Keepers of the Year 2018

first anniversary of Radio Atlantic this week coincides with one of the newsiest weeks of 2018.

So we're taking the opportunity to lift up out of the fog of news and discuss those things that are most important to remember.

The keepers of the year.

What from the past year do we most want to hold on to?

What should we take into the future?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

And now, here with me in studio in DC

is my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

We've bent the time-space continuum to allow us to be in the same room at the same time.

It is wonderful.

Miracles of Physics.

Alex, July 21st is the first anniversary of Radio Atlantic.

You know, I was thinking, Matt, why do I not remember that?

And I realized because I was having a baby on that exact day.

It does.

It does, Mark Annunciation as well.

Is because I was giving birth to a baby son at the same time that we collectively were giving birth to the podcast.

That is right.

And we're going to come back to that, by the way.

Oh.

In the second episode of Radio Atlantic, I inaugurated the tradition of keepers.

Yes, and what a good tradition it is.

And thank you.

Usually keepers is asking listeners, guests, and my esteemed co-hosts to answer the question, what at this moment in your life do you want to make sure to remember?

When I first introduced it, if you remember, I encouraged everyone to think of it as a little time capsule to their future selves.

Now, you may ask, why?

is our anniversary episode dedicated to keepers?

Why is our anniversary episode dedicated to keepers?

So keepers for me comes from a deep philosophy.

It comes out of a desire to pull us out of time for a minute.

We experience life as this continuous stream of events, this churning constant river of little moments that just

exactly.

You know, we have big dramatic milestones that break it up.

And there are like memories with a capital M, but for the most part, we don't get the opportunity often enough to plant our feet on the ground, lift our heads above the water, look around and say, what at this point in my journey do I want to recall?

A little bit of stasis in

a moment, in a time of kineticism.

Yes, which I think is particularly important when the times are as uncertain and tumultuous as they are.

Hence,

keepers of the year.

What was that say it again?

Keepers of the year.

Keepers of the year.

Yes, I have asked Kevin Townsend, the hardest working producer in show business, true story, to make me a supercut of all the keepers shared on this show.

Can you believe it?

I can't.

In its first few months.

So I listened to two hours of keepers all in a row.

Oh, my goodness.

And you still, you're alive to tell the tale.

I am.

I am.

It was delightful for the record.

You find delight in strange corners, Matt.

Let's just say that.

I do.

I really do.

And I am never backing down from it.

One thing that you can't help notice when you listen to two hours of keepers in a row is that people share a few distinct types of keepers.

Alex, you are the master of one of those types.

Oh, no.

I would call this type of keeper.

Pulling a keeper out of your butt.

No, I would call this type of keeper the simple pleasure.

Oh, yeah.

That's a window into my soul.

Yes.

Yes.

Window into my soul.

My complicated hectic life.

And the simple things are what matters.

I am here for it every week.

Kevin made a compilation of a few of your simple pleasures, which we will play for you.

And it starts with your beautiful articulation of the philosophy of the simple pleasure, which you gave in a quote from Zadie Smith.

Oh, well, geez.

Kevin, take it away.

She said, all day long, I can look forward to a popsicle.

The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth.

And though it's true that when the flavor is finished and the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America.

A pineapple popsicle.

Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

A popsicle indeed.

Here are a few more of the simple pleasure keepers that you shared in 2017.

Here's what I'll tell you, America, and anybody else listening to this overseas.

Naps

are underrated.

That's right.

I will say my keeper for this week is a fine drink at the end of a long week.

Yesterday night, I had a glass of eggnog, and my keeper for this week is high fat content, high sugar content, high dairy content, drinkable beverages laced with alcohol.

There is a place called Trickling Springs Creamery.

I don't know if you guys have ever heard of it.

It's like my version of, I would imagine, Disneyland, and it's in Pennsylvania.

And I just want you to know that they make ice cream that tastes like you're already high.

It is that good, if anybody's ever been high.

And I had this, and it literally set my week, which has been a bad week, I'm not going to lie, on the right path.

And I think that the lesson I learned from that is sometimes the simple pleasures really are the best.

So as it turns out, Alex.

Wow.

Wow.

Talk about someone who likes eating and drinking and sleeping.

One might call that person a sloth.

No.

Oh,

we got eggnog, popsicles, ice cream.

Nobody

would dare call you a sloth

wagner.

I mean,

an emotional sloth.

As it turns out, however, I reached out to the fine folks at Trickling trickling springs creamer and yes i did and i got to speak with joe miller omg matt this is your greatest work ever

he is the vice president of marketing marketing at trickling springs appropriately and is also the son of one of the company's co-founders I asked him for a keeper to share with you.

Oh, you're so awesome.

And I thought that you might actually take a special anticipatory delight in what he said.

I definitely.

Here it is.

In the context of what you're sharing, I tell you what's been weighing on me recently is I have three kids.

And this year, we're changing schools on them.

And they're going to a school that is going to give them more academics,

more of a cultural experience.

And

that experience where they're learning new friends.

We're just with some of the families at the school here the other evening.

And that experience where they're learning new friends and

just jumping in and experiencing new things in their life.

That's just a beautiful thing to watch as a parent, to watch your kids connect with other kids and see their faces light up as they make friends.

It makes you feel good that they're connecting with others.

And it reminds you.

of the friends in your life that you you connect with and maybe that you've forgotten to connect with over time but you need to connect with again

and that

i

that's something i would want to keep oh i mean did you need another reason to love trickling springs creamery no but now you have one and so resonant to someone who is on the verge of celebrating her son's first birthday

and the experience of that the the random friends that are going to be coming over for that and the discovery period which is so concrete in this moment, right?

Like Size learned how to open a door and it's the most miraculous thing ever, not to be trumped by the fact that he can say door,

which is amazing.

I love it.

