obviously would be devastated if anything happened to them, but also just something terrible will happen to that region. And of course, that's really scary. The reporting from within the inundation zone of the tsunami was emotionally speaking, certainly the hardest. None of it was hard, again, in terms of how forthcoming people were. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's impossible. I end that piece with an elementary school in a little community called Gerhardt that it's not in a survivable location. It's squarely within the inundation zone. Those kids have no way to get out. And in fact, there's literally kind of no way. There's no route. There's no plan in place right now. And it was horrifying to stand there and think through what can and sadly probably will happen there. I guess what balanced that out for me. I mean, remember that at this point in my career, I have been working for the previous two years as a book critic. And it's quite rare I can tell you it was a book critic to feel like the work that you're doing has any real material importance in the world. So in that sense, although it was disturbing and sobering, it was very welcome to feel like this story actually, it's not just that it's fun and sexy and interesting and I get to learn all the science and talk to all these people. It's actually important. There is a way to tell this story that could actually matter even if just a tiny bit. And a lot of journalists are always telling stories like that and I take my hat off to them. I think they're the heart of our field, but I'm not historically one of them and it was a pleasure to get to do it. Hey, I'm going to put things on hold for just a second. Tell you about someone who's making today's show possible and so many episodes of the Long Form Podcasts possible. That's someone is Squarespace. And if you are someone who needs a website, be it for your writing, be it for your photography, be it for your business, be it for some store of your dreams. Squarespace is the way to do it. They've got beautiful templates. They work on any device. They've got 24/7 customer support if you hit a snag, but you won't because you don't need to know, look at code to you, Squarespace. You don't need to know one Iota of code. Everything's just drag and drop. You move it around. It looks good. Sort of like out of the box. It looks good. But if you want to customize it, it's super, super easy. Don't take my word for it. Go play around. It's totally free to set up a site. Go to squarespace.com. Once you set up that beautiful website of yours and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life." Sign up with the offer code Long Form and you get 10% off your first purchase. That's a pretty good deal. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the show. We really appreciate their continued support. Now let's get back to Katherine. Part of what is so striking about the story is it seems to me that you took the story and took great care in trying to place people there in the moment. Was that the goals that would you set out to do? I wish I could tell you or that deliberate. Writing is so funny and trying to actually talk about it is so odd because of course while you're actually sitting there staring at the legal pad page or the computer screen, it's all much more catch's catch can and improvised and frankly desperate than it sounds when you're dissecting it after the fact. So was that where? Because it sounds to me like at least from what you're saying. You knew within seconds this was the story you wanted to write. You walked into Remnik's office and he was like, "Go." Everyone you talked to was like, "Please tell this story where we're spending our lives working on this issue and we can't get anyone to face it." Was the writing where all of a sudden the gravy train stopped? Oh, it always is. I mean, look, I don't know people's experiences very wildly of course. And even within one person's experience like, "Yes, my own" varies at least somewhat. But it is consistently the case that I am so excited and overdoid when I'm reporting or researching or reading and all you can think about is the kind of platonic form of the piece. There's this incredible thing to be written about this subject and then of course you have to actually sit down and write it and, "Oh yes, that's always where the train stops like lurchingly, right?" and the passengers go flying and it's all the pain-flinch lines are. Nope, please no disaster metaphor for sure. I'm sorry, yes, so the scratch that one from the record. All of that is to say, yes, it's. It's always in the writing that it becomes difficult. In the case of this piece, I'll tell you that probably the single most dramatic change that happened within this piece. And I should say it was written over a long period of time because it began as a freelance piece. And then the New Yorker hired me. And they also kind of hired me as a book critic. So suddenly there were these sort of deadline driven books come out on a certain day. You should probably be kind of timely. So I was sort of writing these things that were more time sensitive than the earthquake piece. Or at least we hoped they were more time sensitive. And we turned out to be right. So the actual writing dragged on for kind of a while because other deadlines kept intervening. And in a way that was really fortunate because I can't begin to guess how many drafts I went through and drafts is kind of a funny idea because I tinker all the time as I write. So it's not like there's a bunch of clear, very separate documents. But for a very long time, this piece started very differently than it