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The love hypothesis, common sense media reviewers.

Uneven romance has explicit sex, features women in STEM.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

An author's note explains Title IX and offers webs

You have to be strong and tough to make it in the

Olive and Ahn are good models of women in STEM. Th

Olive reads as White, is from Canada, and is very

An incident of verbal sexual assault with an attem

Other than a few kisses and some romantic tension,

"Bulls--t," "clit," "clusterf--k," "c--k," "d--k,"

A few food and beverage brands, and a couple of en

All characters are adults of legal drinking age in

Parents need to know that Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis is an adult romance set in the higher levels of academia at Stanford University. Ph.D. candidate Olive starts a fake relationship with a professor in hopes of inspiring her best friend to go for the man she's really interested in. Other than a few…

Educational Value

An author's note explains Title IX and offers websites supporting women and BIPOC women in STEM academic fields. The overall story provides insight into graduate and postgraduate academic life and careers, especially in STEM fields.

Positive Messages

You have to be strong and tough to make it in the academic world, especially in STEM fields. Don't be afraid to speak up when you've been harmed or you learn about something unethical. Your web of lies will eventually come to light, and when it does, it may cause more hurt than being truthful from the start would have.

Positive Role Models

Olive and Ahn are good models of women in STEM. They're extremely loyal and supportive of each other, and Anh creates chances to support other women, especially BIPOC women in STEM. Adam is very protective and kind on a personal level toward Olive, but to his students he's harsh and uncompromising and seems uncaring. Olive makes a grand gesture out of compassion for Anh and models perseverance in advancing her research and career.

Diverse Representations

Olive reads as White, is from Canada, and is very slim. Adam implies he's Jewish and is very tall and powerfully built. Best friend Anh's family is from Vietnam, and she identifies as a woman of color. Roommate Malcolm reads as White, dates men, and enters a romantic relationship with another man. Olive wonders if she's asexual.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

An incident of verbal sexual assault with an attempted kiss and coercion. An excerpt at the end from a future book has sexual harassment and cyberbullying. A man pins another against a wall by the collar and threatens to kill him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Other than a few kisses and some romantic tension, there's only one sex scene, but it's extended, explicit, and meant to arouse. Oral and genital sex, manual stimulation, genital penetration, sucking nipples and genitals, and orgasm are described in detail with some crude words like "clit" and "c--k." Good examples of consent are modeled, and birth control and being "clean" are talked about. A few times adults talk about sex or sex acts like sixty-nining, butt stuff, and getting a "hand job."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Bulls--t," "clit," "clusterf--k," "c--k," "d--k," "f--k," "f--king," "holy crap," "holy s--t," "pr--k," "s--t," "s--tshow," ass," "assness," "bitch," "bitching," "butt," "crap," "crapfest," "dammit," "goddamned," "hell," "jackass," "pee," "smart-ass." "Jesus" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A few food and beverage brands, and a couple of entertainment franchises to establish character and setting.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

All characters are adults of legal drinking age in California, where the story is set. Very little actual drinking is depicted, but there are mentions of past drunkenness, a weekly beer and s'mores night, and taking advantage of free alcohol at academic meetings and conferences.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis is an adult romance set in the higher levels of academia at Stanford University. Ph.D. candidate Olive starts a fake relationship with a professor in hopes of inspiring her best friend to go for the man she's really interested in. Other than a few kisses and some romantic tension, there's only one sex scene, but it's extended, explicit, and meant to arouse. Oral and genital sex, manual stimulation, genital penetration, sucking nipples and genitals, and orgasm are described in detail with words like "clit" and "c--k." Main character Olive experiences verbal sexual assault, and an excerpt from another book in the back has sexual harassment and cyberbullying. Strong language includes "c--k," "d--k," "f--k," "pr--k," "s--t," and more. Adults mention past excessive drinking, look forward to free alcohol at university events, and have a weekly "beer and s'mores night." Two characters remember one of them projectile vomiting after eating bad shrimp, but it's not described. Olive is an orphan with no family. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer, so grief and loss are important themes, along with the struggles women still face in STEM-related fields.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say
• Kids say (1)

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS is about Stanford graduate student Olive, who needs to convince her best friend, Anh, that it's OK for Anh to date a guy Olive had recently been seeing but wasn't really interested in. So she hatches a plan to "fake-date" none other than the Biology department's most prestigious professor, Adam Carlsen, who's also a huge jerk. As Olive and Adam's ruse gets harder and harder to keep up, Olive starts to feel like she wishes their dating wasn't actually fake. Will she be able to untangle her web of lies without ruining everything, for everyone?

