Remembering symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas

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This is Fresh Air, I'm David B. and Kooley. Michael Tilsen Thomas, the composer and conductor who presided over the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, died last week at age 81. He had battled brain cancer since 2022.

The musical and social impact of Tilsen Thomas

ranged far beyond the podium. As an educator, he co-founded the New World Symphony

“in Miami Beach, a place for musicians to launch their careers.”

He composed and performed original works. As a TV host on PBS, he presented a 10-part multi-year series about classical music, as well as a two-hour special about his own grandparents. And by being open in San Francisco about his half-century

private relationship with his life partner, Tilsen Thomas was an early and influential figure in the gay rights movement. Michael Tilsen Thomas was born in Los Angeles in 1944, into an artistic family that stretched back for generations.

His paternal grandparents Boris and Bessie Thomas Chefski, as both stars and organizers of a national road company, helped establish the American Yiddish Theatre.

“In 2012, Tilsen Thomas celebrated them in a great performance”

as TV special called the Thomas Chefski's. Their son Tony, Tilsen Thomas' father, also was in show business. He was a producer of the classic Orson Welles radio show Mercury Theatre on the air. And later, for television, wrote for such programs

as Death Valley Days and Lassie. Michael Tilsen Thomas gravitated to television as well. In 2000, five years after joining the San Francisco Symphony and establishing himself as a world-class conductor, he was interviewed by morally safer on 60 minutes,

who asked him how he saw his job as a conductor. In my mind, the conductor is much more like a director in the theater. It's very clear to me, perhaps because of my family, that the musicians are the ones who are actually doing the playing. And I am there to help them focus and clarify what they need to do

so that they appear to their very best and feel that freedom and confidence to be their very best. Because in the process of playing these thousands of notes, and there are thousands of notes they're playing in every performance. They need sometimes help to say, "Ah, here, make more space for your colleagues over here."

Be more aggressive about this. Don't be afraid to take the risk to be even quieter here. This way, a director would help the actors to clarify their ensemble. Four years later, in 2004, Michael Tillson Thomas had enough visibility and cloud to mount his own music appreciation TV series on PBS.

As Leonard Bernstein had done before him. Tillson Thomas' series was called "Keeping Score." It presented ten installments over seven years, introducing classical works to TV viewers in a very personal and informal manner. This is Beethoven's third symphony when he called Errolika.

It took Beethoven three years to write this piece. It has taken me nearly thirty years to get my head around it and understand it, feel comfortable with it. This score is a messy record of all the questions I asked and the answers I searched for. And time and again along was during I asked myself, "Why is this taking me so long?"

Well, part of it, of course, is it's by Beethoven and anytime you do a piece by Beethoven, you feel this big weight on your shoulders. The guy is so great and so famous. He's not just a composer, he's a brand, he's an icon, he's an industry. How famous is Beethoven? Even Chuck Berry knows who he is.

Which is pretty good for a guy who lived 200 years ago and never even had a gold record.

After discussing the history and impact of each piece, he then conducted his San Francisco Orchestra in a passionate performance,

[Music] [Music]

“Michael Tilsen Thomas also was a composer. Perhaps his most meaningful composition”

was a combination of orchestral peace and recitation called "From the Diary of In Frank."

He wrote it for Audrey Hepburn, who, like Anne Frank, was born in Holland in 1929. While Anne Frank was in hiding, young Hepburn was aiding the Dutch resistance. She survived, Anne Frank did not, but her diary did. Hepburn went to Hollywood, became a star, and was asked to play Anne Frank in a 1959 movie. She declined, feeling it was all too close and personal.

But when Michael Tilsen Thomas wrote a piece with Audrey Hepburn as his muse,

she agreed to read Anne Frank's words as the orchestra played Tilsen Thomas's stirring music. In this passage from a 1990 performance in Oslo conducted by Lucas Foss, you can hear the musical equivalence of Nazi jackboots and later of hope. And of course, you also can hear Audrey Hepburn reading the words of young Anne Frank. It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.

