Interview with Jonathan Rosen
Jonathan Rosen is a writer. He is the author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which almost certainly is going to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Harry Potter and the Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
Contents
Max Raskin: The people in my life have absolutely gobbled up your book like it was Harry Potter. My joke is that this is the Harry Potter for elite academics or something like that.
My question for you is: what’s something you have devoured in the past — is there a book or show that comes to mind?
Jonathan Rosen: The difficulty of answering that is that when there's something I love, the next step is not necessarily to consume all of it, but not because I'm such a modulated person. Maybe even for the opposite reason. My system is easily flooded. My wife can watch three Game of Thrones, which we're in the middle of, but I'm like, “Wow, this was amazing. I have to stop.”
MR: Really?
JR: Whether I need to shrink the aperture to let things in, I don’t know.
I didn’t watch Game of Thrones when it came out, but after October 7th, when my mood was so dark and apocalyptic and full of a sense of the barbarism of the world, a friend of mine said, "You really should watch Game of Thrones. I think you'll like it." And I did. I loved it.
MR: I stopped watching after they killed Ned Stark in the first season. I didn’t like that.
JR: I know. It took me a long time to recover. But he persists as a presiding principle, I suppose.
MR: That’s like the Woody Allen line. I don't want to live on as a presiding principle, I want to live on in my Upper West Side apartment.
JR: Right.
MR: What about TV — do you watch a lot of TV?
JR: I'm never boycotting it. It's just we seem to wait about 10 years before we get around to the thing that everybody else has seen. It’s like, “Oh wow, there’s this show called Breaking Bad. He’s a science teacher!” I’m too late for the conversation.
MR: When you were a kid were there any books like Lord of the Rings that you binged?
JR: Lord of the Rings was one of them, and so was The Once and Future King. The problem for me, though, is that I really am an incredibly slow reader, so it was a slow-motion binge; I’d stay home from school, stay up all night, maybe you have to pee and you don't because you're reading, seasons pass, but in the morning Frodo is still in the Shire.
MR: Did you read Harry Potter?
JR: My wife and I took turns reading it aloud to our kids. What I love about Harry Potter is its respect for evil. No dreaming it away.
Like David Foster Wallace, Except Good
MR: Is it weird for you that you're like the J. K. Rowling of the intellectual class?
JR: It's wonderful to hear that people like the book. I never thought of Yale Law School as Hogwarts. Though now that you mention it, Ivy League institutions are full of competitive wizards, quick to cast spells but slow to apprehend reality.
More seriously, this was a painful book to write, about a painful subject, shot through with “the tragedy of good intentions” — as my subtitle has it. But the paradox of writing is that even when the subject is dark, you are inviting your reader inside a world you hope will enchant them, even when the goal is disenchantment, and you’re un-telling stories as well as telling them.
MR: The thing is that people actually read it. When David Foster Wallace writes that big book for smart people, no one actually reads that book.
JR: I'm amazed all the time that anybody reads anything at all. I'm amazed that people write anything at all. Myself included. You see the wall of books behind me, but as Saul Bellow puts it in Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “The wrong books, the wrong papers.” Even when they’re the right books they’re wrong, because life is always something else.
The world is constantly urging you either not to write or not to read, in a way, but people do. I'm really happy about that. I don't mean to sound like the guy in Bull Durham — just happy to be here. But I'm delighted that people read, and that some of them read my book.
MR: Is it weird that people know all the details in the book? Is that unusual?
JR: It's unusual only in the sense that it's an unaccustomed experience. Also, I shared certain things I was used to hiding, including my Bar Mitzvah…my grand humiliation.
Forward, Backward, and Sideways
MR: Let me ask you about writing. You do a lot of research. There's a lot of Judaism, a lot of mental disease, law, law school. As a practical matter, how do you organize your research?
JR: I did do a lot of research — it was impossible to understand, say, the history of psychiatry without it — but I'm a terrible organizer and a lot of the time I felt I was playing a giant game of concentration. It’s a disgraceful admission but I was always wondering where I put the information that corresponded to some dim inner detail I’d absorbed along the way.
MR: But do you write notecards? Do you put it in the computer?
JR: I fill up notebooks and I fill up computer files. And in a sense those things become the facedown shuffled cards in the game of concentration because I often don't know where the research is going to lead so where do I put it? Especially when I remember things as much by language and emotion as overt content.