I love the fact that you contacted Trickling Springs, that Trickling, what was his name again?

Joe Miller.

The great Joe Miller had such a profoundly philosophical thing to say, nothing about ice cream, which would have been perfectly acceptable.

This is really like the harmony of all the worlds is really coming together.

What a serendipitous and lovely thing that is.

This is my favorite episode of the show, without question.

Wonderful.

I think that in itself, just to hear that is a simple pleasure.

Have you any others that you would like to?

You know,

I will say, I think these, you know, we talked about this in the wind up to

the greatest hits reel of my stoner like dietary habits.

What I call the waterfall of wonder, to use an audio term.

Yes.

We are all craving this sort of link back to a time when things were easy and safe and comfortable and full fat and sweet and delightful.

And I don't apologize for it, I guess.

I mean, I think the trick is always make sure, you know, relax into the cloud of eggnog puff as you will when you get home, but fight like hell during the day which is i think what we're all doing right i mean i think

just by virtue of the wonderful listeners who are listening to this podcast you're engaging with the world you're asking questions you're not even getting provided answers necessarily but the battle is decidedly uphill especially at this moment and the challenges are steep right right so enjoy the simple pleasures i mean and and allow your a truly allow yourself to enjoy them that would be my key my simple pleasures sort of like coda to this, which is once you get them, really enjoy them.

Absolutely.

Right.

Don't just eat the ice cream in front of the TV.

Stop and process each spoonful and like just roll around in the hedonism of that moment.

Yes.

Because you're going to be expected to walk a very fine and tight rope

in your off hours or your on hours.

Or your on hours.

So congratulations to everybody that finds pleasure in the simple things.

You deserve it.

Absolutely.

Simple pleasures squat.

Word.

Now, the second type of keeper that people tend to mention, and perhaps it's basically because I asked for these in my prompt, is an item from arts and literature.

So books they've read, movies they've watched, gallery and museum exhibits, that kind of thing.

In a moment, I'm going to ask you what you most want to remember from all the things that you've read and watched and listened to in your copious spare time

in 2018.

I'm not shoveling food into my face.

But while you think about an answer, I'm going to play one of these that really stuck with me.

So let's rewind back to our currently very relevant December episode on Vladimir Putin and U.S.-Russia relations for a keeper that came from our December 2017 cover story author, Julia Yaffe.

This past weekend was the premiere of Nouriev.

which is a ballet based on the life of Rudolf Nureev, who was a very famous ballerino

from Russia who fled to the West in 1961

and

was gay.

He died of AIDS in 92.

The ballet about him was directed by a young, brilliant, very

daring theater director named Kiril Sidiabrinikov,

who is

really out there.

And he was asked to direct this ballet at the Bolshoi Theater.

It was delayed once because it had homosexual themes, which, as we know, Russia has banned homosexual propaganda.

And then Sidier Brdnikov's independent theater, small theater, everybody was arrested.

His accountant is in jail, and he's now under house arrest for embezzling money, which I doubt he did.

But he is under house arrest, but the ballet went on.

without him.

And it premiered at the Bolshoi on Saturday, and it still had those homosexual themes.

It was about a man who had defected from the Soviet Union and had said that a country that doesn't value its heroes at the time is a really tragic country.

And in the audience, giving the play a standing ovation was the entire Russian elite.

Putin's spokesman and his wife,

Putin's old buddies from the KGB from Leningrad, who are old dudes, very scary guys.

And the director was at home under house arrest.

And if that's not, you know,

a perfect embodiment, a tragic embodiment of what Nudiev's life was about, where

when he died, somebody said about him that he never could have done in Russia what he was able to do in the West.

And I think that still holds true today.

Russia is still brutal when it comes to people in creative professions.

And then when they die, they name air flot airplanes

for them.

So

story.

Russia really sucks in that way.

Well, here's to homosexual themes.

Amen.

And so that's what I took away from that.

Just as an update for our listeners, his sentence was extended a few months ago, which meant that he couldn't go to the Khan Film Festival in May, where his film was up for a palm d'Or.

The last time his sentence was extended, it was supposed to end on July 19th, but I'm not sure whether he'll actually be released on that date or not.

So

I believe he may still be under house arrest.

But thinking back on all the things that you've watched, read,

and seen

over the past year,

what do you most want to carry forth with you?

Oh my gosh, this is so...

There's been, I will say, the past year, probably the past two years, have been some of the most fruitful times for writing, for journalism, for investigations.

And yet the thing that I'm going to say has nothing to do with any of the great journalism journalism that is being generated at places like the Atlantic and otherwise.

Totally fine.

What's that?

Totally fine.

Not that that stuff isn't important, but I think

sort of like dovetailing with the idea of the simple pleasures, we look for things that are transcendent,

or at least I do, and that have a very strong emotional core that continues to resonate and hopefully will continue to resonate far beyond this particularly politically tumultuous period.

I cannot escape the beauty,

the absolute emotional

joy and the simplicity of the joy in moonlight, which is, I think about the bad times.

And certainly moonlight covers a lot of the bad times in a way that I as

a straight Asian American

mixed race kid can

understand.

But it gets to the core of this universal humanity and the search for love in such a powerful and not sort of saccharine way, and is a reminder of the things that sort of break us and the things that can put us back together.

And I just think at this moment when everything feels so

just ground into a fine powder,

it's a reminder that, you know, human relationships are the thing that makes us whole and they're the things that connect us.

And that's the fabric, right, that we can use to stay warm.

So

that's Moonlight came out two years ago?

Nearly, I think.

Yeah.

Maybe even more than two years ago.

But I

find that a wellspring of joy just thinking about that movie and thinking about themes of that movie and thinking about the relationships in that movie.

And it makes me more invested in loving up on the people in my life.

Yeah.

What a wonderful choice.

Absolutely.

Thanks, Matt.

