[CTQ Smartcast] Journalism and Writing in a Changing World, with Samanth Subramanian

Samanth Subramanian is a journalist and an award-winning author of three books. He is a senior writer for Quartz, covering the future of capitalism, and a contributor writer for the Guardian Long Read. Based in London, his writing has appeared in publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, WIRED, Granta, the Wall Street Journal, 1843-Intelligent Life, Aeon, and Mint.

In this CTQ Smartcast, he speaks to CTQ co-founder Ramanand about the future of journalism in a digital world, how he works on his writing, researching a piece while being confined at home, and whether books & reading will endure. Being one of India’s best quizzers, Samanth is confronted with three quiz questions connected to him. Can he crack all three?

 

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Some of the things we spoke about

  • How journalism is a natural home for generalists

  • Finding and developing entries into stories, and doing research

  • The big shifts in journalism in the last two decades

  • Effect of new business models in media?

  • What Samanth learned about communicating science from reading the essays of JBS Haldane

  • Writing long form pieces

  • Practising good writing

  • The “Creator Economy”, newsletters, and personal branding for journalists

  • Samanth’s current beat: “The Future of Capitalism”

  • Researching new trends

  • Note-taking systems

  • The Future Relevance of the New Yorker, Kindle, and long form journalism

AND

  • Why Samanth isn’t losing sleep over the likes of GPT-3

PLUS

  • Watch Samanth tackle a question about Japanese culture and cult Tamil film ‘Michael Madhana Kamarajan”

  • See below for some of his recommendations

What featured in the conversation

  • Approaching narrative fiction as if it was a conversation with friends

  • Demystifying “voice”, “style”, and “range” in writing

  • The geographical differences in dealing with publication house styles

  • How the Internet has expanded the sense of why it is important to know about stories from all parts of the world

  • Dealing with the decline in advertising in certain types of media, like print.

  • Writing well, especially to communicate abstract ideas

  • Creating great long form reads

  • “Targeted Careful Reading” to learn from great pieces 

  • Teasing out the underlying themes and arguments while reading

  • Why the Kindle succeeds despite its relative lack of innovation

  • PG Wodehouse and JBS Haldane

The articles, books, and tools referred in the conversation

Love to read but lost the habit? Want to get inspired to write? Tired of reading only about politics and tech, and want to widen your horizons? Join CTQ’s Daily Reader Compound to build a strong reading habit via wonderfully eclectic short articles.

 
 

If you enjoyed this topic, watch the CTQ Smartcast on How Great Audio Brings Wonder To Our Lives.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

[CTQ Smartcast] Journalism & Writing in a Changing World, With Samanth Subramanian

[00:00:00]

J Ramanand: Great journalism helps us see how our world is changing. But, we live in a world where journalism itself is changing. What does an active practitioner make of these changes? In this CTQ Smartcast, we speak to Samanth Subramanian, a journalist, and an award-winning author of three books. The most recent one of which was on the British-Indian scientist, JBS Haldane. In this episode, Samanth discusses the future of journalism, how he approaches writing on the future of capitalism, why conversations are so critical to good writing, how he uses the approach of targeted careful reading to improve his writing, and why he doesn't recommend books on writing. Samanth is also one of India's best quizzers. So we put to him three fun quiz questions collectively. Can he crack all three? Find out in the Smartcast.

Ramanand: Our guest on the CTQ Smartcast today is the answer to what connects fish, Sri Lanka, and the eminent scientist JBS Haldane. Samanth Subramanian, welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.

Samanth Subramanian: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ramanand: Samanth, let's rewind the clock a little bit. Is there an origin story to when you decided that you wanted to get into writing and be a journalist?

Samanth: There isn't actually. I think, at the end of my school year, the only thing I knew was that I didn't want to be an engineer. I was fortunate enough at that time to have gotten a scholarship to study an undergraduate degree in the US. When I had applied, I had to put down some kind of major or specialization, pick something [00:02:00] with the assumption that it was always possible to change it a year or two years into the course. That's how the US system works. I put down journalism, almost as a kind of fluke. It seemed like something that would be interesting to study because I liked reading, I enjoyed writing, and I was addicted to the news in the late 90s. So I put that down, and I went in, took a few courses, and enjoyed it enough to stick with it. There was no big hinge or inflection point where I decided to become a journalist or a writer. It just was the constraints of the application form to this one particular university that led me there.

Ramanand: Alright. Looking back, I've been fortunate to follow you first through your blogging and through the quizzing circuit, as well. You've often taken the scenic route, you've written about cinema, you've written about sports, cricket, in particular. And today, you're writing about things like the future of capitalism. Describe the scenic route to me. What was it? This is a common kind of reaction for a lot of generalists, I guess, and specialists, perhaps if you were to look at a very crude divide that way, the generalists tend to meander for a bit, drink in different pools, before settling in and then they never, ever truly settle in. How did those years go?

Samanth: It's interesting. You are right in the sense that it might be the reaction for a lot of specialists looking at generalists. But I think it's also the reaction of a lot of people who are maybe not accustomed to seeing journalism from the inside out. I think journalism, by and large, is a field [00:04:00] where this kind of generalism may not be common, it may not be universal, but it is certainly common enough that nobody remarks upon it. It is quite regular in journalism, I think that you start off covering one thing and then move to another thing and then eventually end up somewhere else.

My own tastes and preferences also led me to this kind of generalist approach, because I find myself interested in a lot of different things. My quizzing, which you mentioned, is also an offshoot of that in one sense. I feel too much as if, in my mind, that it would be too much to be tied down to one subject for the rest of my life.

There are sacrifices here, obviously. You sacrifice the kind of depth that you could get if you stick to one thing for 20 years. I started off as a cricket journalist in 2001. If I had been a cricket journalist, 20 years later, maybe I would have acquired a huge level of depth to it. But, my interest was more in the writing aspect of it. And by that what I mean is the form of journalism or the operation, the process of journalism. Let me explain that a little bit. In the sense that I like to put together facts, stories and anecdotes, and research. The assembling of that. Then I like the transformation of that into a piece of prose or a piece of text, the actual process of writing it.

As long as these two components of the job are available to me, I don't even mind what I write about. I have to be interested in the subject. Then I have to be able to write about it in a way that makes it interesting to me and to others. My entire operational principle of journalism, if you will, [00:06:00] is the fact that, if you have these two moving parts, you can apply them to any subject and any topic.

Increasingly, as you know that I've been moving over the last 10 years, in particular, moving more and more towards longer pieces, and again, it's that operational principle, to which even more extreme limit. Which is, if you give me enough time, I will research and write a piece that is fresh and new and interesting on virtually any subject. I say virtually because I mean, there are many things that I don't know, and so on. As long as it's a story where I can go out and interview people, do my research and sit in a library or read books, or read old archives, and talk to other people on background, and so on, I can eventually put some sort of a story or a narrative together that is interesting to read. This is all I'm following. I follow my nose on narrative, and not so much on the topic.

Ramanand: Right. What got you interested in narrative style of nonfiction? At one point I remember you blogging about things like The New Yorker. I remember you talking about getting that DVD collection that they had put all their archives on. It was a very vivid post for me because I think you kind of raved on about it for a while. It left me feeling very jealous. I felt I should also plunge few of my savings. I regret that I didn’t. Where did that yen for this style come through?

