Paulina Porizkova & Bill Keller

the Beautiful. Welcome too, Fast Politics. Paulina Porskova, Well, Hi there. I'm so glad I got to have you on because it's like not that often that you get to have on a friend, you know, someone you really friends with. So I'm very thrilled. I know, I don't think I've been interviewed by a friend yet. Hello friend, Hello. So I knew that you were going to write a book, but I knew that you were like very back and forth on it. So tell us what sort of pushed

you over the edge to do it? Well? Actually, you know what, Well, what pushed me over the edge was the fact that Maria Shriver called me and said, hey, would you write me a book? And she said, I followed you on Instagram, That's why she called, and I want you to write me a book like you write your Instagram. So that to me was like, oh, well, I'm doing that every day for free anyway, So it would be a chance for me to like delve a lot deeper and you know, get my thoughts out a

little clearer. And so that's sort of you know, it was just like an offer I couldn't refuse. It was perfect. What was a little less perfect was that she gave me three months in which to write it. And now, you as a writer, you know, three months, right, a lot of time. Now, it's such a hard thing. How did you sort of decide what to put in there, what not to put in there? How did you get going? This is funny because I'm talking to somebody who has written a book about her life too, and I've read

your books and I love the feelings mutual. You're so funny and so bright, and you revealed a lot. Yeah, so I wasn't editing myself on the page. I just wrote everything that was like inside me. You know that I had been taking up space for the last two years, and I just poured it all out because I figured, well, I can always go back and edit it after, right, I can cut out things that shouldn't be out in

the world. And I ended up cutting very little actually, because I feel like when I was writing it, I really concentrated on writing about myself. This is like my experience is the way I perceived things. I wasn't giving away other people's secrets, so you know, I didn't feel like I was in dangerous territory necessarily because it wasn't about other people. It's not like hell, oh and when I'm at such and such and they said, you know this, No, but part of these books is that you have to

decide how much of your interactions with other people you tell. Well, my husband was my entire life from the time I was nineteen, so it's not like I could omit him because very short book. I was just looking at the Amazon reviews and someone said, came for Okay six stage for Poliscovich. Well, that's really sweet. I thought that was a great kind of line there of just like how

how you're magnetic. But I mean when you finished it, were you just like kind of terrified or were you just like ready or I mean, just talk to me. About that. Oh god, you know, you know the process of writing a book, and then you finished the book, and then you double guests everything you've ever written, and then you would like to go back over it. But guess what, because of this super short time limit, I

really didn't have a chance. So it just kind of had to you know, I just had to go out there though the way it was so in a way it was kind of good because I couldn't like belly ache about how I was going to feel about this coming out and this coming out, and I thought, you know what, I had been perfectly honest in in my writing, and so I don't have to be ashamed of me. I don't have to be ashamed of the way I feel.

I mean, maybe I can sometimes be a little ashamed of not getting a phrase right or you know, doing a stupid metaphor. But hey, you know, it was it was going to be what it was because I knew I was, you know, I was telling my truth. And and and I think, when you do tell the truth, how is that wrong? It was so incredibly tragic when rip dad. Did this help you process the grief? Well, here's the thing, I don't really think that whatever processes grief.

I think grief sticks with you for life. I don't think there is such a thing as processing grief. I

think there's just living with grief. What he did do, though, oddly enough, was allowed me to process a bit of my anger at his betrayal at the end, you know, with the will, and the way that happened was not by putting that down on paper and talking about how miserable I had been and you know how screwed up everything was, but going back and writing the chapter about falling in love with him, because then suddenly I was forced to confront how much I loved him and how

much he meant to me for such a long time, and whether it was healthy or unhealthy, or toxic or not toxic, whatever. I had a lot of love for a really long time with this man. And having to go back to the good memories is what really helped me. Can you explain what sort of the situation with the well? So about two days after he died, we got the wills.

