why religion? >> great question. i don't know. i wrote a book. >> yeah, the answer is read the book, right? >> if i could answer that in ten words, i wouldn't have written this book. because i think when we talk about religion, it's not one thing, of course, it's a huge range of traditions and beliefs and experiences. so that's why i can't answer it. in a simple way. >> thank you for all of those questions and for your attention. elaine pagels, "why religion." i'm just going to mention that elaine will be signing her book across the hall at the elevator if you want to pick up a copy.

>> you're watching book tv. the miami book fair continues now. >> good afternoon. please take your seats. we're about to begin the afternoon session. thank you. i am malou harrison. it's my pleasure to welcome you to miami book fair. we're in our 35th year and i know that many of you have been

with us for many, many, many years. so thank you for your support, thank you for making this book fair continue in the manner that it has over the past 35 years, and we look forward to many, many, many more. along the lines of gratitude, i also want to pay special thanks to the sponsors, those that have given of themselves and their companies and their corporations so generously, and those include royal caribbean, ohl north america, the bachelor foundation, the knight foundation, and so many others, in addition to many individuals, and i should say hundreds of individuals that have given selflessly of their time to volunteer in many, many aspects of this book fair, whether it's

this week during the street fair, or during the year, because as you know, miami book fair is a year-round literary affair. also want to recognize miami-dade college and this is where it's at for miami book fair. we are so proud to be democracy's college, open to any and everyone that seeks to better themselves through training and education at our eight campuses. we certainly are making a difference in that regard. thank you so much for being here. we are going to continue with the afternoon program and i hope you have been having a good time so far at the book fair. have you? yes. wonderful. so as always, please turn your devices off. you will have an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. i ask that you approach the mic

in the middle, ask your question and then please be seated so we can get as many answered as possible. so please help me to welcome adam gopnik, our featured author here this afternoon. mr. gopnik. as adam comes onstage, let me say that daniel mendlessohn unfortunately cannot be with us today. a little bit about adam. he has been writing for "the new yorker" since 1986. he's a three-time winner of the national magazine award for essays and for criticism, and of the george polk award for magazine reporting. in march 2013, gopnik was awarded the medal by the french republic. he's the author of "at the strangers' gate, arrivals in new

york, a memoir" you will hear more about this afternoon. "at the strangers' gate" is an ode to new york striving. let's give adam another warm welcome. adam gopnik. thank you. >> thank you. thank you all for coming. i know that there are countless mendlessohn groupies in the audience who are texting and saying i am getting nothing but gopnik, how do i get out of here. i'm sure daniel would not have come only for some urgent reason which i gather it was a health reason. but you have me. [ applause ] what i thought i would do this afternoon is instead of reading to you from the book, i would just tell you -- somebody's read it. you're the one. my publisher has been wanting to meet you. i would tell you three of the stories that are in the book.

it's a book that's about coming to new york when i was young with my then girlfriend, soon-to-be wife. it's about what happened to us. it's a collection of stories, and doe anecdotes, tales about young couples with huge ambitions in tiny spaces. the truth is, we leave home to find home. that's a fundamental truth about humanity. we leave home to find home. we leave the place we know in order to find or make another place. the odd thing is very often, those of us who leave home first are not the ones who are most unhappy at home, but exactly the ones who are happiest at home and therefore, feel the most compelled to go out and make a new one. that was certainly the case for martha and me when we decided to leave montreal, canada, where we had grown up -- oh, montrealer. not a bad year for the habs, finally. we're recovering. and we decided to get on a bus,

we were just 20, and we would get on a bus and go to new york city, like something out of a 1940s musical comedy. there was the bus, the driver putting our bags on, we decided to go to new york. my father came to see us off and you all know how in literature, the father figure always tells the young man or woman who's leaving the provinces for the capital some piece of sapian advice to get him going. in "the three musketeers," the father says when you get to paris, fight duels with everyone you meet. which is good advice for a guy with a sword. my father is a jewish intellectual, professor of english literature, so that was not the advice he gave me as i prepared to get on the bus. no, he said to me when you get to new york, remember, never

underestimate the other person's insecurities. think about it. yes, exactly. takes a moment but it's a deep wisdom. i try to follow through with it. we got to new york from the bus and we immediately rented the single smallest apartment in the history of human habitation. it was a nine by 11 room. nine by 11 basement room. what they call in new york a garden apartment. we were sort of startled when we found that that's all anyone showed us were basement rooms because in all of the romantic comedies that we had trained our ideas of new york on, "barefoot in the park" and "sunday in the park" and "new york on sunday" all the titles very transitive, in all of those romantic comedies about young people arriving in new york, they always get a six floor walk-up apartment with a skylight.

