Michael Kinsley

DATE February 20, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Dr. Jonathan Kaplan discusses his book, "The Dressing
Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine," and his
medical career
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Jonathan Kaplan describes himself as a medical vagabond. He has worked in war
zones in northern Iraq, Namibia and Burma. He's treated the sick in South
African townships, served as a ship's doctor and as a hospital surgeon in
England. Now he's studying occupational medicine and stress-related illness.
Dr. Kaplan has written a new memoir called "The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's
Chronicle of War and Medicine." Kaplan grew up in South Africa, where his
parents both practiced medicine. His father spent five years in the South
African military, treating casualties in field hospitals. The apartheid
system was in place when Kaplan was studying medicine at Capetown University.
A student anti-apartheid demonstration presented him with his first casualties
and his first cause.

Dr. JONATHAN KAPLAN ("The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and
Medicine): When we heard that there was a demonstration in the middle of Cape
Town city that had ended up in a confrontation between the police and
students, people were asked to go and make their presence felt so that
hopefully, the police wouldn't arrest everybody. I went down with a small
group of other students, and we arrived there to find the confrontation lines
drawn up on the steps of the cathedral in Cape Town. Shortly after the
police charged, it became clear they were not prepared to tolerate any form of
protest, and they used quite a lot of violence in trying to disperse the
students.

Quite a lot of people were arrested, were beaten. Some of us were forced back
inside the cathedral itself, and then the doors were locked from the outside,
preventing us escape. And it was while standing, shocked and feeling
completely helpless, inside this huge gloomy space with people sobbing on the
floor and crying from tear gas and bleeding from wounds that a friend of mine,
somebody whom I didn't actually know very well at the time, started helping
the injured and asked me to assist. And I suppose that was the first time
that I realized that I could do something useful. I discovered that a little
bit of will, a little bit of ability could make a big difference amongst
people who were confused and despairing and who didn't seem to have any idea
of what to do themselves. And I must say had it not been for my colleague, I
wouldn't have known what to do, but...

GROSS: What did you have to do?

Dr. KAPLAN: I had to hold bits of rolled-up cloth against gashes in heads
and stop them bleeding. It wasn't very complicated, but it made a difference.
It gave an appearance of order, that something was being done, that helped to
motivate people. It helped people to get over the shock and dislocation of
being baton charged and beaten and discovering their own vulnerability, and it
had very much the same effect for me.

GROSS: Over the years, you've performed complicated surgeries often in very
makeshift situations in Third World countries, in war zones. The first
patient that you operated on in a hospital near the edge of Cape Town was a
situation where you thought you might faint. What caused you to feel like you
might faint?

Dr. KAPLAN: Every time I've ever been in a situation of dealing with people
who are very severely injured, I've felt queasy, no matter how many operations
I've done, no matter how much blood I've seen flow. And I opened the belly of
a young man that had two bullet holes in him. It was the first time I'd ever
opened somebody's abdomen. I had no idea or assurance that I'd be able to
deal with what I saw in there. I was absolutely terrified. And when I looked
into this incomprehensible mess of torn tissue and blood, I really did feel
that I might faint. The people who were there, the operating theater sister,
the anesthetist, looked at me and said, `Well, you'd better carry on. If you
don't do something, this guy's going to die.'

And I discovered that in a situation like that, one does the best one can.
And it has to suffice because there's nobody else sometimes present to take
over, to defer to who will take control. And that was a very important
realization for me. A short while later, the surgical registrar who was my
superior, turned up and took over the operation, but I had in the meantime
been able to stop the bleeding and been able to prevent this young man dying,
and that was an experience that was probably one of the most significant of my
life.

GROSS: Now this was in South Africa, which is where you're from. You had
thought of staying in South Africa, but to stay, you would have been drafted
into the army. You left South Africa six days before you were supposed to
report to the military. What year was this and what would having served in
the military have meant then?

