John Grisham and Jim McCloskey, "Framed" : CSPAN2 : November 7, 2024 6:59am-8:12am EST : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive (2025)

how can i find numbers and do the math myself? and i did and i found the numbers. i did the math myself. and that's what it came down to. there's no way, like i probably spent an hour researching this, so four people died since i started doing that. it just it just it just was totally mind boggling. so covid made worse because during a lot of patients had to be treated with antibiotics, there was no way they were too sick after covid. so there were more cases of antibiotic resistance. you know, there were more bacteria that developed resistance that previously didn't. i don't think this numbers that i just cited changed since 2019. they probably have gotten worse. there are some really scary prognoses if we continue like business as usual if we don't find good alternatives, then by 2050, we're going to be losing millions of people to antibiotic

resistance, depending on it's numbers change a little bit, but it's a very, very promising threat. it's you know, it's it's something we really have to be taken seriousl threat. somethingy. that has to be tak seriously. at the moment i know the nih -- moving a little bit slow, we will be better if it moves a little bit faster but we have to do the research and research takes time. >> the bacteria keeps evolving. >> you need to have the right phages. he piqued my interest about bacteriophage library in the military. could you go into that? >> absolutely. so in the 1990s there was

another scientist named carl merrill working on the nih who altered phages, saw that we were losing the antibiotic battle and she did some research with another scientist and they published a paper saying these should work. should be looking at the phages. it was not well received. eventually the other scientists on the job continued working differently and ended up for navy research lab and that was at the time of the iraqi war. american soldiers, the wounded,

they had to battle -- which didn't respond to antibiotics. we are looking for alternatives, we will know stages -- with the way we should do it is we should go and collect as many phages as possible, the us military having stations all over the planet, went into the forest and the ocean and rivers and lakes and whatever. they gathered thousands of sent it all to this one lab and checked which

phages worked well until patterson used them and that became a phage library. they used more phages for the second round and so it is now part of, belongs to a different phage companys called advanced phage therapeutics which primarily running now and they also have a number of trials and focus so yeah, i would say we need to worry a little faster. >> i'm impressed you can talk about these bacteria, rolls off your tongue, all the names. talking about slow research where are we now in this research. what are the questions we still need to answer before we were

able to put this into phase 3 human clinical trials or start using this as medicine? >> right. so i think they need to show phages as efficient and that is what they are working on. safety doesn't seem to be a problem. phages rarely cause problems, prepared and cleaned and purified and have all the equipment we need so that's generally the problem. i think whates some trials, th issue is phages not be as efficient, maybe they need different aphages, the good pt about it is you just have to

work for the man that takes time.en if you have three different phages you are testing and none of them work very well, your trial didn't work. you have to go back and find more phages which takes time and documentation and money and funding and all this stuff. these are the biggest stumbling blocks right now and once you are down with that, once you've proven they are safe and efficient, you need to do it on a bigger population and bigger population, phase 2, phase 3 and at that point, so i think it is still years away.

what is interesting is when i wrote the book, some of the people i haven't spon to for the book that kind of like came into the phageli arena later, started talking to me on linkedin, some of the european people saying in europe we overcome the hurdle by creating different pathways. maybe you can do the same and figure out a different pathway. people dying, summer using arms and legs, lining up to create something faster, you have worked differently, european healthcare system is different, maybe easier, maybe not. so it is hard for me to say whether it is possible or not but i know in other parts of the world, some are exploring

deeper ways, maybe faster ways, some of them told me they import phages from georgia now. it is now possible and legal in germany for example. it is hard to judge because you also want to have your own methods of doing so but that hurdle, hopefully possibly still to come. >> host: sort of different in other countries, the us regulatory system somebody mentioning there can be change. could you talk a little bit about there's a reason this regulatory system is so rigid. to ensure safety. go into that a little bit.ab >> absolutely. every phage scientist in america that i talked to has said that is the most important

thing, to ensure that our medicine works in the same consistent way for everybody who takes them and it is very important. first and foremost, to ensure the way medicines are made don't change from one iteration to the next and if they do change, they are tricky because as they multiply inside a person they can change a little bit. they can change but when you first grow them in the lab, they can change from one generation to the next so your original phage and last

generation phage can have different genetics.te how do you regulate that? that's another challenge. we regulate the same rate as the flu vaccine because influenza viruses change too. they have a method to butt it needs to be perfected. but they have a way of doing so.d >> host: when you talk about the notations everybody thinks covid, we know what these mutations are, the different variants that come out and the vaccine that needs to change to keep up with these variants and the first concern when talking about bacteriophages, this is a virus, what does that mean? is there any concern these bacteria phages could mutate to become harmful to humans? could you talk about that? >> sure.

