This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor

Ezra Klein

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One thing we've been exploring more on the show this year is taste. I have this view that the taste is becoming more and more important in this age of so much being algorithmic, so much being served up to you. AI moving to this world where creating a derivative version of anything is that much easier. Knowing what you like, what you think is good, what you think is bad, what you respond to that really matters. That is a way to maintain both humanity and the capacity to do great things.

But after taste, there is this work of getting the thing to where you want it to be, right? If you know something is bad, you feel it's not there yet. How do you get it to where it needs to go? The thing you are trying to do there is editing. I think we have an overly narrow description of what editing is.

We think of it as marking up the grammar of a sentence with a pen. But great editors, and I've worked with a lot of great editors, they're mystics of a sort. They're not technicians. They see something that isn't there yet, whether of their own work or your work, and not really knowing how to get there. They help you get there.

Not really knowing how to get there, they help themselves get there. So this is the thing I've been wanting to explore because it's fuzzy. We don't have very good even language for it. But there are really great editors out there. Adam Moss is one of them.

He's considered by many, considered by me to be one of the truly great magazine editors of his generation. In his twenties. This is back in 1988, he begins this now very storied publication called Seven Days. It survives only two years and wins a national Magazine award for general excellence. He comes to the New York Times.

He remakes the New York Times Magazine. It becomes a key home for great narrative journalism for great essayists. He goes to New York magazine, which he just turns into one of the truly great magazines it still is today, under his successors, in 2019, Moss steps down from New York magazine. He spends more time painting and becomes interested in how artists get from something fine to something great. So he begins asking them.

And the result is his new book, the work of art, how something comes from nothing, which tracks alongside 43 artists. Some great piece they did, be it a visual art, a piece of music, a piece of journalism from where it began. And he gets them to turn over their drafts, their sketches, their notes and tracks, where it ultimately goes and how they get it to there. So this is a conversation, really, about editing, about him as an editor, about these artists as editors, and about how we can all become better at editing, how we can all even understand when it is that we are editing. Obviously, in the conversation, we discuss some visual art that doesn't translate that well into audio.

So we will link the images of those works in the show notes. They are very much worth following up on and checking out. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com dot Adam Moss, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ezra. I had a rumor that this book had an earlier title that was something like on editing.

Is that true? Close. Just called editing. Yeah. Just called editing.

Adam Moss

Yeah. I'm so glad that was true, because that was the thing I kept thinking about in the book. Thing. I think about with your career, what does it mean to edit? I think any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction.

I think you're just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting or your heart is reacting. It's not just an intellectual thing. It's also very much an emotional thing. Bob Gottlieb, in that carob documentary described editing as reacting. And that is pretty good definition, I think.

Ezra Klein

But it's not just reacting. Right. It's trusting the reaction. Yeah. It's trusting the reaction.

Adam Moss

And then there's another part which is kind of separate, which is figuring out what to do about it. I would write all over manuscripts, and sometimes I would have solutions, but often it would just be a reaction. Spent a lot of time praising the stuff that I thought was good and kind of withholding when I didn't think it was good. So instead of saying, this is bad, people could just read. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

You had just gone cold. Exactly. Horrible. Right. You must be fun to be in a relationship with.

I was an editor for a long time. I was editor in chief of Vox. I'm still an editor on this show in a way. And I think it took me at least a decade, maybe more, to even come to the idea that I should trust my own reaction. Yeah.

One thing that I think happened to media somewhat destructively in the same period is that editors stopped doing that and writers stopped doing that. You began to look at social media for the reaction. You began to look outside. We knew what people cared about because they were reading it. We knew what.

And one thing that I think held in New York magazine and is held even since you've left, is it feels like it is for somebody not decided by everybody. And I've started to understand that as more radical and more necessary. But it's also a tremendous act of faith in yourself against the whole world. Right. How do you come to trust yourself?

Your reaction as valid? It's like trusting yourself in any context, which is that you get a little courageous and you venture out and you try something. And I do think, just if we're gonna get on the subject of journalism a little bit, one of the reasons that the thing that you're describing is true is that magazines have been so, newspapers, everything has been so disaggregated, it was much more necessary for the whole to be tied together with a single sensibility. Now, many people, when they read, listen to anything, when they take in media, they don't necessarily even know where it was from. So that I think that people have surrendered a little bit of that thing, which I also value a tremendous amount, the feeling that it came from somewhere, someone, something that I can feel and identify.

So you are considered by many, considered by me to be one of maybe the great magazine editor of your generation. Yeah, I know. Gonna do that. So I've listened to interviews with you. I know you don't like that.