Dr. KAPLAN: It was in 1979. I would have gone into the army for two years,
during which I might have been a doctor, but I would have been wearing the
uniform. I would have then been eligible for call-up for duty for three
months a years for the following 12 years. I would, I'm sure, have found that
under some circumstances, I would have been expected or ordered to do things
that I wouldn't have approved of.

GROSS: Like what?

Dr. KAPLAN: Well, it's impossible to tell, but the experience that made me
decide not to go into the army was that of my friend and colleague who was a
year ahead of me at medical school and who had gone into the army; therefore,
a year in advance of me. He was posted to the northern border of Namibia,
which was then Southwest Africa, where the South African army was fighting a
fairly aggressive war into Angola. He was posted to a forward position on the
border. A prisoner was brought in who was wounded, and he was asked to
stabilize the man, who was then taken off for interrogation.

At some point, he was called by the special police unit who were interrogating
this man and instructed to revive the prisoner, who had passed out, because
they hadn't got all the information from him that they required. My friend
noticed that the man had been tortured, and he realized that he might well
die. When he objected, the officer in charge of the special police unit said,
`We don't care. We don't take prisoners.' And he made a decision to inject
the patient with something that would stop his heart. That's...

GROSS: So the doctor ended up intentionally killing the patient rather than
reviving him, only to have him subjected to torture.

Dr. KAPLAN: That's true.

GROSS: Did the doctor think that eventually, this patient was going to be
tortured to death anyways and he wanted to spare him that?

Dr. KAPLAN: That was made explicit by the people carrying out the torture.

GROSS: That they would end up killing him.

Dr. KAPLAN: Yeah. They said they didn't take prisoners.

GROSS: So this is what you wanted to avoid, being used as a doctor to help in
torture.

Dr. KAPLAN: I wanted to avoid being put in situations of such moral
extremity. I did not want to be faced as a person, as a human being, with
situations like that.

GROSS: It's interesting, you've performed surgery in several war zones, and
yet you refused to serve in the military of South Africa. Obviously, it
wasn't because of fear, because you've been in pretty terrifying situations
voluntarily. You left South Africa, went to England, and worked there in the
emergency room of a hospital. One of the really significant cases there for
you is the case of an elderly diabetic woman who had been mistreated for
constipation. What condition was she in when you saw her?

Dr. KAPLAN: I would point out that I had been, by then, in England for some
years, moving up the surgical career ladder and was quite an experienced
surgeon with a certain amount of responsibility. I only spent a year in the
emergency room. This was four years later when I was working under different
circumstances as the surgeon in charge at a hospital over a weekend. This
patient came in. She was extremely unwell. She evidently had peritonitis, an
infection inside the abdominal cavity from the leakage of bowel contents.
Being a diabetic, her response to infection was poor because that's part of
the spectrum of the effects of diabetes. And I carried out a very quick,
simple operation to stop the infection spreading, to clean out her abdomen and
to prevent there being further leakage into the abdominal cavity.

She then was taken to the intensive care unit where she was hooked up to
monitors and intravenous drips and catheters and ventilators, and the hope was
that she might survive. Unfortunately, she developed a complication, which is
dreaded by all doctors, which is a condition called disseminated intravascular
coagulopathy, a situation where the clotting factors in the blood become used
up, and the patient starts to bleed from every surface, every raw surface,
from drip sites, from the gastrointestinal tract, from the gums. And the
option that I was presented with was either having her bleed to death or
carrying out what was, in effect, heroic surgery.

She was bleeding from a large ulcer in her stomach, and what the only option
that I had was to remove part of her stomach. I carried out that operation.
Unfortunately, it was--and had I had the experience, I would probably have
known in this advance--it was impossible to operate in a situation where every
surface bled as soon as one touched it. And she died shortly after leaving
the operating table. That was a very--a very distressing experience because
it was the first time that I clearly saw that a decision that I'd made had
resulted in my actions causing the death of a patient.

GROSS: But it sounds like she would have died had you not performed the
surgery, too.

Dr. KAPLAN: Perhaps she would have, but that isn't the argument that prevails
among surgeons.