everybody i talk to about that says no. phages can't attack human cells because the biological machinery doesn't match. there's two different types of phages, phages that destroy bacteria, the ones it makes sense to use and phages that hide themselves in the genome and stay there. and that sometimes can make bacteria more pathogenic. that's one silent downside of phages that can happen and in history, in medical history it is known there were a couple phages that made certain bacteria more vicious than it was before. that is exceptionally rare.

one of the questions i asked people when i was writing the book is can one phage mutate into another and phages that hide in the material genome can become phages, not the other way around. generally extremely few downsides of phages. and we now have all the equipment to see which phages are in our medicines and check them and i test them, do all t genetic sequencing like it was 30 years ago when we had a way of doing so.ig we have all the right checks and balances in place. >> host: you said bacteria can get even stronger because of bacteria phages. i

can we then switch back to antibiotics? where do antibiotics play a role? >> that is another duty of combining the two. coming back to the tom patterson space, he was actually treated with a cocktail of phages and onene antibiotic and between the two, to resist an antibiotic, when it tried to resist an antibiotic it became more vulnerable to phages. it's like a double blow. wewo can absolutely use the tw to get there and that is probably going to be done in the future a fair amount. >> the way you explain in your book was so enlightening and so visual also in the way that bacteriophages can attack a bacteria and the bacteria has

to change but if it changes, it is susceptible to the antibiotic. >> right. exactly. that is exactly what happens. a really beautiful microbiology in there and i'm very glad the people i spoke to could explain it to me. the way it works, it has a double coat that protects the antibiotic to get through the massive double coat. to judge a phage it has to shut the second coat and that made it vulnerable to antibiotics so whenever bacteria were inside tom, they still had double coat, the phages did them in, shut the book coat, and biotics did them in and from the

perspective of microbiology, it was a beautiful battlefield, interesting to listen to. >> host: talking about bacteriophages and the future and antibiotics, what do we stilll need to know about how bacteriophages work? i know you mentioned there's trillions of them. how many bacteriophages are there to one bacteria? are there multiple ways? >> guest: generally it is one bacteria, but we will never run out of phages, there are so many out there, trillions and trillions and trillions. they have to continue looking for them and are we continue

building this phage library so that whenever something happens to match it, we have phages, 2 or 3 and we don't have enough, we have to go out and find phages. that was his whole vision and ideally countries would share all the factors, how it will work is not so clear but ideally countries and institutions would share that. >> host: what do we still need to know about bacteriophages and how they can attack bacteria? >> guest: we know a fair amount, the mechanism of how they turn into bacteria and burst them open.

we genuinelybl need to gather many phages as possible. another thing i found interesting writing the book is in lower and middle income countries, this method is really becoming popular. scientists in middle and low income countries are going out in africa looking for them. so many places to look for. they've got rivers, they've got soil and they are building their own libraries based on what they are finding so it is a lot cheaper and easier for the same reasons it was cheaper and easier in the soviet union, you don't have to build massive manufactory's. you can go yout, look for a

phage and a person who is struggling in a local hospital. >> host: i would love to talk about the role of bacteriophages and how they can help the health disparity between middle and lower income countries. . i guess why hasn't antibiotics been able to close that gap? wiser are to get medicine from those higher income countries to the lower and middle income countries and how can bacteriophages help close that health disparity? >> right. i'm probably adding a special venue, traditionalit penicilli not working, we need a stronger armor. quite often that armories very expensive. a long time ago i was writing a story about someone dealing

with an infection, it was an outrageously expensive, thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars to. the new antibiotics are expensive because so much we trend into them. it is difficult, just like vaccines, western countries that get the medicines first and the rest of the world comes when we have that. sore this can actual weight cle the gap because it doesn't require complicated equipment or expensive equipment. they can be very easily grown and they can really become an alternative so it is interesting how places that don't have the money and funding to do it our way are doing it their own way.

they might come out ahead because they have low flexibility in how they do their research and treatment so i think it will be very interesting to see how it is going to develop in coming years.es >> that is interesting and we've gone into the nitty-gritty off antimicrobial resistance and bacteriophages but tell me, what was the most interesting thing that you found a that you think are important to share? >> that are important to share? i really dug into the history of how bacteriophages were discovered and first used and how people use them and i think one of the things i totally didn't expect to find was to what extent they played a role

in world war ii because you can probably argue that the soviet union didn't know how to use phages right. they might have lost the war. the argument can be made because during the war, a very famous battle of stalingrad, named after stalin, one of the most brutal battles in the history of warfare, modern was ite because not only named after stalin, but it also set on the way, if the germans got the city they would get to the oilfield,to and of course e soviets didn't want it to happen. they wanted to have access to their oilfield.