Also, I wanted something with homosexual themes.

That Maria thing was so.

I am here for the homosexual themes.

Among the simple pleasures of moonlight is the fact that that last part is sexy as hell.

Sexy as hell.

So the third type of keeper that people brought to the table,

I would put as the lesson in front of them about human society, politics, and history.

Right now, we might be witnessing history.

We are taping this in a week when the president of the United States stood on a stage with the president of Russia against the conclusions of his own government, against the work of his own intelligence agencies, against the wishes of his own administration, against the friends and defenders of Western democracy, and left many people wondering whether he is truly acting on America's behalf.

The word treason came up more than once.

More than once in the New York Times

of all places.

I wanted to ask you,

even apart from just keeperness right now, I wanted to ask you about this, whether you feel disoriented by witnessing what might be history in the making.

For me, I found that what's disorienting about this moment is that we instinctively look to history as a guide.

But, you know, as they say, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

So people...

Do they say that?

I'd never heard that, but that's very good.

Yeah.

But I feel like people are always straining for historical analogs for the president's behavior, either to make it more significant or to try to make it more familiar.

But nothing exactly fits because we know exactly how all those other stories play out.

Right.

And we don't know how this one does.

The rest of this story feels

either too the rest the rest of the history stories feel either too grotesque or too mundane to map to this one that we're in the middle of right now and I'm curious if if you feel that sense of disorientation or dislocation oh yeah well I always go back to this thing one of my colleagues at CBS said which I think is so to the point Ken Burns had his six-part series on the Vietnam War

and we were talking about it and he looked at me it was my colleague Anthony Mason and he said I can't wait till Ken Burns makes a six-part series on this period in American history.

And it's true.

We have, first of all, I mean, we're being assaulted with news stories that are happening by the minute, right?

So there's very hard for the human brain to process that.

But to contextualize this,

both the suggestion there is that it will end and that the period is finite and the chaos doesn't continue on ad infinitum,

but also we are unable to metabolize the moment.

And I look forward to the period when we can say, I remember what that was like, because I don't even think we know what it's like as we're living through it.

I have to remind myself on any given Tuesday or Wednesday, like we are living through an inordinately traumatic period.

And I mean that, I mean, no matter what your politics are, it is bruising.

The assault of stories, the whiplash,

the sort of changing landscape, the things that are being,

the newness of it, right?

Which is not necessarily, I mean, I don't say newness as a good thing in terms of evolution, but it's unprecedented.

So I don't even think we have words to describe what this represents, right?

We're building, what is it?

We're building the plane on the runway

very much in terms of like the experience of this moment and

who knows how it's going to fly, you know?

Right.

I think one of the reasons that we appeal to history and one of the things that I've actually found comforting in going back and reading history is to read contemporaneous accounts of what it felt like to live in it in the moment.

This is another thing that I think I look for from keepers.

These stories that people tell that are observations about this moment, about society, kind of deeper lessons about human nature that are a little bit extricated from

the specifics or the enormity of what we're seeing or what we might be seeing at this moment.

So for one of those reflections, I wanted wanted to play a keeper from Ioni Applebaum.

One of my favorite people on the planet.

Yes, and just one of the best

who is, you know, a trained professor of history.

He's just a trained professional on all counts.

On all counts.

And also former politics editor of The Atlantic, now ideas editor at The Atlantic.

You know, I've got a penchant for literalized metaphors.

Some days I look out my window here and I can see dark clouds gathering over the White House.

We're not the first building in the complex here.

If you come to see us, you have to come to a second Watergate.

This weekend, I was back up in Massachusetts where I'm from and took a hike in a state park outside of Worcester where glacial melt had scoured a dramatic gorge with jumbled rocks and cliffs.

The best part of it for me as somebody who covers politics for a living is that I was walking there and talking to the other hikers.

Politics didn't come up at all.

We were all out there, mostly with our families, exploring, being outside.

Nobody had their iPhone out.

And I walked in with a bunch of my fellow Americans, and we walked out of Purgatory Chasm together.

I don't know.

I found something just edifying and valuable about these types, hearing on a weekly basis, these types of just like contemporaneous moments from being in the middle of this history

that tell us about the society that we're in right now and what it feels like, even on its edges, walking in a purgatory chasm in a park.

Do you have any of those moments?

You know,

I think history is useful, if not to give us an analog, then to just to soothe us maybe that, you know, it's important to remember.

I was

in Aspen for the Ideas Festival that the Atlantic is the co-sponsor of.

And there was a lot of hand-wringing about what to do, how to reestablish the sort of American principles in this moment.

And someone came up to me and said, you know, I really appreciate the

anguish and I appreciate the like the search for a solution and we need to find one.

But I also remember segregation and it's really important that we contextualize this moment through the longer lens of American history.

On the same note, note, I think it was the New York Times.

I tried to find it, but I'm not quite sure.

I'm pretty positive it was the New York Times.

Reran

the obituary of a father who lost his son at Gettysburg.

He was a Union soldier, and the father went back to find his son's body.

And it's not a comparison between now and the Civil War.

But if we are reminded of the sacrifices of parents and children in the name of preserving the

United States,

you know,

people have sacrificed a lot

to keep us in this marriage.

Yeah.

And we have gone through a lot of trauma as a nation and as a people.

And it's good to remember all of that in

these present times.

You know, that reminds me of a conversation that I was having with my parents two days ago.

My dad

said this thing.

I think he'd be comfortable with me sharing this.

I'll make sure that before this goes to

the press.

But

he said, you know, I thought that it would be better.

I thought that from the time,

you know,

that from what I went through, from what we went through in our moment, I thought that we were making it better, that all of this would be solved by the time that you all were really making your way in this world.

And,

you know, I heard just a certain amount of sadness in his voice for the fact that

we are still wrestling with these things

that our forebears have been wrestling with for generations.

