Episode 668
Kelsey McKinney, Omar El Akkad, and Kuinka
Podcaster and writer Kelsey McKinney (You Didn't Hear This From Me: Notes on the Art of Gossip) "spills the tea" on all things gossip—from prayer circles to AI tattle; award-winning author Omar El Akkad discusses his first book of nonfiction One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which traces his disillusionment with the West and the failure of its promises; and indie folk band Kuinka perform their tune "Living Room Floor."
Kelsey McKinney
Best-Selling Writer and Podcaster
Kelsey McKinney is a reporter and writer who lives in Philadelphia. She is the co-creator of Normal Gossip, as well as a co-owner and features writer at Defector.com. She has worked as a staff writer at Deadspin, Fusion, and Vox, and her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, and many others. Her first novel, God Spare The Girls, was published in the summer of 2021. This year, she released her first non-fiction book, You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.
Omar El Akkad
Award-Winning Author
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. This year, he published his nonfiction debut, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his most raw and vulnerable work to date.
Kuinka
Indie Folk Band
Described by NPR Music as joyous folk pop, Kuinka "laces modern folk and Americana with an electronic jolt, waltzing along the grooved edges of dream-pop, synth-pop, and Brooklyn’s mid-aughts guitar-rock revival" (Vanyaland). Their genre-defying music features several different lead singers, four-part harmony, and eclectic instrumentation. For all of their sonic experimentation, the Seattle group's songs and live shows are linked by an infectious energy that remains present in everything they do.
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “‘Chipmunks were obsessed with my mics’: the man who recorded a tree for a year”
Luke’s story: “Valerie the dachshund is found safe and well after 529 days on the run on South Australian island”
Kelsey McKinney
Kelsey’s new book: You Didn't Hear This From Me: Mostly True Notes on Gossip
Kelsey credits anthropologist Robin Dunbar with the theory that gossip is an evolutionary necessity.
Kelsey references the ancient epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Luke and Kelsey discuss the 2007 hit TV show Gossip Girl.
Kelsey references DeuxMoi, an anonymous celebrity gossip social media platform.
Live Wire Listener Question
Tell us some gossip (that maybe only you care about).
Omar El Akkad
Omar reads from his new book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
Omar discusses his experience growing up in Qatar, moving to Canada, and then to the United States.
Kuinka
The band members of Kuinka perform "Living Room Floor” from their album, Shiny Little Corners.
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Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! This week, writer Kelsey McKinney.
Kelsey McKinney: I go to a bar often and a man will say to me like, oh, what do you do? And I say, I wrote this book about gossip and he'll say, oh, I don't like gossip. And I'll say that's crazy. Did you hear that Patrick Mahomes got traded?
Elena Passarello: Author Omar El Akkad.
Omar El Akkad: This is a book to me about a deep uncertainty, about coming unmoored from a particular orientation and not knowing who the hell you are on the other side of that.
Elena Passarello: With music from Kuinka and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now, the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank!
Luke Burbank: We have got quite the show in store for you this week. A lot to get to, but of course we've got to kick things off the way that we always do. A little segment that we call the best news we heard all week. This is the basic premise of this segment, Elena. It's that most of the news in the world es muy mal. Not- [Elena: No bueno.] Not great. I can't, I don't even know how to say it in English, how bad it is. [Elena:Yeah.] And yet surprisingly, every week there are at least two kinds of good stories that happen. [Elena: Yes.] And we want to present them to you. Elena, what is the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: So this is best news for me and where I'm at emotionally. [Luke: Okay.] And so when I read this story, I was like, this is the one for me. It involves someone putting a microphone 10 feet up a pine tree in upstate New York and leaving it there for a year.
Luke Burbank: Wow.
Elena Passarello: And artist and filmmaker named Joshua Bonnetta, who's made kind of soundscape recordings before, was really interested in seeing if he could capture what a tree might hear over the course of its lifetime. And so he put this special microphone up in a tree in upstate New York that captured the sounds of the tree, the things around the tree. He only went back every couple of weeks to change the battery and check the microphone. Because apparently the chipmunks got really, really into it. And when it was over, he had almost 9,000 hours of the sound that this tree heard from the spring of 2021 to the spring of 2022, and he made a four hour long album. [Luke: Oh yes.] It's kind of like Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Each one is a season and each one is about an hour long. And I have been listening to this album. On repeat all week. I think Eben has it queued up so you can hear what it sounds like.
Luke Burbank: That just healed something inside me.