Learning about Michael’s law professors led to the judges they'd clerked for which led to the history of deinstitutionalization, and the weird marriage of law and psychiatry. Everything led to a realization or discovery that I did not start with, that was hard to classify, and that had to be reabsorbed into a larger framework.
I'm a poor systematizer. I'm a grateful beneficiary of other people's systems. I use bird guides and I'm always happy that someone has done that. But my wife is very good at it. When she would study Talmud, she would draw the boxes. She would show me how to organize things. Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, she came in and created files for me, and I used her system for the 10 years that I was there.
You asked me a very simple question, and we can discard all of this, but in a way, I always gather up much more than I will need, but I never know what it is I will need. And I don't have a good way of categorizing it because often it's associatively linked in my mind to something else as much as it is linked by some ultimate meaning or theory.
MR: Let me just ask you a stupider question which is: Do you hand write your notes? What kind of notebook do you actually use?
JR: That's a good question. I used to use lots of those little Moleskine notebooks. I have very bad handwriting and I can't always read it. Sometimes I’d type up my handwritten notes to have them as a file. Now I use Notes, which I love.
MR: Apple?
JR: Yes. Simply because I can write a bunch of words at the top that serve as after-the-fact categories for what’s written below, and after I’ve forgotten everything, as I do, I can search globally for words or names I want that might be in them.
MR: I'm sending you a funny meme right now.
JR: Let's see. I'm not sure I even understand it.
MR: The genius on the far right just uses Apple Notes.
JR: It's called a pencil!
The bottom line is I've never found a good system.
MR: Just have a good memory.
JR: Well, that's the issue. You don't want to be only as good as your memory. That's the whole virtue of writing things down. And yet somehow in the end, it comes down to memory; it's like when you’re lifting weights, you're only as strong as your wrists.
Nuts and Balance Bars
MR: What kind of pen do you use?
JR: The kind that I find.
MR: You're not particular about the kind of pen you use?
JR: No. I like pens that write more slowly, like a Sharpie that is fine point, so that there's resistance because I have terrible handwriting. So if it's just slipping and sliding around, then I'm not going to be able to read it.
MR: You'll write with a fine point Sharpie?
JR: Yeah, or like a LePen, which is a little fine point felt tip marker. I also use mechanical pencils and I use 0.5.
MR: That's what I have right here for writing in my Gemara.
JR: Exactly. Except they're sharp, so every now and then you can make a hole in what you're working on. My dad always used mechanical pencils. I try to write in books with pencil.
MR: Do you have any writing rituals? Like you need to listen to Bach or eat an orange?
JR: No — I just need to do it.
MR: And do you type in Microsoft Word?
JR: That's pretty much what I use, yeah. The only ritual, to return to that question, is that if I write early it's better because, if you don't, the day is always ready to persuade you — with the news or some horror or just the love of your children or anxiety or a need to make money in a different way — that it's not really worth the doing.
MR: Do you eat when you write?
JR: Yes. I eat when I do everything. I have nuts and Balance Bars. I have low blood sugar, so essentially, I am continuously keeping food handy.
MR: And what do you drink when you snack?
JR: I drink water, but I sometimes drink electrolytes mixed with water. Also coconut water. Love that.
MR: What do you think is the snack you've snacked on most in the last 10 years?
JR: Probably salted cashew nuts.
MR: Do you have a brand you like?
JR: Costco because they come in bulk. Lately I've been mixing in raw cashews and also walnuts because they're good for you and they're shaped like brains.
Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Lipsky
MR: You used to work for Seth Lipsky?
JR: Yep. He hired me as he was getting ready to launch the Forward. I created the culture section.
MR: Was he influential to you? Was there anyone else influential when you were wearing your reporter hat?
JR: Seth was influential. And he literally wanted people wearing reporters’ hats with a hat band you can put your press card in like in the old 40s movies. He would take new hires hat shopping, but my hair defeated his efforts.
Seth’s a fantastic editor and teacher. He loves journalism and practices it in its largest way and reminds you why Herzl and Jabotinsky were journalists. First of all, he left the Wall Street Journal to start a Jewish newspaper, and who wanted to do that in the late twentieth century when he started the Forward? Not me. But he created a wonderful environment. He made it exciting and made you feel that you were doing something that mattered. And he taught — as they say of the rabbis — a generation. I can name half a dozen people, more, who went on to the Times, the New Yorker, the Journal, the Atlantic. But you never felt anyone was moving up after working for Seth, just laterally going elsewhere.
