Modern Love Revised & Updated | Daniel Jones
53:02 Share

Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Kyle, bringing you this week's episode with Daniel Jones, the editor of the New York Times column, Modern Love. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Modern Love has been a weekly column since 2004, created and edited by Daniel Jones.

As it rose to popularity, it expanded into a podcast, a television show, and a book. In all its forms, Modern Love talks about relationships, feelings, betrayals, and revelations. Daniel Jones joins Google to talk about the anthology, "Modern Love: Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption," a collection of the column's most popular, provocative, and unforgettable essays, including stories from the hit Amazon television series.

Originally published in November of 2019, here is Daniel Jones, Modern Love, revised and updated.

So just to start off, for everyone who's not familiar, can you talk a little bit about this? By the way, it's the 15th anniversary to the day of the Modern Love column. Would you give everyone a little bit of an elevator pitch on what the column is, how submissions work, how you choose? Sure. That's more than an elevator pitch. I'll do my best.

So, Modern Love Startup, it's a personal essay column. People write essays of 15, the published length is 1500 words, which is like five double spaced pages. You need, people are often telling the most important story of their life in that amount of space.

It started on this day 15 years ago as a column that was edited by me and my wife together, which was not the most loving arrangement to have. It sounds like really romantic and fun, but she was working on another project and it was really a one-person job. So I took it over thinking it would be like a two-year job. The editor said these things last about a couple of years and they sort of fizzle out.

So I thought it was a short-term commitment. I'm very glad it's not because I really loved it. The submissions come in from around the country, increasingly from around the world through an email address. And we...

It used to just be I, but we, I have one person who helps me. We read everything and have committed to responding to everything. And I think that has helped it last as long as it has because to me the vitality of the column is just the sort of freshness of experience and having the people say what they

is important, you know, not editors. And having their story say, like, this is what needs to be told. And I feel like for people to share truly vulnerable moments and stories like that, they need to know that there's someone at the other end. So that was sort of our founding principle, I guess. How hard is it to get chosen? Is it harder than getting a job at Google? Harder than getting to Harvard?

Maybe a little bit. What are some of the numbers? Just a little bit. It's like 1 in 200. 1 in 200. Okay. So that's good for everyone to know. So you've done this for 15 years. What are some of the trends that you've seen about how love has evolved or has it not evolved? Has it stayed the same? I mean, it stays the same. It stays the same since Shakespeare and before in terms of what compels us to love.

to be with other people and to want to have sex with other people. Like all those drives, those impulses that are baked into us all stay the same. But what I think is intriguing is how sort of what's acceptable changes and what society accepts and how we... I mean, the one sort of truism about love and relationships is that you have to be vulnerable to...

to have someone know you and to know someone else on a deep level, but that's the scariest thing to do. And so I'm always intrigued by how are the ways that we avoid that? How are the ways that we try to protect ourselves from that? And just even the notion that we think we can and how being at Google, how we use technology to try to have a shortcut to love somehow or to try to

to try to sort of acquire love without putting ourselves at risk. And so on the technology piece, do you now see that that plays a large role in... Huge. Huge. Huge. I mean, technology both... Like, it affords an intimacy that feels like love.

closeness and love, but because it can be so curated. I mean, the kinds of essays that fascinate me are like these long-distance sort of text-only relationships, not just texting, but communicating somehow through typed words.

And how deep people get in those and how because you're not at risk of being close to each other and that you can allow yourself to, you can think you're revealing yourself on such a deep level, but there's such a barrier, like there's such a barrier between you that it sort of fools you into thinking that this is real intimacy.

I agree. And we're probably responsible for part of that. But I think what's really exciting about Modern Love and part of what we're here to talk about today, and we called it a media empire now. So this started out as a column, became a podcast, became several books, and now is an Amazon original television show. How do you think these different mediums serve the content? Yeah.

