A Note from David Granger
The editor of Esquire Magazine
Almost 18 years ago, one of Esquire’s writers, Mike Sager, sat down with an actor, Rod Steiger, and started asking him questions. This was not a traditional celebrity interview. No, we wanted to know what Mr. Steiger (who had lived an extraordinary life) was more or less certain about. We wanted to know what conclusions his life had caused him to draw. We wanted to know what he’d learned.
Sager and his editor, Peter Griffin, boiled down Mr. Steiger’s observations into a single page of aphorisms; we shot a portrait of him, and when we published the words and the image, we called the thing What I’ve Learned. We’ve published a What I’ve Learned in very nearly every issue since, and it has, for many years, been the most popular regular feature in the magazine.
Not so long ago, we began discussing ways we might reshape and reimagine some of our longtime magazine features for the digital age. It occurred to Senior Features Editor Tyler Cabot, who has been leading this process, that in addition to the What I’ve Learned features we have, we also have the raw material — the audio recordings of at least a few hundred of the interviews. As he mentioned this to me, I remembered listening years ago to the audio of Dustin Hoffman telling the story of shooting the scene in Rain Man in which he and Tom Cruise are jammed into a phone booth. Hoffman recalls how he “ad-libbed a fart” in the middle of the scene and he remembers Cruise’s outrage, which was caught on camera and then included in the movie. I’d read the story previously, but hearing Hoffman deliver it added a whole new dimension of delight. Shortly thereafter, Tyler showed me an animation Cal Fussman (who has done most of the What I’ve Learned interviews) had David Gerlach, an animation producer, create out of a Larry King interview. It was amazing how some simple illustration brought to life and enhanced the audio experience. A lightbulb went off. And we conceived of this project.
As all that was happening, we had begun to appreciate how Medium had come up with a platform that created Web-based experiences that were more immersive and rewarding and calmer than just about anywhere else in the digital universe. They’d created a site that encouraged people to unplug for a bit — sort of along the lines of what a great magazine experience can be.
People these days talk about “content” being “platform agnostic.” I don’t buy it. I really believe that the medium is a significant part of the message. One approaches a piece of writing, say, in an inherently different way on a mobile phone than in a book.
Generally, when you are engaging in a digital experience, you are doing it in a way that is threatened with distraction. Medium has built a digital platform that encourages its consumers to spend a little time and to focus.
This is an experiment. I hope you love it.
David Granger