Me and my boys got the will in the in the mail, three envelopes, and I opened it and on the front of the will there was sort of like an a them, and it just said I will not provide for my wife Paulina because she abandoned me. And when I first saw this, this is like we're talking about, you know, he just died. I just found him, I was taking care of him, and then he died. And then, you know, and I thought, well, this is obviously bullshit, because I'm right here. I never abandoned my husband, so

this is like some sort of a mistake. And then when you know, as time went on and I realized it actually wasn't a mistake. Well, then I realized it was a lie. And that was a little bit harder to put up with. Obviously, you know, what do you do when your husband's last words to your blatant lie? And I felt like, you know, of course, you know, the surrounding press because the will had been written so that it was public knowledge. You know, suddenly I had

to defend myself. But there's all these people, you know, going on about like, well, how bad was she that he's leaving her? Nothing, like, she must have been a horrible person and she must tea the horrible person, And it completely wrung me out. That was pretty rough, actually, not to mention the fact that I also had no cash flow, So that was I mean, that is the sort of most transparently angry. I mean, you know, it's just it does seem like something someone who was very

angry does. Yeah. And I had no idea. I had no idea he was angry. I had no idea he felt that way. I thought we were like friends, you know, I thought we just made up and and you know, we were cohabiting peacefully. He knew all about this boyfriend that I had met, you know, like everything was out in the open. I had no idea. And you had also been with him for at that point, how many years? Five years? Jesus Christ, that's a long time, Yeah, my whole life. Really. And I asked this as someone who

myself got married very young. Are you glad that you got married young? Or do you that you hadn't? Oh gosh, Molly, that's a hard question. I'm allowed to ask it because you know, I got married when I was twenty three, so I know we booked got married twenty three. Actually, yeah, you know, because I don't know what my wife would

have been if I had gotten married later. I don't feel like I can really answer that question now with hindsight, I think but you know what, I had twenty five years of a really great marriage of where I was really happy and I felt loved and I felt safe. So yeah, it was worth it. Yeah, it was worth it. It was worth the heartbreak at the end because I came out stronger than ever from it. I also think

you have these great kids. I do. That's sort of the most meaningful mattrac tell me what you I mean. One of the things I think you've done really well is you write about aging and what that is about. Well, you talk to us a little bit about that. It's something that we women are really I mean, everyone is confronted with it, but women are confronted with it on a whole other level. Yeah, we do, because we do

turn invisible at a certain age. I don't know that it's set in stone, but it's somewhere in your forties some women say thirties even, which kind of it's flabbergasting to me. But you know, I didn't necessarily realize this. You know, I was my my marriage. By the time I was fifty, my marriage was tanking, and I felt really invisible to my husband. And then I realized I felt invisible in the rest of the world as well, because I had, like, I had no career, I had,

you know, nothing going. I mean, I think you met me around then, and you know I was a bit of a mess. You had a career. But I know what you mean that. I mean, I think like everyone has that sort of going to yeah. Yeah. And I would ask all my girlfriends because I thought this was particular to me, having been a model and having been visible my whole life. I thought, I'm taking this harder than most women, or maybe I'm the only one. Maybe I'm so freaking narcissistic and vain that I can't get

my head out of my ass. And I just, you know, like, this is my problem and I'm gonna have to overcome it. And then I spoke to all my girlfriends and I said, do you ever feel invisible? And they said, uh, yeah, absolutely, And I'm like, oh wait, so this is not just me, this is all of us, This goes for all of us.

And then I started looking things up, and I started looking for women our age and representation of women our age, and you know in the really noticing the media and magazines and TV and all of the you know, places that represent women publicly. And I thought there are not a lot of fifty is looking women, are there? I mean, everybody sort of looks at vague thirty nine. It's true, and I really sort of enjoy I really enjoy my age. I think I'm I really do think that I'm the

best that I've ever been. I mean, because some really hard lessons, but I do feel like I'm just so much better on the inside and the outside. Fine, it's maybe not associate, you know, sociologically acceptable as beautiful, but

