Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today's show is part of our mini series on Power in Media Broadly. Here to discuss power in publishing and the capacity of editorial voices in shaping the direction of the world is Chris Jackson. Chris is the publisher and editor in chief of the One World imprint of Random House. Chris and One World publish some of the best known writers in the world today, Tanahasi Coates, Brian Stevenson, Jay z Eddie Wong, to name just a few of the most prominent. Chris has already played a major role in shaping the American literary landscape, in particular bringing diverse voices and the voices of black writers into a range of national conversations. Just last year, he won the Center for Fiction's Medal for Editorial Excellence, which in the world of publishing is a very big deal. In short, there's nobody I can think of better than Chris to talk about how the power of publishing can be deployed to achieve very concrete and specific, real world goals. Chris, thank you so much. For joining us. I want to start with some of what is the day to day building blocks of your industry. But I think a lot of people don't know about and this is based on my own experience, which is that until I published a book, I basically understood nothing about who the various people were involved in publishing books. And that made me realize that a lot of people just don't know. So you're both publisher and editor in chief of One World, which is an imprint of Random House, Right, you have a huge amount of power in the world in which you operate. Could you explain just at a basic level, what does it mean on a day to day basis that you're both publisher and editor in chief of your imprint. So to be the publisher of the imprint means that I'm supposed to oversee everything that happens with the books, you know, the way we market them, the way we solve them, the way we design them. So that's the publisher role. I'm also responsible for the financial performance of the imprint within the larger company as the publisher. As the editor in chief, I'm the one who has to prove our acquisitions and and then I work with with our editors on developing the books, as well as editing and acquiring a number of them myself. So it's sort of an editorial hat and a business hat. It's it's a lot. It's a lot, but I wouldn't I wouldn't want to have one without the other. I mean, I think it's really important as an editor that I also get to see what's going on in terms of the overall publication of the book. I think it's important, you know, just as a person, as a human being. The reason I got into the industry in the first place was to work with writers and to help, you know, sort of collaborate with them on developing their ideas and stories. So that's really essential to my identity as a as a worker. I want to know about how the situation that you're in right now evolved in the following sense. So I know that One World was originally founded back in the early nineties with a focus not exclusively on African American writers. But when you became the publisher and editor in chief of it just a few years ago, I guess almost five years ago, it had sort of I wouldn't say it had disappeared, but it had kind of declined from prominence right now. Oh, it literally didn't exist. It had stopped existing yet. Okay, so you revived it, as it were. I brought it back to life. And so when you did that, I guess you already knew that some of the famous successful writers whom you worked with were going to come with you to that imprint or did you not know that at all? I suspected that they would come with me. I mean, I think the editor writer relationship can be really important and really intimate and not something that can be easily exchanged. I think, particularly with the writers that I worked with, because I felt like I was working with writers who with whom I shared a sense of mission, and I was trying to create a publishing house that was devoted to that mission, and it was happening all within the same larger corporate entities. So it wasn't that difficult to pull them over into my list. I don't think I would have done it if I didn't know that I could bring For instance, Sanahasey Coats, who had originally worked with at the previous imprint I had worked with, which is a place called Spiegel and Grau. You know, I knew he was gonna come with me, and he was someone who I thought was sort of foundational to what I wanted to do as an editor and as a publisher. Other writers like Brian Stevenson, Trevor Noah, I was pretty confident they would also come with me, some of the bigger names, to help build this new thing. How much have you thought, I'm already working with extremely prominent African American public intellectuals and writers, and if we group ourselves as a word together under a single imprint, that will have a kind of doubly empowering effect on their voices, right, And how much of you thought, well, it's just an efficiency question. You know, I'm already working on these with these folks, or in some cases, I'm hoping to work with these folks, and so why not do it under this framework where I'll have more control over the process. Yeah, I think it's it's probably some combination of those two things. I mean, one of the important things to know about one world, it's not just African American writers, right to me, the idea is that it was an imprint that was going to have writers that represent the country as it actually is, rather than the sort of very monocultural narrow way that typically publishing has worked, which has excluded much of the country, particularly as the country develops and evolves demographically, but also in terms of sensibility and ideologies. So I wanted to bring together a group of writers who I thought represented what I saw as an emerging America or ignored or occluded America, and bring them together in one place so that we could not just publish these individual voices, but that I could think about audiences in a different way and think about how do we find audiences that are interested in these books, so that I could go back to them