Transcript: Michael Powell

My interview with the author and staff writer at The Atlantic

The Lean Out podcast kicked off two years ago this week, aiming to push back on mainstream media conformity, to reaffirm old school journalistic values like viewpoint diversity, and curiosity, and respect — and, in some small way, to help widen the Overton window of ideas considered acceptable for discussion and debate. Happily, this approach seems to be resonating with a lot of you. We’re pleased to say that we now have listeners in 150 countries and close to 5,000 cities worldwide.

For our anniversary episode this week, I’m delighted to be joined by a journalist I admire, whose work I have looked to as an example for our times.

Michael Powell is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a former reporter at The New York Times, where he covered free speech, college campuses, and identity politics.  He’s also the author of Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Michael, welcome to Lean Out.

MP: Thank you very much. My pleasure.

TH: It's so nice to have you on, for our second anniversary episode. When I was still in the newsroom at CBC, working as a rank and file current affairs producer, you were one of the journalists that I looked to that helped me feel like I wasn't losing my mind. [Laughs] I want to talk, today, about a few of your stories that I have really admired. But first, let's talk about your background. You have worked as a doorman, a cabbie, and an activist tenant organizer in Brooklyn before becoming a journalist in the 80s. How did these jobs prepare you for reporting?

MP: It's a great question. I think all were really helpful, and some of it is just simply the skills. If you are going after a landlord that isn't providing heat, you've got research the building and the mortgage and the banks, and all that kind of stuff. So there's this practical stuff. But really, the more substantial [thing] was being a cabbie and a doorman. I think it's very useful. I grew up a middle class kid in New York City, and it's very useful to suddenly find yourself on the other side of the upstairs/downstairs [divide]. In both jobs, you can be absolutely invisible to the people that you are taking around. In fact, they can treat you as invisible. That's something I would recommend for everyone.

I happen to actually really enjoy being a cab driver, just because of New York at that time. It was like the demimonde, and it was part of all of that. But more substantially, it just gives you a sense of what it's like to work hard for your money — and for people who don't see you. That's part of what I think about [with reporting]. When we're committing journalism well, it's writing on those who are not seen or not heard enough of. So, that was great. 

And frankly, in tenant organizing, I was working in East Flatbush, which was a West Indian neighborhood that had recently undergone tumultuous racial change. It had gone from basically a low-income, working class Irish and Italian neighborhood to virtually the same economics, but entirely West Indian and Haitian. It was often very moving to watch people who came here, working really hard, freezing in their buildings.

In a sense, sometimes the organizing was almost easy. People were like, “Why is this happening to me? Why are we putting up with this?” When I go back — and I don't credit three years as a tenant organizer with this — but now it is very moving to go back to that same neighborhood, where there were all these abandoned storefronts and smoke shops and everything else. It still has problems, but there is a thriving neighborhood that's now largely second generation West Indian and Haitian, and there's some whites moving in. I'm glad I did all of that before I got into journalism.

TH: I also want to spend a moment on 9/11 — a huge news event, obviously, for New York City. You were the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at that point. Tell us about a long piece you wrote for the style section, about three months out from the attack, about how New York City was recovering. What did reporting on that moment teach you about your city?

MP: That's a great question. As I recall, dimly, with that piece, what I was dealing with was this sense of shock and dislocation. It almost reminded me of reading a history of, say, Europe right before World War I, or something. I mean, there's just this sense of one moment you've got this city that takes great pride in its centrality to the globe, if not the universe. And suddenly you have this startling attack on the core. We lost a friend. Everybody lost somebody in that.

It's interesting, I had just moved back to the city. I grew up, as I say, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and then lived for a long time in Brooklyn. And we moved back. My family got back nine days before [9/11]. I had been here for a couple of months.

My argument to my wife was, “Hey babe, we're going to go to the theater. We're going to do all these things that we hadn't done when the kids were really little.” And, of course, then I disappeared for a year. Then we all kind of disappeared into this maelstrom. I'm also glad, though. My wife is also a native New Yorker and had been reluctant to come back. We had had a really nice life in Washington. She felt protective of the city in that moment. Which is a strange thing, because New York is a wonderful city, but it can be temple-throbbing and give you a headache. It's not always a place that evokes tenderness. But that evoked a real sense of tenderness.

It was the only time in my reporting life where you’d interview people and end up hugging each other. It was a very moving time. I don't want to overstate this, given what people are going through today, but it gave me an insight into what it's like to live in wartime. I was down there when the towers fell. If it had to happen, I'm glad I was here because I did feel like this was my city and I felt a tenderness towards it that is not necessarily my daily bread.

TH: That moment was striking for the kind of unity and humanity that was felt, not just in New York, but in a lot of places. That is something that we're missing in the moment we're in right now. There's a lot of polarization — that extends to the media as well. And one of the criticisms we journalists have heard a lot is that we are elites who treat the working class, and even sometimes the middle class, as an “other.” Reporting on them sometimes as if they're zoo animals that we observe from afar. This also extends to rural stories as well. But you have made a concerted effort in your work to try to understand people of different backgrounds on a very human level. And you have written a lot about how economics impacts people's lives. How much of the polarization that we're experiencing right now — how much of that do you think can be attributed to class and economics?

