A Change of Address

Sometimes people tell me things they shouldn’t, because I’m willing to listen, for as long as it takes, to understand how they see the world.

Hi, y’all. It’s been a tremendous five years.

As a reporter for The New Yorker, I wrote about mental illness, mass incarceration, criminal trials, Afghanistan, contemporary art, film, startups, cryptocurrency, boats, ships (there is a difference), architecture, corporate malfeasance, guns, private aviation, cannabis, gambling, exploration, restaurants, politics. It usually went like this: I’d find myself interested in a subject—sometimes someone would tell me about something unbelievable at a house party; more often than not, I would read something in the newspaper that made me think, ‘Oh, shit!’—and then I’d spend weeks and weeks asking questions. Once, I had a chance to interview my childhood hero, Willie Nelson. Another time, I found myself in the room with a group of young people trying to buy an original of the U.S. Constitution! No matter the topic, I always had the good fortune of speaking with a variety of people: police officers, front-line medical workers, service members, corporate executives, famous actors. Sometimes, I would talk to very, very brave people, who, by telling me their stories, put themselves and their families at great personal risk.

I had the best job in the world. And yet, every day I woke up and had to remind myself that I was, in fact, living my dream. Something was missing. For the past year or so, I’ve had a sinking feeling that I was on the outside, responding to the questions posed by improvements in artificial intelligence. I realized I wanted to work on the questions. After exploring and consulting for several artificial intelligence companies in San Francisco earlier this year, I decided to make a change. I’ve joined the team at Notion, an artificial intelligence application lab. Starting this week, I will be spending significantly more of my time thinking and talking about artificial intelligence.

I’ll definitely write about some of that here. But this is not an artificial intelligence newsletter. So what is it? Here’s my pitch: I love telling stories. My greatest skill as a reporter is finding the people you’d never otherwise meet and getting them to tell theirs. Sometimes people tell me things they shouldn’t. They share surprising and intimate details, because I’m willing to listen, for as long as it takes, to understand how they see the world. What you’ll find here are those conversations, with all the color—the voices, the scenes, the texture—that you won’t find anywhere else. So this will be a place where you can read about my recent trip to Kherson, near the front in Ukraine. And my attempt to run fifty kilometers in Far West Texas by the end of the year. And yes, my forays into the technology sector, at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence.

At its best, this newsletter will be a place to read about human perspectives on what’s happening in the economy. It will be a place to think about all the infrastructure hiding in plain sight. But always, always: This newsletter will be about society and nature as seen through my eyes.

And more than that, it’s about society and nature as seen through the eyes of the people who are generous enough to spend some time talking with me. Many of the most fascinating, brilliant people I’ve interviewed during these past five years had never read The New Yorker. Many could not (or did not care to) meaningfully differentiate The New Yorker from the many other places that hire reporters and editors to tell stories about what’s happening in the world. “Oh, he writes for the newspaper,” a woman shouted to her friend on one particularly hot afternoon in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood as I was reporting a piece on mental illness and homelessness in New York. Her friend chimed in, “The newspaper? And you want to talk to me?” Yes, I told her. Yes, I want to talk to you, or, er, uh, actually, I want you to do the talking, I said. I’ll ask some questions, and you do the talking and I’ll sit here and listen for as long as it takes. The woman grinned and nodded her head and I turned on my tape recorder and she and I spent five or six hours together, and then I went back to my air-conditioned office and she went back into her life.

Several weeks later, I tried to reach the woman again. But like so many of the people I meet, she had neither a reliable cell phone nor a way to access the internet. The woman did not return my calls—her phone had been disconnected. When I returned to the place we met, the people there wanted to help, but they didn’t know where she had gone. I tried and tried and tried to reach her for another conversation, but I couldn’t ever find her. I share all this, not to tell this woman’s story, but rather to explain why she spent all those hours with me in the first place. It wasn’t because I wrote for “the newspaper”—a New Yorker article about mental illness and homelessness. It was because I listened, really listened.

That’s not always the case. Sometimes, people speak with me not so much because I am willing to listen, but because they know what they say is going to be printed in a well-respected magazine for others to read. The New Yorker recently celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary; our writers and editors (and fact-checkers and copy-editors) are S-tier, the best of the best. Not everyone likes the work that we do, nor the magazine’s politics, but just about everyone will pick up the phone and speak with me when I introduce myself followed by its name. Politicians, tech founders, military officials, artists, White House officials, celebrities, N.B.A. players (or at least their agents)—they’re all curious, why am I calling, what the hell do I want? Or, rather, why is this well-known and widely read legacy media outlet calling? Everyone always picks up the phone; the institution’s reputation precedes me.

Last week, I published an article about savvy prediction-market traders—the guys beating Wall Street at their own game. I spent more than six months reporting and writing the piece, and more than eighteen months thinking about it. The New Yorker did not want me to write or report the article. But I couldn’t drop the idea. After a while, my editor generously encouraged me to take the piece somewhere else. My new editors, at the Times, put just as much care into every sentence and semicolon. The fact-checkers and copy-editors were also S-tier. But still, most of my sources only spoke with me because, when I introduced myself, the name of a respected institution followed my own.

I will continue to write for legacy media outlets, because I want to keep working with—and learning from—my incredible editors. But I am also going to start writing some stories here for a more limited audience—true stories, esoteric stories, stories about snowy mountains and rare flowers, stories about A.I. world, stories about tech bros, stories about people who don’t own cell phones. The kinds of stories that I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to publish in the pages of a hundred-year-old magazine.

The best days I had as a reporter were never when people were excited to talk to The New Yorker or The New York Times. They were the days when people picked up the phone because they wanted to talk to me about their stories. I know now that my strength is writing stories that famous magazines won’t publish, because these stories aren’t always right for famous magazines.

My new job is going to take me to fabs and power plants and data centers, and also to Chick-fil-A franchises and bakeries and autobody shops. I’m going to write about all the people whom I meet and what they’re thinking about. I’m going to write about what I’m hearing at house parties, and what I’m seeing in San Francisco and New York. And because I’m interested in how people think about artificial intelligence, I’m going to write some about that. But I’m also going to write about other things. Last week, for instance, I found myself sitting on an airplane next to a U.S. special-forces operator, who had a connection to the U.S. raid on Venezuela earlier this year. We did not talk much about the special operation, but we did speak at length about his life and my own. I’d like for you to read about what he said.

For now, it’s just me (and my chatbot editor agents, which I’ll tell you about another time). The pieces won’t be polished. But if enough people start to read this, then I can hire an actual human editor and a fact-checker. So, please share this newsletter with a few friends or family members. And please subscribe, so that I can hire some humans.

Adam Iscoe