I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too. I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens,

“I think it will all come right that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Today on Fresh Air, we're going to remember Michael Tilsen Thomas by listening back to

two of his conversations with Terry Gross. The first took part in 1995, the year he took the

job as conductor in San Francisco. As a teenager, you participated in the premiere of works by Bollesh, Doc Hasn't Copeland, Stravinsky. You worked with them directly, yes? Yes indeed. Yeah, so did you think of your sense of what to expect, if you live the life of a musician? Well, they did. Many people did. I mean, also Copeland, but I very early perceived that there were some people in the music business who had been playing music for their whole lives, who seemed

to be a noble and transfigured nearly by the process of making music, and others who seemed to be very unhappy and embittered by the experience of making music. And so I was trying from the very beginning to understand what was the difference between these people at where did the choice lie between having a life in music that made you very, very happy, or one that made you very frustrated? What were you able to figure out? Well, I decided way back then that it was important for musicians

to kind of take a musical hippocratic oath of what I went into the fashion. And what is the oath?

“That you have to discover that it's just necessary for you to make music. I mean, to be a musician,”

you have to love music as much as eating or sleeping or dreaming or all those other things.

It depends a lot on being very well prepared and being in the right place at the right time.

“But I remember a moment when I was around 18 or 19 and I was walking on the USC campus where I was”

going to school. And I thought to myself, well, I know that I'm good enough. I know I'm good enough. I could be a university musician, and there are wonderful things happening at this music school, of great quality and expression. And if I could do this, as long as I can make music, I'll be very happy. And if it turns out that I can make music in some larger arena, well, we'll see about that. But I know that it's music itself, which is this process, this dialogue

with something in my spirit that I must pursue. And then I knew I was going into music with, with no other agenda. It was just the music itself that mattered. And it was those people who for whom music truly mattered, who were the ones that had wonderful lives as musicians. When you said you thought musicians should take a hippocratic oath, I thought it would be,

you know, first you know harm. And that would be something like never perform boring works.

Well, never perform with your heart not being in it, never allow yourself to get to the point where it's a job, always make sure that your spirit is focused so that, so that communicating music to other people is a central priority for you. I have a conducting question. I mean, a stick question. You studied classical stick technique. How much of that do you use now and how much of your technique is based on what you've learned and improvised over the years? It's definitely a mixture

“of both. I think the easiest way for you to understand this is that there's a constant given take”

process going on in the rehearsals and in the performers itself. So there's certain key moments where I have to really indicate the exact echoes of a certain moment in time to get around a particular corner. And then having done that, then what I want to do is sort of turn over the lead of the music to perhaps a solo oboe play or perhaps the viola section or maybe a brass corral. All those different groups within the orchestra have their own reaction time. They all take breaths at a different

speed. They all have a different way of interacting and it's possible with my battle or with a little bit of body language or in using my eyes a lot. Mostly, in using my facial expression, my contact with the orchestra shapes all those things. You were very close to Leonard Bernstein.

“Do you feel like you learned a lot about conducting technique from him? Of course, I learned a lot”

from him by observing him and mostly through the kind of colloquy concerning music that we had over many years. When I was studying pieces, I had the opportunity to call him up and ask questions.

And in the best kind of a rabbinic style, almost always when I asked him a question, he would

ask me a question back and by this kind of dialogue of questions, he would help me to really find my own way of doing the music. That was of course terrific. I guess my conducting style has become a lot freer. It's a lot more economical now, maybe than it was 10 years ago, but you know, these things change. I can only say that now it feels to me in the repertoire that's really mine, that as if I'm making the music happen in space, as if I'm touching the notes and

actually molding them and shaping them in some kind of plastic way, you know, within time itself. You were on the road of the James Brown once, right? Well, I was with him for a couple of days. I met him in Boston. He was doing a show in a small jazz club. And I told him I was a great admirer of his and he said, "Well, come on the road, you know, see how we do it." Because I asked him how he got the band to be so tight. This was the time when he was doing

sex machine was his big hit. And I spent three or four days with him at Lanta, at Augusta, and in Washington, D.C., watching from backstage just what he did. And it was a great thrill. So, did you learn anything you could apply? Absolutely. Because what I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present. And every particular piece, the stroke of the beat had a certain length. He wanted the trap-drucker to be out in front and the hand-drucker

to be in the back and the base player to be right, the center and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the chunk would be and he used it. It was something very sophisticated

So, did it change the way you conducted it all or the way you organized your beat? It didn't change the way I conducted so much, but it changed the way I could listen to music, and imagine how the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the exact moment of the attack and music could be really artfully crafted to propel the music in different ways. Your grandparents were stars of the Yiddish theater, Boris and Bessie Tomashewski,

“and, um, the, well, I think your grandfather died just a few years before you were born”

and, uh, what 38 or 39. Right. And you say what 30,000 people attended his funeral?

