AI transcript
0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Steven Dubner, and I would like to remind you about two live shows that
0:00:09 we are putting on soon.
0:00:12 The first one is on January 3rd in San Francisco.
0:00:15 The second is in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:20 We have got some excellent guests for both shows, so please come hang out with us.
0:00:27 Tickets are at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, one word, again January 3rd and February 14th,
0:00:28 San Francisco and LA.
0:00:34 Meanwhile, today on the show, a conversation with someone I know quite well, or at least
0:00:41 used to, someone who is smart, shrewd, very good at his work, and someone who taught me
0:00:47 a lot, even if not always on purpose.
0:00:49 Why don’t you just say your name and what you do?
0:00:50 My name is Adam Moss.
0:00:51 That’s easy enough.
0:01:00 I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
0:01:05 For a long time, Adam Moss was widely considered the best magazine editor around.
0:01:11 He was the founding editor of Seven Days Magazine, a clever and slightly transgressive
0:01:12 arts and culture weekly.
0:01:17 From there, he went to the New York Times Magazine, and after many years there, he took
0:01:21 over New York Magazine, which he radically remade for the digital era.
0:01:25 He won all the awards an editor can win.
0:01:29 He directly shaped the careers of hundreds of writers and editors.
0:01:32 Indirectly, he did the same for millions of readers.
0:01:38 He left New York Magazine in 2019, still on top but feeling a bit too old for the game,
0:01:42 a bit burned out and ready for something new.
0:01:49 The something new eventually took the form of a book called The Work of Art, How Something
0:01:51 Comes from Nothing.
0:01:58 The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product with
0:02:00 all that kind of toward firm between.
0:02:04 Many people who know Adam Moss were surprised that he wrote a book.
0:02:08 He was one of the few magazine editors who didn’t either start out as a writer or want
0:02:12 to be a writer or think of themselves as a writer.
0:02:14 He was a full-fledged editor.
0:02:17 An editor is mostly backstage.
0:02:20 There’s a lot of power and a bit of risk.
0:02:25 A writer, meanwhile, is out front, directly in the line of fire.
0:02:29 You work on a thing for months or years, and then it goes out into the world with your
0:02:33 name on it, so if people hate it, they know where to find you.
0:02:37 That’s why it was so intriguing that Adam Moss would write a book.
0:02:40 So we will talk about that today, but some other things too.
0:02:46 Mostly his tenure at the New York Times Magazine, where he happened to be my boss.
0:02:47 This was in the late 1990s.
0:02:52 I was what’s called a story editor, which meant I came up with ideas, assigned them
0:02:58 to writers, and then shepherded those pieces through the editorial and publishing processes.
0:03:03 The Times Magazine was considered a great magazine during this era, and it was a thrill
0:03:04 to be inside of that.
0:03:11 So terrifying sometimes, but mostly a thrill, and mostly because our boss was really good
0:03:15 at his job, and we all got to watch and learn.
0:03:18 That said, I quit The Times after about five years.
0:03:23 It used to be that when someone left that place voluntarily and was relatively young,
0:03:27 I was in my thirties, that people would think you’re crazy.
0:03:30 I was doing well as an editor and an occasional writer.
0:03:34 The boss has told me I might be a boss before long.
0:03:35 That was the last straw.
0:03:38 I didn’t want to be an editor or a boss.
0:03:44 I just wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to work on my own, not within a hierarchy.
0:03:50 So I quit and I went off to write books, which is how I ended up here, talking to you.
0:03:55 When Adam Moss’s book came out in early 2024, I read it right away.
0:04:00 For me and many others who worked for him, it was a bit like discovering his journal.
0:04:05 Something that made him tick as an editor, as a boss, was right there on the page.
0:04:09 At the time, I was trying to make a podcast series about mentorship.
0:04:15 The idea was that mentorship is this standard and successful practice in many realms, in
0:04:21 education and sports, the military, in the medical and legal professions, and yet in
0:04:24 other realms, there’s no standard mentorship at all.
0:04:29 I wanted to know why not and whether something should be done about that.
0:04:31 But the mentorship series just never came together.
0:04:35 We couldn’t find a center of gravity, and eventually we gave up, which is fine.
0:04:38 That happens all the time in this kind of work.
0:04:44 But there was one interview we did for the series that I was not willing to ditch.
0:04:47 This one, the one with Adam Moss.
0:04:53 Was he in fact a mentor to me, or maybe more like the master who teaches an apprentice,
0:04:58 or was he just an old-fashioned boss trying to extract labor?
0:05:00 That’s what today’s conversation is about.
0:05:05 It’s the latest in our series of one-on-one conversations to end the year, even if you
0:05:08 are not a big fan of magazines.
0:05:13 Even if you have never held a paper magazine in your hands, I suspect that you will benefit
0:05:20 from hearing Adam Moss’s perspective, because all of us at some point try to make something
0:05:21 from nothing.
0:05:36 So you might as well learn from a good teacher, like I did.
0:05:42 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:05:52 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:05:57 The title of Adam Moss’s book, The Work of Art, is of course a double entendre.
0:06:02 He is the kind of person for whom entendres rarely come singly.
0:06:07 There is a layer, and then another layer, and usually a few more.
0:06:12 This book is ostensibly a set of interviews with a variety of makers.
0:06:19 Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, David Simon, Samin Nasrat, Will Shortz, and their stories
0:06:25 unfold on pages that are packed with sketches and graphics, sidebars, footnotes.
0:06:31 It is very much a magazine in book form, which makes sense considering that Adam spent nearly
0:06:35 40 years making magazines, and this is his first book.
0:06:39 Some people end up in magazines by accident, like me.
0:06:42 I just wanted to write, and that’s where the writing jobs were.
0:06:43 Adam was different.
0:06:46 He was in love with the magazine form.
0:06:50 So I asked what first drew him in?
0:06:51 So many things.
0:06:55 First of all, when I came to love magazines, it was the late 60s, early 70s.
0:07:01 It was a heyday of the magazine form, but also it was a really interesting time.
0:07:07 The world was blowing up in some ways that to a young kid, which is very attractive.
0:07:12 The magazines that I loved, like The New Yorks and S-Wars, etc., they’re a little smart
0:07:13 ass.
0:07:14 They were funny.
0:07:16 I mean, my first magazine I read was Mad Magazine.
0:07:21 So it had this kind of fabulous, fractured idea of what the world was that really appealed
0:07:22 to my adolescent brain.
0:07:28 And there was the feeling that the whole thing was created by someone or something that felt
0:07:30 very distinct.
0:07:32 It had a personality.
0:07:37 And that personality, if it appealed to you, it was very powerful.
0:07:38 It felt very personal.
0:07:42 So this was the medium that you loved, and then you sought it out?
0:07:43 Yes.
0:07:44 And then who?
0:07:45 Okay.
0:07:47 So I had all of this stuff in my head, but it was unformed.
0:07:49 And I went to work at Esquire, and I was very young.
0:07:52 I was a very unformed person at that point.
0:07:54 What were you good at?
0:07:57 I was probably fairly intuitive.
0:08:02 I certainly was eager, and I’d read a lot of magazines.
0:08:07 I had a lot of data in my head based on my own fan taste.
0:08:12 And this guy named Lee Eisenberg, he just, for whatever reason, took an interest in me.
0:08:15 It could have been that he just wanted me to do his work for him, because he recognized
0:08:21 that my enthusiasm was potentially valuable to him.
0:08:25 But he also saw that my brain worked a certain way, and he wanted to encourage it.
0:08:27 It was an act of kindness.
0:08:30 Name some things that you would do there on a given day?
0:08:33 We started a section on the entertainment industry.
0:08:39 And one of Lee’s ideas was that he would put a movie star with a big literary person.
0:08:43 I remember William Styron and Candace Bergen.
0:08:49 My job was to go to the thing and set up the tape recorder, and then make sure everybody
0:08:51 was happy.
0:08:54 But then he would give me the transcript, and he would say, “What do you find interesting
0:08:55 in this?”
0:09:00 Slowly, but surely, I would see what he thought was interesting in it, and then I would watch
0:09:05 him as he constructed this thing into an exciting little bit of conversation that worked in
0:09:07 a printed form.
0:09:09 He was extremely good.
0:09:15 So just being able to watch him took all of that data in my head and started to organize
0:09:16 it.
0:09:17 That was invaluable.
0:09:22 One of the things that I hear a lot from younger editors is that they really resent doing the
0:09:28 older editor’s job for them because they feel it’s exploitive, and it is.
0:09:31 However, it’s an incredible way to learn.
0:09:32 I mean, it’s apprenticeship.
0:09:33 Yes.
0:09:41 And you talk it through, and in there is sharing of ideas, but also a kind of teaching.
0:09:42 And sometimes the teaching goes both ways.
0:09:45 This is really, I think, actually crucial.
0:09:50 In almost every case where there is a mentor, mentee kind of thing, it goes both ways.
0:09:55 Give an example of you as a young editor, as a mentee, let’s call it.
0:09:58 What do you think Lee Eisenberg got from you?
0:10:02 There was a generational difference, not a huge one, but I brought a bunch of generational
0:10:05 assumptions to the table that he didn’t have.
0:10:08 I think there is that element of- New eyes, fresh eyes.
0:10:09 Yes, fresh eyes.
0:10:14 And as you get older, you begin to dismiss certain things that aren’t fully dismissible.
0:10:18 So you were the editor of a few different magazines for a long time.
0:10:22 Can you explain the role, just briefly, of what it means to be the editor and chief of
0:10:23 the magazine?
0:10:27 I think a lot of people who aren’t writers or editors don’t really understand that.
0:10:31 It’s chiefly the person who decides where the magazine is going to go, what the magazine
0:10:37 covers and doesn’t, shaping the magazine’s identity and its relationship to its readers.
0:10:39 It’s a manager job.
0:10:41 The magazine is very, very much a group enterprise.
0:10:44 That’s one of the most wonderful things about it.
0:10:51 And it involves getting a whole bunch of people, story editors like you were, visual people,
0:10:56 copy editors, production people, all sorts of different kinds of people to work together
0:10:57 as one.
0:10:59 So in that sense, it’s like a conductor of an orchestra.
0:11:05 It’s very rarely what people think of as editors, which is the person who fixes sentences.
0:11:06 Although you did your share of that.
0:11:09 I did my share of that, but that’s not the chief job description.
0:11:14 The chief job description is the overall direction of the thing.
0:11:17 So you as a magazine editor are renowned.
0:11:21 In the field of magazine making, Adam Moss is considered a great editor.
0:11:23 And I certainly agree.
0:11:27 And one of the many things that I and a lot of people think you did well was that you
0:11:32 were very, the word that people like to use is exacting.
0:11:37 There’s a standard that is extremely high, but also a little bit elusive and ethereal.
0:11:38 You don’t quite know what it is.
0:11:40 But you know, you want to get there.
0:11:42 Let’s say you agree that you’re exacting.
0:11:43 I agree that I’m exacting.
0:11:48 I would like to think that I was a little bit more clear about what it was that I was
0:11:49 looking for.
0:11:52 But I recognize that that’s probably completely not true.
0:11:55 And what I was doing was a kind of maddening mind control.
0:11:58 It’s a spectrum, but let’s agree that you’re exacting.
0:12:02 My question would be when you are an exacting person.
0:12:07 And I’m sure many people listening to this conversation either are or want to be that.
0:12:10 But you also can’t control every single thing.
0:12:14 In fact, the process is set up so that you’re not controlled.
0:12:15 You’re not writing the articles.
0:12:17 You’re not editing the articles heavily.
0:12:20 So how do you live with that paradox?
0:12:25 Being an editor, it’s both an act of grandiosity and humility at the same time.
