Expat Threadren: Dimitry Léger & Alexandra Marshall
Perspectives on media and America like you've not likely heard
My August conversation with writers Alexandra Marshall and Dimitry Léger was recorded in that breach between the close of the Democratic National Convention and the Harris-Trump debate. To edit out our political talk from this reader version of our encounter definitely had occurred to me.
When I read through our back-and-forth though? The dated stuff was pretty entertaining. Insightful, even. The moldy content puts me in mind of a strong French cheese.
Funky good, that was The Threadren.
Aged gruyere probably came up for me because this week’s guests have been aging in France since the second Bush Administration. Marshall and Léger are my Threadren, members of a New York-centric intellectual clique that caught up mostly online.
How many of your conversation threads have been truly unforgettable?
Post-9.11 America was en route to its war with Iraq. My growing family and I had just ditched Brooklyn for another round of Los Angeles. When I wasn’t editing my first book I was working construction or doing California dad stuff. And Threadren emails would show up in my mailbox, sometimes by the dozens in that time before social media. Through an especially intense window of my life, our digital salon passed for the intellectual free-for-all that was my entitled life in New York.
Today, I consume as much of Marshall’s Substack writing…
…as any other scribe on this platform. Her voice has just always appealed to me.
And my Brooklyn playground hoops opponent Léger just sold the follow-up to his hit novel God Loves Haiti.
Not only did I not cut the dated parts—my regrettable LeBron takes, our naive Democrat hopefulness—I think the cold takes bring a second level of nostalgia to our talk. The Threadren too were the product of a different time, a less demanding landscape.
Nov. 5 has propelled us into a different world from when Alex, Dimitry and I excitedly sat down to this chat. Marshall joined me in Glassell Park to Zoom with Léger, whose Internet connection was unspeakably bad.
Donnell Alexander: You can see we have a varied array of guests in the house today. Okay, we got two guests: My man from way back in the day, from way far away is Dimitry Léger. I’m going to let him say what he calls himself, because I find that to be a complicated thing.
And right here with me in the house: Alexandra Marshall, whom I never see in real life.
This is kind of a reunion. Back in July, we had an episode of with Chris Jenkins—the documentary filmmaker—about a thread that we were on. He and I are on a basketball thread. and it just took me back to one of the greatest threads, probably the greatest thread I’ve ever been on, which these two were a part of.
We’re going to kind of explain these people, who they are, what they’re doing, and what the Threadren was/were—
Alex Marshall: IS.
DA: Yes, is. Thank you very much. I think we need to start with Dimitry Léger, because I don’t know where you are… and he’s frozen.
Alexandra Marshall: Just to fill in the viewers, he’s on a bus in Martinique. [Laughs] Which is why he might not be coming in so strong.
DA: Dimitry’s on a bus in Martinique. He’s muted, and he’s on a bus in Martinique.
Dimitry Léger: What’s up? What’s up! What's up! What's up! I’m Dimitry Léger, writer. I’m a novelist. That kind of sums it up, but sometimes my life is more of a novel than a novels I write. And I live in Martinique, after 17 years in Switzerland and 30 years in America.
DA: I cannot believe you’ve been gone that long.
DL: I’ve been in Switzerland since 2005. I moved here two years ago. I spent 17 years [in Switzerland]. Martinique is part of France, so it's kind of like 19 straight years in France; I lived in France, but I worked in Switzerland on the border.
DA: You’re from Queens, right?
DL: I was born in Haiti, and I grew up in Brooklyn. Flatbush, Brooklyn, baby. Flatbush, Brooklyn. I went to university, undergrad in Queens. My classmate from Flatbush was Special Ed.
(Editor’s note: Erasmus Hall High School appears in Special Ed’s “I Got It Made” video.) I went to the worst high school in New York City when New York City had the worst high school system in the nation. So, I can make the claim I went to the worst high school in America in 1988.
[Marshall laughs]
DA: And you went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for grad school, right?
Yeah, 10 years after [Queens] I went to Harvard for a master’s in public administration, focusing on international relations. Then I worked for the UN for 10 years.
DA: Let’s talk about Alex Marshall. If you’re on Substack, you might know her newsletter, An American Who Fled Paris, an interesting, serial sort of thing. Is it fair to call it a serial?
AM: It’s a serialized memoir, we can say. I am a journalist, a longtime journalist. I first met Dimitry a long time ago in New York City, when he was working at The Source and one of my best friends was working at The Source.
