Chapter 1: What are Jodi Kantor's notable achievements in journalism?
The court will often issue a cryptic opinion. We're talking about like one paragraph. It will say what should happen, but it won't say why.
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.
On this episode, a wide-ranging discussion with Jodi Kantor about her career in journalism, about Harvey Weinstein and Me Too, about the Supreme Court and the shadow docket, and about the importance of entry-level work for young people.
It's hard and it's slow and it's hard and it's slow, and then it turns into something wonderful.
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Jodi Kantor is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist at The New York Times. Her pioneering work has reshaped how we understand power, accountability, and the systems that govern our lives, from the workplace to the highest levels of American institutions.
She has led groundbreaking investigations into corporate culture, labor practices, and sexual misconduct, including reporting that helped ignite a global reckoning and earned her journalism's highest honors. Jodi is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, She Said, Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story, that helped ignite a movement, which was adapted into a major motion picture.
And her reporting has led to measurable changes in policy and practices across multiple industries. Her new book, How to Start Discovering Your Life's Work, turns her attention to a different but equally urgent question, how young people begin and how they make decisions about work, purpose, and direction in a world where the existing rules no longer apply.
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Chapter 2: How did Jodi Kantor break the Harvey Weinstein story?
Because I don't know anyone that's lived in all five. You grew up in Staten Island. I spent several years there as a child as well, just different timing. You grew up in an immigrant family, reading the New York Times obsessively as a child, even before you could fully understand it. But you've said you never imagined you could be one of the people writing those stories.
What prevented that leap from reader to author in your early thinking? You know, the funny thing about Staten Island, especially pre-internet, is that you're very close to Manhattan, but you're also very far. It's a different world. I did not know any authors. I did not know any journalists. My parents' fanciest friends were like dentists.
And even though I inhaled journalism, and I mean, the arrival of periodicals at my house was like an event. You know, it was like this message from a world that I longed to be a part of. But I think my younger self thought it would have been very narcissistic to assume that anybody would want to read something I had written or edited.
It provoked like a kind of internal, who do you think you are, reaction. Wow. When did you first start reading? thinking that you could be a writer or an artist of any type? I'll tell you two stories about Columbia. So that's where I went to college. And that was like my first entry, you know, into a world in which such things were even possible.
So one of my best friends was and is named, we called him Frankie for the new book is dedicated to him. His byline is Franklin for, and he was like my first friend who really understood journalism. And he was like, And senior year, he said, we're too cool to do our work in the Columbia Library.
We're going to take the subway down to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and work in the main reading room. So that's what we did. And that Hanukkah, we were exchanging gifts, and I got him what I thought was the perfect gift because he loved The New Yorker. And so I went into the little gift shop at the New York Public Library, and I got him, you know, like those –
posters that are New Yorker covers blown up. I got him one. Which one? I can't remember. But what I do remember is that when I gave it to him, his face fell. And he said, Jodi, I don't want to hang a New Yorker cover on my wall. I want to write for the New Yorker. And I was like, you're crazy. Like, who talks like that? How do you think that such a thing could be possible?
So that's kind of where he was at and where I was at. And part of the reason I dedicated this book to him is that he changed my thinking and made me see more in myself. But I'll tell you another story, which is that when I was a senior, I was kicked off the Columbia Daily Spectator. I had like a fledgling little column in the Spectator. This was the part of me that did want to be a journalist.
debbie to say that it was not good is an understatement like truly but it still didn't warrant uh what happened next which is that one day i opened the paper with like no warning and there's this column by this other student attacking me and attacking me in such an out of bounds crazy ugly way that i literally cannot say on this show what this kid said about me because it was so offensive
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Chapter 3: What insights did Jodi gain from reporting on the Supreme Court?
Yeah, I think they were running a newspaper at a young age without any experience. I tried really hard to find out who this person is. 1996, there's not a lot of online archives of student newspapers. Oh, no, I have his name and I still can't find him. Because remember, I'm an investigative reporter. Right. I'm really good at finding people. This guy barely exists on the Internet.
It's a good thing. After you were kicked off the paper, after you graduated from Columbia, you, drumroll, went on to Harvard Law School. Presumably to become a lawyer. Now, within weeks at Harvard, you realized you wanted to leave.
You described a late-night reckoning while reviewing a book listing of hundreds of potential summer jobs for first-year law students, wherein you didn't want a single one, and you admitted to yourself... that what you really wanted was to be a journalist despite having zero evidence you could succeed.