Elena Passarello: Yes, yes. Wow. People are responding to it by saying things like, I think I can hear the leaves growing. Like, like it's really having this kind of evocative effect on the people who are listening to it. And you can listen to it too. It's on band camp. But the thing that I think is so cool is that he then made this like other kind of art on top of it. So you'll hear a wind from July blowing through the leaves while a bird from September chirps, you know. Wow. Yeah, so for me and where I'm at, that was great, great news. Just to have somebody slow down and pay attention and remind me that things are growing, it was like a balm this week.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, absolutely. My best news also involves the great outdoors, but it involves a couple, a young recently married couple, their names are Josh Fishlock and Georgia Gardner, and they're Australian, and they were going on a little camping holiday, they were going to this very kind of remote kind of rugged island called Kangaroo Island. A little on the nose, Australians. Okay, it's off the coast of South Australia. This is back in 2023, okay, and they have brought their miniature dachshund puppy named Valerie who is wearing a pink collar, just to give you a sense of Valerie's world. And in fact, the quote from Georgia Gardner was, Valerie is, quote, "'Not a very outside, rough and tough dog.'" I've been there to Australia, that's how they talk.
Elena Passarello: Oh, okay. Yeah, sure.
Luke Burbank: So Valerie is a kind of a, you know, passenger princess, you might say. Like they've got Valerie there at the campsite and they decide they want to go off on a beach walk. They don't want to bring Valerie. They have Valerie in a little like pen that, you know, keeps her contained and safe. They come back from the beach walk and Valerie has chewed her way out of the pen and is now.
Elena Passarello: On Kangaroo Island.
Luke Burbank: Running loose on kangaroo island. No one can find her, they extend their trip by five days looking for Valerie and Cannot find her and are just totally heartbroken because this is not a dog with survival skills of any kind So they go back home. Finally, They just like call it off and just like what a bummer
Elena Passarello: Oh my God.
Luke Burbank: And then the worst.
Elena Passarello: I've never heard.
Luke Burbank: And then about 500 days later, somebody sees a miniature dachshund in a pink collar running around in the wilds of Kangaroo Island. Valerie has been not only surviving, but thriving apparently on the island. So they built a trap for her, which was like a pen, and in it they put her favorite dog food. They put some of her favorite dogs toys. A piece of a t-shirt from her owners, and they just left it in the middle of this thing. They said that when Valerie started smelling the t- shirt, they could see that she was remembering who she was. I thought I was going to cry reading The Guardian today.
Elena Passarello: Oh, oh, oh.
Luke Burbank: So as of next week, Josh and Georgia are gonna come back to the island and old Valorie is gonna get to go home. Yeah, right? So Australian mini Dachshunds being built different. That's the best news that I heard all week. All right, our first guest is the co-creator of the hit podcast, Normal Gossip, which basically shares gossip about people that you have never met and probably never will meet. She's also one of the owners of defector.com, where she's also a features writer. Her reporting and essays have appeared in the New York Times and New York Magazine, among other places, and her latest book is You Didn't Hear This From Me, Mostly True Notes on Gossip. Please welcome Kelsey McKinney back to Live Wire. Kelsey, welcome back to Live Wire.
Kelsey McKinney: Thank you, I'm so happy to be back.
Luke Burbank: I really, really enjoyed this book because I really really enjoy gossip. I think it's sort of our great natural resources. But just to kind of level set, in terms of this book and maybe just even in your life, how do you exactly define gossip? What are we talking about here?
Kelsey McKinney: So I'm using a really expansive definition of gossip, which is just two people talking about someone who isn't there. So that means if I talk to you about Taylor Swift, we're gossiping. If two doctors talk about a patient that's not in the room, that would also fall under this definition. I like to start there because some of you are prickling at that already, right? You're like, I don't like that. It doesn't feel right to me. And there's a lot of, I find that interesting to start in a space where people are like. No, it's a tone, because what is it, if not that?
Luke Burbank: You're kind of taking a little bit of the sort of judginess out of it, if you will. You're just saying, this is what it is, and not putting a value judgment on it.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, I'm trying to do that. I mean, I think there is a huge swath of stereotypes that exist around gossip and what I want us to do and what i try to do in the book is to kind of break those down and look at them critically because, you know, I go to a bar often and a man will say to me like, oh, what do you do? And I say, I wrote this book about gossip and he'll say, oh, I don't like gossip. And I'll say that's crazy. Did you hear that Patrick Mahomes got traded?
Elena Passarello: Right. It's never called gossip when men talk about sports or like kind of the inner workings of a sports deal or sports relationships or sports wives or any that.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, topics, some topics are gossip and some topics aren't, right? And to me, I'm like, I watch the NFL, I also watch the Real Housewives. Both of those are on my TV. Then I go home and talk to my friends about them. That's it's gossip for both of them.
Luke Burbank: Now, is there an evolutionary component to gossip? Like, was there something where if we were, you know, s-talking like that other cave person while they weren't around, it might help us stay alive longer?