early on in the battle, reports of power outbreaks in stalingrad which happens just about any war but once it is destroyed, the infrastructure, water and sewer and all sorts of things, they knew they needed to stop it. once people started getting sick, nobody -- they sent a russian microbiologist to check what was going on. she got a tiny bag of phages, we need phages immediately, people are getting sick. and the train never made it. there was nothing left. she said okay, we will do it ourselves. we will go to the river, find a

bunch of phages and growth underground. we are going -- on a regular basis, they did. very basic equipment, a bunch of hoses, very basic equipment and produced enough phages for thousands of people still in the city and defending the city and it got to the point that everybody had to carry a document, take phages on a regular basis so they wouldn't spread their use. once she got there the epidemic stopped, people stopped getting sick and they could defend the city and they took over the city. and it was really interesting.

>> there was the battle everybody s knows and there waa sub battle against cholera.. >> that nobody knew. >> a prime example of how you don't need much to fight against these infections, that could you could use this during warfare. >> it was very revealing, very revealing. >> host: thank you.is appreciate you taking the time. is there anything you would like to add that you found interesting, more history to bacteriophages you didn't realize happened that you can reveal from your book? >> one of the things that developed for me from this

entire thing is to what extent politics more than persecution, medical progress, we nailed it in the 1930s in 1940s and they disappeared, because a the georgian scientist working with the fringe scientist was arrested and tortured and prosecuted, his whole family was destroyed. all of his records and everything he did was destroyed and never came back, why would you go there? the whole thing fell off the scientific radar. it was very sad to watch and because of the cold war there

was no communication. a century worth of time that otherwise wouldn't happenan because of government and more, wondering where there other things that went the same wayn because of the bad timing, what else was there that was happening? waiting to be rediscovered? there were a lot of questions like that in my head. what else can i write about in my next book. >> it was crazy that every time they seemed to have gathered enough research to bring this out something happen and we are starting from 0 again and every time they try to bring it back together something happened and we are starting again.n. it seems there were scientists around different countries that were putting phages together but for some reason couldn't find each other because of situations that were happening. >> exactly. exactly.

societal and political barriers just weird sometimes. it was mind-boggling to discover all that. >> there might be other technologicall or biological advances out there that we don't know how to cure other diseases, they could be buried somewhere and we have no clue because of these issues. >> absolutely. i wanted to end the book on a hopeful note and that is what is happening luckily unfortunately. just as i was writing the attitude was changing in the medical establishment and all over the world and in georgia too they were becoming more

accepted, getting morning money to develop more phages in laboratories. it was a very interesting place to be in and discover so icy we are on the brink with that right now, the ball is rolling but making it grow a little faster.ha >> we think that phages will become part of our future in healthcare or in medicine but we will wait to see how, right? >> exactly. i definitely hope so. i definitely hope so. >> thank you for taking the time to speak with me about your book. i really enjoyed getting into the nitty-gritty scienceli of things so i really appreciate you nerding out with me a little bit. >> thank you so much. thank you so much.

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c-span.org/c-spannow. c-spannow, your front row seat to washington anytime anywhere. >> good evening, welcome to author author, a simon & schuster centennial celebration. please welcome world renowned historian doris kearns goodwin. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. thank you. i'm so glad to welcome everyone to simon & schuster's centennial celebration. what they've fashioned for us on this day of commemoration, they somehow managed to get the heavens above to mark the occasion by providing a total solar eclipse this afternoon.

'sig spectacular tone for our grand family reunion tonight. here on earth down below the heavens it has been so much fun for me to absorb the storied history of the simon & schuster family, to learn of the unlikely genesis that sprang from two young columbia university graduates, simon, piano salesman, and matt schuster, an honor and culture columnist, the two friends reunited by a dream to establish a publishing house that would sell better books to more people at lower prices. no books, they pledged, would bear their name that they had not read and they were not proud to stand behind, when they opened their doors on 57th st. on january 3, 1924, on but there was only one book on their spring list, book of crossword puzzles. crosswords in newspapers were all the rage and this was the first book to put together a series of puzzles.