Is It Any Good?

This romance set in the lofty world of a prestigious graduate school program has its ups and downs. It's refreshing to see women in STEM represented and important to highlight how much many women struggle in that world. The Love Hypothesis has some funny banter, especially with colorful supporting characters. Readers who enjoy very familiar romcom tropes will feel at home here, because this story is chock-full of them. The one explicit sex scene is easy to skip for those who aren't interested. A big drawback is Olive's truly bad and unrealistic decision making, which strains believability and takes the reader outside the story.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the graphic sex in The Love Hypothesis . Is it over-the-top? Realistic? Is reading about it different from seeing it in movies, videos, and other media?

What are some concerns about reading or watching explicit sex ? Do you compare yourself or your body to the characters? Does it make you afraid, feel creepy, or unsure about what sex is like for real people?

What about all the strong language? Is it realistic? Is it a big deal? Why, or why not?

Talk about women studying and working in STEM fields. What are some of the challenges Olive and Ahn face? How do they deal with them? Who supports them? What can men do to make STEM fields more welcoming and inclusive?

Book Details

• Author : Ali Hazelwood
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : STEM , Friendship , Great Girl Role Models
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Perseverance
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Berkley
• Publication date : September 14, 2021
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 18 - 18
• Number of pages : 400
• Available on : Paperback, Audiobook (unabridged), iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : April 2, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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'The Love Hypothesis' won Amazon's best romance book of 2021, has a near-perfect rating on Goodreads, and is all over TikTok. Here's why it's such a unique love story.

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• " The Love Hypothesis " grabbed the attention of romance readers everywhere in 2021.
• It was named Amazon's Best Romance Novel of 2021 and was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.
• This book checks off all my boxes for a great romance read and is definitely worth the hype.

This year, Amazon named " The Love Hypothesis " by Ali Hazelwood the best romance book of the year. Even though it was only recently published in September 2021, "The Love Hypothesis" has quickly become a fan-favorite, with 88% of Goodreads reviewers giving it four- or five-star-level praise .

It was also nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award and is hugely popular amongst Book of the Month members , with only 1% of readers giving it a "disliked" rating.

"The Love Hypothesis" is about Olive Smith, a third-year Ph.D. candidate studying pancreatic cancer at Stanford. In an attempt to convince one of her best friends that she's moved on from an old crush, she impulsively kisses Dr. Adam Carlsen, the department's notoriously brutal (but undeniably attractive) professor. After the kiss, Adam and Olive agree to fake a relationship so she can prove to her friend that she's happily dating and he can convince their department that he isn't planning to leave anytime soon.

I'm a little picky about my romance novels , so giving this read every bit of a five-star review didn't come lightly. My standards are high because the best romance novels have the potential to expose readers to authentic and imperfect relationships and offer new topics of discussion without making us feel like it's a story we've already read. 

With all the hype surrounding this new romance read, I couldn't resist picking it up.

Here's why "The Love Hypothesis" is one of my favorite recent romance books:

1. the story focuses a lot on olive and adam's lives outside their romance, making their love story more believable and interesting..

Romance novels tend to fall into a few popular tropes such as " enemies-to-lovers " or "forbidden love." "The Love Hypothesis" combines two of the most popular tropes right now, "Fake dating" and "grumpy/sunshine," really well — I loved the contrast between Adam's serious attitude to Olive's bright and sugary one. 

But despite following these tropes, the story feels fresh because it's also largely about Olive's work and its meaning to her. The only other romance book I've read featuring a STEM heroine is "The Kiss Quotient" , so I loved seeing that representation and learning about something new. 