does. The version that wound up in print, you said, oh, I tried hard to put people there. Well, we opened with Chris Goldfinger, this seismologist slash protagonist of the piece in the 2011 To Hoku earthquake in Japan, which is probably the best analogy for what's going to happen in the Northwest. So literally like the ground is shaking when this story opens. For a very long time, this piece did not open like that at all. It opened on a rainy day in the town of Seaside, Oregon, which is actually still where the piece ends. It ends with these kind of imperiled schools in Seaside. But it initially opened with this kind of sleepy beach view. It's very sort of pretty writing, but it's quite quiet. I mean, I was aiming for sort of-- it's kind of jaws like undercurrent of a menace, but in practice, it actually was just sleepy. And the idea was I was going to kind of pan out to the ocean and bring us underneath, and there's the fault line. And I got overly wedded to it because I got to write a pretty descriptive paragraph about the seashore or whatever. And these other deadlines in Irvene. And I went back to this piece at some point, and I read this opening, and I just thought, you know, this is a piece about an incredibly huge impending natural disaster, like give the people what they want. Like this is not the moment to kind of have our sleepy little pretty descriptive paragraph, like have an earthquake. So I got there, but no, I can't say that from the beginning, I had some crystalline vision of, you know, this is how this absolutely has to open. It's the opening was a torment to write. - You referenced "Jaws," were you thinking about it like a movie? - Probably not. Although, yes, I did just make that reference. I'm rarely thinking about things like movies. I wish I were a more cinematic thinker. I'm a very idea-driven thinker and a very language-driven thinker, and I have to really remind myself to think in terms of scenes, not just visual ones, but interactions, you know, drama, humans, moving across the world as we do. - I think I asked that only because there's the only way I could understand it while I was reading it. It just doesn't seem real. I mean, in my experience, at least, was several times throughout the process of reading it, and I just read it, you know, re-read it again today. It gets progressively more real in this way that is both quite powerful and quite unnerving. But for some reason, for a while, the only way I could think about it, even while reading it was sort of as a movie. - It didn't feel quite real to you. You know, you've identified indirectly a fundamental conundrum about writing that piece. So when I was in the excited stage, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is such an incredible story. I can't wait to tell it. I thought I was going to write itself, which is a phrase I actually do not believe in. It's obviously invented by non-writers to torment the rest of us. Nothing writes itself. But I thought it was going to be relatively easy because I thought, natural disasters, you know, what could be more fun? And I knew the data I had to work with. I mean, I'd sat with these FEMA people and looked at their numbers and it's staggering. And I thought, oh, this is going to be easy for once. And then I sat down to write and I realized that I had an incredibly fundamental problem, which is that I was writing about a thing that hadn't happened yet, which is why you're saying, well, it didn't seem real. It's not real. It hasn't happened. The last time it happened was in 1700 and nobody alive witnessed it. Remember it? It has been told about it. And there's no historical record about it, or at least very minimal one. And that turned out to be truly a dilemma in the sense that reporters, the kind of fundamental tool of our trade is facts. We build stories out of facts. And there are no facts about an event that hasn't happened. Now there are things like these FEMA forecasts and there are certain kinds of facts, number of brick buildings in the region, so on and so forth. But there's not a fact of the matter of what actually happened during the disaster. The disaster hasn't happened. So I was put in this funny position of, as you say, writing about a thing that in some kind of deep sense was not yet real. How do you do that? Well, as it turns out, I did it in the future tense. I really wrestled with that. So I didn't quite know how this piece was going to open. And I wrote a bunch of different openings, including this sleepy one that I got wedded for too long. But I knew how it wasn't going to open, which is with a thought experiment. I am unjustly allergic to thought experiments. I have seen them done beautifully. And my baseline belief about writing is that absolutely anything can be done well. But a lot of people have written about this disaster. And I had read versions of it that are like, oh, it's 9 AM on a beautiful July, Sunday in 2018, when suddenly-- and I just couldn't bring myself to go down that road. And so the piece doesn't open that way. But I did realize, well, at some point, the earthquake has to happen. The tsunami has to happen. And I deferred that until I felt I had built the science behind it. And then it's not exactly a thought experiment, because I literally-- I don't say it's happening. I say this will happen. And so the future tense is a deliberate decision on two fronts. It's first of all to stave off the thought experiment. It's not happening in the present tense. It literally hasn't. It isn't. But it's also not happening in the conditional tense, because I talked to the scientists, and they said it's not an if. Right. It's not an if. It's