0:12:30 So it’s like, you have to think big, but you have to understand that it really is a group
0:12:32 project.
0:12:38 And for any group project to work, everybody has to feel like there’s some of them in it
0:12:41 and they have to feel invested in it and they have to feel proud of it.
0:12:45 They have to want to make it just as badly as you want to make it.
0:12:52 And so part of the exacting hood was not just getting people to a certain standard that
0:13:00 I thought was appropriate, but also getting people to care as much as I did.
0:13:02 How much of that was in the hiring though?
0:13:06 A lot of it’s in the hiring, but a lot of it’s also in the sort of day to day way that
0:13:09 you all get together as a group.
0:13:16 A lot of it is just familial as opposed to directed towards a particular task.
0:13:21 A lot of it is helping people find their own independence as thinkers, but also obviously
0:13:26 think the way you want them to for the purposes of this project.
0:13:33 Like a parent, I suppose, I would always relish the first moment that a story editor was willing
0:13:37 to fight with me because I just felt okay, they’ve got it now.
0:13:43 They have their strong point of view, getting people to feel independent within an environment
0:13:45 that they weren’t entirely independent.
0:13:49 It’s a kind of weird little equilibrium, but that was what I was after.
0:13:55 I was very happy that you landed on the parenting analogy because as you were speaking, that’s
0:13:58 what it sounded like for sure.
0:14:01 So parentish, I think, applies.
0:14:03 What about mentor?
0:14:06 Do you think of yourself as a mentor or is that not a word that fits?
0:14:09 I recognize that there’s mentorship going on.
0:14:14 It sounds pretentious to call yourself a mentor unless it’s like an actual title.
0:14:19 One’s a little bit squeamish about using language like that, but the act of teaching someone
0:14:26 I do recognize is crucial to being, definitely to leading, but also just you’re learning
0:14:27 all the time.
0:14:31 There’s a kind of mentor and mentorship that happens in every dimension of life.
0:14:33 How do you choose, though, as a teacher?
0:14:36 How do you choose who to spend time with?
0:14:41 Because you were supervising a lot of people at a place like The Times Magazine.
0:14:45 I don’t know how many story editors there were, maybe 8, 10, 12.
0:14:47 You had very different relationships with each one.
0:14:49 How does that work for you?
0:14:50 Is it a choice?
0:14:52 I don’t think it’s a choice exactly.
0:14:56 You hope that everybody feels that they are the favorite child.
0:14:57 That’s what you’re trying to do.
0:15:04 But everybody responds to different kinds of help, prodding, embracing, all the various
0:15:06 things that make for mentorships.
0:15:11 Just back to the family thing, you have a different relationship with each of your children.
0:15:16 That’s not to say that somewhere in there, you don’t have people that you think have
0:15:17 more potential.
0:15:21 Generally, they’re people who show that they’re eager to learn.
0:15:27 They kind of put their hand up and say, “Teach me,” and there’s no teacher who isn’t moved
0:15:28 by that.
0:15:34 Do you have advice for people who are not naturally … I do believe there’s an astonishing
0:15:41 amount of human capital in the world that is untapped because the possessor of it doesn’t
0:15:45 know how to export it, and others don’t know how to import it.
0:15:46 Import it.
0:15:47 Yeah, that’s nice.
0:15:52 I don’t have advice except to recognize that it’s an essential part of learning, to be
0:15:56 open to learning and to teach, then maybe you have to make a slightly more active effort
0:15:57 at it.
0:15:58 You certainly have to be open to it.
0:16:06 You certainly have to know what you don’t know and find ways to ask, maybe not out loud,
0:16:10 but to signal your openness to being taught.
0:16:15 I mean, it’s an interesting period because what I witness in younger people these days
0:16:18 is that they love their parents, and they have their very …
0:16:21 And very different relationships with their parents.
0:16:25 Yes, very, very different, and also they’re very comfortable with adults in a way that
0:16:27 was different from when I was young.
0:16:32 But there are certain things they resent, and there’s a kind of parenting as it exists
0:16:37 in a workplace that they would bristle at, which I found very valuable growing up.
0:16:41 It’s a sort of famous thing at Esquire when I was there, there would be these story meetings,
0:16:46 and people would cry at the end of the meeting.
0:16:54 They would leave and cry because the editors in charge were kind of unstinting in their
0:16:55 withering comments.
0:17:00 Now, you say this as if people didn’t leave and cry at the end of a New York Times magazine
0:17:01 meeting when you were …
0:17:02 Well, I …
0:17:03 You just didn’t see it.
0:17:08 The point is that I learned from my own mentors that this was the way you conducted a meeting.
0:17:12 It was much more efficient to be brutally honest.
0:17:15 That’s an idea that doesn’t work because blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:17:17 One thought of that as teaching.
0:17:21 I tried to bring some of that stricter method, and people were gassed.
0:17:26 And I would say, “Look, when I was growing up, you used to cry at the end of these meetings.”
0:17:30 And they said, “I don’t want to cry at the end of the meetings, and it’s not going to
0:17:31 work.”
0:17:32 And they were right.
0:17:36 It was necessarily the better way to do it, but because it was the way that I learned
0:17:42 how to sharpen my mind as an editor, I had an expectation that I should do the same with
0:17:46 those people I was trying to get to do the work a certain way.
0:17:47 In that case, yeah.
0:17:48 They taught me.
0:17:50 Meaning, the younger people taught you, like, “This doesn’t feel good.”
0:17:51 This doesn’t feel good.
0:17:52 But did you stop?
0:17:53 And this doesn’t …
0:17:54 Well, I found workarounds.
0:17:57 I found other ways to try to accomplish the same thing.
0:18:00 For instance, just different language.
0:18:04 Basically I learned to praise and then to withhold.
0:18:05 So that was a strategy?
0:18:06 Come over.
0:18:09 It wasn’t a conscious strategy, but I realized that’s what I was doing.
0:18:13 I was certainly told at enough times that I came to realize that, “Oh, yeah, this is
0:18:14 what I do.”
0:18:21 I did speak with five, six, seven former employees of yours, some of whom I overlapped with at
0:18:24 The Times Magazine, some of whom I didn’t.
0:18:29 If we were making a word cloud, I think withholding was probably the big word.
0:18:36 But let me just say that on balance, the overall experience was overwhelmingly positive because
0:18:43 what I got from working with you and what they all got was just a deep, deep satisfaction
0:18:50 of accomplishment and a recognition that you don’t get that satisfaction without having
0:18:54 a lot of failure and bumps along the way.
0:18:58 Not humiliation, and you didn’t humiliate people ever, as far as I know, I don’t know.
0:19:01 I don’t think so, I hope not.
0:19:05 So when I left The Times Magazine working for you, I left because I just wanted to be
0:19:06 a writer.
0:19:08 I loved being an editor.
0:19:13 Editing was the best training for me to be a writer, in part because I saw how many big-time
0:19:19 writers when they would turn in their manuscripts, they were terrible, and I thought, “Holy cow.”
0:19:22 If they can turn in stuff like that, I can do this.
0:19:23 Yes, Pulitzer Prize winners.
0:19:27 I was shocked, but it was also just amazing experience and fun.
0:19:33 It’s really fun to do the work, but then you gave me a six-month leave to go start working
0:19:37 on my first book, and I remember coming back and saying, “This is the life I want.
0:19:39 I like alone.”
0:19:44 And then I remember, at least my recollection is that I said, “I’m really appreciative of
0:19:48 the leave you gave me, and I love this place, I love this work,” but that’s what I want
0:19:54 to do long-term, and so I’d like to stay here for another year, that’s the deal that I remember
0:19:55 crafting.
0:19:59 And then I remember our relationship changed because I was a lame duck.
0:20:00 So what?
0:20:06 Did I just not care about you anymore because you were not going to be a long-term asset
0:20:07 for me?
0:20:08 Was I that calculated?
0:20:09 I wouldn’t say it was that.
0:20:12 I think it was more like plow horse idea.
0:20:14 Get as much out of you as I could.
0:20:15 It wasn’t bad.
0:20:20 The work was still really exciting, but another reason I left was that I recognized when you
0:20:27 succeed in a place like that, this happens in many occupations, when you succeed in some
0:20:32 kind of maker role, you end up getting promoted into a manager role, a boss, and I did not
0:20:37 want to be a boss, so leaving the times to write meant I would never have to be a boss
0:20:43 of anyone other than myself, but then I wrote books, and then the books turned into this
0:20:46 thing that we’re doing now at your company.
0:20:52 We have 20 people, and I think the boss that I became is very much like the boss that you
0:20:53 were.
0:20:54 Oh, really?
0:20:55 Oh, my God.
0:21:00 Now, is that just natural, or do you think that you learned certain attributes of a boss
0:21:02 person from me?
0:21:03 Not natural.
0:21:04 I’ll learn.
0:21:05 That’s what I’m saying.
0:21:08 That’s why I would call you a mentor, even if an unintentional or accidental mentor.
0:21:09 Oh, how interesting.
0:21:11 God, that’s scary.
0:21:12 I’m a writer.
0:21:14 You know, writers are writers.
0:21:18 You have a way of seeing the world, you have a way of, and a lot of this is what I learned
0:21:19 from you.
0:21:22 You have a way of assessing, is this idea worth doing?
0:21:23 Definitely.
0:21:25 That’s a big part of it.
0:21:28 Execution is important, but I always think of it a little bit like pro athletes.
0:21:32 You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have the talent, and then you realize that what you’re
0:21:40 really after is developing your taste or your sense of what’s interesting, what’s important,
0:21:43 what’s fun, what’s new.
0:21:45 Those are all things I learned from you.
0:21:49 You may have learned some methods from me, but your taste and sensibility was not something
0:21:53 I had much influence over at all, because it’s just who you are.
0:21:59 Maybe to some degree, but I think anybody who’s learning, who takes their thing seriously,
0:22:04 it’s thrilling when you encounter someone who sets a standard high.
0:22:10 But the problem is, when you go from being a writer to then being a boss, my first producing
0:22:16 partners, the word that got attached to me was like, “Dubbner’s too exacting.”
0:22:19 And I was pissed because I thought, “What’s wrong with that?
0:22:22 I learned from Adam Moss.”
0:22:24 Even hearing it back to me, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
0:22:28 I think that’s something that you should wear proudly.
0:22:34 I’m very glad to hear that what you felt as a person working with me, for me, whatever.
0:22:35 You can say “for you.”
0:22:36 It’s okay.
0:22:40 Because that you found delight in making something great.
0:22:43 That’s the main thing that I was trying to teach.
0:22:49 Even though it’s painful in the moment, you’re going to feel so good at having made something
0:22:53 that you put everything into and that you can be proud of at the end.
0:22:58 I hope that I conveyed that and that I worked with the kind of people who would feel that
0:23:02 and who would be willing to work pretty hard because they wanted to make something they
0:23:03 felt really, really good about.
0:23:08 It’s not everybody, but that is a certain kind of person and you’re that kind of person
0:23:12 and I’m that kind of person and there’s a reason we ended up in the same place.
0:23:18 I think the thing that’s most important or attractive about what you just said, but also
0:23:23 very much animates your book, is that it’s not just a thrill of accomplishing because
0:23:25 something is good.
0:23:26 It’s doing something different.
0:23:27 Yeah.
0:23:32 One other aspect of this whole business is that artists or any of when we’re talking
0:23:35 creative people, they need to not be bored.
0:23:39 It is incredibly difficult to make something and you have to have reasons to go on and
0:23:42 one of those reasons is simple interest.
0:23:47 You have to feel stimulated and if you do the same thing over and over and over and over
0:23:51 again, you’re just going to bore yourself to tears.
