Episode 569: Lauren Markham

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Over 580,000 members have already refinanced more than $50 billion with SOFI. Visit SOFI.com/boxpod to see how much you could save. That's SOFI.com/boxpod SOFI student loans are originated by SOFI bank and a member FDIC, additional terms and conditions apply. SO Hello and welcome to the Longform Podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe, Max Linsky and Aaron Lamar are here with me. Hello gentlemen. Hey. Hey my friends, how are you? Very good. You missed it because we hadn't started recording, but Max is wearing a sh- a- a- you don't you? Oh, okay. I won't talk about it. Go ahead, Evan, who's on the show this week? Now, people will never know. This week on the show, I talk to Lauren Markham. Lauren is, she's written for a lot of magazines over the years. She has a ton of stories up on the old longform.org when you guys used to pick them. She's written about immigration a lot. She's written about the environment. She's written about all sorts of things. She had a book a few years ago called The Far Away Brothers about a pair of twins from El Salvador who made their way to the United States and what that experience was like for them. And she has a new book out called A Map of Future Ruins on Borders and Belonging. It's just out and it's kind of a mixture of some memoir about her own Greek heritage and an exploration of what that means mixed with reportage about the migrant crisis in Greece and people who are caught up in that. And I wanted to talk to her about all of those different things and we had a great conversation. That sounds excellent. Max gave a weird stink face. You are introducing the wrong episode, but I'm hoping you're introducing the right episode because I want to listen to the episode that you're introducing. If it is the wrong episode, we can just use this anyway. Max is still mad because you're about to reveal the ridiculous sweatshirt that he's wearing a hat. I haven't even talked yet. What is happening right now? No, I was making a stink face because I think there was something off in the recording. But you know, maybe there wasn't. And this is what everyone will hear. You know who helps us make this show and gets us through these technical and social issues like what people are wearing, whether the recorder is recording. It's Vox media. Thanks to them for helping us make this show. And now here's Evan with Lauren Markham. Lauren, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the book and I want to talk about the book, of course. But in the book, you write that you had, quote, fallen into journalism somewhat unexpectedly in my mid-twenties. So given the nature of our show, I very naturally wanted to find out how you actually fell into journalism. So tell me a little bit about the evolution of your interest in writing and then how that became a career in journalism. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, as a writer in high school, I was a writer in college and majored in writing. And I read articles in Harper's and I read articles in the New Yorker. I was like an avid reader of long form. But I understood myself as a creative writer or if I was anything, you know, any aspiration I had was in creative writing. And I didn't really understand the overlap or like what bridge could be built between one or the other. I went to the same college as Matt Power and was much younger than him, but became friends with him later in life. And we shared the same advisor and the advisor that we had in college had told him, you know, you could really make a career of this. And that same advisor, unfortunately, had told me like, you're so beautiful. How did I ever focus on anything in class? Oh my God. Yeah, it was, you know, which of course I didn't, I just sort of laughed off at the time and said, oh, thank you so much. And sort of went on to talk about my thesis. But I think, you know, there was both, I couldn't imagine myself being a journalist because I didn't know what that was or how to do that. But I also didn't particularly get any early in life encouragement of like how one might make a life of writing. And the fact is that I have always been incredibly interested in and engaged in social issues. And I finally kind of understood that like writing journalism was a mechanism to write about things I cared about in the world. And it just took a while for me to get there, which I actually think in retrospect with somewhat of a blessing because I had to work in the world for a while and learn how, learn how things worked before sort of writing about systems and structures, which I think ultimately served my writing. To me, a unique part of your career as I understand it is that you work in a school. So you could describe the work you do at the Oakland International School? Well, for a long time, I was, I helped found the school as a community partner years ago in 2007. And then for many years, like over 10 years, I worked as a school administrator, something called a community school manager, which is basically like an assistant principal, but in charge of everything outside of the classroom. So sort of social emotional services. That became untenable to keep doing that after a while with the writing career that I had and that I was building. Like I couldn't go on assignment except for over spring break. You know, like that didn't work. And also frankly, I was effectively a social worker and doing that for after about 15 years of doing that in various iterations. I think it was sort of time to take somewhat of a break. So I left the school in 2021 for a while, had a kid with this book, but I'm back at the school now doing grants management. Well, you partially answered one question I had, which is looking back over your assignments over the years. Yeah. You've been over the world. You're traveling through the assignments. How did you possibly do that while also having this job? It was really hard when I wrote my first book, The Far Away Brothers. I would be like, okay, I was, I was 80%. So I didn't, there was one day a week where I didn't work at the school. But of course, anyone who's ever worked part-time anywhere, especially at like a demanding place that you care about, it's like that's not real. But I would do this thing where I'd be like, okay, like MLK's day is coming up. We don't have school on Monday. I'm going to like, bank up my