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah. So Robin Dunbar, who is an anthropologist, was kind of the first one to say this. And it has since been like codified amongst anthropologists that he believes that the reason we developed language as a species was to gossip as a way to be like, do you think he's stronger than him? Like, who should we send on the hunt? Right? And that is actually gossip, and it is actually for survival. And so you see the US as a species evolve over time. Because we're able to adapt in that way and talk about people when they're not there.
Luke Burbank: You start the book off kind of seeing if basically ChatGPT is good at gossip.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah. And what did you find out? I want to be clear that my stance is that I hate AI. That's the bias I'm coming from. Thank you. And
Luke Burbank: Would you say that if AI was here? I mean, let's be honest, it is.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, it's an eek in all of our pockets. So I wanted to see, you know, could it gossip? So I go in there, I'm like, will you gossip with me? It's like, no, gossip is bad and you're bad. And I was like, okay, well, I've been researching this book for three years. Here are some reasons it's good. And then ChatGPT was like, oh, actually, you're right. And I was like, oh my God, thank you. And so then I was, like, OK, well, if it won't gossip, does it understand what gossip is? So I asked it to tell me the story of Gilgamesh, an ancient tale. And it tells me Gilgamesh, normally. It's like, here's what happens, right? These two guys are friends. They try to find immortality, blah, blah blah. And then I'm like, cool, can you tell it to me, like, it's gossip. And it immediately is like, Oh, honey, let me spill the ancient tea. Thank you. And so, but, and that tells you a lot, right? It's like, okay, so it's telling us that it's a tone. It's telling that it is vocabulary. In the word T, we have queer culture and black culture being used, right. So it's like the definition of gossip that our collective understanding inside ChatGPT right now has is that it a very, very specific thing.
Luke Burbank: You didn't hear this from us, but this is Live Wire Radio from PRX. We're talking to Kelsey McKinney about her latest book. You didn't hear this me, that being her. We gotta take a very short break, but don't go anywhere. More Live Wire in just a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We're at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon this week talking to Kelsey McKinney about her book. You didn't hear this from me. Mostly true notes on gossip. Kelsey, like me, you grew up evangelical Christian and you write in this book that in that particular Christian movement, I guess, there is. A really, really big obsession with not gossiping. It's one of the first things that gets talked about. And then I double-checked yesterday. I was like, I'm a little hazy on the 10 Commandments. And I Googled the 10 commandments, which first of all is a nightmare because AI is trying to summarize them for me. I'm like, I need to look at them and make sure gossip isn't on there. It is not on there,
Kelsey McKinney: No, it is not.
Luke Burbank: It's something that the evangelical movement is really intent on people not doing. Why do you think that is?
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, so I think first off in the evangelical movement, gossip is like not a sin with scale, right? There are some things that you can do that are sins with scale. So like drinking, you can have one glass of wine and that's not a Sin. If you have eight glasses of wine, you're sinning, right, that's a scale. Gossip is no, there's no scale available. So it is on par with adultery and murder, which is crazy. Like objectively that's wild.
Luke Burbank: To tell like a nine-year-old kid at Sunday school.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah. And so they tell you, right, this is this huge sin. It will ruin your life. And they're also telling you at the same time, right? Everyone has a thorn in their side, this thing that will remind you of Christ all the time, and that's a sin that you'll do constantly. And they took one look at me and they were like, gossip.
Luke Burbank: Were you gossiping a lot as a young evangelical Christian? Yes. So they were actually not wrong that you were doing that. Maybe wrong about what the consequences of gossip are.
Kelsey McKinney: Right, and I think now as an adult and someone who thinks about gossip constantly, I'm like, what is a prayer circle?
Luke Burbank: Oh my gosh.
Kelsey McKinney: If not, gossip.
Luke Burbank: Was your mom on the prayer chain?
Kelsey McKinney: Oh, yeah.
Luke Burbank: My mom was on the prayer chain, which would be something would happen, something juicy would happen to someone. And one typically woman would pick up the phone and call the next woman to pray over this, and then they would call someone else. Yeah. And it had never occurred to me until I read this book, Kelsey, that that is so gossipy.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, well it's it's not gossip right because you're doing it out of a spirit of care
Luke Burbank: You're interceding.
Kelsey McKinney: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Luke Burbank: But I mean, that is just crazy because I would try to listen to what my mom was saying on the prayer chain.
Kelsey McKinney: Yes!
Luke Burbank: I'd be like, huh, what is going on with Ann Nabokowski?
Luke Burbank: So it's enmeshed in that world, but it's somehow very sort of frowned upon. And again, I wondered if it didn't have to do with the idea that if people kind of all got on the same page in some way, they would start to really question the underpinning of this whole thing.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, I think it's partly that. I also think, you know, I wrote a novel, and the novel is about an evangelical pastor who has an affair. And when I was writing the novel, I had a Google Alert set for evangelical pastors that have affairs, which you might imagine. When did you...
Luke Burbank: When did your computer catch on fire?