0:23:55 The artistic person, creative person, I don’t know what you want to call them, person who
0:24:01 wants to make something will constantly find new ways to do it because they’re trying to
0:24:04 keep themselves engaged.
0:24:09 In my book, I mean everybody remembers their childhood as lonely of course, but it is definitely
0:24:18 true that one after another, they describe childhoods of isolation and of need and then
0:24:21 something came along to fill that need.
0:24:24 Among other things, they learn to talk to themselves.
0:24:25 This is a big theme of my book.
0:24:31 I think of all of this as ways of talking to yourself, as ways of translating what your
0:24:33 imagination produces.
0:24:38 And what happened when Adam Moss’s imagination started producing something new?
0:24:44 Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my
0:24:46 painting life, I didn’t.
0:24:47 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:49 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:25:06 In 2019, Adam Moss stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of New York Magazine.
0:25:11 Here’s what he said at the time, “I’ve been going full throttle for 40 years.
0:25:14 I want to see what my life is like with less ambition.
0:25:16 I’m older than the staff.
0:25:17 I’m older than the readers.
0:25:20 I just want to do something new.”
0:25:23 That new thing, at least for a while, was painting.
0:25:28 When I thought I wanted to paint, I was up in Cape Cod where I have a place and without
0:25:34 any schooling whatsoever, I didn’t know how to do a thing.
0:25:40 My schooling was really when I went to buy paints, I’d talk to the salesperson and ask
0:25:45 them to have this work, like I didn’t understand what a medium was, I didn’t understand anything.
0:25:50 Nevertheless, I had this idea that I would do a painting a day, and that’s what I did.
0:25:54 One day I’d do a flower and then the other day I’d do some crazy stupid abstract and
0:25:58 then I would just make an effort at doing a person or something.
0:26:02 The whole idea was that at the end of the day, painting would be finished and thrown
0:26:05 away and start it over, it was fun.
0:26:09 Came back and I thought that was the end of it, I thought it was just a sort of fun little
0:26:14 summer thing, and a friend of mine said, “Well, you really seem to have liked it.
0:26:16 You really should get some training.”
0:26:24 She then connected me up with the head of painting, I think, at the Yale School of Art.
0:26:28 I can hear many listeners’ heads exploding, first teacher, head of painting at Yale School
0:26:29 of Art.
0:26:30 Well, no, she wasn’t my teacher.
0:26:35 She had a student who had just graduated who she thought was really good.
0:26:38 Her name was Maria De La Sandalus and she’s in the book.
0:26:42 She is a beautiful artist, but also a really lovely person.
0:26:44 She would just come over my house.
0:26:49 She taught me how to draw and she taught me how to paint at the beginning.
0:26:54 It wasn’t a particularly structured learning process, but she was my friend, my painting
0:26:55 friend.
0:26:59 Was it built around ideas or mostly execution technique, et cetera?
0:27:01 There was a certain amount of technique.
0:27:08 There was a lot of just helping me find my confidence as a painter and there was just
0:27:14 a certain kindness that I found empowering and a sense that she had that I had something
0:27:16 to make.
0:27:21 Was kindness in a mentor/teacher important to you?
0:27:22 It’s important to me.
0:27:23 It may not be important to other people.
0:27:28 If you look through history at creators of all types and people of all types, people
0:27:35 who have mentors, if you had to guess, would you say that on average, kindness is a benefit
0:27:41 or an attribute at least because when I think of a lot of what people claim at least to
0:27:45 be successful mentorships, there’s often, I don’t know about an absence of kindness,
0:27:49 but a presence of something else.
0:27:54 Certainly there is an expectation that this person can do better and I guess that can
0:27:59 be experienced in a lot of ways as being stern and forbidding and all of that kind of thing
0:28:03 and I’ve had mentor types like that, but I personally respond to kindness.
0:28:06 I need to feel a little loved.
0:28:12 If you were to generalize what a successful mentor is, would you use that as a template
0:28:13 or do you think that’s just for you?
0:28:20 I think there has to be a bedrock of they have a belief in you and you have to feel
0:28:21 it.
0:28:23 Otherwise the mentorship doesn’t work.
0:28:27 You have to believe that they are rooting for you.
0:28:30 I have never seen one of Adam Moss’s paintings.
0:28:32 That’s quite on purpose, yes.
0:28:35 He insists that he is just not a very good painter.
0:28:37 I’m more mediocre than Ben.
0:28:39 I’m okay, but that’s not good enough for me.
0:28:44 When someone is exacting, which we have already established Adam Moss is, then mediocrity
0:28:46 can feel worse than death.
0:28:50 So he needed to find something else to make, something that he would be good at and that’s
0:28:56 how he came to write The Work of Art, a book about how other creative people make something
0:28:58 from nothing.
0:29:01 It’s a book about the process of making.
0:29:07 I’ve always loved process because essentially I love narrative and the act of how something
0:29:12 comes to be is just a perfect story.
0:29:14 Starts with nothing and then ends up something.
0:29:18 But there’s a whole other part of this book that’s trying to understand the personality
0:29:22 attributes that make someone successful as an artist.
0:29:27 It’s about half visual and it works almost like a giant diagram where the text itself
0:29:29 winds around the images.
0:29:31 Some mucic, but also magazines.
0:29:35 And then it has all this footnote material, which is the me in the book for the most part.
0:29:36 Although you’re in the…
0:29:37 I’m in the introductions too.
0:29:42 Yeah, but also chapters differ because in some chapters they’re through written by you
0:29:43 with quotes.
0:29:44 Right.
0:29:45 In other chapters it’s more oral history.
0:29:46 Yes.
0:29:47 Right.
0:29:49 And in that way it’s very much like a big, big, big magazine.
0:29:50 Absolutely.
0:29:51 But it was a new pursuit.
0:29:56 It was new and yet I hope it had the benefit of a lifetime’s experience as a magazine maker.
0:30:00 I had never written a book before and I was really scared of writing.
0:30:01 It’s harder than it looks.
0:30:03 It’s so hard.
0:30:04 Unlike you, I never wanted to be a writer.
0:30:08 I would never have left magazines for writing, but I did leave magazines at a certain point
0:30:13 because I just felt that I didn’t want to be a boss anymore.
0:30:18 I started to write this book and I was just a terrible, terrible, terrible writer, really.
0:30:19 And I had to teach myself.
0:30:24 I had to use my editor head and at first my editor had recognized that it was terrible,
0:30:28 but didn’t have any solutions in mind.
0:30:35 And then over time I just began to strip it of its ridiculous ornamentation.
0:30:37 Was that all by yourself though or did you go to people for it?
0:30:39 No, I did that most of myself.
0:30:45 And then eventually, okay, I got to a place where I was happier as a writer and also the
0:30:46 work itself was better.
0:30:51 Let me just point out the difference between being an editor and being a writer might seem
0:30:52 not that large.
0:30:54 It’s huge.
0:30:56 It’s like marathon versus sprint.
0:31:01 They’re both running, but I wouldn’t think it could have felt so similar to what you’d
0:31:02 spent your life doing.
0:31:03 Well, okay, let me…
0:31:09 I created the book in the way that I created the book in order to assemble a community.
0:31:15 I wanted the group thing, which I always loved in magazines, and I wanted a sense of a lot
0:31:17 of people doing something together.
0:31:24 And so I kind of invented one, and that invention was a whole part one, which was to engage
0:31:26 all these artists in my project.
0:31:32 Okay, Amy Silman, show me how you made a painting, and we’ll go from beginning to end.
0:31:37 Okay, George Saunders, let’s talk about how you wrote “Lincoln and the Bardo,” and
0:31:41 David Mandel, how you wrote “A Joke,” or Kara Walker, how you built this magnificent
0:31:45 sculpture, or Stephen Sondheim, how you wrote a song.
0:31:53 And that process was essentially me recreating a context of group creation, because I thought
0:31:55 of them as my collaborators, not as my subjects.
0:31:57 So that was part one.
0:32:00 Part two was writing, I described already what a hell that was.
0:32:03 And was it hell because the collaborator was no longer there?
0:32:05 I’m just alone in the room again.
0:32:09 It’s the aloneness, it’s the dialogue in your head that was driving me completely crazy,
0:32:11 and it’s why I never was a writer in the first place.
0:32:16 I just found it unbearably lonely, and also I didn’t know how to act all the parts in
0:32:21 my head, where I could talk to myself and make myself better, which I didn’t know how
0:32:25 to do when it’s different people, but I didn’t know how to do in my own head.
0:32:30 So for some of the creators in your book, the people who influenced them were often people
0:32:32 that they never interacted with.
0:32:37 Yeah, possibly never met, you know, Gregory Crudson, who talked about his work as almost
0:32:44 a mathematical formula from like William Eggleston to Ray Carver short stories to David Lynch
0:32:50 and Blue Velvet, some combination of people with sensibility that in his own mind came
0:32:51 together.
0:32:53 Describe what a Crudson photo looks like.
0:33:02 A Crudson photo is a gigantic photograph that resembles a movie still, lit like a movie,
0:33:08 with enough narrative portent, but with no before or after.
0:33:15 So the viewer is meant to supply the narrative by looking at this picture and putting it
0:33:18 into a context of his or her own imagination.
0:33:22 So Eggleston and David Lynch and all those make a lot of sense.
0:33:26 Yeah, I in general don’t much care about the strict definitions of anything.
0:33:31 This book is a book about artists, but really I’ve bent the term “artist” pretty much
0:33:32 as far as it can go.
0:33:36 But I also believe that about mentorship, which in the end it doesn’t matter.
0:33:41 I guess the big distinguishing factor for me would be an influence can be distant and
0:33:47 unaware of you, whereas a mentor, there’s necessarily some kind of estuarial exchange.
0:33:48 Yeah.
0:33:53 Well, one interesting thing about the book was I kept looking for who is the person who
0:33:55 encouraged you when you were young.
0:34:01 There weren’t necessarily the person who was by your side when you were an adult, but
0:34:06 there had to be somebody, could be a parent, could be an art teacher, could be anybody
0:34:09 who basically saw something in them.
0:34:16 And that seeing was crucial to the development of their confidence that they could make the
0:34:20 thing, which of course confidence and what I in the book call faith, the faith that they
0:34:25 are actually able to make the thing that’s in their head, which they can’t, but you have
0:34:28 to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:34:33 I think the book is a bit of a, not a smoke and mirror, but a bit of sleight of hand in
0:34:36 that it’s called the work of art.
0:34:41 And it’s plainly about the process of making creative things.
0:34:46 And it’s plainly about what it took for those creators to even get to the point where they
0:34:47 were able to create something.
0:34:49 I know you love process.
0:34:52 That was a word that you said probably 30 times a day.
0:34:54 And it’s a word that I just have come to despise.
0:34:55 Oh, seriously?
0:34:57 Well, just the words sound so ugly.
0:35:02 It’s so beautiful, the thing that it’s describing and the word itself is so crude really.
0:35:08 I feel like as a magazine editor, some of your favorite stories or at least my conception
0:35:12 of some of your favorite stories were when there was a process of something being described
0:35:13 over time.
0:35:14 Absolutely.
0:35:18 And written texts, not that documentary film can’t do a lot of things can do it, but text
0:35:24 is great at that because it can move in and out of time and it can magnify and shrink.
0:35:29 So as much as you say that this book is about process and artifacts and so on, it was a
0:35:32 thrill to read because I love your work and I loved working with you.
0:35:35 But you never talked that much.
0:35:38 You dropped hints about what made something great or not.
0:35:41 We all learned the language of Adam Moss.
0:35:45 But it was often fragments, rarely sentences, never paragraphs.
0:35:48 I sound maddening from your description.