remember that? and all the comedy comes from struggling to get up the six floors. your mother-in-law, the guy installing the phone. but they never showed us any of those apartments. it was only basement rooms was all we saw. my sister has a basement -- it's cyclical. my sister is 1930s and this is exactly the point i was going to make, is we realized that all of the people who had rented those sixth floor walkups in 1961 were still in those apartments. they had never left. my sister finally had outgrown it and moved up and that's the truth about apartments in new york, as you know if you have ever lived there. apartment hunting in new york is like a game of musical chairs with no music and no chairs. just wherever you are is where you are. actually, that sounds like a joke, but the truth is, years later, i was reading the autobiography of neil simon who wrote "barefoot in the park" and

i discovered the apartment, the one six floors up, the walkup, is exactly modeled on the first apartment that he and his wife had ever rented, and where they had had their first child, and where they were still living when "barefoot in the park" opened on broadway. the lesson you draw from that is you have to become the single most successful commercial playwright of the 20th century to ever leave your first apartment in new york. we loved our apartment. the nine by 11 room, i had -- we had a foldout sofa that sat about here. then i had a study, an office right here. a sheet of glass with a typewriter on it where i wrote for "the new yorker" magazine although they weren't aware of it yet. then back here, there was a tiny little kitchen with an ez bake oven and two burner stove. a bathroom, then a dining room right here which consisted of a piece of travertine marble.

then here was my wife's office right here, where she sat and worked. that was our entire universe for three and a half years. we loved it. we loved it until the first night when we turned off the lights and discovered that it was infested with more cockroaches than the museum of natural history displayed. they came pouring out from underneath the baseboards. what are called asian cockroaches, german cockroaches and what are called american cockroaches but are called in new york water bugs. i don't know if you have ever seen these but they are about the size of a fullback for the dolphins. what's scary about them, they never die the first time you hit them with a sneaker. that just stuns them. you have to hit them again and that's when they explode in a kind of wet, gray, brown ball. then you pick up their little pieces which are beautifully

articulated biceps, triceps and thighs. i'm sort of canadian. my wife is truly deeply canadian, icelandic canadian which means you have the diplomacy of canadians overlaid with courtesy of the icelanders. she is a person paralyzed by her own good manners. she assumed that these cockroaches could be gently discouraged from pouring into our room because my favorite canadian joke is how do you get 25 canadians out of a pool, you say please get out of the pool. she thought similarly. she sent me off to a lumberyard and we bought a four by six piece of plywood we leaned up here, thinking the cockroaches would see it and say oh, we're not supposed to go in there anymore, oh, all right, thank you for the warning. didn't work that way. so faced with this sudden influx of the sordid and disturbing in our first new york home, we decided to do the obvious and

logical thing to fix it which was to go out and buy me an expensive suit. well, follow the logic here. i had gotten a fellowship for $3,000 from the canadian university we went to which they thought was all the money in the world you would ever need to live in new york. and our whole ambition for life at that moment was to live what we called poetically which did not mean rhyme and metered verse. it meant with a certain elevation, certain flamboyance, certain luxuriance of gesture. we wanted to live the way scott and zelda fitzgerald had lived in new york, before dancing in the plaza fountain, throwing money out of the windows. we wanted that kind of gesture in our life and we certainly weren't going to get it in our basement roach crowded with cockroaches. martha had one beautiful dress she was going to wear when we went downtown to get married at city hall and we thought if i buy a suit to match it we will