and say, well, you love to this, you'll love this other book as well, And also create a support network of writers that the writers who work within the imprint, we find ways to connect them so they can do events together and they can support each other in various ways. Because there is a loose sort of mission to all these books, even though I think there's some heterogeneity in terms of how the writers represent that mission, and certainly they don't agree with each other on everything even remotely, and a lot of them are actually in fierce disagreement with each other over some things. But there is a sense that they're all pushing in more or less the same direction and want to be in dialogue with each other or in conversation with each other, even when that conversation includes some disagreement. So that's what I wanted to do. The idea of a publishing house has always been that it's a house. It's a place where a bunch of people will find their rooms, you know, but there's a sense of connection between them that they're all kind of after the same thing. I think, as an outsider or a semi outsider this industry, that you're doing something extremely original in conceiving a publishing house in that way, and conceiving the group of people with whom you work as in some ways mutually self supporting, even where they disagree with each other. I mean, maybe people talk that way maybe in the nineteen thirties, you know, or fifties, but I'm not even sure that they did. I mean, I think the way they used cultural capital at the time was more maybe they would see each other at cocktail parties, and you know, maybe they were very very loosely associated with certain editors, But I don't think that even in its glory days, knob for for our Strauss thought of its writers as a house in the sense that you're describing, you know, I think when they use the word house, I mean use them this wonderfully metaphoric, rich way of where the writers were, the people who lived in the house. But I think they meant it historically when they said house, they meant like the merchant banks that called themselves house. Yeah, now you're right, bit of business house, So I think I've been that's usable. But it's not just I mean, it's not just home here. It's also extremely innovative from a publishing industry perspective, because you're describing something much more collaborative and collective and mutually self reinforcing. And I'm wondering, first of all, am I right that what you're doing is really pretty radically new? And second, where'd you get the idea for it? Yeah? I'm not sure I would call it radically new. I think there is some version of this that happens in a lot of publishing companies. But when I first started in publishing, it was a long time ago, and one of the sort of publishing houses at the time was Vintage, which was being run by Sunni Meta, who would eventually run off Knap and was sort of a legend in the industry, eventually become a legend industry. And he had started this this this group of books, I think it was called Vintage Originals, and and in that list were a group of writers who in like the nineteen eighties. This is actually before I even got into publishing. It's like when I was becoming publishing aware, it was like in the nineteen eighties, there were they published writers, you know, like Jay mcinarry and um, you know, sort of these young New York writers in these paperback originals that all were kind of designed the same and all sort of presented a kind of common vision of what it meant to be, you know, young and you know, disilutioned, preemptively disillusioned, and probably coke adduled lines of coke in the downstairs bathroom at exactly. That was precisely that you're not what it was. But to me, what was interesting about it was that it did present almost like a coherent vision that in its little way because of the kind of critical, massive writers that kind of came through that same list, and that people could read one and they read another, and there was a sort of series association with the books. It did shift our sense of what American culture was at that time, for better or for worse. It wasn't even necessarily it may have been a trivial shift in some ways, but you could see how one writer might not be able to do that. At five or ten writers working in succession and in some loose association with each other could have that kind of effect. And that was really intriguing to me, because, you know, someone who had studied African American literature and been even from as a child, was like sort of obsessed with African American literature. You know, African American literature is a history of movements. It's the Harlem Renaissance. It's black feminist writers in the nineteen seventies, Tony Morrison and Alice Walker and Audrey Lord and people like that. It was the Black Arts movement in the nineteen sixties. We had poets like Mary Baraka and Sonya Sanchez and Larry Neil and so forth that represented that moment in time. And each one of those literary movements, you know, the sort of communist affiliated then broke away from communist group of writers like Ellison and Richard Wright. So you have these moments, and again it's because of the connections between the writers. They were able to not just represent themselves, but to power a shift in the culture that was essential, and that was always very exciting to me. I didn't want to just be an editor who opportunitistally published whatever happened to be solving at the moment. I want to think about how do you create a shift in culture? And I think you can only do that by having some kind of cohesion around what you're doing. So yeah, that's why I thought it was an important idea, and I think it also obviously has a business outcome as well, you know, because you're able to identify audiences and build them. I think someone like Tanahassi in some ways helped people identify an audience that was hungry for new ways of thinking about sort of this basic American problem of racism. And I think it was an interesting project to think about, well, how do we fill in more gaps in that story for that