GROSS: So what impact did it have on you to lose a patient like that?

Dr. KAPLAN: It made me reconsider the decisions I'd made, the circumstances
that had brought me through my surgical training to the stage of moving up the
career system. It seemed suddenly that every decision I'd ever made in the
past had just been the result of luck that it had turned out correctly, and
that probably I shouldn't be subjecting humanity to my incompetent skills. At
the same time, I did realize that I'd learned an awful lot in those years,
that I'd acquired skills that I couldn't really apply anywhere else, and that
if nothing else, what I had become was somebody who was familiar with death in
its various forms, and that one of the roads that was expected of me by my
patients that I would somehow intercede on their behalf with death, that I'd
try and hold death at bay. I don't know whether that was a reasonable idea,
but at the time, it seemed very significant. It seemed one of the
responsibilities that I couldn't sidestep. And so in the end, I decided to
stay within the career of surgery.

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, author of the new memoir, "The
Dressing Station." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Jonathan Kaplan. He has written a new memoir called
"The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine."

You eventually left hospitals. You did all kinds of things afterwards, as
we'll discuss. What were your problems then with being in the hospital? Was
your personal fear that you'd lose more patients or did you have a problem
with the system itself?

Dr. KAPLAN: I think that I'd reached a position where there was a likely road
ahead of me, and that was that I'd become an attending surgeon with a secure
hospital post. That was what I'd been working towards all that time. And I
had never doubted that that was where I'd end up. At the same time, I
realized that as soon as I took that step, I'd effectively be doing that for
the rest of my life; that this point that I was at was probably the last
opportunity in my life when I'd have some flexibility, I'd be able to take a
short detour, as I saw it then, from the career path. I did so and I went off
to work in Africa. The experiences that I had there introduced me to a whole
lot of ideas or reintroduced me to a whole lot of ideas that I'd had about
medicine, that I'd had about the reason for being a doctor and...

GROSS: Like what?

Dr. KAPLAN: I suppose ideas of being useful, of serving, of being adaptable
or something that I must have gleaned from the conversations with my father
and our family medical friends who had served in the Second World War, that
there was some concept of service, that there was something out in the world,
a huge reservoir of suffering that we all should be doing something to
alleviate.

GROSS: Where did you work when you returned to Africa?

Dr. KAPLAN: At first, I worked in Namibia, now independent--the South
Africans having left. And I worked as a medical officer on a government
survey that was entering areas of the northern Namibian border had been sealed
off by the South African army for 15 years. We were conducting a survey of an
area that once had been a demarcated game reserve to see whether there were
any animals left and whether the indigenous people who'd lived there, known as
the bushmen, the Basawra(ph), still survived.

I then went and worked in Zululand, where I was reminded very, very abruptly
about the wildness of African medicine, because the pathology that would come
into the doors of that hospital was strange and wondrous and unlike things
that one sees in the West, except in perhaps the most extreme emergency room
circumstances, perhaps in the wildest and most depressed inner-city areas.
But the stuff that came into that Zululand emergency room and into that
hospital was such a parade of suffering and strangeness that I have never seen
the like.

GROSS: As you write in your book, the problems that you were typically seeing
then in Africa are problems that were either eradicated or unknown in other
parts of the world. And I guess one example of what you're talking about is
the kind of parasites that you saw. Would you describe that?

Dr. KAPLAN: The thing that is most striking when one starts working in
Africa, encountering African medicine, is the range of intestinal parasites
that affect just about everybody in the continent, especially the poor. The
escarus worm(ph) is a particularly nasty example that always made me
nauseated. It can grow up to a foot long, and it forms dense knots inside the
intestinal tract that can cause obstruction. It is so well suited to living
inside the human body that small changes in temperatures, such as a fever
caused from some other source, makes it prefer to relocate. And it'll crawl
out of the nostril or a mouth or other places. And the appearance of a worm
from somebody's nose is one of the things that I find most disturbing.

GROSS: How do you treat it?