I was working for Sidewalk.com, for Microsoft. I was the nightlife editor and then I passed through glossy magazines until those kind of ended. Now I feel that I’m a rotary-telephone specialist—
DA: You just elided like 20 years—
AM: No, I had a long run in glossy magazines. I did a lot of travel writing, a lot of fashion writing, a lot of kind of lifestyle Vogue, Travel and Leisure, blah blah blah blah. Now I’m a writer at-large at Air Mail, which is the digital weekly newsletter from Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley. I write about France for them because I’ve lived in France since 2006.
Alexandra Marshall
So. Long-time journalist, now also writing a Substack about the [adjustment] from living for a long time in Paris to moving into the literal middle of nowhere, where I knew literally no one, and that strange adventure that it has been. Hence, An American Who Fled Paris, because I did.
DA: It’s a good story. I started from the beginning and ended up just kind of popping into it intermittently. It's worth following. I have a real question about the nature of The Threadren, because we’ve been talking about magazines and you just alluded to how they used to be this thing that they aren’t anymore. There was a concentration of magazine people—not everybody was a magazine person, but almost all—and The Source was the big intersection for a lot of us. That’s kind of cool.
AM: It was The Source, at a really good time for The Source. It was 2003 when it started. I was working at Radar—
DA: Radar!
AM: Which was like the most hyped magazine launch of all time that fell to inglorious… whatever, the way all magazines do these days. But I was working at Radar when that thread first coalesced. And it was Dimitry who started it, if you recall.
DL: I do, because I moved to Miami, and I missed all you muhfuckas.
I missed all of you, my New York peeps and my magazine crew. And March Madness was coming up. We were all kind of pissed about March Madness. We were pissed about the fact that it was a billion-dollar tournament and [the players] were working for free. Somehow all that anger came together and we thought, We’re going to boycott March Madness.
[Editors’ Note: In author RK Byers’ account of Threadren formation, Donnell Alexander gets credit for beginning the thread. Byers recalls it as a protest against ESPN telecasts of high school phenom Lebron James’ games.]
It was Chris Wilder and Ngai Croal, RK Byers—
AM: [John] Simons!
DA: Can we do a roll call of everybody who was in there?
‘It expanded to cover so much about people's lives, relationships, child custody struggles, job shit. Publishing started to change while we were all together.’
DL: So, Chris Wilder and RK Byers were were the editors of The Source Sports.
And Chris Wilder was one of the founding managing managers of The Source. Big Sixers fan, big basketball head. RK Byers was his right-hand manager of The Source Sports. I met Wilder in 93 when I was an intern at The Source. N’Gai and I met in 96 when I was an intern at at Newsweek. We stayed friends because we loved basketball. He loves the Lakers and I love teasing him about that because Kobe is not Michael Jordan, no matter how much he says it.
After that, it was Kierna Mayo, who was from The Source but also Money magazine. Now she’s a publisher. Aliya King, who started at The Source and is now an author and publisher as well.
DA: She’s at Disney right now. She’s an executive editor.
DL: Aliya? No, Aliya’s at Random House.
AM: We were all on that. It’s incredible.
DL: She published a book then, a book [with] Faith Evans. She published two celebrity books, then she joined the business. Naima [Brown]. She was someone’s kid sister, and was on there as well.
DA: Tab McDaniel. [Winston Williams is also a Threadren member.]
AM: Yes!
DL: Adam Bradley. He’s in LA right now. He’s in UCLA. Adam Bradley came through.
DA: I didn’t know that.
DL: He writes for the New York Times about hip hop. He wrote a book about hip hop poetry. He was on there too for a half second. We had some heavy hitters on there.
DA: John Simons.
AM: He said nice things about John McWhorter too much.
DA: Oh yeah, he was like my um, nemesis. You have to have a nemesis.
AM: Everybody has a nemesis
DA: You have to remember my book came out in the real heat of this Threadren moment.
AM: Your book, Ghetto Celebrity, one of my favorite memoirs that I’ve ever read.
DA: Thank you so much.
AM: It’s so good.
DA: Yeah, I love that.
AM: It really is good.
DA: But here’s the thing that was really invaluable: You all turned me on to The Wire. I didn’t see the first season.
AM: Oh, really?
DA: That’s where I learned about The Wire. Wow. I get into my own head sometimes and I miss cultural moments. But people forget, not everybody was watching The Wire at the beginning.