be living the scott and zelda life even in our little room. so we went down to a discount warehouse and i bought a beautiful navy blue, martha called it inky blue because she had far more words for colors than i did, and we bought it and it was beautiful and it was designed by ted lapiness. generally speaking, he is not a huge name to conjure with in the history of fashion except for one thing that he had done. he designed the white suit john lennon is wearing on the cover of abbey road. this suit was not only a handsome single-breasted blue suit, it also had the beattitude of the beatles upon it. for our generation, the beatles were not a musical group, they were a kind of celestial event. as you can see, i'm a very small man, short man. whenever i buy a suit it has to go to a tailor to have the cuffs shortened and the sleeves shortened and indeed, we took it to a greek tailor down first

avenue and he looked at it, i tried it on, he said fit nice, fit nice. i was very pleased. left it there. martha went back to montreal to collect our goods. i don't know where we intended to put them in this space, but she did. about a week later, i went back to pick up the suit and it was right that same week when i looked up in the sky and saw yoko ono having skywriting a birthday greeting to john and their son sean. i went to get this suit, i picked it up and tried it on again, he had made beautiful alterations and he said again, it fit nice, it fit nice. he put it on a hanger, suit hanger, and put it inside a suit bag and zipped up the suit bag and handed it to me. i walked out with it over my shoulder like gene kelly in an mgm musical. i had never been happier in my life. everything was coming together. there was a collision of my sister and the fitzgeralds and gene kelly new york musical and we were living in a basement

room be damned. got back here, put the suit back down, and because i was so in love with this moment, i unzipped the suit bag and looked down, there was the jacket and the pants were gone. exactly. i looked and i saw to my grief and horror that this was a suit bag that had no bottom and the suit hanger was plastic and obviously the pants had slipped right off the hanger, out of the bag and were some place out on first avenue. you know how it is, there are these moments in life when you know that tragedy has struck but you haven't yet fully been able to internalize it in your body, like when you see a beautiful antique vase leaning and about to fall over, it hasn't actually fallen but you know you will never get there in time? i think of these as fish out of water moments because fish, if you think about it, really only have two conditions, right, water and oh, my god. and this was oh, my god.

the pants were gone. the pants were completely gone. and hello? this is someone who also clearly lost his pants as well. now in shorts, realize i'm getting to that part of the story, so the pants are gone. go back out on first avenue, and start looking for them. now, in montreal where i come from, where we both had come from, if you lost your suit pants on sherbrook street or anyplace else, someone who pick them up, fold them over, put them on a car hood or fence, write a polite note saying these pants were found monday at 4:00, whoever owns them, and do it. in new york, this is impossible, right? because there's like this huge flood and river of effluvia that pushes everything down. you drop your pants and they are

immediately swept away. i ran back to the tailor and in case something had happened, i hadn't seen, and i explained to him what had happened. he said mournfully, it fit nice, it fit nice. and the word had immediately been cast in the past tense. i knew i was doomed. i rushed outside and looked up and down everywhere for my suit pants. the worst of it was, wasn't just that i knew my suit pants were gone for good, but that immediately, i had been removed into the wrong kind of literature. i was no longer in a scott fitzgerald story. i was in one of those fables set in st. petersburg at the end of the 19th century where heartbroken clerks go up and down the gas-lit streets searching for their lost overcoats and spend the rest of their lives scuttling along the walls in a state of forlorn,

permanent loss. that's the story i was in now forever. i finally went up and down the streets until it got too dark to look any farther. i came back here and called martha in montreal. in those days, 1980, it was still something of a big deal to make a long distance phone call. i called her and i said baby, i've lost my pants. and she took in the full dimensions of that loss in her body and then she said, have you tried looking in the park? because she had a very canadian conception that central park was used as a kind of lost and found by the city authorities and if it was found lost, you would pick up and take to central park and leave there for people to find. this isn't true, by the way. and they were gone. they were gone for good. so when we went to be married at city hall two weeks later, i wore the jacket of that ted lapiness blue suit and jeans and