Okay, so what you then do is you say, well, I've just worked with a lot of great teams. That's true. I know. So it's very hard for people to say why their judgment is good. But somehow the thing you did at seven days, which was the magazine you did in your late twenties to 30, that won a national magazine award as it closed down then did it new York Times magazine at New York.

These were different teams. Yeah. I have tried to hire editors. In fact, I have hired editors successfully. They've worked for me.

It is extraordinarily hard to hire editors, writers who can see what they write. Yep. So if it is just about your great teams, which I don't fully believe, but it's clearly somewhat true, you clearly hired great teams at a bunch of different places. I'm a very good hirer. I will give them.

What do you look for in editors. How do you find good editors? You talk to them. Well, we all do that. But maybe you listen for different things than, what are you listening for?

Adam Moss

I listen for confidence, but not too much confidence. I listen for just an interesting mind. Usually, I'll ask fairly banal questions and see where they take them. I would kind of just keep prodding them to see how the gears of their mind work. And if I was bored, I wouldn't hire them.

If I was excited by the conversation, if I learned something from the conversation. And if they seemed like decent people, which is not small. A lot of people come in, and they show signs of being the kind of editor that I think is destructive rather than constructive. Which is to say that they'll run roughshod over the writer talent or the visual talent or whatever they're in charge of. There needs to be a certain humility in an editor.

But also they need to have a really interesting mind. Did you go to interview questions? I would ask them to try to form story ideas. On the fly of whatever happened that day in either news or their own experience. And in part, that question was to see how alert and well read they were, but also how fast their mind worked.

And formulating the raw data of experience into story, into narrative, into essay. And then I listened to my own reaction. Was I excited by this person? Did I want to be in their company? It's not really unlike you're sitting in a dinner party and someone's interesting to you, or they're not.

Ezra Klein

But do you not worry about being misled by charisma? I think charisma's big part of it, actually. So, yeah, I could be misled by charisma, but I'm a pretty good charisma bullshit detector. Cause some people are great fun to talk to, but they're not great at doing the thing. I've run into this.

Yeah, you get that. And the flip is, I've known people who are actually not great fun to talk to. They're introverted, they're nervous in the interview, but they're amazing at doing the thing. And I've known editors like that too. Yeah, I have too.

Adam Moss

Although I think I'm pretty good at getting shy people to relax. They have to be able to have the conversation, no matter what their basic personality inhibitions are. And then in terms of doing the thing, there are tests and stuff like that. That you give them that, you evaluate that. But also, I really think that you can teach people how to do the thing.

And you can't teach people to think. I agree. Yeah. I think that is the hardest part of hiring. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

So I want to go back to something we were talking about a minute ago about this theory that editing is about reading your own reaction and being able to work with that reaction. So you have this great interview with David Mandel, showrunner of Veep, a show that I love, and the two of you talk through a single joke on that show, and the way Mandel hears all these alternatives and uses his own reaction to guide to the final form of the joke. So can you just talk through that joke first? One of the impetuses for the book was that I went to the set of Veep. I was invited by FranK Rich, who was both a friend of mine and an executive producer of the show.

Adam Moss

And he just, you know, just as a lark, said, hey, come. I was in Los Angeles. Come visit. So I did, and I sat there behind Dave and watched him. It was just some stupid joke that landed on a jewish holiday.

Ezra Klein

And Moses led his people to the land of HanukKah. Canaan rabbi shook up Nikhil. That stupid hat is too small for my hat. Yannuka. Fine.

This stupid hat is too small for my yonuka. It's okay. Yonah. Conversion to Judaism is about a commitment to the jewish lifestyle. Oh, good.

Cause all this learning's giving me a yarmulke ache. So you don't even focus on that whole routine, right? You might think of that routine as an object, but no, just that first. Just one word. Just one word.

Tell me. There's only one change variable in it. So there's this thing. Okay. There's a thing that they do called alts, where they actually take most jokes, and they try to squeeze them as much as possible to get the most juice as they can get.

Adam Moss

That's one of the things when I was beginning to think about the book that I watched with such awe, admiration. I don't know. This moment is like 3 seconds in the show, and they take hours on it, even though it just zips right past. Most viewers wouldn't even pay any attention to it. So what were some of the alts?

So the alts in this case said, scripted and shot. Jonah's saying that land is called New York Hanukkah. That's the one they used. They also wrote Egypt, milikonzi. It's like a yiddish name.

Anyway, these were the various ones. They did shoot New York and Hanukkah, and Hanukkah is the one that they finally used. New York would be kind of funny, too. Yes, it would. So tell me about what Mandel is doing there.