reader, and how do we expand beyond the core reader who we think of as being like maybe a black person or being someone who's like a leftist who cares about these things, and making it into something even bigger how do we kind of expand at wedge that we start from one writer with the next, and the next and the next, until you actually have a culture defining group of writers. That aspiration is really exciting and it is really wonderfully ambitious. I want to ask you about the nature of the movement that you think is emerging now when you compare it to some of those other historical presidents, and they're all fascinating in their own rights, how would you characterize the literary intellectual social movement that you're trying to catalyze right now? I agree that Tanahassi Coats is essential to it and central to its public intellectual face. But as you pointed out, some of the people in this circle don't agree with him on a bunch of concrete propositions. Right well, I think so. I think that's one of the things that's really interesting. I do think there is some friction and some disagreement that I think has been productive in some ways. I think then there's a kind of unproductive friction that exists from other directions. But going back to Tanahassi again is being like sort of in some ways a model. And you know, even before Tanahasi network with Brian Stevenson, you know who's this lawyer Death Penalty, primarily lawyer who runs an organization called Eji in Alabama. And I did a book called Just Mercy with Brian, and I would say those two were probably like definitive to me of what's transpired since then, not just in publishing, but in I think a kind of reckoning that's happening in a larger way in this country. And I think what both of those books did, meaning Just Mercy and Between the World and Me, is that they combined kind of personal narrative with some kind of contemporary storytelling and reportage with a deep dive into history and the sort of historical antecedents for events that were happening right before us here in the present. And I think that's the thing that's most definitive of this moment is unlike you know, you look at the Black Arts movement, where it was about declaring like certain revolutionary ideas about black identity right or in you know, the case of like the Audrey Lord, Tony Morris and Alice Walker moment, it was about exploring ideas of black feminism but also looking at politics in this more intersectional way. I think what this moment is about is really a historical reckoning, a way of going back into history to trace the structural and systemic, you know, decisions that were made through policy over history and how they've shaped the tragedies of our contemporary situation around race and racism. And I think that historical reckoning has been has been the great superpower I think of this generation of writers, which is why you saw, like last year, even with the protest movements, you know, how much it was about pulling down statutes and pulling down monuments and thinking about the persistence of the heroism of the Civil War, you know, generals who are who are put up on these pedestals or even the founding fathers, and really actually not just saying, Okay, this thing happened to this one man by the police, but thinking about what are the police? You know, what are the policy decisions that brought us here? What is our national identity? You know, like really going to the route while also being completely clear eyed about what's right and one of us. I think I think that's the thing that distinguishes this group of writers in this moment. I think that was an extraordinary description of some family shared characteristics and how they're driving a public conversation. I want to ask about a difference of nuance, let's say, between Brian's approach and Tanassi Coats's approach. So, you know, in my world, which is the world of law schools, Brian is he's a god. I mean, I was going to say something close to a god, but that's not actually true. He is just a god. He was a saint, you know when I when I first met him, when I was a baby law professor, and then he ascended to that status. And part of it is, for sure the depth of his capacity to engage with concrete stories, which is a great lawyer, to lee tactic and skill, and to take into account the historical background. But it's also true that his vision, broadly speaking, is one of faith and trust in the capacity of justice, not always in the real world institutions of justice, which he spent a lot of his time showing or broken, but in the capacity of justice as a concept to get us where we would like to go, and also in the possibility of using the tools of the justice system, even when the system is broken, to try to reshape and rebuild that set of institutions in a better way to make it work. Well, right, I'm not saying that Brian Stevenson doesn't have a critical line going through his thought. For sure, he does. But he also very self consciously has identified himself as a person who is you know, he is a profit of the possibilities of improvement, right, and say he literally, not just metaphorically, he literally saves the lives of people who are you know, actually innocent or whom the system has condemned wrongfully and it works sometimes, yeah, you know, And that's central to why that book is so great, But it's also central to why his career is so powerful. Yeah. In contrast, Tanahaso, as a kind of self identified writer's writer and intellectual, often says, and I think I've even heard some conversations where you and he had talked about this, that he doesn't think his job really is to make it better, to provide solutions. His job is to tell you what it is, to tell it like it is, and to lay out the truth. And some of his critics, I think, some degree unfairly have tried to put him into the box of people who think it's just so broken it can't be fixed. And I don't think he ever goes quite that far, but he does have a powerful intellectual capacity to be skeptical of fixes that other people put forward. Let's say, So, I guess I'm wondering how you think about