MP: That's a great question. Even as I think about giving an answer, of course you immediately think of fourteen counterarguments.

But it's clear, I constantly see this … You see it on Twitter, or X, but you also see it in columns. This puzzlement that Americans consistently say they find the economy not performing well. We're told — and frankly, it comes from my class, I grew up a liberal New Yorker — it's like this puzzlement, right? “No, no, it's actually doing pretty well. Inflation is coming down. Not only is it not that bad, it's actually quite good.”

To me, I think it's a much more complicated picture, and I think a lot of people are living a lot closer to the edge than that acknowledges. There's all sorts of ways in which higher interest rates greatly complicate people's lives. I mean, frankly, I see it with my son, who lives in Texas. He's also, God help him, a journalist. He and his wife would like to buy a house, but interest rates now are running close to 8%. That just makes it so much more difficult. And that plays out with student loans and all kinds of things. All across the board.

If one wants to argue, “This isn't all Biden's fault”? Sure, economies are very complicated animals, and that's not [on] any one president or party or whatever. But if you want to argue, “No, no, no, it's really good…” Well, go out into a neighbourhood. Go to East Flatbush.

I often think the same thing with crime. Again, you hear often in the press, “Well, crime is not really not bad.” Oh yeah? Go to Anacostia. Go to Ivy City in Washington, D.C. Or to the South Side of Chicago. There are complicated reasons, right? I'm not arguing, “This is the fault of X or Y or Z.” But these are dangerous places. Memphis, Baltimore. You could go on and on. When I read these pieces that feel kind of arid, I just wonder. Like, come on.

Even if you want to argue — as has been argued — that Baltimore, for instance, has seen a drop in murder. It has. That's wonderful. It's also on its way to homicides per capita that would be double New York City at its worst ever in 1990. So, try going into central Baltimore and making that argument. I just think it reflects an unfortunate impulse in a fair amount of the reporting.

TH: I wonder how much of that … I think about this all the time. When I started, I guess around 22 years ago, I was a music critic. I covered hip-hop, and so I was out all the time. Then at some point in my career we were on the phone all the time. Now we're on Zoom all the time. What do we lose with that progression?

MP: I think your question is the answer. I mean, we lose a lot. Not to sound like an old man, but I remember one of my first jobs was at a paper in New Jersey. Our editor there, I guess it was every two or three weeks, he would demand, literally, that you can't come into the office — all day long. This was before the advent of the cell phone. You had to go to whatever towns you were covering, or cities you were covering, and spend all day there. Then you had to come back with a story. And it was a great exercise. In a sense, when I look at tenant organizing or cab driving, those are things that took me out into neighborhoods.

I am always struck that when you do that, you complicate things for yourself. Assumptions are flipped over. You just can't do that on the phone. Now, there are some wonderful younger reporters. So, I don't want to have one of these “get off my lawn” moments. I think there's also a great deal of pressure on reporters — particularly those who are not lucky enough to work at The New York Times or The Atlantic — to turn stuff over really quickly. Sometimes two and three stories a day. The ability to do what we do well is just eviscerated when that happens.

TH: I do want to talk about a couple of the stories that you've covered that have really stood out to me. This has been a pretty wild time to be a journalist, this last couple of years. In early 2020, you traded in your post at The New York Times sports beat to cover identity, culture, and free speech. A new beat for The Times. One of your early pieces was about the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America protesting a talk by Adolph Reed, a Black Marxist professor, about the role of class in the pandemic. Can you tell our listeners the brief outlines of that story — and what drew you to it?

MP: Sure. Well, for one thing, I knew Adolph Reed. He is an eminent professor, as they say. Before he retired, he was working at the University of Pennsylvania. A hard, tough intellect. Whether you agree with him on everything is irrelevant. He's a really bright guy. And a Marxist, as you say. So, here he is invited to speak to the New York chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The biggest chapter, by far, in that party. And there is a great uproar: “What are we inviting him for?”

He argues that class difference — and class solidarity, probably more to the point — are far more important than race, gender, identity. He doesn't argue those are irrelevant. But he argues that if you want to build a working class, middle class movement around, pick your issue, unionization, foreclosure, housing … If your intent is to locate our differences, to say, “If you are Black, if you are transgender, if you are whatever” — and he would go right across the spectrum — and say, “That's what's most important. We're going to privilege that.” He just believes that's a cock-eyed way of looking at organizing.

That what you should do is look at the very substantial shared suffering, and shared yearnings, particularly within class. This just blew the mind of a lot of the DSA, and they ended up, to use the word I didn't use, “cancelling” him, deplatforming him, saying he could not speak there. In fairness to DSA, there were also a number of folks who were outraged by that. And who said, “No. How could we not invite perhaps the most preeminent Black Marxist in America? Even if we're uncomfortable with some of what he has to say.” So, it struck me as one of those things that just spoke to that moment we were living through.

