Patrick Radden Keefe has long considered access overrated. His celebrated reporting for The New Yorker often involves “write-arounds”— deeply reported profiles of subjects who declined to be interviewed. In 2014, he published a thrilling portrait of Sinaloa cartel chief El Chapo, who could not be interviewed (on account of his confinement in a Mexican prison). During the first term of President Donald Trump, he wrote about the formative figures of the time, like The Apprentice creator Mark Burnett, who refused to be interviewed.
As the United States enters a second Trump term, Keefe says he maintains his view that access isn’t needed to uncover the secrets and scandals of presidential administrations.
“If you’re dealing with pathological liars, I don’t know how good the access is,” Keefe told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club.
In many ways, Keefe added, what you see is what you get with Trump and those in his orbit. “Many of these people, every time a thought flits through their head, go onto social media and tell you the thought. The whole notion of needing an exclusive — needing time with Elon Musk to figure out what’s on Elon Musk’s mind — is kind of a joke.”
In his 2018 New Yorker profile of Burnett, Keefe captured America’s introduction to Trump’s made-for-TV magnetism. “That is the guy’s magic, utilizing the fact that many people just want to be entertained,” he told Mediaite.
Keefe argues that the political media at large has picked up on what Burnett realized about the public’s desire to be entertained. He believes the media’s tactics for covering Trump’s first term reflected that recognition.
“There was a sort of outrage porn in which the journalist writes with great outrage and indignation about what the Trump administration is doing, the reader consumes it and feels outraged, you commune in your outrage, but then it just burns off,” Keefe said.
“It’s all calories, no protein,” he added. “I don’t know if that’s the answer.”
Keefe’s path to becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker began in his Columbia University dorm room — where he sent his very first pitch.
“I knew in high school that I not just wanted to be a journalist, but that I wanted to write for The New Yorker,” Keefe recalled.
It would take seven more years before one of his pitches was finally accepted. A few years after that, he was hired as a staff writer, kicking off a career that would establish Keefe as one of the most renowned magazine writers and authors in America.
He went on to write a series of best-selling books, including Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, and Say Nothing, about an infamous murder in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
In November, FX released an adaptation of Say Nothing, for which he served as an executive producer. The writing process for the series took five years— through the pandemic, protests over the murder of George Floyd, and then campus demonstrations over Israel’s war in Gaza.
“There were all these things that we could see around us in our country that looked a little bit like the story that we were telling in the show. The hope is that some of this very specific story might provide a language in which to talk about these other conflicts,” he said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Keefe spoke with Mediaite about the future of journalism, his writing process, and what he’s doing next.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Aidan McLaughlin: I’m appreciative that you came on the show today because you have some big news. The New York Times reported this morning that you modeled for J.Crew. Congratulations, you are truly a multi-hyphenate. I am not going to torture you with too many questions about that. But was it a nice experience modeling for, I’m guessing it was your first time?
Believe it or not, it was my second. I had done something a little less elaborate for Drake’s earlier.
Similar brands now.
Drake’s made me this beautiful suit as a thank-you.
That helps. I would take a modeling gig for a free Drake’s suit.
It was worth the time.
I want to talk about Say Nothing. The show has been airing for a couple of months now on FX, so you’ve had some months to digest it. This is a story you’ve been working on for over ten years—you wrote the original piece for The New Yorker in 2015, then the book, and now are executive producing the show. What has the reception been and what is it like seeing a story you’ve worked so long be turned into a series?
The whole experience of making the show is weird for me in the sense that as a writer, I am usually alone in the mine shaft for long periods of time. I have a lot of control over every word. The experience of signing onto this production which eventually had hundreds of people working on it— it took us five years to make the show, we had a huge cast of over 100 people, we shot for nine months— and not having absolute control, where I am absolutely a voice in the room, but not the only voice in the room, was thrilling but also nerve-wracking. I was involved enough, I was so close to it and had seen so many cuts that I had lost any sense of whether it was any good. And the reaction has been thrilling. People have really responded to it in an amazing way because it’s a fairly edgy series in terms of the kind of story it’s telling and the way it’s telling it. It’s been really encouraging that people have taken it on its own terms, here, around the world, and particularly in Northern Ireland, Ireland, and England. There are people who don’t agree on anything when it comes to the Troubles who agree on the show. That feels like a weird achievement.
Has the story advanced at all since the series came out? Or does it feel like everything has been tied up in a bow at this point?
