I’m delighted to share a conversation I recently had with Elizabeth Kolbert. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999, Elizabeth is also the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
I contacted Elizabeth to follow up on her interview with Evan Ratliff on the Longform podcast last year. The question that especially caught my ear: When she sits down to write, does she think her work will have an impact? Does she think it will change anything? And she said:
“I still nurse the idea in my heart of hearts that something you write, that there’s some key to this all. We’re all looking for the skeleton key that’s going to unlock it [climate change], and people will go, ‘Oh, that’s why we have to do something!’ I don’t want to say that I completely dispensed with that. I think that’s what motivates most journalists—this information is going to somehow make a difference. On the other hand, I have dispensed with a lot of that…”
Which made me wonder: Why has she “dispensed with a lot of that”?
So I called her up.