Samanth: It's a combination of things. If you grew up like you and I did, essentially enjoying reading of every kind, but reading what you might call good books, in the sense, well-plotted, character-driven, and things like that. There is only one form of journalism that provides something similar, which is [00:08:00] this long form of narrative. It's the only thing, the only genre of journalism that operates in speech, and has characters. One of my editors likes to say, it's the only kind of journalism in which you can see the passage of time over the course of a story, there is a narrative arc.

In the best kind of journalism like this, you can almost forget for a minute that you are reading journalism. You can get sucked into the story and treat it as if it was fiction. Yet, of course, there is this amazing underpinning of fact. You and I both find the world utterly fascinating. This is the reason we quiz after all because I think there's so much to discover, so many oddities and byways of knowledge that we love. The fact that the world is fascinating by itself, made me want to try to convey some of the fascinations to people who read magazines and newspapers. If you want to do that satisfyingly or in the most satisfying way, I think one of the best ways to do it is this kind of narrative journalism. Where you can discover something unknown, or discover some depth in a hitherto superficial story and then be able to translate that in the narrative style of storytelling sense. That is classic storytelling where you start with once upon a time this happened, and then this happened, and this is where the whole thing ended up, and this is what you didn't know about it.

In some of my writing workshops and classes, I often tell my group that there are all these arguments about structure, where do you start a story, and things like that, and we talk about that a lot. One of the things I like to tell students [00:10:00] and to discuss with them is that what helps me very often is to forget that I'm writing a piece for a magazine. If I'm struggling with where I should begin a story I think about where I would begin telling the story to a friend if we were in a bar having a drink. What is the first thing that you will tell him or her to get them interested in this? And then it goes from there. I say this as a kind of shorthand to figure out the structure. But there's something more profound in it, in the sense that this is really an extension of that kind of casual storytelling where you want to get people interested in, hooked, you want to tell them a story, and you want to leave them with a better appreciation or a sense of the world that they live in.

Ramanand: In some sense, there is something timeless about it, which is why people have done it before, and people will probably continue to explore these kinds of stories. Therefore, over the years, have you now evolved a style of your own? If I were to look for a signature Samanth piece, what would I expect to see in that, that marks you out? Or is this too facetious or egotistical question to ask you?

Samanth: I don't think so. There are multiple things here, and it all has to do with writing jargon. None of it anybody is able to define successfully at all. Writers talk about things called a voice, that writing has a voice, prose has a voice. The voice is distinctive, every writer has it. It is very hard to pin down what that is, so I'm not going to try. I don't know what my voice would consist of except that I hope that if people read something by me, they would recognize it as something by me. It doesn't just have to do with the words that you use, it has to do with maybe [00:12:00] the range or the catholicity of writing. Maybe it has to do with the form it takes if it's a longer piece, and maybe it's more likely to belong to long-form journalism such as myself. You can sort of pick things up like that.

Voice is one thing, style is something else altogether related, but distinct. That has to do more with structure and so on. I would like to think that the stories I do best, and that I enjoy doing the most are the ones where you see a lot of character and richness of description, a feeling of being plunged into things as they are happening. Maybe a dialogue between people, where I'm just an observer, hopefully, kind of an occasional dry sense of humour, some attention being paid to the different levels at which a story operates.

Even if I'm telling you a superficial narrative about a spat between members at a club in Bombay, what I'm actually telling you is two or three layers of stories below that, about the way in which the wealthy interact with each other in Bombay, about the way in which India lives with its colonial past, about the way in which India relates to land issues. Some of these are explicitly stated, some of them are less explicitly stated, but the themes are all there. All of these moving parts are there to varying extents, in varying pieces of writing that I do. Definitely, of course, when I write books, they're all there. All of them together constitute [00:14:00] some kind of style. Although, of course, many other writers use these moving parts in different ways, and much more creatively.

Ramanand: Alike to that is a question on the house style of different platforms. Right now, over the years, there are a lot of these platforms, you can take a Salon or you can take a Guardian, you can take a New Yorker. All said and done, everyone has a sort of internal house style. I'm sure there is some give and take between the writer and the editorial nudges that you get. This is something that we observe on the outsides, we are not privy to what happens inside. Can you shed a little light on how these different platforms share a lot in common, they have a lot of these pieces in this narrative style? Leaving aside the more immediate kind of news reporting that also comes on that side. Do you see a convergence of this style, which makes it easier for writers like you to write for multiple publications, or do you have to adapt? Tell me a little bit about that.

Samanth: The most interesting thing I can tell you perhaps is the fact that there are geographical variations that are quite into it. The UK, for example, publications and magazines in the UK, are usually much more forgiving of, even encouraging of your own style. You can take more liberties with the prose, you can be a little riskier, you can be a little more distinctive. Unless it's egregious, they will not edit it down, they will not tear back the style. American publications are much more rigid in the house style. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference in house style between one publication and another. There are minor variations. The New Yorker is the most famous example [00:16:00] of a magazine with a very rigid voice and a house style that you will recognize from 1000 meters away. Some magazines are a little bit more forgiving of that. It depends. I think house style varies, even more interestingly, by the kind of piece that you're doing, and that's where you have to kind of figure out how you suit your tone. If you're doing a long-reported feature on, let's say, this was March 2020, I'm thinking back to just two pieces I was doing. March 2020, or April 2020, when I was writing about the initial developments on vaccines across the world. This is a very scientific and quite a technical piece because you have to explain how vaccines, DNA vaccines, and RNA vaccines work, what the science is, what the stakes are, who is working on it, and what is the kind of work that is being done on it.

In that kind of a piece, you would be less forgiving of style in a writer. You would want them to be… the premium is on clarity and concision, a sort of elegance of prose that makes it as easy as possible to understand something.

If I change that around to another piece that I did, which is about these two brothers who were part of the plan to attack churches during Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, churches and hotels. Now, over there, this is not a technical story. What it is, is a human story. The intriguing part here is the psychological aspect of it, the biographical aspect of it. Over there, the writer is immersed in the story a little more, you are able to show your own mind and your own thinking. You are able to show, and you're able to use [00:18:00], there's a certain latitude in a language that you can use to make it more vivid to people who are living, who have never been to Colombo, but also who don't know these lives at all. I think our decisions will be judgments about style and voice that have to be made depending on what the subject is rather than what the publication is. If it's a reported piece, you're usually allowed more clarity, explanation, that kind of thing. If it is an opinion piece, if it is a column or a film review, or a book review, again, there is so much more importance placed on what you think as the writer, that also shows in the prose itself. The prose can be a little bit more stylized, more unique, or personal, or distinctive.

It becomes quite easy beyond a point to navigate these changes. I think it becomes almost on autopilot. The trick is actually to be able to try to do unexpected things with it. The truly skilled writers would be able to take a vaccine piece and somehow be stylized with it or be unique with it in a way that doesn't interfere with the explanation, but is still somehow subverting this expectation that these pieces will just be clear above all else. There will be some elements of style. That's something that is always sort of interesting to experiment with.

Ramanand: If you can, would you name a couple of these people who consistently surprise?

Samanth: There's a New Yorker writer called Nick Paumgarten, who some people may have read. He's sort of a classic example of this. He wrote a piece, I remember quite early in the pandemic, about how people are responding and how the wealthy are responding [00:20:00] in particular in terms of moving money around and things like that. Again, it sounds like it would be quite a cut and dried piece, in the sense that he would just talk to these people. But it turned out to be actually a very stylized piece of reporting.

