Joshua Rothman

SP

Your column “Open Questions” claims to address what it is to be human. This is an overwhelmingly broad endeavor. How would you describe the particularities of the ‘ideas’ space?

JR

Some magazines do it in a more polemical style, like the ideas are supposed to be provocative, relevant, or argumentative. I occupy the more genteel side of the ideas spectrum. My ideas world is intended to be an alternative to the awful intensity of the news cycle. Built into it is a nostalgia for college—some sort of wish to get back to a more carefree world of ideas.

SP

The broad questions the column asks—like, are you the same person you were when you were a child?—reminds me of an introductory philosophy lecture. There is also a broad range that you bring to approach these questions, and I appreciate the column for how it can jump from the wisdom of a poet to a philosopher to a scientist to your personal experience. What discipline were you most drawn to as a young person?

JR

I grew up in a science household, but my mom was a big reader. In high school and college, I thought maybe I’d go into the sciences, but in the end, I majored in creative writing. But in college, my roommates and I had our own internet business. This was not quite the first flowering of the web, but it was called Web 2.0. It was the exciting new version of the internet. I went to grad school to get a PhD in English, but my dissertation was about philosophy of mind and the problems that philosophers of mind explored, which mostly have to do with the fact that we’re brains and we’re bodies, and how brains and bodies express themselves in novels.

SP

You say the column has a nostalgia for college. Why did you leave academia?

JR

I was finishing my PhD right around the time of the 2008 financial crisis and there were no jobs. I needed to do something different. But also I found that from a metabolic point of view, in academic life, you may work on a project for five or ten years. I discovered that wasn't the right speed for me. I wanted to do a bigger variety of things more frequently. I also discovered I needed the structure of an editor and a publication deadline. As soon as I had my first editor, my first job as a journalist, I wrote so much faster and had much more fun.

SP

This was at The Boston Globe?

JR

Yeah, my first real job was at the Globe. I wrote two or three times a week for bostonglobe.com. Then they would collate it and publish it in the Sunday paper. I didn’t love being hyperspecialized, which is where academia was pulling me. What I really loved about being in graduate school and in college before that, was being able to learn in a lot of directions at the same time. It’s so enjoyable to cross the streams, and it's more true to how we actually think.

SP

In the column, you can see how you enjoy crossing streams, particularly how you meld high and low. You will reference something in popular culture and then Anna Karenina.

JR

For me, the ideas space is about thinking in a way that reflects the richness of what readers already know. There’s a kind of writing from expertise, where the writer always knows more than the reader. I want to write it so readers can feel and see themselves and that there’s resources that we have in common. One big component of that is being broad. It’s a way of connecting with people.

SP

Can you tell me about the weekly process for writing your column?

JR

There’s two aspects to the column experience. One is on the level of craft. I’m writing roughly 2,000 words a week. I think the reader's experience should be like overhearing an interesting conversation that leads somewhere definitive and results in an idea that’s portable. You can take it out of the column and you could explain it to someone clearly.

When I sit down to write the column, I don’t know whether I’m going to succeed in turning the overheard conversation into a complete, crystallized idea. That’s the weekly challenge. It's really different from writing an 8,000 word profile. The last profile I wrote was on Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI. That I worked on for months and months. And you make it as perfect as you can. This is different. It's much more of a performance and you don’t know how it will come out until you’re done.

From the ideas perspective, I think sometimes ideas come from below, as it were. In other words, there’s some ordinary aspect of life that you sense is sort of a doorway into some interesting set of thoughts. Other times, there’s more of a real question that’s been handled many times over a long period by many thinkers. What you’re actually trying to do is write about that question, but in a way that's connected to something practical. I did a column that was called “Should You Just Give Up? That’s a genuine, old question. When do efforts become futile? What’s the point of futile efforts? Sometimes the question is already an elevated question. Sometimes you come at things from the top, sometimes you come at things from the bottom.

SP

Can you give me an example of when something came from the bottom, as you say, and it was incredibly fruitful to think through?

JR

I just wrote one about packing, called “Why Can't You Pack a Bag?”

SP

Which I very much struggle with.

JR

It’s a fun question and it comes from my own personal life sessions. But without it being false or forced, you can see how that leads to really good questions about predicting the future, about what you understand to be the limits of your capacities. You know what you can endure, what you’ll enjoy. These are questions that flow right out of the problem of packing, as it were.

The ideal is that the piece has posed some question to you that you've thought about in the past, but you’ve never progressed because you’ve never quite had the right things presented to you in the right order, or you’ve never had the time, or been in the right frame of mind. In the ideal world, during the time you sit with this piece, you suddenly realize that you can make some progress. It’s not necessarily that the ideas that I'm proposing have to be so profound. It's that the particular situation of reading is one in which you might actually get somewhere on a question that you've previously taken to be an invulnerable question.

SP

Could you describe the form they’re written in and the reason for writing them that way? Is there an instructive imperative to the form?