a when. So I want the future tense. It's very unusual as a journalist to get to write extensively in the future tense. But it's powerful. It's like constant reminder. Don't be confused. This is not like an if question. This is a when question. There's another piece of that story, which I wanted to ask you about, which is-- there's a moment very close to the end, in which you basically try and explain or wrestle with why we're in the situation we're in. How is it that there is this fault line just off the coast that we didn't realize was there until the mid 1990s? And since then, have sort of aside from these handful of scientists for sort of sending up players, however they can, to whom you must be like their patron saint now. But we sort of willfully ignore. And basically what you arrive at is we're only here for a very short amount of time. And in the grand cosmic theme of things, we're only here for whatever it's going to be. 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years. And it's hard when you're only going to be here for a short amount of time to really think long term, because this thing could come tomorrow, and it could also come a couple of years from now, also possible. That's a very powerful idea. It's something that you do in a lot of your writing. I found you sort of like kind of continually take a step back and try and make some larger point that feels larger than even-- something larger than even like a coast destroying earthquake-- sort of about humanity, about the way that we are in the world. And I wondered as I was rereading it today, whether-- how early that idea came to you in this process, whether it was after thinking about it over and over and over again that you arrived there, or whether on some level that kind of like drove you. It was always there quite unlike you asked, though, did I always know I was going to tell it in such and such a way? No, I didn't. But I did always know why I was telling it. And of course, some of that was for the story and the science, quasi-story and science. It's important, absolutely, on its own merits. And I don't want to undersell that. But from the beginning, I knew that this was effectively a story about scale, ours versus the planets versus the universe. These are questions that are very, very interesting to me. I always knew I was going to hit that note. I also knew from the beginning, in many ways, this story, in my mind, was a parable about climate change, basically, another imminent catastrophic problem whose range alludes us. Because it's hard to think on that timeframe. Because while we were basically oblivious to it, we established an entire culture and civilization dependent on continuing to run as it currently runs, which is very much what's happened in the Pacific Northwest, as well. So yeah, I always knew it had this kind of-- for me, this deeper-- I don't want to say deeper in port, because frankly, nothing is more important, ultimately, than lives lost or saved in the event. But it always had this kind of ramification and these echoes with other ideas that are interesting to me. And if anything, I would say the struggle in the writing-- and this is often true for me-- was to scale that back to realize that you have to earn that-- and you can usually do it quite lightly and sort of hit it once and the gong if you hit the gong at the right moment and it really is a gong truly once was plenid. But yes, I always knew what was going to be there. I mean, even in this last piece you wrote about the Tomali King which we should talk about, that does the same thing. There's a moment at the end of the story. It's this fantastic layered history of a man and a town and a state and a community and the country. And then there's this note at the end that steps back even further and makes a point about immigration today. And sort of what it means to be an American and how that shifts. Where does that come from in you, that idea of trying to make some larger, almost like moral or in a way these guys like read as fables almost like there's lessons in these pieces that most writers, most journalists wouldn't strike the gong once. It's rare to go for that larger idea, that like humanity connecting idea, an idea that makes you think about directly, sort of reckon with your own place in this story. What is it about you that allows you to, that forces you to, that makes you go there? Boy, that's an interesting question. I mean, look, you're an astute reader, I think you're right. Oh, what is it about any of us? I think that as is so often the case for all of us, right, our strengths, our weaknesses and vice versa. I am drawn to the vast and abstract and unwieldy. I am interested in impossible things like the human condition. Anthology and existence and cosmology and morality. These are deep and guiding interests of mine. They're what I notice and I don't mean that as a, I'm not particularly informed about them. I'm in no way, shape or form, a legitimate philosopher or cosmologist or any of these things. But it's how my mind works. I'm drawn, I'm drawn to the kind of big and our place in it. And that's very handy for striking the gong. As you say, or at least for seeing the gong, I have to teach myself one and how to strike it a new every time. It's not at all handy for being a writer or a journalist in a certain sense in that more fundamentally I've had to try to teach myself to actually find the story. I mean some of the writers and thinkers I admire most notice stories in the world, the way that I notice the kind of positional questions about morality or time or scale or whatever they are. And so the trick has been, it's not hard