One of the subjects of the book and the series is the Disappeared in Northern Ireland—people who were killed and secretly buried during the Troubles so nobody knew where their bodies were. For their families, this is an awful punishment, as you can imagine, because you are stuck in a purgatory where you don’t have a grave to go to. You haven’t found your loved one so you don’t have any sense of finality with the death. Amazingly, since the series has come out, there has been news about now two members of the Disappeared— whose bodies hadn’t been found— whom they think they might have a sense of where they are. I should say neither of these has been confirmed. In the first case, it’s actually a guy who is a character in the show, Joe Lynskey. And in that case, I think that the intelligence had actually started to come together before the series came out. But a lot of people have watched the show in Northern Ireland, and our biggest hope in some ways with this series was that it would jog conversations and it would get people talking about this. We have information on a card at the end of the show about where it is that you can report information. So there’s another guy who’s not a character on the show, but who has been missing all this time, there are press reports in Northern Ireland saying that somebody after watching the series came forward with information about where that guy might be.
What the book and certainly the show underscore is that it’s a particularly brutal thing to disappear someone, more brutal in many ways than killing them because it leaves their family in this purgatory. And that’s something we’ve seen in Libya’s jails, where people have been disappeared, in Syria’s prisons now where loved ones are trying to find their families, not knowing if they’re dead for the past ten years. Was that part of the story that you wanted to tell, that this was a particularly acute way of robbing people of closure on their family members?
Absolutely. Part of what I was hoping to do with the book and with the show— and I think we’ve done it really successfully with the show— is to take an act of violence and look at the ripples from it. So you are looking at the choice that somebody makes to take up arms and transgress in that way, but then also saying, “What’s the impact of this?” “How far does it radiate outward and how far does it radiate down the years?”
The book came out in 2019, and part of what’s been interesting for me is since it has come out, it’s come out in these other countries. Traveling around— I’ve been a couple of times to Colombia and South America where people read the book in Spanish and it hits differently there. There they have a history with the Disappeared. I had a conversation during my first trip there where somebody said, “How many Disappeared were there in Northern Ireland?” I said, “It was about 16 in the whole course of the Troubles.” And they said, “Yeah, we have that problem too. We have 200,000 here.” So it is a phenomenon that I think is quite widespread. All these different places, I had the same experience when I went to Spain, people are still disappeared from the Spanish Civil War. The way in which that plays out in communities is interesting, and hopefully can make us think about these acts of violence in a slightly different way.
One thing that I was struck by when I was watching the show, from a global perspective, were the ties between the Irish and the Palestinian struggle. There are a lot of similarities between the two. It goes all the way down to language, with the way terms like ‘terrorism’ are used selectively. I’m wondering if you’ve thought in the last year about those ties, and whether that’s something that you’ve considered covering in your journalism.
Absolutely I’ve thought about them. It was interesting when I was writing the book, there were all of these resonances with other conflicts in other places. What I kept thinking as I was writing the book was, “It’s good to be aware of these and sit with them, but this shouldn’t intrude on your narrative.”
You don’t want to write a sweeping global story.
But the urge to break away for these little comparative digressions, it just feels academic to me. It doesn’t feel like the kind of storytelling that I’m interested in doing. With the series, it was the same way. When we were making the series — it took five years to get it made — so if you think about the history during that time, I think the writer’s room was happening during COVID. It was a Zoom room. Black Lives Matter was happening. There were protesters on the streets of the U.S. There were militarized police coming out and cracking down on the protests. There were all these things that we could see around us in our country that looked a little bit like the story that we were telling in the show. And then the show comes out in the context of Gaza and protests on campuses. I think all of us felt that we didn’t want to draw analogies that felt too glib, but the hope is that some of this very specific story we’re telling might provide a kind of language in which to talk about some of these other conflicts. For me, those have been some of the most affirming bits of feedback I’ve gotten on the show. I’ve heard from people who say, “I binged the show with my mother, and afterward we had the first productive conversation we’ve had about Gaza since the war broke out.” It would be hard to think about, for me, a more satisfying response to what we’re doing.
You’re a staff writer at The New Yorker now, an author, an executive producer. How did you get into journalism? Was that something you always wanted to do?
It is something I’ve always wanted to do. It took me a long time to make it happen.
You went to law school.
I did. I knew in high school that I not just wanted to be a journalist, but I wanted to write for The New Yorker. That was my starry-eyed ambition. I started pitching to The New Yorker when I was in college, which in retrospect, is kind of ludicrous.
If you hadn’t gotten the job, it would have been delusions of grandeur.
