2022-05-24 LIVE from NYPL New Yorker Treasures: John Hersey & "Hiroshima" Lesley M.M. Blume with Erin Overbey and Janine di Giovanni >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Hello, everyone. Is this on? No? There it is. Hello. How's everyone doing tonight? [Inaudible] All right, some moderately enthusiastic. It'll grow in time, I'm sure. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark and I am part of the team that brings you "Live from NYPL," and I want to say hello to all of you here in the room tonight, and to those of you who are watching online as well. Whether you're here in person with us or watching at home, we are thrilled that you're with us. So, hello and thank you. We have a very special evening for you tonight and I want to get to it as quickly as possible. Tonight, I'll be speaking with Leslie Blume, the author of "Fallout: the Hiroshima Cover Up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World." It's, of course, about John Hersey, and his seminal 1946 "New Yorker" piece, "Hiroshima." And since here at the library we hold the company records of the New Yorker from its founding, Leslie worked on the book here. And we'll get to talk much more about that later on. Joining her is Erin Overbey, the archives editor at the New Yorker and journalist Janine de Giovanni, the author most recently of "The Vanishing", and whose previous book to that, "The Morning They Came for Us" was a 2017 finalist for the library's own Bernstein Award for excellence in journalism. Leslie's book, Janine's books, you can borrow all of these from the library from us provided you have an NYPL library card, which obviously everyone in this room has, correct? I will find you if you don't have it. I'm looking. Also, "Fall Out," if you didn't see is available for purchase tonight right outside this room. I encourage you to do that if you're able. Leslie, are you signing books afterward? Fantastic. Okay, fantastic. Leslie is signing books and your purchase goes to benefit the New York Public Library. Tonight's event is inspired by an exhibit that we have right downstairs in this building, "Treasures." And, in fact, this is our first Treasures event in person. Thank you, COVID. So, I'm glad that you're here for it with us. The Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library's Treasures showcases some of the most extraordinary items from the 56 million in our collections. They tell story of people's places and moments spanning 4,000 years. I like to think of it as, like, our greatest hits with sort of, like, the Abba gold of the New York Public Library. But instead of, like, you know, "Dancing Queen" and "Mamma Mia," we have the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson's handwriting, as well as the Gutenberg Bible, a Bill of Rights, a Shakespeare First Folio, typewritten manuscripts, photographs, handwritten manuscripts by James Baldwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maya Angelou, Oscar Wilde, and Malcolm X, and much, much more, and it's all downstairs. So, you might have a little bit of time to go see it after this event if you're interested. But if you can't make it tonight, you can sign up for a time ticket either downstairs, or online at nypl.org/treasures. And for those of you who are watching online, if you can't make it because you're somewhere else, or whatever reason, there's also a digital version of the exhibition at nypl.org/treasures. So, any which way you can get there, you can get there and I really encourage you to do that. Among the treasures is the 1924 prospectus for The New Yorker, written by its founding editor, Harold Ross, who is also, of course, a major character in Leslie's book, Fallout. And to talk about the perspectives and more to the point, the incredible New Yorker collections that we have here, I'm going to invite up in a second, Julie Golia. Julie is the Associate Director of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books and the Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts and she's going to give a brief talk before we bring up Leslie, Erin, and Janine. First, I just want to tell you that Live from NYPL is made possible by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, and Adam Bartos. And, of course, by all of you here in the room, watching online, our supporters and friends near and far. So, thank you very much for your support. One last thing. If you have questions tonight, if you're here in the room, hopefully you saw that you have some note cards on your seats. Please write down your question at any time and some friends from the library will come by and pick them up. If you are watching online, you can fill out the form that's on the website or you can email public programs@nypl.org and we will get them there. We want your questions. Wherever you are, we'd love to hear from you. Okay. So, let's start by bringing up Julie Golia. [ Applause ] >> Julie Golia: Hi, everybody. Are we ready to talk a little archives tonight? So, I'm going to be talking about a publication which I think you all know needs no introduction, but I have 10 minutes to give you one to talk about a collection that is about 2,500 boxes. So, let's see how we do tonight. So, we're talking about a publication that is an icon of investigative journalism, of literature, of general wit. It's been an incubator for some of the most remarkable talent of the 20th century, and it has a aesthetic style that perhaps has no parallel. The New Yorker ran its first issue in February of 1925. It was the brainchild of, as Aiden told us, Harold Ross, who was the longtime editor there until his death in 1951. And funding came, I think, very interestingly, from a man named Raul Fleischman. If we all close our eyes and picture the aisle in the grocery store, that would be the heir to a yeast fortune. So, thank you, Mr. Fleishman. And the visual style that I think we see here on the screen that so marks that magazine was the sort of brainchild of Ray Ervin, who laid out the magazine. Who actually designed the iconic New Yorker font, and, of course, created the figure we see up here, Eustace Tilley, who is the monocle dandy who has made his appearance in the magazine in various incarnations throughout its history. So, Ross edited the magazine, as I said, until his death. And one, I think, one of his greatest contributions, one of which we'll be talking about tonight, was bringing in some remarkable editorial talent, including a man named William Shawn, who took over after his death and who we're going to hear a little bit more about tonight, who really launched the magazine to its kind of international iconic status. And, of course, one of the major documents that actually isn't in Treasures anymore, it came down a few months ago, but can be seen in our reading rooms, is the New Yorker Prospectus, which was published actually a year before the magazine came out. And I think is kind of an icon of language in and of itself. I was just saying to a colleague that it might be the best-written thing that we have in the library, which is saying a lot. And to just give you a sense of Ross's sort of prose in this and its role as a progenitor of the magazine, he writes, "The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of Metropolitan Life. It will be human. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated. It will hate bunk." And then, on a later page, not shown here comes a truly masterful burn. "The New Yorker will be the magazine, which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." Some things change and some things stay the same. Before we get into the archive, I do want to give you a hot tip. For those of you who are like, "Is my New York Public Library Card still active?" You all can access the full run of the digital New Yorker for free with your library card via the New Yorker Digital Archive. So, any issue, any page in it, you can see for free, thanks to the New York Public Library. So, whenever you're seeking some inspiration, take out your library card and head on to our website and take a look. But all of those issues, to me, only strike the surface of what we actually have here and the collections at the New York Public Library related to the New Yorker. So, we have about 2,500 of these in our special collections storage that make up the records of the New Yorker, covering literally every issue from the magazine's inception through 1984. We acquired the papers in 1991 when the magazine was leaving its longtime headquarters to move to a new building. And it covers, literally, the day-to-day of working life there. The collection has things like correspondence, inter-office memoranda, detailed type-written manuscripts, layouts of every single issue. This is the magazine being made in action. It provides a sort of a glimpse into the production of one publication over time. What is the value of Magazines Archive? And what secrets does it hold? What can we learn about the people who made the magazine? And what can we learn about the culture that gave birth to that magazine? Well, these