The story honestly reflected the challenges Ph.D. candidates face in academia and that authenticity — deepened by the author's personal experiences — brought the characters, the settings, and the romance to life even more as Olive and Adam faced challenges with funding, time-consuming research, and questioning their sense of purpose.

2. The steamier scenes are also awkward and realistic, which made them even better.

In romance books, there are a few different levels of how graphic a steamy scene can get , from little-to-no detail to explicitly outlined movements. (I personally prefer mine to "fade to black.")

There was only one chapter with adult content, and it was definitely graphic. While I made a ton of ridiculous faces while reading and tried to skim past the parts that made me audibly gasp, I loved that it wasn't a movie-made, perfect sex scene with graceful movements and smooth dialogue. The scene was a little awkward, imperfect, and full of consent and conversation, making it refreshingly real.

3. The book deals with other topics besides the main love story, making it a much deeper read.

While it's wonderful to get swept up in the magic of a romantic storyline, having a secondary plot that addresses real issues is what makes a romance novel truly great . 

Mild spoilers and content warnings ahead: While "The Love Hypothesis" is a fun romantic read, it also addresses the pain of familial death, power differentials, intimacy challenges, and, most prevalently, workplace sexual harassment. 

Love is beautiful, fun, and amazing, but "The Love Hypothesis" takes the opportunity to also include conversations about serious issues. While these topics may be tough for some readers, I think these plot points, hard conversations, and complicated emotions take "The Love Hypothesis" to the next level and make it a five-star read. 

The bottom line

"The Love Hypothesis" has everything I personally look for in a romance novel: A unique storyline, authentic characters, and an important message. If you're looking for a perfectly balanced romance read, "The Love Hypothesis" is worth the hype and definitely one of the best romance books to come out in the past year.

• Main content

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood | Book Review

Posted August 12, 2021 by Jana in Adult Fiction , Book Review / 4 Comments

When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

So. I’m really not the best at reviewing books I absolutely loved because I don’t have many words! We all know I love fake dating romances, and I loved the idea of a STEM romance because science is cool and I really love and miss Big Bang Theory (and no, this isn’t like that per se, it’s just got super smart people spouting off science facts). Anyway, I immediately gravitated toward The Love Hypothesis because it sounded fresh and funny and unique. It was all those things and more! As always, my main points are bolded.

1. This book is so, so nerdy and I loved it. The people are a little awkward and extremely smart. There’s strong women in science, and I loved learning a little bit about the challenges women face in this field. Every chapter starts off with one of Olive’s hilarious little scientific hypotheses about love and life, each one teasing a bit about what’s coming up in that chapter. These made it very hard to stop reading because I’d get to the end of the chapter and decide to read and then BOOM. I’m intrigued again and must continue reading. Very clever. A lot of the book takes place on campus in the labs, and I thought it was such a fun setting with people working late and running experiments because science doesn’t wait for people to sleep or eat. There’s lots of science talk, there’s a science convention and people get all excited about presenting posters and attending talks and it’s all just so much fun. It reminded me a bit of Ross’s paleontology convention from Friends, just no Barbados.

2. Olive is sweet and strong. She’s smart and strong and totally dedicated to her cancer research. She’s looking for a lab that will accept her the following year so she can continue her testing with better equipment and proper funding. It matters more to her than pretty much anything. Everyone she’s ever loved has died, so she’s very reluctant to get too close to anyone except her two best friends. Relationships are scary and also a little confusing for her. It takes her a while to sort through her feelings and figure things out, and I loved watching her grow and evolve.

3. Dr. Carlsen (Adam) is a dreamboat. He’s seen as rude and lacking in compassion. He’s hard on his grad students, but it’s because he wants them to succeed. He’s super sexy and thoughtful and protective of those he cares about. He’s sarcastic, flirty, suave, and all the things I love in a hero. Olive is a little inexperienced in the love department, and there’s a scene where he puts all of his focus on taking care of her. Consent and comfort are so important to him, and the entire scene was him making sure she was ok. It just melted me, and I’ve never read another scene quite like this one.