Kelsey McKinney: You might imagine it was just a hitting constantly and you would be right. And so I but I was watching them because I was like, well, I want to know what the playbook is. I want to know what these churches do when this happens so that I can like break it down and use it. And in almost every single circumstance, someone stands on a stage and they say, you know, this is a very hard time for our church community and the family of the pastor. And we encourage you not to sin by gossiping about it.
Luke Burbank: No.
Kelsey McKinney: But to instead bring your concerns to an elder or a deacon. So essentially what you're doing when you say that is you're saying we, the people in power, want all of the information and we want you guys to not talk to each other, which is the same thing that like bad bosses do. It's like don't talk to each other because you'll gain power and information. We want to have all of that. So it is a way for the church to keep its own self-safe.
Luke Burbank: Well, I mean, one of the things you talk about in the book is gossip as at least an attempt at a form of accountability, whisper networks popping up in places where you have people, oftentimes women and marginalized folks, who are being mistreated in one way or another and don't really have a voice to express that, but then are keeping each other somewhat apprised as a basically sort of survival technique. But you also point out on the book that basically that's not really justice when that happens.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, so I write about how, how we do keep each other safe, right? Like there is often people will say, oh, you know, like middle schoolers gossip all the time and like how much of that is true. And like, I very vividly remember people telling me when I was a middle schooler, like, this is a teacher you should watch out for that's gossip and it was certainly true because why else would I have been hearing it if it wasn't right. And so there is this kind of underpinning that is like Oh, this is important. This is a thing you can use to keep each other safe. We saw this with the Me Too movement constantly. And so I find that really interesting. It also, the problem then though, is it keeps some people safe, but there's no justice for the person doing the oppressing, right? So it is a system of safety and not a system of justice.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Kelsey McKinney about her new book, You Didn't Hear This From Me, Mostly True Notes on Gossip. You spend a lot of time in the book actually talking about the idea of anonymity. Because you know, the title of the book is kind of premised on this idea that we gossip and we trade information but we go like, you didn't hear that from me or I don't want my name attached to this. And you sort of write about why that's important in storytelling and sort of raising the stakes, like talk about the show Gossip Girl. But I'm wondering. Is there any danger or any, like, is there any responsibility of somebody who's gossiping anonymously and posting to sort of stand behind what they're saying?
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is the joke, right, is the book is called You Didn't Hear This for Me, and like, you're clearly hearing it for me, it's my name on the book. And I did that because... I'm just not getting that. I know. And I, and I did because I wanted to make this commentary on anonymity that I think is really interesting, which is that, like, we see all over the place people gossiping with public platforms, right? I'm thinking specifically about, like DuMois is a great example of this.
Luke Burbank: Can you explain who DeuxMoi is?
Kelsey McKinney: Sure, yeah, DeuxMoi is an internet celebrity gossip account on Instagram and what she does is people DM her and then she just posts their DMs on to her stories, which means that people just make things up and send them to her and she posts them. And so that is actually slander, it's not gossip because it's a lie. But I do find that really interesting because when something is behind an anonymous source, we don't know how much to trust it. And you shouldn't trust an anonymous source, right? And so it tells you that like, gossip is something that is dependent on who's telling it to you. Like you don't gossip with someone you hate. That's something we know. And then with anonymity, it's like, well, you know how many degrees removed gossip is usually.
Elena Passarello: Newspaper when someone says an anonymous source from the inside the White House has told me blank that puts the pressure on the relationship between the reader and the newspaper writer and how close they are to that.
Kelsey McKinney: Yeah, the joke in journalism, right, is if people are like, I want to go off the record, I want to use anonymity, you're like, OK, is it Watergate? Is that what we're talking about? Because otherwise, I don't want to use an anonymous name because it lowers your credibility. People trust things when they have names attached to them more.
Luke Burbank: You have written lots of great stuff and you've been a journalist for years and you have done all kinds of things and yet it's like, it may be the case that your strongest brand right now is explaining gossip. I don't even know if it's so much gossiping but just kind of being the person to go to on the topic of gossip. How do you feel about that? Being, right now you're kind of defining career characteristics.
Kelsey McKinney: It's really fun for me in a lot of ways, because if you're known for gossip, then people want to give it to you. So people just, it's like I'm being hit in the face with like a fire hose of gossip at all times. But I love that. It's real fun to be told a lot about gossip and to know like strange things about people I'll never meet. And also it's, like, it is an interesting point in my career for me, because it's like I've always been a writer, and now suddenly I'm known for being a gossip. And I'm like, well, being a gossiper is also being a writer if you think about it. But we'll see if that works.
