Ari Shapiro on the News and More

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Happy to have a few minutes now with All Things Considered co-host, Ari Shapiro. Musician and radio man that he is, Ari's got a book called  The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening. Hi, Ari. Thanks for giving us some morning time before you go to your real job in the afternoon.

Ari Shapiro: Hi, Brian. I'm so happy to join you in between All Things Considered interviews we're taping that you'll hear later today.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: I want to go to something new, the end of your book to start out. I see you have a great answer to the question you must get all the time. What's your favorite part of hosting All Things Considered? Will you start us off with that?

Ari Shapiro: For me, it's waking up every morning knowing that by the end of the day, I'm going to learn something new. I love the curiosity that I get to explore on the show every day. I hope that that love, that that curiosity translates to the experience of listeners where, just to give you a specific example, yesterday we had this news roundup of science news where we were talking about houses made from diapers, the best way to make gummy candy stay gummy. Also, over the course of the day, we talked about politics and business and war and arts. I love that diversity of things. That's my favorite thing about hosting All Things Considered.

Brian Lehrer: I see you grew up through elementary school as one of the few Jewish kids in Fargo, North Dakota. How small a minority were you in as a Jewish kid in Fargo?

Ari Shapiro: We actually had two synagogues back in those days in Fargo. We lived there till I was eight. The thing that I derived from that experience, which I explain in the book, is that by being the Jewish kid who went around from classroom to classroom with a menorah and a dreidel every December, telling these children descended from Scandinavian immigrants what Hanukkah is and what Judaism is, it was my first experience being an ambassador and a translator.

Years later, when at the age of 16 I came out of the closet and was the only out gay kid in my big suburban public high school, again, I felt like I was walking between worlds and helping people make the foreign seem a bit less strange, which is now what I get to do as a journalist when I go to coastal Senegal and talk to people whose homes are sinking under rising seas, or talk to Syrian migrants in Turkey, I'm trying to take something that might feel distant, far away, and strange, and help people who hear those stories relate to it in a more personal, intimate way.

Brian Lehrer: You do refer to a point in the book where your identity as a reporter and your identity as a gay person felt like they were intention in some way. Can you describe that?

Ari Shapiro: Well, all through my life, my career, my identity is relevant. In Zimbabwe, my identity as a white person is relevant. In Iraq, my identity as an American is relevant. What I think you're referring to is when I was covering the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, I went there knowing that I would bring something unique to that story because not only had I been to gay bars and I know the importance and the significance of them, but I had been to gay bars in Orlando specifically, and I understand that these places are more than just somewhere to get a drink.

They can be a haven, a place of safety, a place of community, almost like a secular church for people who've been rejected in many cases by organized religion. What I discovered at the end of that reporting process was that this very vivid memory I had of going out many years earlier with these bartenders in Orlando that actually they were bartenders from Pulse and I had forgotten that that was the place I met them. I didn't remember the name of the bar.

At the end of my telling all of these stories about the massacre at this one specific place, I realized that not only had I been to places like Pulse, but I had actually been to Pulse.

In many ways, I think the book is about the way the people we are shapes the stories we tell, and conversely how the stories we tell shape our lives. That's true not only of the storytellers but also of the people who hear the stories we tell.

Brian Lehrer: All Things Considered co-host, Ari Shapiro, is my guest if you're just joining us. He has a new book called  The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening. I see you started at NPR as an intern to Nina Totenberg. Were you interested in legal affairs reporting in particular at first?

Ari Shapiro: At first, no. I did go on to cover the US Department of Justice for five years, so I gained deep knowledge in legal reporting. Of course, I was a huge fan of Nina. She was a celebrity on par with Meryl Streep in my household growing up.

The reason that I got an internship with Nina was that I got rejected for an NPR internship. When I was graduating from college, I applied, was turned down. I think it's important for anybody who feels like they might be failing at whatever they're trying to do to remember that NPR's Ari Shapiro was rejected for an NPR internship.

Then I found out that Nina hires her own interns separate from the NPR internship program, so I applied to her without any real specific knowledge, experience, or interest in the law per se, but she gave me a chance and I have stayed close friends with her for the 20-plus years ever since. She's still a dear trusted mentor.

She published a book some months before I did, so I'm still following in her footsteps. She sits right around the corner from me here at NPR headquarters, and I just feel very grateful to have her in my life.

Brian Lehrer: She came into our WNYC studio for that book interview as well. You tell a story of a party Nina gave for some relatively powerful people in DC and you did the cooking.