DL: Apparently. Apparently, a lot of people were not watching The Wire, but apparently everybody else was. It’s the weirdest thing. But people love The Wire.
DA: It was a very culturally-literate group of people. And the way you talked about it intrigued me. It was not like you guys were just fanboying a show, fangirling a show.
AM: There were a couple of women for a while. Not only was I the only white person, but also for some time, also the only woman.
‘That’s my my self-own, that I did that full-on awkward, "I’ve got all the Black people over for fried chicken.”’
DL: The only woman, yes.
AM: I think we should add that it expanded to cover so much about people’s lives, relationships, child custody struggles.
DL: Oh yeah.
AM: Job shit, publishing started to change while we were all together. People moved in and out of stuff.
It was in the window on the world. And we developed all these weird shorthands for things” Like I was the one who was always super pro-therapy and somebody started calling like the typical therapist Leonard Maltin. So, every time we’d bring up a therapy topic it would be like, “Leonard’s on the phone.” We just like we got into all these weird little channels of way inside jokes.
DA: What was that “self own”?
AM: You had asked me before, What was it like to be the only White person on the thread? We were having a pre-show discussion.
DA: Because I’m a pro.
AM: Right. First of all. It was fucking awesome. We were all friends. White girls from west LA don’t have a lot of Black friends. I had one or two in my life until I met all of you guys. So, number one you guys all became good friends. I made friends, I love my friends, you know? Yay.
Also, it was hugely, hugely eye-opening and so educational for me, because it was in this context of friendship and honesty. We could just get into some spats. The humor was super raw. It was like rolling with the punches with your kid friends, you know? I learned a lot.
I remember Chris Wilder breaking down, Don’t ever call a Black man smart. I was like, “What do you mean? It’s a compliment!” Stuff like that, where you learn like there are cultural shorthands, little microaggressions—little things that you would never know because it’s not your world.
DA: It was erudite people being raw, and that’s rare to find, you know? Especially as someone who’s out in California, people aren’t as openly intellectual sometimes. I don’t want to blanket the whole state, but you don’t always find that crowd. I had just moved after 9-11, and my circle was pretty small. I was leaning on y’all for those insights and those arguments.
AM: So I’m going to tell you myself. We were talking about how we never get together in person. Can we all be somewhere in the same place for once? So, I had this groovy apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn and I was like, Yeah, come over to my place you guys; I have a big enough place that I can fit everybody.
‘Who won in a landslide? Reagan? Since Reagan 1980, it’s always been 50-50. So it makes sense that Trump is going to be credible. It’s going to be a close game. It’s not like the US versus the rest of the world in the Olympic basketball.’
We talked about food all the time, so I was like, fuck it. We were talking about fried chicken, so I—the White person—had everybody come over for fried chicken. Laughter] There was an awkward twist to that, I felt. I made deviled eggs. Nobody ate my deviled eggs, because everyone, I guess, just figured my White-person deviled eggs were going to be sus. And they were delicious, but whatever.
Anyway, we got together and we hung out all afternoon and got really drunk. It was fun, super fun. And Chris rolled blunts. That was kind of like the first time I ever maybe smoked one?
DA: Oh wow. Okay.
AM: In my living room. It was great. But I that’s my my self-own, that I did that full-on awkward, “I’ve got all the black people over for fried chicken.”
DA: We will have matured as a nation when that is not a third-rail issue.
AM: It’s a unifier.
DA: It’s the bellwether we look for.
The Legend of Black Mexico is my most ambitious storytelling effort since publishing that memoir in my early 30s. You can keep track of how the work is going through periodic updates.
DA: I can’t let you guys be here and not talk about politics, because I feel like it’s almost like we’ve had a snap election, And I’ve wanted that for years. I never would have dreamed of it, as a political watcher.
What is your take on what’s happening here?
DL: It’s 2008 all over again, Donny. That’s why I’m coming home next year. I’m going to vote in person for the first time in 25 years. It's 2008 all over again.
DA: Which part of it makes you say that? There was no Donald Trump. There was not the polarization.
AM: Hmm… there was George Bush though, who seemed as bad as Donald Trump.
DA: Well, you’ve been gone for a minute. [Laughs]
DL: It’s like the second coming of Obama.
DA: I can’t wait to see the polling—legitimate polling out of the convention—because I saw some stuff on TV that made me feel like there’s a huge advantage for the Democrats. But that’s just TV. I can’t tell.