are big questions, some of which are answered in the book that we're going to hear about tonight. But I want to just kind of give a taste tonight of the kinds of sort of research and storytelling venues you can get when opening up boxes like these. And some, I think, are a little bit surprising. So, a magazine is at its core, a deliverable, in the case of this one, a weekly deliverable. Something that is made by people, some people that you see, and some people that you don't see. And when we're talking about invisible labor and often white collar labor, we're often talking about gendered labor. And so, in the kind of the working papers, the inter-office memoranda here, it's really interesting to me to see the ways that we can tease out the work of women and the often unacknowledged work of women. And this is a note that I found that I found really charming and funny about a veritable uprising that was taking place in the New Yorker offices in 1944. The New Yorker received a remarkable number of unsolicited manuscripts and a new policy had been put in place to basically make a log of every single one that was coming in. And this memo basically chronicles the fact that some of the "best girls" were demanding that this practice stop and that they were going to leave their jobs there. And editor William Maxwell was terrified of losing their work. Wasn't able to find the outcome of this but it seems to me a really wonderful indicator of the kind of work that women were doing behind the scenes, the limits in that, and also the potential power to sort of push back against the work that they were being pushed to do. And the New Yorker papers are just one of many collections that we hold in the archives related to people who worked there. And one of my favorite collections, actually, is that of Harriet Walden, who was perhaps one of those steno girls, if you will, who were mentioned in the memo I showed you. She was an administrative staff worker at the New Yorker for over forty years. And her work day included things like typing and proofing manuscripts, managing employee subscriptions, and making sure employees got the copy and the issues that they needed, and pasting together the dummy magazine, which we're going to talk about in a little while. So, she also traveled extensively in her free time and I found this wonderful stack of postcards that she sent back to her friends and her co workers at the New Yorker. And the thing I loved about this one, they're funny, they're clever, and look who she addressed it to -- Walden Pond at The New Yorker, perhaps a kind of a clever nod to the steno pool itself of which he was a part. The New Yorker was one of the most fruitful sites of intellectual collaboration for some of the most important authors and editors of the 20th century. And the nature and I think the intimacy of these collaborations is chronicled in the voluminous correspondence records. So, this is a letter from novelist Vladimir Nabokov, a longtime contributor to the magazine who work closely with fiction editor Katherine White. And it shows a relationships that toggles between the professional and the personal. So, he clarifies things like his address and where to send things related to his work with the New Yorker, but also mentions her husband Andy, who is actually EB White, that EB White, possibly helping to birth some ewes on their farm and then seeks a little help looking for summer employment for his son Dmitri. Look at the signature, that charming V and then a butterfly. So, besides being one of the foremost authors of the 20th century, Nabokov was also a very avid lepidopterist. Loved studying butterflies and moths, drawing them, and sort of chronicling them throughout his life. And we actually hold a number of these, as you can see, really beautiful drawings in a different division in the Burg Division here at the New York Public Library. Truman Capote actually worked at The New Yorker for a short time in the early 1940s as a copy boy, before he was rather quickly fired, because he got on the wrong side of poet Robert Frost. He talked a bit derisively about his time there and how it was a little bit boring. But that didn't stop him from maintaining an ongoing multi-decade relationship with a magazine which published several of his short stories and a number of journalistic pieces as well. Through his letters, I really witnessed I think, a very hands on and almost, like, intellectually intimate relationship between him and his editor, William Shawn, who by this time was running the magazine, but still really took the time to hand edit every single one of these stories, which as you all know, could run quite, quite long. And this is actually a letter that is related to -- what is the what is the book? I've already forgotten 1951. It was related to the piece that he wrote about the everyman opera visiting the Soviet Union in the 1950s that later became post-published as a novel. And this was actually not the first serialized piece that became a book that was published in the New Yorker. So, we can see here, actually, a copy and source manuscript copy of "Annals of Crime in Cold Blood," which was published serially in 1965 before the actual novel came out. So, I pulled this from a series in the collection called "The Copy and Source Materials," which actually are the magazine being made like in real time. And so, you can see here, indications about font size and style. You can see here cross-outs that are being made directly to the manuscript. Actually, I loved seeing here that there was a phrase that was cut out by William Shawn that, indeed, did not make it into the original. But if you look at sort of the font indications here, you can see how it actually plays out in the pages of the newspaper there. So, one of the most visually stimulating things about the New Yorker are its clever cartoons or in New Yorker speak, the idea drawings. And I enjoyed, I had, like, a lovely afternoon, going through a folder of idea drawings that were killed, that never made it into the magazine. And these were really some very clever ideas that often were proposed, paid for, sat in the folder for several years, and then were summarily discarded. The one that we're looking at here felt very timely. It was first proposed in 1947. And then, it was eventually killed in 1941. And it's about a general who's running for president. So, think about our timing. We had a general president just a few years later. Perhaps that is why it was actually killed. And I love what's going on here with the wording. So, the debate here, they're trying out a bunch of phrasing: you know, Joe; you know, general; we've been thinking general. And so, the carefulness of the language to make this as sort of peak clever as possible. And here's another one that was again paid for and then killed. This idea is not to be used, we can see in stern language on the right here, which I also thought was really clever. A woman goes into a voting booth comes out and says, "How can I change my mind?" I thought this could work today. But it didn't, it was killed in 1951. I wanted to leave you with something beautiful. And so, another little research project that I gave myself was to think a little bit about the covers of New Yorker magazines. The New Yorker is not a daily newspaper. It is not an on the nose experience to look at a cover. And so, I wanted to see what would happen if I looked up key moments or dates in American history and what we saw. And so, we're looking here at two covers almost fifty years apart. On the left is the first issue after the death of JFK. And it's a sort of quiet and melancholy look at the mid-century waterfront. And then, the New Yorker's very famous cover after 911, you might remember, was just a black cover. But this is the 911 from 10 years later, which I just thought was such a remarkable pairing, again, playing with the waterfront and a reminder of Harold Ross's call for the New Yorker to always be a metropolitan magazine. And I think these two covers show that is remains true today. So, if I piqued your interest, you should come see us in the Manuscripts and Archives Division on the third floor of this building. You can email us at manuscripts@nypl.org and we'll help you find materials, make an appointment, and come and see them. We welcome everybody as researchers to our division. You can also follow us follow us on Twitter for some cool images and information related to our collections. And don't forget what I told you about your library cards so that you can find your own inspiration in the pages of the New Yorker. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Applause ] >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Thank you so much, Julie. That was fantastic. And I really encourage anyone who's interested to go visit the manuscripts and archives room because you will find amazing treasures in there and it's a beautiful space to do work in. Thank you so much for being with us Leslie, and Erin, and Janine. I'm so excited to speak with you. I got to reengage with John Hersey again, which was fantastic. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: It is very strange to be doing an event not in yoga pants and a suit jacket on Zoom. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Should we, like, put, a, like, a table on a curtain-- >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I think so-- >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So we can just get dressed from up here and then you know, sweatpants downstairs? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I think so. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Okay. Well, if I can Leslie, I want to start with you just with like a little bit of table setting. I assume everyone here and watching is pretty familiar with John Hersey in Hiroshima, but just in case anyone needs a refresher, can you just give a quick overview of, you know, who was John Hersey and what was Hiroshima? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: So, in 1945, John Hersey had been covering World War II for six years for Time Magazine, and he had a falling out with Henry Luce, and he left and he's at large, he started writing for The New Yorker. And after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey and his then editor, William Shawn, at the New Yorker had a meeting and they said, "Something is really all about the coverage up to this point. It's all about destruction, landscape destruction, what happened to the human beings? And Hersey managed to, I won't spoil how he got in, but he managed to get into Japan and Hiroshima. And he wrote for the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker, a devastating historical investigative account of what had happened underneath the mushroom clouds from the point of view of six civilian survivors. And it, really, it changed everything in that moment in terms of how people perceived the bomb up to that point. Up to that point, people didn't really understand that this is the mega weapon that continued to kill long after detonation and it had a huge deterrent effect in politics, but also in widespread attitudes toward the bomb. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And nothing else in the issue, right? It was just Hiroshima. >> Lesley M.M. Blume: A 30,000 word article. The only contents of the issue, although there were advertisements that were run alongside it. I'm sure the advertisers were thrilled about that, you know, the browsiers years and the chocolates. But yes, and one editor described it to me as an unprecedented editorial splurge at that point. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So, can you give a sense of what Americans knew, or I guess more to the point, didn't know about Hiroshima? Like, how shattering was it for them? What, like, what did they discover in reading this? What hadn't they known before? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Well, I think, you know, when the news initially was released about the bomb, when Harry Truman announced it, I mean, he almost seemed to be, like, ecstatically forthright about what had happened. I mean, they released statistics. This is equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. This is, you know, the fire of the son is being unleashed as, you know, a biblical level of destruction. So, people knew something pretty nasty had gone down. But, you know, at the same time, there was a significant amount of total suppression of real information about not just the total devastation for civilians. It was largely a civilian population, more than 90%. And also, just the fact that, again, it was the bomb that continued to kill long after detonation. People didn't really realize the extent of the radioactive, lingering radioactive effects on the human body. I mean, not even the makers of the bomb themselves really had a full command of what they had done. They sent in their own fact-finding mission of physicists, and journalists, and generals. And so, until John Hersey's account came out a full year later, Americans and people around the world had no full picture of what these new mega weapons were. And therefore, they didn't really understand fully, at least this was the belief of the bureaucrats, they didn't understand the implications of the world having moved in to the atomic age and what it meant not just for people in Hiroshima; but people in Dayton, Ohio; or people in London; or people in Moscow. So, that it was a game changer for sure. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Yeah. And speaking of people in Moscow and elsewhere around the world, I mean, it was published as a book almost immediately thereafter. It was translated into, I forget, 911 languages, conspicuously not available in Russia. But can you talk about the global impact of the story? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Yeah. I mean, you laid it out, it was a global sensation. I mean, it literally went into, I'd have to check the my own book, you know, but twenty or thirty languages. And, notably-- >> Aiden Flax-Clark: I've got it tabbed right here, I'll check. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Thank you. Yeah. And but, you know, as you noted, you know, there were-- >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Eleven.. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Eleven languages right away. But later on many, many more. Notably, it was not published in Russia for reasons that we'll discuss when we get into documents and it wasn't initially published in Japan either, because it was under occupation. And the American occupying forces were extremely particular about the kinds of information they allowed the Japanese to consume. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So, a two-part question. What inspires you to write a story about a story? And then, once you decide to do that, how do you go about finding the story of the story? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I'm such a cliche of myself. This was the second book that I wrote that's a story about a story. I don't think -- it wasn't my beginning point with Fallout. And where I began with Fallout is in 2016, Rise of the Trump Administration, suddenly American journalists are enemies of the people. And, you know, that's like basically putting a [inaudible] in my family. You know, I'm from a longtime second generation journalist, and I have been a journalist my entire career, married to a journalist. And so, I wanted to do, I wanted a narrative that would drive home in that moment, that unbelievable importance of an American free press and how sacred investigative reporting is to upholding democracy. So, small unambitious little goal. And then, it's a long story that I won't bore everybody with, I did come to Hersey's story and, you know, because it was so insanely consequential, and he did it at such an incredible peril to himself. I knew I had my story. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Okay. And so, where did you start? Where did you start looking once you decided that was your story? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: That's a really good question. I don't think I've been this stumped. I mean, I've read everything. I told my editor, you know, you'll hear from me in six months, because I'm just going to go underground and read absolutely everything. And so, I think, I started with really trying to get into the American Press Corps and see what else had been written, who else had tried to get in, what suppression they encountered. And so, there were a ton of tracking down of correspondence and out of print memoirs, about, you know, by these other people who would have attempted to get the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and didn't. So, that was really it. I mean, I tried to get the, the larger context of operations first, because, you know, as Janine can really talk about I mean, everything is a logistical question and reporting. You know, can you can you access the ground? You know, and, you know, who are your enemies there? You know, and who's going to try to keep you from telling the story? Everything is a logistical question. So, I was really trying to get a handle on that first and foremost. And then, you also have to interview, identify and interview the older sources. And I'm always in a race against time. So, those were the starting points. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Well, I was trying to get you to say, you know, the New York Public Library, but that's fine. >>Leslie M.M. Blume: I haunted the New York Public Library from the first. And believe me, Fallout would not have existed without your files. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Well, it's so nice for you to say and, you know, completely unprompted, as you know, hopefully, I'm not blushing. Erin, if I can turn it back to the prospectus for a second. Harold Ross wrote in it that the magazine's general tenant or, excuse me, general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, which this was not that. So, was Hiroshima a turning point in any way for the New Yorker? >> Erin Overbey: Yes, I would say, definitely. We had, you know, the magazine has a long history of war reporting. And we had done a lot of war reporting before Hiroshima, including some masterful pieces by Liebling, several other of our reporters, I'd say Rebecca West, you know, people of that ilk. And so, it was not, you can't say it was, you know, the first war reporting that we had done, but it signaled a huge turning point. Because not only in Ross and Shawn's -- and it was Shawn's idea, you know, to do it all in one because as he had read through the four part series, he found it to be, you know, kind of stop and start, stop and go. So, he wanted to run it in a whole big thing. And then, Ross sort of hemmed and hawed and then came along to agree with it. And so, the idea that you would run something as a whole and have that huge impact, it was unprecedented. It also did signal a turn in this magazine, which had, you know, begun its, I guess, you know, role in American culture as a satirical magazine. Prior to the 1940s it was populated by multiple humor pieces, multiple fiction pieces, you know? Now, we know the magazine to run you, know, one fiction piece, maybe a few fiction pieces for a special issue. Back then it was nearly half, if not more, of the magazine was fiction and humor. So, to do something with this breadth, and to also do it, as Leslie pointed out, from this particular point of view of people on the ground and people who had experienced this, not famous people, because, again, part of the satirical and part of as you mentioned, the sophisticated aspect of the magazine had been sort of this understanding that the magazine was reporting on, you know, when the Duke and Duchess would come into town, you know? They would report on the Rockefellers, they would report on this, and report on that. And so, the idea that you would get sort of the regular person's point of view was unprecedented. I will say that there was a reporter who was working in Cologne in France, and they were trying to do something like this with his piece. And then, when the bomb dropped that kind of, you know, Joel Sayre, his piece that kind of dropped. So, I think it was sort of, you know, an idea to transition this concept of a first person, you know, sort of, it's not first person, but it is several, six people, you know, their own perspectives. So, in that way, it really signaled a turn in the magazine's evolution and a much more serious tone. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I was just saying, one of the things I adored about this narrative is also that, you know, they were the scrappy upstart to it, you know, and getting a story of Hiroshima. And, you know, and they bested the New York Times, they bested AP, they bested everybody. Everybody else could have gotten the story but The New Yorker, you know, they got it. And it was shot across the bow in the sense that they're like, we're here to stay-- >> Erin Overbey: Yeah. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Also. And we're so, and we're not going back to what we were, you know, we're not just going to be, you know, top hats and chorus girls. >> Erin Overbey: Yeah. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: We got the story, we're putting our flag in this moment. >> Erin Overbey: Well, and it was serialized, you know, in other papers. And even abroad, it was, it had a huge impact. And at one point, you know, Ross wrote to Hersey and said that there was a British organization that had said something along the lines of, you know, our government institution's going to be kind of shown up by a satirical sophisticated magazine or are they going to be reporting on these things, you know, so? So, I think there was a huge impact, not only in the media world, but in across, you know, the political sphere as well. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Janine, Erin was mentioning the importance of Hersey's reporting about individual people on the ground. And as I was re-reading Hiroshima, last week, I was so reminded of your book on Syria, which employed a very, very similar approach. And, you know, I know that you read Hersey, you said in high school, originally. And I'm just wondering if you can talk about the impact that reading it had on you personally, and how it may have guided your work since then. >> Janine di Giovanni: Yeah. Thank you. So, first of all, Leslie, thank you for writing this really important book. Thank you, Erin, for the work you do. Thank you, Aidan, for bringing us together and the New York Public Library because it's so important in my childhood imagination ever since I read the "Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Worth"-- >> Frankweiler. >> Janine di Giovanni: Yes, yeah, when I was seven or eight. So, it's wonderful to be here. Yes, I read Hiroshima, as we call it, in high school. It was on the standard curriculum and I read it along with "As I Lay Dying," "A Farewell to Arms," and Stephen Crane, "The Red Badge of Courage," another incredibly spare but unbelievably eloquent writer. The effect it had on me was that I saw how you could take an unbelievably complex and painful story and break it down into individual stories and let them tell the story. So, the narrative is actually driven by individuals, not by you as a writer. I mean, sometimes when I read essays, I can feel the writer there. But with Hiroshima, I feel the people driving it, the six characters. And it had a massive influence on me. I never ever wanted to be a war reporter. I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a writer, my whole life. But somehow, I ended up being a war reporter. And I hate being called that, but that's what I am, I guess. And I found that the least painful way for me to work on these enormous issues of life and death was to break it down to individual stories. And I can't remember who said it, but I think it was Joseph Campbell or someone like that, basically saying that there's only three or four human stories and they keep repeating themselves over and over again. And so, even now, I'm doing something very different. I'm directing a war crimes project in Ukraine, although we use an archivist. And we're basically documenting, verifying, coding, and archiving the 11,000 war crimes that have been committed in the Ukraine. And then, we're building cases for the war crimes tribunals. But still, at the heart of this is that we get testimonies from people. So, we go to Bucha, we go to Irpin', we go to Sunni, we go to -- I have reasearchers in the urban, we go to Sunni we go to I have researchers in the Donetsk and places like that, and we get their stories. It's different in the way that we think like lawyers rather than writers, so we can't bias them and we have to be very careful with the testimony. But essentially, when you get people to tell the story of some extraordinarily difficult thing, whether it's war, or famine, or we we're talking earlier about Edward R. Murrows when he went to Buchenwald and he came out and said, basically, "I've told you all I can. I have no words for the rest of it." The most, I think, the best vehicle to drive that is to let other people tell their story. And there's no need to exaggerate it because it's painful, and difficult, and emotional enough. So, in a sense, you just stand back as a writer and you write it. And my editor David Friend from Vanity Fair is here, one of the greatest ones, the William Shawn of his generation. And, you know, we often talk about this. Like, how do you break down unbelievably complex things like Afghanistan, or Iraq, or 911, or famines in Somalia, or Yemen? You let people tell their stories. And, you know, it's a very simple technique in a way as writer, but also it's -- Leslie, you could talk more about this. It's unbelievably complicated, because you do have to stand back away and not bring in your own bias, your own impressions, but let them kind of unravel it and lead the narrative. So, thank you. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Yeah. I actually would like to ask all of you about that. I mean, such a, I mean, you talk about how in Fallout how Hersey kind of wrestled with, you know, maybe didn't wrestle but clearly decided to not put himself in the story. You're talking about this? How do you how do you in your work, wrestle with that issue of taking yourself out of how you write a story? Or maybe you don't? >> Janine di Giovanni: Well, I mean, I personally find Hersey really instructive and I tried to follow that example, because I think it's the best storytelling. The spareness of it, and the absence of ego, and, you know, the new the so-called new journalists drive me to the brink of insanity. With that, and they and they really disturbed Hersey too. He called himself one worried grandpa when they emerged. He was fretting about the direction of journalism. I just think that, you know, the old newsroom adage that, you know, the journalist covers the story, the journalist isn't the story is a big through line with, you know, Hersey and, you know, it's, like I said, it's just something that, you know, in breaking down his work and my own work, it helped me a lot. And also, I'm a Hemingway scholar too. And so, it's the combination of stripping out the adjectives and doing the hover above, you know, has been sort of a one-two punch for me. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So, no Mahler [phonetic] and the third person for you, you're saying. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Not likely. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And how about you? >> Janine di Giovanni: Yeah. Um, so it's really interesting. You said, the absence of ego. And I think that, like, nails his book completely, because I came of age in British journalism in the 90s. And it was all about picture by lines. I mean, I blame the guardian for so much damage. I love the Guardian, but they started the whole like, I was there, I did this, which actually makes very good and entertaining reading like kind of swashbuckling war correspondents or whatever. But it's, actually, it's so egotistical and I have done it. I do do it occasionally. And sometimes, I'm so embarrassed. But there are times and I wrote during COVID. I was sheltering in a very small French village in the Alps with my ex-husband's family and I found that sometimes it is, you do use the first person and you do put yourself in the story. And then, it becomes a memoir. So, it's a slightly different thing. But there are moments when it is a good thing to use yourself in it. But I think something like this, it would have been monumentally wrong for him to be present while we were reading it. So, I love how you say that, like, a lack of ego. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: He genuinely didn't have it, he wasn't beating it back. I mean, he just was this saintly person and in some in some respects. And you know, I agree that, you know, sometimes you have to -- there are different ways of getting attention. And a lot of times the journalist job is to get people to pay attention to something that's excruciating and awful to read about, you know, like this. And one of them would be to ground them in the experience by offering up, you know, your own personal experience, right? But then, in a memoir, reportage sort of way. But the other one, you know, Hersey opted for the other one and that was, you know, just offering up this purist's -- it's almost like a-- >> Janine di Giovanni: Reportage. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Reportage but it was almost like he just was us it just putting them in their own words was the simplest way for him to get attention. >> Erin Overbey: I will say taking it back to archival work, that archival work is wholly about taking the ego out. Because what you're doing, essentially, is you're trying to recreate someone else's life in the most accurate way possible, based upon the remnants of what they've left behind. And so, you know, whether it be writing, archival work, this is all about taking the ego out. There's this wonderful line in the piece that I wrote when I interviewed Leslie last year about the discovery of a rare copy of Hiroshima with a white band, you know? And Hersey -- this was discovered at John Hersey High School in Illinois, by the head librarian. Thank you. Call out to librarians and archivists around the world. And there's this wonderful line and a letter that Hersey write during the time to a school administrator there when he found out that the high school was going to be named after him. And he said that he considered it almost a greater honor than having his Pulitzer Prize. And also, that he was so gratified to have an ever-renewing place in the mind of youth. And that line has stuck with me because for a lot of archival work, it is sort of a process of, you know, crafting an ever-renewing place in the minds of future generations for what people have lived through. Hersey's own writing, you know, this piece that we're talking about, can be seen to also kind of embody that, epitomize that. So, I've always felt that, you know, archival work has a bit of a slam as being kind of this dusty old fashioned cobwebby, sort of, you know, maybe doily, you know, if you can use that word. And I've always strived and I think most modern archivists and most people who do this work -- and I include Leslie and Janine in that because they're both dealing intensely with archival work -- I think the opposite that it's a very modern, very, almost futuristic endeavor that you are laying out the seeds for future generations to be able to see the life story of, you know, these people who have had such an impact during their time. And also people that you may never have heard of that had sort of hidden it's -- part of it is also the hidden aspect to it. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Yeah, like the archive that Julie was mentioning about the woman who worked in the pool at the-- >> Erin Overbey: Exactly, exactly, yeah. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Well, it's like I'm paying you to set up a segue because I'd love to turn to some archival research questions if I could with you, Leslie? And just, you've got some images that you-- >> Leslie M.M. Blume: You got the images. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: I do, I have the images. But can we just talk a little bit about the work you did in the archives here and what you discovered that kind of change the shape of the book? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Yeah, sure. I mean, to be honest, I thought most of my primary work was going to be at Yale, where John Hersey's papers were up. And I had pretty low expectations for the New Yorker records, because they've been so picked over because there have been, you know, really brilliant and elaborate biographies that have been done on the New Yorker as a magazine, but also the individual editors and writers because they're all so damn famous. So, you know, I got into the archive and found a couple of probably the most blockbuster elements in my research came from the New Yorker papers. And, you know, they're pretty innocuous looking scraps of paper, as you guys will soon see. But it yeah, just two in particular were revelatory [inaudible]. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Should we want to bring one up? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Yeah, sure. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Do you want to start here? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Well, all right. This one -- so when I began the project and through most of the project, my research-based assumption was that Hiroshima was always a subversive work, you know, that had never been seen by anybody outside of the New Yorker team that worked on it before it went to press. And because it was such -- I can't use the word explosive. Find a different words than explosive. It was such a huge topic. And it was going to be unbelievably controversial and difficult for the magazine when it came out. But then, I was going through censorship files at the New Yorker -- it was one of the last days that I was in the archives -- and I just at that point, I was just really looking to see what the relationship was like with between the magazine and the War Department censors, you know, them submitting throughout the war, submitting drafts of other articles that might have had national security issues in them. And so, I'm flipping through the files, flipping through the files: 1943, 1945. And so, Hiroshima came out in 1946. And so, I was, you know, in files that weren't even really relevant to my research. And then, I found this document, which had been apparently misfiled or just placed for lack of a better place to put it. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Is there a librarian we should turn in while we're here? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I'm not going to sell anybody out. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: I know there's some folks in the room. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: You know, what I think it is? Because the War Department stopped censorship in 1945. So, I think because this to happen to your leader got shoveled in with other stuff, probably. I'm not going to tell you what I screamed in the middle of the research room when I found this document, but it was vulgar. And Meredith Mann, who was the archivist who's there -- I think he's here tonight. She didn't throw me out, but I'm sure she wanted to. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Do you want to throw her out Meredith, sitting right here? Did you want to throw her out Meredith? [Inaudible] >> Leslie M. M. Blume: Thank you. It's a shocking revelation and I'll tell you why it's shocking because what it is, is it's Hersey's editor is submitting the entire manuscript of Hiroshima to not just the War Department for approval, but to Leslie Groves who masterminded the making of the atomic bomb. And I sat with this and, you know, I went outside, and I don't smoke, but I wanted to. And, you know, I called my editor, do we still have a book? You know, I called one of my research assistants. Do we still have a book? I called you, do we still have a book? And it was that then, I mean, looking at it now and I'm remembering what it was like to encounter it. I mean, there have been, again, a lot of biographies that had been written on this and there was had been a biography of Hersey that came out, a cradle to grave the year before that didn't even have General Groves in the anyplace in the books. So, then came the hard work of finding out well what had happened when they, why did they submit this to him? And, you know, how in hell did it get past him to get published? And so, I'm not going to ruin it for anybody who hasn't read it, but they had real, the Hersey team had very real legal reasons to submit it in, you know, hands tied behind the back level legal reasons for an act that had been passed just days before complicating their mission. And Leslie Groves, who did approve it with small changes, did have reasons for passing it. But, I mean, this was, in my sad world, this was a huge deal. And again, it had just been languishing in these folders and had been unnoticed, you know, for 75 years. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And another reason to read the book is to find out more about why they did it. Should we go to the next image? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Sure. Okay. So, this was more flyover country, you know, for a lot of scholars and because, you know, this was found in Harold Ross's papers. And, I mean, when you're dealing with a book of Hiroshima, as import, I mean every place around the world covered the book and they profiled Hersey. And, you know, so there were folders and folders of clippings about the book. And, you know, you get numb kind of going through all of them but I found this one and I was, like, "Whoa, this is really strange and fascinating. Why would the Soviets send a writer to Nagasaki to debunk Hersey?" And so, I needed to find -- so it turned out the Soviets sent a privato [phonetic] reporter to Nagasaki after Hersey's reporter came out, you know, as indicated by this article, had never heard about it before. And in this book by this Soviet journalist, he said that Hersey had basically been lying. And that, you know, the atomic bomb was really not so bad. And, you know, people, you know, survive just by leaping into ditches and, you know, one that even stuck his head out and had been fine. And, you know, what was this about? Why would they put out this kind of propaganda stick book. And so, I, then, it led me to another huge revelatory aspect of the research in terms of, you know, both the US and the Soviets were having their own cover up of Hiroshima, you know, for very different reasons. And the Soviets simply did not want Hersey's work released in the Soviet Union, because they didn't have the bomb and the Americans did, and they didn't want to create alarm. And so, I hired and met my right-hand woman, Anastasiya Osipova, who's sitting here who I love and could not have done this book without, who tracked down that book, and read it. And then, we really went down the rabbit hole about, you know, the Soviets and their attitude towards Hersey and their own extent to suppress him and his work. And it was -- we beat out every other Soviet scholar who's been working on this for decades, two young women: you're young, I'm youngish, and it was it was really satisfying. And it all came from, again, flyover country from this tiny little clip in the back of this folder. And so, I'm just seeing it again, I'm like, I love you. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And can you elaborate a little bit more on why -- we can guess why the Americans would want to cover up cover it up -- but what motivated the Soviets? Why were they so intent on covering it up? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Well, again, because you know, the Americans had the bomb, they detonated the bomb, and they were the only sheriff in town. You know, they were the atomic power. And with that, you know, they shifted the balance of global power for decades after that. And, you know, the Americans -- Leslie Groves himself estimated that the Soviets wouldn't have the bomb for another five to twenty years, I think he said. Guess what, it was four? But, you know, so at that time, they -- and, you know, America in the in the Soviets were enemies right away after Hiroshima. And, you know, so they were, and, you know, Anastasiya would do a better job of explaining this than I am, but I mean, they were at pains to downplay their disadvantage, if not hide it altogether. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So, I think we have one more image, is that right? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: It will be quick. So, despite the fact that, you know, the Soviets had this antipathy, the New Yorker team made, as according to this other document that I found in the files there, they made a fascinating play -- again, fascinating in my world -- to get Hersey's Hiroshima published in Russia after all and it's interesting. You know, Hersey had been Moscow's founding bureau chief for TIME Magazine and he understood Russia. And he himself said, you know, not a word is written in Russian, that's not a weapon. So, he understood why his work would have been seen as a threat by the Soviets, but they still reached out to the Soviet ambassador to the UN. Is that right? And this letter was one of, you know, 10 drafts. And, you know, every cast of thousands was consulted to get the wording right. And, you know, so they tried and there's a great note from Hersey on one of the drafts where he says, you know, "This is going to be seen propagandisticly. We have to take out this adjective, that adjective, that adjective. So, they knew that they likely didn't have a chance in hell, but they put they put their hand up anyway. And it was met with a century of silence from the Soviets. But again, this is just not -- it was in the files and had been unremarked upon and it was just a big part of my narrative. You know, for me, again, it's really juicy part of the narrative and it was there for the taking and I can't, you know, when you're talking about archives being these living things, I mean, it's, it was exciting as hell to find it, in my opinion. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: That's fascinating. Also, it's amazing that you have a live fact checking team with you over here. Very jealous. [Inaudible] Janine, John Hersey, he gave this interview that Leslie quotes in the book. And he said, "What has kept the world safe from the bombs since 1945 has not been deterrence in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory, the memory of what happened at Hiroshima." And when I read that in Leslie's book, I just, it made me think of you and your work. I had heard an interview with you where you talked about your work is, you know, basically bearing witness and capturing memory. And you were mentioning a little bit about what you've been doing in Ukraine, which I think we'd all be very interested to hear more about. And you did that in Syria, you've done it in so many other places around the world. I'm just curious how that quote strikes you how you view this power of memory in your work? >> Janine di Giovanni: I think it's it resonates with me very strongly, because I'm really, really obsessed with the politics of memory and the way the past is retold. And I'll give you a good example. The genocide at Srebrenica, in Bosnia in 1995. Now, many of us were there, many of us reported it for years and years. And yet, there is, there are many genocide deniers. Peter Hanke, that won the Nobel Prize for Literature and he's a staunch genocide denier. So, I never wanted -- the point of what I do, I think, mainly is that so no one can ever say this didn't happen because it's in our notebooks. And in a sense, the project I'm doing now, which is called "The Reckoning Project," is because I spent years being frustrated with witnessing horrific things. And unfortunately, three genocides in my lifetime: Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Yazidi in Iraq. And having my notebooks full of evidence of atrocities, but they weren't submissible in court. And the war crime tribunals would call me and they, you know, they'd say, "What happened on May 12, 1993, in central Bosnia?" And your memory, you know, I was thinking of Nabokov and speak memory and his, of course, it's wonderful autobiography. Our memory does things to us, in a sense. But if it's in your notebook, and it's in the archives, no one can ever say it didn't happen. And so, my project, The Reckoning Project, Ukraine, was born out of that, because the day the Russian incursion started, I was phoned up by a friend of mine, who's Ukrainian British writer called Peter Pomerantsev, who wrote, you know, one of the most