Dr. KAPLAN: It can be treated by doses of something like paparazine(ph),
which is a compound that kills worms. If there are knots of worms forming
obstruction, it's necessary to open the abdomen sometimes and remove those
worms, in other words by surgery.

GROSS: When you were working in Zululand, you also saw a lot of medicine men,
Sangoma. Did you work with them?

Dr. KAPLAN: The relationship was a strange and tangential one. We got their
patients; they got our patients. We sometimes were consulted by them,
although the way that they'd come was that they'd turn up in the outpatient
department with a list of complaints, asking for medication for each of those
complaints. We'd supply the tablets. They'd write down what the tablets were
for, and then go off presumably to grind up those tablets and incorporate them
in compounds that they would feed to their patients who consulted them for
similar symptoms, which seemed perfectly reasonable. And we felt that if we
could establish a level of trust with them, perhaps they'd send us patients
that they felt they couldn't deal with. Some...

GROSS: And did they do that?

Dr. KAPLAN: Well, it was never that clear. People did turn up who'd
previously seen the Sangomas. In some cases they turned up because of the
consequence of the medication, of the treatment that the Sangomas had given
them. These might be quite mild like making small cuts in the area in a
painful part of the body, and then herbs would be rubbed into those. They
might become infected, causing the person to turn up in the hospital. Or they
also used to use enemas of a bush called Sinecia, which has a very damaging
effect on the liver and could cause irreversible liver failure, in which case
we'd get children, usually, who'd been given Sinecia enemas and we'd look
after them trying, hopefully, to improve their liver function, but often that
wasn't possible.

GROSS: What kind of regard did you have for the medicine men? Did you have
faith in them? Did you think that they were--that any of them were
charlatans, or did you feel that they were really doing their best even though
they were using techniques that were different than the ones you would use?

Dr. KAPLAN: That's a very difficult question to answer. While there is an
enormous importance socially and in the maintenance of cultural cohesiveness
in societies played by traditional healers who are often spirit
intermediatories between the ancestors and the people, the problem of their
concept of disease, of pathology, when it came to physical illness, was quite
different from ours. Often they'd be very effective in dealing with
depression and psychological and psychiatric problems in their own way, but it
was difficult because of the uncertainty of the symptoms that we were treating
and the symptoms that they were treating. Subsequently there's been a much
greater tendency in South Africa towards working together with traditional
healers. And I'm sure that a lot of information has been exchanged that has
been most beneficial to both parties.

GROSS: Dr. Jonathan Kaplan's new memoir is called "The Dressing Station: A
Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine." He'll be back in the second half of
the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, Michael Kinsley tells us what he's learned about Web
publishing. This month he announced that he's stepping down as editor of the
online magazine Slate. In December he disclosed that he had Parkinson's
disease. And we continue our conversation with surgeon Jonathan Kaplan.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Dr. Jonathan Kaplan.
In his new memoir, "The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and
Medicine," he writes about practicing medicine in war zones, in South African
townships and in a British hospital. Kaplan grew up in South Africa, where he
studied medicine.

You write in your book that you felt more useful working in Africa than you
did working in regular hospitals, but that you were aware of an obscure guilt
about practicing this kind of medicine. What were you guilty about?

Dr. KAPLAN: What I discovered--the thing that I discovered working in
Africa, and particularly working in this underfunded hospital that was on the
edge of a continent of horrific diseases and that collected a huge amount of
severe trauma, of people injured in political struggles, of people injured by
criminal acts, of people injured as a result of hard labor in the sugar cane
fields, was that a small amount of medicine makes a big difference when one's
working with people who are very deprived, but the feeling of fulfillment that
I was getting from it, even, in a way, an increased feeling of my own
humanity, came at a price, because these people generally were suffering the
consequences of deprivation, of cruelty, of suffering forced upon them by the
actions of others, of other human beings.

And it seemed to me a source of guilt that I should be finding my fulfillment
through human suffering enforced by other people. There's something
distressing about feeling that one has chosen to work in the proximity of
suffering, and even perhaps in the proximity of evil, in some cases, in order
to justify one's professional and personal existence.