‘You guys have be-clowned yourself since 2016. You have not done a good job covering Trump. You have not risen to the moment or shown that you deserve the deference that you expect to receive.’
DL: It’s going to be tight. It’s always tight.
AM: It’s not yet September and national polls don’t matter, because we need to look at states’ polls. We have elections in states.
DA: I don’t know if you guys have thought about this, but I just realized this week that this would be the first California Democrat President. The sensibility is generally figured to be too far left to work nationally. I just think that would be so great just to have [California] to be more of the governing sensibility of the nation. because I love it out here. I make fun of California, but I love it out here.
AM: This is also why “Kamala as a cop” is a good thing, to make it kind of palatable as a woman, you know?
DA: The last night of the convention was all military people.
AM: And her speech.
DA: What about it?
AM: Just the fact that she talked about wanting to make sure that we have the most lethal fighting force. It’s like, This is what presidents do. She should be the first woman commander in chief. Her job is to put American interests first. Sorry for the rest of the world. [Laughs] Which includes a strong military, which includes all those things. And you can see that she believes it. I don’t think it’s cynical symbolism.
I’d be very afraid of her if I were Vladimir Putin.
DA: I think she's going to slay at the debate. Have you got any thoughts on the debate?
DL: I can’t wait, I can’t wait. The only person who doesn't want to see these debates is Trump. Trump does not want to debate her. She's a fucking lawyer. She 58, remembers everything. She knows policy. She knows all of the details.
DA: It’s really kind of it's very much anti journalism, but I think it’s good that she’s not answering any questions yet. [Laughs]I wouldn’t. As much as you can control the environment in 2024, that's how you win. I hate to say it, but I think a lot of journalism paradigms are broken.
This seems as good a place as any to remind that tipping is not offensive to the proprietor of this Substack.
AM: Speaking of all of our pasts as journalists and merging into like different things as our business basically fell apart and disintegrated. I mean, people are now responsible for putting their own voices out there. So you had all these content creators at the convention for the first time, as opposed to the accredited media, who lost their shit because they felt like, Oh my God, the TikTokers are taking our jobs. We the noble journalists…
And it’s kind of like, First of all, you guys have be-clowned yourself since 2016. You have not done a good job covering Trump. You have not risen to the moment or shown that you deserve the deference that you expect to receive.
Yes, journalists are important for democracy, no question. They should be doing hard stories on Biden, Kamala—all of them—but they should also be covering Trump, and that's the problem. You think Trump participated in any of those investigative stories that were the basis of a lot of the lawsuits and prosecutions that he's facing now?
DL: We shouldn’t really say anything until October. Sometimes there is a surprise in October that kills things. She has to be ready for that. If I recall correctly, Hillary's emails became a thing in October. And that went a long way to undermining her. McCain has done stupid happen in October. It's completely made him seem even more incompetent compared to Obama.
So she could could have a bit of a fire to put out in October.
LeBron James is the best basketball player in America. He was still the best player on the Olympic team.
DA: When you're looking at America from Europe, is there a legitimate loss of stature when someone like Trump is the president of the United States? How does that play out?
AM: You say “I’m sorry” all the time, and you immediately say, “I’m American, but of course I'm not for Trump.” They started asking me to go on French TV and talk about American politics during the last election—I have no idea why that happened. I do not write about American politics.
DA: You’re a culture watcher, though. People don't run on policy. It has become a culture complex.
AM: It’s true, and I am a theater critic in that sense. But I also have an American accent, so I think they find an authenticity. I’m like the Bill Walton color commentator as opposed to the serious sports data analysis person. The whole point is to say, in France at least they are obsessed with Trump. They’re fascinated for the entertainment value, for the horror of it. “What does this say about America?” T[o] the whole rest of the world, we can be a little obnoxious. We got taken down a peg on that one.
DA: Well, what does it say about us to you, that he’s the man, that Trump is always in contention?
DL: The country has been split politically as long as I can remember. Since, I don’t know, since who won in a landslide? Reagan? Since Reagan 1980, it’s always been 50-50. So it makes sense that Trump is going to be credible. It’s going to be a close game. It’s not like the US versus the rest of the world in the Olympic basketball. It’s going to be a close game, so the Democrats pull it out in the fourth quarter.
There’s not going to be any fourth-quarter blowouts anymore, because half the country is what it is.
DA: Until we deal with the Electoral College.
We’re not going to talk hoops, but this is an observation I came up with today that I have to share because Meaty is here and you’re an L.A. person.