Exactly. It’s funny because I ended up pitching to The New Yorker for seven years and I have a framed rejection letter on the wall of my home office. My wife loves to point out that the return address is your dorm. She’s like, “What were you thinking? Did you think that they’d be like, ‘Well, wait a second. We have this guy on the Upper West Side— up in Morningside Heights there’s a diamond in the rough. We’ve got to promote him to greatness.’” So it took seven years. I went to grad school, I went to law school, but I was always pitching. I passed the New York bar and I was supposed to go and work as a lawyer at a law firm in New York. About a month before I was due to take that job, The New Yorker accepted my first freelance pitch.
What’s the process of pitching a story like that?
In this case, what happened was that I had been studying for the New York bar exam. At the time, you actually did it in person at NYU. I would go to these classes and they were incredibly boring. It was all these classes on tax laws and trusts in the state. So I’d pick up The New York Post or The Daily News on my way and a cup of coffee and I would sit in the back row and just read the tabs. There was a trial happening that summer of a woman who was known as Sister Ping— she was a human smuggler from Chinatown. She seemed fascinating to me so I wrote to an editor at The New Yorker and said, “This trial has happened and I want to write about her.” What happened— because this was the first piece they finally took after all those years— was they said, “We’re not sure that you can make any real reportorial inroads in Chinatown so why don’t you go out and report on spec. Come back when you have a story.” So I did. I spent a couple of months knocking on doors and eventually got the assignment.
One thing that’s always impressed me about a good piece of nonfiction writing in The New Yorker is the vastness, for lack of a better word, of those stories. They are these incredibly complex, deeply reported, woven narratives. They also go through this extensive and arduous fact-checking process. What is the process of putting a story like that together? Is it go out, get an enormous amount of research and reporting down, and then figure out how to put the pieces together?
Yeah, more or less. I should say the vastness of it is what appealed to me, even in high school when I first picked up The New Yorker. As a reader, there was this excitement about the idea that you could just fully immerse yourself in a world, where you’d read a piece and it would take 45 minutes.
They are books crammed into 15,000 words.
And you come away feeling as though you’d really experienced something, and that there was a storytelling architecture to it. I spend a huge amount of time reporting. I don’t know how typical or atypical this is, but for me in terms of the time investment, it’s 90% reporting, 10% writing. I’m talking to dozens of people, consulting archives, getting documents, and then the question is, “How do you distill all this into a story that can grab somebody’s attention from the opening paragraph and hold onto it?” Even if they think to themselves at first glance, ‘I’m not interested in stories about the pharmaceutical industry or about Mexican drug cartels or about crime in Amsterdam’. I feel as though I’m always having to compete with the phone in your pocket, and possibly with your jaded sense that you’re going to either sit out stories about subject X, or ‘I’ve already read them all and there’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know’.
You have this uncanny ability to turn deep reporting on brutally real stories, that may not at first blush have that much that’s sexy about them, into these arresting dramas. How did you learn how to do that?
You have to find the sex. I couldn’t resist. You walked right into that one. I think that some of it is about story selection. When I’m thinking through whether it makes sense to invest that kind of time on a piece, it’s not that there’s a set of ingredients, but I do need to feel that there are characters who are interesting and that the story has enough twists and turns. So there’s raw material that I know I can fashion into something that will have the kinds of seductive narrative properties that you need. There are a lot of people who if I tell you, “I’ve got a story about insider trading,” their eyes are already glazing over. The question for me then is, “Is there actually enough here that I can turn into a really thumping yarn?” Sometimes you can’t. It’s happened where there will be some issue, sometimes a really pressing issue— as we talk, LA is burning. Climate change and its various manifestations. There are things that I haven’t written about that I think are deeply pressing. I just haven’t found the narrative vehicle that I would need in order to do it my way.
Your way, from what I can gather: Say Nothing is not a history book about the Troubles. You tell that story through these characters. That’s something you did in Empire of Pain where you told the story of the opioid crisis through the Sackler family, in your great profile of Larry Gagosian for The New Yorker where you told the story of making it in America, wealth, and art. Is that a conscious decision that you made at some point, to tell stories about big issues through characters?
Yeah, I think there are different ways of looking at it. I’m glad to hear you say that Say Nothing is not a book about the Troubles, because I thought about it as a story about a handful of people against the backdrop of the Troubles. Some of that may be a dodge on my part in the sense that when you write a history of the Troubles, it has a pretense of being a full history of the background of the Troubles. The first thing that’s going to happen is the professional Troubles-ologists and the people who have already read all the books on the Troubles are going to say, “Wait a second, why didn’t you talk about this?”