GROSS: On the other hand, you went to places like this because you didn't
want to turn your back to suffering. You wanted to be of service.

Dr. KAPLAN: That's correct.

GROSS: So you left Africa eventually, but you left Africa and then went to
Kurdistan with a human rights medical group that works in international
situations and war zones. Why, after leaving Africa, did you go to a war
zone?

Dr. KAPLAN: Because human motivation is never clear-cut, and I had achieved
and discovered something, some opportunity for self-realization, some form of
fulfillment in Africa that I no longer felt when I got back into a
conventional hospital post. When I was asked whether I'd be prepared to work
in northern Iraq during the Kurdish uprising at the end of the Gulf War, I
volunteered because I was trying to find out more about that situation and
about the circumstances, the insight, that I'd gained in these extreme
situations.

GROSS: Would you describe the refugee camp that you worked in there?

Dr. KAPLAN: When I arrived in northern Iraq, the Kurdish uprising was
collapsing. The Kurdish peshmerga fighters were retreating. Millions--that
is, two million Kurdish civilians were on their way, fleeing towards the
borders of the country, northwards to Turkey and eastwards to Iran. I arrived
on the Turkish-Iraqi border as huge numbers of refugees began to cross the
mountains, over the snow fields, and try to enter Turkey. They were prevented
from crossing by the Turkish military, who had been fighting their own
undeclared war against their own Kurdish population for 10 years--quite a
ruthless war--and had absolutely no wish to allow Iraqi Kurds to come onto
Turkish soil.

So the people were trapped up on the border line, in gullies, on rocks, on the
mountainsides, where they died of exposure and dysentery and altitude
sickness, and where I arrived initially with no equipment, no personnel--I was
traveling on my own; I'd been separated from the rest of my party. And I
walked through this refugee camp, seeing suffering that I could do nothing to
alleviate, seeing people die that I couldn't save, seeing a migration of
people the like of which I'd never encountered before, and it was an
experience of utter helplessness. It was very, very distressing.

GROSS: You had no tools to help. You had no medical equipment with you.

Dr. KAPLAN: None whatsoever.

GROSS: Were there things that you could do to improvise?

Dr. KAPLAN: For 400,000 people?

GROSS: Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. You write that in Kurdistan, you became
aware of the perverse seduction of war. What is that seduction?

Dr. KAPLAN: There is a clarity to life, to understanding things, that comes
in a place where everything depends on one's decision-making, and one's
survival and that of one's patients depends on the way in which you see
problems and you see solutions. There is none of the insidious dread that
goes with dealing with daily issues, like mortgages and pensions and careers
and property. Life is the way life looks, and there is a freedom associated
with that, that of course, is also partly colored by the possibility of
immediate and rather violent death or disfigurement. It's not a very healthy
situation, and it's not a very pure pleasure, because fear is very unpleasant,
and it's often very frightening. But there is some quality of insight that
I've had in places like that, that I've never found anywhere else in my life.

GROSS: I want to thank you so much for talking with us about your work.
Thank you.

Dr. KAPLAN: My pleasure, Terry. Thank you.

GROSS: Jonathan Kaplan's new memoir is called "The Dressing Station: A
Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine." He's now studying occupational
medicine and stress-related illness.

Coming up, Michael Kinsley reflects on his six years editing the Web magazine,
Slate. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Michael Kinsley discusses his time at Slate and other
aspects of his life and career
TERRY GROSS, host:

When Michael Kinsley left his position as editor of The New Republic in 1996
to become the founding editor of the Web magazine, Slate, many of his
colleagues thought he was crazy. It seemed like an untested idea. Slate has
since become one of the most respected online publications, offering
commentary on politics and culture. The magazine is published by Microsoft.
Last week, Kinsley stepped down as editor. In December, he disclosed that he
has Parkinson's disease. Kinsley is also a former editor of Harper's and a
former liberal commentator on CNN's "Crossfire."

