TWNW Special: What to Read This Summer 2024

MCMAHON:
Welcome to The World Next Week's special summer reading episode. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.
Every year, we look forward to discussing books we've read and plan to read, as well as other media we recommend for what we hope are these slightly more relaxed summer months. And, joining us today from Berlin for this summer reading podcast special is our old friend, Deborah Amos.

Deb is a professor, author, and, of course, an award-winning international correspondent for NPR, where her coverage of Middle East and refugee issues is unparalleled. She's now the Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University.
Deb, welcome back to the show.

AMOS:
Thank you. And I'm former NPR, but a small quibble. I am a professor.

ROBBINS:
You will always be NPR in my heart.

AMOS:
Thank you.

MCMAHON:
And, just a reminder to listeners that our summer reading show, which we do annually, does not feature the work of our CFR colleagues, although they're prolific and distinguished, and we do highlight CFR publications all year long on our usual programming. Today, we'd like to spotlight those authors and creators outside of CFR.

ROBBINS:
So, Deb is our guest. You get first dibs on sharing a book you've read that you want us to know more about.

AMOS:
So, the first thing I'm going to admit is I listen to books, and I do it a lot. When I have to underline, of course, I don't, but for the most part, I listen to them, so that is also in my calculations.

What I did, over the last couple of weeks, is I wanted to listen to both Pulitzer Prize winners, fiction and nonfiction. So I'll start with the fiction, Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. It is a mother-daughter story, takes place in what is then called a lunatic asylum. But, what is startling about this book is it's about the chaos after the Civil War, so it takes place between 1864 and 1874. And, I'd never thought about that before, about how crazy it was. People would show up, they'd move into your house, there was nothing you could do about it, there was hardly any law enforcement. It's just a cracking good read with a very good narrator.

The second thing I did is I listened to the nonfiction, and that one is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it was a tough one for Nathan Thrall. It's a story about a Palestinian bus accident where children are...The bus is hit by a out of control truck and a lot of the children are killed. The bus explodes.

And, the book comes out right after October 7th. We all remember that date. It is when Hamas goes on the rampage in southern Israel, and so Nathan's book tour gets canceled everywhere he is. But it is a remarkable story, and it tells a story about Palestinians in remarkable detail, how they live, what it is like to live under occupation. And, he wins the Pulitzer Prize this year for it. There was a book talk here, in Berlin, and as we were all drinking bad wine, as one does after a book talk, someone had called him said, "You won the Pulitzer." And, we all celebrated with him, and then he was canceled the next day in Frankfurt.

So he's had a rough patch with this book, but it is worth reading, because you learn a lot about how Palestinians live, what the restrictions are on their lives, and he does it through a very imperfect character, Abed Salama, real guy; but we find out a lot about occupation.

MCMAHON:
So Deb, first of all, on Night Watch, that's really intriguing to me, and I find that particular period of time, that decade, sort of the decade right after the Civil War, especially interesting and almost forgotten in the U.S. because it was so tumultuous. I became freshly aware of it in reading the recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Chernow, where he goes into what was facing the U.S. and Grant's particular role in trying to pacify the situation and how truly awful things were in certain parts of the country, especially the defeated South of the United States. So, I'm looking forward to taking a look at that book.

And then the Nathan Thrall book also, for completely different reasons, sounds really interesting. You mentioned he was canceled in Frankfurt. Is that because the subject matter was seen as too troublesome for the German hosts? Or what was the reason there?

AMOS:
Correct. And, late October, he was canceled in London for security reasons. This one was somebody on the board of the place where he was speaking didn't like it. It's very difficult here in Germany to talk about Israel-Palestine without coming into conflict with the government. The way that they crack down here on any kind of protest that is pro-Palestinian is much tougher than what's happening in the states. So, it wasn't surprising that he was canceled despite winning a Pulitzer Prize. They found another venue for him.

And, I think that Germans are beginning to question this. "Why can't we talk about this?" And Nathan is the perfect person to do it. He spent thirteen years living in Jerusalem working for the International Crisis Group, and he's encyclopedic in his facts. I covered the Middle East for a long time, stuff I didn't know: the color of your visa; who can go into East Jerusalem; who can't; how the color of your visa changes if you've been in jail. This is a bus that bursts into flames. There are an Israeli checkpoints nearby. No one comes for these kids and so you begin to get this sense...And the way he builds the book, he goes away from the accident and you learn a lot about Abed Salama. And, there's a moment where you think, "Why do I need to know all this?" But you need to care about somebody. You need to know about somebody to really understand the tragedy of what happens on that bus.

