Eating the Dinosaur

Eating the Dinosaur is a new book by Chuck Klosterman. I just love these passages about the art of interviewing in the first chapter from Ira Glass, host of This American Life:

They can tell by my questions that I'm really, really interested and really, really thinking about what they're saying, in a way that only happens in nature when you're falling in love with someone. When else does that experience happen? If you're falling in love with someone, you have conversations where you're truly revealing yourself...I think small intimacy that doesn't extend beyond a single conversation is still intimacy. Even if the basis behind that conversation is purely commercial, there can be moments of real connection with another person. In an interview, we have the apparatus of what generates intimacy -- asking someone to bare himself or herself. And if you're the person being asked the questions, and if you're normal, it's hard not to have it work on your heart.

and Chris Heath, Journalist:

If a question is interesting, it is very difficult to resist answering it, because you will usually find your own answer interesting to yourself. If you have any ego at all, or a desire to share your experience and thought processes, then you may also imagine your answer will be of interest to other people. But that lure and appeal would quickly break down in a real conversation without a second factor: the person asking the question must be interested in hearing the answer. There's no single bigger reason why people answer questions. Here, of course, lies the biggest difference between a successful interviewer and an unsuccessful one: the successful one makes the interviewee feel as though he or she is interested in the answers. The unsuccessful interviewer -- and I have sat in or listened to enough interviews to know, unfortunately, and disappointingly, how common they are -- does not."

I'm gearing up to release a podcast on Genetics, in which I want to eventually have interviews with scientists. I'd love to make my interviews even half as captivating as the average on This American Life.

Again, via Metafilter