days off and work two weeks in a row and take two days off. So I take like Thursday and Friday off and fly overnight and report all day, Thursday, Friday's out. And then take a super late flight on Monday, get home at 2 in the morning and then like, be at my desk at 8 o'clock the next morning, like helping students like, find shelters because they were kicked out of their house. It was a lot, you know, hence like the way it became untenable. Like it didn't, it didn't work in the long term. Yeah. But I mean, a lot of especially long-form journalists, especially these days, everybody has some kind of side gigs or ways they make money because it's so difficult to make a career. But yours was so integrated in some ways with some of your stories, not all your stories because you're right about the environment, you're right about all sorts of things. But in some of your stories, it seemed very integrated with what you were doing in your job. Definitely. And I feel like there's this almost like trap that is always set for people like if you're a journalist, but you write about solutions to problems or you work in the area, you get labeled an activist. And an activist is not a journalist and they're these sort of supposed to be these separate entities. And I'm wondering if you ever encountered that or struggled with that, this sort of distinction between that work and your journalistic work? Definitely. And especially at the beginning, you know, at one time a beloved editor reached out for pitches being like, I love to get some pitches from you on immigration. And I pitched her bunch of stuff and she's like, oh, I like all of these. Let's talk. And then it was like, actually, I talked to the higher ups. You actually can't write about immigration because you work in immigration. And my response was sort of like on the one hand, I understand that. On the other hand, to be clear, I work at a school and like make sure that students like go to class on time and make sure that there are mental health providers and try to find lawyers for my students. But I'm not like working in immigration in the sense that I'm not, you know, working in this big structural way in immigration. I think over the years, as I've become more established, I think that's been less of a problem because I'm just honest about that on the page and sort of in advance to any editors. And the fact is that like, I think there's sort of a very slow sea change happening in our profession. I'm curious what you think about this around the notion of objectivity as not fully a real thing, right, as something we might strive for and fairness, but like all of us are coming in with the lens. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is I always read those debates from a distance. of I always thought magazine writing was that way. Like I mean, that's a newspaper thing as far as I'm concerned. And I see this struggle over it and I see I read the different sides and it's an interesting debate. But that's the beauty to me of a magazine story is you go out in the world and then you come back and if you've learned something and you want to express that as an opinion, you can do so. And if you have some stake in it, you also just describe that state. You can just write about it. Like that, that seems like the easy way out. Exactly. But newspapers don't want to take the easy way out. No, no, yeah. Right. Well, it takes, it does take space in fairness, right? That sort of, that, that takes a graph or two, that maybe newspapers don't have. But no, I completely agree. I mean, yes, you put it beautifully. Like that is what's so delightful about reading. And I think writing, long form nonfiction, is that there is a consciousness on the page generally, right? That consciousness isn't sort of a raster obscured into the like transparent eyeball of, you know, justice and clarity that frankly, none of us are able to have. It's about the striving for it and the striving for kind of being as honest as possible. And it seems also like your work at the school also gave you access to stories or at least to understanding the kind of people that are in these stories as three-dimensional people than otherwise. And isn't it, do I remember you quickly that for the far away brothers, you're, they were at the school, right? Is that why you- They were at the school, yeah. Yeah. What I was going to say is like I really have kept a really pretty strong like firewall between the work I do at the school and the people and things I write about. So even if thematically they're, they overlap, you know, I don't write about things that happen at the school with the very significant exception of my first book, which you know is written about two former students of mine. And that was a complicated ethical journey to even think about, you know, is this even ethical to do this? Is it ethical to ask? I talked to a lot of other journalists about it. I talked to a lot of my fellow staff members, my boss and mentor at the time who had founded the school. She said something really interesting, where she's like, girl, like we have journalists knocking down our door all the time to introduce us to students, our families, you know, to write these stories. And she's like, and, you know, we are the arbiters of that sometimes. And we were often deciding, you know, do we trust this journalist to do a good job? Do we want to broker this relationship? And she was like, I would much rather that be you. Like I trust you to do it more than like whoever off the street, which I appreciated. And of course she was on on my side and saw me as a trustworthy person. But I appreciated that frame. And it was an interesting thing because for a long time was like, I don't think it's appropriate to ask these, they, you know, they weren't my students when I asked them. But I said, you know, I was thinking, like I don't know if it's appropriate to ask them because they don't know what I'm asking. Like they haven't read like long-form journalism like this, like they haven't, they don't know what it is that I'm asking of them. But then I also started to think about the notion that like I, that was infantilizing them in a way. You know, these were two young men who made it by themselves at 17 years old like from El Salvador to the United States. And there was some way that I was sort of stripping them of any like agency by saying like, oh, I couldn't possibly give them the choice