Hi Loyal Readers. Thank you for opening this week’s issue of Article Club.
Today’s issue is dedicated to my interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of this month’s featured article, “The End of Children.” I hope you read the article and take a listen to the interview.
Yes: This article is about the imminent worldwide population implosion — in other words, how by the end of this century, we’re going to start losing people, and fast, and how the human race might inevitably go extinct sooner rather than later.
And yes: I was surprised when I found myself interested in this topic. After all, before reading this piece, I would have said two things: (1) Um, isn’t climate change what we should be worrying about? and (2) Doesn’t this inexorably lead to “childless cat ladies” and The Handmaid’s Tale?
But let me tell you: The magic of Mr. Lewis-Kraus’s writing and reporting, alongside the spirit of Article Club — which encourages us to build our empathy — got me to rethink my perspective on the plummeting human fertility rate.
And this was all before getting to talk to the author himself. As you know, one of my favorite things about Article Club is that writers generously say yes to talking with us. The same was true with Mr. Lewis-Kraus. Here’s a photo of him, so you know what he looks like, and then I’ll write a bit about what I appreciated about our interview.
It was wonderful to meet Mr. Lewis-Kraus. More than what’s typical in these Article Club interviews, we talked about writing and craft. A significant part of our conversation was about how he structured and organized the piece.
His thoughtfulness was apparent right from the beginning of our conversation. I loved learning how he decided to write the story in the first place and why he chose South Korea as his case study of population collapse. Some people told Mr. Lewis-Kraus that South Korea and its 0.7 fertility rate was “played out” and “a cliché,” but nobody from a major magazine had spent time in the country, he said. I was personally grateful that Mr. Lewis-Kraus took significant space in his article reporting from South Korea. If you want to gain a better appreciation of how serious the problem is there, I encourage you to watch this 15-minute video, recommended by loyal reader Peter.
I was also impressed with Mr. Lewis-Kraus’s awareness of his readers as he drafted the piece. He understood, for example, that his audience (aka subscribers of The New Yorker) are astute readers who mostly lean progressive and who may believe that population decline is a problem only in some countries, like Italy and Japan. Rather than skirting this issue, Mr. Lewis-Kraus decided to tackle it head on:
What I realized was, Everyone is going to feel like they’ve read this story before — like, everyone is going to feel like they’ve heard this. And so the major thing that I need to do upfront is say to people, essentially directly address the reader, and say, like, You sophisticated reader might think that you know what’s going on here, but you don’t know what’s going on here.
Later in our conversation, I asked Mr. Lewis-Kraus how he makes sure not to get ahead of his readers — on the one hand respecting their knowledge, but on the other hand acknowledging that they haven’t spent hundreds of hours reporting and thinking about this issue, as he has. I found his answer to be humble.
Part of what, what doing this job is, is it’s starting knowing nothing about something and then very quickly learning as much as you can — without forgetting what it felt like to know nothing about it.
More than anything else, I left this conversation with deep respect of Mr. Lewis-Kraus and his process as a writer. As I’ve said many times over the years, while I can recognize the highest-quality writing when I read it, I still don’t understand how writers are able to pull it off. That’s maybe one reason I keep doing this newsletter — so that I can continue to explore this question and share my findings with you. Thank you very much for joining me on this journey.
An invitation to our discussion on July 27
I warmly invite you to participate in our discussion on Sunday, July 27, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. We’ll meet on Zoom. You can sign up below, it’s free.
Thank you for reading and listening to this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀
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