Ari Shapiro: I think this anecdote says more about Nina than anything else. My internship with her was coming to an end. I was looking for a job and having no luck. She knew that I loved to cook and I was living in a shared studio apartment, so I wasn't doing any ambitious cooking. She said to me, "Why don't I hire you to throw a dinner party where you will be the cook and also a guest, and I will invite a bunch of Washington VIPs who could conceivably give you a job?"

She invited the late Congressman John Dingle. He has since passed away. She invited the former Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick. She invited all of these people who are Washington DC bold-faced names.

I spent all day cooking, then sat down at the dinner table, and at the end of dinner, she said, "This is my intern Ari. He cooked the meal you've eaten tonight. He's looking for a job and not as a chef." It was this incredibly generous gesture and also a leap of faith on her part to give me that opportunity.

For all of the ways in which Nina is impressive and formidable, all of which are true, she's also incredibly kind and generous.

Brian Lehrer: You have a 9/11 story in the book, something that I think is worth saying out loud for the sake of history. A speech that The Morning Edition host at the time, Bob Edwards, gave to the staff as you were all in a state of shock like everyone else in America. What did Bob Edward say?

Ari Shapiro: He said in moments like this, people all over the world are asking what they should be doing, what role they should be playing. We're fortunate that as journalists, we know what we're supposed to be doing. We know what our job is. We are there to document what's happening and tell the story and share it with the public.

At the time, I was the most junior person on The Morning Edition staff. I was a temp working the overnight shift from 1:00 to 9:00 AM, so the attacks on the World Trade Center happened just at what was supposed to have been the very end of my day.

As I describe in the book, 20 years later, as a host of All Things Considered, when everything was shutting down all over the world and everyone was figuring out how to work from home and how we were going to get this show All Things Considered on the air when we couldn't even be in the same room as each other, I shared that story with the staff of the show that I now host, which has stuck with me all this time as I went from being a temp editorial assistant to being a reporter, to a correspondent and now, a host.

Brian Lehrer: You've been a London correspondent and you write about how your time in London revealed to you a cozy American bubble through which you viewed the world without realizing it and without intending to. What's an example of an aspect of that bubble or a story that revealed it to you?

Ari Shapiro: Well, specifically, I had been a White House correspondent for four years. I had reported versions of the story, "What Will the Civil War in Syria Mean for Barack Obama's reelection prospects?"

Of course, when I started covering wars myself, it became abundantly clear to me that the most important question to ask about the civil war in Syria is not what will it mean for President Obama's reelection prospects. In fact, that's probably not among the 10 most important questions to ask about the war in Syria.

I realize that in the United States, we have the great fortune of not having had a war fought on our soil in more than a century. We have these two enormous oceans on either side of us. As empathetic and well-meaning as we might imagine ourselves to be, I was pigeonholing stories about people living through war as somehow people who were fundamentally different from us. Like they were- the phrase I use is war people in war places.

Then when I went out to start covering wars, the challenge that I faced was how do I tell these stories in a way that won't allow people to make the same mistaken judgment that I had been making all this time, that will break through the preconceived notions that listeners might have about those living through these times and help them see our common shared humanity?

That was the challenge that I set myself as I was in Iraq, as I was in Eastern Ukraine, as I was in Israel, as I was covering the Syrian refugee crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, let me ask you about this other aspect of you, which a lot of our listeners don't know about.

Ari Shapiro: Yes, you mentioned that I'm a musician too. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, a frequent guest singer with the internationally bestselling group, Pink Martini, which I think you describe in the book as a band founded in the culture wars of the 1990s.

Ari Shapiro: In Portland, Oregon, my hometown, yes.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious how you would compare the culture wars of the 1990s from the perspective of a singer to the culture wars that you're covering today as a journalist.

Ari Shapiro: I'm going to answer that question by quoting the person who I quote probably more than anyone else in the world, the writer and performer, Taylor Mack, who told the story of this country over 240 years through a 24-hour performance that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

Taylor said, when you tell the story of the country through slavery and the Trail of Tears and Japanese internment camps and everything else, you find that these things go in cycles. I don't know why, but they do, and you also find the stories of the people who are trying to make life better for those around them, and any of us can hope to do is to be one of those people in whatever time and whatever place we find ourselves living in.

Brian Lehrer: Ari, I love hearing you tell stories on All Things Considered. I'm really impressed and delighted with how you can tell stories as a conversationalist in the guest seat, so thank you very much for joining us today. Ari Shapiro's new book is The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent listening. I'll be listening this afternoon, Ari.

Ari Shapiro: Thank you, Brian. It's been a pleasure.

 

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