Luke Burbank: Kelsey McKinney, thanks so much for coming on Live Wire. That was the writer and podcaster, Kelsey McKinney, right here on live wire. Her new book is You didn't Hear This From Me, Mostly True Notes on Gossip, and it is available right now. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at Powells.com. You're listening to Live Wire, I'm Luke Burbank. Right over there is my friend, Elena Pasarello. Of course, each week we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. This week, we were inspired by Kelsey McKinney's Love of Gossip and her new book, You Didn't Hear This From Me. Elena, in that spirit, what did we ask the audience?
Elena Passarello: We asked them to tell us some gossip that maybe only you care about.
Luke Burbank: I feel like I'm carrying around so much of this kind of gossip.
Elena Passarello: I do love innocuous and also deeply personalized gossip.
Luke Burbank: So we actually asked the live audience at a recent taping of the show to answer that question, to tell us about some gossip that they might be the only ones who care about. And here's what they said. This is what Alex said.
Alex: This week, my mom told me that my uncle has three toes on his right foot, just three.
Luke Burbank: Like what were the circumstances under which Alex's mother needed to divulge that?
Elena Passarello: Is it like three toes remaining or?
Luke Burbank: Great question.
Elena Passarello: Always Three Toes.
Luke Burbank: I'm telling you, Elena, if I lost three toes in some sort of incident, it would be how I was starting every conversation. There would be no confusion about the origins of my toe loss because that's quite the story. So I'm going to guess maybe this was a pre-existing condition. Okay. All right, here is another Live Wire audience member who wanted to share some gossip with us that maybe only they care about. This is Andrea.
Andrea: Back in high school, we would vote for the homecoming court and there were screenshots going around that some girl voted multiple times with the same account to bump herself up and be on the homecoming court.
Elena Passarello: Caught in the crossfire.
Luke Burbank: Seriously, sounds like there was some dirty dealing in that school election. Did you run for office of any kind or any kind of a special position when you were in school?
Elena Passarello: No, but I was voted, you know, basically like a class clown.
Luke Burbank: Most likely to co-host a public radio variety show.
Elena Passarello: That's right. What about you?
Luke Burbank: I ran for class president, uh, and then I lost and then the next year I ran for class vice president, I figured I should manage my expectations and I also lost.
Elena Passarello: Oh no!
Luke Burbank: I was not as popular with the student body as I thought I was, apparently. This one is anonymous, so you know it's probably going to be good. I have not previewed this, Elena. So this is a person who is sharing some gossip that maybe only they care about, but they wanted to stay anonymous.
Audience Member: A former youth pastor became an assistant principal, and then a child was struggling and he thought that the best way to handle that was to bring that student into his office and sing Ed Sheeran songs to them on the guitar, and he never showed up again to school.
Luke Burbank: The child or the teacher.
Elena Passarello: That's a good question. Or Ed Sheeran. If it was the teacher, was it like an act of quitting? Like, here's how you don't get asked back to your job.
Luke Burbank: What's the opposite of quiet quitting? It's singing Ed Sheeran to a student. Listen, I went to a very, very conservative evangelical school, and of the many things that they did to us as punishment, I would have taken Ed Sheeran in a hot minute. That was so much better than what was going on there at that school. Anyway, thank you so much to those brave Live Wire attendees. Our next guest is an author and journalist whose debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of the 100 novels that shaped our world. His latest work relates back to a tweet that he posted in 2023 talking about the bombardment of Gaza, and now it's the name of his new book. The book is One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It's been described as a heartsick breakup letter to the West. And it's received critical acclaim from a bunch of places and really kind of expanded my mind on this topic of Gaza that I thought I had already thought about pretty deeply. Omar El Akkad joined us at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon to talk about it. Take a listen.
Luke Burbank: Omar, welcome back to Live Wire.
Omar El Akkad: Thank you so much for having me. How are you doing?
Luke Burbank: I'm doing really well. I feel like I knew about this book even before I had a chance to read it for the show because I was hearing so many people talking about it. And it's just really made an impression on the conversation around particularly Gaza, which is a topic that's been written about so much. I'm wondering if some part of you felt any kind of intimidation or pressure to take on this very serious and very frequently written about subject.
Omar El Akkad: Yeah, every part of me. You know I was more nervous the first time I came on the show? Because I felt like maybe you didn't know how depressing my books are, and you invited me by accident. But this second time, it's all on you now, right? There's no pressure.
Luke Burbank: Well, I'm glad you're feeling good. That's the progression we like to have with our guests on the show.
Omar El Akkad: That was the original title of the book, actually.
Luke Burbank: I'm glad you're here.
Omar El Akkad: I'm glad you're feeling good.
Luke Burbank: This tweet that you wrote, I mean, you basically said this statement that's now the title of the book. When you wrote that on Twitter, did you have any sense, oh, this is something that's going to be viewed 10 million times and is going to really propel you in a direction?