We invited him to share some of the things he's learned about Web publishing.
I asked him about the biggest drawbacks he experienced putting out an online
magazine.

Mr. MICHAEL KINSLEY (Former Editor, Slate): People do not like reading on a
computer screen. One of our minor embarrassments was when Bill Gates was
quoted in the newspapers as saying he prefers to read magazines in print, and
I think most people feel that way. And the other thing, which is related, is
we have not found a way, although we've experimented with various techniques,
to publish the kind of long magazine essay or reportorial piece that runs in
The New Yorker or The Atlantic or The New York Times Sunday Magazine. That's
the one thing you really cannot do, or at least we haven't found a way to do,
on the Web.

GROSS: Did you try?

Mr. KINSLEY: We've tried in various ways. When we started, we just ran
these long pieces, and we decided--well, we not only decided, but we knew that
very few people were reading them, because, of course, you can tell on the Web
exactly how many people have read not only each issue, to the extent you have
a concept called an issue, but each individual page, and people just weren't
reading them.

We had an interesting experiment, which we're still playing around with, where
the writer, instead of accumulating all the reporting and then sitting down
and writing a long piece, sort of reports in on his reporting, or her
reporting, as they go along. So the one we did was our writer, David Plotz,
who is our Washington bureau chief, got very interested in the so-called Nobel
Prize sperm bank, which was a thing in the '70s where someone collected sperm,
allegedly, from Nobel Prize winners, although that didn't really happen, and
to sort of create a eugenicist's paradise. And the thing sort of collapsed in
bankruptcy, but there were kids born from this experiment, and no one had ever
followed up on what happened to them.

And David sort of kept a journal of his reporting. He wrote an opening piece
saying this is what he intended, invited people to get in touch with him and
there was a very useful feedback group that was created, where people would
read this and know someone who knew someone who knew one of these kids, or one
of the parents, and they would report back. And you could--it became a sort
of mystery story. You could follow his detective work, trying to track down
the story and expose the skeleton of the reporting of a piece like this, and
the net result was, I'm sure, about the length or longer than one of these New
Yorker or New York Times Magazine-type pieces, but it was over the course of
days and weeks, and it was in little bits and it was much more readable on the
Web. And that was one model that I think is promising.

GROSS: I want to take you back to 1996 when you first joined Microsoft to
create Slate Magazine on the Web. This was one of the early Web magazines.
You were probably given a lot of advice at the time. Think back to us to
1996. What kind of advice were you given then, at a time when many people
didn't even know about the Web and weren't reading things on the Web?

Mr. KINSLEY: Well, in 1996, the Web was still controlled, or at least
heavily influenced, by sort of techies and techie philosophers, rather than
businesses and media. And it was an establishment yet, as it has become. And
that was a very wild and free period, and many people were offended when
Microsoft got involved and I got involved, as they regarded, an establishment
journalist, and there was a saying that information wants to be free, meaning
that the very idea of commercializing the Web was offensive and innately
wrong.

And I think that has turned out to be a fallacy, that the Web is a medium like
any other, and it can be corrupt like any other. It can also be a wonderful
medium for expression, like any other. And it can be a wonderful medium for
commerce like any other. So they were wrong about that. They were right
about something I was wrong about, which is that I came in thinking that we
would charge money to customers for Slate, and that that was the model that
would lead to profitability. And we tried charging for a year, and it didn't
work. We had 30,000 paying subscribers, which wasn't terrible, but we had
400,000 people monthly visiting our free part, our front porch as we called
it. And now we have three or four million. So we aren't making money yet,
but it looks as if trying to sell advertising to many millions of a people is
a more logical way to break even than trying to get 19.95 from a few dozen
thousand.

GROSS: When you started editing Slate, did techies give you any advice about
how the location on the Internet should affect the format in the magazine; how
being a Web magazine should affect the content?