I stubbornly buck that, in the same way that I didn’t think of Empire of Pain as a book about the opioid crisis. Oxycontin isn’t invented until halfway through Empire of Pain. I thought about it as a family saga about three generations of this family that dovetails with the opioid crisis. What that means as a writer, just selfishly, is that you can kind of plunder the broader history. My Larry Gagosian piece is about the biggest art dealer in the history of the world but I didn’t feel any obligation to tell you the whole story of the contemporary art market in the last 50 years. If there’s a chance to tell you Larry Gagosian’s story and then at the buffet of this history, I can pick and choose the very best morsels to incorporate into what I’m doing, I love that.
It’s a way to avoid getting yelled at by purists.
As often as I can, I try to avoid getting yelled at by purists.
I heard you say once that screenplays are a great resource for nonfiction writers. When did you realize that?
So to continue the story of my career, after seven years of pitching, The New Yorker accepted that pitch. It was a freelance pitch that they published. I thought the story came together very well and I said, “I’m ready to be a New Yorker staff writer.” And they said, “No, you are not. However, we will let you do another freelance piece.” So for six years, I was a freelancer and they didn’t put me on staff. I had to pay the bills so I did all kinds of other stuff. One of them was I wrote screenplays. None of them got made, but I wrote a bunch of movies and TV shows that were paid gigs. What I realized gradually was that experience was actually feeding into my nonfiction writing in a way that was really helpful. I don’t mean in a cheesy cinematic writing way: ‘You’re building a scene!’ ‘It feels like you’re watching it!’ All of that I find at best kind of corny. At worst, I think a lot of the time it’s actually magazine writers who are really hoping they get their story option so they’re going to write it as if it were a screenplay.
Magazine writing is its own thing. It should be its own thing. It was helpful for me in thinking about structure, how you juxtapose scenes, and also just about the distillation that you do in a screenplay. If you’re watching a movie, a four-minute scene is a really long scene. The idea that you can take any conversation, anything that happens, and distill it down to four pages of screenplay writing is just a useful exercise. I think as often as not in a magazine article or a book, you can take what you have and shrink it by 20, 30, 40% and it will be better. It’ll be painful to do it and unpleasant in the process. I’m doing it right now, I’m working on this book, and revisiting the earlier chapters to just think, “What can I lose?”
You’ve got to kill your darlings. That did not dissuade you from working in Hollywood again, that experience?
No. There was a great profile in The New Yorker once of Guillermo del Toro, the director, in which he describes Hollywood as, “The land of the slow no.” Something I struggle with is that you can spend years and years trying to get something off the ground and it just never gets there. I’ve had that experience and I wrote all those scripts that didn’t get made. There’s a part of me that likes the sense of being able to deliver something, that I can sit down or write an article or write a book that I’m very confident will be an artifact in this world— good, bad, or indifferent, you can read it or not read it, you can like it or hate it— but it’s going to be a thing in the world. Whereas a script may just end up being a script that nobody reads.
But listen, I grew up on the movies and I love that kind of entertainment. The experience of making Say Nothing has been so satisfying because it is different from the book. It is its own thing and it operates with its own rules, and yet it feels as though it shares this critical DNA with the book. And it reaches a huge audience of people who are just realistically never going to pick up the book. But also interestingly enough with the show, people will go back and read the book, and it works for people who’ve read it already. That’s thrilling, where it’s not something that’s going to disappoint people who have read the book and liked it, but it’s also going to reach a lot of people who won’t read the book.
A big topic on this show is the evolution of the media industry. You are nice proof that the deeply reported magazine piece is alive and kicking, though it’s probably in shorter supply than it used to be. Just on magazine journalism, what’s your view on the state of the industry today? Are you optimistic about where it stands or concerned about its future?
Both. I think that people respond really well, ultimately, to being told a story. I think it’s an experience that we have just as humans; I think we’re hardwired practically from the cradle. A lot of our earliest memories— certainly mine— are falling asleep at night as my mother read me a story. And so I think that narrative is going to continue to be a really important delivery device for information. For that reason, I’m confident that there will be ways in which this writing will continue; for all the problems with this business model, there will be a demand for this kind of work.