TH: I'm curious, for you writing about that in that particular moment — this is the summer of 2020 — what were the pressures on you, as a journalist, working through that story and getting that story out there?

MP: I was very lucky in that I had a powerful editor, who backed me. And we had both agreed, when I took on this beat, that frankly The New York Times had done a bad job on this. The cultural tide was running against us, strongly. The notion of speech, expression, was very constrained. So I got a lot of backing there. And a lot of pushback elsewhere. But I did believe, and I continue to believe, that these are crucial questions for us. And questions that we were not, at that time, really talking about.

TH: Another story that stands out is about a Black astrophysicist, Hakeem Oluseyi, who I subsequently had on the podcast. Your story ended up being on the massively popular The Daily podcast, which The Times does. Which I took as a sign that some of these third rail stories are becoming a little less third rail. Can you briefly explain the outlines of that story about Dr. Oluseyi, and the public reaction to it?

MP: It is a kind of a complicated story. I mean, straightforward in one way and complicated in another. There was this debate over the naming of the new deep space telescope, and it was to be called the James Webb Telescope. An uproar arose among the left, I guess was what united them, but kind of the identity-driven left. Webb had been a part of a gay purge — they argued, incorrectly, as it turns out — at the State Department when he had been there in 1949 and 1950. Oluseyi was asked originally to sign on to one of these letters, protesting this, because he was a reasonably prominent physicist and astronomer. He said, “Before I do that, I want to look at this.” The more he looked into it, to his really enduring credit … And I should say he's a Black astrophysicist from a very poor family in Louisiana and Houston, and has his own remarkable tale.

To his credit, he just said, “No. Not only am I not going to sign, I'm going to research this fully. I'm going to go into the National Archives. I'm going to talk to historians.” And he ended up writing a piece on Medium.

Then he just got savaged for that. “He's a straight guy. He doesn't understand anything.” It got very nasty. Ironically, in doing the piece, I called some gay historians. In fact, probably the preeminent gay historian of that time. He completely backed up what Hakeem was arguing. 

Then the story got very nasty, because there was a turn on Hakeem and an effort to suggest that he had essentially engaged in sexual harassment. It was this really ugly whisper campaign. In the course of reporting those things — and I'm sure you deal with this also as a reporter — it took, frankly, some months on my part. The last thing you want to do is have a piece that comes out and then somebody stands up and says, “No, he harassed me.” There was nothing to it. I'm quite confident in that. I talked to an awful lot of people.

To me, it spoke to not just our political moment around identity, but also the destructive, personal, “I'm not just going to disagree with you, I'm going to take you down. You're going to be driven out of polite society, academic society.” I think probably it hurt Hakeem in some ways, those things. Even though The New York Times puts a piece on the front page. Even though The Daily does the piece. I know he's been denied speaking engagements, and this sort of thing. It was an unfortunately instructive piece, I thought, on this moment in our culture.

TH: I'm curious about the role of the reporter in this moment, with this really destructive behavior that you're describing. I was thinking about this in the context of another story. You also recently reported on Yoel Inbar, a University of Toronto professor who criticized DEI statements on a podcast five years ago and lost a job at UCLA over it. Now, that is not as an extreme example. But it shows that this is still very much alive and well. These kinds of stories, very few people in the media want to touch them. Because it does run the risk of turning that great, big, hostile spotlight on yourself. What is it about you as a person that you don't run from it, that you run to it?

MP: How do I answer that in a non-self aggrandizing way? I mean, look, maybe there's a virtue to being somewhat older. There's some downsides. But I have done a lot of reporting. Ironically, at an earlier stage in my career, I did a lot of reporting on poverty and other things and would get attacked as a leftist. It’s an interesting spin that way. But I think mainly, in all seriousness, I happened to grow up in the 70s and 80s when free speech and free expression were primary values [for what it meant] to be a liberal, to be on the left. That was the time of the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, suing to allow Nazis to walk through a Jewish suburb of Chicago.

It was kind of in the historical shadow of the Joe McCarthy era. There was just a sense that deplatforming people — words like that didn't exist back then — or censoring people because of what they have to say was fundamentally illiberal. Fundamentally not a progressive act.

As I looked at taking this on, yeah, I knew there was going to be pushback. But in the first place, my friends are my friends, they know who I am. On social media, you never know who you are, you don't recognize yourself most of the time. So, you can't worry about that that much.

It felt like an important moment to do this kind of reporting. And that's what you look for as a reporter, right? There weren't a lot of people doing this. It was really important, to the extent that anything we write has a larger impact on society. It just felt like something urgent to write about.

TH: You were at The New York Times during some pretty turbulent years. You're at The Atlantic now. But during the pandemic, at The Times, we saw the James Bennet departure, the Bari Weiss resignation, generational tensions in the newsroom, and more recently the open letter from contributors over trans coverage. What can you tell us about what the mood was like on the inside during some of those years?