So I think it's timely, and obviously, so did the Pulitzer board.

ROBBINS:
And who is Abed Salama?

AMOS:
A guy. Honestly, he's a guy. He doesn't marry the love of his life out of pride. He ends up in a loveless marriage and takes on a second wife. He finally has a boy. And, so the second part of this is to learn about Palestinian culture and society through a very, very conflicted character. He is not an official, he is not a politician. He's just a guy. And, that is why I think it's so deeply reported, because just to look into the life of a civilian is a difficult endeavor, and Thrall has done a great job on it.

ROBBINS:
At a period of time in which people probably don't want to talk about normalcy.

AMOS:
No, and that has been his problem in getting this book out and so the Pulitzer Prize, I think, will give it more heft than it would have had. And, I'm sure that for an author who's had his book tour canceled, it was a remarkable bit of karma.

So, as the guest, I now get to ask you. Bob, let's start with you. And, what have you been reading?

MCMAHON:
So, I have been reading The World of Yesterday, which is a memoir by Stefan Zweig. And, I'm embarrassed to say I knew very little about Stefan Zweig other than seeing him name checked in all sorts of reviews over the years. He's certainly well known, more recently, as the inspiration for Wes Anderson's film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I love memoirs and I love memoirs about this period of European history, so it seemed like just a natural for me. But, Zweig is an unbelievably prolific author. He was one of the world's most famous, if not the most famous author, at one point early in the twentieth century. And, so I have a whole host of things to read now ahead of me, certainly inspired by reading this book.

So, he's someone who's born in 1881. He's sort of growing up in this magical time in Vienna. His father's a very prosperous merchant Jewish family in Vienna. And, Zweig encounters, because of the society he grew up in, his own talents, the travels he undertook in Europe, he becomes well-known to a whole host of famous people: Sigmund Freud; Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet; Richard Strauss, the composer; Maxime Gorky; the sculptor, Rodin; and so on and so on. And, he just lives this incredible life. And, through this memoir, he's evoking this period, this really lost period of European history, but an important period. And, there is a sense of foreboding.

There's partly a sense of foreboding because anybody who reads this book, it's pointed out early on in the foreword that Zweig, after submitting this to his publisher, committed suicide. So, this is his last act. It's early in World War II or sort of mid-World War II. He's in exile in Brazil, and this is sort of his last creation. And, it's not a pity party by any means. He's really, again, as I said, evoking this incredible period of time. But, it's also there are periods: his life is interrupted first by the traumas of World War I; then there's the weird sort of peaceful period, partly the Weimar Germany period and others in between the wars; and then Nazism emerges in his own beloved Austria, he cannot live in again. And, then he's living in a life of exile. It's just his evocation of it, and it's really a public memoir. You don't really find out much about his own personal life. It's really about him living in these incredible situations and his impressions of it, which are really worth reading.

And, I'll just leave you with the final line from his book, which is kind of haunting. He writes, "In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light; and only those who have known the light in the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives."

AMOS:
Did you pick this because there's a mood of foreboding these days in the United States?

MCMAHON:
I didn't initially. It certainly became something that resonated with me, though. As I'm reading what he's saying and where he's traveling and what he's experiencing and so forth, there are definitely things that you could compare to either this present moment, you could certainly compare it to that post falling of the Berlin Wall euphoria period, called by some "the end of history" and so forth. So, there are parallels there, certainly, and that's why I say there's this element of foreboding that's not just what he's talking about, but also as you're reading this, you're thinking, "Oh, okay, some of this sounds familiar."

And, it's amazing, in many different genres, everybody has their favorite Zweig book. And, I actually listened to a podcast with this translator, Anthea Bell, who just said, "there are so many layers in the way he writes, in German, that it's a fascinating insight both into him but also into the craft of writing into the German language." That becomes part of the mission, is to make sure to evoke that. So yeah, I'm just scratching the surface, here, jumping into the memoir, which was his last act.

Carla, I wanted to turn to you and see what you would like to share from your bookshelf.

ROBBINS:
So the book I just finished reading is called How to Win An Information War, and it's by the Ukrainian-born British journalist, Peter Pomerantsev. And, I followed his work since 2014 when he started publishing widely about Russian information warfare, the doctrine, the strategy, and the tactics. And, Washington wasn't really paying any attention, but Ukraine and the Baltics were already targets of major disinformation campaigns by the Kremlin's political technologists. It's really a term that I really just love, because it really sort of goes to the core of what he's writing about.