0:35:52 I sound like I must have been just a horrible person to work for, but okay.
0:35:53 Maddening maybe a little bit.
0:35:54 Well, definitely not.
0:35:55 Definitely not.
0:35:57 But maddening among nine other things.
0:36:01 But what struck me the book was really about was something separate than the process of
0:36:08 creation, really more about what it takes to become the kind of person who can create
0:36:10 things from whole cloth.
0:36:13 That’s really hard to do and I don’t think people understand the bravery it takes to
0:36:14 do that.
0:36:15 Yeah.
0:36:16 The book is not self-help.
0:36:20 So I’m not sure a lot of these things can be learned.
0:36:24 I mean, you can get better at everything, but you’re either a person who can focus or you
0:36:25 can’t.
0:36:28 You’re either obsessional or you’re not.
0:36:31 You have a high tolerance for tedium, which you need to to be an artist.
0:36:32 Or you don’t.
0:36:35 You have drive or you don’t.
0:36:36 What about taste?
0:36:38 You have taste or you don’t.
0:36:41 Or you have a certain sensibility or you have a certain sense of humor.
0:36:46 These are all things that you acquire for all sorts of mysterious reasons that you and
0:36:47 I don’t understand.
0:36:50 No one has ever understood how personality is formed.
0:36:56 And that all said, the book is, I hope, very encouraging to artists because I think most
0:37:02 people who are trying to make things don’t need to be James Joyce or Pablo Picasso or
0:37:04 Louise Glock even.
0:37:10 They can be themselves and they can find immense joy and satisfaction in making art.
0:37:13 They improve their ability to focus.
0:37:18 They improve their ability to persevere, to not give up when things get hard.
0:37:24 A lot of art making comes down to something as rudimentary as being able to learn to
0:37:25 fail.
0:37:33 Again, like parenting, it’s a little bit like a child learns to walk because they understand
0:37:34 how they can get up from falling.
0:37:36 They have to fall.
0:37:39 Your book nods at failure.
0:37:41 I think it’s a lot about failure.
0:37:42 Okay.
0:37:43 But ultimately.
0:37:44 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:45 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:46 Yeah.
0:37:53 And I’m thinking, yeah, this failure is instructive and real and useful to hear about, but it’s
0:37:56 an exercise in what some people call survivorship bias, right?
0:37:58 We read about the winners.
0:37:59 Sure, of course.
0:38:03 And I was very well aware of that, that this is a retrospective history of success.
0:38:06 And so everything has to be viewed through that lens.
0:38:10 I’ve always had this theory that I think is wrong, but as a writer or if you’re a creative
0:38:16 person of any type, an editor or an entrepreneur or whatever, I think it’s natural to try
0:38:17 to mimic success.
0:38:18 Yeah.
0:38:21 But I think that most successes are pretty singular.
0:38:23 I completely agree with you.
0:38:27 And so I felt that learning from failure was really the way to go.
0:38:33 I wanted very much to give people permission to fail because failure is, if you go through
0:38:36 the narratives in the book, there’s just failure right and left.
0:38:40 When you’re trying to create something, your brain is trying to subvert you in so many ways.
0:38:45 There are so many obstacles, and there is this kind of animus you need to have in order
0:38:47 to barrel ahead.
0:38:49 An animus toward what?
0:38:50 Animus is the wrong word.
0:38:54 You have to have a fighting spirit, I guess I would say, where you’re just not going
0:38:59 to be daunted, which as I was going through this, I found very reassuring because of course
0:39:05 the reason I did the book was because I had recently taken a painting and felt enormous
0:39:13 frustration and a sense of failure in that and truly what I didn’t understand is in
0:39:18 a group, there is a conversation that happens that’s external.
0:39:22 You and I, if we’re working together making a magazine, we talk about something, there’s
0:39:26 a phrase that came up in the David Simon chapter called The Bounce.
0:39:29 Our method of making something better is by bouncing.
0:39:34 I say something to you, you say something to me, bang, bang, bang, in the end something
0:39:37 happens which is better than it was when we started.
0:39:43 In most artists’ lives, that conversation has to happen in their own head.
0:39:47 I became very confused, how does someone have this kind of inner dialogue, and that’s what
0:39:50 I was trying to understand.
0:39:54 David Simon was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun before he started writing books
0:39:56 and making TV shows.
0:40:00 One of those shows was The Wire, which many people consider one of the best TV shows ever
0:40:01 made.
0:40:05 If you would like to hear an interview with him, check out the People I Mostly Admire
0:40:09 podcast, another show in the Freakonomics Radio network.
0:40:13 It’s episode 109 called David Simon is on strike.
0:40:14 Here’s why.
0:40:17 We’ll hear more from Adam Moss in a minute.
0:40:37 I am Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:40:41 So would this book exist had you been a better painter?
0:40:42 Probably not.
0:40:46 I would not have had The Drive, which was born of my own frustration.
0:40:51 So I would have been satisfied painting all day because I would, I hope, have taken a
0:40:55 certain kind of satisfaction from the painting itself that, you know, why do you want to
0:40:56 do anything else?
0:41:01 I just want to do this all day long, which now I feel actually not because I’ve gotten
0:41:05 to be a better painter, but because I understand something about my relationship to painting
0:41:06 that I learned from the book.
0:41:08 Which is what?
0:41:12 When you say this in this context, it sounds so banal, but here I’ll say it’s a hobby.
0:41:15 Now, well, there’s a way in which that’s a description.
0:41:19 But what I would really say is that I was trying to create narratives and so for the
0:41:21 narrative to work, I wanted happy ending.
0:41:23 I wanted an exaltation.
0:41:28 I wanted that moment in the rom-com with the big kiss at the end where everyone lives happily
0:41:30 ever after.
0:41:36 And the artists themselves, when they would get to that point in their own storytelling
0:41:39 of their own work, refused to give me that.
0:41:45 They would express a certain amount of relief that the thing was over.
0:41:47 Maybe they would say, “Yeah, it was nice.
0:41:51 I was glad other people got to see it and I heard some nice things about it.”
0:41:54 But you’d never got the big firework.
0:42:00 And I found that as a writer of the book, somewhat frustrating, I kind of needed it for closure.
0:42:05 I needed it for my own purposes, but I also needed to feel that they made something great.
0:42:06 I was rooting for them.
0:42:12 There was a great deal of transference involved in this book, and I fell in love with all
0:42:19 of my subjects, so I wanted something spectacular for them in the end, and it never came.
0:42:22 When I would talk to them about that, I said, “Well, you don’t sound like that.
0:42:24 That was very important.”
0:42:27 And they said, “It’s not about the thing I’m making, it is really about the work.
0:42:33 I just get up every day because I like or I need more than I like to work in this way.”
0:42:37 And the endpoint is not that relevant to me.
0:42:42 And I just thought this was bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit over a long period
0:42:43 of time.
0:42:48 And then I was just worn down, and I came to kind of grok the truth of it.
0:42:52 I absorbed that, and suddenly my relationship to my own work changed.
0:42:53 How so?
0:42:58 I got enormous pleasure from what I like to think of as the verb of it rather than the
0:43:04 noun of it making one mark as a painter, just like one little chew that pleased me for whatever
0:43:11 reason released me from this incredibly punishing attitude I had toward the work itself.
0:43:15 I do care about the work itself, I really still want to be a good painter, but I can
0:43:17 get pleasure out of the making.
0:43:22 It’s interesting as you’re describing you coming to accept what these people were telling
0:43:27 you about their perpetual dissatisfaction because you make it sound so foreign.
0:43:33 But that’s exactly the way that I and everybody else who ever worked with you described you.
0:43:39 When you were happy with the work that I or anyone else did, everyone described it as
0:43:42 this like great thrill, it was like a high.
0:43:46 Getting your approval or praise was incredibly powerful.
0:43:51 Then there’s the corollary, getting your dissatisfaction could be demoralizing for many people.
0:43:52 You had to kind of fight through that.
0:43:59 But the steady state was more like, yeah, it was a really good issue this week.
0:44:00 That was it.
0:44:01 That implies many other things.
0:44:07 It wasn’t a great issue and more important, there’s next week also.
0:44:09 That’s one of the things that’s fantastic about magazines.
0:44:14 You always have next week or in a digital world, you always have five minutes from now.
0:44:19 That’s why I was particularly suited to magazines, but none of us know ourselves very well.
0:44:25 Over lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting
0:44:27 life, I didn’t.
0:44:33 To the degree that it’s hard to know oneself, let’s call it the internal versus the external
0:44:37 on a scale of zero to five, how bad or good do you think you are?
0:44:39 Well certainly not zero and certainly not five.
0:44:42 So somewhere in that two to four range.
0:44:45 Did you become more self-aware over time and experience as an editor?
0:44:47 Yeah, I think so.
0:44:48 Maybe to a fault.
0:44:49 What do you mean by that?
0:44:52 Sometimes experience can be a hindrance.
0:44:55 You stop yourself from making something.
0:45:00 The Simeon chapter, the Simeon Nosrat chapter, the title of the chapter is With Beginner’s
0:45:08 Eyes because she makes this observation about Sulfat acid heat that when she, very excitedly
0:45:12 at the beginning of her cooking life, tells a fellow chef, the fellow chef says well everybody
0:45:13 knows that.
0:45:15 She says no they don’t.
0:45:16 They don’t know that.
0:45:22 In any way I’ve never seen that anywhere and I think people need to hear this, that this
0:45:24 is really how you should think about cooking.
0:45:29 And she goes on and builds this fabulous book and then a little empire off of it.
0:45:33 Sometimes experience stops you from doing something because you know it has failed too
0:45:38 often and you don’t want to go through that failure again.
0:45:41 You have to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:45:52 That was Adam Moss, the most influential boss I ever had by a mile, who did me the great
0:45:57 favor of showing me that I didn’t want to be boss, that I just wanted to make things,
0:46:01 but who also taught me how to be better at making things.
0:46:02 So thanks, Adam.
0:46:07 His book is called The Work of Art, although it might just as easily have been called The
0:46:09 Art of Work.
0:46:14 And the other book he just mentioned, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is also well worth reading
0:46:19 and you can hear its author, Samin Nasrat on a couple of Freakonomics Radio episodes
0:46:20 from 2023.
0:46:25 One is called What’s Wrong with Being a One Hit Wonder and the other is Samin Nasrat
0:46:27 Always Wanted to Be Famous.
0:46:34 Coming up next time on the show, we ask why is there so much fraud in academia?
0:46:38 If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as
0:46:40 a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
0:46:46 The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful
0:46:51 career because most people, if they’re caught at all, they skate.
0:46:58 She was at the center of everything, being a prestigious faculty member at Harvard and
0:47:01 all of her public speaking and her books.
0:47:02 That’s next time.
0:47:06 Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.
0:47:09 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:47:15 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
0:47:17 transcripts and show notes.
0:47:21 This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:25 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin
0:47:31 Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine
0:47:35 Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnson, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Neil Coruth,
0:47:38 Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:47:41 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:47:44 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:47:50 As always, thank you for listening.
0:47:51 I’m going to shut up.
0:47:52 Can you just say that again?
0:47:53 Gigantic.
0:47:54 No, say it the way you did.
0:47:55 Gigantic.
0:48:07 The Freakonomics Radio network, the hidden side of everything.
0:48:08 Stitcher.
0:48:11 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:00:09 we are putting on soon.
0:00:12 The first one is on January 3rd in San Francisco.
0:00:15 The second is in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:20 We have got some excellent guests for both shows, so please come hang out with us.
0:00:27 Tickets are at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, one word, again January 3rd and February 14th,
0:00:28 San Francisco and LA.
