This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
You may know Ari Shapiro's voice from NPR's flagship program "All Things Considered." He joins In the Moment to discuss his new book, "The Best Strangers in the World."
He kicks off the interview with a reflection on his roots in Fargo, North Dakota.
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Lori Walsh:
Ari Shapiro, welcome to In the Moment in South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Thanks for being here.
Ari Shapiro:
It is a pleasure to join you. Thanks for having me.
Lori Walsh:
You kick this book off with your roots in North Dakota, which I'm guessing a lot of people around here don't know. And you say that being a Jewish kid in North Dakota helped do your job by helping people understand each other. Tell us a little bit about your time here in the Dakotas.
Ari Shapiro:
Yeah, my parents both taught at NDSU. I was born in Fargo and lived there till I was eight, and I still feel like that is a town that has shaped me, even though I haven't been back since my childhood.
I do, by the way, remember, at a very young age, I went with my best friends' parents on a trip to South Dakota and got so painfully homesick. I remember bawling to my parents over the phone from the hotel room. No knock on South Dakota.
But the thing is, as one of the few Jewish kids at my elementary school, every December, I would go from classroom to classroom with a menorah and a dreidel talking about Hanukkah. And it was kind of my first experience as a public speaker and also as an ambassador, introducing people to something they were unfamiliar with.
And what I realize is that now as a journalist, I kind of perform those same acts of translation. I serve as an ambassador with people who I have no personal connection to beyond my journalistic interest in them. But when I go to coastal Senegal and talk to people whose homes are being swallowed by rising seas, or I go to a small town in Mississippi where workers at a prison are not getting paid because of a government shutdown, in a way, I'm doing the same kind of thing and using the same kinds of skills that I learned as that little kid in Fargo going from classroom to classroom with a menorah and the dreidel.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, and it all comes down to empathy for you as well as hard-hitting journalism, but you're always looking for, you say in the book and you can hear it in your work as well, that you're looking for the people who are impacted by the policy and you're looking for something that's relatable.
Help us understand how you choose your stories and find the people that you want to talk to.
Ari Shapiro:
Yeah, there's absolutely a place for asking tough questions to the people who are making policy. But the thing that I live for, the thing that I strive for, the thing that I fill the book with, is the stories about the people who might seem different from us but actually have much more in common with us than we might realize. And so when I'm traveling, doing my work as a journalist, I'm always looking for those ways to connect stories to listeners back home.
I mean, to give you one example, in coastal Turkey, when I was covering the Syrian refugee crisis, I remember meeting this café owner who had set up folding tables in front of his restaurant with power strips, and he had in the windows of his restaurant put the Wi-Fi code and password. And all of these folding tables with power strips were full of people who were making this difficult journey from Syria to Europe, and they were charging their mobile phones and they were FaceTiming or Skyping with their families back in Syria. And the Syrian refugee crisis was in the news all the time during that period. It was 2015. And I just remember thinking, oh, that search for a place to charge your phone, that search for a Wi-Fi hotspot where you can get connectivity to talk to your family, that's something that anybody listening to this story in South Dakota or anywhere in the world can connect with.
Lori Walsh:
And he says, "I would like to think somebody would do this for me."
Ari Shapiro:
Exactly. And that's that empathetic leap that is so meaningful to me when I can find it, and that I try to share with listeners and that I try to thread throughout this book.
Lori Walsh:
I want to bring out another aspect of this book, which is the support you received from people like Nina Totenberg, from people like Susan Stamberg, the founding mothers of NPR, your bosses, your producers, to be yourself, to be fully yourself, to get married to Mike, to do the things that you needed to do to live your life in spite of sometimes listener criticism and homophobia.
Ari Shapiro:
Mike and I have been together since we were in college. So I was never hiding him. I was never hiding the fact that we were together. But especially when the movement for same-sex marriage started in the United States and Mike and I wanted to go get married, I felt like I was stepping into the middle of a culture war that I should have been narrating as a journalist, not participating in as someone getting married.
And it is a huge credit to the people I worked with, the people I worked for, that at every crossroads, they said, "You should be yourself. You should be your full self. You should go get married. You should live your life, and you can also be a journalist."
And that doesn't mean that I'm an advocate or an activist. It doesn't mean that I set aside the goal of representing both sides thoroughly and accurately and fairly. But that's kind of the push-pull that I try to explore throughout this book, is how do we bring our full selves to the stories that we tell, and also try to fairly, thoroughly, in a nuanced way, tell those stories that allows any listener to feel like they could be a surrogate for me, the narrator.
It's a tough question, one that I've explored throughout my career in different ways, and that presents sort of one of the through lines of this book.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Another through-line is this idea that you're very used to and adept at, and award-winning, at creating radio that really is short-lived in some ways, although much of it endures and is timeless, but tomorrow you get to go back and do it all again. This is a book. It's going to have literal shelf life.
Ari Shapiro:
Oh, I know. It's so stressful.
Look, as I say in the book, I have always been attracted to forms of expression that are short-lived. Like I sing with a band, I like to cook, I make radio. What do these things have in common? You do it and then they're gone, and then the next day you start from scratch and do it again. And one reason I was always afraid to write a book is because I knew that whether it was good, bad, or indifferent, it would sit on a shelf and stare at me forever as the book that I wrote. So now that it's out there, all I can hope is that it is meaningful to people, that it has a positive impact, that people laugh or cry or are moved or want to read something aloud to a friend. And at this point, it's out of my hands, so I have to just let go of any of those fears or concerns.
Lori Walsh:
Well, if it helps, I already have excerpts from the book written down on a Post-it note on my desk.
Ari Shapiro:
Oh, wow. Really? I'm dying to know what they are. Can I ask you?
Lori Walsh:
Sure.. I'm not at my desk, but they're in my notebook too. All kinds of good things. But the one—well, there's a couple that have some not-FCC-approved words in there.
But speaking of the band, I do want to say, your book tour is bringing you to Minneapolis on March 28th. And Pink Martini is playing in Brooking, South Dakota on the 27th, Fargo on the 29th and Minneapolis on March 30th. Can I put any of those together and make a guess that you might make an appearance?
Ari Shapiro:
It kills me that I can't do those performances. I have not been back to Fargo since I was eight, and to return with Pink Martini would be such a dream. I'm still in touch with one of my elementary school friends from Fargo named Ryan, and he is going to treat the band to the experience when they're in town. And I'm going to be on my book tour, so I won't be able to join them. But I hope that if people can make the trip, they will come see me in Minneapolis and come see Pink Martini, because both, I hope, will be an experience to remember.
Lori Walsh:
And this is all about expressing your full self as an artist, as a journalist, and now as an author. Ari Shapiro, thank you so much for your time. We really, really appreciate it.
Ari Shapiro:
I've loved the conversation. Thank you. And once we're done, you can tell me the not-FCC-approved words you wrote down.
Lori Walsh:
See you next time. Bye.