about this thing. And it was really interesting when I first asked, I said, you don't have to answer now. This is something I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about writing a book about an accompanied miners, you know, coming from Central America because I'd written a bunch of magazine stories. And I'd really like to talk to you guys at some point about including your story. And one of them was like, you can write about us, but just so you know, we're not going to tell you everything. Like we might not answer all your questions. Like there are things we won't want to talk about. And I was like, okay, you know, like, and that didn't, that wasn't like, oh, end of story, no ethical quandaries here. But it was like, oh, these, these young people feel completely comfortable like setting boundaries with me. And so that was affirming too. And I mean, as we were discussing before, like it's in the book. Like there's a point in the book where they they walk into your office, you know, that it's not hidden in the context of the book. No, right. Exactly. You obviously are very interested in migration issues and are drawn to those types of stories. And in this new book, you're pursuing your own family story as part of the book that you're writing. But I was wondering which did one predate the other? Like, did you grow up being interested because of your family history? Or did you become interested in migration stories? Because either you work at school or through journalism? You know, migration did bloom really large in my family's story of itself and thus sort of my own self perception, my own sense of identity. Part of my family is, you know, our great grandmother came from Greece in the Ellis Island era. And that was very much like our origin story, you know, almost mythically, like many, like many families, right, have these mythic stories of where we came from or who we are. And I think because of that. And because of this sense that all of this belonging that I had been afforded in the world was in part on her back, right. And was a product of this. Like, I felt some both an interest in the continued stories and how of immigration over the century, you know, and how those have changed in tenor and in kind and in form. And I was also felt a responsibility and was interested in dissecting those questions of belonging of who gets to belong and how and at what point does one step across the line, you know, there's the line of the border and then there's the line of belonging once you're in the border. And so I think I felt a really interest and draw to attend to those questions and kind of a responsibility, you know, I've been incredibly fortunate and lucky in my life and very privileged to be afforded so much belonging and it felt like how do I become an agent of belonging in some way. And I think that the work at the school is one manifestation of that. And I think my writing is is another, especially this new book. Do you remember when you first conceived of or became comfortable with the idea of writing about your own heritage? Yeah, I mean, for a while I talked about it as the Weird Grease book, you know, because I had this sort of these ideas that there are these associative pieces, the story of my own heritage and my own great-grandmother who came from Greece, you know, in 1914. So there's that. And then there's the story of millions of people who are crossing into Greece today and facing tremendous exclusion, tremendous violence, you know, physical violence and sort of psychic violence. And then I had all of these thoughts about, you know, Greece's this setting for all of these mythic, lauded journey stories and Greece as this birthplace of Western civilization, I'm using scare quotes here, the cradle of democracy. And so there was a sense to me of like there's this convergence, this physical convergence where everything sort of all of these pieces are connected in Greece. But also there was this sense to me of like, oh, there are these associative pieces that fit together, I think, but I don't know if they fit together into a book. And so I sort of kept the project at bay for a really long time thinking like, you know, that's just weird. And I had other things to do, another assignments. But I was it was knocking on the door for a while. And then frankly, like once COVID hit, I wasn't traveling, I had more time. And I sort of finally sat down to write some of the things that I'd been thinking about and it had been reporting on related to Greece and in Greece and related to my own family. But you'd already done some of the travel or a lot of the travel and exploration. Yeah. Part of it. And so did you intend that you would eventually write about it or you sort of thought, well, this is dual purpose, I'm doing it for me and maybe I'll write about it maybe it won't. I think it was dual purpose because if I had said I'm doing book research, I alone, I think it was like too much pressure. You know what I mean? I wasn't ready to sort of claim it yet because I didn't quite believe in it yet. And I'm just the kind of writer who has to make sense of something on the page. Like I just it, you know, it has to be through the writing process that I make the connections and even see if the connections are fully there and are valid. So it really took the writing to claim like, oh, this is, you know, this, this is a book and this could be a book. But one of the things that drew me to reporting on Greece and this is something I write about in the book is that I felt so much like I was walking in circles about immigration and about reporting on the US border. It was like, especially after my book published, it was like, I have said everything I have to say about the 7,000 times and in billions of words, I cannot write the same story again. I cannot report on this same thing in the same way. I don't even do reading this. It was just I felt like I was writing, I was banging the same drum, you know, and screaming into the void. And it's not that I had any kind of illusions or have any kind of illusions that like one piece is going to like change the immigrating or any system, right? Like change does happen incrementally. But I think I was like, I can't write about this anymore. And yet this is the prism through which I see the world, largely, you know, and its injustices is migration. And so I think going to Greece was a way for me to think about this in a fresh way because I'm tired of beating the same damn drum, you know. Support for the show comes from SoFi. So, If I help you refinance at rates as low as 4.24% APR, potentially saving big by lowering your monthly payment. Visit SOFI.com/voxpod to see how much you could save. That's SOFI.com/voxpod. 