And

I guess part of what struck me about it and what stuck with me afterwards, what I was reflecting on, is the fact that in some ways we kind of have to appreciate the process of wrestling with this stuff.

This is who we are, right, as humans.

And we don't get to be excused, no matter our generation, from the challenge of having to deal with one another's prejudices and particularities and

bigotries and biases and sins and errors.

We will have to wrestle with this probably for as long as life exists.

This is the project.

This is the project.

In some ways.

Yeah.

Can I offer a story that I think could be a compendium for with along with your father's story?

Yeah.

My mom and my grandfather and my grandmother came over to the United States in the 1960s.

They left Burma as the country was being sort of taken over by a military junta.

And my mother got a full scholarship to go to Swarthmore College, which is a great school.

Wow.

And she was graduating in 1970, and it was sort of the peak of the anti-institutionalism that very much

colored that era.

And she decided my grandparents were going to come up for her college graduation.

And she said, oh, not, I'm not going to go through with all of that.

That's just, I don't need, I don't need that diploma.

Like, I've done my work.

I don't, I don't, I'm not going to participate in that, that program.

And my grandfather, who

was,

you know, had, had been in this country and left everything behind, hung up the phone.

And then my mom said, five minutes later, he called her back and he said,

very quietly, Then why did we leave everything?

Wow.

And my mom told me that story, and it's so moving to me even today.

But it is a reminder that, like, we stand on their shoulders.

They did work.

They made sacrifices.

This is our work.

This is our time.

Yep.

The sacrifices are ours to make for the next generation, whoever they are.

It's a good reminder as we think, you know, yes, we think and hope and wish things were better, and I'm sure our parents do.

But, you know, this is.

This is our time.

This is our time.

Got to step up.

Yep.

Now I'm going to ask you to think about one last type of keeper.

I will call it the story drawn from life.

Something that we observe, whether in our news or in our daily lives, that just leaves us with the larger lesson of how to live and what we want to remember.

You have had a really full year.

Yeah, I definitely have.

Yes, as we have recounted so far in this podcast, the anniversary of the show is also the first birthday of your son.

Yes.

You've experienced personal loss this year.

Yes.

You just finished taping Showtime's the Circus.

Yep.

That was right after you published a book.

I imagine all that life.

What a stupid, insane year and also a beautiful year.

Indeed.

And it must have given you

a few lessons that you might want to re-impart to your future self.

And so this is what I want you to think about.

Imagine Alex Wagner, decades hence,

from

2018, Alex Wagner.

What is the message that you want to shoot forward into transmit to your future self?

Am I supposed to say that now?

Yeah.

Think about just at this moment.

At this moment, you know, I think the thing,

and I like,

I'm a one that is prone to histrionics and very emotional proclamations, but the truth is paraphrasing Kanye West, who I am not really prone to paraphrase these days, but I have the dragon energy.

We all do.

And I'm way stronger than I think I am, as we all are.

Yeah.

And way more resilient and much more capable of putting one foot in front of the other than sometimes it feels like.

So I would give myself the advice, buck up, keep your head up.

You got this.

Amazing.

Yes.

You do have that dragon energy.

I do.

I do.

You can see the flames coming out of my gills.

Yes, they're great flames, everybody.

Beautiful flames.

So, for our next segment, we're going to hear from Jeffrey Goldberg.

We're going to share some future-pointed keepers from

some selected members of the Atlantic staff.

Delightful.

Alex, thank you so much.

Matt, this is a beautiful,

beautiful episode of the podcast that you've put together.

I am lucky to be your colleague.

Thank you for doing it.

I am lucky to be yours.

My esteemed colleague.

Thank you for this year.

Of course.

Thank you for this year.

Thank you for listening to this show, everyone out there.

Indeed.

Yeah.

Thank you for a year of Radio Atlantic.

Yeah.

Hey there.

I'm Claudina Bade, and I lead the audio team here at The Atlantic.

I think a lot about what makes great great audio journalism.

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And we are back.

And Alex, I am sad to say, had to leave us, but I am back with Jeffrey Goldberg, my other esteemed co-host and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Hello.

It's not that, hi, it's not that we won't be in the same room together.

I just want people to understand that.

I love Alex.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Just don't want any rumors to start.

I think, I guess I'm starting a rumor that we can't be in the same podcast studio at once,

which is a false rumor, fake news.

Fake news.

Hashtag.

As I explained to Alex, Kevin very helpfully made me a supercut of two hours of keepers from all the episodes

leading up to from the first several months of Radio Atlantic.

You know, it's now our first anniversary.

Yeah, I've been told.

One-year anniversary of Radio Atlantic.

Yeah.

And listening to two hours of keepers,

you start, very quickly start to get a sense of the

very finite taxonomy of keepers that people come to the table with,

the types of things that they want to be reminded of.

And the first category is the category of the simple pleasure.

Jeff, you have, in the keepers that you have brought to Radio Atlantic,

very consistently

evinced a pleasure in listening to music.

And that's been revealed in your selections.

Kevin, can you roll the tape?

When I wasn't working 24-7 for the Atlantic, I spent part of the weekend listening to some Boots Riley, including one of my favorite Boots Riley cuts, Ride the Fence.

This is a guy who can use the word antelope in a rhyme.

Tired of being hunted like an antelope, take the system by the throat.

That's the antidote.

So I pose a proposition, take a look, be in supporter opposition.

It just, the man can rhyme

and so can this man.

No, no, no, no.

Tired of being hunted like an antelope.

Take the system by the throat.

That's the antidote.

So I pose a proposition.

Jeff, what is your keeper?

You're going to be very surprised to learn that it's the Mars Day and the Time song, Ice Cream Castles.

skies.

I started listening to the music of Ariana Grande, and

I really like her.