MR: Is there anyone else that had that impact on you?
JR: Well Seth gave me my first real job – and I’ve only had two. And I was very young when he hired me, and I didn't want to be a journalist. I did it kicking and screaming. And so in a way everything about it, in retrospect, was valuable — not just because he's a wonderful person and a terrific mentor, but also because the working itself was a lesson. I was going to be “a writer” — I didn't drop out of graduate school to be anything else. It was an aspiration but it's not an occupation. And all the things that seemed like diversions — assigning stories, reporting under deadline, finding art, laying out the section, cutting a piece last minute if an ad came in — all those things were the actual experience of really working and making something with other people. It would've been dreadful to miss out on that.
He also made me write a column. I did not want to do that either. And he kept telling me to just go somewhere and write about it, showing up is the most of it and you'll find something to say. He imposed on me things that were wonderful and that, looking back, I was lucky to do.
MR: For a reader of mine who has never heard of you, what book would you recommend they read? Not necessarily the book.
JR: I suppose because it's short, if I were to name a book, it would probably be The Talmud and the Internet, which began as an essay in The American Scholar, even though I always think of fiction as the starting point of everything — or maybe the ultimate end point of everything.
MR: That's the one where you start with the Ben Bag Bag teaching — turn it over, turn it over, everything's in it.
JR: Yes.
MR: I read that!
JR: I write about my two grandmothers. One was American and one was murdered in Europe and how I am the inheritor of both of their worlds, and I didn't want one to negate the other. I feel more than ever the grandchild of both of them now, ironically.
Profiles in Courage and Graphomania
MR: What about a piece of reporting that is popping into your head that you would recommend?
JR: Well, I wrote a piece about the explosion of antisemitism in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks that grimly holds up, I fear — though in 2001, when I published the piece in the New York Times Magazine, the conspiratorial Jew-hatred that flew in on the contrails of the hijacker’s airplanes could be traced to the failed states and authoritarian regimes whose hatred of the West had incubated the attacks on America, and to fevered pockets of the European Union. Whereas nowadays, such fanatical ideology seems to be rising from the ruins of our own institutions.
MR: Is there anything else you’d recommend?
JR: There’s a piece about I.B. Singer I wrote for the New Yorker I still like, I got to say “feckless shlemiel.” But probably a profile of Henry Roth in Vanity Fair [text file], who published a great novel in 1934, Call It Sleep, and then had 60 years of writer's block, or at least unpublished silence.
They sent me to interview him in 1993 — he was 87 and living in a converted funeral home in Albuquerque where I spent an amazing few days with him. He’d spent years in flight from himself, immigrant trauma, sexual shame, Judaism, but he found himself in time and returned. I also wrote a tribute to Roth for the Times Book Review when he died two years later and a review-essay for the New Yorker some years after that, which began with an anecdote from my visit. I drove him to the doctor but made a wrong turn, and he told me if you make one wrong turn you’re screwed for life. I tell that story in The Best Minds, too, because the panic I felt in that moment — especially since Roth was panicked himself — helped persuade me to try Prozac when I got home.
Everything I wrote about Roth was different, but drew on the time I’d spent with him, proof that Lipsky was right: showing up is half of journalism. The rest is commentary. Roth’s second novel was itself a looking back, a long series of revisitations.
MR: Was it any good?
JR: It's an extraordinary novel. Mercy of a Rude Stream. It's four volumes. They're uneven, but remarkably and brilliantly edited by Bob Weil, who is a very, very fine editor. Roth went from writer's block to wearing a tape recorder around his neck. He didn't become a graphomaniac, but almost.
MR: What's a graphomaniac?
JR: You can't stop writing.
He calls his computer Ecclesias — it was the computer that liberated him because he had terrible rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t type. In the book he's talking to his computer, and talking to — and about — the young person he was. There’s something moving about that. Some of his epigraphs are from the Talmud. He discovered something dialogic, something about a discussion with the self that takes place over time, the center of which is in a way bound up with your ultimate identity I think.
MR: Robert Nozick had all this stuff about identity over time and the Ship of Theseus and stuff like that, whatever.
JR: Well a boat can be replaced piece by piece and still be boat, because a boat doesn’t have a soul. You can’t do that with a person. A person can’t be replaced.
MR: Do you believe in the afterlife?