they had a first printing of 3600 copies, one dollar and $0.25 for each copy and it included any racer cast pencil. shortly before publication, richard and max began to have cold feet, fearful their first offspring might make it seem they were publishers of activity books and make it difficult for them to attract novels, poetry, and serious works of nonfiction so they decided to hide the puzzle book under the name of plaza publishers in honor of the plasma hotel where they had routinely met week after week to plan this big adventure. but then when the crossword book became a colossal bestseller, selling one hundred thousand copies in the firstch two weeks, richard and max decided the time had come to acknowledge their illegitimate offspring. an article t in publishers weey the mysterious plaza books, they proudly revealed was a wholly-owned subsidiary of simon & schuster and in that

same issue our enterprising founders announced their first fall list including two novels, one biography, one book of poetry and four more puzzle books. by the end of 1924, the five crossword books had sold one million copies, and richard simon and mack schuster were off and running att which poin matt schuster who had admired abraham lincoln ever since high school decided to adopt lincoln as his middle name edward forever after sign his name him lincoln schuster. what better threesome could we have as ourmo founding fathers which is simon, mac schuster and their silent partner, abraham lincoln. it is a mark of how old i am the f investors in our publishing home for nearly 1/2 of its hundred year history. a [applause] >> and over these 5 decades,

they never lost faith in me as i took an inordinate amount of timer to complete each book, twice as long to write about the civil war as it took the war to be fought, longer than world war ii to write about the homefront. they've been at my side on the emotional germany on an unfinished love story of personal history of the 1960s. the idea for the book - you are so great, thank you. [applause] >> the idea for the book, one summer morning severance after my late husband had turned 80, he came down the stairs with clumps of shaving cream on his years singing o what a beautiful morning from the musical oklahoma. when i asked why he was so chipper he announced he had finally decided to open 300 boxes he haddi dragged through our entire married life, boxes that contain diaries, letters,

drafts of historic speeches, memos and memorabilia from his 1960s when he seemed to be a zealot like figure present at defining moments with all the major characters, jfk, jackie kennedy, lbj, martin luther king, jean mccarthy, robert kennedy. for 40 years, dick had been leery of opening these boxes. the end of t the decade, the escalating war in vietnam, the assassination of martin luther king and robert kennedy, violence on college campuses had cast a dark curtain on the entire euro for him and for the entire country. dick wanted only to look ahead, but then, at 80, if he had any wisdom, he better start dispensing soon so we resolved to go through the boxes in chronological order, reliving the 60s week by week, year by year, at the end of the story knowing only what people at the time knew.

thus began our last great adventure together. in the middle of our project dick was diagnosed with a cancer that eventually took his life. throughout his illness, the prospect of the book kept him anchored, gave him a sense of purpose. i realize now we were both in the grip of a fantasy, maintaining the enchanted thought that as long as we were working on the project, learning, laughing, exploring the boxes, his life, my life on our lives together would not be finished. of a talisman is an object thought to have a magical power and to bring luck, the book was our talisman. i have often called the subject of my book abraham lincoln, both maroosevelts and lbj my guys, because i spent so many decades immersing myself in their letters, diaries and memoirs, waking up with them in the morning, thinking about them when i go to bed at night. i would often talk with them and we continually ask them questions,ow but sadly they ner once answered. but now my guy is my husband, sitting across the room from me, arguing with me, correcting

me, laughing as we read aloud from his letters, diaries and documents. when dick. i felt the weight and responsibly of the h project w had begun together. in the months of grief and dislocation that followed it was always on my mind. it began to evolve from a memoir i was helping him to write, to a joint memoir as i export my own experiences in the 60s and then to somethingn larger as i reached out to interview and to hear stories from a chorus of voices that had witnessed and held shape and generation. the importance of telling stories from previous generations was the core of an addressed abraham lincoln when he was 28 years old, he was troubled by the temper of the country in the 1830s, a tendency to substitute passion for judgment, to engage in mob action in disregard of the laws of the land. in such unsettled times he cautioned a dictator might arise. he worried that with the passage of 60 years since the american revolution in the

revocation of the constitution, the living history of that time, the vivid and visceral experiences once found in every family was fading along with the founding generation itself. to restore that state of communal feeling so essential to democracy, the stories of the revolution in the founding of our nation, he said, must be told and retold, read and recounted to. lincoln's words took on a powerful resonance in my mind as i realized that in a similar way, some 60 years after memories of the upheavals of the 60s have begun to fade, the have become misunderstood, we might add our voices along with a chorus of firsthand participants and witnesses to the task of restoring a living history of that pivotal decade allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made and what light might be cast on our own fractured time. more and more, i realized memories of violence and riots

that set whole cities ablaze provided the greatest illumination of the 60s, the exhilarating conviction thatat individuals could make a difference, the impulse that stared tens of thousands of young people to join the peace corps, to participate in sit ins and freedom rides, to march and demonstrate against segregation and denial of the vote and to launch the women's movement and the gay rights movement for freedom, equality, and justice. when the conscience of the country was fired, long-established systems of disco nation began to tumble. how we need a return of that fighting spirit today. [applause] >> but as i come to a end, let me return to where i began, young richard simon and matt schuster and the choice they made at the birth of simon & schuster to adopt as their logo the figure of a man spreading seeds from a painting by john françoise mallett.