sneakers while martha wore her beautiful white wool dress and we were married. about two weeks after that, we were here in this place, we called it the blue room in honor of that great rodgers and hart song, "the blue room," where every day's a holiday because you're married to me. you know that song? that was part of our poetic infusion into this space, the blue room. we were here in the blue room and we suddenly heard a hubbub outside on the street. couldn't figure it out. lot of people talking in a harried, agonized way. i went up and heard that john lennon had been shot earlier that evening. somehow, out of those two fatalities, my own trivial and passing one and the cosmic and enormous one of the loss of john lennon, some little tangle of loss got implanted inside our cells that would never go away again. we came to understand at that moment that inviting as new york and its possible poetry was, the

lethality of the city was every bit as real and one we would have to keep in mind and it would keep us removed for the rest of our time there. i bought many suits since that day, but the truth is, i never had another pair of suit trousers because your first suit is a little bit like the first time you have sex. you can do it again but you never get to do it over. it's always the same first condition. so i always feel, and i tell my children, that i am walking around the streets of new york city to this day nude from the waist down, because you think about it, new york is a little bit like the opposite of the city in hans christian andersen's tale about the emperor. there, you could walk around naked and only one boy saw it. in new york city, you walk around naked from the waist down for 37 years and the only one who knows is you. so that's the first story in the

book, is about my suit trousers. [ applause ] second story in the book has to do with food which is a subject i have written about a lochltt. i was here last time with a book about food. food's a subject i think about a great deal, particularly in the context of marriages, because marriage and food are really aligned. people often ask me how was it that martha and i were able to live for three and a half years in a single nine by 11 room without tearing each other apart, without fighting all the time, because if you think about it, it's like a kind of sociological experiment that some beknighted psychology professor would have put together, put two young people in a nine by 11 room and see how long it takes them to kill each other. and the truth was, we didn't fight, in part because the space was so small, because you know how that is, right, the truth is that when you get in a fight early on in a relationship, you always say well, i saw her as she really was for the first time, or i stepped back and i

had some real perspective on him. this place was way too small for any of that kind of activity. you couldn't step back and see anybody in a new perspective. in fact, i have no visual memory of martha from those years. i only see her as a kind of picasso portrait, a bit of an eye here, half a smile over there, tiny piece of her nose right here. i have to put her together compositely. but we did have one fight. we did have one fight. it was a fight about food, because here's my theory about marriages. anyone in this room married? several people. i should have asked is anyone here either a parent or a child? exactly. here's the truth. i think it's like the famous thing of tolstoy, all happy families are alike, all happy families are different. all happy marriages have fights and you have a different fight every day. we all know couples like that. they find something new to fight about every day.

an unhappy marriage. all happy marriages, you fight every day, but it's always the same fight. you have the same fight over and over and it's usually about food. because food is the place where moral taste and mouth taste kind of intersect so what you're eating turns into a moral fight. my great-aunt rose and her husband ron, perfect example of this. they lived here in florida, where all jewish people are eventually banished to. they came from philadelphia to florida with my grandparents, kind of migration in reverse, and they came here and when you visited them, they always had the same fight, and this was the fight. my uncle ron would say that they gave you large portions in restaurants in order to charge you more money and my aunt rose would say that they had to charge you more money in restaurants because they had given you such large portions. they had this fight for 50 years, as long as i knew them,

even when uncle ron had his vocal cords removed in the hospital, they still had this fight. i'm telling you they give you the big portions just to charge you more. ron, i have been talking to you about this for half a century. same fight over and over. very happy marriage. they just went right on for 50 years. martha and i had one fight and this was the fight about food, because i discovered in our first weeks in this room that she was a well-done person and i came from a long family of rares. now, i should have known this when we got married, because we had been dating for a long time and she had always ordered everything well done but you know how it is when you're dating, you believe anything weird is just a little flirtatious affectation, so when she was saying well done, oh, that's just being really lovable. not a bit of it. i realized when we went for a cookout at her parents' place and her father put the hamburger on for five minutes, then another five minutes, then

another five minutes, then another five minutes, that her family were well done and my family was obsessed with rare. you couldn't have anything medium. you had to have everything rare. took me awhile to figure out what was really going on. martha's family as i said came from iceland and they came from a long line of icelandic peasants. you eat everything raw because you sort of grab it as you can off the lava field, break off the back leg of a lamb and chew on it or grab a mussel or something. having everything well done was a way of marking their passage from their agricultural past, showing they were now sophisticated urban people who could cook for a long time. my parents were just the opposite, because they were in rebellion against the cooking of their parents. they were at war with pot roast. they were in rebellion against flanken and meat loaf.