for me to know why I'm writing what I'm writing. There's almost always some deep moral or scientific concern or both. I'm very often writing about mortality. I'm very often writing about morality. I'm very often writing about squaring the scales of being human with the rest of the world. That's all intuitive to me. What's tricky is like, but what's the story? And how do you report it? And how do you make it bear up under the weight of these big abstractions that interest me? To you've always been wide that way? I think so. I mean I think we're probably all kind of, I'm thinking about this very beautiful line from Gerard Bailey, Hopkins poem that I really love where he says, "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same meaning we're just who we are right, we're always expressing kind of some fundamental essence of ourselves over and over and over." And yes, I think I probably always had the same interest. I've always noticed the same. It's like we're all little separate species and you see ultraviolet and icy infrared and I have to learn to pick up on the rest of the thing. So yeah, I've always been interested in those kinds of questions I'd say. Your book was kind of about a big question. Can you give me the capsule? Sure. So in 2010 I wrote a book or it came out in 2010, a book about being wrong, which actually horrifyingly in the scope of like, Catherine's interest, that's not even a big one. But of course it's mine. It's minor Catherine. It's incredibly unwieldy. What I didn't realize was my first and so far only book and a lot of very wise people kind of gently tried to say to me, like, "This might be challenging for a first book." And of course what they were saying was, "This is a huge topic that bears on everything that has absolutely no natural infrastructure. So in the first book, you're going to have to invent the entire structure of this book and also along the way master like 12 different disciplines." That was of course the deep attraction for me of the subject. I got to play around in philosophy and science and political science and you name it and that was really fun. Give me like the elevator pitch for the book. Oh my gosh, I can't. Still six years later, I couldn't even do it when I was in the thick of writing or the thick of promoting the thing. But essentially it's about fundamental paradox of the fact that we are all incredibly error prone. We all get things wrong all the time. And that fact is essential to who we are. It's both definitive of the limits of being human. That's kind of the scale question again, right? Very little we can actually know and we screw it up all the time and it's also fundamental to creativity and progress and all of these kinds of things. And at the same time for the most part we really hate it and we're really terrible at it. Right. Well there's also this kind of like a mind-fuck part of the idea which is inherent in being wrong is not realizing that you're wrong. Yeah, exactly. I mean I make the point in the book that one of the really maddening things about being wrong is that it feels right up until you realize that it feels exactly like being right. So we kind of move to this world in this happy state of kind of a epistemological bliss. We know everything and of course we don't and it collapses over and over again. And sometimes in really funny ways or really satisfying ways or really illuminating ways, sometimes in really tragic ways. That's a big question. That's like fundamental human condition stuff. Yes. And you give a TED talk which has been seen like one good Gillian times and I thought it was going back. I was kind of like, alright these are like big questions. This is like everyone in the world can relate to being wrong. Right. There's like we are looking out over the expanse of New York City. There's no one out there who has ever not been wrong. Right. Massive unifying idea. Sort of in the tradition of like, glad well and do hang these like big ideas that touch everybody that like you can totally see some CEO making like all of their top executives read, you know. And it made me wonder like, why didn't you keep down that path? Like I saw this road stretching in front of you. That was like like the guru avenue and seems like you didn't go down guru avenue. Well, if one thing you would be the least sincere and most cynical person on the planet, write a book about being wrong and turn yourself into a guru about it. I think they might be fundamentally incompatible positions. But more than that, the very straightforward answer to that question is I like to write and I want to be writing. And I am not actually very interested in spending much of my professional time doing other things and I don't say that to diminish all the other things writers can and do do and that includes teaching and includes giving talk. I gave quite a few after the book came out and I'm glad I did. I learned a ton. Did you like doing them? I did actually one of the most surprising things I learned is that oh my god turns out I'm a ham. I love to be on a stage. I literally never like not even like seventh grade like community theater. You seem really comfortable out there. Yeah, it turns out I totally love being on a stage, which like my older sister for instance could have told you obviously. I want to adjust my description of guru revenue just a bit. I don't mean like necessarily why didn't you spend the next six years like traveling around giving talks for tons of money. I think I mean more like we're sitting here talking about how you struggled to figure out how to like ring the gong once in that earthquake story and like once in the tamale