this original emblem was a metaphor for the enduring power of books to plant seeds of inspiration, imagination, courage, entertainment, empathy and resilience and a reverence for facts, a reference for truth and a reference for knowledge, the very qualities of mind and spirit we so badly need to begin the process of healing our beleaguered country today.ce in that spirit let our celebration begin. [applause] >> and now please give a warm welcome to the president and ceo of simon & schuster, jonathan karp -- jonathan karp. >> good evening. working and reading her manuscript as it came in chapter by chapter has been one

of the greatest experiences of my time at simon & schuster and i hope you will all read her new book which confirms why doris is called america's historian and chief. the authors convey the luminous literary sweep of our list and we are going to do our best to keep the action moving as fast as we can. to celebrate a century at simon & schuster our authors will share a personal story about an idea or a book that was especially formative and meaningful in their lives as readers and as writers. we wanted to give you some humor up front soho we have invited an author who follows in the tradition of many of the comedians we published, from eddie can tour, groucho marx and bob hope to gilda ratner, carol burnett and amy schumer.

for pure laugh out loud humor, the funniest book i have ever worked on is a bestseller called is this anything. it is my pleasure to welcome the author, one of the greatest comedians of all time, jerry seinfeld. all right. worst possible way to introduce a comedian, you just heard it. that is the worst thing. it is actually hostile to say that actually. how about schuster, so post that he got second billing, he jams lincoln into his name in the middle of his life going if it is going to be and schuster, i will be lincoln. all right. i understand that there was a book that helped you, inspired you to become a comedian.wa

there was a book that we talked about. what about it? >> how did it inspire you? >> the first book ever written just about this profession. nobody had ever tried to just look at the profession, talk to the people that were doing it and to write about it. when i was a kid, watching comedians on tv i literally didn't know how they said funny things. i thought maybe they talk like this all the time. i didn't know these were jokes that they figured out and practiced which i thought they just talked like that. i was 15 and then i had to figure out what they were doing. >> i noticed when i was reading your manuscript when it first came in that a lot of your earliest bits seem to have been inspired by breakfast cereal. my favorite bit about the

breakfastyo cereal was the bit about life. can you talk about the inspiration behind that? >> the inspiration is getting a laugh for your act.th that's the inspiration. it is one of those things, comedy is like looking at things that second time. life, i could see, that's a big word, big title. life magazine, okay, fine, this is a cereal and we are going to call it life. i thought how -- how about cody's or squares, no. this is much bigger, this is life, i tell you. my kids love that joke. >> it's a good joke. >> you sort of stayed on the breakfast cereal track. >> i did a couple things but i

returned to it. >> i'm trying to help you promote your project. >> are really going to turn the tide with that promotion. this is going to make all the difference. >> it is premiering on netflix on may 3rd which would you like to tell them what it is? >> i made a movie about how kellogg's invented the pop tart. it is called on frosted. it is not like barbie. barbie was made by mattel. kellogg's did not even know we were doing this. i got a very flimsy cover letter from a shady lawyer and the valet. the valley. i showed it to netflix and we are completely legally allowed to do this. we will take all their products, all their ip, their characters. it will be fine. three weeks ago we told them that we made this. and they actually were pretty good about it. >> as they should. you told me that you actually

got a lot of your ideas from walking through markets after you did your earliest shows. >> i wasn't a drinker or drug person so after doing shows, comedians, we got to do something after the show and i would go to the supermarket. because they were so brightly that and there were so many things to look at. that is what i would do. so i had a lot of food bits. >> something else you talked about, you didn't really. you weren't always so eager to write books because you liked the audience but for your audiobooks, you recorded it all by your self without an audience in the midst of the pandemic. i was wondering how that experience was for you. >> slow. slow and quiet, just like marching through sand at the end of a bad day at the beach.

just trudging back to the car. that is what it was like. thank you, john. doing comedy to dead silence was just horrible. i don't know if people liked it. i can't imaginee that they woud but you say everyone does this, you have to do it so i did it. >> finally, how has your writing evolved through the years, how have you changed as a writer? how has your process change? >> the process is the same. i don't have to force myself so much. this is the only thing of value that i do and i used to do it because i had to do it because comedians, if you don't create new material you die, you have

to do that to survive so it was something i would force myself to do and after many many years i started to enjoy, now i really enjoy it a lot.yo but you inviting me to do the book was the only time i ever stopped and thought, what happened to me? how did i go from a kid in my room just wanting to do this thing that to me was like being an astronaut or a baseball player and then i became that thing, how did that happen? because you invited me to do the book, it forced me to stop and reflect on that. that was a great experience and i thank you for encouraging me. >> thank you for writing the book. you want said that you thought of yourself as a singer/songwriter. people forget that before he does the stand up it islo all written and meticulously crafted. you were revising words that were decades-old to the time we