so rare meant france, pink meant paris. they loved it. i inherited this and martha inherited the other and it was greater than any religious abyss could possibly be between us. it came to a head finally one day, this was in the early '80s when i went and got some tuna to cook for dinner. now, some of you may remember in material ' the early '80s, one of the key things about that period is when we made the transition from tuna fish to tuna. if anyone recalls that. until about 1983, we only had tuna fish which is the thing you had in cans that you then mixed with mayonnaise and served on sandwiches. suddenly there was tuna, there was tuna steak, like filet mignon you could cook any way you wanted to and only serve rare. i was at the fishmonger's and got these beautiful pieces of fish. my mom taught me to cook. she was one of those women of the '60s, hugely accomplished scientist but believed in cooking. my friend calvin trilon calls

that the domestic deviation of feminism. she had taught her two sons, not her daughters, how to cook. but she had taught me, she had given me to come to new york, she had given me the dictionary of cuisine or the encyclopedia of gastronomy so i would be cooking every night because i like to cook but i would saute, huge clouds of smoke would rise up and pass out. people thought we were running a crack den, because there was no other explanation for it. poor martha had to fight her way with an oxygen tank on over to i guess it's tuna. i go back here and decide to make tuna. i bang the peppers and do it and cook it and bring it over and i put it down here, and i call martha to the table. she comes over and she cuts it open and she says i can't eat this, this is too rare.

now, some part of me was so inflamed by this that i have often wondered if it wasn't a kind of, forgive me if i shared this, i wondered if it wasn't a kind of freudian underpinning to the whole thing because you have been married for six months and something pink and large that you're offering your wife and she's rejecting it, maybe, possibly. in any case, i was more enraged than i had ever been in my life. ... with this very gracious person. she looked at me and she said are going to go back and you're

going to finish cooking up fish. [laughter] and i knew it was a pivotal moment in our relationship, and in our marriage and so of course i did. i went back and i finished cooking the tuna. the next day the super came down and he said i don't know what your doing in there, but you've got to stop because all the neighbors are complaining about smoke coming out. that was a huge blessing because i had to start in our tiny little room. i had to start breathing and stewing. couldn't sauté anymore. the great thing about raising and stewing is it only has two moral turns. you don't have to deal with rare and well done. the only two moral terms are tough and tender. that's all you talk about, right? if the tender enough. well, it was really tough one to put it in but i've been bracing up for four hours.

and tough and tender such a beautiful moral dimension to build a marriage on. anything tough can be made tender with enough care. that's all that marriages with enough care. and externally when we left the apartment we found a beautiful word to build the marriage and i urge i'm never young couple and that word is medium. medium is a gorgeous word because you have one straight moral action like pennsylvania avenue to run down on. but at the same time you say i'll take it medium rare and she can say i'll take it medium well and you're both simultaneously on a straight access and in your own private chapels of taste, but you can go through life that way. medium and tender are the words of a long and happy marriage, which i'm glad to say i have.

i wish ron and rose were still alive. they passed away here in miami a couple decades ago. i'd been able to tell them the essential truth, which is it is true when it comes to food the prices always do give baker if you're married to the right person, the portions also get larger. that is the second story in the book. [applause] i'll tell you the third story than i'd love to take some questions. so eventually i got a job in a ridiculous job. i became the grooming editor at gq magazine. i was in charge of all the moisturizers come in the shampoos and i spent three years of my life rewriting. i loved it. i thought is at the center showbiz. i would go back and do it again anytime soon. we were able to move downtown in new york in may brought this little loft, we rented it.

we thought it was great because we were leaving. actually were exchanging one kind of vermin for another because though this place didn't have cockroaches it was infested with rodents, mice and later on rats. a whole chapter about rat in the book. and again, martha with her canadian vision of the world with stamper folk when we came in and say mice go away. but they didn't. so she insisted that i stay up nights to keep an eye while she was sleeping. that may sound like an impossible demand but i should ask lane right away that one of the happy divides in our relationship is martha is a champion sleeper. one of those people who can sleep any time for any length of time. she has not woken up yet. she was waking up on a saturday morning in new york. i have yet to sleep in my adult life. you can see the circle.

