ZadekpediaOverview
The New Yorker enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly through its writers and its reporting rather than as an institution examined in its own right. In the excerpts, the magazine is identified as the employer of guests, the venue for articles the host urges listeners to read, and a publication whose coverage is invoked as evidence that a controversy has registered beyond libertarian circles. No excerpt describes the magazine’s ownership, history, editorial stance, or founding.
Sarah Stillman and “The List”
The most extended treatment comes in a 2016 episode with Sarah Stillman, introduced by Bob Zadek as a reporter and columnist for The New Yorker who has written a major article called “The List.” Zadek tells listeners the article has been widely read and positively received, and asks Stillman what the list is. Stillman says the article focuses on young people placed on public sex offender registries after a wide range of convictions, and that the predatory stranger case is very much an outlier when it comes to juveniles. She describes a girl in Texas who pulled down the pants of another kid on the playground, was charged with a sex offense in juvenile court, convicted, and placed on a public registry — something Stillman says haunted her into her 20s. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)
Zadek frames the segment himself, comparing the registries to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and its letter A, and asking whether the lists accomplish a public good or a public bad. Stillman declines to offer full policy prescriptions, saying it is not her job as an investigative journalist to find all of the complex policy prescriptions, and points instead to researcher Nicole Pittman, who she says created a group called Impact Justice and wrote a Human Rights Watch report on the registry’s societal impacts. Stillman says she was won over by empirical evidence showing something different from what people first imagined when they conceived of the registry. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)
Asked whether states are moving in a more enlightened direction, Stillman says she cannot say she is seeing concrete changes on the ground quite yet, but that a growing community across the political spectrum wants to re-examine the issue, and that the laws came about in a moment of fear and were crafted quickly before research existed. She names Patty Wetterling as someone speaking out. Zadek pushes back on her phrase “understandable fear,” saying he is not so sure the fear is understandable rather than irrational, and notes that society relies on lists a great deal, including no-fly lists. Stillman begins to respond that the registries also came out of a long silencing of the damage of sexual assault, citing the attention given to the movie Spotlight, before Zadek interrupts to let her sign off for Mother’s Day. He closes by commending the article, giving its publication date as March 14, 2016, and saying he will return to discuss the death of Justice Scalia. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)
The magazine as citation and foil
In a 2009 episode on Cash for Clunkers, the magazine appears only in passing. Katherine Mangu-Ward walks through Bastiat’s parable of the broken window — the boy, the shopkeeper, the glazier, the argument that the money will stimulate the economy — and applies it to the old cars being junked under the program, which she says were valuable items Americans once bought from each other and shipped to the Third World. Zadek, responding, sets aside what he calls his sarcasm about a car on milk crates and says, “that’s just the New Yorker in me.” He goes on to describe the program as destroying a capital asset in the name of stimulating the economy. Cash For Clunkers is a Dud (2009)
In a 2014 episode, the magazine figures in a recorded clip from Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation, played by Zadek to illustrate outrage at the Obama administration’s handling of the Bowe Bergdahl exchange. Welch says the president disregarded statutory authority requiring 30 days’ notice to Congress, and that everybody, including the president’s supporters like Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, says “Yeah, it’s illegal, but…” — and that people shrugging at it shows what partisan mindsets have done. Zadek introduces the clip by describing Welch as a participant on a television show supported by Reason called The Independents. Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014)
Across episodes
The magazine recurs across the episodes, but not as a subject under development. In 2009 it supplies a self-deprecating aside from Zadek; in 2014 it appears inside a quoted clip as the venue where a commentator acknowledged illegality while shrugging at it; in 2016 it is the employer of a guest and the publisher of the article under discussion; in 2022 it is cited as the venue of a favorable review. The episodes show no argument advanced about the magazine that later episodes revise or extend.