published. >> i like to play with them. they are like legos, a good writer, words are legos, toys to play with. >> thank you for playing with us, jerry.n it is an honor to be your publisher. jerry seinfeld. [applause] >> introducing acclaimed a novelist, essayist, critic, poet and playwright, call in tow been. caolm toibin. >> this in general feeling that bad poets should write prose and that is one of the reasons

i became a novelist but there is another more important reason. because we have so many famous barman and bartenders and bad barman are hard to find and are not welcome. and i was a bad barman. it all began when i was 16 and got a summer job in the grand hotel on the south coast of ireland. it began badly as a barman and it never improves. i had no idea how to pull a can of guinness. even when i learned, i still had no idea. you are meant to pool it this way and this way and then i wasn't sure, maybe this way back but only less so, maybe a bit. or maybe the other way around, if you did it this way. some nights that summer the ballroom of the hotel was

packed with people, the bar was open until 2:00 in the morning at the customers pushed past each other to get my attention and wanted things like one vodka and tonic, one vodka, one gin without ice, two kinds of guinness, lemonade, and they looked at me like it was urgent. the problem is by the time i remembered the order, i had forgotten it. so i also had forgotten the face of the person who ordered. the best thing, the only solution i felt at the time was to get loads of different types of drinks and mixtures, put them on the counter and hope that someone would claim them, then try to work out how much the order cost. if you want to know, did things

get worse? it got worse. one afternoon early in my staying, i noted the two men were in deep conversation. since there was not much else to do i decided that afternoon to listen to what they were saying. a this is an incipient example of a novelist listening into people. just that it might've also been understood as a sign of pure not us on the part of a bad barman. so i hovered close to two men, they were talking about money. i was all ears. and suddenly in the middle of this one man looked up at me and said what you ever shared off, you little squirt and mind your own business? the next day, i had the afternoon off. it was a glorious day, windless, with a high sky and since i had packed one book, i

thought i would carry it with me. i might even read it. it was called the essential hemingway and include the full text of the sun also rises which was published under the umbrella of simon & schuster. that book that afternoon hit something, hit the nervous system i before it hit anythin else. it was like energy, electricity. hemingway's sentences were simple, filled with repetition and odd variations, emotion that seemed to live in the space between the words and i was no longer a bad barman, i was no longer a bad poet, i was living in a book and that book opened up possibilities. in four years i would be living in spain, i had a typewriter and an idea. i am still a bad poet, still a bad barman but now i could find

a way to subsume all that failure into style. i would start to write fiction. [applause] >> please welcome to the stage the number one new york times best-selling author of 23 novels, brad for. >> itll is fun to follow jerry seinfeld as an irishman and tell my story in four minutes, three minutes and 51 seconds. last time i was just asked to say anything it was for a former bigwig ceo, they said say something nice that people don't know about him.. i said he's the fastest guy in publishing, the only person i know who can leave midtown 5:00 on friday and be in hamptons by 3:30. not knowing he had a reputation for sneaking out a little early on the weekend. and my family growing up, the

arts were something to make you better rounded, they were not a career path. my dad had begun his life as a young adult in the marine corps and my mom was a flight attendant for twa in the 60s, the glamour days of air travel and she lived at 515 e. 88. to be back here, the dream was to study and do the family business and i hated it. i took the strong campbell personality test, said you are scoring off the charts for writing and publishing. i did something no american has done before. when i graduated college i took all the money i saved and moved to paris, that had never been done. i got twohi chapters into and stopped because i had a little voice i think we all have in the back of my head, what if you don't find a publisher or nobody likes it?

i succumbed to that voice and ship on my laptop back home and travel withn money i made in college and came up with an idea for a tv show. i was the producer, the host, i met my wife and on our honeymoon in italy, she asked you what would you regret on your deathbed never having done, when i get home, making that happen. the lions of lucerne, i've been to lucerne switzerland to do a show. i didn't know how i was going to work this incredible rockface that mark twain called the most moving piece of rock in i the world, this carving t commemorate the swiss guard who died in the initial throes of the french revolution but someday i am going to use that title, the last night on our honeymoon, a shared train compartment we were in with a brother and sister from atlanta, georgia which they recognized me from the tv show and we talked about our shared