Do I have concerns? Of course. I think part of it is just a matter of the way in which the consumer has been trained, by virtue of how publications went on to the internet, to believe that you should get this stuff for free. I think the challenge if you’re in the business of doing the kind of journalism that I do is you get what you pay for. Real reporting costs money. You can ultimately get something that’s a “long-form article”, but if people haven’t invested the time, the energy, and the money to put the real reporting into it, it’s going to show. So I worry about the business model, I worry about the consumer. To some extent, I worry about AI. I know that AI is a big concern for people. But my feeling there, I certainly say to younger journalists that if you’re doing your job in a way that AI could easily replicate, you’re not doing your job.
What I do is I go out and talk to people who haven’t given interviews before, I find stuff that isn’t on the internet already. I’m trying to put new things in the world, and yes, then organize them in a way that is compelling and has some literary merit. But it’s not just this kind of recombinant process of taking stuff that’s already on the internet and rearranging it. To me, that’s not journalism. It never was journalism. I feel as though if we focus on the things that we do well, and try and cling to the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth, that there is a value in going out and fighting to unearth it and then tell it in a compelling way, that this kind of work will endure and continue to be both pleasurable in a literary way, but also valuable in a democracy.
I want to talk about Trump’s election, because I feel like it has caused a lot of journalists to reassess the way that they approach their work. Changes in power in Washington always prompt some thoughts among journalists about how they do their jobs, but I think Trump is a particularly transformative president in that regard, just in the way that he triumphed over institutions — including the Fourth Estate. Did Trump’s reelection make you reconsider the way that you approach your work and how you’re going to do it over the next four years?
Yeah. In my case, I guess I would say watch this space. I’m still figuring it out. I did write about the Trump administration the first time around. I had one case in which I wrote a big article about Carl Icahn, who was Trump’s advisor on deregulation. It turned out that Carl Icahn was basically just advising on things that would help his own bottom line. On the eve of that piece coming out, simultaneously, Icahn quit and the Trump administration fired him. That was the rare case where you expose something that’s pretty dodgy and it actually changes. Most of the time, it doesn’t work that way. With the other stuff that I wrote about in the Trump administration, that was not the case. I worry about what that’s going to look like in the near future.
My colleague Jane Mayer wrote an amazing piece about Pete Hegseth, who’s the nominee to be Secretary of Defense, and it was a shocking story about the fact that this guy has never really run anything of any size, and when he has run small things, he’s mismanaged them, that he would have work events in Vegas, get drunk at strip clubs, and have to be carried out by his own employees. When Jane published this piece, I’d really been agonizing about how you do this job in the new Trump administration. And here’s the answer: you just keep doing the job, which is what Jane has done. And then, of course, a week later it looks like Hegseth is probably going to get confirmed in. So where does that leave us?
Anyway, the thing I come back to is a line that is attributed to my colleague, Elizabeth Kolbert. I don’t know that she ever said exactly this, because I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates on a long-form podcast once talk about a conversation he’d had with her in which he said, “You’ve devoted 20 years to writing about climate change and you haven’t stopped it. How do you get out of bed in the morning if what you’re doing is writing about this thing, and all of this amazing work that you’re doing doesn’t stop the train?” What he said that she told him was, “You have to think of it as a message in a bottle. That even if you’re not going to be able to stop these things, for future generations if nothing else, there has to be a record of what happened and a message that says it’s not that we didn’t know.” To me, that may be a kind of modest expectation to place on the work. I hope that you can right the wrongs, but short of that, I think there is a nobility in doing that, and I think it’s an essential kind of work that we should continue to do.
I should note that we had Pete Hegseth on this show a couple of years ago. He lasted seven minutes and then stormed off.
Really? Why?
It was 2022, and I asked him, “Who won the 2020 election?” He did not want to answer the question. And said, “We know who the president is now. This isn’t a gotcha.” He got very angry, yelled at me, and stormed off.
Amazing. You should have done it at a strip club. Then he would have stuck around.
I’m of two minds about the Trump administration. I feel like it’s going to be a more interesting story, but it’s also going to be harder to get readers to pay attention to it. I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s going to be a replay of the first term — there is going to be this general hum of corruption and relentless chaos, but coverage of that almost feels stale now. What I take from your view is that it’s our job to try and make our coverage of it as compelling as possible, but if readers decide to tune out because they just can’t deal with more coverage of a second Trump administration, that that’s not something we should be concerned with because it’s for posterity.