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Learn more at BMC.com. There's sort of multiple books within this book, in a way. There's certainly multiple storylines woven together. Looking at your own heritage, there's also the story of Ali, this migrant who is accused in a fire that destroys the migrant camp in Moria. How did you sort of come to that as a specific story that you wanted to include in the book? There are so many stories. I'm interested in how you arrived at that one as one that you wanted to focus your reporting on. Yeah, that's a really central story. These six Afghan kids who sort of took the fall for the burning of the largest refugee camp in Europe, that none of the refugees, no one on the left, no one on the right one, if that camp to exist, it finally burned. And sort of someone had to pay and it ended up being these six with very skin evidence. I was drawn to that story for a number of reasons. I think that their story perfectly encapsulates the vilification in the extreme of migrants enough like the profile of a migrant. There's this notion in many destination countries in the world, if not all. It is a convenient profile, particularly for right-wing politicians and politicians trying to capitalize on angst within the country, within the borders. It's really convenient, right? You know, this very well here in the United States to sort of say it's their fault, right? These marauding invaders at the gate, and that's, that is, you know, essentially what happened to these young men. They came to Greece. There were six of them. They're all from different parts of Afghanistan. They were living in this horrific refugee camp where there were, you know, rat infestations. There was garbage everywhere. It was built for 3,500 people. And at one point when they were there, there were 20,000 living there. I mean, it was horrific. 500 people sharing a bathroom. So they're stuck there. They are applying for asylum. It's really difficult to navigate that system like it is here. Some of them get lawyers. They have their court dates. The court dates moved. They have another asylum interview. That's moved. And they're just like at the mercy of these systems. And then this horrific place that's sheltering them from the place they came from, which has become, you know, rubble in so many ways from Afghanistan. The place that they ended up that's sheltering them burns to the ground. They're on the run, living on the sidewalk because the fascists won't let them go to one town on the other side and the police are tear guessing them to keep them on the streets from the other side. And the police come and round up six guys and say, you burn it down. And they just go to prison. You know, it's like, the story is so, it's like you couldn't write the fiction version of that story because it would just be eye rolling. It's just like two grim, you know, it's two, it's a terrible thing that's happened to them. So I think that that's partially why not just because it's so terrible, but because there are just so many beats to that story that reveal the way that migrants are both cast aside on the one hand and treated so humanly all over the world, but are also cast as criminals and are made to pay for things that are much bigger structural problems. And then you're trying to sort of get a handle on, well, what is the case against them? What's the evidence against them? And you write about the challenge of sort of almost like trying to find evidence that isn't there because there isn't any evidence. I couldn't, I had this real naive like, I'm going to go get the fire report and I'm going to talk to the prosecutors and I'm going to, you know, I have my little journalist checklist and people are looking at me and greased like, you have a damn mind. Like, this is not here, you know, I talked to the governor of the Northern, a G and Islands and he was like, fire report, I would love to see it. Let me know if you get it. It's like, what do you mean? And the prosecutors are like, we're not available to speak with you right now. And I'm like, great, I'll be back in a month. We're also not available in a month to speak with you. And I'm like, ah, okay. Meanwhile, I was doing a piece separately about this court case in the US and there was this like, you know, and I was just like looking through a pacer and it's like the files of evidence and the testimonies of this and that. I was like, oh, wow, you know, this is pretty good actually. We have a pretty good here in certain ways. So you're putting those two stories together, you know, your own story and that one, but you actually write about like being concerned about putting them side by side, like not wanting it to seem like you're comparing them. And so how did you sort of resolve that for yourself, how you were going to approach it? Yeah. You know, I always think about like ethical questions in journalism as something we have to hold all the way through every step of the way. Like, it's not a checklist. It's not, I did it. I did that ethics. I know like I figured that out. And I think that that was the same with this story. Like it was actually, you know, I did not want to create any false equivalency between what my family experience coming to Ellis Island and what forced migrants are experiencing today because there isn't an equipment that it's a false equivalency. I am trying to look at these two stories side by side in fact to show how different they are, not just in terms of the what happened, but in terms of how the tales are narrated, right? It took me a while to figure out that this is actually a book about storytelling, about journalistic storytelling, about the kind of myths we spin culturally and politically, you know, about history, about current events. And yeah, and the role of journalism within all of that and my role as a journalist. And so I think that that's really what I ultimately figured out that I was trying to do with these two side by side is to show how different the way we talk about these things, this elated Ellis Island era kind of heroic past of early migrants who frankly were treated like absolute