love of books. the sister said are you going to make more tv shows? i said i'm going to write a novel. she gave me her business card on a platform and said i work for simon & schuster. if you read, if you write that novel i would like to read it and i thought this is great. i've got a title, told my wife i'm going to do it, i met somebody from simon & schuster, i just need an idea. we went to the hotel to check-in in the room wasn't ready in the desk clerk said if you go around the corner to this café, have a sandwich, it will be done. i figured his brother in law owned the café and the rooms are never ready in time and he sent everybody over for coffee and a sandwich.h on the table next to me with an english linkage newspaper. i picked it up and inside i found an article about a swiss intelligence officer who had embezzled all this money from the swiss government and was training his own shadow militia with high-tech weapons from his own private arsenal. that became the line of lucerne. i'm on my 20 fourth book with

simon & schuster, it's been in my family the whole time. i hopepe you have a lovely nig tonight. happy anniversary, simon and schuster. thank you for coming. [applause] >> please welcome the celebrated host of the breakfast club, charlemagne tha god, and legendary author of 24 iconic novels, judy blume. [applause] >> please, please, please, please. my name is judy blume. >> i am charlemagne tha god. >> we are here to talk about things people told us we couldn't do. miss judy, she don't like when i call her miss blume. >> i don't.

>> what are things people told? couldn't do in your life? >> the first thing was you might be a nice girl but you can't write. u get out your handkerchief and cried. you have no idea what little children are like. so i got out my handkerchief and i cried and then i said what does he know? it wasn't a publisher. it wasn't an editor. it was somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who wrote books. >> who was that person so we never listen to them ever again about anything? >> this was, this was 50 something years ago. >> absolutely. >> but i am still here. >> that's right. that's right. [applause] >> i was told -- >> how about you? >> i am always told what i am

not able to do. one of the greatest t things i was ever told is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. one thing that i remember vividly was my cousin who is like my mom and dad's cousin. i am from south carolina. she said to me one time, talking about the big dreams i had an things i wanted to do, you shouldn't put your goals so high because if you don't reach them you are going to be disappointed. i remember thinking i should have kept to myself, my inside voice became my outside voice. .. sugar, honey, iced tea. i ever heard in my life that she was like, no, you're going to be because you got all of these big dreams you look where you're from. you're from this small town in south carolina. you'll never be able to achieve all those things. and luckily, i didn't listen to her. good. yeah, good.

you know, my mother my mother used t >> good, good. my mother used to t say to me, just be a good girl, judy. just be a good girl. but somehow i don't know, i have grew that. >> i wonder what was considered a good girl to her? >> a good girl with somebody who didn't give her any trouble. >> okay. >> right? >> and your booksks have caused good trouble? >> yeah, they have caused trouble, yeah. i mean,i that was, so they were two guy principles.s. the first guy principal was the principle of my kids elementary school. i was really proud, it was publisd, so proud. i signed three books and it gave them to the school library, and the next thing i know they were gone. and so i asked him and he said, those books are inappropriate for fifth and sixth grade girls.

it's like, wait, fifth and sixth grade girls some of them already have their periods turkeys like no, no. [laughing] >> how would he know? [laughing] >> and the next guy principal, i'mpr sorry if any of you are meant and your principles. [laughing] this is a long time ago. things have changed i hope except the books are still banned. [laughing] but the next guyuy principal ita was about dini and dini touched her special place. >> she's a reason i don't go into my daughters room for any reason. >> he has four daughters come he knows. >> that's right. he said to me if it was about a boy who would be normal. what? >> yikes. [laughing] like, another thing people told me i couldn't do because my mother was an english teacher,ut you know, she still tedious sometimes in south carolina.

she would always tell me to read books that didn't pertain to me. so. we had the book at program s well. i don't know if y'all remember the book at program, you get af. you know, i don't just look like a ninja pirtle -- turtle. i would go to libraries and didn't pertain to me and that's i started readingng so much beverly clearly and ms. judy blume. remember people telling me i couldn't read those books because i was a young black male from moncks corner south carolina and i'm like, it's great storytelling tom udall? i like judy blume disdain way i like jay-z.. they're the same type of storyteller. like a good storyteller is a great storyteller. [applause] >> anything else? >> well, there's more sacks.

so i wrote for ever. there's always more -- so vote for ever. i was told you cannot do this. you young woman enjoy her sexuality. >> were all here because young women enjoyed their sexuality. [laughing] [applause] that's why we're here. and i live in key west which happens to be even though we denied in the state of florida, that book is banned in the state of florida. [laughing] >> because a a young girl enjs her sexuality. as the father of daughters, you don't want that to happen. >> they are 15, eight, five and two. i don't -- not at this moment. judy blume, ladies and gentlemen.