JR: That's a fascinating question simply because I never think of it as the afterlife. I don't know why, but the immortality of the soul is a different proposition, more a continuity than “the afterlife,” which sounds like a place you inhabit, like a second home in Florida.
MR: Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?
JR: I do. Whether that means we retain our memories, whether that means something more specific, or less, I do not know. But let's say strong intuitions and intimations that yes, we arrive, as Wordsworth says,
"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home…"
Which is very much like that midrash about the soul not wanting to inhabit the body until the angel puts out the light and gives it a shove, but then, when it’s time to die, not wanting to return to God. We live inside of the self we're in, and I don't know why, on what basis I should think otherwise; it's not as if I have some mystical knowledge.
It's much more based on the culture I've inherited. It’s like when Golda Meir was asked if she believes in God, and she said that she believes in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God. It's not necessary for her to individually feel the faith in order for her to feel bound up in something not just larger than herself but something truly bound up with Sinai.
Free Fallin’
MR: Have you had any hippie-dippie, deep spiritual experiences?
JR: If I have, they're not so large that they come to mind now. I don't actually know the answer.
It’s more like the feeling at the end of Mr. Sammler's Planet where Sammler is standing by the bedside of his friend, who has died, and despite all the horror in the world, and all the injustice of the past, inwardly affirms that we do know why we are here and how we are meant to be. And then he says, “For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know." It's a moral affirmation that is only possible in a world in which God exists.
MR: There's a great piece that just came out about Gödel his thoughts on the afterlife, and it's exactly this. They just discovered some letters that he wrote to his mother where he talks about the afterlife and it’s very similar to what you're saying. You'll think it's really cool.
JR: I'd love to see it.
MR: Have you ever done psychedelics like acid or mushrooms?
JR: No.
MR: Have you ever smoked pot?
JR: Yes. It was not a transcendent experience.
MR: Do you drink?
JR: No, I don't drink at all.
MR: Why wasn’t smoking pot a transcendent experience?
JR: It made me anxious and paranoid. I was already in college. I always had a sense that it would not be a liberating experience. I felt sufficiently fragile in myself that I didn't need to expand my mind. I didn't want my mind to fly apart.
You asked me something before about the mystical experience. What I was going to say, and maybe it’s a moralistic thing, is that I don’t believe in God’s intervention in daily life, because I believe in free will, which is itself a divine thing. I don’t believe that God says, “You, I’m not going to save.” Not only because my grandparents were murdered, and I don’t think God decided not to save them, but simply because I don’t feel that that is how the world works. And I think, in fact, there's something about free will that almost requires your not believing in easy interventions.
There's a moment in Paradise Lost, which I love, where God is explaining that Adam and Eve — not yet created — are going to fall. God knows that because He knows what's going to happen, but it in no way means that God is responsible. And God says of Adam, “I made him just and right,/Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall."
And if that weren't true, evil wouldn't be evil. It would be bad luck. Satan's problem is that he refuses to be responsible for what he's done, but he’s got free will too. In any event, I do not expect divine intervention on my behalf.
MR: Maybe let me ask you this: Have you ever done cocaine?
JR: No.
MR: You just said this really sophisticated thing, and I'm asking if you’ve ever done cocaine.
JR: But I was asked by a psychiatrist if I had done cocaine, when I learned my daughters had ADD and my wife, who was reading all the books, said that I definitely had it too. And the psychiatrist thought that if cocaine had helped organize me it might mean I would be responsive to ADD medication. Though it doesn’t help dyslexia.
MR: You have dyslexia?
JR: I do.
MR: Are you left-handed?
JR: No, why do you ask?
MR: I feel like a lot of people who are dyslexic are also left-handed. Tucker Carlson told me he’s both.
Is your dyslexia bad?
JR: By now, I don't know. I don't think so. Not being in high school is the first step. And I’m lucky enough to structure my own day. I know how to read and I read a lot, but I am really slow. If somebody shows me a New Yorker cartoon, they better wait.
MR: That's with everyone though. No one gets those New Yorker cartoons.
A Young Aharon Barak
MR: Do you believe in God — the Jewish God?
JR: Yes.
MR: And what does your Jewish practice look like today?
JR: I don't actually have a good answer. We make Shabbat dinner. The rest is improv. For me.
Let me answer it this way. My most regular and sometimes my only regular performance is to say Modeh Ani every morning. And even though it is such a slender thing to do, such a tiny thing to do compared to what Torah life imposes on you, there is something about beginning the day with gratitude, and with that mysterious thanking of God for being faithful by returning your soul, that just that can shape the day.