And, this book tells the tale of Sefton Delmer, and he's a British reporter for the Daily Express who covered, with incredible access, the rise of Adolf Hitler. And really, he was on the plane covering Hitler's campaigns. It's really hard for us as reporters to imagine that there were political campaigns for Hitler, but there were, and he really was right in there with Goebbels all the time. And, after covering all of this, once the British intelligence got over their mistrust of him, he went and worked for them, and he directed a series of propaganda operations during the war, including creating several fake Nazi radio services, all of which were broadcast from a great country house outside of London.

And, one of the most popular featured this character, Der Chef, who was this hugely profane and anti-Semitic unnamed military leader, who was played by a German Jewish émigré, a guy who was a writer of detective novels and a literary agent in London. And, this Der Chef defended the honor of the German military while denouncing the thievery, the corruption, the perversion, talking about SS orgies in a monastery in Bavaria, committed by the Nazi elite and their families. And, the details that Der Chef used were based on a mixture of actual British intelligence—Ian Fleming, who was working then for British Naval Intelligence, was a source—as well as very clever disinformation. And, the production was apparently so persuasive in undermining trust in the Nazis that the U.S. embassy in Berlin, and the U.S. was not yet in the war, reported that the broadcasts were likely coming from disaffected German army officers. So, this is really quite compelling stuff.

And, Pomerantsev weaves these stories of Delmer's counter-propaganda efforts with his own recent reporting experiences in Ukraine, and before that, in Russia. And here, the book gets a lot weaker, because he's trying to build a case for how we might push back right now against modern day Russian information warfare. He argues, it's not a particularly compelling insight...I mean, pretty obvious that appealing to people's higher order values is far less effective than appealing to their immediate self-interest. As I said, not a transcending insight, and I'm not sure what it says for journalists in particular who are constantly having to push back against disinformation.

But the story itself about the radios is a great yarn and his descriptions of how propaganda seizes popular imaginations, preying as much on people's need to belong, as on darker impulses, I really think it's useful for understanding Russia today, and I fear for understanding what's going on, here

AMOS:
Timely, as well. There's stories in the newspapers, I'm sure where you are, too, about a disinformation campaign in France that Russia appears to be running to say the Olympics, going to be terrible. Their team is not allowed to compete except as independents, and this is kind of a revenge misinformation campaign to keep people away from the Olympics. This is one we know about.

ROBBINS:
This is sort of steeling ourself for what's going to happen in the American election. One of the things about Pomerantsev that I so compelling is that he really got it, so long before we got it in 2016, and that's when...I've been reading him before then. I think what's dissatisfying about the book is he doesn't have an answer. The book is called How to Win an Information War, and I really did want an answer here.

We who write, fact-checking, there's so many great fact-checking outfits that are out there and that work in Ukraine, that work in all sorts of places in Europe and also in the United States. We're caught in this thing. Is the truth sandwich the way you do it? Every time we write something we say, "Of course this is a lie, but nevertheless, this is what President Trump and other people have said." We wrestle with this as reporters. And, then there's this other question, so many of the people in this book are journalists who then get involved themselves in counter-propaganda exercises. I personally am not going to get involved in that, but we wrestle with this every day. That said, there's a great series of yarns here, and in reading about it, you do understand why propaganda itself is so effective.

AMOS:
I just finished teaching journalism to twenty-year-olds here in Berlin, and there's a moment where you realize they live in a different world than we do, and I wonder if-

ROBBINS:
Because they're twenty or because they're German?

AMOS:
Neither, because none of them are German. They're all Ukrainians, Syrians, Hungarians, Romanians. That's the kind of class that I had. But, what I mean is they are taking in disinformation, misinformation, fake news, like a fire hose, and I wonder if they're not better at it than we are because they live in the world of this. And, maybe the idea here is to just give people skills on how to recognize the misinformation because you can't stop any of it. You cannot. We are now in a world where everybody sees everything.

MCMAHON:
So how to filter it, but also how to find the genuine sources of information because-

AMOS:
Yeah, I think. But, I've just had this realization after being with all of them for fourteen weeks that they live in a different world than we do, and it's a generational divide. And, I don't have an influencer, I don't care what my favorite movie person thinks about Ukraine. I really don't. But they do, and they read it, and they have influencers that tell them stuff. So, I think it's an inoculation campaign.

ROBBINS:
But does it inoculate them? Are they vigilantly inoculated and if they're studying journalism, do they have an answer to this question that I don't think this book actually answers?