JR

I started off as an academic person. When I started to become a journalist, my first thought was that I would use what I had learned as an academic. I would use that scholarly knowledge and that would be why I had a right to say stuff. I wrote a lot of pieces, that I cringe to read now, that were expertise-based. As I stayed in journalism and I was edited by better and better editors, I started to feel differently about that type of writing—that use of expertise as a source of authority. I started writing a lot about science. As I started writing longer and more complicated reported pieces about the sciences, I came to value concision, lucidity, and transparency. I started thinking more and more about how to make readers feel that they had access to all the ideas in the piece. How to ideally leave nobody behind in the writing.

Anyway, I found myself wanting to be able to explain or express a philosophical idea in a way that just brought people along. I’m in the middle of the new series of books by Karl Ove Knausgaard. There’s this one character who’s talking about reading Nietzsche and writers like that. The whole challenge is that ideas are really exciting because of a specific life situation. So, when Nietzsche comes up with the idea of eternal return, for example, when you just explain that idea, it sounds crazy or boring or bloodless or arbitrary. You have to actually have all these feelings. You have to have all these circumstances around that idea for it to strike you as powerful. I think that's true. I think that to explain an idea in philosophy you have to create the dramatic situation that makes it meaningful because that's where ideas come from. They come out of situations.

This is a long way of saying that over a long time of writing these types of essays, the first one I did that I felt was actually good was about making big decisions. I found that if you mix together things in the right way you can create the sort of context that can make ideas that would be abstract into something relevant to you.

SP

Where did you learn how to create a story that conveys a philosophical idea?

JR

When I was in graduate school, I had two professors, Helen Vendler and Philip Fisher. Vendler would make us read a poem aloud with feeling and then explain why we had acted out the poem the way we had. It was an exercise designed to make us connect with this lyric poem as something that was said by a person in a particular situation, and that the poet felt such and such that they were responding to such and such situation. Maybe that’s not true—I think a lot of critics would disagree with this approach. But it made poems feel connected to a real-life context.

Similarly, Phil Fisher taught novels in such a way that made them suddenly transparent and visible to you as taking place in the same world that you live in. There’s a simple way that you do that, which is to take a novel and it’s happening in the present, like you do with taking Jane Austen’s Emma and turning it into Clueless. But there’s another way, which has to do with the ability to articulate human situations in a vivid way so that you can see that they’re the same situation that is in this novel. So, for example, a human situation that’s familiar to all of us is having the sudden understanding that we’re morally confused and we might actually be bad. We might be guilty in ways that we don't understand, and then looking around ourselves and saying, “Who can tell me how to not be guilty?” And realizing no one can tell you. There’s not any clear book that tells you how to be good. And that's the situation of a book like The Trial, which is a totally abstract, mystifying book, but actually it's a completely transparent book that’s related to ordinary life. So those professors opened the door to the idea that ideas are everyday, which is the opposite of an alternative impulse, which is basically to have the ideas pull you out of the everyday into this elevated realm. This impulse is different. It’s to show that these ideas are already in your life. And I guess my whole writing career is doing what those professors taught me to do.

SP

When I think of the impulse to make older novels relevant—like, let’s say, teaching an Edith Wharton novel in such a way that compares it to contemporary New York social mores—there is almost the danger of cringiness. There’s a thin line.

JR

Cringiness is a risk. Another area of risk in this type of writing is that it’s so general. I'm always writing, “We think this…,” “We do that…,” “You think this…,” and I know that there's lots of reasons to object to that type of writing and the universalism in the style. But everything in writing is a trade-off. You have to decide what your goals are and then let the trade-offs turn out in a way that’s driven by a conscious choice. In my case, my goals are to write pieces that reach a lot of people, that are accessible, concise, that are broad enough for people to find purchase in them. So that means that sometimes it's a little cringy or cheesy and that’s okay. 

SP

It’s funny that you mention concision, since you’ve also written about and interviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard. On reading My Struggle, you wrote, “It pushed me to think more about my own self, and, in particular, my emotions. It’s reacquainted me with the vividness of feelings. It’s a sentimental education.” Can you expand on your affinity for his work?

JR

I mean, I’m in the Knausgaard demographic. I like all the same bands. It is like reading my own diary. One of the things I find really compelling in those novels is the seamless and natural way that you move from everyday life, minutely described, into thoughts and responses to art and ideas.

James Wood was once speaking about the comic-book quality that sometimes happens in those books. The protagonist will do something really embarrassing and then the text will give no explanation. He’ll do that with ideas as well. He’ll take an idea that is really complicated and weird, like an idea that Kierkegaard had about God and nature, and then he’ll just describe staring out the window, seeing the rain in front of the street lights or the woods in the distance and listening to the silence of the woods. Then he’ll describe that sight in such a way that you see what that long, potentially interminable essayistic part was about. For me, that's very much my experience of intellectual life. 

I feel my intellectual life working when an idea that I’ve worked hard to understand suddenly becomes visible in the ordinary. Like, “Oh, that’s what Kierkegaard was talking about.” I remember having a conversation with one of my dissertation advisers who wrote biographies. I asked him, “Why biographies?” Instead of writing a biography of a thinker, why not just write about the thoughts? And he said, for him, biography was a useful discipline. His idea was if you had to include all the life and then still explain the ideas, it was a framework where it pushed you to get the ideas right.