Omar El Akkad: No, no, I didn't at all, and I don't know why it gained traction. I mean, I'm not a particularly smart person. I work in pattern recognition most of the time. And I was thinking of these patterns of how you can't really find too many people who will outwardly tell you that they were always for South African apartheid or they're always for segregation. And I thinking in those terms, but independent of that, my editor was in town for the Portland Book Festival. And we went out to dinner and I was raving and ranting about not really knowing what my place is in this part of the world is anymore. And at one point, I think he just got so sick of hearing me talk about this. He was like, you should be writing about this and so I was writing it independently under a different title. And it was only after the draft was completed that another editor suggested that I repurpose that for the tweet for the title. So now... I'm on this sort of inadvertent public relations tour trying to convince people that I didn't just take a tweet and stretch it out to 250 pages. [Elena: Right, right.] I promise you that is not what happened.
Luke Burbank: Let's talk a little bit about your personal background. You were born in Egypt and then you lived in Qatar for growing up about a decade, and then eventually came to Canada and now the U.S. You write in the book about kind of the way you thought of the West when you were a kid living in Qatar, how did you think of the west in those days?
Omar El Akkad: I mean, I can't speak for everybody who grew up in the part of the world that I grew up in, but I saw this phenomenon quite often and I engaged in it, which is to look at this place on the other side of the planet and not be completely concerned with what it actually is so much as what you need it to be. And a lot of the time, that's a negative space. I don't care what it is, I care what it isn't. Which is to say, I grew in a part of a world where culture is censored across the board. Some of my formative childhood memories are holding up copies of magazines to the light to try and see past the black ink, you know, like this.
Luke Burbank: You had like the Nirvana Nevermind CD, but the baby is like.
Omar El Akkad: The baby is just a black square. In utero, it's just wings. It's wings and a black rectangle. I'm dating myself, as I say this, but. And so what you need that faraway place to be is not this, right? I need it to be that I can think whatever the hell I want and say what I want and so on and so forth. And you know, this is not unique to the part of the world I grew up in. It's not unique to here. There's a version of this that goes in the other direction, right? Every time something really awful happens here, which in the last 100 days has been like every 15 minutes, right, there's always someone who pops out of the woodwork and says like, oh my God, we're snatching people off the street now. What is this? Vietnam, what is this, some other, and you're like, no, this is here. This is not, and it's again, it's a superimposition, right. And so it was a version of that. That is, what do I need this place to be, such that I don't have to deal with all of the things that make me feel so confined here. And I lived with that for the vast majority of my life and it was more than enough for me to have this blank canvas onto which I could superimpose this.
Luke Burbank: You said something in the book that I really hadn't thought of, which was with your family when you moved, and I don't know if this is actually exactly your experience or more typically for like white Westerners, but when they go to a place like Qatar, they might have a housekeeper and live in this larger mansion than they might live in their native country or the place they're coming from. They have this kind of oversized life. And then particularly for like, you know, people of color who are going to the West, like your family went to Canada, that you said your life gets smaller all of a sudden.
Omar El Akkad: You're handed an unofficial contract, and it's here are the terms. And some of them are fairly abstract, and for immigrants, I don't know how many immigrants there are in the audience, it often contains a sort of perpetual gratitude clause. There's also things that are much more practical, which is to say that someone who is a heart surgeon in the old country is now here driving a cab because the qualifications aren't recognized, and it is a much more pragmatic kind of thing. Ever since I grew up in Qatar, I lived there from the ages of about five to 16, basically. You know, you see all these villas and you see these skyscrapers and it's one of the richest countries on earth on account of all the oil and gas money. But like, who's cleaning these skyscraper? Who's building these skyscrapers? Who's cleaning these houses? It's so-called third country laborers who are folks from India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines. And the contract they're signing is ruthless. You're going to get paid dirt, you have no rights, and I'm living in that world, but I'm higher up on the ladder. Ever since I sort of came to terms with that, because when you're a kid, everything around you is just what is normal. Ever since I've come to terms with that I've looked at every society I've lived in in terms of whose non-existence do I need to assume for all of this to work? Because I go to the grocery store here and I know how those vegetables got to the shelves. But it is a fundamental aspect of my existence here that I temporarily or permanently forget about what class of human beings put those there, and are responsible for that. And so that's how I've come to sort of think about any society I live in, whose non-existence do I have to assume at all times to continue to be able to live here without my conscience sort of exploding in front of me.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire Radio. This week we're at the Patricia Reser Center in Beaverton. We're talking to Omar El Akkad about his book. One day everyone will have always been against this. There's a part of the book that really jumped out at me where you were describing the way that language is used very specifically to kind of depersonalize things and sort of mask the real violence that's going on and the decisions that are being made that end up killing people. In places like Gaza. I was wondering, could you, would you mind reading some of that from the from the book.