That's correct. That's extraordinary. I found that, I never realized that until just recently,

I found the old New York Times piece on his funeral and there were the pictures of second avenue closed off totally in this huge parade of people going out to the cemetery in Brooklyn where he was buried. Did you grow up thinking that you literally had show business in your blood? Oh, I absolutely knew that, especially because I grew up around my grandmother, Bessie Tomashewski, Boris's wife, who some people say was a greater star than even he, she was a tremendous actress,

a natural talent. She had gone on the stage for the first time and she was about 13 and a half years old and she became a huge headline. First, as a, as a tragic actress and then in her mid-40s, she converted her career into being a major comedian and she created a number of characters on the stage. I'd, one very famous one, Minka, the Dean's Point, Minka, the Housemate, which was a kind of Yiddish

kite, pig million story. And in this play and others, she created that character, that Fanny Brice

and Molly Peacock and even Barbara Streisand are still playing to this day, that kind of Rye Wise, Americanized Jewish woman who has lots of personality and lots of mischief behind

“their enormous wisdom. So did she teach you anything about singing or acting when you were growing up?”

Well, lots of things, me, she told me the history of the theater in enormous detail and she recited scenes from it. And when I was a very young kid, she took me on to the stage, the pasty and a playhouse and we were studying on the stage and she said, "I must have been three or four at this time." She said, "Look up, Michele, look up and look up. What do you see far far away?" And I said, "Well, I see lights." And she said, "Look further up." And she said, "Far away

up there. You see that light up there." It says, "Exit." I said, "Oh, yeah, that's very far away."

She said, "Well, up there, that's the second balcony or the gallery. And up there are the cheapest

seats. And in those seats, sit the people who love the show the most." That's interesting. Yeah. She said, "Whenever you're doing on stage, if you're whispering, if you're singing, if you're

“ill-acquising, whatever you're doing, you must remember that it must reach those people.”

The intent of what you're doing must reach those people. You must be generous to reach your whole audience." So things like that were very valuable advice, of course. Conductor Michael Tillson Thomas. He spoke to Terry Gross again in 2012 when he had written and appeared in a PBS great performances special honoring his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Tomashewski, who were prominent stars of the Yiddish Theatre. Michael Tillson Thomas, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thank you, pleasure. The role of the Yiddish Theatre was very important for Jewish immigrants to the United States, many of whom spoke only Yiddish. And so they couldn't read the regular newspapers. A lot of the English language theatre would not have literal meaning to them, because they wouldn't understand the language. So the Yiddish stage, I mean, that, it was a really important, particularly in New York, a really important place for gathering

and for doing anything cultural. Well, absolutely, of course there were very many Yiddish newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and all these major cities at that time. But for the audience to go to the theatre, to experience a show, especially your show, which was very often my grandfather's case, a kind of spectacle, gave them a sense of the importance, this year, scale of what was achievable by an immigrant in the United States. It inspired them.

Old ladies used to come up to me on the street and said, we were kids, we had nothing, but once a week or once a month we went to the theatre and we saw the red velvet curtains with the name Tomashewski and large gold letters, and we thought, if that's possible, if him to do, then it's possible for us to do. Conductor composer and pianist Michael Tillson Thomas, talking with Terry

and John Powers reviews the new "Devil Wears" product movie. I'm David B. and Koolie,

“and this is Fresh Year. The name Tomashewski is such a famous name in the world of theater”

and in the world of theater. I grew up knowing that name. I knew that there were Tomashewski's were famous performers on the theater stage, but that's about all I knew. Your last name is Thomas, which is an abbreviated version of Tomashewski. How did Tomashewski become Thomas? He really started with my father who was trying to make his own way in life in the theater, and he simply was unable to do that everywhere that he went. He would mention his last name,

and right away was, "Oh, your Boris Tavashewski's son, and therefore he didn't want that. He just wanted to be able to find his own way in life and in the theater." So he was the one who changed his name initially to Ted Thomas, and quite frankly, he also wanted to escape from that whole crazed celebrity situation, which my grandparents inspired. And I think he also wanted to protect

“me from that. Because there were crazed fans, the only way of describing, there were stalker kinds of”

people who were pursuing my grandparents and their children, and with the same kind of order that were accustomed to thinking of crazy paparazzi or fans pursuing stars today. Were you aware of that when you were growing up? Your grandfather was dead, but your grandmother lived until you were 16 or 17, and she lived nearby, and I think you were pretty close to her. Did you get a sense of people stalking her? Or was it like way too late for that because she was

already in her 70s? Well, she had also moved out to LA, and one of the reasons for doing that outside of getting some character parts in movies she hoped for was that she wanted to get away from the whole scene in New York, Italian as she said with too many ghosts. But what I really

“became aware of the shadow of Boris for the first time was when I went back east when I was perhaps”

11 or 12, and I was going to a lot of shows, stage manager, cousins of mine, because so many members of the family were still in the business, in show biz, it's not necessarily as actors on stage, but in everything having to do with the behind-the-scenes life, and we used to go to just one scene every play, so theater people, they say, "Oh kid, the good scene to see the lunch,

the actu finale is good. Eddie Foiz, joke in the second scene of the first act is good."