Given that music has consistently been one of your simple pleasures, or complicated pleasures, or complicated pleasures, what is the

musical performance or moment that in your life right now you want to make sure that you hold on to?

Is this my keeper of the century?

No.

This doesn't have to be your keeper of the century.

No, but I have it.

I will come back to that question.

All right.

Well, it's going to be the same thing.

So

I don't want to do the big reveal.

What's my favorite, like from my whole life, my favorite concert?

Right now, something that you've heard recently that you're like, man, 90-year-old Jeff, pull that album out because it's going to be a

okay.

So this is going to sound really weird and superficial, but I just, we have an editor at the Atlantic.

I'm not going to say who it is because I want to protect this editor's privacy.

Who this is crazy, this is going to sound crazy, but this person, not going to say who it is, is always editing with you know earbuds in, right, which is a normal thing.

And one day I said to this editor, I'm using this gender-neutral thing, obviously, to disguise this.

I said, What do you listen to when you edit?

And this editor said, mostly guns and roses.

And

I

can't edit to guns and roses.

I was kind of floored by this.

And

we had this discussion.

And you ever have an experience where you've listened to a band or a performer for years, even decades, and somehow missed a great song that they had.

And so there's this Guns N' Roses song, Shadow of Your Love, which is a straight-ahead guitar, three-chord, whatever.

But it's like, it's really good.

And I just.

For whatever reason, it never, I guess it's on Chinese Democracy.

I don't even know if it's on Chinese Democracy or not, but it's such a great, simple simple pleasure, and I guess you could thank the good people at Spotify for this pleasure of discovering a song from a group or a person who you thought you knew all the songs.

So, like, I've been listening to the, it's like the number one song in my car right now is this weird, simple guns.

It's actually, I don't even understand the words because he's just screaming.

But it's great guitar work.

And I was just, you know, I don't know.

Fantastic.

Does that?

Yes, that absolutely counts.

Does that fulfill the need here?

I'm not sure what the need is.

That is absolutely not.

I just want to make sure that I'm fulfilling the need.

So the second type of keeper that people brought to the table, as I shared with Alex, is entertainment, media, books, media, music, performances, theater, that type of thing.

And so, I have asked several friends and employees of The Atlantic, our colleagues, about some of their keepers, and they did naturally sort of fall into these categories.

So, next, I'm going to play a keeper from a friend of The Atlantic, Thomas Page McBee, who has both written for us, has been part of

our sister publication, Quartz, and shared this.

So I recently was able to catch a live version of Hannah Gadsby's one woman show, Nanette, which is now on Netflix.

And it was an unbelievable experience.

I think it's probably unbelievable to watch on Netflix, but it was certainly unbelievable to be in the audience because what she does is

It's a comedy special in theory, but she sort of starts out by telling you that she's going to quit comedy.

And the whole show is based on that premise.

And when she goes into why, it's, it's, as a queer person, she's talking about the ways that she's had to debase herself in order to

be funny.

And so

after the first 15 minutes where she sort of demonstrates how her comedy works and it's really hilarious, she then proceeds to like do this meta deconstructing of how comedy works.

So she, for example, talks about how there's no catharsis in comedy because it's a there's a setup and there's a punchline, but there's no actual like reflection.

So then she basically creates this show that answers this problem she has about how comedy doesn't work the way she wants it to.

And in the process, you know, it's harrowing, it's hard, it's beautiful, but she in the end creates a catharsis.

Have you seen the net?

Have you heard the rapturous praise that this comedy special has been?

I have no idea what anybody here is talking about right now.

Well, it's on my list to watch, and I'll clue you.

We've actually covered it, so I do know this.

Once I do see it.

The next praise that I want to play is from Megan Garber.

Never heard of her.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is the dynamics of attention and how important attention itself can be, you know, in a democracy, frankly, and just, you know, in your own life.

And we tend to overlook that, I think, sometimes.

We pay attention to other things, but actually, so much comes down to attention.

So, one of the books that I have that I basically think about it probably every day is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, which I've written about for the Atlantic, but it keeps sort of haunting me.

And it is basically an argument essentially for attention, you know, for

paying attention in the best kinds of ways and sort of, you know, trying to overlook the small things and the distracting things and, you know, even the fun things sometimes, which are great, but sometimes, you know, can keep us from,

you know, actually paying attention to the things that really matter.

And I think, you know, in the past year, especially, we've seen the bad things that can happen when we let ourselves be distracted by the shiny things, by the small things, by the funny things, etc., etc.

So I've been thinking a lot about that book and thinking about how important it is to really just be

intentional about what we decide to pay attention to.

She's so smart.

I know.

We should hire her.

We should.

As a matter of fact, for those who have not listened to Megan's many appearances on Radio Atlantic, she is an Atlantic staff writer.

Our next keeper also comes from an Atlantic staff writer, Derek

My keeper for the last year is a book called Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild.

This is a book by a sociologist who goes to Louisiana and a couple other places to investigate the paradoxes of modern American politics.

Why do people who need the government hate the government?

What happened to the American dream?

If Donald Trump is the answer, what was the question?

And there is no two-word description of a book that is more debased with overuse than, quote, required reading.

But this is literally required reading.

This is, I think, to top off that hyperbole, maybe the best book about politics I've ever read.

And it just happens to be a Rosetta Stone for our own American berserk.

It treats Champs Bass with extraordinary humanity, but is brutally unsparing in peeling away their contradictions

and makes one of the best points and one of the most sort of thrillingly insightful chapters I've read in any politics book about what she calls the deep story of modern American politics.

This idea that there are a large number of Americans who feel like they are standing in line.

And this line sort of snakes up a hill toward the American dream, and they feel like they're being cut in line.

And they feel like they're being cut by government, by big corporations, sometimes by minorities, by women.

And this feeling of being cut in line is the deep story that she uses to explain the rise of Trump and the American moment.