Omar El Akkad: To watch descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language's purpose. To watch the unmaking of meaning. When the Guardian runs a headline that reads, Palestinian journalists hit in head by bullet during raid on terror suspects' home, it is not simply a case of hiding behind passive language so as to say as little as possible. And in so doing, risk as little criticism as possible. Anyone who works with, or has even the slightest respect for language will rage or poke fun at these tortured spineless headlines, but they serve a very real purpose. It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who weaned on such framing can shrug their shoulders and say, yes it's also very sad but you know it's all so very complicated. Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated. There is an art to this sort of thing. Of all the after effects of the war on terror years, the most frequently underestimated is the heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence. It's a phenomenon that's by no means unique to that one moment in American history, but anyone who lived through the NATO invasion of Afghanistan and the decimation of Iraq will be familiar with the hallmark uses of this shadow vocabulary. No one during those years was ever tortured, only subjected to enhanced interrogation. When a soldier pulling at a joystick thousands of miles away mistook a wedding party for a terror cell and set a missile-wielding drone to incinerate the lot, nobody was killed. There was only some collateral damage, a term first coined to describe the killing in Vietnam. No prisoners. Who requires a prison sentence, only detainees, who can be held forever without charge. And when those detainee's after years of confinement to cells not much bigger than broom closets went on hunger strikes, they were engaged in asymmetric warfare against their captors. It is easy enough to focus on the words, the phrases, their plain malicious absurdity, but words alone can only obscure so much. It is evident now in this latest round of mass killing that the machinery of state violence benefits just as greatly from the dehumanizing power of what is assumed as much as it does from what is said. The Bush and Obama era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. Military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies to come of the post 9-11 years. And for good reason. It doubly defiles the debt. First killing, then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute. It also renders them untouchable in polite society. Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst possible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst possible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike, their entire lives turned to rubble, and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists, who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst possible thing is getting yelled at.
Luke Burbank: That's Omar El Akkad. Reading from his new book here on live wire You're a journalist yourself. What would you want to see the major journalistic institutions doing, particularly when it comes to the topic of Gaza that they're not doing right now? Is it language choice? Is it not actually being able to get reporters into places like Gaza? What would, if you could wave a wand, what would you have them doing?
Omar El Akkad: I would have everyone in the industry think at all times about the gap between the story as it would be written in a vacuum minus external pressures. By external pressures I mean the risk of advertisers pulling their ads, the risk of a company no longer giving you access to the CEO because they don't like the story you've written about the company, the risk of the editor-in-chief not liking something you've written in your career being sidelined. All of these external pressures. To think of the gap between the story as it would be written absent those pressures and the story as it is written under those pressures and figure out how to close that gap as much as possible because that gap in my mind is the definition of journalistic malpractice. I don't think that journalists are bad people. I think it's an incredibly difficult, I mean, nobody gets into this stuff for the money. There's a reason it has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. I mean it's hard work, but I think anytime you allow that gap to exist, you are undermining what this profession is fundamentally supposed to do. And that's not an easy thing. I don't expect some intern, you know, 21 year old to be like, well, screw all of you, I don't care about the ads, I'm writing it the way. I get it, I get that it's difficult, but the entire enterprise collapses. If we don't do something about closing that gap. The entire faith in everything we call journalism goes out the window so long as that gap exists.
Luke Burbank: It seems to be kind of the central premise of this book that both people on the political right and political left are in ways responsible for these atrocities that happen around the world, and particularly in this book, A Place Like Gaza. And on the left, it has to do with a lot of people who sort of say the right thing, but who do not want their own comfort to be confronted by having to make real change. What would you like people to do as opposed to just say? How can... Well-meaning liberals who think they're saying the right thing about this change their behavior in a way that you think would be more productive
Omar El Akkad: It's not the left and it's not right and it is not some well-meaning liberal in the abstract, it's me. There's not a single thing this book indicates or interrogates or autopsies that I'm not complicit in. Because for the vast majority of my life, I'm that guy, right? I'm the guy who keeps his mouth shut at the dinner party because you don't want to make people uncomfortable. I'm a guy who picks up the ballad and looks at whoever has the R next to their name and just votes for whoever has a D next to our name because hey, lesser of two evils, here we go. I'm not distant from this. And so I have to keep sort of self-correcting because the answer I gravitate to when you ask that question is indicative of exactly how much of that person I am because what I want to say is some variant of that idea of first they came for this and then they came for this, and eventually they came from me. Even if they never come for you, that makes the earlier stuff no less evil. And so this is the argument that I have been trying to move to as much as possible. It is quite possible that a system that allows for the killing of tens of thousands of children on the other side of the planet may never come to your doorstep. But the damage being done to your soul is happening right now. Every time you are asked to look away. And so every human being, and I promise you, I'm not trying to convince you of anything in this book, I'm trying to argue with anyone, I'm past that. My political opinions are fairly clear. This is a book to me about a deep uncertainty, about coming unmoored from a particular orientation and not knowing who the hell you are on the other side of that. That is fundamentally what this book is about. But I think every individual needs to decide how troublesome am I going to be about this? Because the option to preserve my comfort at all costs. Is going to be available to me right up until the very end. But this is the only thing I've been able to think about, let alone write about for the last year and a half. If I can't do this for one reason or another, be it fear or concern for my future career or whatever, that's fine. And that's a decision I get to make, but I don't know that I get to call myself a writer on the other side of that. And so it's the book I had to write and I wrote it.