I recently read a beautiful essay by Mijal Bitton about the way relationships are at the center of the transmission of tradition, and themselves become a part of what’s transmitted. She gave a beautiful talk at the rally in Washington after the Hamas massacres of October 7, which I sent my daughters.
MR: Was there ever any temptation in your life to become super religious?
JR: I respect it enormously, but the kind of surrender that it would require and the kind of knowledge it would require are impediments. And in a weird way, though it may be untrue, my dyslexia, which made learning Hebrew incredibly hard, if not impossible, made my relationship to Jewish practice and prayer feel shamefully remedial — even as I was maturing in other ways.
The obsession with brains and intellect has a way of substituting for other things. With my daughters’ bat mitzvahs, we wanted to really have something that allowed them to feel whole and not merely as if they had to learn something that was beyond them or not meaningful to them.
MR: Are your daughters married?
JR: No.
MR: Do you want them to marry Jews?
JR: I want them to marry wonderful people. Who are Jews.
MR: Do you think they will?
JR: I have no idea. I hope so. Converts are welcome.
MR: Did you ever think about making aliyah, speaking of your identity?
JR: Again, my Hebrew was the greatest obstacle, or so I told myself, and so I really didn't. And I feel ambivalent about that, sad about it in a way, but I no longer feel that it's a failure of Zionism not to make aliyah at this point. That's a whole other conversation that's too hard to encapsulate in what would be a short answer.
Questions about faith, by the way, even if they're asked by an observant Jew, often feel like Christian questions because of how they're asked, unless you take more time than we’ve got to define the terms, including peoplehood. Do you know what I mean by that?
MR: You look like an Israeli. You look like Aharon Barak or those Israeli intellectuals from the 40s and 50s. Like Benny Morris.
JR: You know what's funny about that? The only Hebrew I can really understand is Hebrew spoken by people who made aliyah in the 30s or 40s, or who were born, like my mother-in-law, in mandate Palestine. They spoke in a way where each word is still separated from every other word.
Michael
MR: I want to ask you a few questions about friendship. Do you have a lot of friends?
JR: I do.
MR: Do you have a best friend?
JR: If I do, it's my wife.
MR: Are you still in touch with Michael [Laudor]?
JR: I haven’t visited him in a long time.
MR: Does everyone ask you that?
JR: People very much want to know about our relationship today, if he has read the book, if we are friends as before. In some cases hoping, I think, that the tragedy the book explores might have resolved itself in the unwritten aftermath. But it all remains complicated.
MR: Is there someone who’s the opposite of Michael for you — someone who grew up not particularly smart or like a goofball idiot who ended up being some master of the universe. Like someone who you went to school with who didn’t know Chaucer but now he invented Velcro?
JR: No.
But what's interesting about that question is that I will no longer be thinking about it in those terms. It didn't do Michael a favor that I thought of him as being brilliant, and it didn't do a lot of people a favor that I thought in those terms, least of all myself. Because even though I was shy and inept at many things, I had an exalted and unhealthy idea about what it meant to be special or smart or brilliant or creative. And at this point in my life, what's so moving is to reconnect with people who are just wonderful, who I didn't really know or notice enough to even share myself with when I was young. And to discover how much I have in common with lots of people I had lost touch with for forty years. What I discovered was that I actually grew up surrounded by wonderful people, but I was always very lonely, and that had much more to do with alienation from myself, I am sure.
I had wonderful parents, but the unit of measurement was intelligence and originality and an ability to articulate the world as if that made you the master of it. And my mother hated the suburbs, and that seemed to consign everybody there to a kind of mediocre limbo. But that, in fact, is not true. Revisiting my past has been humbling in the right way. Becoming a parent is humbling in that way too. You don’t look at your baby and feel your child is incomplete, or will only become worthy of your love if she says something amazing. She’s amazing from the start, and whole even before she can talk.
MR: That’s like the debate in the Jewish literature about when a fetus becomes viable.
JR: Yes.
MR: Of course, the answer is when it graduates medical school.
JR: That used to be the joke. I feel it's harder to tell now, when everyone’s viability is somehow deemed provisional.
The Judge and the Rabbi
MR: I interviewed Guido Calabresi who you write about in the book. He said that everyone has some psychological tendency, which, if left unchecked would tend toward a full-on mental illness. What would be yours?