story. Another way it could have gone was that you wrote another book that was another like 350 page gong ring sure so couple things to say about that. First of all, it was very clear to me I wasn't going to kind of continue writing about wrongness even though it's such a large topic that obviously I didn't exhaust it. I mean it truly does include among other things all of a epistemology a field I love for me the engine of writing is almost always ignorance like I write to figure out what I think it's part of why writing is such a struggle for me. It would go a lot better and a lot faster if I figured out what I thought in the road. Also, I would save myself literally thousands of words that wind up on the cutting room floor or tens of thousands in the case of the book. But that's the engine for me and that's what makes it fun and interesting and once I already know what I think about something it is actually more excruciating to write about it. I really hate I'm very bored by writing when I know how I already feel. So I knew I didn't want to take on that topic again. I'll wrap up the kind of group he's just by way of saying. I did at some point for New York Magazine write a piece about big idea books which people could very legitimately say well that's a category which I you know that my own book arguably has a place in. It's a very critical piece and it outlines some of the reasons. reasons, I didn't want to go sort of down that particular road. But to the kind of questionable, why not another 350 page work on a sort of single sweeping subject like that? I think the answer is, I will surely do that again. I just, not quite there yet, and I love my current job. Okay. I didn't mean that as pejoratively as it seems like you took it. I don't mean it as pejoratively as it sounds like I might have received it. I think, look, there's a lot of roles for books and writing in culture, and I think absolutely one of them is to help people make sense of their lives. For all I care, one of them can be to help corporations run better. It's not what I want to do, but I don't offhand dismiss it as inherently in every instance of objectionable goal. But it is true that when you write a big kind of idea-based book that everyone can identify with, like being wrong, that has certain kinds of obvious implications for practical life, there are a lot of enticements to just carry on speaking about it or writing on the same theme. Were you enticed? I mean, long enough to, you know, do it for a little while, and I think I sort of made a promise to myself when the book came out that I would just say yes to everything for a solid year. I had killed myself to write the book, the least I could do on behalf of my publisher, my editor, my incredible agent, was like, do my part to try to make the book work, and it felt like one piece of that was saying yes. That was my own moral calculation. I don't at all mean the dismiss. I admire writers who step entirely away from that world and handle it differently. I decided to say yes, glad I did. No, I think whatever section ahead for me were off pretty quickly, not again because that world is evil in some way, but because I like to write. And it's time consuming to do other things. And ultimately I felt like, why am I not at home thinking I want to go think. Think instead of talk. We're jumping around here, but I feel like we can't let the really big one go without talking about it's after bath. That story comes out. You find your truly cinematic lead. You find your structure, you ring the gong, the piece comes out. And I remember that day, I mean not only did I email you that day, but I remember it's just like my version of the internet, like the internet that I look at. That internet's like mouth dropped. It was my experience. There was just like a steady like really? What? It was almost like some disaster had happened. It was kind of how like I feel like people reacted to it. What was that day like for you? And then tell me about the reaction to Pacific Northwest and has there been any changes to it? And you know, what was that like for you? Well, so that immediate day was kind of funny for me in that, first of all, let me remind you that from my perspective, this piece had been sitting in like messy kind of, you know, chameleon like form in the middle of my life for over a year at this point. And my chief feeling about closing it and getting it off the desk finally was just really, I was just so happy to be done with it. I can remember really liking the art they did for it. Beyond that, I didn't really give a thought. I had a lot else going on in my life at that moment. Good, exciting stuff. I didn't really give a thought. It's almost like you didn't see it coming. Yeah, well, truly, I mean, some of this also was a kind of after effect of working as a book critic for a while, book pieces, which I love writing, tend to kind of sink quietly off into the, you know, under the ocean of other more sexy stories out there. So I didn't really think about it. And then, I mean, in a very sort of immediate way what happened for me that day, I had relatively recently started a relationship with the woman that I'm with now. And I was actually out in Oregon and she had just come out to visit me. So for one thing, we're three hours behind, right? So like the New Yorker world in the East Coast, like the piece is already gone up, gone up, people of long-send started reacting when we got up that morning. And a friend of hers had texted her to say like, hey, you know, I think your new girl is kind of having a moment on the old internet here. And so we kind of, I recall opening my Twitter feed, looking