this nuance of difference between these two figures whom you're describing, I think correctly as as exemplary in this current intellectual movement, and both of whom are part of your movement. Yeah, so I think that's an interesting distinction. It's one that I think people make a lot about, particularly in that critique of name critique, but like that sort of observation about Tana Hassi, and I think it goes to one of these things I think has been a bad thing that's happened over this period of time, which is this conflation of because an idea is presented in the form of a book, that all books are trying to do the same thing. And I think that Brian clearly has a certain kind of mission, specific mission that he is engaged in, a specific project that he's engaged and I could think as both a lawyer and as a communicator and as a leader, and I think Tana Hassei has a has a different one. You know, it reminds me like the books. Some of the books that I love the most when I was growing up were books that were that you could characterize as quote unquote negative, whether it was you know, Joseph Heller or Selene or whatever like it was. These are people who were writing about the horrors of particular historical moment, and they were writing with black humor. They were writing with no attempt to solve a problem, but merely to name it and to observe it. And that was very powerful and useful. And sometimes a reader needs to be devastated. They don't necessarily need to be hopeful. Thinking of a reader is being human being that has lots of points of input and a life that goes on beyond the book. There. I think we should give people the credit for being able to read a work of tragedy. And I think that's what Tanahassie in some cases is doing as a writer, as a literary figure, as an advocate, not as a politician certainly, but as someone who is as a writer feels like his job is to mind his own mind and feelings and to convey it in as powerful way as possible. That said, Tanahasi's the most famous nonliterary piece probably is his essay on reparations. And if there is anything more hopeful than the idea of presenting a case to reparations, I don't know what it is. He was not saying this is a hopeless situation. He laid out the historical roots of whether it's lining, and all the things that have created a system of segregation and wealth depletion and exploitation, and he said, but here's a possible solution if we're willing to do it. And I think Brian in his way, offers the same kind of hard choice, which is we've created this system of mass incarceration, disproportionate punishment, but here is a solution if we're willing to take it. And I think Brian rightfully, you know, he comes out of a different tradition. He comes out of the civil rights tradition in the South, and it certainly intellectually he comes out of that tradition, and so his goal is to inspire with that sense of hope and possibility. But I think they're basically in some ways saying the same thing, which is that we've created a dire situation that has cost us enormously as a society, and there's a solution if we're willing to take it, and it's hard. Both fiction and fiction can be important parts of historical reckoning of the kind that you're describing. And certainly the other African American literary movements that you've described all had some components of powerful nonfiction writers, essayists, memoirists, and also fiction writers. Right, how do you think of the balance? I mean, many of the writers you publish are primarily nonfiction writers, although in some cases I mean Tonahasi published a novel that was very well received recently. But how do you think about that balance of fiction nonfiction as you develop a group of writers who, as you've said, are not just you know, they're not You're not just trying to sell books. You're trying to shape and influence a way of engaging with the world. Yeah. Now, I think fiction's really important. I think poetry also is really important, and I think, you know, screenwriting and playwriting are also very important. And this is something I believe also very deeply, which is that part of the political project is a project of imagination and can you can you fight for something that you can't see? You know? And sometimes we have to imagine the thing that we want. And I think there's a lot of writers who can maybe get slotted in this kind of category of afrofuturism, that very sort of imaginative space. But I think that is very complementary to the nonfiction work because I think this is one of the great things in one of the real challenges of sort of African American history, but also history of a lot of other marginalized groups, which is that you wake up, you know, the first day of your consciousness, whether it's you know, as a child or where you get older, and you have like a moment of awakening to the world that you're in. And it can be depressing, it can be it can feel overwhelming, it can feel like there are problems that you need to understand, but there's also a world that you want to create. And I think a lot of the works that we're talking about, when they kind of go back into history and kind of untangle the roots of some of our present problems and tragedies, help explain that the sort of backwards looking part. And I think sometimes it's our fiction that can help us explain, can help us see something that's not there yet. I also think that fiction is important. You know. I'm doing the sixteen nineteen Project book this fall, and that book is going to be a mix of nonfiction essays and fiction. So there's going to be a great deal of fiction in that book by really the best writers. Fiction and poetry from the best writers who are working today. And what they're doing is going back into history and trying to imagine the interior lives of the people who lived through the events that the essays are unpacking in a nonfiction way, in an argumentative nonfiction way. But what was it like to actually live it again? I think that's one of the powerful things that's happening. You know, I talked about what describes this moment makes it different