Jodi Kantor

And so I wanted to do articles that ask tough questions of the cultural world and put in the newspaper information that otherwise would not come out.

Well, at that time, working in Arts and Leisure, you were shaping cultural narratives rather than uncovering or investigating hidden systems.

What did that period teach you about what gets attention, what resonates, and what endures?

I think it helped teach me to take big swings.

The things we did in that section that really landed were ambitious.

Califasana, who's a wonderful writer at The New Yorker, was back then a critic at The Times, and he wrote an essay called The Rap Against Rockism.

I know another story we did that I really loved.

We wanted to ask whether a Juilliard education is worth it because it's so venerated.

And Dan Waken, a great reporter in 2004, went back and he found all of the members of the Juilliard Classical Music Association.

class of 1994 and he said okay in a decade since graduation what's happened to these musicians like the best trained musicians in the world at this elite institution and what he found was heartbreaking debbie i mean a small number of people in the class had gone on to be superstars

There was a decent chunk who were, like, fine.

You know, like, they were fine.

They were in music.

They were fine.

There was a really big group that had had to leave music.

It just wasn't sustainable.

I think the opening anecdote in the story was about a guy from the class.

selling, I can't remember if it was like his French horn, right?

And selling it for like 500 bucks or whatever, because the life no longer worked.

And so it was a way not of attacking or undermining Juilliard, but asking appropriate questions about that education.