My basic theory in my twenties is that IQ was fungible. I would hire a great physicists, biologists, someone who was smart, and I would assign them some task, and they would figure out how to do because they have a high IQ.
I basically thought that I should never ask somebody to work for somebody who is not smarter than them. We’ll just have this IQ hierarchy. Well that didn’t work for very long. By age 25, I realised IQ comes in different forms. These guys who understand sales and management, that seems to come negatively correlated with IQ. That was befuddling to me.
The Lucy Kellaway Interview: Bear Grylls
Authenticity, I protest, can be a mistake in an interview; the trick is to be inauthentic in just the way that fits your brand.
.. Never has crawling into a camel’s carcase to escape a sandstorm been less relevant to modern office-dwelling couch potatoes; yet never have we loved watching Grylls do it more, and never have we been keener to try it ourselves.
.. What might be more relevant to telly viewers is programmes that told them how to survive on the minimum wage, deal with ugly divorces, dementia and that sort of thing.
Yet, according to Grylls, the two sorts of survival are the same. “In the end, it’s about positivity, kindness, humility, courage, determination.”
.. I also wonder if what he is describing is merely the luxury of a near-death experience, which tends to be a warped guide to living.
Paris Review Editor Frees Menagerie of Wordsmiths
Many writers despise being interviewed; in his collection “Picked-Up Pieces,” John Updike called interviews “a form to be loathed, a half-form like maggots.” They worry that their loose talk will be, to some readers, a cheap substitute for deep engagement with their real work. Yet over the decades few major writers have turned down The Paris Review. Part of the appeal of these exchanges, for writers, is that they’re allowed to tweak the text later, adjusting and readjusting the masks they want to present to readers.
.. The interviews with Hemingway and V. S. Naipaul are the most plainly contentious. “The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions,” Hemingway says, “proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely.” But answer he did, perhaps realizing that readers care about the stray, telling details of a writer’s life in much the same way that an author cares about those details in the characters he or she puts to paper.
Open Source Media
A lot of people think about software when they hear the words “open source,” but I’d like to extend the concept to “media”. By that I mean books, tv, magazines, radio, etc.
Example
The basic idea is simple — suppose you’re reading a book about Jack Kennedy that makes an interesting claim and then cites its source with a footnote to an “NBC Interview with Jack Kennedy: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in the Oval Office in the White House, Sept 9, 1963.”
One of my first questions would be: “Can I get a transcript of the interview?” A second would be: “Can a get a recording of the whole interview?” Without the first, I can’t verify what the president said. Without the second, I can’t get the context.
Two related questions this raises are: “What are the ground rules for the interview;” and “How much editing was done to produce the final product?”
It’s interesting that in Brinkley’s interview, the president was given a number of “mulligans,” although he appears not to have seen the questions ahead of time.
One of the commenters noted:
The media and politicos are in cahoots, rehearsing the interview.
Ground Rules for Interviewing
So I’ve been thinking: “What are fair ground rules for an interview?” Here’s a few ideas:
- The full recording, including out-takes, should be available for the historical record. [ref]How soon is that?[/ref]
- Should anything be left out of the transcript? Inevitably I think the answer will have to be yes, unless you get rid of all “off-the-record” interviews. I also think the appropriateness of off-the-record remarks varies according to the degree of power that the interviewee has. The secrets of the powerful often warrant less protection than the secrets of the weak.
- It may take time to gain the trust of the interviewee; and in real-life, the interviewer only begins recording when trust has been established and the interviewee is ready.
The Complete Record
I’ve sometimes wondered, what would happen if journalists tried to put everything on the record. They would record their telephone calls asking for the interview. They would share all their email correspondence. They would begin recording as they approached the office or home of the interviewee and then just keep filming until after they left. And they would publish the entire contents of this “record” with every interview they did. This is now feasible on the web, whereas it was impractical in the television or print-only world.
Now of course most people wouldn’t care to watch the whole thing; but a few would; and they might post notable things for the inspection of a wider group. Is this what we want?
Paris Review Style Interview
An alternate model is employed by the literary journal “The Paris Review.” It’s editors like to select their favorite authors to interview; and they give the authors full license to edit their answers.[ref href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/books/23interview.html”]”Yet over the decades few major writers have turned down The Paris Review. Part of the appeal of these exchanges, for writers, is that they’re allowed to tweak the text later, adjusting and readjusting the masks they want to present to readers.” (New York Times) [/ref]
Naturally, the authors are used to choosing their words carefully; and this approach allows them to extend such care to the interview. It allows the author to say exactly what they want, potentially resulting in more clarity, or alternatively less accountably.
Speaking about interviewing authors, David Fenza says:
A good literary interview is not faithful to the actual spoken event. The transcript of the actual spoken interview should only serve as a draft of a dialogue that will, eventually, present the writer as completely and succinctly as possible. A good literary interview is improvisational, but it’s also revisionary. Writers are creatures who succeed through revision; they are most themselves when they revise; and this should carry over into the interview.[ref href=”https://books.google.com/books?id=ra2lH0scz9MC&lpg=PA69&ots=UHq3Q9xNk8&dq=paris%20review%20interview%20process%20favorite%20author%20edit%20transcript&pg=PA69#v=onepage&q=paris%20review%20interview%20process%20favorite%20author%20edit%20transcript&f=false”]The Art of the Author Interview: And Interviewing Creative People, by Sarah Anne Johnson. pp 69.[/ref]
When to allow a “Paris-Review” style interview depends on the type of interview desired. In any case, the ground rules should be disclosed.
If a President is given chances to “edit” their answers, there should be some indication of this when the interview is published. But no matter how the interview is edited or revised, can the full historical record be preserved?
It is common to see something like “This is an edited and condensed version of the interview.” It would be interesting to see some sort of statistical disclosure about how much of the included text was changed; and how much was excluded.