Yeah, I mean, man, how long have you got? I wrote a big piece during the first Trump administration about Mark Burnett, the creator of The Apprentice. One thing that I came away from that experience very convinced of is that, and this is not all down to Trump but I think his personality is a big part of this, is that there was a moment there where for a lot of Americans, politics just became entertainment by other means. And Trump is a fantastically entertaining guy. There was a moment in one of the debates, during the primary last time around where Trump sat out the debate, I guess it was a Republican primary. During the debate, they’re all doing what every politician has ever done in a presidential primary debate, talking about their platforms, their policy ideas, taxes, inflation, and Trump went on, I think it was still Twitter at the time, and just wrote in all caps, “BORING”. On some level, that is the guy’s magic, utilizing the fact that many people just want to be entertained.
I think it gets very tricky for news outlets. What I became concerned about at the end of the last Trump administration was that I thought there was an unholy thing happening. There was a sort of outrage porn in which the journalist writes with great outrage and indignation about what the Trump administration is doing, the reader consumes it and feels outraged, you commune in your outrage, but then it just burns off. It’s all calories, no protein. I don’t know if that’s the answer. And I think that you’re right, that at this point, people are just so jaded that it’s like, ‘How can you be outraged anymore?’ It’s this sort of iterative thing. I don’t know what the answer is. And I don’t mean to suggest that it’s for posterity, that it’s only a message in a bottle. I think ideally you do create accountability, you create some sense of shame. You hopefully are able to make people think, “What’s the country that I want to give to my kids? Do I want my kids to tune into the news and see this utter cesspit?”, just at the level of the discourse. I’m going to have to figure that out on a piece-by-piece basis, but what I keep telling myself is that the answer is not to completely check out. I think that whether we like it or not, we as journalists, as citizens, as a country, we are playing for keeps. We are all going to have to live with this stuff well beyond the horizon line of the Trump administration.
Another challenge for journalists over the next four years is going to be access to the Trump administration, because the way Trump looks at traditional media has changed a lot. In many ways, they won the 2024 election on the back of independent media. They proved that they didn’t need the approval of CNN to win another election. That’s not something I imagine concerns you much because you have had a lot of success writing about subjects without having access to them.
Two thoughts on that. One is I’ve always felt that access is overrated, particularly access to powerful people. In one of the pieces that I wrote about the Trump administration, I wrote about H.R. McMaster’s tenure at the National Security Council, there was a source who I will not name because this person was talking to me on background, but it was a prominent Republican, close to Trump’s circle, somebody who talked to a lot of journalists on and off the record, who late in the fact-checking we realized that there were lies that this person had told me, just completely fictional, completely invented things. Not even in a self-aggrandizing way, but just to mess with someone, just to take a little vial and inject it into the system. So that was a situation in which I had access.
I think this is the case for many people writing about the Trump administration, that if you’re dealing with pathological liars, I don’t know how good the access is. The other thing I would say as someone who has done a lot of write-arounds, where you don’t have access to the person and you’re wondering, “What do I have? Are there letters? Are there emails? Other people who have talked to them? Depositions?” So many of these people, every time a thought flits through their head, go onto social media and tell you the thought. The whole notion of needing an exclusive— needing time with Elon Musk to figure out what’s on Elon Musk’s mind— is kind of a joke because his id is right there.
I read somewhere that he’s tweeted 1,000 times this week.
Say no more. Journalistically, to me, the interesting question is, “Is each one of those a story?” If Elon Musk starts shooting off his mouth about politics in the U.K., does it need to be a leading story? I don’t know. I think that’s for people to decide, but we’re in an interesting moment in that respect.
Are there some subjects— like Elon Musk— that you find so big and public-facing that they don’t make for interesting subjects for you to write about? Do you opt for uncovering people who are a little bit more behind the scenes?
I tend not to be the person who is running for the ball that everyone else is running for, for a whole variety of reasons. I think that the advantage is almost always with the beat reporters who are working a beat hard, and they’re doing these little incremental scoops where they’re just on it, and every little droplet of new information they get, they publish it. And that’s just not what I do. I spend six months on something and do something much more synthetic. So I’m always at a bit of a disadvantage when I’m doing my thing in a press box with a whole bunch of other people who the minute they find something out, they can report it.
What are you working on now and what do you have next? What’s on the horizon?
There’s a book that I’m hoping to finish this spring which grows out of a piece I published in February in The New Yorker about a kid who died in London in 2019 in mysterious circumstances, a teenage boy who after he died, it emerged that he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. So it’s about his life, death, and his parents’ effort to get to the bottom of what happened to him. On a deeper level, it’s about how London has changed in recent decades; how all the foreign money that’s come in has changed the city. Beyond that, I am very excited to be getting back to The New Yorker. There are a couple of pieces— I can’t tell you what they’re about— but I have a couple of things on the docket that I think should be fun for 2025.
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