0:00:34 Meanwhile, today on the show, a conversation with someone I know quite well, or at least
0:00:41 used to, someone who is smart, shrewd, very good at his work, and someone who taught me
0:00:47 a lot, even if not always on purpose.
0:00:49 Why don’t you just say your name and what you do?
0:00:50 My name is Adam Moss.
0:00:51 That’s easy enough.
0:01:00 I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
0:01:05 For a long time, Adam Moss was widely considered the best magazine editor around.
0:01:11 He was the founding editor of Seven Days Magazine, a clever and slightly transgressive
0:01:12 arts and culture weekly.
0:01:17 From there, he went to the New York Times Magazine, and after many years there, he took
0:01:21 over New York Magazine, which he radically remade for the digital era.
0:01:25 He won all the awards an editor can win.
0:01:29 He directly shaped the careers of hundreds of writers and editors.
0:01:32 Indirectly, he did the same for millions of readers.
0:01:38 He left New York Magazine in 2019, still on top but feeling a bit too old for the game,
0:01:42 a bit burned out and ready for something new.
0:01:49 The something new eventually took the form of a book called The Work of Art, How Something
0:01:51 Comes from Nothing.
0:01:58 The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product with
0:02:00 all that kind of toward firm between.
0:02:04 Many people who know Adam Moss were surprised that he wrote a book.
0:02:08 He was one of the few magazine editors who didn’t either start out as a writer or want
0:02:12 to be a writer or think of themselves as a writer.
0:02:14 He was a full-fledged editor.
0:02:17 An editor is mostly backstage.
0:02:20 There’s a lot of power and a bit of risk.
0:02:25 A writer, meanwhile, is out front, directly in the line of fire.
0:02:29 You work on a thing for months or years, and then it goes out into the world with your
0:02:33 name on it, so if people hate it, they know where to find you.
0:02:37 That’s why it was so intriguing that Adam Moss would write a book.
0:02:40 So we will talk about that today, but some other things too.
0:02:46 Mostly his tenure at the New York Times Magazine, where he happened to be my boss.
0:02:47 This was in the late 1990s.
0:02:52 I was what’s called a story editor, which meant I came up with ideas, assigned them
0:02:58 to writers, and then shepherded those pieces through the editorial and publishing processes.
0:03:03 The Times Magazine was considered a great magazine during this era, and it was a thrill
0:03:04 to be inside of that.
0:03:11 So terrifying sometimes, but mostly a thrill, and mostly because our boss was really good
0:03:15 at his job, and we all got to watch and learn.
0:03:18 That said, I quit The Times after about five years.
0:03:23 It used to be that when someone left that place voluntarily and was relatively young,
0:03:27 I was in my thirties, that people would think you’re crazy.
0:03:30 I was doing well as an editor and an occasional writer.
0:03:34 The boss has told me I might be a boss before long.
0:03:35 That was the last straw.
0:03:38 I didn’t want to be an editor or a boss.
0:03:44 I just wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to work on my own, not within a hierarchy.
0:03:50 So I quit and I went off to write books, which is how I ended up here, talking to you.
0:03:55 When Adam Moss’s book came out in early 2024, I read it right away.
0:04:00 For me and many others who worked for him, it was a bit like discovering his journal.
0:04:05 Something that made him tick as an editor, as a boss, was right there on the page.
0:04:09 At the time, I was trying to make a podcast series about mentorship.
0:04:15 The idea was that mentorship is this standard and successful practice in many realms, in
0:04:21 education and sports, the military, in the medical and legal professions, and yet in
0:04:24 other realms, there’s no standard mentorship at all.
0:04:29 I wanted to know why not and whether something should be done about that.
0:04:31 But the mentorship series just never came together.
0:04:35 We couldn’t find a center of gravity, and eventually we gave up, which is fine.
0:04:38 That happens all the time in this kind of work.
0:04:44 But there was one interview we did for the series that I was not willing to ditch.
0:04:47 This one, the one with Adam Moss.
0:04:53 Was he in fact a mentor to me, or maybe more like the master who teaches an apprentice,
0:04:58 or was he just an old-fashioned boss trying to extract labor?
0:05:00 That’s what today’s conversation is about.
0:05:05 It’s the latest in our series of one-on-one conversations to end the year, even if you
0:05:08 are not a big fan of magazines.
0:05:13 Even if you have never held a paper magazine in your hands, I suspect that you will benefit
0:05:20 from hearing Adam Moss’s perspective, because all of us at some point try to make something
0:05:21 from nothing.
0:05:36 So you might as well learn from a good teacher, like I did.
0:05:42 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:05:52 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:05:57 The title of Adam Moss’s book, The Work of Art, is of course a double entendre.
0:06:02 He is the kind of person for whom entendres rarely come singly.
0:06:07 There is a layer, and then another layer, and usually a few more.
0:06:12 This book is ostensibly a set of interviews with a variety of makers.
0:06:19 Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, David Simon, Samin Nasrat, Will Shortz, and their stories
0:06:25 unfold on pages that are packed with sketches and graphics, sidebars, footnotes.
0:06:31 It is very much a magazine in book form, which makes sense considering that Adam spent nearly
0:06:35 40 years making magazines, and this is his first book.
0:06:39 Some people end up in magazines by accident, like me.
0:06:42 I just wanted to write, and that’s where the writing jobs were.
0:06:43 Adam was different.
0:06:46 He was in love with the magazine form.
0:06:50 So I asked what first drew him in?
0:06:51 So many things.
0:06:55 First of all, when I came to love magazines, it was the late 60s, early 70s.
0:07:01 It was a heyday of the magazine form, but also it was a really interesting time.
0:07:07 The world was blowing up in some ways that to a young kid, which is very attractive.
0:07:12 The magazines that I loved, like The New Yorks and S-Wars, etc., they’re a little smart
0:07:13 ass.
0:07:14 They were funny.
0:07:16 I mean, my first magazine I read was Mad Magazine.
0:07:21 So it had this kind of fabulous, fractured idea of what the world was that really appealed
0:07:22 to my adolescent brain.
0:07:28 And there was the feeling that the whole thing was created by someone or something that felt
0:07:30 very distinct.
0:07:32 It had a personality.
0:07:37 And that personality, if it appealed to you, it was very powerful.
0:07:38 It felt very personal.
0:07:42 So this was the medium that you loved, and then you sought it out?
0:07:43 Yes.
0:07:44 And then who?
0:07:45 Okay.
0:07:47 So I had all of this stuff in my head, but it was unformed.
0:07:49 And I went to work at Esquire, and I was very young.
0:07:52 I was a very unformed person at that point.
0:07:54 What were you good at?
0:07:57 I was probably fairly intuitive.
0:08:02 I certainly was eager, and I’d read a lot of magazines.
0:08:07 I had a lot of data in my head based on my own fan taste.
0:08:12 And this guy named Lee Eisenberg, he just, for whatever reason, took an interest in me.
0:08:15 It could have been that he just wanted me to do his work for him, because he recognized
0:08:21 that my enthusiasm was potentially valuable to him.
0:08:25 But he also saw that my brain worked a certain way, and he wanted to encourage it.
0:08:27 It was an act of kindness.
0:08:30 Name some things that you would do there on a given day?
0:08:33 We started a section on the entertainment industry.
0:08:39 And one of Lee’s ideas was that he would put a movie star with a big literary person.
0:08:43 I remember William Styron and Candace Bergen.
0:08:49 My job was to go to the thing and set up the tape recorder, and then make sure everybody
0:08:51 was happy.
0:08:54 But then he would give me the transcript, and he would say, “What do you find interesting
0:08:55 in this?”
0:09:00 Slowly, but surely, I would see what he thought was interesting in it, and then I would watch
0:09:05 him as he constructed this thing into an exciting little bit of conversation that worked in
0:09:07 a printed form.
0:09:09 He was extremely good.
0:09:15 So just being able to watch him took all of that data in my head and started to organize
0:09:16 it.
0:09:17 That was invaluable.
0:09:22 One of the things that I hear a lot from younger editors is that they really resent doing the
0:09:28 older editor’s job for them because they feel it’s exploitive, and it is.
0:09:31 However, it’s an incredible way to learn.
0:09:32 I mean, it’s apprenticeship.
0:09:33 Yes.
0:09:41 And you talk it through, and in there is sharing of ideas, but also a kind of teaching.
0:09:42 And sometimes the teaching goes both ways.
0:09:45 This is really, I think, actually crucial.
0:09:50 In almost every case where there is a mentor, mentee kind of thing, it goes both ways.
0:09:55 Give an example of you as a young editor, as a mentee, let’s call it.
0:09:58 What do you think Lee Eisenberg got from you?
0:10:02 There was a generational difference, not a huge one, but I brought a bunch of generational
0:10:05 assumptions to the table that he didn’t have.
0:10:08 I think there is that element of- New eyes, fresh eyes.
0:10:09 Yes, fresh eyes.
0:10:14 And as you get older, you begin to dismiss certain things that aren’t fully dismissible.
0:10:18 So you were the editor of a few different magazines for a long time.
0:10:22 Can you explain the role, just briefly, of what it means to be the editor and chief of
0:10:23 the magazine?
0:10:27 I think a lot of people who aren’t writers or editors don’t really understand that.
0:10:31 It’s chiefly the person who decides where the magazine is going to go, what the magazine
0:10:37 covers and doesn’t, shaping the magazine’s identity and its relationship to its readers.
0:10:39 It’s a manager job.
0:10:41 The magazine is very, very much a group enterprise.
0:10:44 That’s one of the most wonderful things about it.
0:10:51 And it involves getting a whole bunch of people, story editors like you were, visual people,
0:10:56 copy editors, production people, all sorts of different kinds of people to work together
0:10:57 as one.
0:10:59 So in that sense, it’s like a conductor of an orchestra.
0:11:05 It’s very rarely what people think of as editors, which is the person who fixes sentences.
0:11:06 Although you did your share of that.
0:11:09 I did my share of that, but that’s not the chief job description.
0:11:14 The chief job description is the overall direction of the thing.
0:11:17 So you as a magazine editor are renowned.
0:11:21 In the field of magazine making, Adam Moss is considered a great editor.
0:11:23 And I certainly agree.
0:11:27 And one of the many things that I and a lot of people think you did well was that you
0:11:32 were very, the word that people like to use is exacting.
0:11:37 There’s a standard that is extremely high, but also a little bit elusive and ethereal.
0:11:38 You don’t quite know what it is.
0:11:40 But you know, you want to get there.
0:11:42 Let’s say you agree that you’re exacting.
0:11:43 I agree that I’m exacting.
0:11:48 I would like to think that I was a little bit more clear about what it was that I was
0:11:49 looking for.
0:11:52 But I recognize that that’s probably completely not true.
0:11:55 And what I was doing was a kind of maddening mind control.
0:11:58 It’s a spectrum, but let’s agree that you’re exacting.
0:12:02 My question would be when you are an exacting person.
0:12:07 And I’m sure many people listening to this conversation either are or want to be that.
0:12:10 But you also can’t control every single thing.
0:12:14 In fact, the process is set up so that you’re not controlled.
0:12:15 You’re not writing the articles.
0:12:17 You’re not editing the articles heavily.
0:12:20 So how do you live with that paradox?
0:12:25 Being an editor, it’s both an act of grandiosity and humility at the same time.
0:12:30 So it’s like, you have to think big, but you have to understand that it really is a group
0:12:32 project.
0:12:38 And for any group project to work, everybody has to feel like there’s some of them in it
0:12:41 and they have to feel invested in it and they have to feel proud of it.
0:12:45 They have to want to make it just as badly as you want to make it.