Ezra Klein

What is the edit happening? How does he make the decision between them? He describes making the decision purely by reading his own reaction, and that it happens in the editing room. It also happens on the set because they only shoot some of them. He futzes around himself with the joke, and then people feed him various other alternatives.

Adam Moss

He is just evaluating, and hes evaluating not in a way that feels conscious at all, but hes trying to understand what makes him laugh. There are, in my view, three stages of making art. One of them is the imagining, and the final one is the shaping. But in between there is the judging, which kind of what were talking about here. The editing and imagining gets a lot of space on YouTube videos and books that help you free up your imagination, which is very important.

And then the shaping gets a lot of attention because it's about craft and technique and how you make the thing that is at least close to something in your head. What kind of never gets any love is this middle ground, which is the judging. And after your imagination has spewed whatever it is that it is spewed, there has to be a kind of functioning intelligence that is not intellectual, necessarily, but is nevertheless your mind operating keenly, making sense of what you've done, and then figuring out how you can best put it to use. And all of this is so subjective. Everything is so subjective.

There is no objective explanation of this word will work better than that word. But in his case, he just sits in the. And he laughs or he doesn't. We should say here that the book's in some ways motivated. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

By you have gotten more deeply into painting. Yeah. And the distance between what you think is good and what you're able to do is vast and seems to fascinate you. Yeah, it fascinates me and frustrates me and did actually motivate my. I felt like, well, okay, artists may look at the world differently than I do, and there was a way of thinking that I didn't seem to have.

Adam Moss

So I went to talk to other people about how they thought, and that's kind of what the motivating thing in the book is. A number of the artists in your book talk about this idea of listening to the body. Twyla Tharp says that when she's drafting a piece and she's a great choreographer, she says, okay, brain, catch up with the body. Carol Walker, who made the sugar baby sculpture in the domino sugar refinery, said she had to, quote, put some paper on the floor and let my body do the work. About the sense of the tension between the cerebral and embodied and the physical.

Yeah, it happens, actually, really an unbelievable number of places in the book. And also there's this other very strange thing that happens in the book, which is, over and over again, people describe being most creative when they're in motion. So whether they put themselves in motion when they're running or swimming or something like that, or biking or even just on a train or an airplane, just moving the body physically in space, moving seems to unleash something in them. But I feel this way. I don't know if.

Do you do things other than your sort of journalism life? Because I do find that in my own painting, it's a physical sensation, it's a physical high, and it's one of the really satisfying aspects of it. I'm considering this. Do I do first, do I do anything? Aside from my journalism?

Ezra Klein

I do. I like to think that I have a full life. Well, I didn't mean that in the first place. No, I'm joking. I miss that state, which I think I used to achieve more often.

And I think one reason I used to achieve it more often is that when I started out as a blogger, there weren't that many notifications competing for your attention. You didn't have slack. And not that many people emailed me. And I find I break concentration much more now. The place where my body leapt up when you were talking was the plane.

I find I achieve completely different mental states on planes, and I think it's because there is so little distraction. And so when you're talking about painting, I mean, I assume you don't paint on a screen. I assume you paint on canvas. And I do think there is a tension between the body, that kind of embodied flow state, and distraction and interruption. It takes time to get there, and I think it is difficult to stay there sometimes.

And at least for me, I remember being there more often when I was younger. Yeah, interesting. Well, people describe it as one of the rewards of creating is to get themselves into this thing that we've all come to know as the flow state, this sort of period of utter absorption, where all of the distractions in life just disappear. And I think that is real. I've even, as a terrible painter, I've even experienced it.

Adam Moss

People actually seek a kind of physical sensation as well as a total absorption. I mean, I have this one chapter in the book of Ian Edelman, who is this crazy, magnificent sandcastle maker. And that's why I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to talk to him about making this thing that would. That he has one day to do and then perishes at the end of the day.

I thought that was something quite beautiful. And he describes making sandcastles, not just in terms of the kind of crazy, almost supernatural focus, but also in terms of its physical sensation, and describes it, compares it to the feeling he has on a bicycle, riding in traffic in New York City, dodging cars. And that just seemed like a fantastic metaphor because he's moving forward in motion. He's dodging cars. When you make something, in a way, it's like, this is just totally not true.

But I'll say it anyway. It's like a video game. Things are coming at you. You have to deal quickly with them. You have to make decisions about what you're going to do with them on the way to something else.

Ezra Klein

What do you think about the relationship here between speed and this kind of creativity or intuition? Because there are people here working very slowly. And then something that comes up again and again is the power of the deadline, the thing they did very quickly. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that people are different. Right.