I mean, I have my personal view of this. The essays are the purest form and beyond that it's interpretation. And even the essay isn't pure. An essay is a collection of what the person decides to include and what they leave out. But that becomes the base story. And then what was interesting to me, like we'd done a...

a couple of in-house projects, like we did an animation project where we took essays and the author was re-interviewed and that was sort of spliced together into sort of a story and then they were animated by different animators. And that was really the first thing that happened. And then the podcast happened after that and then the TV show. But what I love is seeing talented people reimagine these stories. And even if an actor is reading

the story word for word, they're still bringing their sort of emotional past in there to it. It's a performance. And for me, I don't, like the column is my job, so I don't get to enjoy it in the same way that readers do. For me, it's like,

I'm not complaining about it. It is hard work, but it's work I enjoy. But I don't read the column as a reader. I read it as an editor. And from the moment I decide to work on something, it's problems. It's problem solving and all of that. So I don't really appreciate it as an audience. But when other people are turning it into a podcast or turning it into a TV show, even if I'm helping with those efforts, I feel like I'm an audience for that all of a sudden. And essays that didn't necessarily...

move me a lot because I was working on them and trying to get them into the paper, like devastate me when I'm on the podcast or when I see them in a TV show and I'm just like a sort of a bawling mess. Like, you know, amazing. Which one did you cry the hardest at? Of the TV show? I don't know who's seen it, but the end of episode seven with

Andrew Scott and Olivia Cooke are in a hospital and she's giving birth. And there's a couple of scenes after that that were, I mean, I've probably seen it 40 times at this point. And it works for me every time. It's just really powerful. - Amazing. So we're on to the second edition of this book. For this book, how did you, so you did this once before, but how did you sort of, you divided it into sections.

How did you divide those sections? How do you categorize all of these stories? And then specifically for this book, how did you sort of come to picking these particular essays? Some of them are, they're all now on the TV show. - Right.

So this book is just sort of a-- we did an anthology back in 2007. And this was sort of taking that book and bringing it up to date by getting rid of a ton of essays and bringing in a bunch of new ones. I mean, the sad secret about this book is I was given like three weeks to do it. But it turned out better than the previous one, which I had like a year to do.

Because it was one of these things where you can make a TV show faster than you can do a book, honestly. Like a publisher needs a year to do a book and the TV show is done in less time than that. So they needed me to turn this thing around instantly. And it was really just days of sitting with these essays and figuring out how they sort of cohered into groups. But the groups should be provocative. Group names should be provocative in their own right and all of that.

And I literally, I just sort of slammed it together and wrote a new introduction and sent it off in the time I had because I didn't have much time. But it turned out better because of that

short time frame. I couldn't obsess about it like most things. And I think the intro is really important, actually. So when you get the book, read the intro because you talk about something really important. You mentioned it before, vulnerability, because I think part of what you're so good at doing is you've actually gotten the privilege of sort of defining love and defining it broadly. And I know you always sort of, you always, I know you've been asked what is love or the definition of love. And you do try to do that at the beginning of the book, but

For modern love specifically, can you tell us a little bit about how you've defined love? I know you talk about desire and vulnerability and some, you know, but they're not all romance. Well, it's important to me that it not be just about romance. Like, I don't even like the word romance. It just seems so shallow compared to the word love. Like, it feels like sort of a...

to get you to fall in love. But love is the deep bonds of a marriage or family life or children or parents or pets, anything that makes you feel so connected to someone at the expense of yourself in a way. And this is the most important thing in anyone's life are your human relationships.

And to have essays that are, you know, where each person is sort of defining it on their terms, they're saying like, this is what's most important to me and this is the experience that most affected me. That sort of, it sort of gets defined through this volume of people writing about it. To me, it gets defined through example, not, not,

or not, you know, definition. And you've provided the world with so many examples, so that's so nice, and we appreciate that. Thanks. It's been fun. So Andrew Reynolds did an essay in the book, as well as some other people. A lot of the contributors either have, we talked about Amy Krauss, or have written sort of our writers in their own right. What's it like when you have somebody who is famous and submitting versus...

you know, your everyday person, does that make a difference? Do you think people read into it in a different way? How does that sort of connect to the whole process? I don't think it is different, honestly. I think everybody has the same concern about, like, what are people going to think of me if I...

you know, talk about this stuff. I mean, one of the episodes in the series, episode four, that has Tina Fey and John Slattery is by a writer named Anne Leary, and she's married to the actor Dennis Leary. And she wrote a really... This is one of the essays that I really pushed to have in the series because it was so meaningful to me personally in how it talked about what...

what a good marriage is, basically. Like what a failing marriage is and what a good marriage is. And she used this sort of metaphor of their tennis game. And it was one of those light bulb moments of brilliance that I was just like, it comes about sort of once every five years or something for me, and that was one of them. But that was something to write about someone who's a public figure.