4. The chemistry between Olive and Adam is insane. These two can throw the banter back and forth forever and get me laughing, but they can also build up a level of tension that makes you squirmy. There’s an age gap of about 8-9 years between these two, so Olive loves to make fun of him for being old. She also loves to make fun of his healthy eating habits. He likes to tease her about her love of sugar and poor taste in food. But then there’s a scene where Olive’s best friend kind of forces her to kiss Adam after he’s just pushed a car out of the road and is all sweaty, and wow. And then there’s a scene at the department picnic where Olive has no choice but to coat his muscley back in sunscreen (poor girl), and wow. Their relationship is sweet and spicy and tender, and I just love them.

5. Olive’s best friends, Anh and Malcolm, made me so happy. They are both scientists and work together, although their research is all different. Anh is the loyal best friend, who also mothers Olive and makes sure she doesn’t get skin cancer. Malcolm is Olive’s roommate, and he’s pretty much made of rainbows and sunshine. They love to discuss hot men and other fun things. I would love to be a part of this friend group. Adam’s friend, Holden, is another favorite character of mine. He gives great advice, really cares about his people, and is so happy all the time.

6. There’s some deeper issues at play that run throughout the story, including the #MeToo movement. All were treated with sensitivity and respect. 

7. There’s so, so much humor! I actually laughed out loud at one point, which never happens to me. I’ve been known to smile or silently laugh, but this was an actual audible laugh that startled me.

8. The writing is also spot on, and flowed so nicely that the pages practically turned on their own. 

All in all, this is a stunning debut for Ali Hazelwood. Strong women in science, a sexy doctor hero who values and supports those women, hilarious banter, strong friendships, and a very sweet love story all wrapped up into a glittery, sugary package. What’s not to love? I highly recommend The Love Hypothesis, and cannot wait to see what Ali Hazelwood does next!

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THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS

by Ali Hazelwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021

Fresh and upbeat, though not without flaws.

An earnest grad student and a faculty member with a bit of a jerkish reputation concoct a fake dating scheme in this nerdy, STEM-filled contemporary romance.

Olive Smith and professor Adam Carlsen first met in the bathroom of Adam's lab. Olive wore expired contact lenses, reducing her eyes to temporary tears, while Adam just needed to dispose of a solution. It's a memory that only one of them has held onto. Now, nearly three years later, Olive is fully committed to her research in pancreatic cancer at Stanford University's biology department. As a faculty member, Adam's reputation precedes him, since he's made many students cry or drop their programs entirely with his bluntness. When Olive needs her best friend, Anh, to think she's dating someone so Anh will feel more comfortable getting involved with Olive's barely-an-ex, Jeremy, she impulsively kisses Adam, who happens to be standing there when Anh walks by. But rumors start to spread, and the one-time kiss morphs into a fake relationship, especially as Adam sees there's a benefit for him. The university is withholding funds for Adam's research out of fear that he'll leave for a better position elsewhere. If he puts down more roots by getting involved with someone, his research funds could be released at the next budgeting meeting in about a month's time. After setting a few ground rules, Adam and Olive agree that come the end of September, they'll part ways, having gotten what they need from their arrangement. Hazelwood has a keen understanding of romance tropes and puts them to good use—in addition to fake dating, Olive and Adam are an opposites-attract pairing with their sunny and grumpy personalities—but there are a couple of weaknesses in this debut novel. Hazelwood manages to sidestep a lot of the complicated power dynamics of a student-faculty romance by putting Olive and Adam in different departments, but the impetus for their fake relationship has much higher stakes for Adam. Olive does reap the benefits of dating a faculty member, but in the end, she's still the one seemingly punished or taunted by her colleagues; readers may have been hoping for a more subversive twist. For a first novel, there's plenty of shine here, with clear signs that Hazelwood feels completely comfortable with happily-ever-afters.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-33682-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Ali Hazelwood

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

New York Times Bestseller

IT ENDS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

Hoover’s ( November 9 , 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

More by Colleen Hoover

by Colleen Hoover

SEEN & HEARD

by Ali Hazelwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.