shit, right? Again, nothing compared to how people are treated on like the island of Lesbos right now, for instance, or at our southern border. But there's this sort of mythology of that that is so asymmetrical to how we talk about people migrating today. The larger mythology you deal with, which is almost I thought of it almost as like the third book I was reading within this book is about this mythology of Greek history and the way how we hold it in our minds as this sort of like cradle of democracy and how that has affected modern Greece. And were you already kind of like a student of Greek history or was it through this process that you that you kind of investigated all that? It was completely through this process that I investigated that. I knew and was interested in the way that Greece and Ancient Greek was canonical, right? That it was this thing we all had to study in school. Even one of the people I read about in the book, one of the young men from Afghanistan, he only went to like third or fourth grade in Afghanistan. But even he learned about ancient Greece, you know? Like this is this canonical thing that many of us have to learn in school and it's just held so central in Western so-called education and thought. And it is propped up, this is this origin story. And I had suspicions of that. But what was really interesting to me over the course of reporting this book is that I guess my suspicions were right and lots of people waste more than I had thought and written extensively about this before. But including some contemporary scholars who, and this was the most fascinating part to me, talk about this period of Ancient Greece, which is a pretty small period. Like the whole Byzantine Empire came afterward and very few people talk about that in relation to modern degrees. But there's this huge distance between the Hellenic past that we study and talk about and contemporary degrees in terms of how the place looks, you know, and how the government functions and the structures of that civilization. But also in terms of how it's regarded by the rest of the world. So there's this amazing scholar, Ranjali Kalutiko, who talks about the way that we that Greece, contemporary Greece, kind of performs Hellenism for the rest of the world to kind of gain or maintain a sense of inclusion, right? Like we, you came from us, and therefore we still have to be in the Eurozone, or you still have to take us seriously, because Greece is treated pretty badly by the rest, contemporary Greece. It's treated pretty badly by the rest of Europe, the debt crisis being the 2008 debt crisis and austerity measures being the most egregious and extreme manifestation of that. But also the way that Europe is currently sort of saddling Greece with a very disproportionate responsibility for caring for the refugees who aren't trying to go to Greece, they're trying to go to Europe, and Greece is just the easiest place to get to from any of them. - Yeah, when you kind of go to some of the, you know, the most, you know, visited sites in Athens, you know, the Echroplos or whatnot, it actually reminds me, have you read Clint Smith's book, how the word has passed? - Love that book. I think it's such a fantastic book. - It kind of put me in mind of that because it's the way these stories are told through these places, but also in the same manner of when I read that book, for me personally, like I could not imagine going to a place like that and coming back with anything interesting to say. (laughing) So it does make me wonder, like just at a very practical level, like do you take notes everywhere you go? Do you come home and write it up? How do you kind of capture the thoughts that you have when you're in these places? - I do take notes, I carry on a little notebook, but I think that it also comes through the writing itself. Like I don't think that I necessarily had the fullness of the thought, you know, that is rendered in the book when I was at the Echroplos. I really think of this book as, and I think a lot of books, but this one may be more directly, and it shows more in the text, is like a conversation with the other texts that I was reading to help push my thinking and make meaning. But also, I don't know that that first scene would have necessarily, so the sort of the book opens with the Moria Fire and then shifts to the first kind of morning. I was in Athens where we ended up at the Echroplos kind of by accident because it's very been, it was just, we just were like, wait, whoops, we were trying to just wonder the city, and here we are at the gates. But then we encounter this older gentleman, who asks us to sit down, and effectively the story is that, he asks us to sit down, he's playing his bazooki toward the birds and the trees, and we're listening to him, and he says, you know, I speak bird, and we're like, oh, what a sweet thing for, and I'll man to say why it's like playing a bazooki. And then he says, you know, I speak bird because soon there will be no Greeks to talk to anymore, you know, and so it was actually a gap in Stanton and sort of good luck for the book, I suppose, that like on that first morning, sort of the first person I talked to who wasn't like the ticket taker at the Echroplos was already bringing up the refugees. You know, and was already sort of projecting forward this like Greece is coming to an end because these new people are coming. - That brings me to a question that you sort of touched on earlier this frustration you had about sort of feeling like you're writing the same migration story and seeing it again and again and being frustrated with the journalism aspect of that. And there's a lot of writing in the book about journalism, the frustrations of it. And I wanted to kind of take them one at a time. I mean, for me, I don't know if this will be true for all readers, but like part of the suspense of the book for me was you sort of bring these things up periodically and I was like, what is gonna happen at the end? At the end is she gonna say, and this is the last thing I'll ever write. - Yeah. Now I'm just playing a bazooki toward the birds at the edge of the Acropolis forever, the end. - This is the last you'll hear from me on the page. But I think they're really addressed very eloquently. So one of them is the way that these stories are rendered and the way that they fall into certain conventions. So what was it about that that was bothering you? - I mean, a