the inner workings of their marriage, the fact that they decided to get divorced, and they have kids, you know? They have kids who are teenagers at the time. And I mean, I feel like part of writing about this is ego, like the assumption that the world wants to hear what you have to say. But part of it is this generosity of like, I feel like what I went through would help other people who feel shame about it or...

can articulate it in the way that I can and most of the pieces that I'm most drawn to have that sort of tone of offering like

I'm offering this." Like, it's not a sort of like show-offy, prancy tone or something. It's like an offering through learned experience and difficult experience. And to that extent, so you pushed obviously for this one to be in. You've read so many essays. I mean, we talked about this. Because a lot of times we all think it goes into a black hole. It doesn't. You actually respond-- No. They all get opened and they all at least get started.

You said once every five years something comes along and just blows you away. So do you have some favorites? Is it hard to be objective as sometimes you read something and maybe it hits really close to home or something of that nature? I do have favorites, but the favorites that I have aren't necessarily ones that did especially well. There are more ones where I felt very...

protective of the writer because they were really,

trying to get down something that was so personally revealing and difficult. You know, in one case, it was actually, it was one, we had our best material at lunch, I have to say. We talked about all this stuff at lunch. But one of the essays that I was proudest of was by a Chicago poet named Courtney Queenie who had been, it was about domestic abuse and she was, a scene where she was sort of getting beaten up by her boyfriend in his apartment and

Then it sort of spirals into her seeking a protective order and all that. But it's so beautifully written. And she'd written the first draft in the second person where it's like, you're in the apartment, you're blah, blah, like trying to sort of push it away from herself. And I said, we can't really do it that way. It's got to be a first-person essay. And that was sort of the first hurdle to overcome. And we made it through all of these editorial hurdles. And the last one was...

What happens if this provokes him to to come after you and we had a bunch of conversations about that and She said I'm willing to you know, silence doesn't work with this stuff like I'm willing to to take that risk And that's on me too. You know, I'm the one who's sort of enabling this thing to happen But the piece came out it was it was fantastic and so important for a lot of people who had

been through that and the ending of the essay is so moving because she finally gets, it's the whole process to get a protective order of protection

And when you get it, it's just a piece of paper. It legally protects you, but it doesn't really physically protect you from anything. But she sort of walks out of the courtroom holding this piece of paper, and she just feels happiness for the first time in so long. And even at the same time, knowing that it's just symbolic. Like, it's not any kind of real protection. She doesn't have a bodyguard or anything like that, but just the fact that it was granted to her.

But you talk a lot about vulnerability and part of the vulnerability for both love and submitting and letting the world sort of hear your story So yeah, that's a great example one thing that I love is and especially the podcast and in the book and and is that you get life updates at the end sometimes from Yeah, so you actually get to see sort of what's happened and

How has that been for you? I mean, did you ever imagine people would sort of be following this years later and what happens to them? It's been great. I don't participate in that process. So that's all done by the podcast producers. They do two sets of interviews with the writers, a pre-interview and then a taped interview. And then they splice it together into, you know, something that makes sense and cuts out the extra stuff. Yeah.

But I don't hear that. I hear the final, the sort of next to final version of the podcast that's just sent to me and my assistant as an audio file. And we listen to it the day before it goes live because we just have to check it out and make sure everything's okay with it from the Times perspective.

And I hear those interviews and it's all news to me. You know, like I am in touch. I maintain relationships with some of the writers, but there have been so many. But so I don't know. And especially in stories that have taken place, you know, five years, 10 years before. And the other great thing they do often is involve other people who are in the stories, husbands and wives.

children and friends and other people who are involved in these stories and they get their perspective. So I love that part. That's sort of the big bonus for me to be able to hear how these people are doing and hear from the other people involved. And usually it's pretty heartwarming. Usually it sounds like they come out. No? Yeah, I can't think of any time when it was combative in the...

in the postscript. - But it's good that you get to hear, do they stay together? How does their life turn out? And I think that's-- - Yeah, they can be really moving. - Very personal. - The postscript's gonna be really moving. - So the show, big deal. TV star now. So you're a consulting-- - I'm a TV star. - You're a TV star, we'll talk about that. You're a consulting producer on the show. What does that mean? - A consulting producer can be anything from a vanity title to someone who's really involved.