But you've also written that as far as your family was concerned, journalism belonged on a long list of careers that seemed too flaky or low-paying to pursue. So what happened after the late-night reckoning and How did your family respond to your subsequent decision? Well, let's remember, I not only did not have evidence I could succeed, I had evidence to the contrary.
I had been kicked off a newspaper. That was my sole journalism experience. It was like this admission to myself, you know, like, I really do want to be a journalist. I at least want to try. And people thought I was crazy. Like, as we now know, I'm a kid from Staten Island who got into Harvard Law School, and I admired what attorneys did writ large.
What I discovered is that the way you have to judge a career is really based on the tasks that make up every day. The stuff that attorneys do hour by hour, like I felt deadened inside. It was so slow. It felt tedious to me. It involved so much process. And I realized I hadn't paid enough attention to myself. Like in college, I had been everybody's editor.
Debbie, I think I fixed people's papers even without them asking me to. I had this like... Bossy desire to make text good, if that makes any sense. I began to like finally see, faced with the prospect of an unhappy life in the law.
I began to see that, and I began to see that being in the text of copy and talking to people and learning things about the world, that was actually how I wanted to spend my time. And that's what I tell young people now. The way to judge a career is pop quiz. It's 11.30 on a Thursday morning. Do you feel connected to the task before you? Yeah. So, yeah, people thought I was nuts.
You know, like the Harvard thing I mentioned, not to sound like a jerk, but to show that it was a big deal to leave. There was concern around me that I was giving something up. My parents are very supportive, but I think they were mystified. My dad, I think, is a kind of economic rationalist where he's like, you should earn as much money as you are capable of earning.
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Chapter 4: How does Jodi Kantor define a meaningful career in today's world?
So he had worked there the year before. So think of Slate now, but rewind to 1998. This is a startup. It is owned by Microsoft. It is edited by Michael Kinsley, this, like, incredible figure in journalism. There's nobody like him on the scene. Now think of somebody impossibly witty, inventive, bold, skeptical of power. playful.
And he was starting this new magazine to explore what could be done with journalism on the internet. So I was lucky enough to become an editorial assistant, which, you know, I was like hired to, you know, do the floors and windows, like to do very, very basic tasks. But Slate was an amazing place to start. There was a lot of opportunity for young people and also a
We got to witness everything that happened. There were three different offices, so we communicated by this magic new medium of email. And as a result, and because everybody was really included in all these group emails, you could witness the discussions between the more senior journalists. And so anyway, to answer your question, like within a week of getting to Slate, I was home.
I was like, this is it. There's no question. I did the right thing. What did that early environment teach you about how journalism actually worked as opposed from how it appeared on the outside? The greatest lesson of Slate is that journalism can never be boring. Michael Kinsley was merciless on anything he thought was boring. I remember we were in a meeting at one point.
Somebody mentioned like some story they wanted to do. And he said, that sounds like a perfectly worthy story. I have no interest in reading. Florals. Exactly, exactly. And that kind of defined his sensibility. And I still think it's true today. And it's true even of very difficult investigative pieces. Journalism should not be homework. It's not academic papers written for a specialized audience.
It needs to be enthralling. And even when the news is bad, I believe it can be enthralling. Journalism is the art of drawing somebody into a story and holding their attention. You were then recruited by Frank Rich to join the New York Times as the editor of the Arts and Leisure section, which was a significant leap at the stage of your career.
How did you first meet Frank, and what do you think he saw in your work that led to that invitation? Well, Debbie, I want to be blunt. This was a crazy thing to happen. I knew it was crazy at the time, but all these years later, now that I am a 50-year-old grown-up investigative journalist who does complex work, I can see even more fully how nuts it really was.
They handed the arts and leisure section to someone who was 28 years old and had very little journalistic experience. Frank just really wanted to shake things up. The reason I was hired is because at that point I was the culture editor of Slate and I was doing things that were new and different. And I can say one more thing, which is I did have a vision for the coverage.
I felt and probably still feel that too much arts and culture coverage is... is dictated by the PR calendar. Like it's dictated by like, this thing is coming out and this thing is coming out. Obviously, there is a lot of service in that. But what I really want from arts journalism is more of a sense of independent inquiry and asking questions. the big questions.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do young people face in starting their careers?
I want to do that. I had a little imposter syndrome. I felt a little bit like I was helping run a hospital and I'd never practiced medicine. And then the biggest thing, Debbie, the entire culture of the Times venerates reporting. Like going out and getting information that people wouldn't otherwise have. Like everybody kind of knows that's the best job in the building. And I wanted it.
But back to your point about wanting to have impact. I don't think I really understood journalistic impact at that stage. I think it came later. I think it came through covering the Obamas for six or seven years because my reporting assignment became an unbelievably exciting thing. Essentially, for six or seven years, I chased the question, who are Barack and Michelle Obama?