at it, and feeling so overwhelmed that I just immediately closed it and was sort of like, it's a gorgeous summer day in Oregon, like we're out here, she's like, come to visit me. That's so healthy, I almost don't believe you. No, but I swear to you, it's true. I mean, I'm not normally that healthy, like I too have a Twitter addiction and like look, we all have various ways are addicted to or certainly very happy to like experience positive feedback from pieces that we've had or anything that we do. So it's not that I'm like saintly or indifferent to that stuff. I just had something more important going on, like, which is I was in love. And I really could not be bothered with the internet. And not only that, we had planned to go out to this kind of remote cabin in central Oregon where there literally, we had to walk a mile down a river to get a cell phone. And I was like, no, I'm not going to be there. I was like, I'm not going to be there. I mean, every day I walked down the river, and there was sort of this day loose of earthquake-related things. And it was actually healthy, that I was not in a space where I was motivated to kind of track it tweet by tweet or. - It'd be great if that's just how the internet was. Just like once a day. - Just once a day, you know, you should really. - Just once a day, I know it's truly. - I spent my life trying to reproduce those circumstances, it's true, I should always. - That really does, like that seems like. - That's like, you've got. You've got like a big blackbuster thing, and the internet is going crazy. It seems like a very idyllic way to experience it. It was, it was, and I think. Look, it's a good lesson, it was a good lesson for me at least, which is like, you don't need to burr dog every moment of a piece like that. I think it's easy when you're. You know, sitting at a loan in front of your computer and you should be writing to do that instead, or it's easy when, you know, the more generous take on that, is you kill yourself to write a piece. You do want to see how it's fairing in the world, but certainly there's just absolutely no need to do that in a kind of minute-by-minute way. And I'm grateful that as it turns out, I was just otherwise occupied and not really bothering to do so at that point. There's a follow-up piece that you put up a couple of days later that's kind of like the practical appendix to the story. Like, I mean, what I saw was kind of like that mouth drop on Twitter, but was part of the reaction like a genuine panic? I wouldn't say panic, but I said to you earlier that I truly did not set out to write a terrifying piece and somehow, and this, I don't think this reflects well on me as a writer, I didn't truly even realize until I myself finally went and read about it much later that it actually, yeah, it's kind of scary. I was thinking about what one is always thinking about, which is how I make the sentence work or what's the transition or what goes where. So I kind of lost the force for the trees, but it seemed to me that the overriding initial response to that piece was, oh my God, this is freaking terrifying. I was a little alarmed by that reaction because not only because I hadn't seen it coming, but because, and I think I might say this in the sort of opening to that follow-up piece, oh, fears of limited use, right? It's not panic, it's obviously never a useful strategy and even fear is only useful if it actually motivates you to take some kind of protective steps and so I had that moment of, you know, that original piece is, although I do care very much about the area and I wanted to try to draw attention to an issue. It's obviously not servicernalism in any sort of useful way and I just had the moment of like, okay, this is actually not terrifying for, unless you live in an inundation zone for the vast majority of people in the Pacific Northwest, you can take very real steps to protect yourself. I can't guarantee you're not gonna get hit and head by a flying brick or be on the wrong bridge at the wrong moment, but for most people, you can do a lot of really simple things to save yourself and so I had that kind of moment of conscience of, ugh, like, I don't want people to just be scared. Like go do something. - So, both down your bookshelf, it's gonna be fun. - It's so frustrating. What was the reaction like from the scientific community? - Really gratifying from my perspective. I mean, obviously, I said earlier, we deal in the business of facts and my primary concern with that piece and with all pieces was to feel like I got it right and I was, you know, inevitably you write a piece like that and then you get a certain number of non-scientific nace errors who are like, oh, you know, fear mongering, journalism, yellow journalism, this, that and the other. And. - There were no earthquake deniers? - Borderline. I mean, there were certainly, there were certainly some people who were almost in that camp who don't really believe it or certainly just don't think it's gonna be particularly bad or it's gonna happen in 10,000 years. And so it was very reassuring to me that to my knowledge, the whole scientific community was unified in saying, it's very credible, this is accurate, the fact here, there's a lot of ways to tell the story but the facts and the story are accurate. - And has there been an impact? - I think there has. And I don't wanna overstate it because the things that would make the largest difference are things like, you know, fixing the whole infrastructure of the Northwest, which our whole country could stand to do. And, you know, that's a long ways away. Those are, you know, a billion dollar, you know, fixing every