0:12:52 And so part of the exacting hood was not just getting people to a certain standard that
0:13:00 I thought was appropriate, but also getting people to care as much as I did.
0:13:02 How much of that was in the hiring though?
0:13:06 A lot of it’s in the hiring, but a lot of it’s also in the sort of day to day way that
0:13:09 you all get together as a group.
0:13:16 A lot of it is just familial as opposed to directed towards a particular task.
0:13:21 A lot of it is helping people find their own independence as thinkers, but also obviously
0:13:26 think the way you want them to for the purposes of this project.
0:13:33 Like a parent, I suppose, I would always relish the first moment that a story editor was willing
0:13:37 to fight with me because I just felt okay, they’ve got it now.
0:13:43 They have their strong point of view, getting people to feel independent within an environment
0:13:45 that they weren’t entirely independent.
0:13:49 It’s a kind of weird little equilibrium, but that was what I was after.
0:13:55 I was very happy that you landed on the parenting analogy because as you were speaking, that’s
0:13:58 what it sounded like for sure.
0:14:01 So parentish, I think, applies.
0:14:03 What about mentor?
0:14:06 Do you think of yourself as a mentor or is that not a word that fits?
0:14:09 I recognize that there’s mentorship going on.
0:14:14 It sounds pretentious to call yourself a mentor unless it’s like an actual title.
0:14:19 One’s a little bit squeamish about using language like that, but the act of teaching someone
0:14:26 I do recognize is crucial to being, definitely to leading, but also just you’re learning
0:14:27 all the time.
0:14:31 There’s a kind of mentor and mentorship that happens in every dimension of life.
0:14:33 How do you choose, though, as a teacher?
0:14:36 How do you choose who to spend time with?
0:14:41 Because you were supervising a lot of people at a place like The Times Magazine.
0:14:45 I don’t know how many story editors there were, maybe 8, 10, 12.
0:14:47 You had very different relationships with each one.
0:14:49 How does that work for you?
0:14:50 Is it a choice?
0:14:52 I don’t think it’s a choice exactly.
0:14:56 You hope that everybody feels that they are the favorite child.
0:14:57 That’s what you’re trying to do.
0:15:04 But everybody responds to different kinds of help, prodding, embracing, all the various
0:15:06 things that make for mentorships.
0:15:11 Just back to the family thing, you have a different relationship with each of your children.
0:15:16 That’s not to say that somewhere in there, you don’t have people that you think have
0:15:17 more potential.
0:15:21 Generally, they’re people who show that they’re eager to learn.
0:15:27 They kind of put their hand up and say, “Teach me,” and there’s no teacher who isn’t moved
0:15:28 by that.
0:15:34 Do you have advice for people who are not naturally … I do believe there’s an astonishing
0:15:41 amount of human capital in the world that is untapped because the possessor of it doesn’t
0:15:45 know how to export it, and others don’t know how to import it.
0:15:46 Import it.
0:15:47 Yeah, that’s nice.
0:15:52 I don’t have advice except to recognize that it’s an essential part of learning, to be
0:15:56 open to learning and to teach, then maybe you have to make a slightly more active effort
0:15:57 at it.
0:15:58 You certainly have to be open to it.
0:16:06 You certainly have to know what you don’t know and find ways to ask, maybe not out loud,
0:16:10 but to signal your openness to being taught.
0:16:15 I mean, it’s an interesting period because what I witness in younger people these days
0:16:18 is that they love their parents, and they have their very …
0:16:21 And very different relationships with their parents.
0:16:25 Yes, very, very different, and also they’re very comfortable with adults in a way that
0:16:27 was different from when I was young.
0:16:32 But there are certain things they resent, and there’s a kind of parenting as it exists
0:16:37 in a workplace that they would bristle at, which I found very valuable growing up.
0:16:41 It’s a sort of famous thing at Esquire when I was there, there would be these story meetings,
0:16:46 and people would cry at the end of the meeting.
0:16:54 They would leave and cry because the editors in charge were kind of unstinting in their
0:16:55 withering comments.
0:17:00 Now, you say this as if people didn’t leave and cry at the end of a New York Times magazine
0:17:01 meeting when you were …
0:17:02 Well, I …
0:17:03 You just didn’t see it.
0:17:08 The point is that I learned from my own mentors that this was the way you conducted a meeting.
0:17:12 It was much more efficient to be brutally honest.
0:17:15 That’s an idea that doesn’t work because blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:17:17 One thought of that as teaching.
0:17:21 I tried to bring some of that stricter method, and people were gassed.
0:17:26 And I would say, “Look, when I was growing up, you used to cry at the end of these meetings.”
0:17:30 And they said, “I don’t want to cry at the end of the meetings, and it’s not going to
0:17:31 work.”
0:17:32 And they were right.
0:17:36 It was necessarily the better way to do it, but because it was the way that I learned
0:17:42 how to sharpen my mind as an editor, I had an expectation that I should do the same with
0:17:46 those people I was trying to get to do the work a certain way.
0:17:47 In that case, yeah.
0:17:48 They taught me.
0:17:50 Meaning, the younger people taught you, like, “This doesn’t feel good.”
0:17:51 This doesn’t feel good.
0:17:52 But did you stop?
0:17:53 And this doesn’t …
0:17:54 Well, I found workarounds.
0:17:57 I found other ways to try to accomplish the same thing.
0:18:00 For instance, just different language.
0:18:04 Basically I learned to praise and then to withhold.
0:18:05 So that was a strategy?
0:18:06 Come over.
0:18:09 It wasn’t a conscious strategy, but I realized that’s what I was doing.
0:18:13 I was certainly told at enough times that I came to realize that, “Oh, yeah, this is
0:18:14 what I do.”
0:18:21 I did speak with five, six, seven former employees of yours, some of whom I overlapped with at
0:18:24 The Times Magazine, some of whom I didn’t.
0:18:29 If we were making a word cloud, I think withholding was probably the big word.
0:18:36 But let me just say that on balance, the overall experience was overwhelmingly positive because
0:18:43 what I got from working with you and what they all got was just a deep, deep satisfaction
0:18:50 of accomplishment and a recognition that you don’t get that satisfaction without having
0:18:54 a lot of failure and bumps along the way.
0:18:58 Not humiliation, and you didn’t humiliate people ever, as far as I know, I don’t know.
0:19:01 I don’t think so, I hope not.
0:19:05 So when I left The Times Magazine working for you, I left because I just wanted to be
0:19:06 a writer.
0:19:08 I loved being an editor.
0:19:13 Editing was the best training for me to be a writer, in part because I saw how many big-time
0:19:19 writers when they would turn in their manuscripts, they were terrible, and I thought, “Holy cow.”
0:19:22 If they can turn in stuff like that, I can do this.
0:19:23 Yes, Pulitzer Prize winners.
0:19:27 I was shocked, but it was also just amazing experience and fun.
0:19:33 It’s really fun to do the work, but then you gave me a six-month leave to go start working
0:19:37 on my first book, and I remember coming back and saying, “This is the life I want.
0:19:39 I like alone.”
0:19:44 And then I remember, at least my recollection is that I said, “I’m really appreciative of
0:19:48 the leave you gave me, and I love this place, I love this work,” but that’s what I want
0:19:54 to do long-term, and so I’d like to stay here for another year, that’s the deal that I remember
0:19:55 crafting.
0:19:59 And then I remember our relationship changed because I was a lame duck.
0:20:00 So what?
0:20:06 Did I just not care about you anymore because you were not going to be a long-term asset
0:20:07 for me?
0:20:08 Was I that calculated?
0:20:09 I wouldn’t say it was that.
0:20:12 I think it was more like plow horse idea.
0:20:14 Get as much out of you as I could.
0:20:15 It wasn’t bad.
0:20:20 The work was still really exciting, but another reason I left was that I recognized when you
0:20:27 succeed in a place like that, this happens in many occupations, when you succeed in some
0:20:32 kind of maker role, you end up getting promoted into a manager role, a boss, and I did not
0:20:37 want to be a boss, so leaving the times to write meant I would never have to be a boss
0:20:43 of anyone other than myself, but then I wrote books, and then the books turned into this
0:20:46 thing that we’re doing now at your company.
0:20:52 We have 20 people, and I think the boss that I became is very much like the boss that you
0:20:53 were.
0:20:54 Oh, really?
0:20:55 Oh, my God.
0:21:00 Now, is that just natural, or do you think that you learned certain attributes of a boss
0:21:02 person from me?
0:21:03 Not natural.
0:21:04 I’ll learn.
0:21:05 That’s what I’m saying.
0:21:08 That’s why I would call you a mentor, even if an unintentional or accidental mentor.
0:21:09 Oh, how interesting.
0:21:11 God, that’s scary.
0:21:12 I’m a writer.
0:21:14 You know, writers are writers.
0:21:18 You have a way of seeing the world, you have a way of, and a lot of this is what I learned
0:21:19 from you.
0:21:22 You have a way of assessing, is this idea worth doing?
0:21:23 Definitely.
0:21:25 That’s a big part of it.
0:21:28 Execution is important, but I always think of it a little bit like pro athletes.
0:21:32 You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have the talent, and then you realize that what you’re
0:21:40 really after is developing your taste or your sense of what’s interesting, what’s important,
0:21:43 what’s fun, what’s new.
0:21:45 Those are all things I learned from you.
0:21:49 You may have learned some methods from me, but your taste and sensibility was not something
0:21:53 I had much influence over at all, because it’s just who you are.
0:21:59 Maybe to some degree, but I think anybody who’s learning, who takes their thing seriously,
0:22:04 it’s thrilling when you encounter someone who sets a standard high.
0:22:10 But the problem is, when you go from being a writer to then being a boss, my first producing
0:22:16 partners, the word that got attached to me was like, “Dubbner’s too exacting.”
0:22:19 And I was pissed because I thought, “What’s wrong with that?
0:22:22 I learned from Adam Moss.”
0:22:24 Even hearing it back to me, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
0:22:28 I think that’s something that you should wear proudly.
0:22:34 I’m very glad to hear that what you felt as a person working with me, for me, whatever.
0:22:35 You can say “for you.”
0:22:36 It’s okay.
0:22:40 Because that you found delight in making something great.
0:22:43 That’s the main thing that I was trying to teach.
0:22:49 Even though it’s painful in the moment, you’re going to feel so good at having made something
0:22:53 that you put everything into and that you can be proud of at the end.
0:22:58 I hope that I conveyed that and that I worked with the kind of people who would feel that
0:23:02 and who would be willing to work pretty hard because they wanted to make something they
0:23:03 felt really, really good about.
0:23:08 It’s not everybody, but that is a certain kind of person and you’re that kind of person
0:23:12 and I’m that kind of person and there’s a reason we ended up in the same place.
0:23:18 I think the thing that’s most important or attractive about what you just said, but also
0:23:23 very much animates your book, is that it’s not just a thrill of accomplishing because
0:23:25 something is good.
0:23:26 It’s doing something different.
0:23:27 Yeah.
0:23:32 One other aspect of this whole business is that artists or any of when we’re talking
0:23:35 creative people, they need to not be bored.
0:23:39 It is incredibly difficult to make something and you have to have reasons to go on and
0:23:42 one of those reasons is simple interest.
0:23:47 You have to feel stimulated and if you do the same thing over and over and over and over
0:23:51 again, you’re just going to bore yourself to tears.
0:23:55 The artistic person, creative person, I don’t know what you want to call them, person who
0:24:01 wants to make something will constantly find new ways to do it because they’re trying to
0:24:04 keep themselves engaged.
0:24:09 In my book, I mean everybody remembers their childhood as lonely of course, but it is definitely
0:24:18 true that one after another, they describe childhoods of isolation and of need and then
0:24:21 something came along to fill that need.