JR: Can I dispute that statement first? It was precisely because Guido was formed by a Freudian universe in which the seeds of mental illness are universal, and planted in childhood, and subject to the will of the person suffering from it, that he believed, with the best intentions, that Michael’s organic brain disease was simply part of a continuum…
But leaving that to one side…it’s a good question. In other words, is there an embryonic mental disorder that if I didn't keep it in check would consume me with madness, or a particular illness whose name I might know?
MR: Both.
JR: I think it probably has less to do with my keeping something in check as it does with the lucky circumstances of my life and the people and routines that help sustain me. Am I prone to anxiety? Yes. Depression? I don't know. But I am very prone to strong feelings of either despair or outrage, for example in the aftermath of October 7th, when I see people taking something evil and pretending that it's good, using terms like resistance and liberation to excuse murder and rape. Ordinarily, I really am a pretty good-humored person, and I can never tell why I'm so lucky to not have to work full time to say “Down you demons.”
MR: Are you obsessive?
JR: About some things, I’m sure. But I’m also inclined to chaos and entropy. I know it sounds incredibly boring, but I really don't feel there is a pathology I can name. I guess I'm always amazed that everything holds together — that I really get up, that I really do what I'm inspired to do – more often, perhaps, than what I’m supposed to do.
Of course writing is such a strange and sometimes painful thing to do, it can feel like an activity on the brink of madness. Even if it’s normal and healthy minded, you're imagining things that aren't there, time passes differently in a book. If it's winter in your book on Tuesday, when you go back to work on Wednesday it still has to be winter, even if it’s spring outside your window.
That's why it can feel like you're dying, because you're inhabiting something that isn't there but that has to feel real to you. And it will be real if you can finish it, just not physically real. You have to court chaos even while you’re trying to make order; that’s not a mental disorder but it is a strain.
MR: Do you floss?
JR: Every morning, yes. And night. I'm a big believer in flossing.
MR: What's your morning reading look like?
JR: I get up very early, I get up at 4:00, so I promised myself I would not spend my morning merely reading the news. I would either read a book or I would read a psalm or I would listen to a shiur that's on YouTube or something like that.
MR: What's the last shiur you listened to?
JR: It was this morning and it was about the Ari [the kabbalist Isaac Luria], and how the body mirrors aspects of creation. I hadn't meant to be listening to it. I often listen to this guy Rabbi Breitowitz — he’s a smart and lovely souled guy, deeply knowledgeable, and I just enjoy listening to a shiur, whatever it's on. Usually, the weekly parsha. Sometimes he just answers questions.
MR: Let me ask you, do you exercise?
JR: Yeah.
MR: What do you do for exercise?
JR: I take boxing lessons.
MR: Really?
JR: There’s nothing like hitting something. I go to a gym uptown called Mendez, and have a fantastic teacher, Eileen Miyoko Olszewski. She’s a boxer and a total trainer, mind and body.
Ornithology
MR: For someone who's never done birding before, what would be the first book you'd recommend they buy to go birding?
JR: There are a thousand apps, but I think the Peterson Field Guide is still fantastic because of its simplicity. It's simple, but it understands that you don't make the bird look exactly like the bird you're going to see. You condense what are called its “diagnostic features” into the image, and you have an arrow pointing at them. And so you're looking for the ring around the eye and the bar on the wing. And even if you don't see them, those become the telltale marks in your mind. Soon enough, you'll replace those with the bird itself — you'll know its name, but if you allow yourself, you'll also see the mysterious living creature in front of you.
MR: Do you have a set of binoculars you like?
JR: I do, but they're heavy. I use Leicas, 8x42BN. But I often use this monocular, which is 10x50, which is very high power.
MR: Where's that from, the monocular?
JR: Polaris Optics — I have no idea if that's good or bad, but I like it.
MR: For someone who's living in New York who's never done this ever, where's the closest, easiest place to just pop to try it out?
JR: The Ramble in Central Park is a fantastic place to go. In spring, it's got a great migration — a couple of hundred species of birds, many warblers, these little tiny neotropical migrants. Because it's in the middle of a city, it's an artificial profusion. You’ll see more birds than you would in the Berkshires, perhaps, where they have many more choices.
MR: What's the first bird that pops into your head right now?
JR: A towhee. They used to be called Rufous-sided towhees, and I love the word “rufous,” but now they're just called Eastern towhees.