AMOS:
So, here's their obsession, which I have noticed, and I really noticed it here in Berlin, is for open source investigations, "I'll prove the truth. I will go and do facial recognition and geolocating and I will show you what happened in Mariupol, and I will design an entire website where I'll show you what happened in Mariupol." So, on the one hand, they're being bombarded with mistruths, but on the other hand they're obsessed with truth is justice, narrative is justice, and it's a very interesting frame for this generation to take in the world.

MCMAHON:
That would be a nice coda for the Pomerantsev book to add something like that, to fill in what you were looking for, Carla, maybe.

ROBBINS:
So, there is this one other project that Pomerantsev is involved in that intrigues me. It's not mentioned so much in the book, but follows exactly on that, and he's part of something called the Reckoning Project that teaches Ukrainian journalists to collect evidence. And, they teach them special interview techniques, as well as data collection that can be used not only for journalism, but for war crimes prosecutions, because it is different, how to preserve this information, how you interview people not playing on trauma so much. And, I think that's really the Lord's work.

And, you're right. This next generation of journalists, certainly they have different tools than we had when we were coming up in the business, so maybe that is a hopeful thought, Deb, that they can use those tools there. So, they've got the influencers as the negative on one shoulder, and the other one is that they have all this ability to collect data and they can see things. We also know that so many images can be manipulated. But, I'll go out on the hopeful note, here. Let us be hopeful.

Now we have these books we can recommend to our listeners. Let's share what's been on our to-read list. Bob, why don't you start us off?

MCMAHON:
Okay. Well, I decided to choose one of my favorite authors on issues of climate change. And, not favorite because she makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but because she just kind of lays it out in really authoritative terms, and that would be Elizabeth Kolbert, longtime New Yorker writer, Pulitzer Prize winner for the book, The Sixth Extinction.

It is really troubling stuff that she covers. However, she has a new collection of essays called, H is for Hope, in which she takes every alphabet letter, so twenty-six letters, and each of them stands for something. They're not all hopeful things, by the way, but they are all things that add up to understanding this moment that we are in and what is involved in understanding climate change and trying to do something about it.

And, so just to give you a little flavor of what the letters stand for: the A is for a person named, if I pronounced that right, who is I believe a Swedish individual who created the world's first climate model back in 1894. Pretty extraordinary. The Z stands for ground zero, and what she says is ground zero for climate change in the United States, the Colorado River Basin. In between, she has B stands for blah, blah, blah of the Greta Thunberg blah, blah, blah speech about it's time to start doing something and stop blathering on. The E is for an all electric plane that she learns to fly, so there's some of the hopefulness that comes through in this is the extraordinary progress made in things like zero emission technologies and in renewable energy and so forth.

And, she deliberately tries to get the H for hope in there to give people a sense, let's not throw our hands up for this problem that she has been chronicling probably almost better than anybody, but let's get out there and start trying to do something about it, and get to zero emission and all those things that are still far off because it's happening. And, as she has said repeatedly, it's coming for all of us.

ROBBINS:
Well, this notion of not getting completely paralyzed seems so absolutely essential. With my own students, I give them a choice of topics in my intro class for what they want to do for their presentations, and I've been really surprised for the last two years that they haven't volunteered to do climate.

AMOS:
Really? That's surprising.

ROBBINS:
I keep telling them. There are things they want to do: responsibility to protect, and they want to do cyber conflict, and they want to do nuclear weapons. They haven't been rushing...I have to wheedle them into doing...I keep saying to them, "This is the existential threat of your lifetime," and when I ask them why, I get this answer, this sort of, "What can we do about it?" Which I find incredibly depressing.

And it's not that...fifteen years ago people were saying, "Well, you can't really say extreme weather is caused by this, or you can't eat it, you can't smell it, you can't necessarily see it." And, now this other extreme of, "We're not sure, we seem paralyzed by it." Not everyone. I have students who are majoring in sustainability, but a remarkable number of them who are not volunteering to focus on it because they feel paralyzed. It's nice to know that H is for hope.

AMOS:
I think this is a bigger issue among young people in Europe. I see it here. People care about it, people talk about it, people study it. There's these demonstrations that go on all the time in Europe, certainly in Germany there are. I don't know why that is, but as soon as I got here, I noticed it. It is just a different level. I don't think that there was the campaign in Europe of climate deniers as there was in the U.S. I think it's an American phenomenon that young people aren't as engaged as they are here. Also, politicians don't question it.