I started out, they needed me because I'm the only person who knows the archive. And they wanted, I think they wanted to make sure along the way that they were honoring the original column and that I could sort of keep an eye on that. So at the beginning it was mostly what essays are we going to use? And there were 700 and some to choose from.

And they read, John Carney, the showrunner and director, read a lot of them, hundreds. And the other people read as they could, the Amazon studio executives and the executive producers. But it was like, what are we going to pull from? What are we going to use? What can the final variety be? And I was involved in any of those final decisions. I was just offering up like, okay, well, here's a bunch of essays about this and here's a bunch of essays about this and whatever.

In the end, there were probably 200 or so that everybody read. But then as the show went into production, it was all filmed in New York a year ago in the fall, I just involved myself, I sort of insinuated myself into every part of it that I could. And I was still working every day at the Times, but I would leave. Each morning, you'd start out at like four in the morning and you'd get an email with the

with the locations and everything for the day. And so I could just go off on the subway or whatever and find where they were and sit in my New York Times Modern Love chair, you know, director's chair. And I loved it. Oh my God, I've never had more fun with anything in my life than doing this.

And just showing up, seeing how it worked, watching them shoot scene, the exact same scene 15 times in a row, meeting everybody involved. It was just a blast. And then the last phase was helping to promote the show, plan for all the stuff that was happening with the show launch, and sort of the times created a...

an ever-growing team of people. At the end, I think it was like 20 people or something from all different departments who all contributed something to how we were going to play our part in rolling this show out. And that was fun, too, because, you know, I work in styles and I sort of work with the same editors and people over and over. But I really like to have these sort of cross-department, you know, connections that we did like merchandising with

Brian Ray, the artist from "Iron Love," who did the cover, has the little drawings that are on the cover. He did t-shirts and hoodies, and in time for Christmas, we'll have pajamas. Oh, wow. We're all waiting, waiting anxiously for...

So it was just all those efforts and events and stuff like that. And all of the essays or all of the episodes are, their essays are in this new book. Right, there are eight essays that formed episodes and they're all in this book. That's nice. That was on purpose, I assume. That was on purpose. That was on purpose. So you can find them in the book. You have to sort of look for them under their different headings. But it's a nice, that's a nice, brings everything together. And I think it's really interesting when you get to see the

see the film and then read the essay or read the essay and then see how it plays out because it really does. There are also essays in this book that I know that we're working on for season two. Oh, there is going to be a season two, everyone. That's very exciting. There's a season two, yeah. That was a week, yeah, thank you. A week into, after the release, the numbers were so good that they automatically...

Renewed it. And you have so much source material, right? You've got 700 and something essays. I think we probably have about 600 seasons worth. Yeah, perfect. Good, that'll give me something to do. So how do the writers feel? I mean, I'm sure, you know, in the past when you submitted to Modern Love, you knew what it was, right? You're submitting to a column. All of a sudden, now you have a chance to be Hollywood or Hollywood-tized. I know.

Were all of the authors that you-- or writers that you chose, were they happy about that? Did they feel that it was a strange experience to see themselves being portrayed by some of the biggest stars today? Yeah, I think it was a little weird. They were definitely happy to be chosen.

And the Times has this process where if anyone inquires about the rights to an article of any kind, it goes, there's a sort of chain of emails that get started that includes the writer of that article. So all these people were tipped off. So they inquired about dozens and dozens and dozens. And all these people had sort of heard, you know, whispers about the show.

So they didn't get anything official other than this, like that they were CC'd knowing that theirs was being considered. So from that point on, everyone was like, I hope they pick mine. And so when it got down to the final eight that were picked, those people were thrilled and they were compensated for it. And

They weren't, with one significant exception, involved. The scripts were written independent of them. The essay by a woman named Terry Cheney that inspired the Anne Hathaway episode, which is about sort of dating while bipolar, essentially, they involved her. Both John Carney and Anne Hathaway talked about

to her a lot because it was just something they didn't want to get wrong. Like they just wanted to make sure their artistic choices, which were kind of bold, like it turns into a sort of a La La Land opening to represent her manic phases and it's just all bright colors. And so he had all these things in mind and he just wanted to make sure that that would be something that was accurate to her experience. And there's a part of the middle of that episode

where she imagines herself as the title, as the star of her own sitcom in a title sequence, like a Mary Tyler Moore kind of title sequence. And that came straight out of her conversation with him. And he was saying, well, what,