A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.

As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9780593550403

Page Count: 416

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023

ROMANCE | PARANORMAL ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

Review: The Love Hypothesis, by Ali Hazelwood

[fa icon="calendar"] Sep 13, 2021 11:08:00 AM / by Suzanne

The Love Hypothesis pairs a 26 year-old grad student/researcher with a 34 year-old faculty member/researcher in a fake dating relationship for the ages. I flipping loved this book. Everyone told me I'd like it, but I couldn't stop picturing the male love interest, Adam Carlsen, as Adam Driver (this book started as Reylo fic) and I knew, just knew  I wouldn't like it because of that. I was so wrong.

This is somehow a debut novel. It doesn't read like a debut novel. It reads like a romance author at the top of their game and gave me all the feelings I want from a romance. I laughed, I cried, but most of all I was swept up in the love story. I read so much romance that it's rare I really feel  the romance anymore, but this single POV story had me convinced that love is real and these two people are in it.

I read this mostly on audio, but when the BOTM copy I had ordered at 2 am showed up a week before publication, I finished the book in print just so I could race through those last 80 pages. And now I'm bereft, having not only no more pages to read but no more books from Ali Hazelwood either. This book is nerdy and queer and funny and fresh and *ugh* I loved it.

Adam is determined to have Olive's consent at every step of the way, and Hazelwood manages to make it hot as hell. It's a slow burn which makes sense for the plot and characters, but it's definitely a burn. Turns out, this author can write great sex, too! Miracle of miracles, we get character development, plot that makes sense, quality sexytimes and a whole range of feels from a single book. 

One note - Olive is pretty clearly demisexual, but I don't think the word ever appears on page and it's clear she's struggled with her lack of sexual attraction in the past. On page, she says things like "I realized I could only be attracted to people if I had an emotional bond and trust with them, and even then not often" or "I wondered why I didn't seem to experience attraction, especially sexual attraction, like normal people". So this language may be off-putting to ace-spec readers, but it also feels natural for the character given her general dense-ness when it comes to caring about herself and not just science.

If you'd like to purchase a copy of this book, please consider using one of these links to support the site: Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop , Kobo , Libro.fm

I received a copy of this audiobook for review, but also purchased a print copy from Book of the Month.

Content warnings: sexual harassment and coercion by a potential supervisor (Olive's), past parental death from pancreatic cancer which is frequently mentioned because Olive's work is in pancreatic cancer detection, past parental neglect, past emotional abuse by a supervisor (Adam's), mentions of misogyny and racism in academia

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BOOK REVIEW: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Synopsis: When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

The Love Hypothesis snuck up on me and captured my heart.  It was addicting, sexy, angsty and thoroughly intoxicating!  I’m sure a huge fan of the fake dating trope and it not only made this book a ton of fun but it had a lot of emotional power too.  With a broody male, a quirky girl and a story filled with science, contemporary romance lovers will fall head over heels in love with this book!

“Have you considered getting a real girlfriend?” His eyebrow lifted. “Have you considered getting a real date?” “Touché.”

The prologue quickly pulled me in.  Not only was the meet cute beyond adorable and memorable , but it was laced with emotion too.  When we jumped two years and eleven months into the future in chapter one, we found Olive fake kissing some random guy.  I was like what is even going on?!   But it was because she hoped that her best friend would see her liking someone else and would then start dating her ex, who she never had feelings for. So to prove to her bestie that she had moved on, she kissed the first guy she saw. And it was Adam Carlsen who was a professor at her school and a complete jerk. It led to them fake dating and there’s so much more to the story then this but eeps I loved every minute of it!

“People who date, they—they talk. A lot. More than just greetings in the  hallway. They know each other’s favorite colors, and where they were  born, and they . . . they hold hands. They kiss.” Adam pressed his lips  together as if to suppress a smile. “We could never do that .” A fresh  wave of mortification crashed into Olive. “I am sorry about the kiss. I  really didn’t think, and—” He shook his head. “It’s fine.”

