I was surprised when I started doing this how often people just wanted to talk, to get their opinions out.
I knew Isaac Chotiner through his New Yorker interviews, which are brief, sometimes tense, other times funny, always revealing Q&A exchanges with public figures in politics, media, business and culture. Whether or not you know the person being interviewed, you come away having learned something. What I like best about the exchanges is whatever their tenor, the things said tend to settle into my brain and stay there for a while, which is saying something considering the speed the world moves and the volume of things we learn about it in any given day. I was weirdly shocked to learn that Isaac is a Rocket fan.
We talked about Hakeem Olajuwon, fandom not making much sense, Isaac’s first angry memory as a Rockets fan, his favourite iterations of Rockets rosters, resiliency in fandom, the Russell Westbrook experience, what’s effortful for James Harden, the Dillon Brooks experience, and the calm vibration frequency of Fred VanVleet.
We also talked about the work Isaac does, what drew him to the interview/Q&A format, and what he thinks it is makes people give themselves away in the interviews he does with them.
Plus: How he thinks of who he wants to interview, how interviewing — and people’s perceptions of it — has changed in the last few years, who he thinks gets off too easy in the NBA from a coverage perspective, the origin of “gotcha” questions and whether they’re real, fatigue points in critical coverage, “access bargains”, where the idea of NBA as a moral beacon came from, and who in the NBA he’d like to sit down with for his kind of interview.
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