MCMAHON:
But Deb, we're also reading a bit about in the run-up to the Euro-parliament elections, that there's been a bit of a backlash against some of the green policies, in terms of it's hit people in their pocketbooks in different ways. It's hit some of the industries. Like in Germany, it certainly hit some of the auto-related industries. So, it's interesting to say how they're trying to reconcile that, because the green parties look to take a bit of a beating in the Euro-parliament elections.

AMOS:
Yes, and a lot of that is more about immigration than it is about climate change.

ROBBINS:
I don't think it's our students don't care about it. It's this-

AMOS:
Yeah, I didn't say that.

ROBBINS:
It's the sense of agency, and I think that does have to do with the politics in the United States. And, it is because of the climate resistance and all the obstructionism of it.

Also, there's this absolutely wonderful Vox video that showed how the Republicans turned against climate change. There was a period of time, there was this absolutely fabulous ad of Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi together saying, "We don't agree about a lot, but climate is one of the things we do agree about." There was a period of time in which Mitt Romney, John McCain, lots of Republicans and Newt Gingrich agreed on climate change that it was something we had to act on. And, then Koch money came in and it was off to the races about climate denial.

So, I think it's that sense, and certainly for these younger people, they've grown up a world in which obstructionism in Washington on climate really gives them this sense of "We're not sure what we can do." I'm not saying all my students. As I said, I have students who major in this. But, I think the difference with Europe is transcendent.

AMOS:
And, also you had a ruling, and it was a couple of years ago, in the German supreme court that took into account the climate for future generations.

ROBBINS:
And, that's happening here. You've got young people here suing in different states about their future. But you're right, we haven't had that ruling.

AMOS:
And unlikely, too, with this Supreme Court.

MCMAHON:
So Deb, moving right along, I'd like to hear what you are gearing up to read.

AMOS:
So for me, I think it's going to be the Steve Coll book. He is such a remarkable researcher and there is no detail that he doesn't put his hand on and put into a book. And, it's called The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq. I covered both, the first one and the second one, and so I think I will now find out everything I didn't know when I was on the ground. As soon as I finish watching silly programs on Netflix, I'm going to tackle that one.

ROBBINS:
I'm giggling because that's my next book, too. And, I am intrigued by it-

AMOS:
For the same reason, no doubt.

ROBBINS:
Well, yes, for the same reason. I'm eager to read it because it purports to answer the question that has gnawed at me ever since I covered the run-up to the war, from the 2003 war from DC. At this point, we know painfully why the Bush administration and all of Washington miscalculated so badly and persuaded itself that Saddam still had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons: confirmation bias, group think.

But, what this book purports to answer is this question of "Why didn't Saddam show the world that he no longer had any WMD?" He had twelve years of these punishing international sanctions, and with the U.S. poised to invade, why did he risk his regime and ultimately his life to maintain that lie? And, one of the things about the book that seems so intriguing is he has access to these transcripts and these tapes that they captured; and Saddam, like Richard Nixon, he had a tape recorder in his office and he was taping his meetings with Ba'ath leaders and with foreign dignitaries. And, the U.S. military went in and they got these tapes and these transcripts, and they were available for a while at the National Defense University, and then the center that was there that had these things ran out of funding and they suddenly were not available. And, then Coll sued and went for a FOIA request and got access to them, so he's asking this question, which has completely intrigued me.

And, I must admit also, Deb, that I wanted to raise this because I knew you were going to be on, and Deb and I, in the first war, were in the room next to each other at the Dhahran International Hotel.

AMOS:
Yeah, we were.

ROBBINS:
And, I knew absolutely nothing about the Middle East, and Deb taught me everything I know about the Middle East. So, I had to bring that up.

MCMAHON:
And, I'm looking forward to the memoir that's co-authored by the two of you on that experience, by the way.

AMOS:
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

ROBBINS:
Combat tailoring, as we like to refer to it.

AMOS:
Exactly. I know. We were there for a long time. The other thing is that Saddam was such a chatty Cathy when he was waiting for his trial. I met a researcher who now runs a organization called CEJA. He's a war crimes investigator. He was working for the UN, and he told me that Saddam had a bunch of Iraqi lawyers and they were also scared of him, they didn't ask him any questions. So the Americans said, "Oh, this is going really badly, so Bill Wiley, could you please go and talk to Saddam and be his lawyer for a while?" And he did. And, for four months, every day, for hours, he talked to Saddam, and all of that's on the record. So, he wanted a record out there. I'm not surprised that he recorded stuff, now that I hear you talk about it.

ROBBINS:
And, some of the answers, he later told U.S. investigators about Kuwait, quote, "If you didn't want me to go in, why didn't you tell me?" These are really intriguing things. And, he was so persuaded that the CIA knew everything, it was so powerful, and this is what Coll writes, "A CIA capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts was not consistent with Saddam's bedrock assumptions."

