As David Remnick describes it, he vaulted to the editor's chair of The New Yorker from a similar role at the high school he attended in his native New Jersey. What this leaves out, of course, is Remnick's Princeton education and his years covering one story or another -- first for The Washington Post, which sent him to Moscow, and then for the magazine he now runs. The 47-year-old writer reprises that other role in a newly released collection simply titled "Reporting," which features his profiles from The New Yorker on such subjects as the late publisher Katharine Graham; politicos Al Gore, Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu; authors Philip Roth and Amos Oz; and boxers Mike Tyson and Larry Holmes.

On May 11, he begins a promotional tour at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

The following Q&A is an edited version of a recent phone conversation with the author.

What does your new book tell us about your priorities as a writer and journalist?

I don't think that any one person is always a collection of absolutely coherent interests. Israel and the Soviet Union are part of my background; I make no apologies for that. But more broadly, as a writer, I'm interested in reporting as deeply as I can and making some narrative sense of what I write about. I grew up on that sort of non-fiction writing, reading The New Yorker, Esquire, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and later, John McPhee. Maybe my hero of them all was A.J. Liebling. If you look at his career, he wrote about the Second World War, food and boxing, among other things.

So you grew up under the influence of "New Journalism"?

With all due respect to Tom Wolfe, I think he devised this term "New Journalism" as a form of self-advertisement and advertisement for his contemporaries. Before that term ever came along, there were not only Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, but also Daniel Defoe and a long list of others.

"Non-fiction writing" may be a less thrilling moniker, but that's what I do. I'm a believer in fact and the possibilities of writing something of value, something entertaining, without straying from fact. I don't believe in the notion of relativism in non-fiction writing and the intentional playing around with fact, and I don't mean to limit this to the James Frey incident. In the category of memoir, if someone is remembering and reconstructing the past as best she or he can, that's one thing. The reader understands that. But if you just say to yourself, "All bets are off; I'll come up with the best story possible, and make things up to enhance the story" -- well, that's a novel. Let's not kid ourselves: This matters to us as writers, and, more seriously, it matters to the reader.

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Buy David Remnick's book, "Reporting," by clicking here, and Poynter receives a small cut as an Amazon affiliate.

Do you subscribe to the "great man" theory of history?

The cliché is that there are no indispensable men or women. I think that's ridiculous. Look at one of the people I write about in my book -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If he didn't matter that much, I don't think the Soviet Union would have worked so hard to control him. The biggest historical event I've been close to over an extended period of time was the final years and collapse of the Soviet Union. My wife and I lived there for four years, and we had the unique and wonderful experience of being as close to that experience as one could get without being a member of the Central Committee or the Politburo. People were suddenly free to talk and so eager to talk. And my sense of it has always been that, yes, there were vectors of history at play, and trends and institutional forces that moved things along in certain directions. But it was the volition and actions of one man in particular -- Mikhail Gorbachev -- that changed history to an incredible degree.

How does this theory apply to our current president and his role in history?

I feel like you're trying to catch me here. But yes, [President] George Bush has allowed certain things to happen that Al Gore wouldn't have. Those hanging chads we've made so many jokes about -- they couldn't have mattered more.

In the piece on Katharine Graham, you start with a story about the time when you were a reporter at The Washington Post and took her to the circus in Moscow, where she was nearly mauled by a big cat. Where's the journalistic objectivity?

Like any 29-year-old who nearly causes a disaster for the person he works for, I dined out on that item for a long time. But the point of writing about it was to acknowledge how little I understood her. She was who she was, and it's hard enough to know what your best friend is like. So admitting what I don't know is part of it. You need a certain gall to do this kind of work, to ask strangers impolite questions, but it has to be matched with a certain modesty. 


In the Amos Oz interview, he talks about how Israelis see themselves as participants in history, while those of us in the West are more like passive observers.

I think Amos is wrong. I don't live on Manhattan Island without a sense that I am part of whatever happens. The world is small enough so that none of us escapes history. One of the great themes in books of the past 10 years by Philip Roth has been the intrusion of history, in all its violence and shock, into ordinary and seemingly protected lives. That's what "American Pastoral" is all about.

Do you see public access to documents as the biggest obstacle for reporters these days?

I don't want to sound like I'm making any excuses, because in the end there aren't any excuses. On the other hand, the weapons of mass destruction story wasn't easy because you had every intelligence agency in every country in the West saying that there were weapons -- certainly not nuclear, but chemical or biological. But now that the story has unraveled, there's so much evidence of concocting and concealing and sloppy intelligence work. Still, there's a lot of good journalism going on out there: Look at the Pulitzers this year -- The New York Times got one for uncovering domestic spying, and The Washington Post for uncovering the government's secret prisons. William Bennett (who said these winners should be arrested for publishing classified information) clearly has no idea what real journalism is and the role it has to play in an open society -- which is ironic, considering all the statements he's made about the virtues of democracy.

Print journalism is under assault from the technological media. What do you see ahead?

It's clear that more and more newspapers will move toward the Internet, and the advertising dollars, I hope, will follow. In order to do the right thing in journalism, you have to spend a lot of money -- especially if you're a newspaper, which has to do it every day. We would be a much poorer country without the three or four best newspapers -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. They are the key engines of both reporting the news and investigating the news. Are there times when they've made mistakes? Yes. Are there times when they could have been more aggressive? Yes. But they're all making changes for the better, and no small credit for that goes to the vitality of the Web.

What issues are you watching?

Given my background, I'm very concerned about the direction of the former Soviet Union, and not many people are paying attention -- understandably, because there's so much else to preoccupy us. I understand we're living in pretty dark times, because when you're talking about global warming, you're not just talking about a little pollution, but something that could bring down the planet or, at least, badly erode man's ability to persist on it. And when you're talking about the Middle East, it's not some regional problem, but something that could engulf our institutions and our treasury, and something that could lead to tremendous disruption and further loss of life -- which we've already endured too much of.

When we talk about Russia, we're not just talking about increments of change, but the future direction of the states that comprised the last empire on Earth, and whether some of those states, like Turkmenistan, are going to become another North Korea or a democratized state. And if you're a hopeful person, you know that the only solution for Israel is a real and workable and contiguous Palestinian state, and you just wonder how much longer and how many more people will die before that happens.


How do these problems relate to Americans and the American imagination?

I never try to be as broad as the "American imagination." These are sweeping generalizations that, whether it's in journalism or just conversation between the two of us, don't hold up. It's hard enough to understand another human being, much less understand what Americans think and what Americans say.

And finally, what's the deal with your interest in boxing?

Let me start with an admission: I think the sport is pretty much dead, and good riddance. It's a circus on the perimeter of American culture. But why do writers like it? Because it's very naked and exposed. It's very much harder to get close to ball players than it was 30 years ago; they're so rich and they don't need you, and they're so insulated by agents and the rest. The best you can do nine times out of 10 is very superficial reporting. Boxing is the one exception because these guys are very alone and have stories to tell, and, what's more, are willing to [tell] them. It's an interesting if not repulsive American spectacle.