Adam Moss

Bob Dylan, for instance, famously said he wrote all his songs in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. I have a piece of stationery in the book. The book is filled with process artifacts of all kinds. It's a very visual book. And this is just a written record of him writing blowing in the wind and inverting a stanza or a verse.

And some people do their best work really fast, and some people take forever doing it. But it's important to remember that those people who do it very fast, they're able to do it very fast because they have just getting back to the body like an athlete. They have kind of body memory. They have skills so ingrained in them that their impulsive decisions are informed by a lifetime of experience. I think another example of this, just spitting the work out, at least at the beginning, is the chapter of Steven Sondheim.

Ezra Klein

So can you talk a bit about that process for him? There was a situation that. It's from the musical company, and there was a situation that the playwright wrote in which a bride is flipping out, having a full blown anxiety attack. And it starts. And I have it in the book, it starts as this monologue of her having a kind of nervous breakdown.

Adam Moss

It's a great little monologue. And he thinks of this as a song. And he writes a song called the wedding is off. And its function is to recreate this nervous breakdown. In music, its kind of a disaster.

The singer cant sing the song, the rhythm is all wrong, its jaggedy, it doesnt build. Hes made a bunch of mistakes and it becomes absolutely clear that the thing has to go. And just ruthlessly, just ruthlessly he goes boing and just ejects the song right out of the show. And because he is Steven Sondheim, the new song had different rules. And so the new song would have to be started essentially from scratch.

And he was able to write the song, which is called getting married today in a week, which is crazy. Listen, everybody. Look, I don't know what you're waiting for. A wedding. What's a wedding?

Steven Sondheim

It's a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever, which is maybe the most horrifying word I've ever heard, in which is followed by a honeymoon where suddenly he'll realize he's saddled with a nut and want to kill me, which he should. Thanks a bunch, but I'm not getting married. So go have lunch because I'm of not getting married. You've been grand, but I'm not getting married. And don't just stand there, I'm not getting married.

And don't tell Paul, but I'm not getting married today. When you listen to this song, which it's well known to be maybe the most dense, fastest song in all of musical theater and also one of the most difficult to sing, you will see its incredible complexity. It's really one of the great theater songs of all time. And he was able to do it in a week because he had solved all the problems the first time.

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Ezra Klein

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Ezra Klein

The Amy Sillman chapter is the one that sticks with me most, and it is worth the price of admission on the book just for that. So to give a little bit of background, abstract painter and you have 36 or 3739-3939 of the iterations this one painting went through, and it transforms utterly, but it is never clear to me exactly why. And you have some of her reasoning, but she is also very honest in. Saying it's not very convincing, her reasoning, right? Not at all.

But she often, she says in ways absolutely. It's not clear that this would have been any worse if I had stopped at number seven or number two. Kept starts with saying the first one was the best. I shouldn't have changed anything. And I actually could have done.

Adam Moss

She has about over 100 iterations of this. I could have basically devoted the entire book to the path of this painting. And so there is this question then, is what you're listening to editorial intuition or neurosis? Well, they might be the same thing. I mean, it's part of her, I don't know what you call it, I guess her own self description, that it doesn't actually matter where she stops, that the important thing in the making of the painting is the making and destroying and making and destroying that that's actually what the whole thing is about.

I use this phrase, it's almost like a game of musical chairs where she decides to stop in that what I think is a fairly neurotic process. But I don't mean neurotic in a bad way. She is performing a kind of artistic ritual, and it happens to be that a great painting usually is the thing that she ends up with. But also, let me just tell you, because you can't really fully grok it until you see it, there's so many beautiful paintings on the way that she just ruthlessly a racist. She doesn't really even think twice about it, and she doesn't have a particular regret about it.

In fact, as she puts it at one point, regret is kind of what. The work is all about. One of my very favorite chapters, Cheryl Pope using felt in this absolutely gutting piece of art, mother and child on blue mat. I found it extraordinarily moving. Can you say who she is, what that work is?

She's a Chicago based artist. She works in lots of different media. She had been deeply upset while making this work, which, of course, interested me, and she was just an absolutely wonderful person. But the story here is that she had three consecutive miscarriages, and she really very much wanted to be a mother, wanted to give birth to a child. And she said she felt almost deranged to, in a sense, create the child in an artwork, to have the artwork be the motherhood that she couldn't have physically.

And so she created a work on felt in which she visualized the child, in fact, 1.2 children. Then one child. At one point, the child and the mother had no faces because she was afraid giving them faces would be too specific for an artwork, but also too painful for her. And eventually she decided she needed to give them faces. And after the work was finished, she regretted that decision.