He's been doing pieces through this pandemic that I've been looking at as examples of this kind of writing, where you expect it to be something quite straightforward and concise because Nick Paumgarten can never let go of his voice. I think whatever he's writing about, he will continue to write it in just his stylized, unique, and distinctive way that we know and love. He is a good example.

Ramanand: Great. In fact, one of the things I was curious about was now that so many people have tools of content production, and are democratized in a sense. Everyone out there is potentially a writer with an interesting thought. How do you navigate this getting an interesting angle when you know it's a million monkeys out there? Finding an interesting, unusual angle to something that everyone is talking about. Does that cross your mind? Or does distinctiveness play a part in the stories that you choose to tell? Or do you just trust the fact that whatever angle you have, the way you will talk about it, what research you do around it, will shoulder the burden of making it distinctive and strong in its own sense? Do you worry about what everyone else is going to be talking about?

Samanth: No, I don't find myself worrying about that, because an angle is just the beginning. An angle is a take. It's very easy for people to have angles and takes online, [00:22:00] but that's not journalism. That's not what I do in any case. Everything that I do, all journalism is predicated on research and reporting. As long as these people with angles are not going out there and spending two months, interviewing people and trying to understand something, what I do is very different from what they do. Having said that, you're right, that there's a lot of noise. Somebody like me has to treat that as an asset, in the sense that people are talking about this. There are ways for me to spot entries into stories that they have not thought of. That is one advantage. Among these people who have takes, obviously, there are, the “million monkeys” who you referred to, but there are also a few dozen people who know what they're talking about, because they are inside this particular industry. That is an advantage to me, because it leads me to sources. I find very often people online, who are on Twitter and just kind of talking about a subject with a lot of knowledge because they are inside the industry, inside that sphere. I will write to them and say, listen I'd like to talk to you about this. Some of these people run newsletters, and I subscribe to their newsletters, on a range of topics, some of which I will never write about, but just on the off chance that there is a story idea in there somewhere, and this guy has explained it in an interesting way in a particular issue of the newsletter, I might be able to pick up on it.

However, I don't ever have to worry that these dozen people talking about something with some knowledge and depth will cannibalize the journalism I plan to do about it. They are also drowning in the noise, they are also not writers, they are not storytellers, they are doing what they do best, which is they are knowledgeable about their own field. There is always and [00:24:00] there always will be, I think, a function, or role for somebody like me to go from the general audience into the specific world, try to absorb some of this knowledge and bring it back to the general audience. It doesn't worry me in any way.

Ramanand: In fact, I was going to ask you how you would probably define what you do these days. But you just answered my question. I want to then ask when you started your career, we didn't have things like Twitter. The internet was kind of, as you look back at it, sounds so much more innocent and naive than perhaps it is today. In some sense, I also look at it, there's a small parallel with what we used to do with quizzing as well. Prior to that era, the school-style quizzing, which is all very factual, and things that you could get out of an encyclopedia drove that kind of quizzing. Once the internet came, we got medium form, and maybe occasionally long-form PowerPoint slides of questions. Suddenly people could do research, people could find and dig out more interesting stories. You didn't have to have 30 years of experience in the topic. If you can cast your eyes a little bit on what would have been a major shift, in terms of practising the kind of journalism that you do in the last couple of decades? Now with things like Twitter, with so many things at your disposal, what has shifted? If you can take two things, one is what has changed in the kinds of stories you choose to tell now and what has changed in the process? Maybe we'll get taken to some of these a little more. Let's start with the input side, what has changed broadly if you look back?

Samanth: The kinds of stories that you choose [00:26:00] to tell, let's start there. I think 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, because the internet was more rudimentary. There was a diminished sense compared to now at least of other parts of the world. Even sometimes other parts of a country. Correspondingly, if you are a writer in one part of the world and you are writing for another part of the world, the kinds of stories you could tell would also be much more basic. If you were a magazine writer in India in 1995, wanting to write for The New Yorker, you would tell a very particular kind of story, which is overly broad and generic and possibly sort of a stereotype. The appetite for those stories would be small. Once you've written one story like that, that's pretty much it for the next two years. Obviously now, because the Internet has expanded the sense of people's knowledge of other parts of the world, and expanded their sense of why other parts of the world are important, what it is, why it's important to know about them, you can be much more nuanced in the stories that you tell. It doesn't really have to be a profile of a prime minister when he is elected, and then that's it for the next five years. There are many more things you can do. The inputs have grown, inputs as we call them. The kinds of stories that you can do, that has expanded.

The process has changed, in some ways, most notably, not because of Twitter or anything, but because I realized over the last year, in particular, communication is enhanced so much by [00:28:00] what you can do online. It is sometimes easy to fool yourself, they can perpetually just sit at your computer on Zoom and talk to people. That should be enough to do long-form journalism. Research is easier. I can download books, I can look at old magazines, and newspaper archives, I can look at journal articles. There is so much out there that it is possible to school yourself or educate yourself on a topic entirely online and then write a fairly good piece out of it.

However, I say that it has only changed in some ways is that it still doesn't feel to me like Internet-driven journalism is quite anywhere near as rich as offline journalism. I think the whole point of being a journalist, one of the points for me was to be able to go to interesting places and meet interesting people in person and be able to describe what that is like. So many times on assignments, I have caught myself in the middle of something, I've just literally reminded myself saying, look at where you are and you’re so lucky to be here. Below the seafloor in Singapore in a place where they store oil, or I will be in a boxing ring in Hong Kong where bankers are hitting each other. You know, all of these places that I've been to, purely because of journalism, and I want to convey some of that back to my readers. That is impossible, obviously, if you're just sitting at home doing Zoom.

The access to information has grown, the access to people has grown, it's much easier to find, to track down somebody if you want to, with all the tools of the internet at your disposal. Ultimately the core process, which is the conversations with people, the absorption of surroundings [00:30:00], and then the writing. Then the synthesis of that into a piece that has remained exactly the same. I think that is why it remains such a powerful thing to do, because there's so much durability in that process, and so much value in that it won't change in a hurry. I don't think Zoom or the pandemic or any of that have transformed that.

Ramanand: Once we had armchair journalists, now we have journalists within a single room. I hope you will get to go out more often soon.

Samanth: It’s funny, I'm going out today for an interview for the first time in seven months. Of course, it's London, we're meeting in a park, socially distanced, and all of that. It's not like I'm seeing anything interesting, because I can't yet go to offices or to a place of work, but it's a start. We'll see how that goes.

Ramanand: In some sense, that is a story in itself, right? Stepping out. It’s a momentous occasion for a lot of us right now. I just want to shift attention away from craft to the business side of journalism, because that has had a lot coming at it in the last couple of decades as well. As someone who's on the creative end, who's writing these stories, how much is there a shift in business models or the fact that some people are measuring success, because they can finally measure something tangible. It may just be a vanity metric, in some cases. How has that changed the way journalists operate and behave?