Mr. KINSLEY: Well, one of the really exciting things about the past few
years was that we were not only inventing a publication, we were helping, at
least, to invent a medium. We had long debates and discussions about should
there be paging or should there be scrolling, how you get from one article to
another, how you get from a table of contents, do you have a table of
contents, what should be on your home page and all sorts of things like that.
The way I came to think about it was we were, essentially, having to invent
paper and invent ink in order to put out our magazine. And many of these
conventions in print date back centuries, and some of the conventions are
already fairly well established now five or six years later on the Internet.
And as the next few years go on, the Web will ultimately reach the point where
people will not have to think through navigation and issues like that. It
will be much easier, but a certain amount of the excitement will be gone.

GROSS: Have you found that the writing that you edit is any different on the
Web than the writing was in hard-copy print magazines that you did? Are you
looking for something different stylistically?

Mr. KINSLEY: Yes and no. We at Slate regarded it as very important because
people are so skeptical about the Internet to have the same standards of
careful editing and accuracy on the Web as there was in print and is in print.
We have, basically, two kinds of articles, if you can call them articles,
features, forms of journalism, in our magazine. One is basically traditional
magazine articles. They tend to be a bit shorter.

The other one, though, is something which can only be done on the Web, which
is basically the voice of e-mail. E-mail is a really wonderful medium for the
exchange of ideas. When it works well, it's got the spontaneity of talking
and the reflectiveness of writing. So when I came to Slate, I tried to
develop features which captured that excitement and integrity combination.
And we have dialogues on issues. We have a feature called the breakfast
table, where two interesting people simply talk about what's in the day's
news, e-mailing each other back and forth. And I think very often it really
does work, and it's the kind of thing that is tightly connected to the
technology of the Internet.

GROSS: One of the things that you can do on the Web that you just can't do in
hard-copy magazines is you can count the number of people who've visited the
site, then you can count the number of the people who visited each individual
article. This is interesting, but potentially heartbreaking information to
have. If you're a writer publishing in a popular online magazine, but you
find out that very few people are actually visiting your article, that could
be very sad indeed. And then you, Michael Kinsley as the editor, would have
to decide, `Well, does that mean this writer is out, this feature is out?'
Can you talk a little bit about how you used that empirical system to make
editorial decisions?

Mr. KINSLEY: Well, you're right, Terry. It really is the apple of knowledge
that can lead to all sorts of unfortunate consequences. We actually at Slate
don't use it too much. I don't think I've ever killed a feature because of
the traffic measurements, but you can't help but be influenced by it.

You have to keep in mind, though, that traffic figures can be very misleading.
An article that is not very good can get a huge amount of traffic if we
feature it in our headlines space on our home page, or MSN, Microsoft Network,
which we're a part of, features it on the network home page, that can affect
its total traffic much more than its innate merits. So for that reason and
because, I think, a magazine should have its own voice and not be a popularity
contest, we don't pay too much attention to these traffic figures. We pay
attention to the total traffic figures, and we certainly brag about them to
advertisers. But the traffic to individual articles, we don't pay a lot of
attention to it.

GROSS: Have the writers had an approach-avoidance relationship with those
numbers? You know, really wanting to know how many people read my piece, but
scared to find out?

Mr. KINSLEY: Oh, no. We don't offer them that information.

GROSS: How come?

Mr. KINSLEY: For basically the reason you suggest. If it turns out they're
very popular, they may want more money. We don't want them to find that out.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. KINSLEY: And if they're very unpopular, they may get depressed. And a
depressed writer is even worse than an undepressed writer to deal with.

GROSS: My guest is Michael Kinsley. He's the founding editor of the Web
magazine Slate. He stepped down as editor last week. We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Michael Kinsley is my guest, and he is the founding editor of Slate
magazine. He started with Slate in 1996. This is an online publication. And
he recently announced that he's going to be leaving as editor of Slate,
although he will continue to write for the publication.

Slate is owned by Microsoft. What was it like for you during the Microsoft
trial? Did you cover it? And what are the difficulties of covering a trial
of your owner?

