Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there's not much evidence of it.
We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.
I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time.
I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.
Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?
I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.'
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.
I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.