Ezra Klein

It's possible this is actually said in the chapter, but just while we were talking about it, the reason the felt is so affecting is it's something children make artwork out of. Yeah, it's not said in the chapter, but I think that's true. The other thing that I felt about the felt was that it looks like. Yarn, I should say. Yeah, it does, is that she has to punch through it.

Adam Moss

So the physical act. We talked before about the way that physical action factors into the making of the art, but in this case, the punching through, since this was built on so much anger and upset, also moved me. One thing the book is very interested in is tools, and something I noticed was how seldom a digital tool was mentioned. I feel like the only people who used a digital tool were the musicians recording into the voice memos app of their iPhone. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

Almost everybody else was using paper of some sort or another. The notebooks were paper, the sketching was paper. It felt like people were really pushing themselves, particularly in the editing process, in the idea generation process, onto paper. First, is that right? And second, why?

Adam Moss

Well, it's not entirely right. There's a whole chapter that's the exception to that, which is about a guy named Tyler Hobbes, who's a generative artist, and why I like that chapter so much, is that the machine is super important. It becomes the hand. He creates algorithms, gives it to the computer. The computer spits stuff out.

He reacts to it the same way that a painter might react to whatever they've painted with their hands. And then he changes the algorithm and just keeps going that way. Well, he's, in a way, become the editor of the machine. Absolutely. Which I think I have a thing that AI is going to turn us much more into editors, because we're going to have to know if the thing it is spitting at us is correct and evaluate it.

Yes. The generative artist you mentioned, whose work is very cool, he has to be working in code because he is trying to get the computer to create more interesting work. Right. But the people for whom the question is, how do they get themselves to create more interesting work? Felt to me almost ostentatiously oriented towards church paper.

Yeah. And that included the young ones. I didn't notice a large age gap here. It wasn't like the young people were all typing away on an iPad. And so what is it about paper?

Ezra Klein

Why are they doing that? Well, paper, for one thing, is something you can throw away. So there is a thing that a lot of artists and writers do, which is they create a first pass that is perishable, that is meant to be disposed of. So they write in longhand as opposed to type something they paint, like in the Amy Sillman example, and mean to paint it over. George Saunders, who did such a great episode with you that I listened to, actually, all this one, George Saunders gives himself six months to just totally screw around as the way to make the thing.

Adam Moss

So there is a kind of built in failure stage. Very important, I think, and pretty universally expressed. Well, my theory, the thing. I'm glad you did, the hypothesis I am testing here to see if it comes up is that it is easier to achieve certain kinds of states with paper. So I did an episode some time ago now with Marian Wolf, who's a great scholar of how people read, and the reading mind.

Ezra Klein

And the point of a lot of her work is that different things happen in your mind. Reading on paper, reading on a screen, reading on different kinds of screens. What is happening with distraction? I mean, it just changes form, does change content. It certainly changes the perception of content.

Adam Moss

Yeah. I think you're more focused when you're working with paper. I mean, I find, at least in my own experience, and I'm a focus group of one that my mind wanders more when I'm reading on a screen. I mean, even just thinking about the smoothness of a computer screen versus the texture of a page, one has a kind of scratchiness in art. There's a lot of preoccupation with what the surface feels like, the toothiness of the surface.

In fact, my book is sort of smoother than I would have wanted. It was. The smoothness was a compromise in order to get the image reproduction to be so good. And the image reproduction is really good, but I would have rather it had a kind of almost mountainous kind of. Texture, which the COVID does.

Yeah, the COVID does. The book is a. I really want to say this, and I want people to hear it. It's a piece of art itself. It's a beautiful object.

Ezra Klein

I mean, I enjoyed its physical form more than I've enjoyed the physical form of a book in a long time. Oh, that's nice. And that was clearly highly intentional. Yes. Yeah.

Adam Moss

The COVID is a. The image on it is a Proust manuscript in which he had crossed the whole thing out with these giant blue xs. And then to actually get penguin to agree to do the book in this cloth cover, reproducing those xs, it just felt like, okay, that really is the book I'm trying to make here. And they were generous enough to do that. I like this topic of the way the feel of a thing or your relationship to a material or a tool changes the way you think.

Ezra Klein

You have a great chapter with the musician Rostam, and I want to play a bit of the song you talk about in a river, so you ain't out across the march.

So he starts off playing the mandolin there, and then he switches to the guitar, which is such an unusual transition, and it just changes the tone of the song completely. And what's wild to me in your interview with him is that Rostam didn't know how to play the mandolin before composing that song at all. And this just comes up repeatedly where people are using new materials for work that becomes really important, like Carol Walker using sugar to make that massive sculpture. What's going on in this confrontation with new tools and materials and approaches? What does it unlock for these artists who really know something really well, to then move into using something they don't know that well?