0:24:24 Among other things, they learn to talk to themselves.
0:24:25 This is a big theme of my book.
0:24:31 I think of all of this as ways of talking to yourself, as ways of translating what your
0:24:33 imagination produces.
0:24:38 And what happened when Adam Moss’s imagination started producing something new?
0:24:44 Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my
0:24:46 painting life, I didn’t.
0:24:47 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:49 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:25:06 In 2019, Adam Moss stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of New York Magazine.
0:25:11 Here’s what he said at the time, “I’ve been going full throttle for 40 years.
0:25:14 I want to see what my life is like with less ambition.
0:25:16 I’m older than the staff.
0:25:17 I’m older than the readers.
0:25:20 I just want to do something new.”
0:25:23 That new thing, at least for a while, was painting.
0:25:28 When I thought I wanted to paint, I was up in Cape Cod where I have a place and without
0:25:34 any schooling whatsoever, I didn’t know how to do a thing.
0:25:40 My schooling was really when I went to buy paints, I’d talk to the salesperson and ask
0:25:45 them to have this work, like I didn’t understand what a medium was, I didn’t understand anything.
0:25:50 Nevertheless, I had this idea that I would do a painting a day, and that’s what I did.
0:25:54 One day I’d do a flower and then the other day I’d do some crazy stupid abstract and
0:25:58 then I would just make an effort at doing a person or something.
0:26:02 The whole idea was that at the end of the day, painting would be finished and thrown
0:26:05 away and start it over, it was fun.
0:26:09 Came back and I thought that was the end of it, I thought it was just a sort of fun little
0:26:14 summer thing, and a friend of mine said, “Well, you really seem to have liked it.
0:26:16 You really should get some training.”
0:26:24 She then connected me up with the head of painting, I think, at the Yale School of Art.
0:26:28 I can hear many listeners’ heads exploding, first teacher, head of painting at Yale School
0:26:29 of Art.
0:26:30 Well, no, she wasn’t my teacher.
0:26:35 She had a student who had just graduated who she thought was really good.
0:26:38 Her name was Maria De La Sandalus and she’s in the book.
0:26:42 She is a beautiful artist, but also a really lovely person.
0:26:44 She would just come over my house.
0:26:49 She taught me how to draw and she taught me how to paint at the beginning.
0:26:54 It wasn’t a particularly structured learning process, but she was my friend, my painting
0:26:55 friend.
0:26:59 Was it built around ideas or mostly execution technique, et cetera?
0:27:01 There was a certain amount of technique.
0:27:08 There was a lot of just helping me find my confidence as a painter and there was just
0:27:14 a certain kindness that I found empowering and a sense that she had that I had something
0:27:16 to make.
0:27:21 Was kindness in a mentor/teacher important to you?
0:27:22 It’s important to me.
0:27:23 It may not be important to other people.
0:27:28 If you look through history at creators of all types and people of all types, people
0:27:35 who have mentors, if you had to guess, would you say that on average, kindness is a benefit
0:27:41 or an attribute at least because when I think of a lot of what people claim at least to
0:27:45 be successful mentorships, there’s often, I don’t know about an absence of kindness,
0:27:49 but a presence of something else.
0:27:54 Certainly there is an expectation that this person can do better and I guess that can
0:27:59 be experienced in a lot of ways as being stern and forbidding and all of that kind of thing
0:28:03 and I’ve had mentor types like that, but I personally respond to kindness.
0:28:06 I need to feel a little loved.
0:28:12 If you were to generalize what a successful mentor is, would you use that as a template
0:28:13 or do you think that’s just for you?
0:28:20 I think there has to be a bedrock of they have a belief in you and you have to feel
0:28:21 it.
0:28:23 Otherwise the mentorship doesn’t work.
0:28:27 You have to believe that they are rooting for you.
0:28:30 I have never seen one of Adam Moss’s paintings.
0:28:32 That’s quite on purpose, yes.
0:28:35 He insists that he is just not a very good painter.
0:28:37 I’m more mediocre than Ben.
0:28:39 I’m okay, but that’s not good enough for me.
0:28:44 When someone is exacting, which we have already established Adam Moss is, then mediocrity
0:28:46 can feel worse than death.
0:28:50 So he needed to find something else to make, something that he would be good at and that’s
0:28:56 how he came to write The Work of Art, a book about how other creative people make something
0:28:58 from nothing.
0:29:01 It’s a book about the process of making.
0:29:07 I’ve always loved process because essentially I love narrative and the act of how something
0:29:12 comes to be is just a perfect story.
0:29:14 Starts with nothing and then ends up something.
0:29:18 But there’s a whole other part of this book that’s trying to understand the personality
0:29:22 attributes that make someone successful as an artist.
0:29:27 It’s about half visual and it works almost like a giant diagram where the text itself
0:29:29 winds around the images.
0:29:31 Some mucic, but also magazines.
0:29:35 And then it has all this footnote material, which is the me in the book for the most part.
0:29:36 Although you’re in the…
0:29:37 I’m in the introductions too.
0:29:42 Yeah, but also chapters differ because in some chapters they’re through written by you
0:29:43 with quotes.
0:29:44 Right.
0:29:45 In other chapters it’s more oral history.
0:29:46 Yes.
0:29:47 Right.
0:29:49 And in that way it’s very much like a big, big, big magazine.
0:29:50 Absolutely.
0:29:51 But it was a new pursuit.
0:29:56 It was new and yet I hope it had the benefit of a lifetime’s experience as a magazine maker.
0:30:00 I had never written a book before and I was really scared of writing.
0:30:01 It’s harder than it looks.
0:30:03 It’s so hard.
0:30:04 Unlike you, I never wanted to be a writer.
0:30:08 I would never have left magazines for writing, but I did leave magazines at a certain point
0:30:13 because I just felt that I didn’t want to be a boss anymore.
0:30:18 I started to write this book and I was just a terrible, terrible, terrible writer, really.
0:30:19 And I had to teach myself.
0:30:24 I had to use my editor head and at first my editor had recognized that it was terrible,
0:30:28 but didn’t have any solutions in mind.
0:30:35 And then over time I just began to strip it of its ridiculous ornamentation.
0:30:37 Was that all by yourself though or did you go to people for it?
0:30:39 No, I did that most of myself.
0:30:45 And then eventually, okay, I got to a place where I was happier as a writer and also the
0:30:46 work itself was better.
0:30:51 Let me just point out the difference between being an editor and being a writer might seem
0:30:52 not that large.
0:30:54 It’s huge.
0:30:56 It’s like marathon versus sprint.
0:31:01 They’re both running, but I wouldn’t think it could have felt so similar to what you’d
0:31:02 spent your life doing.
0:31:03 Well, okay, let me…
0:31:09 I created the book in the way that I created the book in order to assemble a community.
0:31:15 I wanted the group thing, which I always loved in magazines, and I wanted a sense of a lot
0:31:17 of people doing something together.
0:31:24 And so I kind of invented one, and that invention was a whole part one, which was to engage
0:31:26 all these artists in my project.
0:31:32 Okay, Amy Silman, show me how you made a painting, and we’ll go from beginning to end.
0:31:37 Okay, George Saunders, let’s talk about how you wrote “Lincoln and the Bardo,” and
0:31:41 David Mandel, how you wrote “A Joke,” or Kara Walker, how you built this magnificent
0:31:45 sculpture, or Stephen Sondheim, how you wrote a song.
0:31:53 And that process was essentially me recreating a context of group creation, because I thought
0:31:55 of them as my collaborators, not as my subjects.
0:31:57 So that was part one.
0:32:00 Part two was writing, I described already what a hell that was.
0:32:03 And was it hell because the collaborator was no longer there?
0:32:05 I’m just alone in the room again.
0:32:09 It’s the aloneness, it’s the dialogue in your head that was driving me completely crazy,
0:32:11 and it’s why I never was a writer in the first place.
0:32:16 I just found it unbearably lonely, and also I didn’t know how to act all the parts in
0:32:21 my head, where I could talk to myself and make myself better, which I didn’t know how
0:32:25 to do when it’s different people, but I didn’t know how to do in my own head.
0:32:30 So for some of the creators in your book, the people who influenced them were often people
0:32:32 that they never interacted with.
0:32:37 Yeah, possibly never met, you know, Gregory Crudson, who talked about his work as almost
0:32:44 a mathematical formula from like William Eggleston to Ray Carver short stories to David Lynch
0:32:50 and Blue Velvet, some combination of people with sensibility that in his own mind came
0:32:51 together.
0:32:53 Describe what a Crudson photo looks like.
0:33:02 A Crudson photo is a gigantic photograph that resembles a movie still, lit like a movie,
0:33:08 with enough narrative portent, but with no before or after.
0:33:15 So the viewer is meant to supply the narrative by looking at this picture and putting it
0:33:18 into a context of his or her own imagination.
0:33:22 So Eggleston and David Lynch and all those make a lot of sense.
0:33:26 Yeah, I in general don’t much care about the strict definitions of anything.
0:33:31 This book is a book about artists, but really I’ve bent the term “artist” pretty much
0:33:32 as far as it can go.
0:33:36 But I also believe that about mentorship, which in the end it doesn’t matter.
0:33:41 I guess the big distinguishing factor for me would be an influence can be distant and
0:33:47 unaware of you, whereas a mentor, there’s necessarily some kind of estuarial exchange.
0:33:48 Yeah.
0:33:53 Well, one interesting thing about the book was I kept looking for who is the person who
0:33:55 encouraged you when you were young.
0:34:01 There weren’t necessarily the person who was by your side when you were an adult, but
0:34:06 there had to be somebody, could be a parent, could be an art teacher, could be anybody
0:34:09 who basically saw something in them.
0:34:16 And that seeing was crucial to the development of their confidence that they could make the
0:34:20 thing, which of course confidence and what I in the book call faith, the faith that they
0:34:25 are actually able to make the thing that’s in their head, which they can’t, but you have
0:34:28 to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:34:33 I think the book is a bit of a, not a smoke and mirror, but a bit of sleight of hand in
0:34:36 that it’s called the work of art.
0:34:41 And it’s plainly about the process of making creative things.
0:34:46 And it’s plainly about what it took for those creators to even get to the point where they
0:34:47 were able to create something.
0:34:49 I know you love process.
0:34:52 That was a word that you said probably 30 times a day.
0:34:54 And it’s a word that I just have come to despise.
0:34:55 Oh, seriously?
0:34:57 Well, just the words sound so ugly.
0:35:02 It’s so beautiful, the thing that it’s describing and the word itself is so crude really.
0:35:08 I feel like as a magazine editor, some of your favorite stories or at least my conception
0:35:12 of some of your favorite stories were when there was a process of something being described
0:35:13 over time.
0:35:14 Absolutely.
0:35:18 And written texts, not that documentary film can’t do a lot of things can do it, but text
0:35:24 is great at that because it can move in and out of time and it can magnify and shrink.
0:35:29 So as much as you say that this book is about process and artifacts and so on, it was a
0:35:32 thrill to read because I love your work and I loved working with you.
0:35:35 But you never talked that much.
0:35:38 You dropped hints about what made something great or not.
0:35:41 We all learned the language of Adam Moss.
0:35:45 But it was often fragments, rarely sentences, never paragraphs.
0:35:48 I sound maddening from your description.
0:35:52 I sound like I must have been just a horrible person to work for, but okay.
0:35:53 Maddening maybe a little bit.
0:35:54 Well, definitely not.
0:35:55 Definitely not.
0:35:57 But maddening among nine other things.
0:36:01 But what struck me the book was really about was something separate than the process of
0:36:08 creation, really more about what it takes to become the kind of person who can create
0:36:10 things from whole cloth.