Like, what does it feel like when you're a manic? And she said, I feel like I'm in the title sequence of my own sitcom. Wow. And he wrote that into the script because of that. Did you find that the episodes are pretty faithful to the script? They vary a lot. Some of them are very faithful and some...

really just takes the situation and sort of creates a story beyond that. And are the writers okay with that? Do they... I didn't hear any complaints. Didn't hear any complaints. No, I mean, Terry didn't like... She understood, but didn't like that...

the Anne Hathaway character repeatedly loses jobs. And it's a plot point in the episode when she loses the job that she has. And she's like, I never lost a job. That was the whole thing about her.

sort of super achievement is that, you know, she straight A student in school, first in law school, all this stuff, and that she was so proud of the fact that she could hide it and make up for it. And she never lost a job. And she was like, I understand why they had to do it that way, but, you know, I never lost a job or got a B because of it. Wow. But when

But when Anne Hathaway is playing you, it's kind of okay. You're like, right, Anne, do whatever you want. Yeah, smooths a lot over. It's amazing how many stars attached themselves to this project. Were you surprised by that? I mean, you obviously have stars that also do the podcast, right? Yeah, that surprised me too. I don't know why I'm so pessimistic about this stuff. When we had our first podcast meeting up in Boston...

And I wasn't hot on the idea of turning it into a podcast in the first place. I just thought, like, well, who wants to listen to someone read them an essay?

And then they thought that they would make that more appealing by trying to get actors, like we sat in this meeting and the guy who's the general manager of WBUR said, "I want to have Meryl Streep read these things." And I was like, "Good luck with that." What do they have? Why would they do this, essentially? I don't know why I always think that way, but I do.

And they just started asking and people started saying yes. And the podcast is sort of, as soon as a bunch of people say yes, and you go to more people and say, well, these people said yes, then they say yes. That's right. Yeah, totally. And the same thing happened with the TV show, but the...

The idea that it was an anthology, so each episode was six days. Six days of shooting. Wow. And you can squeeze six days of shooting into almost anybody's schedule. I mean, there's a lot of stuff after that with promotion and whatever. In fact, I think actors spend more time promoting something than they do shooting it. But it was...

It was easy to shift around and get people, you know, to be able to work them into a schedule. And there was no long-term commitment. It wasn't like this is going to be your vehicle for the next five years. You know, it was like these are your six days. So they began those asks. And I think Anne Hathaway was one of the first asks for that specific essay. And it was, again, you know, as soon as people start saying yes, then more people say yes.

say yes. And they pretty much just went down their wish list and everybody said yes. Wow. Yeah. This medium's pretty long. So, you know, you talked about Anne Hathaway having a sort of La La Land breakout scene. Do you find that that sort of, I mean, the essays probably take

I know on the podcast they read them in maybe, what, 10, 15 minutes? It's 10 minutes almost exactly every time. Now you have 30 minutes to fill for somebody's story. You have 20 extra minutes to really show this story. What did you think of that process? And were there scenes where you were like, wow, that really added some...

some color to this that I didn't see in the present. It was fun for me to see what they took advantage of, like what they, like in Anne Leary's essay, which is about this marriage falling apart, lots of scenes in a therapy office. But she has just like a couple of lines in the original essay about the March of the Penguins, the movie The March of the Penguins, where, you know, penguins just mate for as long as, just to

until their egg is hatched and their penguin child is on his or her way. And so she was comparing their marriage to a penguin marriage and just mentions it as part of that. And so John-- oh, no, it wasn't. It was Sharon Horgan who wrote and directed that episode of Catastrophe.

And she just imagined that into a whole scene where they're in the theater. And so those, I mean, I was clued into this stuff when I was reading the scripts along the way. And so it was just a, it was sort of a gratifying surprise to see like what they would choose to expand and what they would choose to leave out. And even the, you know, some of the episodes, like the Anne Hathaway story is not much of a story on paper. It's too complex.

You know, one meeting someone in a supermarket, a date that doesn't go well, and then a date that doesn't happen at all. And the rest is sort of her talking about her childhood and growing up with this and eventually being able to sort of come be open about it and get treated for it. But even when that essay was chosen, I was like, how are you going to build a 30-minute episode out of this?

