The Art of Getting Someone to Talk

By Andy — 2026-08-11 — Literary News

I walked into a bookshop in Bangkok last month and someone had left a New Yorker on a table. It was Rachel Syme's piece on Carol Burnett. The thing just sat there, creased at the spine.

That's the marker of real profile work, as far as I can tell. People hold onto it.

Syme appeared recently on "The Critic and Her Publics," a podcast about the craft of interviewing hosted by Merve Emre. The show asks simple questions: how do you get someone to say something new? What makes a good question? When do you push, and when do you listen for what they're not saying?

Syme's answer, more or less, is that you have to know the terrain before you enter it. She knows musicals. She knows the grammar of old Hollywood. She knows fashion inside out, which means she understands that a woman's wardrobe is not decoration—it's argument. She's been covering those subjects for The New Yorker since 2012, which gives her the kind of deep literacy that makes an interview feel less like interrogation and more like conversation between people who've read the same books.

She's spent time with Sarah Jessica Parker, Patti LuPone, Barbra Streisand, Parker Posey at a boutique, Carol Burnett on her own terms. The point isn't the celebrity—it's the possibility that emerges when you actually know what you're talking about.

Actually, that's not quite right. The point is both. The celebrity gets boring fast unless there's something underneath. Syme seems to understand that fame is a text, like any other text. It needs reading. Not decoding, not exposing. Reading.

She talks about the glossy profile as a form under pressure. Everyone assumes it's dead—too much access, too many gatekeepers, not enough real conversation anymore. But Syme suggests the form isn't compromised so much as it's gotten harder. You have to be smarter. You have to know more. You have to earn the conversation by proving you're worth the time.

There's something bracing about that. In an era when every interview feels like it's trying to be a scandal or a puff piece, Syme's work suggests a third option: the profile as an act of attention. Sustained, informed, unglamorous attention.

She loves a good yarn—that's what Merve says in the podcast description. Not a scoop. A yarn. There's a difference. One is transactional. The other assumes you're both in this for something closer to understanding.

The full conversation is available wherever you get your podcasts, and the transcript lives at the New York Review of Books.

You want to listen to someone who actually listens.