from some of these other historical moments, is I think so much of it is in both imagining the future but also looking back and understanding how we got here. You look at the works of Colson Whitehead. Colton is someone who I've always loved, and in part it's because of the way that he kind of pointed our imaginations forward, right but his last the sort of cycle of novels that he's on right now, starting with The Underground Railroad and then with Nickel Boys, and then he has another one coming soon that go back into history are to help us see that past with a new clarity. And I think that's something that again is very indicative of this age that the fiction and nonfiction are working, I think hand in hand in that way, and in creating this reckoning. The idea that it's possible to have profound power over a culture and over imagination through curating a collection of writers is emerging to me as a powerful theme of our conversation. And I want to ask you about what must be one challenging part of it. To do this really well, you need a combination. You need the people, the public intellectuals who are at the top of their game, Tanhasi or Close and Whitehead. And yet you also must be looking for brand new voices. You must always be going through the manuscript's emissions and asking people and keeping your ear to to the ground to try to figure out who who are new exciting voices. What's the trick too, If there is a trick to trying to balance all those different components so that the curating process doesn't become closed, how is it possible for you to make sure that new voices, like you're always looking for make their way in, right. I mean, I think this is one of the useful things about having a sort of team that works with me, because you know, it is actually a lot to be you know, for instance, I said I was working on the sixty nineteen project book. You can only imagine how much attention, like every single piece of punctuation in that book I have to pay attention to because I know that one wrong sentence, one wrong comma, and the weight of you know, twenty five state legislature will land on us. So that's very preoccupying, right, And then I'm also trying to work with as you said, like some of these writers are are already very big writers who are coming back for subsequent books. But we have a great team of people who are who are really you know, looking for those new voices and new writers, you know, one of our like over the last three years, since we've really been up and running in this sort of relaunched version of the imprint, we've had a National Book Award finalist every single year. And what's interesting is it's the National Book Award finalists are not the Tanahassee's and the Abram Candy's and you know, Brian Stevenson's their first time writers almost in every case. There was Carlo Ville Vincentsio who wrote a book called The Endocumented Americans, which was a finalist last year. And Carla, you know, started this book just out of college as herself being an undocumented person. And then we had a book called Brothers Have Been Done by a writer named Marwan Hisham who was a citizen journalist in Syria writing about the war from the inside during Isis occupation, which was a finalist. And I mean had a collection of short stories called Sabrina and Koreana by another first time writer, nam Kali Fajardo and Stein, who was an indigenous Chicana who lived in Colorado and was very much outside of like the New York literary kind of seen. One of our younger editors found her work and championed it, and hopefully we're building her into another one of these writers who we can think of as being like the sort of New American Canadate of writers. Yeah, so we are absolutely still looking and we're trying to also find ways to to this has been very shrity process, but find ways to open our submissions process to nonagented writers. Try to find people who maybe can't get through that other layer of gatekeepers, which are the literary agents, which are you know, publishing has historically been very non diverse. The world of literary agents even is vastly less diverse even in the world of publishing houses. So so we're trying to figure out ways of maybe helping that situation out. Thank you for that. Nicole Hannah Jones has agreed to come on the show a little bit later in the summer, so we're going to have an opportunity to really delve into the sixteen nineteen project even more. The sixteen nineteen project puts on the table something we haven't talked about yet, which is backlash. It's a sign in a way that a cultural movement or an intellectual literary movement is having an impact if some people are angry about it, or threatened by it, or disturbed by it. I'm wondering if, more broadly, you think about the kind of dynamic interplay between the movement you're helping to create and it's discontent out there in the world, largely in Trump world, but not only more broadly among some people in Middle America who are you know, often mischaracterizing and generally haven't read the things that they're criticizing, to be sure, but who nevertheless experience there being a kind of intellectual movement and they're not sure what it is, but they're pretty sure that they don't like it or that they're afraid of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think this is completely predictable that there would be a backlash. There's always a backlash. What's only principle if you succeeded, right, I mean, literary movements that don't succeed don't don't produce backlash. It's a sign of exactly so as soon as you see the success, you know the backlash is coming. And it's funny because you know, you look at each one of these books, and it's true that the god like Brian Stevenson as the one person who has never gotten any kind of backlash, which I think I need to think about more, like, why is it that Brian is able to like Brian talks as much as anyone else about the about systemic racism, which is allegedly like the core problem people have with what that they're describing as critical race theory, that racism isn't just a matter of what's in your