Going from late 2006, there's still this like relatively everyday couple from Chicago, and then watching them become president and first lady of the United States and covering the White House. And that was a thrill. And listen, I mean, hats off to my colleagues who do political reporting, especially now. But I think I had a craving to do journalism that could help people a
Around 2013, you began investigating gender and workplace systems, not just as topics, but as entry points into how power actually operates. What did you start to see structurally that made those stories feel particularly urgent at that time? Okay, so this was a time when the country was really, I think, on the cusp of a new gender discussion. Hillary Clinton had ran for president.
She had failed. The questions of why that hadn't worked and would we ever have a female president were top of mind. There were publications like Jezebel, and it felt like we were in a more open period of talking about gender than we had been in a while. My stance on this question was like, yeah, like I'm reading a lot of big feelings out there. I'm reading a lot of people's personal essays.
That's not what I want to do. I want to bring new facts to the table that are going to help make the gender discussion in this country better. better.
So I did stories about the workplace, about Harvard Business School, with female characters, and there were a lot of fascinating things that emerged about gender, and that's also part of what led me to the Weinstein story eventually, because I had written a lot about women in the workplace by that point.
However, there was something that emerged that is very relevant now that I did not expect at the time, which is that as early as 2014, I could see that the workplace was undergoing a transformation. It was being digitized. The way I first saw this was I did a story about hourly workers. They happened to work at Starbucks. I wrote about one woman in
Like the kind of job where in a previous era they would have been like, okay, Debbie, you're on Tuesdays four to nine every week. That was being wiped away. And very sophisticated software was slicing and dicing people's schedules in a way that was brilliant for the business. Like they could anticipate weather patterns. They could anticipate sales patterns. patterns.
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Chapter 6: How does AI impact entry-level job opportunities?
There was so much. what feels to be utterly immoral, illegal activity, well beyond the actual crimes that were committed to try to keep this story from being told. How did you manage through that? How did you feel when you found out that people that were talking to you, trying to supposedly help you, were actually lying to you to try to get information to bring back to the Weinstein crew?
Debbie, the most important thing I can tell you is that the women were more powerful than all of that. That's the lesson I want people to take. So it's totally true that cuckoo things happened. I mean, Weinstein went so far beyond the pale of what's acceptable and how he dealt with us. And you're right. I mean, they hired this Israeli ex-intelligence firm to try to track us and dupe us and
one of their agents posed as, wait for it, a women's rights advocate to try to like manipulate me into giving information. I didn't fall for it. Luckily, they came to my apartment. They took pictures of, you know, the boring red brick building in Park Slope where I live with my husband and my children and None of it worked. None of it worked. The women were more powerful.
The truth is more powerful. I appreciate you being aghast at it because it's nuts, and I want that to be the public's reaction. But just the way I want to build my sources confidence... that they can tell the truth and that I can get them through the process safely. I want to build the public's confidence that these stories can be reported.
There is a danger here, and I've heard other writers do it, of exaggerating the peril we face, and I think it's a bad thing to do because I want people to know that the tools of journalism, which are time-tested and powerful, they're not one-offs. Like, the Weinstein story was not an anomaly. It worked because our craft worked.
So the other reason not to exaggerate, Debbie, is that I have too many colleagues who are facing bigger threats, colleagues who report across the world that life is really dangerous for journalists in Mexico. You know how many journalists died covering the Israel-Gaza war. So many different countries, so many different places. Journalists being put in jail in Russia. Exactly.
And in this country, we're more and more worried about threats to journalists and really anybody who participates in public life. So that's why I am very wary. of being too melodramatic about what we faced with Weinstein because I know a lot of other journalists who have taken bigger risks than I have.
You've described the reporting as requiring hundreds of interviews and a rigorous accumulation of evidence. But we're living in a time now when public trust in truth itself is fragmenting and it seems more and more every day that that the leaders of this country are fragmenting it even more.
And I'm wondering what distinguishes an investigation that produces consensus from one that remains contested? I mean, that is the question. So we have to give... the answer that's in the article, and we have to give the answer that's out of the article. This is why it's so important, Debbie, not to, forgive my language, not publish half-assed stuff.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from Jodi's career transitions?
It's getting really harder. And you get it on the left and the right. You get people on the left who are like, I don't believe the corporate media. And on the right, many people are like, believe something in the New York Times? Like, never. Wouldn't think of it. And then you have the last part with a grownup doing something. It's a little harder, right? Like Congress doesn't do much right now.