These are sort of interesting insights, how these two countries could so deal with each other so much. Certainly, we backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. How could we so misread each other? And, I think that's a big part of this book. So, I'm really looking forward to it because I've been gnawing over this. And, I think so many people in Washington are like, "We always knew he didn't have WMD."

AMOS:
Baloney.

ROBBINS:
Which is baloney for those of us who covered this. We didn't know it. The question is: if he knew he didn't have WMD, why didn't he tell us? And, that's why I want to read the book.

AMOS:
If you spent any time in the Middle East, everybody in the Middle East believes the CIA knows everything. That is just a given. Saddam was no outlier on that one. And, one of the sentences that I said so often in the Middle East is, "They're not that good." And, there was no way to convince anybody that the CIA doesn't know everything.

MCMAHON:
And, having covered the run-up to the 2003 invasion at the UN, day after day and trooping into the Security Council, the UN gets a bad rap for a lot of things, and some of it's certainly deserved, but the UN actually had it right.

First of all, their mission that went in and demilitarized or de-WMD'd, as the case may be, Iraq was successful. It actually worked. It was an international system with heavy scrutiny and monitors that took away this power on biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons from the Iraqis, and it was shunted aside for other reasons. So, there you go-

ROBBINS:
I'm not sure I would agree with that assessment, Bob. But, keeping in mind that they got pulled out in 1998, I would argue that this has as much to do with sanctions and not having access to the things to keep it up. We can arm wrestle about that, I would say.

MCMAHON:
We can take that on a separate discussion.

ROBBINS:
I think the other reason I want to read the book is, did Saddam really know he didn't have the stuff? That's the other question that I've always wondered about. I think in that system, did people have the guts to tell him that there were nothing left in the larder, that there were no biological weapons left?

And, as Hans Blix once said, "Mustard gas is not marmalade. You don't pour it down the drain." Did Saddam know? If you were like the guy who was in charge of maintaining the stocks of mustard gas and you realize that most of the stuff had evaporated, would you have had the guts to send the word up back up to Baghdad that you no longer had anything left? I don't think I would've had the guts, knowing the way Saddam took bad news.

AMOS:
Yes, not good for your future.

ROBBINS:
Or your family's.

MCMAHON:
Well, these are great suggestions. The Coll book sounds like a true winner. How about we take a break from books, and Carla, maybe expand it to movies or podcasts or even a musical?

ROBBINS:
I'll sing this one. So my husband and I just watched Bodkin on Netflix. It's a seven part...well, is it a murder mystery? Is it a dark comedy? Let's just say it's really odd, but it captured our attention. At it's most basic, it's the story of three reporters for the Guardian who are making a true crime, drum roll, podcast about the disappearance of three people twenty years ago from a tiny Irish town, a fictional town of Bodkin, during their annual, I think I'm pronouncing this right, Samhain Festival, which is a Gaelic version of Halloween.

Unfortunately, I found the character of the podcasters played by Will Forte, is that how he pronounces it, an SNL regular, pretty much of an unappealing dork. Sorry podcasters. But, his relentlessly bitter partner in this project, Dove, is an Irish investigative reporter for the Guardian who has been sent there under extreme protest by her editors to help her after her source on a National Health Service expose commits suicide. She's definitely really interesting, though one wonders how she ever gets anyone to talk to her because she's really mean. And, their researcher, Emmy, is a dream. She's efficient, she's enthusiastic, and undoubtedly the most talented of the three, if seriously wet behind the ears.

But, the mystery really kept us watching, not least because it includes an illicit trade in eels, and that really is a serious problem. So in your book, Bob, is E for eels, as it turns out. And, there are defrocked nuns selling yoga retreats and lots of other fun stuff.

AMOS:
And drugs.

ROBBINS:
Bodkin also led me to make a list of movies featuring the business of journalism that haven't gotten a lot of attention in recent years that I plan to revisit this summer, and I figured that both of you could add some of your suggestions.

So on my list: Good Night and Good Luck about journalism icon Edward R. Murrow and his battle with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, which seems particularly apt for our times.

The China Syndrome from 1979, which was the story of a television reporter played by Jane Fonda and her cameraman, Michael Douglas, who discovers safety coverups at a nuclear power plant. The term China Syndrome itself has entered the lexicon. It's this fictional idea that somehow a nuclear meltdown is going to penetrate through the core of the earth to China.