Samanth: You hear a lot of stories. I should say that until January this year, I had not actually been in a newsroom [00:32:00] as part of a physical office for 10 years. I was mostly a freelancer, it's only in January that I joined the newsroom. Although even now I'm no more. As a result of that, sometimes I've been immune to the changes over the last decade in particular, and because I write magazine stories, there is a different kind of metric that is usually applied to these stories. Nobody kind of judges you on the number of hits a piece gets. Nobody hikes your pay up and down. You hear all these horror stories from within the industry that traffic matters, and journalists are judged by that. Definitely for the business side, the thing that has hurt most is obviously the huge decline in advertising in print media. The consequences of dwindling circulation.

Advertising and subscriber numbers were what, news organizations used to fund journalism. The process is expensive, it's time-consuming. The longer you report, the more expensive it becomes if you want to do in-depth investigations. If you want to do a piece that involves travel, if you want to do a piece that involves rigorous fact-checking, where you employ fact-checkers, and maybe lawyers to go over a piece to make sure it's watertight, all of this costs money. If you don't have the money to pay for it, you obviously can't do as much of it as you would like. For a long time from about 2005 to 2011 or 2013, there was a genuine, a very alarming decline in the funds that were available for this.

In parallel, there was also the rise for different kinds of journalistic enterprise which was almost all online, which was entirely comment driven. Which would look at the [00:34:00] shoe-leather journalism that a mainstream newspaper or magazine did and then ride off that by commenting on it and trying to do so for traffic. That emerged on the side and, while it employed a lot of people, net is probably good for the journalism industry as a whole, it was impossible for people like me to feel that it was entirely a good thing. There's only so much opinion you can take. What you really need is the facts.

Things are quite precarious, but I think somehow the industry has been able to keep up, particularly in the US, they are able to keep going. In some publications, subscriber numbers have improved. The flip side of that has been a disastrous falling out of local news, which is really the lifeblood of journalism everywhere.

We see this in India also. Big newspapers are consolidating, but smaller newspapers don't have business models anymore to run on. It will only get worse as advertising in print declines. We see in India, the huge emergence of opinion journalism almost as a genre by itself. Sometimes, again, disastrous effects when you look at some of the sites that are around today. The change in business model has at least for a while genuinely imperilled reported journalism. It imperilled journalism that requires time, energy and resources.

I think while it's not quite as precarious now, as it was maybe 10 or 12 years ago, there is still a sense, particularly again, with this pandemic, a sense that it could all vanish overnight. Everybody, all these magazines sort of had a tough year last year. [00:36:00] It's very much your livelihood. If I was a freelancer still today, as I was last year, your livelihood would very much be tied to the fortunes of the larger economy and the larger kind of market for journalism out there.

Ramanand: Samanth, I have a bunch of questions based on what we just discussed. Since I have you here and I can't resist asking a couple of quiz questions to you. So I hope you're up for it. You did not know this was coming.

Samanth: Yeah, I did not. Totally unscripted.

Ramanand: Great. All these questions have a sort of connection to you.

Samanth: I better get them right.

Ramanand: My question is about Japanese children. Japanese children liked collecting these, especially during the summer. Over time since more families moved to cities, this hobby of collecting became a little difficult with a lot of friction in it. A company called the Mirai Seiko company in Tokyo in 1999 installed a vending machine, the first of its kind to vend these items so children could just walk up to a machine, pay 400 yen and get a pair each. What were these children collecting? I'll give you a hint in five seconds. Your hint is Haldane.

Samanth: Good God. Beetles?

Ramanand: Oh, wonderful. Well done. They used to collect beetles, bugs, and insects of all kinds. Apparently, they had these summer trips to the forest and so on, which became tougher with urbanization. [00:38:00]

I always trust you to pull that one out of the hat. Before we go ahead, because you spent so much time on the book, A Dominant Character, congratulations, by the way. It's a fine piece of writing. I also wanted to ask you that because Haldane was also known for his ability to communicate science. Some of our listeners are people who are looking for ways in which they communicate what they do to the people around them. Can you give us a sense of some of the things that you learnt from this exercise of delving into his life that some of these listeners can apply? Give us a few tips on how to do communication around seemingly abstruse topics.

Samanth: Yeah, absolutely. For a long time in writing courses, there was one standard essay about how to write clearly. This essay is Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. Orwell's essay is problematic in various ways, but it has some nuggets of truth in it, which is don't use jargon, don't use long lines and long words, try not to be opaque that kind of thing. I firmly believe the essay that should replace it is JBS Haldane's own essay, How to Write a Scientific Article.

I think it is a much better piece. He does not talk down as much to his readers. I think he gets at some really key concepts of communication in it. For example, some of the advice he shares is common to Orwell as well, which is don't use long words, don't use fancy sentences or complicated [00:40:00] sentences, try to be simple or very easy. One of the things he says is if you're writing about science, try to relate the science with somebody, something that your readers will know in their daily lives and move up from there instead. For example, if you want to describe the explosion of a bomb, maybe you start off by talking about how a kettle goes off under pressure on your gas, and then you move from there, to the larger explosion. He would often pick his anecdotes and stories from the newspaper headlines. For example, when he wanted to write about how hormones work, he picked on some kind of scandalous tabloid story about how some English Football Club was using monkey glands to enhance their performance and he went on from there. He warned writers to not think their readers to be daft, which I think is very important. Don't ever underestimate your reader. It's not that your reader doesn't know or want to know, it's just they need to have things explained to them in a particular way to best know what you want to communicate.

This is not something he ever said out loud, but it’s something I've kind of gleaned from reading a lot of his popular scientific articles. His essays obviously had to be simplified, because that is just the nature of a piece that runs in a newspaper or a magazine about science, but it never oversimplifies. In the sense that it never went to the point where you are essentially giving the reader a misleading image of how the world works or how nature works.

Finally, he would range all over the map. Science and communication for him was not just his own field, which is genetics and maybe a little bit of biochemistry, but it could be cosmology, and it could be chemistry, and physics, [00:42:00] and all of these other things. He would keep up to date on new discoveries across all of these things, and somehow be able to communicate all of them to his readers, and he would be excited about them. The other interesting thing, you could see in his writing, the fact that he himself was excited, and stimulated by some of these things he was talking about, and some of the research that was being done out there that he was distilling for the reader. Communicating that is a huge asset for any writer or any science communicator, because you want your readers similarly to feel excited and stimulated by that.

Ramanand: Incidentally, at Choose to Thinq, we have something called a daily reader compound it's like assigned reading but more fun. We have a group of people, we give them one nonfiction article, about 15 minutes worth of reading a day. We curate that and so on. One of the ever-popular pieces across these different cohorts has been Haldane’s, On Being the Right Size. It's a simple PDF, no trappings of any kind, but people just love it. Your pieces have also made the cut. Samanth, don't worry about that. We've got a few of your long and short pieces. There is one I think about toilet rolls, if I remember correctly. That's a big popular one, that's for Sundays because that's a long piece.

I actually wanted to ask you about this. We've arrived at this kind of 15-minute mark, the 3000 odd word kind of a threshold for something that a lot of busy people can consume in a day. When you've made the shift from simpler, smaller pieces to long reads, what has been the biggest shift in your [00:44:00] mindset? I'm sure it's not simply that I can put more information. I'm sure it just gives you a larger canvas. What does that larger canvas allow you to do?

Samanth: That canvas allows you to do a lot. I mean, we talked about some of this, it allows you to be more vivid, more descriptive. You can occasionally meander with some kind of self-discipline, as long as you come back to your topic. You can do interesting things with form, just with how the piece looks on the page, how it functions on the page. You can do interesting things with structure.