Interesting. Out of a meeting and two dates and some history, they did. Wow. So let's talk about something fun. You're in a couple of episodes. You have a couple of cameos. Yeah. Has anybody spotted Daniel? You told me a fun story about that that I think you should share. Oh, yeah. Well, we were looking early on for some device to sort of connect people.

the episodes and in the end they did something toward the end of the series that um that did that but before that was decided i suggested that i deliver a pizza in every episode that was kind of a joke and they didn't um they didn't take me up on it it would have been kind of distracting i think to have showing up as a pizza delivery person in every set um but um

Yeah, but I did make it clear that I wanted to be in an episode. And so Emmy Rossum, bless her heart, put me into the start of episode six.

as a father walking along with a daughter, because it's an episode about a woman whose father dies when she's 11, and it sort of fucked up her relationship life. And early on in the episode, she's looking sort of longingly at my wonderful relationship with my actor seven-year-old daughter walking along the sidewalk.

You're a natural. I know. It was really good. It took like four hours and the scene is about seven seconds or something like that.

So I was in that scene and most people who know me see me in that scene because that's where the focus of her eyes go and you can even hear my voice even if you can't hear what I'm saying. And then the scene that nobody notices me in is I'm in the Sharon Horgan episode as just a diner in the background behind John Slattery and his actor son is sitting here and I'm sitting behind them and I'm

But it's sort of a breakout moment for me because as an extra, if you're a good extra, nobody notices you. So you can't make any noise. You have to fake talk and fake eat. And you have real silverware that you can't clink against anything.

And I'm really good. I'm just so-- I'm total wallpaper. If this modern love thing doesn't work out, we know. I know. We have a backup for you. The extra community is a whole community. All these people show up as extras every day on all these things. And they know each other. And they get sent off to some church basement. And then they're all summoned back to the restaurant. And it's a whole social scene. It's great.

New York plays a big role in at least the essays that were chosen. A lot of them are in New York. That also, as you spoke about, helps tie in, I think, a lot of these stories together. Not all the essays are from New York. You said your biggest reader base is in California. Yeah, we have more New York Times subscribers in California than New York. So was that sort of also a device, you know, in terms of using New York to sort of tie everyone together? I think so. I mean, I...

I don't know what John's thinking was on that, but it definitely feels like a sort of love story to New York. It's sort of a gauzy rather than a gritty New York.

And it's, yeah, it's a bit of a love letter to the city. For sure, for sure. It is the New York Times after all. Right. I'm going to invite anyone who has a question up to the two microphones at this time. So please start lining up. But in the meantime, I have a question for you, which is, have you written a modern love? And if you did, what would that be about? I kind of have. I have, I wrote...

Let's see two versions of my own modern love story one was um

Essentially published in the book that led to Modern Love being created, which is a book of essays I edited and contributed to called The Bastard on the Couch, which was the sequel to my wife's book, The Bitch in the House. It's true. It's not even a joke. Well, it's kind of a joke. But those two books together, which were essays about relationships, is what led the then style editor to want to create the Modern Love column.

and have us do it. But I wrote that story, which is about my life with my wife, and it was about chivalry. It was sort of an examination of how chivalry is coming to it. What was it called? I can't remember the title of it. The End of Chivalry, I think it was called. And I wrote another thing for, I think it was for Harper's Bazaar or something, when I had a book coming out that was

They were like, "We want to hear your modern love story." And I didn't really want to tell my modern love story, but I sort of told a safe version of it. We can read it in the book. Yeah. Please. Around 2015, there was this piece published titled something like "36 Questions to Fall in Love." Yes. And I was introduced to that on a first date and I really loved it and I still do it with friends. It just feels like training wheels for intimate conversation. It's kind of fun.

I'm curious what the reaction was on your end, because it felt like such a little cultural moment to me, and I didn't hear anybody else talking about it in real life, actually. It was a huge cultural moment. It's the most... So that essay came out, and I did...

And it was the most read story of the year in The Times. But I did a sidebar that had the questions and had an introduction to the questions. It took me about 10 minutes. And that sidebar is the, I believe, this is being taped, right? I'll say one of the most popular things ever to run in The Times, but I believe it was the most popular

most read article, bylined article ever to appear in the New York Times. And it's though, it's just so ironic, like I've worked so hard on so many things. You know, a toss-off thing. But tens of millions of people read it. And the article itself also had tens of millions of people who read it. And I loved that piece because it was

It was a gimmick, but it was a gimmick with integrity. And those questions are what we need today. Like, if the problem in relationships is... I can go on and on about this. These days, we date strangers. And we didn't used to date strangers. We used to date people we knew. We used to have communities where...