[cheers and applause] >> i go by the name of charlemagne tha god. >> my friend. thank you, everyone. thanks. >> joining us now please welcome any in peabody award-winning journalist michele norris. [applause] what a thrilled to be. what a thrill to come on stage with charlamagne judy blume. good evening, everyone. oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. let's do that again. this is an occasion. good evening. thank you. good storytelling is often fixations. things you just can't let go of something that gets in your mind and it just stays there. sometimes it's a memory, it's an aroma. sometimes a person, sometimes

it's a thing. and thing that i'm going to talk to you about tonight is a thing that is stuck in my mind. it's a piece of furniture called a sideboard. you know what a sideboard is? it's like a buffet, but a little bit fancier. or that thing that sits off to the side when you're having a big event with your and the table is too full, that all the side dishes won't fit at the table. so some of them go over on the side table and that's where it holds the punch bowl. this is the center something in my mind because it's the center, a story that i receive. you see, i'm a storyteller and a story collector. i run something, the race card project, i collect stories, race and identity. in just six words and. a six word story came to me about a sidebar, and when i heard that story, i couldn't let go of it. maybe it was because my grandmother, birmingham, alabama, had a sideboard that she so proud of. would it was wouldn't it had a marble top? we used to have to polish the top of it, but the sideboard that this fellow wrote to me about from the midwest was a

sideboard that had been built by slaves in that was his six words. the sideboard is built by slaves and i received that. and then it took me a while to get back to him because. over time, i've collected more than 500,000 stories, so it takes me a while. get back to everybody who's written to me and all these things stay in my head. such that i sometimes not even know where my keys are because i have so many in my head and so many fixations on the things that are in the story. but this one really stuck with me and. so i wrote to him and i said, i want to know more about the sideboard. and he responded and said, it's been destroyed, huh? yeah, that was my response. i felt like i had been crushed. i was i angry? i had to leave the house. i went and took a long walk. i, i was emotional. i actually showed a few tears over this and i had to figure out how to call because i didn't want to confront him. i wasn't going to exactly where the finger hit him, but kind of was i and i just wanted to know why he would destroy, because i understood that it might have been difficult for him because

of the history weight, both the physical weight, the weight of what that represented. but it meant something different, i guess, to me, because of the people from whom i descended, the people who made something like and when i finally got him on the phone, he explained, oh, no, no, no, it's not destroyed. who? but he gave it away. he couldn't find someone to take it because it was so big and heavy. he wanted to give it to a museum. finally he found someone who was willing come to his state and take because they were picking up a bunch of antiques. so they came and they took this thing which weighed. it was like moving a piano and took it away and moved it to a warehouse in kansas. it was an antiques dealer. it and as we talked he explained to me why just couldn't have it in his home he's from people who once owned and that has been moving through a series of connected houses, getting smaller along the way. the house that they owned in the south was big and then a smaller house, and then they moved to

the midwestern, a smaller house. and he lives in a very small house and he said, i didn't have room for this side table, but he also just didn't have for it in his heart. he explained to me the reasons why, because he knew the history. he knew that it was built by slaves. you knew why slaves the building. because in the part of the south that he was from, they built furniture from live. and if any of you have ever worked with wood, know that live oak is a very, very kind of wood. you can cut three pine trees with a single saw. i see you nodding your head you understand this but it sometimes takes three saws to cut through a single trunk of live oak because it is so hard and because it is hard, the saw sometimes will fly off another direction. so when you go to community and you know who was working on wood because you would see the results of that lost fingers maiming, they'd lose. they'd have all kinds of cuts about them. so they decided we're going to let the enslaved do this work because it's just too dangerous. he taught me that. but turned out i could teach him something also because the research i had done, i had

learned about people who were enslaved, built furniture, who also did ironwork, who built the balustrades, and some of the architectural elements in the homes we still live in today. and what learned is that people who were unable to read and write, not because they lacked intellect, but because people refused to allow them to learn how to read, write, develop their own language through their craft. some of the enslaved told stories through the world, working through the dental molding, through the way that they carved things. they told stories of births and deaths and discoveries and most likely disappointments. he wanted that piece of furniture destroyed. i imagine why anyone would want to destroy it. i asked him, why did you tell me that it was destroyed? because that destroyed. and he said, because that's what i want to happen in my mind. i want to see it erased. i want to see it crushed. and i just can't understand.

i understand. people want to outrun a history. it's something that's perhaps something we should be thinking about. and it makes me think about another six word story that has landed my inbox. history is a complicated demand ding mistress. she will not be ignored. we know that now. in the moment that we're living in, we get to choose future. in terms of climate change, in terms of electoral politics, in terms of how we treat each other. but are a lot of people right now who are also invested in the idea that they get to choose their past past? but do they but should they all i know is that i will never forget that sideboard. i got to see it. and yet it's still in my mind. and the dude who lives in the midwest who inherited the sideboard decided to give it away.

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