important books on propaganda, the Kremlin's propaganda. And he said, "What can we do?" And I said, "We can start getting testimonies from everyone, because the Kremlin is going to play this that, you know, nothing happened. It was a military exercise. People didn't die in Bucha, they were fighting in battles. They weren't just civilians who were pulled out of the cellars and executed in extra judicial murder." And, I think, so this was born out of my years and it's now 35 years -- I've been doing this really long time -- of frustration. And also, at an attempt to give agency to the survivors and to their ancestors that these things, these terrible, terrible things did happen. And I've been haunted, but also fortunate enough to witness it. And therefore, I had an obligation. And my very first mentor was this extraordinary woman called Felicia Langer. She was a Holocaust survivor and she was at, for a long time, the only Jewish lawyer in Israel defending Palestinians in military court. And so, she was a much hated and reviled person, but she kept doing this work. And one day she took me aside and she said, "If you have the ability to go to these places and write what you have seen, then you have an obligation." And I was 23, I think, and I took it to heart. I just changed my life forever. I never want it to be go to war zones but I did. And that's what get goes into Erin's archives and what's goes into Leslie's books, you know? That is we have this hard evidence and these facts, unless you're a complete liar and fantasist, and there are journalists who are accused of that, it's there, right? And it's going to be there. The politics of memory cannot destroy it. >> Erin Overbey: And I would say, picking up on what Janine said that memory is so important. It can be twisted, it can be changed, it can be corrupted but archives really are sort of an antidote to that. And not only in war reporting, not only in war situations, but I would even say, in what we're seeing now across the country with the book bannings, you know? This idea that if we remove something, we can whitewash, we can erase, we can keep people from, you know, understanding their own history. And I've always felt, you know, it's interesting, Janine, you talk about the personal and Leslie, you as well. I've always felt that if we -- we can't flinch from history, you know? There are so many things of our, in our own history in America that are wrenching that are heartbreaking. We have to be willing to go to that place and understand. And that's what archives do. And I'll give you a plug here. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So nice. >> Erin Overbey: Since you're looking for plugs. >> Aiden Flax-Chart: Yeah. Janine, you owe us another one. No, we got those [inaudible]. >> Erin Overbey: Janine will get that, which is, you know, years ago I spent probably close to, like, a year in the NYPL archives, you know, just going through all these memos and memorandum and everything like that. And it really does tell you kind of the story of people's lives at the magazine in other, you know, collections that you have, I'm sure other writers and scholars. There's almost no substitute for it. And that's why when you were saying earlier that you are working with an archivist on this, I was just so pleased. And I thought, you know, it's an incredible project. >> Janine di Giovanni: I'd love for you to meet my archivist who actually, I don't know if any of you heard of the Syria archive, which was a really important mechanism to record the horrific things that happened there. But he helped build the Coblenz Trial. And I don't know if there's any lawyers out there but it was the first trial of Syrian war crimes using universal jurisdiction. So, it's a way of getting the bad guys when you can't actually go into Syria and get them but when it was in Germany. So, archives can be used. It's not just you know, sitting in a library, it can be used in many ways. And his way is to use it as an archivist activist, I guess, right? >> Erin Overbey: Yeah. >> Janine di Giovanni: It's political human rights activism. >> Erin Overbey: I identify with that so much and not in terms of the war crimes -- I identify with war crimes -- but in the way in my sort of entry into archives. Because my grandfather was this sort of very religious person, and he had a card catalog, and it was filled with sayings from New Yorker writers like HL Mencken and EB White. And when he went to teach his Sunday Schools, he would use these sayings to sort of, like, prick the kind of sanctimony of his fellow congregants, you know? "You think obedience is great? Let me give you this," you know, "line from HL Mencken?" So, I think that, you know, in addition to the war reporting that we're talking about, archival work, and the work of sort of journalism itself can be used in these ways to kind of reflect a mirror. Show people sort of, you know, what life is about, what the period of time that we're talking about is about, all these different things that, I think, we tend to gloss over sometimes. >> Janine di Giovanni: I just had a thought, as you were speaking. So, I think this book, I've always thought of this book as war reporting, but actually it's not. What it is, is it's peace education. Because what it shows is that what the horrible things that war does to individual people and to society. And essentially what war is, is it's designed to break down society to its core and to destroy communities. And so, in a sense when you read This book, you do you want to do everything you can to prevent war and to stop war. So, it's interesting because I always thought of it like you, as war reporting but it is the opposite of war reporting. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I think Kersey would agree with that assessment that it-- >> Janine di Giovanni: Yeah. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Because he always thought as a as a document of conscience. >> Janine di Giovanni: And its transitional justice. It's that is transitional justice at its very best because it's giving agency to these people who survived something horrific and it's giving them the chance to heal. And the reason that wars start, again, and I won't be boring about it, but, like, wars reoccur in places like the Balkans or Africa when there is no justice. And when there's never justice served and justice is denied to people, then there's a festering that lingers for a very long time and eventually people will start fighting again. It's what happened in Bosnia. It's what happened in many places in Africa. So, interesting. This book should be taught, again, over and over as a way of teaching people why we should never wage war. >> Erin Overbey: Well, and I think, you know, just following up on that, that William Shawn really did see it as a wakeup call. And that's what he even wrote that, you know, that this is a wakeup call to people in America. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: There was a note on the front page of when it was published in the magazine. There was an editor's note saying, basically, you readers, you have not comprehended what age we've come into and what this what this implies for every single one of us, so wake up. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Well, it's time to turn to some audience questions if that's okay? The first one is for you, Leslie. And it said, "What effect did his time in Hiroshima and the survivors have on Hersey himself?" >> Leslie M.M. Blume: He went underground when it came out. And at first, to be honest, I didn't think that much of that decision. He went out of town and then I didn't come to appreciate how much blowback he was anticipating until my own book came out with the amount of blowback that I got, just from documenting his story of bringing it out, you know? My book is not about should we or shouldn't we have dropped the bomb and neither was his. But, I mean, like, the rage that it inspired and likely would have inspired for him. So, he went out of town, when it came out. It fell to the editors of the New Yorker to publicize the piece and to contend with the international interest that -- where did he go? He was in the mountains of North Carolina. And, you know, he went with his wife and family. And, I mean, it was pretty remote. And then, after that, you know, he stopped writing works like this, like Hiroshima. He turned to fiction after that. They moved to Connecticut and he had a quiet life. And he always said that he felt that fiction could accomplish what nonfiction could not accomplish. And it was a great irony, because he's best known for Hiroshima, you know, which became and remains one of the most influential pieces of written journalism ever, you know, to this day. So, he went underground, he wrote a lot after Hiroshima. He wrote a lot of novels, which are, you know, a lot of them are out of print today. And so, he remains best known for that reporting. But the thing that made him the most famous, also, was the last real act of journalism like that that he did. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Have you read his novels just out of curiosity? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Yeah. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I think some of them are due for a comeback and really timely today and some of them-- >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Not as much? >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Not as -- but, I mean, it's just I'm a nonfiction girl, so. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: So, if you had to call out one that you thought was, like, due for a comeback. I don't want to put you on the spot because I'm a person who can't remember titles, but. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Yeah, I think "A Bell for Adano." It's actually it's pretty great and it's fascinating, because in some ways, and I know I use this phrase earlier, but it's a shot across the bow for Hersey's own reporting in Hiroshima. Because he's, you know, on one hand, during the war, he's seen as a pretty patriotic reporter. He even gets a war commendation for helping evacuate a wounded marine. But, you know, and he has written a book about General MacArthur and his troops, and it's extremely laudatory to the point where it embarrasses him later and he wants to take it out of print. But A Bell for Adano is it's a portrait of another general in, General Patton in 1943, in Italy, who Hersey said had lost his marbles and it is just a withering send up of Patton. And it was a portrait of he said, Hersey said, "This is what we're fighting against." And it demonstrated, it's not just great writing, and it won his Pulitzer, and was made into a movie right away. It also shows that he was willing to reprimand leaders if they fell short in his opinion of what he thought the Americans have been fighting World War II for in the first place. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: This next question was addressed to you, Leslie, but I'm going to throw it to everyone. And they asked, Leslie, you were prompted to write this due to alarm at contemporary treatment of journalists under the Trump Administration. But for all of you, you know, how are you feeling about the state of journalism today? is the question. It's a big one. So, you each have thirty seconds. >> Janine di Giovanni: I'm, okay, thirty seconds. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: I'm joking. >> Janine di Giovanni: There's something that really does concern me. And that's the lack of fact-checking, which does not happen-- it does intense fact-checking at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But I'm really worried, for instance, Ukraine. Four thousand reporters, the minute the war started, rushed to Ukraine. Reporters from all kinds of walks of life. I saw someone on CNBC who was the Playboy correspondent, the White House correspondent. I think there's a lot of sloppy journalism now that I think would not have happened in Hersey's time. I think that blogging was disastrous. I think citizen journalism, in some senses, can be great when you when you need to train, for instance, Iraqi or Syrian journalists to report on their own atrocities. But I think that it's the internet -- and I now sound like a dinosaur -- has allowed so much Twitter, Facebook, I, you know, my students at Yale read their news on Facebook. I mean, that says a lot and Twitter. People don't buy newspapers and read them in full. They don't kind of go and get facts. I think they're much more reliant on social media, which to me is really horrifying. So, I think there's still some great stuff out there. You know, I think the reporting on Trump was phenomenal. But I do think there's been a lot of sloppy journalism and, you know, let's not even get into the polarization of the news, which really scares the hell out of me. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: I get asked all the time, you know, if Hersey's report came out now, how would it be regarded? And it's, like, would half of the country decry it as fake news? You know, you're writing for half of your audience now that you would have written for in the old days. And you know, and I have to say, I'm, you know, I'm not fact checked at some publications, that are major legacy publications, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I started my job as a researcher for Nightline. We had a saying, you know, error is terror. And you need somebody behind you. It's a real problem. >> Erin Overbey: Well, I will just say I very cordially disagree with Janine in parts, as we did earlier. But I will say, obviously, the New Yorker's fact checking team is second to none. So-- >> Janine di Giovanni: Yeah, but I said the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. >> Erin Overbey: Yes. No, no, no, no. I don't disagree with that. The part that I just very gently disagree with, is the internet, and blogs, and digital, and all of that, because I think that we need to separate two things. I think there is authentic, fantastic journalism being done digitally, on websites, our website, I would say, including and other websites. And even through social media I think there's some really fantastic -- I'm a huge fan of Twitter, as you may know. And but I would say that we need to separate the authentic journalism, from, say, disinformation. I would say that Facebook has obviously become notorious for kind of being a platform that my, you know, and not just Facebook, but some other social media sites may be platforms for extremist views that are disseminated without necessarily being checked. So, I think you have two things at play. You have the future of journalism, which is very much a both -- my hope is a both a print and digital, but we are increasingly digital. And there's a lot of remarkable journalism being done on blogs and digitally. And then, separate that from, I think, the sort of haphazard, chaotic, maybe misinformation or disinformation that is kind of promoted by certain factions in America or globally. I think, maybe, you know-- >> Janine di Giovanni: You know one thing that has become absolutely tremendous is local news. Like, the rise and rise of local newspapers, especially, again, during the Trump Administration, I think, is the kind of blowback to it, you know, local papers, local reporters, local issues became more and more important, and some really tremendous stuff coming out of it, radio podcasts. I'm not completely against digital and just I am really old fashioned. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: But something that has, you know, implications for the kind of writing that we do more in, you know, long form writing. And I was listening to this podcast the other day, a Columbia Journalism Review, "The Kicker" and Kyle Pope, who's the editor, who was interviewing the new editor of the New York Times. And he was talking about the role of digital journalism and how they are looking at ways to even move away from written journalism into visual journalism. And I'm not using the correct vocabulary, but it was pretty shocking to me. [Inaudible] And spatially mapping everything out. And, you know, again, as somebody who, I mean, it's not just because I earned my living from this writing. It was still shocking to hear it so baldly stated, that that's the future of, that they see that as the future. >> Janine di Giovanni: The then you get into stuff, and I hate to keep going back to war crimes but, like, so many journalists in Ukraine who have absolutely no clue about international humanitarian law, international criminal law, saying this is a war crime, this is a war crime. And it's not verified and it's not forensically examined. So, I think, because it became a buzzword because Biden said, "What's happening now in Ukraine are war crimes." And so, it immediately, you know, everyone picked it up. This is a war crime, that's a war crime. War crimes are very specific. And, you know, there's also crimes against humanity and it's broken down. So, things like that, I think, can be quite dangerous. And podcasts while -- I like the radio. I mean, I'm an old-fashioned BBC radio four-type person. But I think that, you know, now anyone can make a podcast, right? And so, you do get these extremists that can, anyone can launch a podcast, anyone could do inflammatory, you know, recruiting or whatever. And so, that's my only fear about it. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: Well, I hate to leave it at this, but we have to close up shop. But I'm going to summarize the disagreements on the state of journalism as ambivalent. So, the book, the original book is Hiroshima. Leslie's book is Fallout, even if you've read Hiroshima, reread it and reread it alongside Leslie's book. It is an incredibly enriching experience. I can't encourage it enough. Thank you all for being here. Leslie, Erin, Janine, thank you so much for being with us. >> Leslie M.M. Blume: Thank you for having us. >> Aiden Flax-Clark: And please, buy the book outside if you're able to and you haven't already.