Even if you were set up on a blind date you you knew each other somehow like you that you had people in common who knew each other And now we date strangers and I don't even think we realize how weird that is It's weird and there's a lot of distrust and it makes being vulnerable much harder and people ghost each other and it's just a cruel cruel, you know world out there and it doesn't mean that people don't find love because they still do and huge numbers, but

It's just a weird phenomenon. It's a weird time to be alive. And those, I just feel like those questions break through that. Because no one wants to be the first person who is vulnerable. And that game forces equality on that score where you have to ask each other. They start out pretty easy and then they get deeper and deeper and harder and harder and more probing.

and whether you end up falling in love with the person. Oh, and then it ends with having to stare into each other's eyes for four minutes, which is so hard. That's so hard and weird. But...

If it doesn't make you fall in love with the person, it at least allows you to be known by the other person and for that person to be known by you. And it can work in long-term relationships, and it can work in friendships, and it can work with parents and children, and it can work romantically, but it's purely because it forces this issue of making vulnerability equal.

Yeah, thank you. Do it with your teams at work too. Hi. With anyone that was depicted in one of the stories that wasn't the writer submitting it, has they ever expressed that they were misrepresented or anything like that? Like they're either upset about the way they were represented? I mean, we tried to handle all that kind of stuff before publication. So...

we ask the writers to notify people who are in it. It's sort of like a gradient of seriousness with stuff like that. But with the most serious being contentious divorces or sexual abuse or something like that, and then going all the way down to

you know, the one night stand where you never see the person again and you don't even remember their name. But, I mean, one thing I've sort of learned over the years, just that you can't really know until you have experience doing it is, you know, when to involve people, what to notify them about, what to have them read, whether I need to personally talk to them or exchange information with them.

But we have a really good record of not having people be pissed off. And sometimes people are, but we know that in advance. And people are entitled to tell their stories, and you don't live your story absent of other people. And there was a piece that was done about...

One of my favorite ones about a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan who comes back to Vancouver to discover his, and he's young, 20s, his wife is having an affair with her co-worker and they end up getting divorced. And it has all these wonderful scenes where he finds himself in the

I hope we can make a TV episode of this one too. He finds himself in the waiting room of a therapist's office in Vancouver with the wife of the guy who his wife had an affair with. And she's seeking therapy for her divorce. And they're in the room together. And the therapist comes out. And she's like, oh my god, I didn't realize it was the same relationship. But that one, the people who were those other people

were not at all happy about having that story come out. But people in general aren't happy about the New York Times having a name in the New York Times, unless it's something like

They're uncovering a lot of bad things about a lot of bad people, and people aren't happy about that. But in this case, I was in touch with the people. I was like, I realize this isn't what you would like to have happen, but do you actually contest anything that happens in here? And they really couldn't. And so we just went ahead with it. And that's not fun.

So you're sort of balancing like whose whose interest do you want to honor here the interest of the storyteller or as long as it's it's happened You know people are allowed to say it happened Thank you. Yeah, and it's not anonymous when you submit you have to yeah, you have that's yeah The Times rules and I like these rules you have to have you can't change facts You can't change names can use an anonymous byline or anything like that I think as soon as you start

evading and replacing, then all the credibility of a personal essay falls apart. It's gotta be all out there.

I've read and I'm just wondering if you can confirm that there will be a soundtrack from all the music from the episodes. I cannot figure out what the final song of the final episode is. And I'm like almost embarrassed to admit how much time I spent trying to find it. And it kind of has the name on Amazon when you like click for the extra information, but it doesn't give you who is actually singing the song. The Lost and Found song? Yes. Okay.

The soundtrack came out on Friday. It's today. Thursday. It came out last Friday. It's available on any place where you can get music. YouTube Music? It's called... YouTube Music. Only on YouTube Music, probably. Only on YouTube Music. Um...

And a lot of the songs, this was kind of funny because they, a lot of the songs were original and people were trying to Shazam all these songs and weren't having any luck and it's because it was original music. I have no idea why that soundtrack didn't release with the show. And I don't know if they were caught off guard by all the interest in the music.