couple of things. I think there's a convention in a lot of immigration journalism that, and again, I am not, there are so many incredible journalists writing about immigration and thank God for journalism and I am still a journalist and I got an assignment today to go down to the border later this spring. Like I'm still doing it. This is not like a referendum on journalism. It was like a crisis of form and a crisis with myself about like how do I want to continue to do this and what does one do when one feels like they're writing again and again about the same thing and nothing's changing and like what is the responsibility there? And I think that's the only way to do this is to just keep beating the drum again, you know, forever and ever. And honestly, I think the answer is yes and I also think as there are different ways to beat the same drum, you know, and I think that's what I'm sort of trying to explore here. But in terms of frustrations, I think that one convention that really troubles me that I have totally done is the immigration story starts at the border. The immigration story is about the border itself and of course it's not, right? There are so many sociopolitical dynamics, historical dynamics that play out on a particular person in place that influence their decision to migrate long before they even think about migrating, right? So I think that was part of it and that's like an issue of scope, right? So it's maybe no surprise that this book is like, you know, 2000 years ago, it's like where is the beginning, right? Of a story, which is actually a question I think I ask almost for Badam when does the story start? And so that was one thing. Another thing is, you know, just, and this is I think just like not great journalism and I'm an untrained journalist, you know, like I got on the job training. And so I think some of my early stories did this because I didn't really know any better and I was sort of trying to follow the conventions and be a good soldier of what I was reading. But you know, just writing characters that are flat or that like the only thing about them is that they're an immigrant, right? The only thing about them is that they're stuck in nice detention and that is not very interesting to me nor do I think it does much to sort of reveal the multifaceted dimensions of human beings but also like of the varied overlapping systems that end someone up in nice detention in the first place or in the Moria camp. So that's another thing. And yeah, and then this like thing of linearity that like this happens and then this happens and then this happens and this happens and like the end. You know, we start at the border, we end when something else happens and that's it. And I think I was just feeling a sort of crisis of like, but what about all the other stuff that happens in between? Yeah. So I wrote a book that like it has meandering and it has multiple books within it and goes many places and asks lots of questions and circles back around the same questions, you know? I really wrote like could not be a different book than my first book. And that was intentional, you know? There was a version of this book that could have been just the Moria fire and I think that would have been a great book and it just wasn't the one I could have written, you know, at this time. Well, there's sort of two of those things in particular that feel like their intention. One is when you're trying to write people as characters in a story, quote unquote characters and draw them as completely as possible. And it's not just about the misery of being stuck in a detention camp or center or right at the border, this, that. But then the other side of it is writing the same story and nothing changing and feeling like I don't want to make something change. And it feels like if your impulse is to hope the story changes something, there's a greater inclination to kind of dial up the misery because that might be the thing that would do it. Exactly, exactly. And part of it, I mean, you bring up this idea of action and part of it was this crisis of like, what does this amount to? What does it mean to be a journalist? Like, what is this action? And I was writing this book part of it anyway, a good part of it when I'd quit my job. And so that was really up for me. It's like, OK, if I'm only-- there was a couple of years where I was just sort of mostly freelancing. And it was like, OK, if I'm only doing this, then this has to really matter. And what is the currency of mattering? Like, what is the effect? How do you measure that? And it used to be at my old job. It was much easier to do because I could end the day and be like, well, I did like-- and it's not like not a pad on the back thing. That was just the nature of the work. That was my job and I was doing it. But I think writing and journalism does not have that same-- you can't make that same list. So I think it was a crisis of what is action, how does action and writing map together, and how does one measure outcome. And also, then there's a part of the book where I'm like, well, is outcome the point? Or do we just have to do this? Because we just have to do this. And how did you come through that? Ultimately, how did you answer the question? Well, what if I tell these stories, and it doesn't actually change anything? Well, I think it's like, there is an impatience in the question that I think is valid and honorable. And then there's an impatience. There's a quality of impatience in that question of like, what is this all for? That's sort of bratty, honestly. And that's like, you know, I'm just being impatient and I want what I want now. And again, that's why it's like-- it's both, right? It's honorable to want places like Moria and like, horrific ice detention facilities not to exist in the way that they do or at all. But sort of saying, why isn't anything I'm doing working? Like, that's the bratty thing. And I think, honestly, part of the thing-- and I write about this in the book-- is sort of studying and talking to a number of people who, especially in Greece, but in the US too, who are doing concrete action, you know, who are like enacting really-- concrete efforts of solidarity that matter and seeing that actually the scale of what they're doing is quite small and sort of understanding then that like Well, I'm not satisfied with the with the drop in the bucket feeling. It is true that most change happens over time and it