Olive was a brilliant scientist in grad school, but she was a little unsure of herself at times.  It took me a little while to warm up to her, and I wanted to shake her a time or two about her lying.  I wanted her to be upfront and honest but as the story unfolded and we learned the whys behind her actions it was impossible not to love her.  Her past and present helped mold who she was nowadays and we get to know every part of Olive.  So during moments like when she explained why she was so passionate about her research, I got tears in my eyes.  I loved her determination and dedication! And when she found her voice and the courage to say and do what she wanted, I was so proud of how far Olive grew from that first page till the last!

Olive laughed, and the way he looked at her, kind and curious and  patient . . . she must be hallucinating it. Her head was not right. She  should have brought a sun hat.

Adam Carlsen was such an unknown besides his reputation as an arrogant asshole. Yet each time we learned a little something more about Adam, I kept falling harder and harder.  Adam knew how to take control and be in charge of a situation.  Yes it sometimes made him come across as a complete and total jerk but other times it came across so hot *fans face*.  He left me feeling beyond happy, giddy and counting down till his next interaction with Olive!  But with Adam, I loved how he commanded attention from others without even trying. I also loved how his humor was so subtle and effortless; each time he made me laugh out loud he snagged another piece of my heart. Adam was caring, strong, beautiful, someone so easy to become obsessed with and the moments he was thoughtful made my heart exploded. I was absolutely obsessed with this broody man who oh so easily got added to my book boyfriend list!

“We are friends, right?” His frown deepened. “Friends?” “Yes. You and I.” He studied for a long moment. Something new passed through his face,  stark and a little sad. Too fleeting to interpret. “Yes, Olive.”

Olive and Adam’s moments together created even more speculation and gossip of what was truly happening between them.  So it easily led to them fake dating. They both had reasons behind wanting to do that. So each time they were together, I desperately wanted them never to part. I was obsessed with their coffee dates or when they ran into each other. Because even the most simplistic moments between them, like listening to a presentation or a school picnic, made me have butterflies in my stomach. The chemistry between them was through the roof hot. And while I guessed how quite a few things would play out, it never once took away from my love of this story.  But one thing I didn’t guess correctly was how unbelievably sexy this book was.  Pages upon pages of scenes had me melting into a pile on the floor.  Together they were sigh worthy!

He took a deep breath. His shoulders rose and fell in time with the  thudding of her heart. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see  you.”

The Love Hypothesis was a mixture of steamy and adorable, and landed right on my favorites list! It was impossible not to cry tears or stop the smiles that constantly appeared on my face. Ohhh plus it was so cute that Olive kept thinking of them as a book trope, like the fake boyfriend, possible one bed, her wearing his shirt and he’s speechless.  It truly didn’t even matter that I’ve read so many of these tropes countless times, Olive and Adam made it feel unique on every single page. Now I now can’t wait to read whatever else Ali Hazelwood releases!

He tilted his head. “Standard protocol?” “Yup.” “How many times have you  done this?” “Zero. But I am familiar with the trope.” “The . . . what?” He  blinked at her, confused.

“It was good, wasn’t it?” Olive asked, with a small, wistful smile. She  wasn’t herself sure what she was referring to. Maybe his arms around  her. Maybe this last kiss. Maybe everything else. The sunscreen, his  ridiculous answers on his favorite color, the quiet conversations late  at night . . . all of it had been so very good. “It was.” Adam’s voice  sounded too deep to be his own. When he pressed his lips against her  forehead one last time, she felt her love for him swell fuller than a  river in flood. 

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Adult Romance

March 16, 2022 at 11:05 am

March 23, 2022 at 12:09 pm

A million times yes! You’re making me want to re-read this one *sigh*!

March 21, 2022 at 11:05 am

March 23, 2022 at 12:11 pm

Thank you! I’m so happy to hear that it lived up to the hype for you, yay! This book was such a wonderful surprise, I was hoping to enjoy it and loved that I loved it so deeply!

March 23, 2022 at 2:16 am

March 23, 2022 at 12:23 pm

Personally I’m not a fan of the cover at all *shrugs and then hides face* lol. But it was the fake dating trope that pulled me in and I’m so glad I did because the story was so fun and the chemistry was amazing!