heart. It's a matter of systems and Brian, this is what his whole career has been about, but just mantling these systems. And yet somehow he has escaped this sort of backlash, which I think is really great and also really interesting. I need to think about why that it's But yes, it's totally predictable, and it's the kind of thing that is, you know, its purposes to demoralize you. I mean, the thing that's demoralizing is that, as you said, I don't think these are people who have necessarily engaged in any kind of meaningful, good faith way with the work that they're not just criticizing but trying to outlaw. And that's frustrating and demoralizing, and it makes you want to defend in good faith the work that you're doing, but you're actually putting this good faith defense out against people who actually don't care about the good faith defense. Meanwhile, you know this as someone who's written books and is that you know, you get one bad review and it can dominate your mind in a way that ten good reviews don't. And the fact is that these writers have had an enormous effect on the way this country thinks about it's past, it's present, and it's possible future, and I would say an enormously positive effect on those things. And that's something I try to keep in mind, is that we're winning and the backlash is a sign that we're winning. This year we published Heather McGee's book, The Some of Us, which you know, was a best seller, and again kept pushing forward, I think, into the next stage of this idea, beyond or one oh one, into sort of like two oh one about well, you know, if this is what's you know, if our policies historically have been racist, like, how can we use that understanding to improve present policymaking. These ideas have been assimilated into mainstream democratic thinking, and I think, you know, we're on our way to having an anti racist majority in this country, which will be a real tipping point, even beyond the demographic changes. That's a tipping point that I think is coming and it's not and they won't be able to stop it. And if we can just figure out how to survive these occasional tempests, I think we'll keep pushing forward. We'll be right back. I have a question about economic power in its relationship to the Big Picture project that you're involved in. Publishing houses are almost all in the United States owned by a tiny number of big conglomerates. Right. Penguinandom is no different. But at one time, you know, let's say, the record industry was also in the hands of a small number of actors. And one of the innovations that we saw in the nineties and the odds was the starting of music industry entities, as it were, houses some of which were black owned or a majority black owned, that contributed to a transformation in that industry. Not total, but a meaningful transformation. Right. Is that doable in publishing? I mean, could we imagine that there could be a publisher doing the kind of work that you're doing that was genuinely a black owned, independent publishing house rather than part of a global conglomerate. Yeah. No, this is something I think about quite a lot, because, yeah, there is like a certain amount of tension, of course in doing the work we do within this giant conglomerate. There's also you know, there are these sort of models for how it's been done in the past. There are independent black houses that are out there still. I just did an event the other day with Hockey Amunt of Booty who run Third World Press, which has been around for forty years and has published some very important writers over that time. And I think, you know, this is a time when publishing in general again consolidations in some ways of response to weakness, not to strength, and the weakness is that there are now lots of independent or VC funded entities. They're trying to remake the business in various ways. And you can even see things like substack as being sort of encroaching a little bit on book publishing traditional territory of being the place where you know, a writer could have an independent voice and could control their own content. And now you know, other people are finding other ways of doing that. So I think there's a lot of interesting open We're kind of, I think a transitional moment and a somewhat open moment in terms of where this industry is going to go, and I do think there are opportunities for that. That again, that said, one world is and I think this is really important, is that it's not we're not just publishing black books, right, We're publishing books from all kinds of people. We're trying to publish it out of a certain tradition and sensibility though that's different from the sort of I would call the mainstream publishing world's tradition and sensibility. I do think there's a place for an independent publisher right now, maybe more than ever, because a lot of the traditional advantages of a large publisher don't exist as in the way that they historically did. You know, the physical distribution and warehousing and all that is not as important as it was fifty years ago because basically everyone's solving to one customer for one thing that runs so much of the business, and a lot of what's being sold is digital in audio and ebooks forms. So we'll watch that space and see whether see whether that emerges. As a last question, I just want to ask you a little bit about your own biography and what brought you to where you are. I read that you went to a Hunter College high school. How was that educational experience important to what ultimately led you to where you were, and how did going to school there relate to the rest of your childhood and upbringing. Yeah, so I grew up in Harlem in you know, the nineteen seventies and eighties. Harlem was definitely pre gentrification. I grew up in the Grant housing projects which are on the west side of Harlem. And then I and I went to a public school there, initially PS thirty six, and it was it was not a good public school, and there was a lot of chaos, not a lot of resources. It was a time when Harlem and a lot of uh, you know what we're called, I guess inner cities around the country