just doesn't happen. doesn't happen for me at all. so i'm awake on a friday night keeping an eye out for my sin market is asleep in the bedroom. it is one big space but it's strange how those spaces when we assign them function suddenly have all the aura in the intensity and the feeling of the space. you say this is the dining room and it suddenly becomes an anti-bush was space where you don't want to be. that's the kitchen and that's where you want to go tell your father your gay. we put the bed in the corner and immediately became the bedroom. he mentored indelicately. by indelicately. but despite we've we've been married for about five or six years. after five or six years at least it seems that way to me. your early time together sort of exploring not.

a little more asked delay. and then you begin to reenact the sex like the civil war reenact there is to fight, to refight the battle of spotsylvania and second bull run. everybody knows who will advance and jewelry trade exactly what everyone will be wearing, uniforms. they enjoy it much more than the people who fought the original battle ever did. that is true about long-term sex in a marriage. we were just edging into that part of our life. so i'm not looking through the mic and the phone rings yet i had started condition to be in the urban editor of gq and just started publishing a few pieces about art and the art world an obscure magazine. the phone rings, i pick it up

and say this is john from the pluralism and individualism conference. were all looking forward to your keynote tomorrow morning. i have no memory much less the keynote for the individualism conference and a better person would say i've no idea which are talking about. and pulled on a minute. let me give my calendar. i walked over instead could you tell me the details. i'm sure i have everything done correctly here. he said yes with the pluralism individual at some conference tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. at the hotel at 50th and lexington were all looking forward to your lecture. and i said i am too. i hung up. martha is sound asleep. i think what am i going to do. pluralism and individualism you have a vague idea what that is. plural many come individual one.

at the time i was studying our history still officially getting my graduate degree so i thought if you grab a handful of slide in the history of modern art, you'll have a lecture on pluralism and individualism. city scenes and that's basically what i did. get up the next morning at 6:00 a.m. martha is still sound asleep. put on my jacket and my jeans and i go down. i get on the subway. i go up to fit yet and lexington or the corral hotel is which is to be a piece of cincinnati in the middle of new york with the place you could drive up. i walk into the lobby and there is a guy in a suit pacing. sees me, shakes my hand and says were all waiting for you. i step into the ballroom about four times as wide as this room. every seat is taken. there is a big banner on the far end this has pluralism and individualism 85 and everyone

has a suit or sport jacket and tie. all the women are in skirt, stockings and high heels and i think to myself, who are these people? are they scientologists? pluralism and individualism 85. so i stepped to the microphone and i gave the keynote address that would've done professor irwin corey proud. i say when we confront the reality of modern civilization we can only ever understand through the full range of its many pluralism. and yet when we inspect those pluralism is an older plurality, we are driven back to realize that a pluralism is simply the composite of a countless individualism that make it out. we look at the individual and yet we can only see the plural. and yet when we explore pluralism in the fullest range

of its pluralistic implications, we are driven back inexorably to the individual. i went on like that for 35 minutes. they applauded at the end. step back out and there is john. he said thank you. i was very healing. it is the single best thing in the organizer ever does get he slips the envelope in my pocket. never been paid for a lecture. i waited and without the street, opened up, $500 inside. all the money in the world. i come back home. martha still asleep. i take my clothes off, get back in bed about 9:30 by now. i go back to sleep at 11:30 martha finally wakes up and i say they become the you will not believe what happened while you were asleep. $500. i told you are or dream about coming to new york was that we would live in this flamboyant and extravagant needlessly

frivolous way. netware $500 we decided to go and have one great dinner at one of the new franklin american restaurants that were win out and we never had done before. we had champagne and we went back home tipsy at midnight and came back to our loft and i open the door and turn on the light. and there are 100 mice dancing. it's like one of those old 30s cartoons with bass fiddles. i realize looking aghast and holding my arm out that the mice are it not been all the themes of my keynote from earlier that morning because when you look at one mouse to try to focus on it, all you can see is the plurality of mice and when you take in 100 mice in your part may come you keep seeing these little individual mice. i said baby, you can come in here. you don't want to come in here. one friend about 90 bucks a way

which is long before cell phones and long before there were any atms in soho. so we sobered up and we started the long trudge up to its place. but as i walked along the trudge, i realized i had a manhattan epiphany in that our relationship to new york was exactly like a relationship of the mice to our loft. no one had invited us to come to canada either. we forced our way inside and made a living in the life by sheer force of will. and so as i trudged up the block to 75th street, that night was the first time i ever felt that i was a citizen of new york. thank you so much. [applause] that is a taste. thank you.