It's a brilliant book.

And in 20 years, I would like to tell myself, this is the book that in 2017 and 2018 seemed to correctly explain the world to you.

Do you have a go-to political recommendation for like the politics book that if you could only, if you could trap someone on an island and force them to read one and only one book about that?

I would never want to trap someone on an island and force them to do anything.

I'm a libertarian.

I have to come back.

I passed.

There's a lot of people.

You can definitely pass.

Yeah, you know, it's like,

you know,

Richard Hofstar.

No, I mean, since Richard Hofstern on paranoia and its use in politics,

you know, anything about the HANA Arendt on totalitarianism,

maybe not.

It's flawed.

Come back to that.

We'll come back to that.

Ooh,

I think we will.

Interesting question.

The next keyword comes from our staff writer, Christianity.

I would not be ready to run for president because when you're running for president, you're not supposed to say, oh, the one book

apart from the Bible

has three from different parts of the ideological spectrum.

Not really.

I mean, Elizabeth Warren is not picking any sort of Cato Institute, whatever.

I guess that's true.

Our next keeper comes from our staff writer, Krishnadev Calamore.

I don't want this to be a plug for the Atlantic, but I'll make it a plug for the Atlantic because this piece has stayed with me for a fair amount of time.

And it's Alex Dizon's piece, My Family slave i think part of the reason it really has stayed with me is it you know we look of look at slavery as something that happened in the past uh it obviously is something that happens among many communities that you wouldn't really expect it to happen among

and that piece very powerfully conveyed how easy it is to become complicit in culture in culture I'm doing air quotes

and

take parts of your cultural practices without really giving them second thought and making them part of your everyday life however exploitative and awful they are it takes a great deal of courage as the late Alex Dizon had to be able to document what happened and also

talk about the path that he followed

to come to that conclusion on his own.

Coming from a culture myself where

things like domestic servitude,

I wouldn't say it's fairly common, but

it's common enough for people to know it exists without really calling it that.

It really made a huge impact on me.

And I suspect that as we move forward,

exploitation is something that is going to stay in our midst.

And it's important to remember how easy it is to normalize it.

Another deep one from the Atlantic.

It is.

And it's a story that I would hope to revisit as the years pass.

The third type of keeper, after the media recommendations, the books, the movies, Netflix specials, Atlantic stories, the third type of keeper that people tended to mention was the observation on human society.

And so let's start with this one from Emma Green.

I've spent most of the last year in Israel and watching America from afar and also watching how Americans interact in Israel has really been been a study in fracture.

One of the most historic moments I got to see while I was in Jerusalem was the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem, which is something that American presidents have been promising to do for literally decades.

And it finally happened.

So I was up in the rafters when the ceremony happened.

I got to see all the big wigs of the Republican Party.

It was like shooting fish in a barrel on my beat.

So many famous pastors and people who I write about all the time, just right there.

And

at the same time, as we were watching this triumphalist ceremony that was happening in Jerusalem that brought so much happiness to so many communities, Jewish, Christian alike, there was this violence that was happening also in Israel at the same time, in Gaza.

The comparison between those is a little bit fraught.

because they weren't necessarily directly causally related.

And it was also set up in order to grab the attention of the American press.

The protests were set up to grab the press attention while the embassy opening was happening.

So in that way it's hard to equate the two of them but it certainly was a moment of recognizing that America has a big footprint in Israel and abroad in general, and that the way that footprint is expressed caters to certain groups interests more than others.

And it can sometimes have

a,

I guess, less ameliorating effect in one area and a much more positive effect in another.

So that message of fracture is what I'm taking away and just trying to be sensitive to the stories that are coming out of 2018 and how radically differently experiences have resonated for different groups.

And being in Israel is probably the best arena for understanding that as any.

Emma's Dakeway did remind me of a great story that's been circulating by Atlantic contributor Amanda Ripley, although this story was published in Medium called Complicating the Narratives,

in which she asks the question, what if journalists covered controversial issues differently?

I would recommend that to our crowd.

Yeah, Amanda's very smart.

A lot.

Next, we'll hear from our staff writer out in one of our California bureaus, Alexis Madrigal.

In 2018, I think kind of like the most significant conceptual thing that I learned was that in the late 1960s, you know, a time of similar political tumult, you know, and craziness, there were these three things that happened that actually completely transformed the global economy that basically no one was talking about in national media.

One was containerization, which has covered a lot shipping and the way that it transformed global trade.

One was a development of Visa and MasterCard, these payment networks that allow you to draw money from your bank or your credit account, you know, in Kuala Lumpur.

And the third is internet protocol, you know, the way that we ended up like shipping around network traffic and bits and created this kind of world that we know.

And those three things come together and they're a huge chunk of the modern world.

And yet none of them would have been A1 news or even B1 news.

And I think we're living in this time where you've got Trump dominating everything so thoroughly.

The whole paper is Trump, basically, you know.

And I just want to remember that these incredibly significant structural things continue to go on underneath the surface, whether that's going to be for our time, something like CRISPR, you know, gene editing, whether it's going to be the different kinds of artificial intelligence developments.

It's just the kind of thing where it's so easy, I think, to get caught up in the present and to get it caught up in a particular narrative version of the present that is about dominant political figures, whether it's Nixon or Trump and not the millions of other people who are also making significant contributions to our way of life.

It is a kind of bracing question, given how much of the air in the room is taken up by President Trump and his administration.

When the history books are written and the president takes up his piece of it,

what will they think we missed?

What were we not paying enough attention to?

Right.

It was the question, are containers more important than Donald Trump?

Yeah.

I know what Alexis would say.

Clearly.

The last category of keeper, after the observations on human society and politics and history, were just the lessons on life, real letters to our future selves about how, what kind of people that we want to be in the world.