Equally important is what the form does not allow. If I have put 5000 words down on a page, and the reader knows when they begin the piece, it is going to be a long piece, there is even more pressure on the writer to not let the reader go from paragraph one. If it is a 500 words short piece, you can somehow assume that the reader may read it through because it's not a lot of time. Maybe once if they're like Magnus Magnusson, once they started, they will just finish. You cannot assume that for a long read at all, you have to make sure that every paragraph is compact and worth having, and leads in an intriguing way to the next paragraph and then maybe the next section, and that you are drawing conclusions for the reader or guiding them towards conclusions or giving them information that they didn't have. The pressures or the demands of it are just as high, they are just as intense as the liberation that it affords you when you sit down to write 5000 words.

Ramanad: From there I want to segue into how you get better as a writer because this kind of a shift you just spoke about. [00:46:00] Does that happen purely through… you get commissioned to do something or you pitch something, you start working on it and the process, because you have a group of people to help you. A writer is not a single person chugging away, it's a team of people who put together that product. I'm actually curious to know how it is that someone like you gets better at their craft? Do you approach writing as deliberate practice? Do you have practices around like I will write 1000 words outside of what I'm supposed to do? Or is writing so all-consuming that you'd rather watch Netflix instead? Tell me a little bit about the practice of the getting better side of writing for yourself?

Samanth: I do know one friend who actually writes a page a day in a notebook outside of his own journalism. It is not journalistic writing, it is just writing. He just does it for himself to kind of see the sentences form and so on. It's a very good practice. I wish I could do it, but I can't. I mean, I think I write on a day to day basis. I've been doing this for 20 years now, almost every day I have been writing. I write on weekends, there will be something I have to finish, or something I have to edit. When I'm working on a book, it’s seven days a week. There's so much of that to do. I think it forms its own practice. It's the equivalent of would a batsman even need that practice if he is playing a game every day? I don't think so.

The only way to get better is to just keep doing it. A lot of these other things help. For example, having editorial feedback on your pieces, helps a lot. Having somebody else from outside your own mind, look at the piece through three or four or five drafts is immensely helpful. Then the things you learn from that [00:48:00] and apply it to the next piece. It's invaluable. I think I like to do a lot of what I call targeted careful reading. Which is, if I read a piece by someone that I admire a lot, I tend to go back to those pieces again and again, and read them multiple times and sometimes even sketch out for myself the reasons they work, why I like them, how I would break them up structurally, what this section is doing, what the section is doing, why these words have been chosen, why this tone has been taken, all of these things. I will kind of go back to these pieces again and again, some of these pieces I have revisited 20 to 25 times. That helps a lot because it then gives you things that you can apply in your own writing later, like lessons.

Ramanand: Is there any one of them that comes to mind, just as an example?

Samanth: Yeah, the one that comes to mind above all else, every time is a profile of Shivnarine Chanderpaul by Rahul Bhattacharya. Again and again, many times over, I read this enough times that it will embarrass him if I tell him about it. It's one of those things I go to such pieces just to kind of remind myself of how a piece can really flow, and what writing can do. The effect it can achieve.

There's a lot of other things and little tricks that I have. For example, if I'm writing a piece in a particular genre, or if I'm writing a book in a particular genre, I will tend to keep reading other books and other genres that remind me of the tone that I need in my own writing. It's not necessarily that if I'm writing a book about a civil war, I will read another book about a civil war, maybe something else entirely, but somehow the voice and tone in that remind me of the voice and tone I have to take or what I want to take in my own writing. I will kind of sort of sit next to my laptop as I'm writing for the entire duration of a [00:50:00] project, and I will keep dipping into it sometimes, like looking at one paragraph, and refreshing my mind helps.

These are all trivial tricks that have kind of worked out for myself. The main thing about writing is that you just have to write. I think it's the same with everything, classical music, sports, art. You just have to keep doing it, and you have to be attentive to the ways that you do it. I think if you keep doing it without paying attention to what you're doing, and why you're doing it, the mistakes that you make, the habits that you have formed and want to break, your particular distinctive assets as a writer, but also your particular distinctive weaknesses as a writer. If you don't keep paying attention to this, you will never progress. You have to kind of write and then you have to stand over your own shoulder as you write and look at what you write and analyze it.

Ramanand: Do you hate reading your own written articles? Or do you go away for a while and come back and read it? Or are you very comfortable with making that or getting that distance very quickly?

Samanth: It's an interesting question. Once something is published in the immediate aftermath, I don't read it, because invariably, I've moved on to something else, or I'm sick of that, or whatever. I won't go back to it. If I do go back to something, it will probably be years down the line. At that point, I'll go back and it will feel as if I have not written it. Maybe this is a consequence of the volume of writing you do as a full-time writer or journalist. Or maybe it's just a consequence of the way my mind works, but I will be able to look at it quite dispassionately, and maybe I will remember why I did something here or why I did something there. By and large, it will feel almost like a very alien, unfamiliar piece of work. It's a very [00:52:00] strange feeling to have.

Ramanand: Before we go ahead and keep talking about the creative side of things, I have one more question. Because we're talking about fish and tamarinds, I have to ask a question about Michael Madana Kama Ranjan. According to Kamal Hassan, which 1895 comedy subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, is one of the inspirations behind the tone and tenor of the film.

Samanth: By comedy, you mean a book?

Ramanand: I’m being deliberately ambiguous about it. This is a very sincere question.

Samanth: There’s a fish connection you said.

Ramanand: No, the fish connection is only for the choice of the film.

Samanth: I see.

Ramanand: I didn't mean to include it.

Samanth: I'm going to blank on this one. I'm sure.

Ramanand: Okay. 1895 comedic play?

Samanth: Let me say, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Ramanand: You're absolutely right. Good, well done. I do not know, this is what he says. We'll take everything with a pinch of salt. Of course, the gold rush ending is perhaps something that is more...

Samanth: Yes, of course. Yeah. The house falling off.

Ramanand: I wanted to ask a little bit about this… we spoke about being a freelancer, we spoke about the whole media economy changing. Is there now some pressure to monetize your audience, be the CEO of Samanth Inc? I know you've done podcasts in the past [00:54:00], you have a newsletter, but you see a lot of people around starting Substack publication and trying to keep that afloat while balancing other things. Is the creator a lone kind of wolf now who's got to fend for himself? Is that how a lot of people see it?

Samanth: Increasingly, I think it's true. I'm lucky in the sense that I still have ties to institutions, obviously, extremely good, robust institutions. I am not at the stage where I'm kind of writing only for my Substack and trying to monetize that or doing only a podcast and trying to monetize that.

I think this goes back to our earlier question of how business models have changed and how news organizations have sometimes been unable to keep people on their rolls, or to fund their writing in ways that are needed. Obviously, writers think that they will do better by breaking away from the institution and being solo, like you said. Then that becomes this situation where you are your own brand, and you have to simultaneously not only do the content, but do the brand promotion. This has been true for book writers for a long time now. It's only starting to become a little bit more common for journalists, magazine and newspaper writers.