I think it's beautiful. I find it beautiful and other women right, and so I feel like, you know, ladies, we need to like gang up here and show them that we're not supposed to change ourselves to to smooth out societal norms of what who we're supposed to look like or what we're supposed to look like, but rather change their perspective, we should claim where we are and go, you know what, I am beautiful. It might be a different kind of a beauty than what you're used to,

but keep looking, you'll see it. If you just keep looking, you'll see it. Don't you feel like there's been some movement towards less ages? Um? Not much, bolly not okay, again, I do think that some of our biggest power player women are in their fifties, but again, they don't really look above forties. Right. It's a good point, you know that, And that's that's the problem is like, yeah, you can be fifty, you can be sixty, you can be seventy, but you can't look it. Thing gracefully is when you

do right, right. I have accidentally walked into this as my purpose of being like, I'm going to try to embrace who I am and what I look like and see see if I can change people's minds about Yeah, you know what, do you still look great? And you don't have to look twenty to look great, like you can be a great looking older woman. Yeah. No, I think that's a really good point. Tell me what else? What is sort of next for you? That is such a good question. I have like cereal idea. So I

just literally just fell off the book tour. Right, it's like winding down to Christmas, and I'm doing my last book signing next week and like you're like one of my like last podcasts, and then next year. Literally it's

like tumbleweeds. There is nothing on my schedule, there's nothing lined up I was working for a little while on this, trying to put together this reality show with a friend of mine who's the producer who who was working on Beyond the Edge with me, the Jungle show where I nearly killed myself, and he wanted to do a show about the second coming of age of the one of

the fifty year old woman. And I thought it was such a great idea, and we pitched it and the response was, yeah, you know what, it's not really our demographic. He yes, we don't have a demographic, Molly, no demographic for older women. Jesus. Apparently older women don't want to watch themselves true, right, Yeah, I mean that seems kind of nuts, but very interesting. Thank you so much, Paulina. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You're the best. You know.

I always love to talk to you. And next year let's hang out. Yes, yes, yes, I would love it. Yes. Bill Keller is the founder of the Marshall Project and the author of What's Prisoned For. Welcome to Fast Politics, Bill Keller. Thank you very excited to have you. This is like a topic that Jesse and I are pretty obsessed with, and so I'm so excited that you, first of all, you're founding editor of the Marshall Project. Which can you tell our listeners a little bit about the

Marshall Project in case they haven't heard of it. Sure, it was started by a guy named Neil Barsky who was a reporter for the actually for the Wall Street Journal, who covered Donald Trump's real estate fieldings, among other things, and then he went into the hedge fund game, got very rich and decided he wanted to give some back. He grew up in a civil rights activist family and decided he wanted to create an online news organization that

would focus on the criminal justice system. This was a preposterous idea, and when newsrooms were dying right and left and firing people, but he pulled it off. Marshall Project has now got I think forty people working for it, you know, counting the people who do fundraising, but also the reporters and editors and guys who do magic with data. We've won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes and various other awards. We do a daily, daily news round up that sort of just gives you a shortcut to what's going on

in the world of criminal justice. So one of the things you did was you were the editor of The New York Times, and you went to the Marshal Project, which must have really helped them. I mean, I'm sure you're too modest to say this, but it certainly helped them get on the radar. Yeah, I'm sure it did. I mean, whether whether it should have or not, I don't know. You know, I did bring a reputation that was helpful with fundraising and probably somewhat helpful with hiring.

There aren't a lot of people working at the New York Times with the Washington Post who want to give up that security to go with the news startup, so we didn't have the pick of the litter, but we probably had probably helped that. I was the founding editor. So now the book you've written is for It's called What's Prison for Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration? So explain to us a little bit about how you sort of got to this and a little

bit about what the central thesis of the book is. Well, after about five years working with all those reporters and editors at the Marshall Project, I retired as the editor in chief. I thought I'd learned some lessons from those five years that I'd like to share, offer up humbly for public approval. I decided to focus on prisons. I mean, there are lots of parts of the criminal justice system

that Marshall Project covers, including courts and policing. A lot of policing and policing, and courts have gotten an incredible amount of attention over the last decade or so, as they should have. Prisons are different. They're not the most transparent. They're probably the least transparent arms of the domestic government that we have. I think there's a sort of reluctance to one of people don't necessarily want to know that much about prisons. That's where you put your problems behind

