Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Best of Design Matters: David Remnick

April 28, 2025·58 min·5 clips

Remnick describes getting his mouth washed out with lava soap by a teacher he says should rot in hell.

Remnick starts in uncertainty. Before the career chronology has anywhere to sit, he admits that a story he is about to tell may be false, which gives the whole conversation a funny little crackle. Memory is already on trial. He talks about early journalism as a time when the world was still miserable, but democratic promise felt visible in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and South America. Later, when history seems to lurch backward, that younger hope sounds less naive than bruised. Millman keeps pulling him back to formation. His job at The New Yorker sits beside the muscle he built at the Washington Post, where speed was not magic so much as repetition. Police coverage and sports stories had to be filed fast. Asked how he learned to move that way, he treats it like trained motion, something the body learns after enough deadlines. The biography opens out from there. After an internship and early work at the Washington Post, he is sent away for a year and ends up in Tokyo. The setup is absurd in the best way: a Jewish kid from Jersey at a Jesuit school in Tokyo, met by three priests and one immediate rule about students. Cut off by language, he reads almost monastically, sometimes one or two books a day, then leaves after six months. From there, he travels cheaply through Southeast Asia, reaches Paris in a Leon Russell T-shirt and Converse sneakers, and makes money singing Bob Dylan songs underground. By the end, journalism feels like his trade and his bet: pay attention, write cleanly, and maybe help keep the world from sliding backward.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Design Matters with Debbie Millman