This week, The New Yorker débuted its first-ever digital-only issue. The New Yorker Interviews features an exhilarating array of conversations with figures that span the worlds of politics and culture, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hockney, Stephen Sondheim, Stevie Nicks, Angélique Kidjo, and more. Today, to celebrate this digital first, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about talented interviewers over the decades. In “Lillian, Mary, and Me,” Dick Cavett writes about an epic feud that ignited between two literary powerhouses after Mary McCarthy insulted Lillian Hellman on Cavett’s show. In “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” Kenneth Tynan profiles the talk-show host Johnny Carson, finding surprising parallels with a certain F. Scott Fitzgerald character. (“Gatsby, like Carson, is a Midwesterner, a self-made millionaire, and a habitual loner, armored against all attempts to invade his emotional privacy.”) In “Oprah’s World,” Nancy Franklin considers the noteworthy œuvre of the daytime television mogul. In “ ‘Ziwe’ Is Trapped in an Interminable Dance with Whiteness,” Doreen St. Félix examines the tumultuous energy behind a newcomer’s variety-and-interview series. (“We know what Ziwe wants to dismantle. But what does this self-described ‘agent of chaos’ want to create?”) In “I Have to Ask,” Nicholas Lemann chronicles the television career of Barbara Walters, who, over a period of decades, developed a signature mix of journalism and entertainment. (“She has interviewed every President since Nixon, and many of America’s most notorious murderers. She is at once a bourgeois, an establishmentarian, and a Hollywood queen transposed to Manhattan.”) Finally, Thomas Whiteside goes behind the scenes of the gripping series of conversations, several years after Watergate, between the British journalist David Frost and the former President Richard Nixon.
—David Remnick
From The New Yorker’s Archive
Dept. of Litigation
Lillian, Mary, and Me
How an innocent question launched a life-altering lawsuit.
By Dick Cavett | December 16, 2002
Profiles
Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale
The world of Johnny Carson.
By Kenneth Tynan | February 20, 1978
The Talk of the Town
Frost vs. Nixon: A Trial on TV
Three years after the Watergate scandal, David Frost gets Richard Nixon on the air.
By Thomas Whiteside | May 16, 1977
On Television
“Ziwe” Is Trapped in an Interminable Dance with Whiteness
The variety series on Showtime, formerly an interview show on Instagram Live, struggles to release itself from the grip of its muse.
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