i'd love to take some questions. i think we have a few minutes. it doesn't have it be about mice and lectures about anything. >> i'd like it to be about food. if you're talking about food, i heard a snippet of you this morning on the new york radio hour that's out now. talking about thanksgiving. i want to know how you're preparing your turkey this year. and how his french turkey is different from an american turkey. >> this is an excellent question. i did a thing for "the new yorker" radio hour to speak about making turkeys because i'm still the cook of our house. two things are true and our french turkey is different from american turkeys. you call it in india. we call it a turkey. we both did the country of origin totally wrong, but this or said differently than we do.

my theory of turkey is a bit heretical. i don't know if i can do it, which as i have brine turkeys and basic turkeys and dry brine turkeys and i've gotten heirloom turkeys, turkeys and france come a supermarket turkeys in an emergency in my experience is that every turkey tastes like every other turkey you ever have. it's a magic good because it never gets worse and it never gets better. it just tastes like turkey and it needs gravy and stuffing in all of those things. so i will brine our turkey. i ordered an heirloom turkey and i will brine it, but this is purely coming in now, jewish ritual practiced by people who don't speak hebrew. you know how to do it in the hope will please god in the long run. and that's how i do my turkey. >> okay, adam, about for decades ago, you were my student at a school in west philadelphia.

>> your neighbor? >> martin rosenthal. science and drama teacher. let me say -- [applause] let me say when i first came into the office to find out who my students wear, they said you have adam trained to. adam was 10 in the eighth grade and i said how can i tell adam. he said you'll see. you'll know when adam walks in. adam walked in with a bow tie. you were about this big with black hair that came down to year and you were charming. >> we went to a movie together. >> what? >> did we make a movie together? >> i wanted to make a film and we made a movie together. >> and fairmont park about the death of a bird. i remember his zero well.

>> adam also been dramatic in my drama class and i'll never forget he had a ball in a came onto stage and the ball was called darkness. he threw the ball against the wall and he said life and you put the ball in esa dark. light, dark. >> is this true? really i did? >> well, it's a pleasure to see you. i remember that film extremely well. it's a kind of viacom. do you have more embarrassing versatile? >> and just let me tell you when i left philadelphia to new york i also ended up with the one room with cockroaches. my wife, judy gustin has a book at the book fair this year, longing to be free and i'll see you tonight. >> fantastic. such a pleasure. thank you for coming. i don't know if you recall, but my best friend in eighth grade was a wonderful man named jim

lesueur and i'd not seen them in 40 years and we reunited this past fall. we had a wonderful lunch together in philadelphia when i was there. can i take one more? one more question? can you believe this reunions from eighth grade. please. >> what is your take on the tina brown here is that "the new yorker" and how did it affect you? >> they were incredibly happy for me because i was in europe doubletime. i love and adore tina brown. the billy martin of magazine editors. anyone you remember billy martin? i mean that there's certain people who just have an uncanny feel for talent and tina has a better eye for talent and like billy martin a willingness to put herself on the line for talent than anyone i've ever worked with and worked with in publishing or editing. she spotted anthony lane when he was 24 years old and one year at cambridge and major movie critic

company david remnick of the magazine when i said i want to give up our writing go to paris and other senior crazy, she said that sounds like a really good idea. you should try something larger. you could do that. so i love and adore her. what billy martin i'm always in awe of somebody -- there's very few people who can do that. she's uncanny judgment of talent and i love and adore her and hope even after my joke i can still count on her as a good friend. thank you so much for coming. it was a delight. >> be out there will be signing his book across the hall, across the elevator if you'd like to continue the conversation.