LeBron… isn’t a good basketball player anymore. I mean, He’s good. He’s a B-plus player, but the idea that he’s excellent? He can excel against the cream of Eastern Europe and against nations where they don’t have indoor stadiums? But on defense he is such a liability and hard to plan around. I’m a Lakers fan, and it makes me insane because they're trying to build this team around this declining asset.
The way that he played in the Olympics is going to tell people he’s great, but the bottom level of talent there is so low that you can hide him on defense there. It really bothers me, and I’m a LeBron fan. I just think this is his era as a declining asset. It eats at you, eats at the organization in a way that’s not great for basketball.
AM: Patrick Ewing.
DA: Yeah, it's very Patrick Ewing.
AM: Well, no, I think LeBron is a superior player to Patrick Ewing, all things considered. But when the franchise is an aging—it's like Joe Biden, for fuck’s sake.
DA: In basketball, just in general, it just annoys me how little people talk about defense.
DL: He’s the best basketball player in America. He was still the best player on the Olympic team. He, for some reason, he has the energy. He has the health.
DA: He plays no defense.
DL: He’s the best player in the NBA. I mean, that's what we have AD for. I mean, AD plays defense.
DA: It's half the game!
DL: LeBron plays point forward. He plays point forward. AD’s there for the defense.
AM: He’s a Heat fan—how can you say the defense doesn't matter? We’re East Coast basketball people.
DL: Well, the Lakers suck. The Lakers suck for a lot of reasons that don’t have to do with defense. The Lakers suck because they can't bring in players. They have two of the 10 best players in the league.
DA: Because of LeBron.
DL: You guys surround him with bums. You surround him with bums for these many years? You guys can't draft right. You can’t trade right. You keep surrounding him with bums. And that's the management. That's management. Look at the Timberwolves. They moved heaven and earth, brought in Gobert. Now they have the best record in the league, because they paired Gobert with the Dominican KAT and with Anthony Edwards.
There’s things to do out there, but you guys just don't do it. And can’t blame LeBron for it. He’s been 25 and 8.
DA: You don’t watch the games.
DL: I watch all the games.
DA: You don't watch the games.
DL: Lakers fans don’t want to blame management. I watch the games.
DA: Oh, I do want to blame management. Lakers fans are so spoiled. I mean, this is about as bad as it gets. Most cities never get a championship. If we’re only in The Finals, it’s a big disappointment.
DL: And the bubble chip doesn't count. The bubble ’chip doesn’t count.
DA: Whatever.
DL: Sorry. Get a real ’chip.
DA: [To Marshall] The championship during the pandemic.
[Marshall doubles over with laughter]
DL: Yeah, the COVID chip.
DA: I'm inclined to agree with you, but I don’t talk about it. Not in Los Angeles.
AM: I grew up in LA, and I never liked the Lakers. I really got into basketball when I moved to New York.
DA: What was that all about?
AM: It was about becoming friends with my father again. My dad was a big basketball fan, a Utah Jazz fan, especially. He lived in Salt Lake for a time, in my Mormon family.
DA: I forgot that about you!
DA: So my dad and I would watch games to bond and that’s how, and that was when I was a bit older. When I moved to New York—I moved in 94—so, the Knicks were glorious. That's when I learned to love basketball and when I really became super into it.
I like a defensive game. I mean, the Sprewell era of the Knicks—yes, you know—be still my heart. That was fantastic. I had a whole thing on the thread. Like, he was my crush. We had the National Boyfriends Association, you remember? It was the draft of hotness and every year we had to do the NBA. I was pushing a bunch of heterosexual men to join me in the National Boyfriends Association.
DA: I missed that.
AM: Everybody joined.
DL: It was great.
DA: It was very open, very open society. You know, we have to record again with different members of The Threadren. I had this idea, like, you could have five or ten of you on.
DL: It could still happen. We're on Slack. The diehards: Me, N’Gai, Rich Byers, and Naima. And Moira, Ngai’s cousin.
AM: Wait, Moira the producer, Moira?
DL: Moira the producer.
AM: I gotta get back on. You know, I was thinking about this. My life changed. I read books now. I can just be on the thread again.
DL: Yes!
AM: It’s on Slack; the time difference made it hard. I stopped in 2006 when I moved to France because the time difference meant that if you weren't pinging those emails through all day long, you would wake up to 300 in your inbox.
DL: On Slack, it's easier to manage.