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The Love Hypothesis

If, like me, your catnip is the taciturn, brainy, hot hero who is secretly a big squishy marshmallow at heart, look no further than this awesome debut!

Description

The Instant New York Times Bestseller and TikTok Sensation!

As seen on THE VIEW!

A BuzzFeed Best Summer Read of 2021 When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos.

As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees.

That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

About the Author

Ali Hazelwood is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis, as well as a writer of peer-reviewed articles about brain science, in which no one makes out and the ever after is not always happy. Originally from Italy, she lived in Germany and Japan before moving to the US to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. When Ali is not at work, she can be found running, eating cake pops, or watching sci-fi movies with her three feline overlords (and her slightly-less-feline husband).

Praise for The Love Hypothesis

An Indie Next Pick!

"A literary breakthrough… The Love Hypothesis is a self-assured debut, and we hypothesize it's just the first bit of greatness we'll see from an author who somehow has the audacity to be both an academic powerhouse and divinely talented novelist."— Entertainment Weekly

“ C ontemporary romance's unicorn: the elusive marriage of deeply brainy and delightfully escapist... The Love Hypothesis has wild commercial appeal but the quieter secret is that there is a specific audience, made up of all of the Olives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited for this exact book.”—Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author

“Funny, sexy and smart, Ali Hazelwood did a terrific job with The Love Hypothesis .”—Mariana Zapata, New York Times bestselling author

“This tackles one of my favorite tropes—Grumpy meets Sunshine—in a fun and utterly endearing way...I loved the nods towards fandom and romance novels, and I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended!”—Jessica Clare, New York Times bestselling author

"Pure slow-burning gold with lots of chemistry."—Popsugar

"A beautifully written romantic comedy with a heroine you will instantly fall in love with, The Love Hypothesis is destined to earn a place on your keeper shelf."—Elizabeth Everett, author of A Lady's Formula for Love

"Smart, witty dialog and a diverse cast of likable secondary characters...A realistic, amusing novel that readers won’t be able to put down."— Library Journal, starred review "Hilarious and heartwarming, The Love Hypothesis is romantic comedy at its best...a perfect amalgamation of sex and science, sure to appeal to readers of Christina Lauren or Abby Jimenez."—Shelf Awareness

"With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose, and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwood convincingly navigates the fraught shoals of academia...This smart, sexy contemporary should delight a wide swath of romance lovers."— Publishers Weekly

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The Love Hypothesis

Quick recap & summary by chapter.

The Full Book Recap and Chapter-by-Chapter Summary for The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood are below.

Quick(-ish) Recap

Three years prior, Olive Smith talks to a guy when she's in the bathroom fixing her contacts (and can't see) after her Ph.D. candidate interview. She tells him about her passion for her research. She doesn't catch his name but remembers the conversation distinctly and wonders about the guy she met.

In present day, Olive is a biology Ph.D. student researching early detection methods for pancreatic cancer. She kisses a guy randomly in order to trick her best friend into thinking she's dating someone (so that her best friend Anh won't feel bad about dating Olive's ex). That guy turns out to be Dr. Adam Carlson , a young, handsome and highly-respected tenured faculty member in her department. He's also known for being hypercritical and moody.

Meanwhile, Adam's department chair is worried that he's planning on leaving for another university and has frozen some of his research funds. So, Adam he agrees to pretend to be in a relationship with Olive in order to give the impression he's putting down "roots" here, in hopes they will unfreeze the funds.

As Olive and Adam fake-date, they get to know each other. Olive sees that Adam is demanding and blunt towards his students, but not unkind or mean. Olive confides in him about her mother getting pancreatic cancer, which is why she's doing her research.

Olive soon realizes that she has feelings for Adam, but she's afraid to tell him. When he overhears her talking about a crush, she pretends it's about someone else. Olive also hears someone else refer to a woman Adam's been pining after for years and is surprised at how jealous she feels.