Honestly, I don't know what to think of this. It's still so new. I haven't yet seen how this will shake out. On the one hand, I feel somehow regretful about the fact that journalists have to go out and do this. Most journalists and I include myself in this, are only really good at what they do. They should really only be good at what they do. Is hard enough to go out [00:56:00] and do reporting and come back and write a decent piece, it’s not easy. You should not put these demands on them to also amp up their own marketing and things like that. I feel bad about that. I feel bad also because the quality of the work suffers. We talked about how, if you're a writer in an ecosystem or an editorial ecosystem, the final product is much better without comparison. It is better to have two editors look at your work, it is better to have multiple fact-checkers, it is better to be able to talk about all of this. If you're just putting work out on a Substack, however good a writer or journalist you are, the work is not as good as it could be. I think that is also a drawback of this.

This is classic 21st-century capitalism, where you shred the institutions of their resources, and then the people go out there and turn into marvels of capitalism themselves, turn themselves into entrepreneurs and industries of one and somehow promote that as a win-win for everybody, for the reader, and the institution and the writer. Even if 10 journalists went out there, and you wanted to subscribe to all of their Substacks, and you paid $25 a year each, that's $250 a year, which is much less than a newspaper subscription cost on a yearly basis, for the work of a lot more people doing much better calibre work. This is some kind of complete… It feels like we're all being fooled by the platforms and the people who create and promote these platforms. On the other hand, I feel if journalism itself has been gutted in fundamental ways, financially, it's better than nothing that journalists and people, like me [00:58:00] potentially go out there and try to monetize this for themselves. It's better than not doing any journalism at all. Maybe there is something to be said for the fact that if you are a brand, you will cultivate a particular set of readers who will follow you through your work.

You can kind of speak to them in an intimate kind of relationship that perhaps you could not do from within an institution. As I said, I'm undecided, partly because all of this has not yet shaken out in a way that we know for sure what the drawbacks and advantages are.

All said and done, the number of people who will be able to make a living off monetizing their own brand of journalists is going to be minimal. I think it's going to be the tip of the iceberg and nobody else. The people who have left magazines and newspapers to start their own Substack and make money off it and are doing well are people who would always have done well. It's not like Substack has helped them.

For the remainder, you will have a few 1000 subscribers and maybe a few 100 paid subscribers and you will struggle to get by and you will wish you had a job in a newsroom. I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to work. There will be a long tail of people who are out of work and trying to make sure that they can make ends meet with a Substack. That's not a good look for journalism at all.

Ramanand: Yeah, certainly these kinds of dilemmas are also playing out within corporate entities that we often encounter. Sometimes you get into a stage of divided loyalties, right? You have a loyalty to yourself as a brand, because you want to keep that one avenue open if something happens to the industry you are in, the company that you are in. I think some of these are also common concerns across a broad range [01:00:00] of people. I wanted to ask because if you look at what it says about your current profile, you're writing about the future of capitalism. It's a fairly ambitious thing to be kind of commenting on while living through those rapid changes as well, as individuals, as commentators. What is the future of capitalism according to you? Do you have a stance on it? Do you have a particular lens, guiding you in the kind of articles that you're doing? Or are you still in the state of an observer who is trying to make sense of it all?

Samanth: Yeah, I think it's the latter. I think the future of capitalism is just a catchy title. It is essentially a remit for me to go out and see how the world works with some kind of economic perspective. How markets work, how governments work, how governments relate to their citizens, what happens to resources, and so on. It's kind of like a manual to look at that, then go and look at different things in different subject areas. You can find the future of capitalism in the movie industry and how that works. You can find it in, as I've been doing in vaccination programs. You can find it, of course, in markets, and central bank actions, and in theories of economics. The future of capitalism is everywhere, we are living through it, and it is affecting us throughout. I liked this brief because it allowed me to do what I always do, which is wander around the map and just look at what interests me, except to do it with a particular kind of lens or viewfinder in my hand.

The idea is not to be prescriptive. I don't think I'm a huge economic ideologue, one way or another. Obviously, I abhor the depredation [01:02:00] of 21st-century capitalism, and many of which have unfolded in our lifetimes. It's been very instructional to see some of these play out in real-time.

I'm interested not in just tearing this down wholesale, because that will be quite boring, but just in analyzing, and finding interesting and unusual ways in which these things work, that maybe shouldn't be working the way they do.

There's one example I can share with you of a story that is going to be published today, I think. It goes back to my yearlong obsession with vaccines, and is about trying to quantify the amount of public funding that has gone into one or other of these vaccines over the years. I don't mean over the last year, because obviously, so much public funding has gone into scaling up manufacturing and providing adding capacity at some of these vaccine manufacturers, plants and so on. I mean, the big scientific breakthroughs that over the years made these vaccines possible. Are we able to quantify how much of that was funded by the state by taxpayers? It turns out, some academics have been trying to do this, and the answer, not surprisingly, from people who know drug development is a huge amount of, in the case of one vaccine between 97.1 and 99% of all research funding came from public institutions or philanthropies. What happens to that money now? Well, that money has then been transformed into an IP that the company owns. Some companies are choosing not to profit off the vaccine as long as the pandemic lasts, but they have described arbitrarily until July 2021. After that they can price the vaccine at any point. Other companies are profiting from day one, Pfizer and Moderna and so on. The governments, having funded all of this research in the past, are now spending more money to buy those vaccines back at [01:04:00] $20 a dose or whatever to administer for their own taxpayers. The taxpayers are paying again and again for the vaccines and how they've come into this world.

This is an interesting example, because while we always knew this conceptually, that this is how drug development works, the coronavirus pandemic, the transparency and the urgency of it has provided a unique window to analyzing some of this data and analyzing some of these processes. It's a direct link to how capitalism works in a sense. It's a direct link to the power of the private sector and of corporations to the stickiness of a particular kind of model that we just think is how things work. The stickiness of certain, what we call it clichés of thought. For example, if companies aren't allowed to enforce patents and licenses, then there will be no incentive to conduct R&D and discover new drugs. As we find out from this vaccine process, these companies didn't do most of the research in the first place, they didn't have the incentive to do a lot of this until it was brought much closer to market. The incentive was all in universities and public institutes and the incentive was all… an amount of funding, all being driven by grant money from these governments.

It is useful to re-examine some of these principles of economic philosophy that we tend to take for granted. This is an example of the kind of thing that I want to do with the future of capitalism, to not just look at interest rate cuts and things like that. I think that's quite dull, but we'll examine some of the larger issues.

Ramanand: Making the dismal science a little more interesting.

Samanth: Yeah, or avoiding the dismal science altogether, as much as possible.

Ramanand: One final question there is. Let me take an example, you wrote an article about NFTs a short while ago, and you guys [01:06:00] also had a nice little gimmick around it, and so on, if I were to call it that. Tell me a little bit about the research process, in the sense that I'm just curious to know. It's like, getting into a rabbit hole, and not exiting, staying there for a while, walking around the place, and then coming out with some coherence. I think emerging with that is important, otherwise, you can just do this forever like a doctoral student. I know you don't have that luxury. What I'm curious about is, let's say when you look back at something like an NFT, or even the vaccine development thing, how would you get started? What is your map going to look like? When do you stop, and you say, I have enough? Is it the deadline that drives it? Or is it just that I think I now have a coherent view of this topic?