walls and then you don't deal with them. So I thought I would try to write essentially a primer on prisons and the role they play in America and have played historically. Provide some context the kind of endless tension between the professed belief in second chances and redemption on the one hand, and on the other hand, the sort of punitive puritan streak in America. What did you find as you were working on this? What surprised you? I think the thing that struck me most was, Yes, prisons

are scary and exhausting. They grind people down, they leave them stigmatized and often with no skills. And I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this, but there's ample evidence that it doesn't have to be that way. The heart of the book is really focused on people who are trying to prepare prisoners for life after prison, to give them an education, to give them behavioral therapy, to teach

them how to avoid anger. And then some of the more ambitious efforts or experiments where prisons or parts of prisons have adopted lessons from Europe and how how they do prisons, which is much more enlightened and successful I think than ours, both in terms of being humane and in terms of assuring public safety. There has been a weird bipartisan It's weird because it's bipartisan and that is so deeply unusual in America. Push to reform criminal justice?

Is that real? I mean, do you feel like the Koch brothers are committed didn't reform in criminal justice? And if so, can you talk to us a little bit about that? Sure? I'm happy to back in. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker focus on the right wing a campaign for criminal justice reform. There's a conservative

logic to reforming the criminal justice system. The libertarians, like the Koch brothers, tend to see prisons and courts and police as another arm of overbearing government, over taxing government. A lot of evangelicals have taken up this sort of effort to reform conditions in prisons and access to them to the outside, connections to the outside. And there you have some fiscal conservatives who who just think that it's the eighty billion dollars a year we spend locking people

up is not worth that much money. So their motives are different than progressive advocates of criminal justice reform. But I think up to a point that there is some room for common ground. Unfortunately, that movement sort of hit a public high water mark in with the passage of the First Step Act, which was a very modest reform made it somewhat easier for prisoners to earn time off their sentences by enrolling in education courses or other sort

of betterment programs. It somewhat lessened the ridiculous over sentencing for crack cocaine is compared to powder cocaine. It was a piece of legislation that has been a little overset sold. It dealt with the federal prison system, which is really only about ten percent of the people who are incarcerated. But that said, it passed the Senate eight seven to twelve. Can you imagine anything passing the Senate a margin like that? And Trump signed it and tried to take credit for it.

And I know that Jared Kushner was who is has a personal interest in criminal tessics reformed because his father did time in New Jersey. He was involved in drafting and negotiating the terms of that piece of legislation. That was sort of the high water mark. And since then, the general paralysis that afflicts everything in Washington these days seems to have kicked into criminal justice reform at least.

I mean, it's hard to imagine, but in the TwixT campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, there were four Republican contenders who embraced this so called right on crime conservative criminal justice reform measures. One of them was Ted Cruz. Of all people, that those people have kind of gone mute in the this this sort of Trump era absence of bipartisanship. You know, whether it's just kind of gone

silent for a while. I mean, there are some reasons to Somebody reviewing this book described me as unexpectedly optimistic, and I slightly recoiled from from that because it sounds naive. But I'd say there's reason for hope. In spite of the groodlock in Washington, a lot of states are doing at least incremental reforms on their own. That's there. They're responsible for the largest portion of the prison population. We're

hearing more words from prisoners themselves. It's actually a new nonprofit called the Prison Journalism Project that conducts classes in journalistic skills and values inside prisons and then helps prisoners get journalists and published outside. So there's a little more transparency creeping into the prison world. For example, during the pandemic, a number of prisoners managed to write essentially expose as

of how badly prisons handled the pandemic. This week, we've got a prison strike across Alabama, which in earlier days probably would have been suppressed. Nobody would have known about it, but a bunch of prisoners managed to get word out and now it's a big story. I'm a journalist, so I believe in the curative powers of journalism, but I think that may be a small indication of a reason for hope. Thank you so much, Bill, This was so interesting. Well,

thank you. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to your the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening. H