So that kind of stuff. But there was this one show in my fair lady, and everybody was talking about it, and I thought I'd like to see it. My mother said, "Don't ask cousin Georgie to get you into that show. It's the hardest ticket to get, and just don't be a monster." So of course what I saw him, I immediately said, "Could we see my fair lady?" We went to the theater people were lined up round the block to hopefully get some returns, and he went over to the stage door, knocked,

and said, "Hey, is he around?" And his company manager came out, and my cousin indicated me and said, "Hey, is he? See this kid?" Boris Tomashewski's grandson. Two minutes later, we were in Rho 5, right in the center of that theater. Although your grandfather died before you were born, you got to know your grandmother, Bestie Tomashewski pretty well, and tell us about the kind of parts that she played in the Yiddish theater. Bestie started out as a young girl.

She was about five, which he arrived into the United States from Ukraine, and she met Boris, kind of eloped with him when she was a young teenager in 1415 years old, and she began

finding her way in the theater. First playing kind of innocent young girl roles, but as time went on,

she also discovered her enormous abilities as a comedian, and she very often played trouser parts or parts involving women being disguised as men for particular political or educational social purposes, a little bit like what the story of Yenteles, right? So Bestie did a lot of plays like that, where women disguises herself as a man in order to gain the advantages of education or whatever that a man can have. What did she tell you about women's rights and the

disparities facing women when she was young? Well, she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory and Baltimore, and then suddenly finding herself on stage as a star, pretty quickly. But she went

effective producer and manager, and someone who paid far more attention to the whole business and

“organization aspect of the theater than my grandfather did, who was the kind of big dreamer and”

party or, and that was so unusual for a woman of those days. I have some correspondence of her as where she's writing to some people who put into an ad in some big paper that she was going to be a part of some season they were doing and she writes to them saying that she absolutely has not agreed to do this and these are the conditions which they must immediately fulfill in order for this to happen. It's really very tough and straight talk and there's a lot of stuff about her. I didn't have room

for the show, remarkable things like what she was arrested by theater Roosevelt. This happened in this way in New York. There were blue laws at the time, meaning that performances were forbidden on Sunday. But of course, in the year to theater, Sunday was a very big day because Saturday was the Sabbath. So they played on Sunday at one point when TR was police commissioner of New York, he and some of his men raided one of the Tamashavsky's theaters and he came in and he saw

Bessie who was very young and who looked much younger than she was always and he said, "Look out

little girl," but she said, "Little girl, my ass, I'm the star here if anybody's being taken in, it's me." That's so funny. So she got arrested. That's exactly the way she told me the story, little. Like she insisted on getting arrested. Yeah, she was going to be in the center of it. I mean, women's rights feminism was a very big part of the theater, but along with a lot of other social issues. The theater plays, even the so-called "shunt" sort of low everyday plays,

were about issues like women's rights, like about labor, capital and labor, child labor, about degrees of religious observance, about the whole issue of assimilation, about reproductive rights of women,

“and also a lot about the language. Are we going to speak Yiddish? Are we going to speak English?”

What language at home, what language in the rest of the world? And what about the much larger issue, which is how can it be that somebody who was such a big shot in the old country became a nobody in America, and some little schlamiel from nowhere in a tiny village has suddenly in the United States become such a macher, such a big shot. And what does an immigrant pool of people do to understand where now is honor, where is tradition? Composer, conductor, and musician,

Michael Tillson Thomas, speaking with Terry Gross in 2012. He died last week. We'll hear more of this interview after a break. This is fresh air. So I want to play a recording by your grandmother, the late Bessie Thomas Chefsky, singing a song, and I'm going to have you introduce it. This is actually from a DVD outtake from your shell. So tell us about this song, and when you think it was recorded. This is a little introduction to a song called "Minka's Song", "Minka's Monologue",

one of Bessie's most famous parts in which she's playing a girl from a little village who's

come to the United States, and is on the eve of a huge adventure, a big million-like experiment

in which she will be elevated from her lowly parlor-made status to being the lady of the house.