were really in a state of complete neglect and implosion. And it was a very chaotic situation. But there were teachers there and principles there who definitely had come out of civil rights movement right and more radical movements that followed, and who who really believed that they were still in it exactly and we're still in it. It was still going on, right, and so they barely come out of it, if they come out of it at all. And they saw, you know, they really wanted to give me an opportunity, and so there was a school that you could get into just by passing a test. There was no other qualification. And it did change my life to be able to go into that school. I mean was being raised at the time by a single mother in the housing projects, and then I was suddenly put into this environment where I was surrounded by kids from all over the city and in a situation where I could I could just learn and it was free, which I think is also really important. That it had all of the advantages of any private school, but it was free. It just kills me because I knew And this is one of the great lessons of that moment for me, that I was leaving kids who were just as smart as the kids I was coming to, but who for various reasons, because of disorganization at home or because of other just simple things like you know, every every kid in my class was on public assistance of some kind. But these were clearly intelligent kids, but didn't necessarily have some other elements that allowed me to leave. And I think that made a big difference going to a public school, being sort of divided between these two worlds, the world of home and the world of the school on the Upper East Side. It really I did shape my sonse of certainly injustice, but also that the injustice wasn't fair. And I think this is really so cool to like a lot of these books that we're talking about, very few of the writers woke up and we're like, I want to fight for racial justice. A lot of them woke up and we're with a question, which is, why is it like this? Why is it that I live like this and ten blocks away as in my case, you know, or twenty blocks away people live in an entirely different way. My school was on Park Avenue on the Upper east Side, and it was like, okay, so there are these two radically different worlds. Why is that? And once you start asking that question, you can't stop. It's not out of some desire to create division or to grift your way into some hustle. It's like, I want to know why the world is the way it is. And that kind of bifurcation of my childhood is what is what made that question so acute for me. There's very few things in life more generative than realizing that nothing makes sense right. And it can be very or hard as a kid to be put in that situation. But if you make it through that initial wonder, you have a lifelong question about how things work right. And what a great question like not to feel like I understand, but that I wonder and then to see where that wondering takes me. And I think if you'll read between the world to me by Tanahas. If you read How to Be an Anti Racist by Abraham Kendy, these your books that start, if you read the sixteen nineteen project, they all start with a question like why is this clearly unfair situation? Why does it exist? This has been for me one of the most enlivening and fascinating conversations that I've had since starting the podcast. I would just want to express my gratitude Chris for the conversation, but also really for the work that you're doing for the construction of the thought world and the curation and the organization of a movement. I think it's powerful. I think it's profound, and it's having an enormous impact. Thank you, Thank you. I really appreciate listening to Chris. I was blown away by the importance of the vision that he has and how far he has already come to accomplishing it. Instead of just looking at a publishing house as a for profit business, or even as a list of titles that might work together to one degree or another, he's reconceiving the idea of an imprint of a publishing house as a kind of metaphorical group house or community in which intellectuals, writers, creators can come together to be a movement, not just a set of books or authors or ideas. And Chris isn't just talking the talk. He's actually done it already. He has published and edited a large number of the writers who are contributing to our current moment of historical reckoning with the legacy of racism in America and with the crucial question of what we need to do next to improve it. That's explicitly the project of Tanahasi Coats, it's explicitly the project of Brian Stevenson, and it's also the project of a large number of other writers who are part of the literary group whom Chris is publishing. I was also very struck by Chris's thoughtful observations on the way that we need not only nonfiction but also fiction to make sense of our past and of our present. He's really bringing together both of those genres of writing within his publishing empire and its growth. And it's surely appropriate, given his interest in history, that he is deeply aware of how earlier historical movements in African American literary and social thought have themselves shaped our national conversation, going all the way back to the Harlem Renaissance and up through our contemporary world. Sometimes on Deep Background, when we get behind the stories, what we find is disorder, illogic, difficulty, and contradiction. That was not my experience of the conversation with Chris. To the contrary, getting behind the story of how his publishing house has put together its remarkable list of books and its remarkable community of writers, I actually discovered a coherent, thoughtful, historically sophisticated plan for what he intends to do and which he is already effectuating. If only all conversations about what's going on behind the scenes of power were so inspiring. Until the next time I speak to you, be well, think deep thoughts, and have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original stlative podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background