The first of those comes embedded in a lesson on politics or question about politics from our staff writer, Mikae Coppins.

I write about politics for a living, which means that in the future, when I look back at this time, I fear that I'll remember,

you know, all-nighters and like staring at Twitter nonstop on my phone.

But what I hope I remember is the time that I took off this summer to be with our new baby and two other kids.

I am lucky to work for a company that gives a very generous amount of paternity leave for new dads and parental leave in general.

That is not the case for most people in America.

Just to put in a quick policy plug here,

I looked this up.

About 70% of men who have new babies in America take off 10 days or less to spend with the child.

And only 13% of those people get any kind of payment for it, which puts America well behind a lot of other first world countries.

So there are all kind of policy reasons to have paternity leave that have to do with wage gaps and gender issues.

But for me, what I found was taking this time off, stepping away, deleting Twitter from my phone, was that it really reoriented my

priorities and perspective and kind of helped me understand everything that was going on in the world right now through a very different prism.

You know, I would check in, I would check in watching the news periodically, and my five-year-old daughter would see people on TV and would sometimes ask, why aren't they being nice to each other?

Which is like kind of heartbreaking as a parent.

But, you know, and the best answer I could come up with was that sometimes people forget to be nice to each other.

And I think that that is a very simplistic answer befitting a five-year-old.

But it also was something that I learned or kind of reminded myself of was to try to remember to be nice to people, to be kind to people.

I'm going to have to go to the newsroom right now and remind him to not be nice to people anymore.

He's back from eternity, I leave.

Somehow I think you're going to fail in that.

No, I know, I know, I know.

Well, as long as his pen is mean, it's fine.

He can be nice to people in person.

So the last keeper from one of our colleagues comes from a staff writer on the family section, Julie Beck.

So Mind Keeper is really just a phrase or more of a concept, I guess.

But I got it from this essay, which was called How to Do Nothing by Jenny O'Dell.

And it's pretty long and it's really good and it touches on a lot of different stuff.

But this is a quote from that essay, which is what I want to talk about.

So the quote says, in nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous, and yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and regenerative.

Indeed, our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

And so those two words, maintenance and care, are what I would like to keep.

They've sort of been rattling around in my mind like two nuts in an empty gourd or something ever since I read them.

And I've been really trying to redefine productivity to myself to include the work of maintenance and care alongside the work of making something new.

So that applies in all kinds of different arenas, right?

So maintaining the cleanliness of my environment, maintaining and caring for my relationships, fixing my possessions when they break instead of throwing them away and getting new ones, taking the time to sort of just like take care of my body, like physical therapy and yoga and like stretching things out instead of just trying to like build muscle or lose weight or, you know, make my body into something new.

It feels like, you know, every hour of every day is crammed in with back-to-back bad news and emails and notifications and a fire hose of information.

And the effect of that can be to feel like time is really scarce and we have to make the most of every second.

Because I think people do realize and recognize that their time and their attention are valuable,

but they can end up interpreting that as like an internalized pressure to just be as productive as possible in the time that you have.

So then you end up just clicking on a thousand tabs and working on three things at once and like spiraling into insanity.

And for me, when I get like that, I think it makes me feel better to spend my time and attention on maintenance and care, just even reading the tab that I have open before I click a new link, for example.

So obviously I'm not perfect at that, but I think

sometimes the work of sort of just staving off entropy is the most calming and satisfying work.

And like Odell said in the essay, it's very undervalued in our culture a lot of the time.

You have heard from our colleagues and friends of the Atlantic the things that they most want to carry forward with them into the future.

And now I ask you to visualize a wisened old Jeffrey Goldberg decades hence and transmit a message to that person.

What, from this vantage point in 2018, do you want your future self to remember?

Can it be a thing in the culture?

It absolutely can.

Can it be bigger than a bread box?

It absolutely can.

Can it be a person?

It can be vegetable, mineral, animal.

Can it be a musician?

It certainly probably will be.

So

I'm about to do something stupid again and pay a

lot, a lot of money to go see, again, the Tribune of the Working Class, Bruce Springsteen, on Broadway.

Because that was, and I am a, I don't want to say that I am.

One should never describe oneself as a religious person, but I'm a religiously observant person.

But I recognize also that Springsteen is a religion.

And I went to see him on Broadway doing his one-man retrospective show.

And this was number what Springsteen show for?

Well, I don't know if it counts as, you know, yeah, I mean, I've been to 80 or 90 Springsteen shows, but I don't know if going to Broadway is the same.

I actually, sorry.

About to do this.

Yes, please do.

I actually asked Springsteen

if going to the Broadway show counts as one concert, no concerts, or like two or three concerts based on just the ticket price, right?

And just the intensity of the experience.

What was his answer?

His answer was, let me try to remember it.

His answer was,

yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

I think that was the entirety of his answer.

Yeah,

I don't know.

But it was, I mean, it was a good conversation from my end.

Yeah.

But

that was extraordinary.

I mean, it was extraordinary to go to and it's extraordinary for people to see.

And to be fair to Bruce Bringstein and in his,

you know, acquiescence and or love of capitalism, he does make available every night a bunch of tickets at an extremely low price so that the people he originally was singing to and about can still come and experience this.

There's a whole bunch of observations one could make about that experience in 2018 America.

But what happens in that theater is what is, to be fair, what happens in that theater does happen in the larger concerts and that I've been to many, many, many times over 30 years or more,

which is that he builds from his own words and his own music a community.

It's a temporary community.

It does exist permanently, but in the space, in that time, he builds a community in which people feel

good about themselves.

People feel good about America.

They believe that America is an unfinished project.

They

feel connected to each other in a way as you leave a theater, as you leave one of those shows.

And in the age of bowling alone and atomization and people sort of going into their bubbles and the echo chambers and all the rest,

there's a thing that happens where he builds,

he builds without digital tricks.