Adam Moss

I think the artist is drawn to things that will excite them, and I think that artists, like anyone, get bored doing the same thing over and over again, and so they seek new adventure. One of my incredible frustrations as a painter, even today. And my painting is just very, very tight and conservative. And I just decided about two weeks ago that I would just put away all the brushes I had, wouldn't touch them, and that I would just make paintings using whatever materials I have around. Palette knives, sure, but scissors, any ruler, anything that I had so that I could smear the paint so that it wouldn't have the kind of fastidious relationship to the thing that it really is in real life.

And I wanted to just allow myself a little bit of berserk. So I'm myself trying new materials in order to produce something different. And actually, it's kind of working. I was really struck by all that, too, that how many times in the Cheryl Pope chapter, for instance, she just keeps changing media and she doesn't know. She tells me that she goes into Home Depot, and she asks the salesperson, how do you actually do that?

How do you use glue this way, or how do you use felt this way? What is the device I should buy? And they just continue to do it. The point I would emphasize here, because I found it both reassuring and frustrating to hear this over and over again, was that the reason they're able to do this, the reason they're able to work in a different medium that they don't know, is because of their training. And one of the things that training does, the rostam example.

Rostam, I mean, as he describes playing the mandolin, is just playing the guitar upside down. And he has gotten a really rigorous early musical education, which enables him to be able to do the thing that I couldn't do. I don't know how to play the guitar. I would certainly not know how to play the mandolin. So anyway, there's that just, it's a basic thing that kind of has to be said that the training really helps.

There's not a lot of shortcutting that goes on. But the other thing is just, we had talked about this a little bit earlier, is faith, is that once they learn they can actually succeed using new materials, they're moved to use new materials again and again. It made me think of Steven Johnson's book where good ideas come from, and one of his arguments in that book is that great ideas often come from adjacency. Somebody knows a lot about a domain and then looks over to the next domain and applies it. And that's what I see happening often here, which is adjacency.

Ezra Klein

Rostam knows a lot about, I assume, the guitar and other things looks over into the mandolin and can feel something. Yeah. Well, I would say that this whole book is exactly that I never wrote before. I hate writing, and I have been a terrible writer for most of my life because I had this idea of how to write, that there was a way to write, and so that way to write was pretentious, and I couldn't stand it. And so the draft process was really teaching me how to write.

Adam Moss

It was like using my editor skills that I had honed in a lot of years and applying it to myself, and I kind of found I was a pretty good editor of myself, and I was able to strip this thing down. Strip this thing down. Strip this thing down into something I could stand. I still didn't like doing it, but. I'm not horrified by what I produced as a writer.

Ezra Klein

I functionally cannot start writing until I can see the entire thing. Yep. So many of the writers I know, they write a little piece for here. They start in the middle, they go to the end. Nonfiction writers, I know tons of nonfiction writers who they're very able to put together the pieces where they know what this scene, they have this argument, and then they begin stitching.

Adam Moss

Yep. For me, I will just be stuck until the entire structure reveals. Now, that might not be the final structure the piece has. Things can change in the edit, but I need the whole thing there. Yeah, I think I'm more like you, but people are different.

That's the point here. There's 43 chapters in the book, and there's 43 different ways that people make art. That's not to say there isn't anything that unites them. I mean, I do think that they are a little bit unusually, a collection of freaks, and that is that they have a kind of superhuman drive that enables them. There's a great quote that I found early on by James Baldwin saying, talent is insignificant.

What matters are love, discipline, luck, and most of all, endurance. And one thing, people who are really talented at things saying, well, I think it's really. I mean, having done a kind of data set of these 43 that seems to be true, these things take a long time. They're hard work. Ultimately, they need to go the distance.

They need to not give up when pretty much everyone else would give up. So we've been talking a bunch here about artists who edit a lot, but I want to think about the other side of that, too, those who go out more raw. So let's hear a clip by this performance artist, Grady west, who invented a character named Dina. Martina, do you have good salads? Very good.

Ezra Klein

Oh, good. Then I'd like a small cesarean. Oh, but does it have gluttons? I really don't want glutton. I'll have your glutton.

I'll have her glutton. You will? Yeah, just get it on the side. Oh, that's great. Yeah, just have him put the glutton on the side.

And, Doreen, I think I'll hand things off to you. Is your red bull in a can or is it fresh in a can. Oh, that's a shame. Do you have any breakfast wines? So, great heat.

West is voicing the cesarean lady there. That's Dina Martina. How did that act, that Persona, come together? Okay, so he goes to this cabaret, and he doesn't think about it for 1 second the night before. He finds a wig, I think, and he smears this makeup on his face, and he goes out with nothing scripted and just starts to talk and calls himself Dina Martina.