On Slack, it's easier to manage. Ngai’s now an executive at Microsoft. He’s pushing AI all day, and I’m saying, dude, AI is another way to waste time. So we argue over that. He’s still a diehard Laker fan. We still argue over that. RK Byers is self-published now, so we still talk about books a lot. And of course, the politics thing. So, the thread is alive and well on a better organized one thing. But it’s down to about four or five dialogue points.
DA: We have just a couple minutes, and I want to just make sure that we sort of land with where you are, because I vaguely know what you're doing professionally, and you’ve mentioned your book. I don’t know how much you want to talk about the book. I know that it’s not like a main thing, but—
AM: I can talk about it.
DA: And you're working the Graydon Carter thing. I didn't connect you with that. Can you update us, both of you?
DL: I love seeing Alex’s byline in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal magazine, T magazine.
AM: Yeah—every, like, five years.
DL: I’m saying that I love seeing Alex’s byline pop up randomly in a beautiful laid out story. That happens all the time. And her Substack is very awesome. Really, because I lived in Middle of Nowhere, France—from Paris to middle of nowhere, France. I'm like, damn.
But me, moving wise I came here to Martinique two years ago because my French version of my book was a hit in mainland France. I came here for a book festival as a, as a guest of honor. Then I decided to just stay, because my kids are grown, living their own lives in Europe and I miss the Caribbean.
I write about the Caribbean life. I wrote my second book. I write love letters to Caribbean women and was living in Europe. It was time to align my values and end that disconnect.
Now I’m on a bus with like 50 women and two dudes and we’re about to go to a festival. We do a music festival almost every evening. Jazz, hip hop, blues tonight. It’s a super culturally-rich part of the world, so we all we do is art exhibits concerts. Last night I jammed— Ugh! Basically I’m living the Caribbean life I write about.
And when my kids come here, I always tell my kids, Listen, if you have to deal with racism in Europe, always keep in mind that in Caribbean and South America, everyone looks like you. Whenever you want a break from Europe, come out here and everyone looks like you. Everyone has the curly hair like my daughter. Everyone looks vaguely Arab like my son. They come out here, it’s like, ‘Oh, you just blend in.’ It blows their mind, and I’m like, Yeah, guys, this is the life.
Everyone's happier since I’m back home. Even my ex-wife is happy that I’m back home. You could you could do the nomad thing. I lived in Europe for a long time, just to look out for my kids and my family. Now everybody’s grown, we’re empty nesters. By great coincidence both kids are living in Stockholm now. My son’s an accountant and my daughter’s studying in college and the ex-wife is back in Geneva. Everybody’s in their part of the world where they’re supposed to be.
AM: I moved out of Paris. After 17 years of being a French journalist, covering Frenchie journalist things. I moved to the middle of nowhere after a breakup.
I was in a big house with my ex. The whole magazine industry pretty much collapsed, and my life sort of collapsed. So, I moved out to a pasture, actually a stunningly beautiful region of France called Le Perche, in Normandy. Really accessible and easy from Paris. It is out of the middle of nowhere, but at the same time it’s actually quite easy to go back and forth to city life, thank God.
Being out there, much lower overhead. So, the fact that journalism was not taking up as much of my time, I could fill it with doing other things. I’ve started ghostwriting a fair amount. And as a ghost, you should be discreet. I won’t say whose books I’ve written, but I've just finished a second one that was very research- intensive and really grueling and difficult. I’m free as of two days ago.
And I’m about to start another one.
DL: Yay!
AM: I’m in a quiet place where I live alone in a very large house in the middle of a village in the middle of a forest. It’s very peaceful, the oxygen is just rich. It’s stunning and it’s made everything slow down in my life: More contemplation, longer- form writing. So, in addition to the Substack thing that was kind of a memoir project based on this whole passage, I’ve also just started like noodling around. Hey, maybe I’ll try writing a novel. Because you can have the freedom to do that when you have low overhead and space. It’s in this environment where it’s conducive to creativity.
DA: Would you ever come back here to live?
DL: No!
[Alexander laughs]
AM: I was talking about that with my brother—
DL: No!
DA: Like it’s the stupidest question.
DL: Yeah, it really is. I came here two years ago and I was like, Wow, I could wait ’til I’m retired to move back to the Caribbean, [but] I was gonna move back now and figure out how to make a living here while I’m here.
But, like… no.
AM: When you spend a lot of time out of America, you realize America is anarchy.