He builds a community

around a set of larger ideas that are very humane ideas.

It's too bad in a way that some of the people who should be listening hardest to people like Bruce Springsteen aren't listening to Bruce Springsteen and would love to figure out a way to

see that change.

But it's a really remarkably intense experience to have him,

if you've listened to him for 30 or 40 years, to have him walk through his life through the songs, through certain songs that he's written

is

a religious experience.

Wonderful.

I am snipping that out and sending that to the other accolades of Springsteen.

To the other end of my life.

Oh, there are several.

You have accolites?

I have multiple acolytes, yeah.

Mykeeper of the year,

the thing that I want to take with me comes from an author that we lost this year, an author who died a few months ago, Philip Roth.

Many people who've read his book, American Pastoral, stopped at the same place that I stopped years ago when I first encountered that book.

This passage that begins, I think it's in chapter 8, but it begins, you fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations.

I'll skip ahead a little bit.

He says, You never fail to get them wrong.

You might as well have the brain of a tank.

You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them.

You get them wrong while you're with them, and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting, and you get them all wrong again.

Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway.

It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

That's how we know we're alive.

We're wrong.

A few months before he died, Roth gave one of his final interviews to the Irish Times.

And one of the questions that the interviewer asks him is,

what did you do when you stopped writing?

How did you spend spend your time?

And Roth said, you know, I had spent my whole life reading fiction and I decided to read non-fiction and I got myself into history.

He says, I seem to have veered off course lately and read a heterogeneous collection of books.

I'd read three books by Tanahasi Coates, the most telling from a literary point of view, The Beautiful Struggle, his memoir of the boyhood challenge from his father.

From reading Coates, I learned about Nell Irving Painter's provocatively titled Compendium, The History of White People.

I had always wondered why race had seemed to be such

a problem in Roth's writing.

Why, when he was so perceptive and nuanced and subtle and probing on so many other aspects of the human experience,

why race never seemed to get quite below the surface.

And so it was astonishing.

to discover that he'd never before discovered Nell Irving Painter in his prior reading, or that he'd just encountered our dear colleague, Tanahasi.

So you wish that he had read Tanahasi 10 years ago and had written informed by him, huh?

Absolutely.

And Nell Irving Painter, absolutely.

Interesting.

I think that

I read that passage from American Pastoral differently at this moment in my life, both thinking about Roth and what he discovered and thinking about myself and what I've discovered.

But I don't think it's the getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

I think it's the striving to get them right.

I do think that people are not,

of course, fundamentally knowable or reducible to an idea that you can have in your head.

But I think that that process of coming to someone else with their experience that overlaps in some part with yours and in much greater part, not at all with yours,

that process of striving to get them right, to understand them, to know what makes them tick, to value that particular set of experiences that shaped them and value them enough to be curious about them, that that actually is the thing.

One of the most important things that we can do, one of the most important and most lovely things that we can strive for, the striving to get them right.

So that's the letter that I'm sending myself decades hence.

Strive to get them right.

Can I add something to that?

Yeah.

On the side of Philip Roth's laptop on his computer, the computer screen, he had a post-it.

And on the post-it, it said, no optional striving.

You know that?

No.

It said, no optional striving.

It was just write.

Don't go get awards.

Don't give speeches.

Don't write

op-eds.

Don't do anything.

Just

stick to it and write.

No optional striving.

We should all have that on our side of our computers.

Absolutely.

Except when we have to tape podcasts.

Except when we have to tape podcasts.

Then all the striving is optional.

Well, Jeff, thank you very much.

Thank you, Matt, for sharing your Keeper of the Year.

And to our listeners, thank you as always.

And we'll see you next time.

I usually start the credits by saying this episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend, who has in fact produced and edited all 53 episodes of Radio Atlantic in the last year.

But this week, I've got a question for you, Kevin.

Kevin Townsend, what is your keeper?

So in the keeper tradition, I came relatively unprepared, but I have an immediate thought based on my immediate experience of-spoiling our guest secret.

I biked to work today through Rock Creek Park for the first time in a few weeks because I've had a little ankle injury from soccer.

And my keeper is this thing that happened when I was biking home through Rock Creek Park a few weeks ago.

For context, my family has for like many generations gone to this little lake in New Hampshire and enjoyed the beavers that try and make a lodge near the cabins and things like that.

And they're always so tough to get near or they're so skittish of humans that you're never around them.

And three generations of being near and hearing rumors of beavers, but never actually really being around them.

And biking up Rock Creek Park, there was one like a few feet away from the path, giant beaver trundling along, stick in his mouth, like not a care in the world.

And it was like seeing a mythical creature that I'd only known about from a distance and heard spoken in whispers.

And seeing it not just near me, but in the middle of the city on my commute, incidentally.

There was just something so magical of having nature in a city I adore.

And I love those little moments when the world peeks through a city and you get to see it.

Amazing.

Leprechauns are real.

Well, Kevin, thank you to you for all the work you do to make this show what it is.

We seriously and literally couldn't have done it without you.

Next, thanks to you, our listeners, for joining us in our first year of Radio Atlantic.

It is a genuine honor to spend this time with you every week.

Thank you so much for spending it with with us.

What are your keepers of the year?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your keeper.

We listen to everyone, even the ones you don't hear on the show, and listening to them is among the most edifying parts of my day, so please do call in.

We'll be off the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back in your feed the week of August 10th.

Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss our triumphant return.

If you're not sure how, search for Radio Atlantic and Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast app, or just go to theatlantic.com/slash radio and go from there.

Thank you to Catherine Wells, our fantastic executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

We are so glad to have you.

We are also so glad to have our incandescent theme music, the battle hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by the impossibly talented John Batiste.

Most importantly, once again, thank you for listening.

May the lessons and memories you carry with you enrich every day of your life.

Onward.