“Okay, so this is Bessie Thomas Chefsky, recorded approximately when?”

1920 something. Wow, okay, here we go. So that was the late Bessie Thomas Chefsky, singing in Mirish, and she and Boris Thomas Chefsky are the late grandparents of my guest, conductor Michael Tillson Thomas. So what kind of music

her biggest numbers right there at our living room since she would arrive every weekend to our house,

“and we would put on a little show together, in which I would accompany her in some of her songs,”

and she would do recitations, and we did little scenes together. So although with my parents, fondest hope that I would become some kind of scientist or mathematician, I realized that she was already getting me into the whole theater experience right there at home. That's really interesting. You know, one of the things she says, do you want to think you describe her having said to you when you were young? You're more like me than your parents are, they're more conventional,

and you have more of what she's saying, like a creative spirit or something. That she said your parents are very lovely people, but terribly conventional. You're like me, you're an adventurer, you'll have to prove something. Did you take that to heart?

“I paid attention to it. I didn't quite what it meant. And as I listened to her tell all these stories”

of her life from her childhood through her stardom, and then even her reflections on the way fashion changed, and the way she was in her late life of quite lonely person, I took it all in, and what I kind of understood from her was that it had been a very interesting ride that she really was proud of what had been accomplished. And when she saw somebody a very successful entertainer coming up, and she could see in them something that had come

from the kind of things that they had done in the theater. She was very proud of it. She recognized them and appreciated them. So when your grandmother died, and you were, I don't know, 16 or 17, was there music at her funeral? There wasn't much music at my grandma this funeral. There were a few prayers, and there were very few people there, and her plaque just says, "Besitama Chewski, Yiddish theater, pioneer star," which is exactly what she wanted it to say. But of course,

there's a whole repertoire of songs that we played at home all the time whenever we thought about her, that I still play. It was a very big moment, a big ride of passage in my life.

The first day that I took over playing her songs instead of my father playing them, and measuring

the way I was playing them against the wonderful nuances that he and my grandmother had brought to the music. I was lucky to hear my family play that music for me. I wanted to keep in my ears exactly the way they had sung the songs and played them with all the irony and emergency and snap you little gestures and comebacks. So you mentioned some advice in your show that your grandmother

“gave you about when you're on stage, you have to remember that the people in the uppermost balcony”

are the people who paid the least butter and joying at the most, and you have to, even if you're whispering, you have to make sure that those people can hear you. How has that affected you as a conductor? My way of expressing what she said to me is, "What does it like for people beyond the sixth row?" That we play in such big halls, sometimes in classical music, and their halls designed to be very rich, which is on the one hand very nice, the gorgeous

sound that's there. But to get the sound to be distinct is difficult, and I sometimes tell my students that playing classical music is like making an announcement in an airport that you hear someone say, "Passengers on Flight 391, there are no, no, no, no, I immediately please." So you're trying to make every single moment completely distinct. Another way best he had of saying that you said, "Listen, when you're doing an accent, you've got to watch out for the

ninth void, that's the ninth void that's dangerous," because you're saying, "I was going to the park one day." And I noticed the most beautiful, you suddenly, you know, around that you're suddenly dropped the accent, you'll drop it, you've got to keep the contour of it all the way going through the same thing in music. That's really great. My go-to's in Thomas, thank you. It's been great.

As always, thank you. Michael Tilt's in Thomas, speaking to Terry Gross in 2012.

The longtime conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, who conducted more than 120

those recordings, from very early in his career. In 1976, Michael Tilt's in Thomas conducted the

“Columbia Jazz Band in a recording of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Tilt's in Thomas relied”

on the original orchestrations when the piece first was performed in 1924, and on Gershwin's 1925

piano role recording, to present an authentic recreation of the work, a version that was both historically significant and widely praised. [Music] [Music] [Music]

“Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews the Devil Wears Prada, too. This is fresh air.”