That’s how I often feel about the cringey everyday lifeness of how I tend to think. There are trade-offs associated with writing in this way, but on the other hand, you are constantly having to bring these thoughts in contact with practical things. As a result, maybe that is a useful constraint.

SP

Maybe ‘cringey’ wasn’t the right word. I feel like there’s an earnest quality to the column that's very refreshing. You mention understanding ideas through the context of life, which reminds me of the anecdotes in your column about your children. I’m curious how that aspect of your life has influenced your writing.

JR

All I do is hang out with my kids. I lived in New York City for a while and before I was in Boston, and now I live in a very small town. I have a very routinized life. I walk to the same coffee shop and the same place I work every day. It’s not uncommon for me to see my footprints from the previous day in the path. My life is very concentrated. So that’s one of the reasons the kids come up all the time.

Since my first child was born, I've been interested in person, selfhood, personality, and where it comes from. I’ve also been thinking about the continuities between someone my age and someone his age, or the sort of fractures in identity. On the one hand I resist the idea that having kids changes you too much because I feel like I was a fully present adult before I had kids. But during the time that I’'ve been in the years of early parenthood, one of the things that’s been most interesting to me is the relative urgency of certain questions, like do you want to take your kids to church or temple or whatever or not? How detached are you from your parents and the way they raised you, or how much are you continuing what they did? How much are you shaping them and how much are they who they are? I mean, these are questions that have practical significance during this period and you have to think about them pretty acutely.

The last big profile I did was of Geoffrey Hinton. He’s been married three times, and two of his wives have died. His life is structured by grief and loss. I think if he were to tell you the story of his life, which he does in that piece, it's only partly about his work. It's a lot about his family life. The first thing he said to me when we spoke was, “If we're gonna do this, you have to write about my wives.” But your relationships, the way you handle love and family, those things are an engine of your life. Maybe ten years ago I would’ve written less frequently about these types of emotional subjects and more frequently about slightly more heady things.

SP

You’ve also profiled science fiction writers, philosophers, the painter Peter Sacks, the musician Michael Stipe.

JR

The best part of the job is profile writing. It’s an unnatural relationship to have to people, but it's special. You get this brief encounter with someone, but it’s really high intensity. During that time, you have permission to violate all sorts of social codes and get as nosy as you want. And if they’ve agreed to do this with you, then they’ve agreed to share most of the time. So it’s a special experience where you get to find things out about people.One thing I've kind of learned from writing profiles is that the range of human types is very broad. What this means for someone who wants to write about ideas is that the kind of differences between us, which of course are a source of value in life, are also differences in our ideas. When you think about how ideas work, they’re not necessarily in contest with one another. They might reflect different aspects of who we can be, different potential ways of being. The implicit idea is not, Is this person right? It's more like, here’s the type of person for whom this set of ideas would be. 

SP

What is the column you’re writing this week?

JR

I think the question is going to be, “Why can't you just deal with it?” It’s not about procrastination, which is you have a to-do item and you’re putting it off. This is more about the big things you have to do. You have to sell your late father's house to pay for your daughter's college tuition. Why can’t you just deal with it? There’s philosophical questions around the will in there, but I’m interested in the way we talk to ourselves and the ways we could talk to ourselves to lever ourselves out of the frame of not being able to deal with stuff. With the column, I’m keeping an eye on the mix. I’m trying to not get too monotonous. I've been writing the column on a weekly cadence for six months or something. 

SP

The weekly column is only sustainable for so long.

JR

Every single one of these columns I published afterwards, I reread sometimes and I'm like, I should have done this. I should have said that. It would’ve been better if I’d done it this way. But then you apply that lesson to the next thing almost immediately.

SP

How do you distinguish between your career as a writer and an editor?

JR

I was the ideas editor for the website and I edited a lot of print magazine pieces, too, during that time. Being an editor is a special job. You get to help writers in their careers, which is really gratifying. A lot of it is not about line editing, a lot of it is about thinking with someone. It’s like having a little graduate seminar with someone. You have an experience with a writer, you work really closely for a few months on a piece, and it can be a peak intellectual experience. You’re helping them express themselves. It’s a really rewarding job, but it’s very stressful. As a writer, the worst thing that can happen is you’re behind and your editor sort of shields you from the machinery of a publication. But as an editor, you’re a cog in the machine. So your email inbox is always exploding and you're always the weak link, always holding people up.

But I think the biggest thing that was interesting to me about being an editor was being able to pursue intellectual projects over long periods with writers. A publication never announces to its audience that it's doing this, but it pursues and finds a writer who’s doing something interesting and then you work with her. And then you as the editor help create, essentially, a syllabus of pieces over a period of time that explores something.

Narrative journalism, which is what The New Yorker does, is an epistemically strange endeavor. I feel you're supposed to get an idea that you can take away into your own life. You read an article about surgeons, and you’re not a surgeon, and you learn some things in that article that are meaningful to you. That’s what the idea is.