is true that most changes cumulative and it is also true that I cannot just sit here as a writer and not write about this stuff. So here we go. This is what's happening. There's this other trap. I feel like when you write about a book that's about a larger issue, which is that if you don't say what the solution is to the larger issue. There's often these reviews that say that God, you know, the book was greatness and that, but she offers no solutions to the problem. But if you do offer a solution, then you kind of get into the like activist thing or your solutions to. But so this is all to say you do get there in the book and you do say, well, there are ways to solve this problem if we want to not solve it, but there are ways to improve the situation to look at it differently. Yes. And I'm wondering how you approached writing about that and why you decided even to include that. I guess because I didn't want this to be too grounded in abstraction, right, in the sort of like I have feelings like we have feelings about the border and how it's being weaponized against human beings. And one of the things there's a moment in the book that actually comes from a mother Joan story wrote about pushbacks, a terrific practice of, you know, the Greek ghost card, like putting on ball of cloth, and dragging refugees back out to see drift and sometimes diets, perfect. But I wrote in that piece, it's in the book that I had this moment of realization when I was. In Greece and people were talking about how horrific Moria was and you know it's like an open air prison and people are only now allowed to leave a couple times a day. And sorry, there was the Moria camp and then the one they built in their stead that's a much more, I mean Greece is starting to model their attention facilities more after ours. But people, you know, they can only go come and go a couple times a day and now they're talking about only coming and going a couple times a week and I found myself sort of saying like, I mean, it's better than in the US, like in the US, they don't get to leave it all. They spend years there, they can't, you know, it's a prison. Like I know it sounds bad, but we have actual prison. And that really actually kind of fucked with me like to see my mind doing that thing because I realized that I had been writing at the about the horrors of these systems for so long. And yet I had been infected with just the sort of, well, that's just the way it isness of them, you know, like like even as I'm criticizing them. And so I think I wanted like the particular section in the book, I think you're talking about where I wanted to say like here are some other options to both make those concrete and also kind of help snap us all out of the like, we actually don't need immigration prison guys. We really don't, it doesn't have to be that way lots of other countries don't do this. We've tested models that are far cheaper and like are actually proven to be very effective in getting people to their immigration court hearings. So I wanted to kind of concretize it and also help us all see that that like everything in society is built from our own imagination. And thus we can imagine things differently, but it's very hard sometimes because these systems are so. They're just so hulking, but in a way that can to return to the other question about change. I mean, it can be more depressing because if you sit down and read the answer to immigration is a drain on the economy and the answer is no actually it's not it's quite the opposite. And here's all the statistics why then you sort of stuck thinking like, well, where does it come from this idea that it's not I mean, I guess that's sort of what your book is about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's funny. I'm actually, you know, I actually don't find that frustration. I mean, I hear you. I'm like, I get that. But I think personally, I'm like, that feels so liberating to me because then we get to look at like, okay, it doesn't have to be that way. Why is it that way? It's that way because politicians need the border to be completely like in disarray. That is disorder as a political instrument like they are creating chaos to then say, look at the chaos like us, you know what I mean. So I think when we can say it doesn't have to be this way and say, wait a second. So why is it this way? It's way more expensive. It's really bad for our economy. It's not good for human beings. It just creates more chaos that's needless. It creates more political division. Ah, those are those are things that are actually serving a certain class of people. And so then that to me feels like that's a place where you can start to imagine a different system. So when it comes to your personal story and what you were sort of looking for. I mean, do you feel like you got to a place where you settled those questions for yourself or you'll always be kind of like pursuing that history. Yeah, no, I mean, I don't think I had concrete questions. So much concrete questions about like my heritage is not like I was like, I'm going to find out the answer more just like my questions were actually more like, huh, this is interesting. This is a big part of my identity and I've never been here and I know nothing about this part of the story. Like how is this a part of my identity then like what does it mean to have an identity that you both have and don't have, you know, like what is this claiming what is this yearning. So it was actually much more curious about it than sort of like seeking answers. You know, and those questions, it's interesting because this sort of like, well, my this like really powerful important matriarch in my family was Greek and therefore I feel a sense of affinity for this place, even though I've never been there. There can just be like a sweetness and like, oh, yeah, that's cute, you know, to that. But there it's not that far from there to like my ancestors were white and from Greece and like, you know, this kind of stormfront stuff or white supremacy stuff around like. The amazing heritage of European white people and I descend from them, you know, like honestly, like that isn't I don't feel at risk of getting there, but I understand like how one gets from where I was, you know, in my sort of curiosity about my heritage to this sort of claiming of it at the exclusion and expensive others and in this like supremacy form. So I feel like that was interesting to