But I'm one of the first people who bought the soundtrack. I bought it. I'm going to go look on my phone right now. This is like breaking news. I don't know if season one, Gary, I forget his last name now. Confusing on one of the actors, Gary Carr. But the person who did most of the songs is named Gary. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

There's a search term for you. Any other questions? I have learned so much about relationships from reading Modern Love all these years, and I was just wondering, piece of advice, you know, like one definitive thing that you have learned from all your years of editing the column. Hardest question for last.

I mean, it's going to sound really sort of boring, but I think the hardest thing and the most necessary thing in relationships is just sort of basic kindness and decency. And I see that in-- and it's-- you know, when you're with someone for a long time, you just start to lose that. Like, you don't treat the people closest to you in life with the same respect that you treat a stranger.

you know, that you run into on the sidewalk. And actually this is something that Anne says, she's just full of pearls of wisdom. This is something that she said too, was that, you know, treat your partner, treat your loved ones the same, you know, with the same kindness as you would at someone you run into at a party and start talking to. Don't, you know, you don't treat those people dismissively and, you know,

And, you know, cut them off and talk to them, you know, abruptly and act impatient. And you need to sort of do that same thing with the people you love. Just a few more. Anyone else has any last questions? Well, in the meantime, I'll ask one just quickly. Do you have any favorite love stories that are not modern love? No. No. Short question. Yeah.

Yeah, but I'd have to think about it. I don't have it on speed dial. Okay, you think about it. What's your question? I love the tiny love stories, and I wanted to know more about that, how it started, and if it has the same success. Oh, I'm glad you asked. The tiny love stories started a little over a year ago. These are 100-word love stories with a picture, very sort of Instagrammable. And there was...

Talk of wanting to do another modern love column.

And I didn't want to do another, like it wouldn't be called Modern Love, but it could be called Modern Something. The idea was that it would make all the stuff doubly as popular, but my fear is that it would just steal from my own audience. And I didn't want to do another essay column. I feel like I want this to be the essay column. And so in response to that demand, I said, well, let's try to come up with a new way of telling a love story. I think we should tell a short, really short love story that would have

you know, a picture and see what we come up with. And so we started this a year ago. I have a woman who works with me who's worked with me for years, even though she just graduated from college like a year ago. But she's really smart and really good at this stuff. And so when she graduated, she was helping me sort of as a part-time intern for years. And then we brought her onto The Times when she graduated.

And this became her project. We worked on it together. And we still work on it together, but she's increasingly taken over the load. And people submit these 100-word stories through a form, attach their picture.

We curate four or five of them into a column. And the joy for me was, like the fear was that we would get all these 100-word How We Met stories with like a wedding photo. And I wanted it to be the same as the column where it's really sort of emotional, impactful stories that cover the broad spectrum of what love can be.

And that's what it's become. Some of these are just so powerful. They make us cry, you know, in a hundred words. And sometimes the picture is really such a good complement to the story. So we're totally proud, and I'm totally proud of her, this woman, Mia Lee, who sort of oversees it at this point. And we're doing a book of them that will come out soon.

about a year from now, we're just starting it. And it will have a page a day tear off calendar component to it too. So I'm really glad that these stories will have this new life. I was curious how writing this column has impacted your own relationship. I don't know. You know, I'm always asked that question and it's so...

woven itself into my life that it's hard to sort of separate lessons from it. What I take from the column, which is sort of a surprise, and this is not just from what gets published, but from all the stuff that I read through, and now this includes all the stuff that's submitted to the Tiny Love Stories, which we've gotten like 15,000 of them or something in the past year, is like what kind of person

sort of leads a happy life and what kind of person doesn't and the choices that lead you down either of those paths and so much of it has to do with what we were talking about for with with vulnerability and with being able to

to have bad things happen in your life, which bad things happen in every person's life. And how do you react to that? Do you, do you, you know, if you have a child die, do you adopt a child again or something like that? Or do you close yourself off? And I see that dividing line over and over and over in the short stories or the longer ones of people being brave and choosing to be brave. And that that is like,

the path of light, you know? But you also see the sort of bitterness and blame and withdrawal. Totally understandable, but it's not the path of happiness, you know? It's not fulfilling and it's, you know, this is your one shot. You live life with other people. It's so easy to isolate ourselves these days.

So I'm always reminded of that. And I'm a pretty private, insular person. And it's good for me. Like, it's good for me to be reminded of that and the sort of human connections and how important they are. Well, we are so happy you were here today. And thank you for being here. And one more round of applause. Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.