0:36:13 That’s really hard to do and I don’t think people understand the bravery it takes to
0:36:14 do that.
0:36:15 Yeah.
0:36:16 The book is not self-help.
0:36:20 So I’m not sure a lot of these things can be learned.
0:36:24 I mean, you can get better at everything, but you’re either a person who can focus or you
0:36:25 can’t.
0:36:28 You’re either obsessional or you’re not.
0:36:31 You have a high tolerance for tedium, which you need to to be an artist.
0:36:32 Or you don’t.
0:36:35 You have drive or you don’t.
0:36:36 What about taste?
0:36:38 You have taste or you don’t.
0:36:41 Or you have a certain sensibility or you have a certain sense of humor.
0:36:46 These are all things that you acquire for all sorts of mysterious reasons that you and
0:36:47 I don’t understand.
0:36:50 No one has ever understood how personality is formed.
0:36:56 And that all said, the book is, I hope, very encouraging to artists because I think most
0:37:02 people who are trying to make things don’t need to be James Joyce or Pablo Picasso or
0:37:04 Louise Glock even.
0:37:10 They can be themselves and they can find immense joy and satisfaction in making art.
0:37:13 They improve their ability to focus.
0:37:18 They improve their ability to persevere, to not give up when things get hard.
0:37:24 A lot of art making comes down to something as rudimentary as being able to learn to
0:37:25 fail.
0:37:33 Again, like parenting, it’s a little bit like a child learns to walk because they understand
0:37:34 how they can get up from falling.
0:37:36 They have to fall.
0:37:39 Your book nods at failure.
0:37:41 I think it’s a lot about failure.
0:37:42 Okay.
0:37:43 But ultimately.
0:37:44 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:45 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:46 Yeah.
0:37:53 And I’m thinking, yeah, this failure is instructive and real and useful to hear about, but it’s
0:37:56 an exercise in what some people call survivorship bias, right?
0:37:58 We read about the winners.
0:37:59 Sure, of course.
0:38:03 And I was very well aware of that, that this is a retrospective history of success.
0:38:06 And so everything has to be viewed through that lens.
0:38:10 I’ve always had this theory that I think is wrong, but as a writer or if you’re a creative
0:38:16 person of any type, an editor or an entrepreneur or whatever, I think it’s natural to try
0:38:17 to mimic success.
0:38:18 Yeah.
0:38:21 But I think that most successes are pretty singular.
0:38:23 I completely agree with you.
0:38:27 And so I felt that learning from failure was really the way to go.
0:38:33 I wanted very much to give people permission to fail because failure is, if you go through
0:38:36 the narratives in the book, there’s just failure right and left.
0:38:40 When you’re trying to create something, your brain is trying to subvert you in so many ways.
0:38:45 There are so many obstacles, and there is this kind of animus you need to have in order
0:38:47 to barrel ahead.
0:38:49 An animus toward what?
0:38:50 Animus is the wrong word.
0:38:54 You have to have a fighting spirit, I guess I would say, where you’re just not going
0:38:59 to be daunted, which as I was going through this, I found very reassuring because of course
0:39:05 the reason I did the book was because I had recently taken a painting and felt enormous
0:39:13 frustration and a sense of failure in that and truly what I didn’t understand is in
0:39:18 a group, there is a conversation that happens that’s external.
0:39:22 You and I, if we’re working together making a magazine, we talk about something, there’s
0:39:26 a phrase that came up in the David Simon chapter called The Bounce.
0:39:29 Our method of making something better is by bouncing.
0:39:34 I say something to you, you say something to me, bang, bang, bang, in the end something
0:39:37 happens which is better than it was when we started.
0:39:43 In most artists’ lives, that conversation has to happen in their own head.
0:39:47 I became very confused, how does someone have this kind of inner dialogue, and that’s what
0:39:50 I was trying to understand.
0:39:54 David Simon was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun before he started writing books
0:39:56 and making TV shows.
0:40:00 One of those shows was The Wire, which many people consider one of the best TV shows ever
0:40:01 made.
0:40:05 If you would like to hear an interview with him, check out the People I Mostly Admire
0:40:09 podcast, another show in the Freakonomics Radio network.
0:40:13 It’s episode 109 called David Simon is on strike.
0:40:14 Here’s why.
0:40:17 We’ll hear more from Adam Moss in a minute.
0:40:37 I am Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:40:41 So would this book exist had you been a better painter?
0:40:42 Probably not.
0:40:46 I would not have had The Drive, which was born of my own frustration.
0:40:51 So I would have been satisfied painting all day because I would, I hope, have taken a
0:40:55 certain kind of satisfaction from the painting itself that, you know, why do you want to
0:40:56 do anything else?
0:41:01 I just want to do this all day long, which now I feel actually not because I’ve gotten
0:41:05 to be a better painter, but because I understand something about my relationship to painting
0:41:06 that I learned from the book.
0:41:08 Which is what?
0:41:12 When you say this in this context, it sounds so banal, but here I’ll say it’s a hobby.
0:41:15 Now, well, there’s a way in which that’s a description.
0:41:19 But what I would really say is that I was trying to create narratives and so for the
0:41:21 narrative to work, I wanted happy ending.
0:41:23 I wanted an exaltation.
0:41:28 I wanted that moment in the rom-com with the big kiss at the end where everyone lives happily
0:41:30 ever after.
0:41:36 And the artists themselves, when they would get to that point in their own storytelling
0:41:39 of their own work, refused to give me that.
0:41:45 They would express a certain amount of relief that the thing was over.
0:41:47 Maybe they would say, “Yeah, it was nice.
0:41:51 I was glad other people got to see it and I heard some nice things about it.”
0:41:54 But you’d never got the big firework.
0:42:00 And I found that as a writer of the book, somewhat frustrating, I kind of needed it for closure.
0:42:05 I needed it for my own purposes, but I also needed to feel that they made something great.
0:42:06 I was rooting for them.
0:42:12 There was a great deal of transference involved in this book, and I fell in love with all
0:42:19 of my subjects, so I wanted something spectacular for them in the end, and it never came.
0:42:22 When I would talk to them about that, I said, “Well, you don’t sound like that.
0:42:24 That was very important.”
0:42:27 And they said, “It’s not about the thing I’m making, it is really about the work.
0:42:33 I just get up every day because I like or I need more than I like to work in this way.”
0:42:37 And the endpoint is not that relevant to me.
0:42:42 And I just thought this was bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit over a long period
0:42:43 of time.
0:42:48 And then I was just worn down, and I came to kind of grok the truth of it.
0:42:52 I absorbed that, and suddenly my relationship to my own work changed.
0:42:53 How so?
0:42:58 I got enormous pleasure from what I like to think of as the verb of it rather than the
0:43:04 noun of it making one mark as a painter, just like one little chew that pleased me for whatever
0:43:11 reason released me from this incredibly punishing attitude I had toward the work itself.
0:43:15 I do care about the work itself, I really still want to be a good painter, but I can
0:43:17 get pleasure out of the making.
0:43:22 It’s interesting as you’re describing you coming to accept what these people were telling
0:43:27 you about their perpetual dissatisfaction because you make it sound so foreign.
0:43:33 But that’s exactly the way that I and everybody else who ever worked with you described you.
0:43:39 When you were happy with the work that I or anyone else did, everyone described it as
0:43:42 this like great thrill, it was like a high.
0:43:46 Getting your approval or praise was incredibly powerful.
0:43:51 Then there’s the corollary, getting your dissatisfaction could be demoralizing for many people.
0:43:52 You had to kind of fight through that.
0:43:59 But the steady state was more like, yeah, it was a really good issue this week.
0:44:00 That was it.
0:44:01 That implies many other things.
0:44:07 It wasn’t a great issue and more important, there’s next week also.
0:44:09 That’s one of the things that’s fantastic about magazines.
0:44:14 You always have next week or in a digital world, you always have five minutes from now.
0:44:19 That’s why I was particularly suited to magazines, but none of us know ourselves very well.
0:44:25 Over lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting
0:44:27 life, I didn’t.
0:44:33 To the degree that it’s hard to know oneself, let’s call it the internal versus the external
0:44:37 on a scale of zero to five, how bad or good do you think you are?
0:44:39 Well certainly not zero and certainly not five.
0:44:42 So somewhere in that two to four range.
0:44:45 Did you become more self-aware over time and experience as an editor?
0:44:47 Yeah, I think so.
0:44:48 Maybe to a fault.
0:44:49 What do you mean by that?
0:44:52 Sometimes experience can be a hindrance.
0:44:55 You stop yourself from making something.
0:45:00 The Simeon chapter, the Simeon Nosrat chapter, the title of the chapter is With Beginner’s
0:45:08 Eyes because she makes this observation about Sulfat acid heat that when she, very excitedly
0:45:12 at the beginning of her cooking life, tells a fellow chef, the fellow chef says well everybody
0:45:13 knows that.
0:45:15 She says no they don’t.
0:45:16 They don’t know that.
0:45:22 In any way I’ve never seen that anywhere and I think people need to hear this, that this
0:45:24 is really how you should think about cooking.
0:45:29 And she goes on and builds this fabulous book and then a little empire off of it.
0:45:33 Sometimes experience stops you from doing something because you know it has failed too
0:45:38 often and you don’t want to go through that failure again.
0:45:41 You have to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:45:52 That was Adam Moss, the most influential boss I ever had by a mile, who did me the great
0:45:57 favor of showing me that I didn’t want to be boss, that I just wanted to make things,
0:46:01 but who also taught me how to be better at making things.
0:46:02 So thanks, Adam.
0:46:07 His book is called The Work of Art, although it might just as easily have been called The
0:46:09 Art of Work.
0:46:14 And the other book he just mentioned, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is also well worth reading
0:46:19 and you can hear its author, Samin Nasrat on a couple of Freakonomics Radio episodes
0:46:20 from 2023.
0:46:25 One is called What’s Wrong with Being a One Hit Wonder and the other is Samin Nasrat
0:46:27 Always Wanted to Be Famous.
0:46:34 Coming up next time on the show, we ask why is there so much fraud in academia?
0:46:38 If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as
0:46:40 a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
0:46:46 The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful
0:46:51 career because most people, if they’re caught at all, they skate.
0:46:58 She was at the center of everything, being a prestigious faculty member at Harvard and
0:47:01 all of her public speaking and her books.
0:47:02 That’s next time.
0:47:06 Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.
0:47:09 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:47:15 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
0:47:17 transcripts and show notes.
0:47:21 This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:25 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin
0:47:31 Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine
0:47:35 Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnson, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Neil Coruth,
0:47:38 Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:47:41 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:47:44 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:47:50 As always, thank you for listening.
0:47:51 I’m going to shut up.
0:47:52 Can you just say that again?
0:47:53 Gigantic.
0:47:54 No, say it the way you did.
0:47:55 Gigantic.
0:48:07 The Freakonomics Radio network, the hidden side of everything.
0:48:08 Stitcher.
0:48:11 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Adam Moss was the best magazine editor of his generation. When he retired, he took up painting. But he wasn’t very good, and that made him sad. So he wrote a book about how creative people work— and, in the process, he made himself happy again.
- SOURCE:
- Adam Moss, magazine editor and author.
- RESOURCES:
- The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, by Adam Moss (2024).
- “Goodbye, New York. Adam Moss Is Leaving the Magazine He Has Edited for 15 Years,” by Michael M. Grynbaum (The New York Times, 2019).
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat (2017).
- EXTRAS:
- “David Simon Is On Strike. Here’s Why,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
- “Samin Nosrat Always Wanted to Be Famous,” by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
- “What’s Wrong with Being a One-Hit Wonder?” by Freakonomics Radio (2023).