So I'm not ready to call it over, but I'm worried that the formula is showing some signs of wear and tear. And I'm also worried wondering about whether this is a moment to maybe be a little creative and maybe play with the formula a little bit. I mean, I'll ask you a provocative question I ask myself. If we published the Herbie Weinstein story right now, would it have the same impact? It might.
I mean, look at the Cesar Chavez story that my colleagues did two weeks ago. It has had enormous, stunning impact. On the other hand, you have to say to yourself, oh, would Weinstein have been able to deploy an army of deepfakes in order to undercut our findings? Let me ask you a question in response to that question. Question with a question.
And this is something that you wrote about in She Said. Your reporting brought down Harvey Weinstein. He was convicted of rape, sexual assault. He's serving a 23-year sentence. Your story and your investigation triggered global consequences. It led to workplace reforms, changes in laws, public and private reckonings over sexual harassment, violence. It ignited the MeToo movement.
This new reporting about Cesar Chavez resulted in a complete rewriting of his legacy. Statues, street names. Why has this been able to happen to people like Harvey Weinstein or Cesar Chavez but not seem to be able to stick for politicians? That's not totally true. So let's do the history.
For a long, long, long, long time, the history is basically like one episode after another of a lack of accountability, whether we're talking about President Bill Clinton or President Donald Trump getting elected after the Access Hollywood tape. Then these stories come along. Fall of 2017, Me Too happens. Debbie, for a year, the impact is on both sides.
For the first year, it was not politicized. I even remember seeing tallies in that first year of how many Democratic and Republican politicians had fallen because of Me Too, and the numbers were equal. We forget this now, but it happened. And it was a beautiful moment because it was actually about the women, right?
It wasn't about like, I'm a Democrat, so I'm going to come to this conclusion about what happened, or I'm a Republican, so I'm going to come to this conclusion about what happened. It was like, no, this behavior is everywhere in the culture, and we are going to fairly try to find out what actually ensued.
And then what happened, and this really happened with the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, is that Me Too became very politicized. And I'm not blaming the Me Too movement. But that is what happened, and that is largely where things stand today, where now the Like, it's totally true that Me Too is kind of a blue state democratic movement.
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of balancing craft and need in a career?
Oh, because there are a lot of varieties of on-the-record evidence. Like, for example, okay, so Adam Liptak and I reported the backstory of the immunity decision, like truly one of the most controversial decisions the court has made in our lifetime. The court awards President Trump broad immunity. This is after he was going to be prosecuted for what he did on January 6th.
And the court awards him even more immunity than his own lawyers had asked for. And also, the opinion was... widely regarded by scholars on the left and the right to be very messy, like disjointed, like left too many holes, didn't hold together well as an argument. So how could they have given him this much immunity?
And also, like, the Chief Justice John Roberts is known as a pretty good judicial craftsman. So how could it have come out in this kind of messy way? In that story, We were able to quote from some of the justices' private memos to one another. That is very unusual. That information was very hard to get. And so it's on-the-record information, but it's not an on-the-record interview.
It's a quote from a document. Were those documents given to you? Oh, don't even ask. I'm not telling you. Okay. That's what I want you to know. The Supreme Court is often presented as neutral, orderly, above politics. What has become visible now as you look more closely at the dynamic in this group of supermajority conservative justices?
The reason it's very hard to find out is that the court over the last 10 years and especially recently has essentially become more secretive. For anyone who doesn't know what the shadow docket or the emergency docket is, I want to define it for a sec. This is an alternate way of deciding cases.
It's really just happened in the last decade, in which the court not only bypasses a lot of its usual careful processes of consideration and writing, they make these kind of fast-track, shortcut decisions, but they often do it without explaining their logic. And the reason that is shocking is because... judges explain their logic. That's how they get authority. You know, to write an opinion as a
And so to write an opinion is to hope that even somebody who truly disagrees with the opinion will accept it. And therefore, it's really important in upholding rule of law, right? It's like a real act of respect and glue for the public. In these emergency cases, shadow docket cases— the court will often issue a cryptic opinion. We're talking about like one paragraph.
It will say what should happen, but it won't say why. And these are not minor issues. They're technically temporary decisions, but they've had enormous consequences. They have been used to award President Trump a lot of power. For example, one of the questions dealt with in this cryptic way over the past year was about who can be deported and how. And we don't know what the court's logic is.
So I just really want to make sure that listeners know that the court is not explaining itself in a lot of these cases. And it only makes our journalism more important, right? Because there's our rationale. We have this imperative to see and to understand. What keeps you doing this work? Oh, I love doing this work. I love doing this work.
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