Samanth: Things usually start with reading, as they often do. You try to read enough to understand things in your own mind, and to isolate what you think the interesting unanswered questions and the interesting themes are. This goes back to our earlier topic of there may be a superficial narrative in a lot of pieces. What is really interesting and makes these stories last longer than a day is the sense you can prevail or some kind of more durable, longer-lasting, more universal themes and ideas.

Of course, it's particularly true, long-form pieces, less of the NFT setting. Let's take that away. You do enough reading to identify new questions, then you start talking to people. The most fundamental unit of journalism is conversation. However much you read, I think that there's no substitute for being able to ask people questions [01:08:00] and have them tell you things. It invariably involves starting to make calls, video calls now, the phone calls and meetings in an earlier era. Once you've done enough of that, I think the deadline pressure is ever-present. Less so for longer pieces, but more so for short pieces. I think more than anything else, stop doing research when you think that you have isolated something in your mind that you have not seen out there yet in the coverage of a topic. Or some kind of deeper, more fundamental questions that people have missed. Or you think that you have an interesting answer to a question that is being posed by other people. Or that sometimes even just the questions may be the same, the answers may broadly be the same, but the way you're telling the story is utterly different, new and compelling. You have that, and then you return to the world and start writing. Knowing when to stop research is often a function of knowing when you think you have enough to interest the reader. That depends a lot on how long the piece is going to be, how deep it is going to go. A lot of these quite functional elements of journalism start playing a role.

It's very easy for me. The reason I like doing books is because it indulges me. It gives me the chance to do this rabbit hole thing for four years, on average. I don't have to emerge until I'm quite ready. I can take my time and I can kind of keep revisiting things. It's my one chance to go into the kind of depth that a beat reporter would otherwise have in their own day-to-day [01:10:00] careers. Somebody who has covered the finance industry for 10 years will have the kind of enviable depth and breadth of contacts, knowledge and so on that I wish I had about a lot of things, and I don't. I think books give me a chance to simulate some of that for myself.

Ramanand: Are you the organized note-taker types who tries tools one after the other? How do you go about organizing all these materials that you encounter?

Samanth: For journalism, I'm very organized. There is a process. I take notes. If I'm meeting somebody in person, I do taped interviews, and I transcribe those interviews, I organize my research. For work, I'm quite regimented, and can usually find material quite easily.

What I had found for a long time, and this might be interesting to talk about, is in the non-work sections of my life. When I'm not just reading but any kind of experience, whether it was going to a museum, or whatever, I found that I was being less regimented than I would like. In the sense that I would read things or experience things, and later want to remember them, and find that I had a poorer memory than I would like to have for some aspects of that. I don't mean details, like a quote in a book. That's not the point. My memory was poor, I noticed some of the larger ideas, and the things would strike me, but then they would all get mixed together a few years later, and I would regret not having taken notes then. Last year, I decided I would, [01:12:00] as everybody seems to be doing right now, try a note-taking app. I use Bear, which is an iOS app. I don't use it for every book. It's not like I'm annotating like the Gideon Haigh book that I'm reading now, for example. It's not like I'm taking notes from them, although I might, it's an excellent book. But definitely books that I consider as serious reading, that I want either for a project, or for just to educate myself better in something, I have started taking notes.

I haven't yet felt the fruits of that. It's been so recent that I still remember the books I read quite well. I think it's only a couple of years down the line, when I want to refer back to these notes that I will see how effective they are. By and large, I felt that this had to do with a larger lack I felt in my life of structured non-work reading. I do a lot of unstructured reading, too unstructured from my own good. I wanted some kind of systematization just to get more out of the experience. It sounds like a very Stakhanovite way to approach reading, which should be fun and interesting, and it is still fun and interesting, but I felt like having small projects for myself, or having these kind of small notes taken on the side that would just make me better as a reader and a writer. So, I've started to do that.

Ramanand: It's almost like, we get asked sometimes about how do you become a quizzer? How do you get good at quizzing? I kind of struggle to answer that question, because there is no one thing. It is just a system of your environment that you find yourself in. [01:14:00] I think some people listening to this will kill me if I don't bring up a little bit of quizzing in this conversation. What I realized over the years was that how much of quizzing was not so much about the questions, but it was about the social aspect of quizzing, it was about hanging out with certain kinds of people who had interesting things. We had a social recommendation engine long before there were apps to cater to that. It is that osmosis being inside that environment that played the highest role, and therefore you didn't need to go out and systematically remember stuff. Unless it was for writing a question for an upcoming quiz, in which case you have to get stuff down somewhere. Anything on the social side of quizzing, because I don't think too many people talk about the fact that when people say that why aren't people getting into quizzing, I think it's partly the groups that hook you in.

Samanth: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think even now, 25 years after I started quizzing, or 25 years after my first landmark quiz in Madras. Especially now I think most of my best friends are quizzers. People I text on a daily basis are quizzers, my most active WhatsApp groups are all quizzers, and it's not like we're talking about quizzing, in fact, we almost never talk quizzing. The distinct advantage is that these are people with quite a wide range of interests, and huge curiosity to just know things from different fields. Each one has their own specializations and deep fields of knowledge. It's amazing to be able to ask them questions, and they will be able to tell you things, not quiz questions, but just things that you want to know. The social aspect of it is [01:16:00] perhaps the main reason why I do it, and why or when it's something that I've missed so much over the last year and a half because of the pandemic, and then quizzing is just essentially ground to a halt.

The social recommendation engine is something that's extremely useful. There are so many things I have discovered for myself based on the recommendations of these people, partly because now we know each other’s things, and so we will tell each other what we think they will like, but also just out of conversation, interesting ideas will emerge. Small sub-genres of cinema or books or things that I’ve ignored or have not even known the existence of, I will pursue and kind of grow to fall in love with myself. It is really a way to enlarge your world. You're right, in a sense that in an earlier era, you would need to know just enough to frame a question. That's pretty much it. Just to go back from the previous subject, even the kind of attention I pay now to some of the notes that I make, for example, would be very different from the notes that I make if I find an interesting quiz question in a book. The quiz question notes are what people will call fundas. It's like a little piece of trivia or a little passing coincidence that makes it a nice question, or whatever.

The notes I make for myself outside of that are much more abstract and much more idea-based. This is partly a result of our collective education in India, where we only ever learn to read for the facts, and we never learn to read for underlying themes and arguments. It's something that I've had to really, even now, even today, I have to keep paying attention to what is the underlying argument in a piece of text. [01:18:00] Very often it doesn't have to be stated explicitly, but it's still there. I need to be able to draw that out for myself, and to then put that away in note somewhere to be able to remember what a book was truly about, which is not the surface narrative, but the arguments below.

Ramanand: Right. Samanth, I have about eight minutes left on the clock, so I will ask my last quiz question before I wrap up.

What I'm talking about originates from something called the ooph, a phoenician word for a monkey. The shape of what I'm talking about is supposed to resemble a monkey and its tail. The origins have also been attributed to the eye of a needle or not of a rope. What am I talking about? The answer is a single letter.

Samanth: Is it Aleph for A? Essentially the first letter of the alphabet.

Ramanand: You are close but that's not the right answer.

Samanth: Okay.

Ramanand: Think again, it's connected to you.

Samanth: Ah, yes. Okay.

Ramanand: Something we just alluded to. Monkey's tail, eye of a needle, not of a rope are some explanations for why this shape comes about.

Samanth: Alpha, the Greek letter?