Adam Moss

This all happens without any forethought whatsoever. And he does have a very particular sense of humor. We were talking before about taste. Sense of humor seems to me the same, operates under the same wavelength. He has now ridden Dina Martina for decades, I think three decades into an international stage act in lots of different places.

I know him from provincetown, where he's kind of in residence over the summers, but it is an hour of a character completely oblivious to how anyone else would see him. It has a bunch of characters. One of them, you heard Doreen. Doreen is the heir to the kotex fortune. He has a child named Faibi, which is a puppet.

The thing is insane. It's just completely unhinged. And it's perfectly intact in terms of a bizarro world that he has created. There's no cracks in it. And he developed it in 1 second, in 19 what have you, into a sort of alternative cabaret context.

It's amazing. And then he now. Yeah, he writes it now. It's honed to it, 55 minutes. But basically it's still anarchy.

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Ezra Klein

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the age range of the artists profiled generalizing wildly. What is different? What are the hallmarks of great art produced early in a career and late in a career? For the most part, I think that one very important quality of an artist is that they have faith that they can make the thing. There's a great line that Michael Cunningham, who wrote the hours, said to me at one point, he didn't even realize he was saying it, but I.

Adam Moss

I was asking him how it was possible that when he'd written a draft of the book, he had to throw away the draft. And I kind of probed him about that. And didn't that feel just really awful? He said, nah, there's plenty more where that came from. And he just said it like that.

And that is a one sentence description of a thing that is absolutely essential to an artist, which is the faith that they can keep doing it. And those people, as they got older, people, had more and more faith. The flip side of that, and one thing I know from my own experience, is that you make kind of wonderful things when you're young, when you don't know any better. There was a magazine I did called seven days when I was starting out. It was really.

It broke every rule in the book. It just was like it didn't have a middle. It was just all sidebars. It was nutty from the perspective of someone who understands how to build magazines. It broke every rule, and for no good reason.

And I would never make that in my life now or in the last 25 years. I would have just looked at it and thought it was kind of amateurish and stupid. And yet it kind of worked. It was exactly the right thing for then. And I did something that I wouldn't be able to do later.

Look at leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. He wrote that book throughout his life. There's the young man's version, and there's the old man's version, and some of the language changes as he gets closer to death. And that's interesting. And the poem is in some ways better at the end, but not in all ways.

In some ways, it was best at the beginning. I know writers, and primarily, I know political writers and nonfiction writers, and my gloss on this would be that pretty. In politics, young writers are arrogant and overconfident and don't know what they don't know and don't know what's going to fail. And old writers are way too cautious and know too much what's gonna fail and are too locked into what the rules have been. And both sides are completely right in what they're annoyed at in the other.

Ezra Klein

Yeah. And the balance of that in any given career is really hard. It is. And it's not necessarily true that the middle aged person has it all together. No.

And I really mean this. And everybody is right. I've come to think of this kind of thing, and I think there are many dynamics like this, that you have to think of it like an ecosystem. Yeah. Want people to be the right balance, but ecosystems need to be imbalanced.

You need young political thinking that is kind of wild and doesn't know that we tried this and it completely failed. Absolutely. And you actually need that just as you need the old thinking. And one is not better than the other. They need to both be there.

And asking one person to embody it all is not possible. Yeah, no, that's true. I just think balance is correct in almost every context. And just to pull back to artists for 1 second, the essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance, or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It's so hard.

Adam Moss

It's so hard to get the equilibrium right. You're too childish and you can make a glorious mess. But it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult, and the thing has no fire.

There's nothing animating it. So this crazy middle ground in all of these cases that we're talking about is somehow where you have to live. And it's very hard to be there. One thing that comes up a bunch in the book is you'll know that people will find a much earlier version of a piece for you than they realized. They had a jotting, a draft, something else, and it's far before they realized they were working on the thing they were working on.

Ezra Klein

And you often you keep repeating, it was there, it was already there. It made me think years ago my story of myself as a journalist, the whole thing about how I sort of learned to be a policy journalist writing about healthcare at a certain point in time. And somebody brought me some columns I had done for the alternative school newspaper when I was at UC Santa Cruz. And this was before all that. And it turned out I just sounded like myself.

I was writing about John Kerry's tax plan and I was shocked to find out that I was writing about John Kerry's tax. But I didn't think I had that interest at that point. And there is something that may come out or it may not come out, but there is often a sensibility buried somewhere that is trying to come out for a long time. Whether you can let it out is a question, and socially dependent and a million other things. But there is something buried in people that, for better or for worse, it's often hard to get away from.