Mr. KINSLEY: We covered the Microsoft trial, I think, in a way that proved
our independence. We had a novelistic type writer covering it. And she's a
lawyer who certainly understood and explained the issues, but described the
characters like in a novel. And she was not terribly flattering to the
Microsoft characters; the lawyers for the company and the witnesses for the
company.

GROSS: Did you go into Bill Gates and say, `Well, this is going to be pretty
critical of you, but it will help our credibility to do that. So, you
know...'

Mr. KINSLEY: I have never had that conversation with Bill Gates, but I think
he senses it. Being owned by Microsoft, in terms of editorial independence,
has been a perfect experience. And I've never worked for a publication where
I've had less interference. In fact, there couldn't be less because there's
been none.

I find that this gets my goat a little bit, this subject. People are so
suspicious of Microsoft. The average publication owned by a media
conglomerate--Time Warner even before it was part of AOL, or News Corp., the
Murdoch empire--has far more conflicts of interest in the course of its daily
and weekly publishing schedule than we do. I mean, the subject of software
and the subject of Microsoft Corporation don't come up that often, naturally,
in a magazine or a Web site devoted to politics and culture. It comes up
some, but not that often. Whereas every time a Time Warner publication
reviews a movie, reviews a book, it bumps up against some of the other media
properties owned by that same company.

But media companies don't get this sort of suspicion. Now, in part, that's
because they build up reputations over the years for editorial independence,
and Microsoft was unproven. But at this point, I think it has proven its
understanding that, as you say, Terry, editorial independence is a smart
commercial decision if you're going to publish `content,' as its sort of
vulgarly called on the Internet, media news, whatever, you have to have
credibility. And credibility requires independence, and Microsoft really has
been perfect about that.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Kinsley, and he's the
founding editor of Slate, which is an online politics and culture magazine.
He announced this month that he's going to be leaving his position as editor,
although he'll continue to write for Slate. In December, Kinsley announced
that he had Parkinson's disease, and that he'd actually been diagnosed several
years ago.

Michael, how come you decided to come out about Parkinson's in December?

Mr. KINSLEY: Well, I kept it a secret simply because it was easier to get
through the day not thinking about it if the people you dealt with in the
course of the day didn't know about it. And after eight years, which is a
longer run than I expected to have, enough people knew about it because of the
few people I had told had told other people. And the symptoms were evident
enough that it was more trouble to keep it a secret than not to. And when the
balance of inconvenience shifted, I decided to go public. It was a completely
selfish balance of advantage to me decision.

GROSS: And how bad are your symptoms now?

Mr. KINSLEY: I don't think they're very bad. This gravely sound you hear in
my voice is probably a symptom. That's really the most noticeable thing, I
think. When I went public with this, most people were surprised or shocked.
Some people suspected that there was something wrong, and some people knew
there was something wrong. But the fact that a majority of even people I saw
all the time didn't know I had it indicates to me that the symptoms are not
all that serious.

GROSS: What are some of the things you want to do with the time that you're
freeing up by virtue of leaving your position as editor of Slate?

Mr. KINSLEY: The one thing I really want to do, in case I can't do it later,
is adventurous, outdoor type stuff, which I had no interest in doing
whatsoever before I got Parkinson's and before I moved out to the Pacific
Northwest. But you know, if you told me 10 years ago, `Gee, you might not be
able to go camping and hiking the rest of your life,' I'd say, `Well, who
cares? I haven't gone camping and hiking for the first part of my life.' But
then when they suddenly tell you might not be able to do it, you really want
to do it. And I moved out to the Pacific Northwest where these kinds of
outdoor activities are central to life, and I've fallen in love with it. And
I hope to squeeze a bit more of that in than I would otherwise be able to with
a job like editor of Slate.

GROSS: Well, Michael Kinsley, I wish you the best. And I thank you very much
for talking with us.

Mr. KINSLEY: Thank you, Terry. You, too.

GROSS: Michael Kinsley is the founding editor of the Web magazine Slate. He
stepped down from his position last week, but will continue to write for
Slate.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.