Ramanand: No. It's a letter.

Samanth: This is a question I am going to flub, for sure. Is it Q? Q for quizzing?

Ramanand: It is Q. That's one of the explanations for the Q. I think what happens is that, because you have to come up with a question, you kind of go and dig and that has its own benefits.

Samanth: Amazing, because [01:20:00] ooph sounds so much like alpha. It sounds like that.

Ramanand: Yeah, it does. It sets you on the wrong track. That’s useful as well.

Samanth: Yeah. Nice.

Ramanand: Let's bring this conversation to a close. I just want to get some quick takes from you on a few of the topics. I'll start with something called the future relevance of X. I'm going to give you three topics and just off the top of your head, how do you see the future of these?  What is the future relevance of The New Yorker?

Samanth: The magazine itself may or may not exist. Who knows? I hope it does. The kind of work that it does, and the by and large strict adherence to fact and fact-checking, the rigor, I think all of that will be even more relevant in the years to come. In a time when you can’t trust what you see online, or what you get forwarded on WhatsApp, there is increasing relevance for an institution that you can take at face value and trust to tell the truth, and to present things in context. Immense, I would say.

Ramanand: Okay. In fact, I think the last few years have made us more aware of what a fact really is. I think we've experienced our share of kitchen questions as they call in the circuit, which has cooked up questions, and we've had our brush with a lot of cool but not true facts. That's a good point.

The future relevance of the Kindle?

Samanth: Again, similar. In the sense that I assume now electronic books are not going to go away. [01:22:00] The Kindle may not exist. Hopefully, we'll have something that looks better, and does a better job of representing books without killing your eyes. Hopefully, we will have an ecosystem that is not controlled by this one company, always good.

The future relevance of the Kindle is tied to the relevance of the book. The book itself is immortal. I think that is never going to go away. In fact, the thing I've been surprised by is the continuing relevance of the print book, surprised and pleased by it. I don't deny using the Kindle, I use it a lot, particularly when I have to get books quickly for work, I tend to download and consult them. I have just moved from… yesterday, I finished one book and I started another one. The second one was in print, and immediately I felt a vast relief, being able to take in words from a page.

Ramanand: It enables you to do things like these, which is to point to the author's book and not point to the Kindle somewhere.

Samanth: You can't see what anybody is reading on the train, which is always a pain.

Ramanand: The Kindle has actually been around for a while, so are you surprised by how little innovation has happened, in a sense, since the Kindle, in the world of books.

Samanth: I actually think its success is due to the lack of innovation. I think the success is due to the fact that it was simple to start with, it tries as closely as possible within the limits of what an electronic device can do to mimic what a book does, no frills, similar kinds of motor functions to turn pages and so on, and not do anything else, not build a browser in there that you can then check Twitter on, all of these other rabbit holes.

I think a large part of this success lies in the fact that it has stayed quite concrete. They launched a [01:24:00] Kindle Fire, for example, as you may remember, and there's no comparison. I mean, I will never read a book on a Fire or even on an iPad anymore, I think. It's a testament to the power of the printed book, that the electronic device that most successfully aims to replace it has to mimic it so closely.

Ramanand: Okay. The future relevance of long-form writing.

Samanth: Again, immense for similar reasons to the future relevance of The New Yorker. I think there will be more and not less need for depth, complexity and nuance. There will be more, not less need for rigor and fact-checking. The world is complicated and it will only grow more complex. It's kind of like a ramifying entity and so I think you will need more and more long-form journalism. Whether you will see more and more of it if economics will allow it. That's a different question altogether. It will still be relevant. The people who continue to do it will always find readers and it will be invaluable work. So many of the big things that we have seen develop over the last few years have been the result of just nose-to-the-ground long-form journalism. Just off the top of my head, the series of public figures or Hollywood celebrities who are toppled by the #MeToo scandal, it was all the result of work done over months, sometimes years by journalists who had the time and patience to do it. Incredibly relevant.

Ramanand: Some of the people listening to us today are interested in things like writing, but they're not going to be professional writers, but they see the value of writing [01:26:00] and what they do. Can you recommend a couple of great books, timeless books that they should read and reread so that they get better at writing?

Samanth: The trick is not to read books on writing, I think. Books that tell you how to write are invariably flat and not particularly engaging. They're only really interesting to people who have spent years in it already and want to just understand the nuts and bolts inside out. The trick is to read books that make you want to write more. The trick is to read books that excite your sense of what language can do or what communication can do. That is different for different people. One of the books, one of the authors, writers, I keep coming back to time and time again, even now, of course after decades is PG Woodhouse because I think reading a few pages of Woodhouse renews my enthusiasm for the language, the musicality of it, the potential of it, the color in it. That is my trick.

People who write will have different tricks. Depending on what you want to achieve with your writing, I think you should set out to read writing that does that kind of thing well. For example, if you want to be a science communicator, as we talked about, read a lot of Haldane. Haldane’s essays are available online. Very easy to digest. If you are looking for a good model for yourself, there is no one better. If you want to write about food, you should read AJ Liebling. If you want to write about or communicate things about technology, for example, if you're a tech writer, [01:28:00] or you're in the tech space, it's useful to read a magazine like Wired because Wired's articles put a human face on technology. They don't treat technology as some kind of abstract black box where things happen. They kind of show it as a product of human processes and human intervention and with decidedly human effects. The answer is to read, not books about writing, but books that have good writing or articles that exhibit good writing and learn from that.

Ramanand: Are journalists in any way worried about AI-generated tools like GPT-3? Do you see it as the terminator or do you not lose it?

Samanth: Unless AI can go out and interview people and come back and describe what a factory looks like, the conversations that it had, and what it felt while it was doing these interviews, no I’m not worried.

Ramanand: Alright. My last question is that, in one of your pieces I read a quote by Haldane’s sister, which is talking about Haldane saying that he thinks things are going to be much worse before they are better. Do you share that sentiment? Or is your glass differently filled?

Samanth: Much worse than they are now? I don't know. I have different answers on different days. There are some days on which I read just because of my own interest in it. I end up reading a lot about what people in the climate change industry say about the next 50 years. On those days, I think a lot of things seem truly irreversible. I think as Naomi said that they will be a lot worse because before they're a lot better, if at all, they become a lot better.

I see the human tendency to cut corners and to profiteer [01:30:00] or to oppress. I think these tendencies won't go away. As the world gets harsher in a warming climate, they will only be exacerbated, in which case, then we are looking at a very bleak time indeed.

Within our own lifetimes, I feel enough will stay the same that we can have good lives, and live a responsible lifestyle, but still not feel the worst effects of all of this. I mean most of the times I worry about are most of the times after. Having said that, you know, we've survived this far. There are enough good people out there, clearly, because these are the people writing about the climate change problems and these other problems that I'm talking about. Maybe it just needs a fundamental shift in the system that allows those energies to dominate. It's tied very much to the beat that I'm on now. The Future of Capitalism is very much about what that system will look like, in a way that enables us to avoid some of these pitfalls and the catastrophes to come.

Ramanand: Right. On that sobering note Samanth, here’s wishing you more stories, more conversations, and hopefully, more interesting little rabbit holes for you to explore. Thank you so much for being on the CTQ Smartcast.

Samanth: Thanks so much, Ramanand. It was amazing. Such a pleasure.

Ramanand: Thank you.

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