Adam Moss

Yeah, well, okay, so just two responses to that. One is, one of the really fun things about the method of this book was to actually show the various artists the early work or the early version of the thing, which would usually amaze them. It would get them to speak truthfully and to remember exactly how it went in a way different than their memory has distorted it over time. Second thing is that, yes, people have a sensibility that is theirs, that they can't escape. And this, again, this is a refrain.

Oh, my God. How many people said, you can't run away from yourself? You can't. You are yourself. That's it.

I mean, Gregory Crutzen, who's a photographer who makes these very unusual photographs, which are kind of like film stills, and they're giant, very beautiful. He was just apologizing, in a sense, over and over again for the fact that all of them inhabit a certain kind of common sensibility, which I thought was marvelous. But, he says, you're just constantly trying to escape it. Kara Walker, when she was making the sugar sculpture called the subtlety or the marvelous sugar baby, she was tired of the antebellum silhouettes that had kind of made her famous, or not tired, but she felt she'd exhausted them, and she was trying to do something different. But how different?

She says at one point, you, Kara, who are you? And that is kind of a question they're all asking. I kept talking to Thomas Bartlett, who was a music producer, and we were talking about this record, which was people doing covers. Martha Wainwright or Justin Vernon of Bonivert, their own versions of covers of Neil Young's harvest, I think. And no matter what their intention was, the song would sound like them.

It would not sound like Neil Young, it would sound like them. And they were not trying. This was just something they couldn't get away from. I think obvious, but still impossible not to marvel at. Fact, is that you are who you are.

Ezra Klein

I want to end with something very related to this, which is this distinction or question of whether you're editing for yourself or editing for the audience. I found myself pulling a bunch of my media diet back to magazines over the past year. One, I think they remain, in many ways, my favorite form. They're just remarkable acts of curation, almost every single one of them. And I found myself once again, in a way I haven't been for some time, just sort of desperate to feel like somebody actually liked this.

Maybe I wouldn't, but somebody somewhere did. They chose it. They made an intentional decision. And I want to bring it back to New York magazine, the magazine you edited. I love New York magazine.

Longtime subscriber. It's my favorite magazine. And the thing that has always amazed me about it is that I cannot describe why it all goes together, but the sensibility is very coherent, and it has survived you, which is more impressive. Right? It has been great since you've left, which means that what you did was not just you sitting there telling everybody what to do, that there's something that emerged.

You guys do all, or did do all kinds of Washington, DC profiles, but I know you would not really profile Jake Sullivan, but there's another kind of profile you would do. I cannot extract out of it the description of it. So how were you figuring out what went with what? Was it an idea of the audience? Was it just you?

You were just editing for yourself, and you are the audience who's on the other end of that process? Certainly the latter. I was always editing for myself, and the reason I left the magazine is that I felt like I was no longer the audience for it. And the audience needed to be younger than I was, and they needed to have a certain way of looking at the world that I didn't have anymore. So I left.

Adam Moss

It's very poignant to me that the curator, the editor, the decider, has become of less importance in these times. But I don't know how. I never knew. In all of my years as an editor, I never knew how to edit for somebody else. I had to edit for myself.

I had to have this thing that we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, this thing that you trust. And the only way to trust it is to feel it. I think that's a nice place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Okay, there are three kind of related to this project, but they're all three books I really like. One of them is a book of interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester. I think there's nine of them. I learned more about art from reading these interviews. I'm not a wild fan of Francis Bacon's art.

I am a wild fan of Francis Bacon as a thinker about how art gets made. And I learned so much from that book that went into this book that I wrote. So that's one another book written by one of the subjects of the book. Amy Sillman is a book called faux pas. She's a great painter.

She is an amazing writer. And this book is so much fun. Filled with her own eerie edition. Absolutely. But also illustrations, chartlets.

It's just a fun object. And also really smart and wonderful. And then, because nobody talks about these when they come here, I want to throw in a purely visual book. It's the sketchbooks of Richard Diebenkorn. It's just pages and pages and pages of years and years and years of his sketchbooks, his drawings of his wife, himself, some in pencil, some ink.

I can just sit and live in those pages. Imagining him as the drawer, which is kind of was what my project was all about. So there you go.

Ezra Klein

Adam Moss, thank you very much. Thank you.

The episode of the Ezra Klein show was produced by Annie Galvett. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team includes Roland who, Kristin Lin, and Amen Sahota.

We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero, Rachel Baker and James Burnett.

Steven Sondheim

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This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor

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1: Introductions and Overview

2: Creativity in Motion

3: Editing as Intuition

4: Tools and Materials

5: The Personal Nature of Art

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