Chana Joffe-Walt on The Best Tape You Can Get

Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what’s unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new?

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From the episode: “Chana Joffe-Walt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and a producer at This American Life. Her series on school segregation, Nice White Parents, examined how progressive Brooklyn families undermined racial integration. She regularly takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and education. But it was her series of conversations with men, women, and children in Gaza that made me want to begin the season with her, to explore how the interview can preserve the dignity and complexity of ordinary people in a time of genocide.”

For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.

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The Critic and Her Publics

Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by

Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.