Luke Burbank: Well, it's an incredible book. And again, it really shifted my thinking about a lot of the aspects of the story. So I'm glad that you wrote it. Omar El Akkad, everyone, here on Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: That was Omar El Akkad, recorded live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. All right, we have to take a very quick break, but do not go anywhere. When we return, you're going to hear an extremely energetic, extremely upbeat number from my new favorite indie folk band. They're called Kuinka, and they're going play us a tune in a moment here on Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. This is one of my very favorite parts of the show. It's when we play a little game we call station location, identification, examination. Now it's a lot of pressure on our announcer Elena Passarello. I see you over there just trying to get kind of ready. Trying to get emotionally, physically prepared for...
Elena Passarello: Stretching my delt.
Luke Burbank: That's right. That's where you do a lot of your most important locating. [Elena: In my delts.] That's right. Here's what we do. I quiz Elena on a place in the country where we are on the radio and Elena tries to guess where that place is. Okay. According to this place's official website, it is best known for its rich Western heritage. Okay, so that's right away giving you some, some hints encompassing cowboy culture and its ties to the old West. Including legends like Buffalo Bill Cody.
Elena Passarello: Ties to Buffalo Bill Cody.
Luke Burbank: I feel like you're probably in the state already. You're trying to think of the city in the state, right?
Elena Passarello: I'm in a Dakota
Luke Burbank: Um, you're near a Dakota.
Elena Passarello: I'm near Dakota.
Luke Burbank: But not in a Dakota. This place is very close to the Bighorn Mountains. It's a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts doing the hiking, fishing and the wildlife viewing. And they have a famous rodeo there as well that started in 1931, regarded as one of the top rodeos in the nation.
Elena Passarello: Is it Laramie, Wyoming?
Luke Burbank: It is in the state of Wyoming. And if you can name even two other cities outside of Cheyenne, I'll be impressed.
Elena Passarello: Uh, Casper?
Luke Burbank: No.
Elena Passarello: Jerome.
Luke Burbank: It's an wow.
Elena Passarello: Great poll.
Luke Burbank: Still wrong. Have you heard of Sheridan, Wyoming? Sheridan Wyoming, where we're on KPRQ-FM in Sheridan in Wyoming. Shout out to everybody there tuning in. Thanks for listening. All right, before we get to a song from Kuinka, we got a little preview of what is happening on next week's episode of Live Wire. We are gonna be talking to the actor and filmmaker, and let's just be honest, legend, Bruce Campbell. We've had Bruce on the show a couple of times in. I realized that you and I could just probably slowly back away from the stage and no one would notice
Elena Passarello: We were no longer needed. Also, we didn't need lights, because he lit up the whole stage with his star power.
Luke Burbank: We were just small moons orbiting Bruce Campbell. And we wouldn't have it any other way. By the way, Bruce is in this Peacock series called Hysteria, which is about sort of a satanic panic that sweeps the town. It's really funny. And he also has made an indie film with his wife, which is not a horror film. For those of you who think that Bruce Campbell can only dabble in things that are horrific, he's made this really lovely movie with his wife as well. So we're gonna talk to Bruce, and we're going to get some standup comedy from the very funny Sara Schaefer. She's trying to still get to the bottom of a conspiracy involving her childhood blankie. And then we've got some music. From Seattle-based singer, songwriter, Emi Pop, recorded at the Hotel Crocodile in Seattle. So that is coming up next week on the show, do not miss It. In the meantime, our musical guest this week, their genre-defying sound features several different lead singers, four-part harmony, and eclectic instrumentation, which NPR Music has called joyous folk pop, and it really is. Their live shows have this really infectious energy that remains present in everything they do. And we were so excited to have them on the show. This is Kuinka, who joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen.
Kuinka: [Kuinka performs "Living Room Floor"]
Luke Burbank: That was Kuinka right here on Live Wire performing their song, Living Room Floor. And that is gonna do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Kelsey McKinney, Omar El Akkad, and Kuinka
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our Executive Director and our Producer and Editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our Technical Director is Eben Hoffer. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor and our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Ashley Park is our Production Fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alvez, Mike Gamble, Pony Dahmer, and A Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the state of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Adria & Jeremy Katka of Seattle.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