bridge and highway type projects. But a lot of things have happened that's been hurtening to me. I got a lot of notes from contractors, the just of which were essentially like, thank you, you just put my children through college. So I think individuals took a lot of action. People really did bolt their homes to their foundations, things like this. I know that the city of Portland just staged a major kind of planning scenario with I think 20,000 people or something like this to really walk through how they can better kind of improve their response when it happens. I know the White House held a summit on seismic safety and among other things, I think are implementing an early warning system in the region. Personally, perhaps most gratifying, that little community of seaside is putting its referendum to move its entire school district back on the ballot again this November. - Oh really? - Really, really, really, really hopeful that they might this time get the funds to get those kids out of the dangerous zone. - Oh, that's fantastic. - Well, it'll be fantastic, but it actually happens. - What do you think it's gonna happen? - I can tell you, I'm gonna make a whole heck of a lot of noise come October to see what I can do to help make it happen. I don't know, I certainly hope so. I certainly hope so. - I'm not sure we're gonna have enough time to get like totally into the Tommali story, but you sent this tweet while you were writing that story, which was, "I'm here a million years into my career "and I've finally figured out the secret of writing, "find a killer story." At this point in your career, a million years in, what are you looking for in a story like, you're in a position here, it feels like where you can kind of write about whatever you want. - On a basic level, I'm looking for stories, which, although the sound's ridiculous, actually is kind of a shift for me. I mentioned I'm always drawn to ideas. I notice big abstract things in the world. And so I've always kind of registered ideas. And now I find I'm very interested in stories. I would love nothing more than this will never happen, but I dearly wish that my next book were gonna be just a yarn, like a book length, like the perfect storm. And I'm not kidding, I actually think that book is incredible. So part of me, I've got an eye out for a really wonderful yarn. The story of Louis Tommali was a great yarn and I was so happy to find it. And I would love to tell some more of those. But that said, I do always still notice the ideas. I notice beautiful books and I wanna write about them. I notice things about how we speak or how my own mind works and I get distracted and wanna write about those things. So I know that I don't wanna be guided. The risk of something like that earthquake pieces, you start to feel like you get a little taste of, for instance, how much more people like to read about natural disasters than like literary criticism. And it's easy to be seduced by that. And I know I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna go chasing things that I think are kind of hot stories. - Why? - Oh, because there's so much else in the world and because part of what makes a story beautiful is the fact that you're dying to tell it. And that alchemy, the story that you're dying to tell, doesn't, in my case, at least, always or even often line up with the kind of obvious popular story or great story. And again, I don't mean this disparaging lamb. I'm grateful for the people who tell those stories well. But I think it's distracting to start to try to, I'm glad that there's people at this organization that do things like crunch the numbers on what stories get the most hits because I would like for the New Yorker to survive and remain economically viable and so on and so forth. But I don't wanna become that person. I don't want my own choices to be dictated by what I think is gonna fare well with other people. I'm interested in the things that I would love to write, either because they kind of land squarely in the stuff Catherine is obsessed with category or because they kind of push the boundaries of what I feel like I know how to do. - Those kind of feel in slight tension to me. - Absolutely, sure. - The stuff you really know well and the stuff you don't know at all. - I mean, I will tell you frankly, I've never written an easy book piece, but it's easier to write a book piece than any other kind of piece for a very simple reason, which is you don't have to explain what you're doing there on the page. You're on the page 'cause someone else wrote a book and you're writing about it. I don't know to justify my presence and why I'm taking up room in the magazine. Every other story you need to explain, what are we doing here? Why are we learning a piece of history from 1909, no where as well frontier, why I'm in? You have to justify your existence. In every story you have to figure out, what am I arguing here? For a long time I thought my problem was a writer and why I was so slow and everything took so long was I didn't outline. And if I only knew the order the piece was gonna go in, I would write it much better. And so I started outlining and it still was a disaster and took forever. I realized like no the issue is an outlining, the issue is you have to do the very hard work of stepping back and thinking like, what is it about? Like truly like, what am I claiming here? You know that's the guiding light that's gonna pull you through the piece, not like this section and then that section and then that section. I mean you need to know that at some point you have to put things in order but there's a lot of order things can go in but order