me to sort of map that, but I think that was like mostly my curiosity is sort of like what does this amount to and what are these stories we tell ourselves and why do we why do we do it. And then in terms of like the personal stuff about being a journalist like, yeah, I'm still a journalist, I love journalism, I love writing journalism, I've, you know, written a number of pieces since this. But I think to that same thing of like, you know, how we hold ethical questions like I feel like we don't answer ethical questions we hold them throughout and that is how we answer them like I think these are questions about journalism that I'll continue to hold and the fun thing about freelancing and writing about various different things as you get to answer them in different ways or like tend to them in different ways every every piece you write right because they're different demands every piece brings different demands. And that's the fun thing about freelancing, but I have to bring it up because your book has just come out that you you wrote an essay some years ago when your first book came out or long reads. That that captured it was some of the most honest writing about the feelings that people have on publishing a book or even just about writing for a living and publishing anything. Including you write because the book does very well I could say this you don't have to say it does like it's reviewed really really well you're like nominated for winning prizes for it and still you're sort of like checking around for it in bookstores which is of course the secret thing that writers do and you write good things happened. But I wasn't focused on those the closer one comes to something being in reach the further the horizon recedes it's like trying to swim towards the setting sun. I stand by it. Well, that's what I was wondering like here you have a book that has just come out. Does it still feel that way to you or has that changed at all? I think it changes somewhat like I think you know that essay that you mentioned and I share it with people whose books are about to come out because I because I'm like. A lot of people are secretly losing their shit after their book comes out and that's not what's being displayed on social media and I felt so you know honestly when my first book came out I didn't have a big writing community so I felt just kind of like a monster. And I think what's been so interesting about that essay which is a long time ago people continue to read it and like write me about it is just like how many people like oh my god same you know. So I think the thing about a second book is that I was sort of more prepared and that essay helped me sort of exercise some of those things and I also this book I'm proud of it I believe in it it's a really different beast it's not you know I didn't go into this thing like this is going to be an instant bestseller not that I thought that about my other book but I don't think that I'm not trying to take a dig at the book but this is like a more literary. I think it's a very lyric book in form and it's not a linear structure and so in that way I sort of knew that it wasn't going to be necessarily for everybody you know although I hope I hope many people find it and I hope they enjoy it you know I hope it's a companion to them in some way but I think it's easier with the second book because I could kind of be prepared for all of those feelings but you know I'm only a couple days in and they're pinks you know it happens. It happens everyone it's good to be honest about it it's exactly others will know right people you're non writer friends are like oh my god your book came out like are you just on top of the world and like your writer friends are like how are you doing are you okay you know but so I'm glad that you have a quick journalism and you continue writing you also mentioned that you you have returned to the school and so do you feel like you will always balance these sort of like having this grounded day to day job where you're accomplishing those things with going out on assignments do you think that you're going to be like I'm happy with you. I'm not an assignment so you think you'll you'll always merge those two. It's hard to know it suits me. me now. I missed it. I really did. I mean, I needed a break from it. Like a month after quitting my job, I was pregnant after having tried for two years. You know, like there was, I threw out my back and couldn't walk for two weeks like the day after I quit that job. You know, there was like, I needed a reset. But I really did miss it. And I missed the work. I missed the concreteness of it. I don't know that at least at this point in my life. But I think just personality wise, I don't know that I'm suited to write all the time, even though when I have another job, I'm just mourning and lamenting how little time I have to write. So like, there we go. But also, I live in the Bay Area. I have one and a half year old. Like I have chosen an expense. I would like health care so that if I break my leg, we are not in financial ruin for the rest of our lives, you know. So I think that there are practical reasons, but also I think like just the nature of who I am, I think I like how I like working on a team. I like concrete things. I like tests that are finished so to some degree of balance, probably for a while. Well, thank you for taking the time to come on the show. I hope you get some time to go out and talk about the book outside of your everyday duties. But it's great for it to be in the world. Thank you so much. This is such an honor. That's it for this week's show. My thanks to Lauren Markham for coming on the show. Her book is called a map of future ruins. It is out now. The show was edited by Seth Kelly. Our show notes were by Megan Valley. My co hosts are Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer. I'm Evan Ratliffe. We do this show in partnership with Vox. As always, we thank you so much for listening. See you next week. Let's face it. College is expensive. And how you pay for it really matters. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi bank and a member of FDIC, additional terms and conditions apply, and I'm a last 696891. Support for this show comes from Atio, the AICRM for modern businesses. There are teams closing deals twice as fast as everyone else. Always one step ahead. Always prepared. 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