Network from 1976, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, and it's about a TV network struggle with poor ratings, another thing for our time. And, Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, this anchor who threatens to commit suicide on air, an idea that his bosses, including his producer, played by Faye Dunaway, love so much because it drives up the ratings and they play it for all it's worth.

I am a total sucker for Aaron Sorkin, so I'll probably rewatch The Newsroom, which is his gauzy West Wing-like take on television news, which is starring Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer. If you haven't seen it, I absolutely love it. It was never a very popular Aaron Sorkin one, but I really love it.

AMOS:
Me too.

ROBBINS:
Did you love it?

AMOS:
I did.

ROBBINS:
It just makes me really happy. And, for those who yearn to be foreign correspondents, there's The Year of Living Dangerously, although the journalistic ethics in that one is seriously off. Mel Gibson plays a neophyte Australian reporter in Indonesia in the weeks before the overthrow of Sukarno. It's really a love story with Sigourney Weaver. And, Linda Hunt won an Oscar for that and she plays his photographer, Billy Kwan, who gets him sources and tries to evoke his sense of morality as a reporter.

And, finally, the Killing Fields, which is a more accurate take on being a foreign correspondent about Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian photographer, Dith Pran, who gets left behind to the not tender mercies of the Khmer Rouge.

And, really, finally, His Girl Friday, which is a 1940 American screwball comedy, as they call them, which is directed by Howard Hawks. It's got Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, and he is the most hardboiled of hardboiled newspaper editors, and she's his ex-wife and ace reporter, and he tries to win her back by getting her to cover the execution of a murderer and chaos and hijinks and execution ensue.

So, those are the movies I'm planning on watching this summer about journalism and I recommend them all.

AMOS:
Wow.

ROBBINS:
You got any for my list, Deb, Bob?

AMOS:
Civil War is here in Berlin, and my German friends always want to come and talk to me after they see it because there's some things they don't understand about this journalist.

ROBBINS:
The Kirsten Dunst one, right?

AMOS:
Yeah, about the journalists. "Are they all that cynical?" I was asked. I said, "Well, there's different levels of cynicism among the three of them. And, if you're a journalist, you can see that there's a wide difference between the three of them." But, most of that movie is about the business of journalism, although these people do not ever seem to file. That is a question that I had when I was watching it.

ROBBINS:
That's a question I have about a lot of movies, like you ever watch Salvador? They never file. They don't file. They don't take notes. They don't file.

AMOS:
So, ladies and gentlemen who are not journalists, we file.

ROBBINS:
We take notes, we file.

AMOS:
Keep that in mind.

ROBBINS:
Bob, do you have a favorite journalism movie or TV show?

MCMAHON:
I was going to add the Killing Fields if you didn't add that at the end. That's a great representation. Obviously, All the President's Men is a great one, too, for just the craft of things and watching Hoffman and Redford piece things together in the early '70s. It's just a great evocation of Washington, too, in that time.

I would add also just the much-loved HBO series, The Wire, in its last year or two has some interesting Baltimore Sun-type depiction of what's going on there and how they're trying to cover the drug war. And, what's happening to the city of Baltimore and some of the things that questionable doings of some of the people in the newsroom there and the ethics of journalism. I think it's an interesting component to the overall story that they're trying to tell. Obviously, The Wire written by a Baltimore Sun alum, so it does capture that, as well. So, I would recommend that, too.

AMOS:
Oh well, you know, that one was always interesting for me because the editor that this script is based on came to NPR at a moment when I was there and I would hear him saying those lines. It's like, "Wait, I heard those before. They were on television."

ROBBINS:
You're talking about Bill Marimow?

AMOS:
I am.

ROBBINS:
He was in Nieman with my husband. Although, I will say that David Simon, who did The Wire, he truly hated The Sun. I think that of all of the different years of The Wire, that one is the meanest one.

AMOS:
It's mean, yes, I-

ROBBINS:
His depiction of The Sun is really, really-

MCMAHON:
I agree. I agree.

ROBBINS:
And, The Sun was a great paper. It really was. Like many other local papers, it's still battling on, but it used to have foreign correspondence-

AMOS:
I know.

MCMAHON:
In the Middle East, Robert Ruby? Just absolutely-

AMOS:
I knew Robert Ruby in the Middle East. Yep.

ROBBINS:
Yes, absolutely. I used to yearn to work for the Baltimore Sun and be a foreign correspondent for them. You think all these great local papers...

MCMAHON:
And, Russell Baker got his start there and covered the Queen Elizabeth's coronation and everything. It's a great part of his book Growing Up. Anyway, I digress.