is irrelevant if there's not a worked out coherent idea that you know you're writing about. - Do you think it's only recently that you've been able to sort of take that step back and see that consciously? - Well it takes various forms. I mean like a lot of things I think we all have the same revelation over and over. I always know that I need to figure out what the heck I'm writing about. And not like this is interesting because X, Y and Z but like literally this is the heart of this piece and I can articulate it for you in a sentence. That's hard work and it just takes time. I would say that the thing that I'm figuring out now is how to use reporting in the service of that kind of writing, of idea driven writing, of rich and linguistically interesting writing. For a long time those things felt intention to me. I loved to report but then I had all this material and I couldn't figure out how to marry it to the kind of writing I like to do and I think that's what I'm trying to sort out now. - You say it's hard work to do that thinking and to figure out what the story is about. How do you think about that work? What is that work? - It is literally like thought. It is the work of the intellect. I mean I never experienced this more clearly than while writing the book where I could feel it. It was like a muscle at worn out. I mean you're just trying to figure out like, okay I'm writing a book about wrongness. Like truly what would be the logical structure for a book like that? What's the claim? How then do you lay out the idea? Like what would, why do you decide to put X chapter first and X chapter next? And those are questions about logic and their questions about their intellectual questions. Like even in something as quote straight forward as a book piece, at some point you have to figure out at least part of this is an issue of length. I think if you're writing a short, I really admire Dwight Garner, the one of the daily book critics of the New York Times, then man can write a thousand-word piece about a book and it doesn't need a lot of structure and it doesn't need a grand claim. He's very witty and all he's doing is telling you what the book is about and how it works and he's smart about literature and it's a pleasure to read. I'm often working to the tune of 5,000 words and if you're gonna convince him I'll stick with you for that long, you'd damn well better be making a point. And my job is to figure out what that point is and it's shallingly hard. I mean it really is like why this book, right? Like why does it merit attention when the 99 other books in my TBR stack, my TBR stack are getting ignored right now and what am I trying to say about it? And am I making a deep point about literature am I making a deep argument about literature? I don't know how to explain it better than to say that it is actually the work of thinking, of trying to clarify first for yourself and then fair reader an idea and that idea can be as simple as this is someone deliberately striving for an endorsing the category of the Great American novel and wielding it in this particular way in the history of ideas about great novels and great American novels or it can be, you know, okay this piece is my little anti-Trump creed occur and here's what is it deeply about? It's deeply about certain ideas about being American and maybe you never even see that stuff in the piece. Maybe it's scaffolding that drops away because once as a writer you know what you're writing about you don't need to hit the gong or the gong sounds all on its own if you do your work right, but you got to know what it is. - Does that work get easier? - I don't think so. I keep waiting for it too. I wish it did. I think some things about writing get easier. I've gotten better at, oh, the famous murdering of darlings. I can let go of stuff quicker when I realize it's in my way. I can iterate a little bit faster. I've gotten better at realizing when I actually do need to just go think, but the thinking itself, it can't get easier because it's bespoke every time. You're not thinking in the abstract like lifting a 20 pound weight this week and a 25 pound weight next week. You're thinking about a particular thing and so it's always novel. If it were the same answer as last week's answer you'd be writing a boring piece. You'd have already written it. So no, I think it's just really hard every time. - Maybe we should end on that. - I'm not hardening note. - Katherine, thank you very much for taking the time. - Thanks so much, it's gonna pleasure. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to Longform. I'm Max Linsky, my co-hosts are Aaron Lamarnev and Ratliff. Our editor is Jenna Weiss-Berman. Her new son is Abe Weiss-Garcia, welcome Abe. Our intern this week is Courtney Harrell. Our sponsors were male chimp and square space. Thanks to them and thanks to Katherine Schill's that one was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. We'll see you next week. (upbeat music) - So I guess what you're saying is you don't really have an answer for Remnick. I. Do I have an answer for Remnick who wanted to know what is it that I want to do? I would hope that all of us should be so lucky as to have that being answer that evolves all the time. My great joy in being here is, "Oh, I want to do something this fun than something else next month." And that sounds like dilatantism, but I think at its best it's actually just curiosity. It's just fun. The world is so big. I don't know what I want to do in five years on a good day. I know what I want to write right now and that's I think that's enough for me. 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