Itching for a Fight

I don’t understand why people talk to Isaac Chotiner. His reputation as the best interviewer-assassin at work today—maybe ever—precedes him. I suspect that each guest thinks he will be the one to finally best Chotiner. And he makes good use of this hubris. He calmly and respectfully dismantles the tendentious arguments people make about everything from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to gerrymandering, genocide denial, and deportation. But he also has an appreciation for deep knowledge. The opposite of the gotcha interview is the expert interview, when Chotiner lets people who know their trades inside out explain them to his devoted readership. As our conversation shows, the flip side of his savagery is his generosity. Merve Emre: Are you used to being on the other end of this?Isaac Chotiner: Yeah, but I’ll survive.Can you tell us the story of how you got from being a college student to being the premier “assassin” interviewer? I worked in politics briefly after graduating from college, on the John Kerry campaign in 2004. I wanted to give journalism a try and got a job at this thing called Bloggingheads.tv. It was ahead of its time, sort of a pre-podcast podcast where two w...