The Devil Wears Prada, too, which opens wide today, is a sequel to the 2006 hit about an

idealistic young journalist played by Anne Hathaway, who becomes the assistant to a scary, dictatorial fashion magazine editor played by Merrill Streep. Both reprise their roles in this new film, as do Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. It finds the magazine world in a vastly different place than it was 20 years ago. Our critic at large John Powers says the film, if not quite as much

“a larke as the original, is still good fun and has more to say. When the Devil Wears Prada hit theatres”

in 2006, I was the film critic at Vogue, the model for runway, the fashion magazine in the story. The inspiration for Merrill Streep's icy editor Miranda Priestley was my own boss, the legendary Anna Winter. I didn't do a review because no matter what I said about the movie, which I found slight but entertaining, people wouldn't have trusted it. Now comes the long-awaited, the Devil Wears Prada, too. And I'm free to say that David Franklin's

film should delight fans of the first one.

cleverly written by Aline Brasma Kenna, this fizzy sequel boasts the same expert cast, all as good as you'd hope, not to mention the same ravishing outfits and sumptuous hotel Swedes. But as the action moves glossily from Manhattan High Rises to New England Manchens to Lady Gaga singing in a Miller-Nazes Museum, it has more on its mind than the original. The story is set 20 years later in the present day, and Hathaway's back a smiley, wholesome

Andy Sachs, who's risen from being Miranda's beleaguered assistant to become a prize-winning reporter of hard news stories. Then she gets laid off from her paper. Luckily, there's been a scandal over to foolish article in runway, and in a damaged control move, the owner hires the respected Andy to be the magazine's features editor. She's back where she started. Only this time she winds up trying to save the publication

she wants thought her personal hell. Like any good sequel, the movie feels like a reunion. The elegant Silverhead Miranda,

Andy's mentor, the art director Nigel Kippling, is still there too, to dress her and guide her,

“and in Stanley Tucci's lovely performance, be quietly touching.”

Emily Blunt's scheming character Emily Charlton, who is once Andy's sharp elbowed rival, has left runway for a big job at Dior's New York outpost, and is romantically involved with Benji Barnes. Let's just in thorough, a dorky smug Jeff Bezos figure, with a wise, philanthropic ex-wife played by Lucy Liu. Here, early on, Andy Nigel and Miranda go to the Dior offices, Andy explains her new role to a shocked Emily.

I am the new feature editor at runway. No, you're not.

Are you serious? Wow, one does never cease. No, I'm actually a journalist now.

I've been published in a, it doesn't matter. Anyway, we are all well aware that running that story

“was mistaken or taking immediate steps, cannot actually get over this. It's really remarkable,”

a senior editor at runway. You. Yep. We're all so thrilled. Now, the first devil wears prada, with its masterpiece of a title, was a pop fable about wealth and glamour. It had the mythic pull of a hero's journey. Andy travels through hateys, in this case the fashion world, and faces down the monstrous Miranda, whose unashamed meanness tickled the audience. In fact, the world has changed hugely since the original, and the movie reflects it.

This new story is less mythological than historical. Less concerned with its heroine's personal journey, Andy's meat-cut romance here is a big yarn. Then with what's happening in the larger society, where the digital age has crushed magazines and newspapers. Back in 2006,

“runway like Vogue was a juggernaut with lavish expenditures and a September issue the size of a”

bank fault. Now with the cano budgets and issues as thin as its models, the magazine is struggling to survive. Its major presence is online and ripe for gambling. The movie accurately depicts how the print world has been falling into the hands of finance thugs, gibberish spouting consultants, and tech moguls like Benji, who treat publishing as a personal plaything. Driven by algorithms and profits, none of them actually cares about good journalism. Andy does, which is why she fights to

keep runway afloat. She knows it's imperfect and often shallow. It is still better than the new guys will make it. Plus she needs the job. As from Miranda, she may be as ruthless as ever,

but she's less intimidating than before and not only because we saw her human side in the first film.

She knows how shaky her position is in the new media landscape, where the sophisticated value she represents and institutions she leads are all being washed away in a tsunami of clicks. In the devilware's product, too, the devil is not Miranda, but the money meant. And they were product, too. John Powers reviewed the devilware's product, too, which opens in theaters today. On Monday's show, Booker Prize-winning novelist Douglas Stewart. Like the main character of his first

two novels, Stewart grew up in Glasgow in the 1980s, working class, queer, and with an alcoholic mother. She died when he was a teen. He also went on to have a career in fashion in New York, which plays into his latest novel. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Freshair. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/thisisfreshair.

We're rolling out new videos with in studio guests behind the scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive. Freshair's executive producer is Sam Brieger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertsville, and Charlie Carter. Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Phyllis Meyers and Marie Boltonado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth,

say a challenger, Susan Yucundi, Annabellman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Coolie.