ROBBINS:
So Deb, besides books, what's something else that you are going to be indulging yourself with this summer?

AMOS:
Have already done The Hitman, which I loved. There's not many movies that just hit every note perfectly. The Fall Guy was too long, this one is just right. And, the Hitman is based on a real character. They make up some of the facts of his hittery, but nevertheless, it allows humor without making the characters cartoonish, and you root for the bad guys, and the real bad guys get their comeuppance, and it's the best ninety minutes, whatever it was, that I have spent in a long time. Movies can be a teeny disappointing.

The other thing that I wanted to tell you about is a podcast that the BBC has out called Things Fell Apart by a guy named Jon Ronson, and it's all about the battles of the culture wars, mostly in the U.S.: abortion rights, book banning, COVID, police shootings. And, he has, as the British say, a fetching way of construction. So even if you think you know the story, and you'll hear some things that are familiar to you, he will reveal things that you never even thought about, and will start one place and then, "Oh, this is about Rodney King. Oh, wow, that's interesting." And, it's his second season. The reviews are fantastic and it is worth your while. And he's just marvelous. His voice is pleasing to hear. He has just a way of delivering his stories.

ROBBINS:
I'm already looking up where The Hitman is playing near me. You have persuaded me.

AMOS:
Oh, go tonight.

ROBBINS:
I want to go tonight.

AMOS:
Yes, go tonight.

MCMAHON:
You want me to chime in with my non-book?

ROBBINS:
Please, Bob.

MCMAHON:
So, I'm also in the podcast realm. Discovered earlier this year a podcast, which apparently is quite popular in the UK, called The Rest is Politics. And, it's got two extremely engaging and extremely articulate hosts coming from the center of British politics. So, Alastair Campbell is a former Downing Street director of communications and strategy, and Rory Stewart, who had formerly served under David Cameron as minister for the environment, he was in Theresa May's government as minister of state for international development.

Both of them extremely impressive and just bring a very interesting personal experience in sort of the game of politics. But, then it so happens the early elections were called for July 4th in the UK, so they have lots of interesting stuff. They get great guests and it's a very interesting exploration of just the craft of politics, but they always have a segment on what's going on in the world, as well, whether it's protests in Georgia or what's happening vis-a-vis China and Europe or Russia-Ukraine comes up a lot. Great sort of lens to look through and to engage in what's happening and what can be done about it. And, then what is the UK response to some of these things, as well.

So, for me, it was a refreshing way in which you can get people from different sides of the aisle to come together. They're not always agreeing. They both agree that Brexit was a disaster, however, but they're not always agreeing, but they are extremely always civil. And, I love it. It's like thirty to forty minutes fly by every time I listen to it.

AMOS:
Rory Stewart is such an interesting character. I met him in Iraq. Previous to that, he had walked through Afghanistan and wrote a book about it. In Iraq, he became sort of a governor of a province, and his father had been an administrator in India. And, when the people in his province, he told us, began to riot, he called his father and said, "What should I do?" And, he said, "Well, what we did is we just shot them all."

ROBBINS:
Oh my God.

AMOS:
And, he said, "I don't think I can do that here." I shall never forget that story. He told it when I met him in Basrah, and it made me laugh. He taught at Harvard and then he became a politician. He's just got a remarkable background, such a smart guy. I will go listen to that one. I will go find it.

MCMAHON:
It's really worth it. He had a recent hiatus, by the way, just to add to his aura, where he went offline completely and meditated for about two weeks or so, and he basically told everybody, "I'm not going to be reachable. I'm not getting any phones." He was sort of going to a deep, walled off meditation experience. He's back now, but that's why he was gone. So, added to his very interesting bio of him.

ROBBINS:
And, we will be doing that the week of July 4th when this podcast runs, right? We will be meditating.

AMOS:
If you can hear this podcast, it means we're meditating.

MCMAHON:
Exactly. That's a great line, actually, Carla. I think I'm going to peddle that one.

ROBBINS:
If you're hearing the sound of our voice, we are meditating.

MCMAHON:
Well, that wraps up our summer reading and listening and watching special. We hope you have a fresh list of things on all of those fronts, wherever this summer takes you. To our regular listeners, Carla and I will be back next week with our usual programming. Deb, thanks so much for joining us.

AMOS:
Thank you. Great to be here.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation, are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts and our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. And this is Carla Robbins saying so long. Over to you, Deb.

AMOS:
Goodbye from me, from Berlin.

MCMAHON:
And, this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye, and have a happy, healthy summer.