Why did you choose May 2020 as a unifying theme?
Well, the first season of “Things Fell Apart” was my lockdown project. It was my first time working in journalism without traveling, and I conducted all my interviews remotely from the laundry room of my upstate home. It was great. It was also a bit of an experiment. Well, I’m not as young as I used to be. Can you continue doing journalism without taking 100 plane rides?
One of my favorite little moments in your audiobook about Alex Jones and pro-Trumpers [“The Elephant in the Room”] It was at the RNC, it was hot in the summer, and I followed him into an air-conditioned Winnebago, and we both sat there and let out a middle-aged sigh. It’s a very human moment.
[Laughs.] They wanted a second season of “Things Fell Apart,” and I wanted the parameters. My first thought was that lockdown might be interesting. And what I discovered through research was that almost every culture war story in recent memory exploded within 20 days of each other. Of course that’s natural. But I don’t know if anyone really noticed that.
You are a cancellation expert as well as someone with a long-standing interest in third rail. Is there a generalized theory as to why it spent its life touching the third rail and wasn’t cancelled?
I would be happy if that happens. Sometimes it can be a little confusing.
There’s John Safran, an Australian journalist. he’s very good. He’s the same kind of person as me and Louis Theroux and others. And he brought this up to me. I was having lunch with him in Central Park, and he said, “Have you noticed that we’ve never been in trouble?” His theory was that we was passed down to his grandfather.
But I think the biggest reason, if possible, is because I’m not an ideological person. And when my story criticizes someone, it often criticizes both sides.
This brings us back to the next question. When do you actually need to be a little more judgmental than you think you are? In theory, non-judgment sounds great, but still—
I don’t think we should let people quit too easily. However, we don’t do it in a performative, hierarchical, or cumbersome way.
I remember President Trump saying, “There are very good people on both sides.” I’m just scratching my head because I’m like, ‘You just ruined it for everyone on both sides of us.’
A few years ago, when people said “the internet is crazy about this” or “this is what people are talking about today,” they tended to mean Twitter. Even if it, by definition, will never get close to the majority of people.
Still, Twitter had immense influence.
And now, in this drier version, I think it’s hard to call it an X. . .
It’s a bit like ordering a venti latte at Starbucks.
Or calling Snoop Dogg Snoop Lion or whatever. Anyway, for the usual reasons I try to avoid it, but last week when the Chabad guys went into the tunnel, I went to Twitter. Because we thought, social media, now is your time to shine. There were some funny things in there, but for one thing, it felt like it was quickly becoming saturated, like the same memes were going around over and over again. And the other problem, of course, was that as a Jew on Elon Musk’s Twitter, I didn’t know if I was being laughed at or not.
Yeah. The last time I went on his Twitter page was the Jeffrey Epstein paper, and the first thing I saw was a hoax about Jimmy Kimmel. So I threw up my hands and went back to legacy media. My friend Adam Curtis said this in the early days of Twitter. “There will come a time when Twitter will become one of those John Carpenter movies, like Escape from New York.”
This analogy shows some of the advantages and disadvantages. Amidst the wreckage and disgusting graffiti of a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic New York, you’ll find some truly amazing art. And maybe one of those people wandering around on the subway tweeting can tell you something about Jeffrey Epstein—
Something that turned out to be true. absolutely. That’s why it’s so unfortunate. I loved how early Twitter felt like a Robert Altman movie. Now I only use social media to promote my work and the work of others. There are no further opinions.
On Instagram, you can watch videos of unlikely friendships between animals of different species. And Twitter, especially these days, is like when you’re walking in the countryside and come across a fence, you can’t decide whether to touch it to see if it’s energized.
“Things Fell Apart” comes from Yeats’s poem “The Center Can’t Hold.” Do you have any desire to return to any center? Somewhere in the middle, some place of rest, where we no longer spiral out of control? You say you don’t want your audience to worry about imposing their left-wing biases, but still wanting to remain centrist is inherently conservative. , there’s something conservative about it, like a small “C.” . In other words, Yeats was a conservative. Didion was definitely like that. I don’t know about Chinua Achebe.
There are parts of that poem that I don’t like. I don’t like the line, “The best have no conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.” That’s pretty derogatory.
Personally, I find it disappointing that many centrists are moving to the right. I was really surprised that while Trump was doing all the things he was doing, there was an obsession with quote-unquote “wokeness.” I was like, “Okay, this is our top priority right now?” So I definitely have a problem with centrists. They can be a bit autocratic.
There is a term called “radical centrism.”
I don’t see myself as part of it at all. For me, “things falling apart and not being centered” is like a kind of human center that is curious and tries to understand people’s perspectives and explore nuances. To be honest, centrists are not talking about centrism. ♦