In the meantime, Olive needs more lab space and has been talking to Dr. Tom Benton for a spot at his lab at Harvard. When Tom arrives in town, it turns out he's friends with Adam. Adam and Tom are friends from grad school, and they have recently gotten a large grant for some joint research that Adam is excited about. After Olive completes a report on her research for Tom, he offers her a spot in his lab for the next year.

Olive and Adam's relationship continues to progress until they attend a science conference in Boston. Olive's research has been selected for a panel presentation, while Adam is a keynote speaker. There, Olive is sexually harassed by Tom, who makes advances on her. When she rejects him, he accuses her of someone who sleeps around to get ahead. He also says that he'll deny it if she tells anyone and that they won't believe her.

While Olive does finally sleep with Adam at the conference, she soon tearfully breaks things off since she doesn't want to complicate things with Adam's joint research project with Tom. Adam is also in the process of applying for a spot at Harvard.

Olive is certain no one will believe her about Tom until she realizes that the accidentally recorded the conversation where he made advances and threatened her. Meanwhile, Olive's roommate Malcolm has started seeing Dr. Holden Rodriguez, a faculty member who is a childhood friend of Adam's. Olive and Malcolm turn to Holden for advice, who encourages them to tell Adam about the recording. He points out that he thinks the main reason that Adam is considering a move to Harvard is because Olive is supposed to be going there.

Olive finds Adam and shows him the video. He is incensed at Tom and reports it to their faculty. When Adam returns from Boston, he reports that Tom has been fired. Meanwhile, Olive has been reaching out to other cancer researchers for spots at other labs, and she's gotten promising responses. Olive tells Adam that she loves him and that she never liked anyone else. Adam admits that he remembered her from the day he met her in the bathroom and that she's the one he's been interested in for years.

Ten months later at the anniversary of their first kiss, Olive and Adam re-create the kiss to mark their anniversary.

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Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

Olive Smith is an applicant for Stanford’s biology Ph.D program. After the interview with Dr. Aysegul Aslan , she ends up in a bathroom nearby unable to see and trying to wash out her eyes because she put in expired contacts.

She meets “The Guy” there, who she assumes is a Ph.D student there. As they strike up a conversation, she tells him that her name is Olive and talks about why she’s applying to the program. She tells him that she wants to do it in order to research a specific topic.

A few weeks later, Olive is accepted into the program.

Years later, Olive is now 26 and a Ph.D. student in Dr. Aslan’s lab. Olive has just kissed a random stranger (in order to trick her best friend, Anh , into thinking she’s on a date) — only to realize that the “stranger” is actually Dr. Adam Carlson , a 34-year-old tenured and highly-respected professor in her program with a reputation for being notorious moody, mean and hypercritical.

After they pull away, Adam accuses her of assaulting him. Olive insists she asked him and he said yes, but he says he merely snorted. Finally, she explains that her friend Anh had hit it off with a guy she’d been dating, Jeremy. Olive broke things off with Jeremy, but Anh felt too bad to go out with Jeremy. To make Anh feel better about it, Olive lied to Anh about dating someone and being on a date tonight. When Anh showed up at the lab, Olive needed to kiss someone so Anh would believe she was on a date.

Finally, Olive apologizes and leaves. She doesn’t notice that Adam had called her by her name (which she hadn’t brought up in this conversation).

A few days later, Olive is still embarrassed by what happened. However, she figures that she’d never crossed paths with Adam before then, so perhaps she wouldn’t cross paths with him again. Meanwhile, Olive is preoccupied with needing to find more lab space for her research on early detection of pancreatic cancer. Today, she also finds out Tom Benton , a well-known cancer researcher and an associate professor at Harvard, is interested in potentially allowing her to carry out her research at his lab at Harvard. He’s going to be in town in two weeks and wants to meet with her.

When Anh sees her, she confronts Olive about kissing Adam Carlson. Olive thinks back to how they met since they were the only two non-cis-white-male students in their class. Beyond that, Anh was her biggest support and best friend.

Today, Anh demands to know why Olive is dating Dr. Carlson. This conversation is interrupted when Adam walks in. He plays along and pretends that he and Olive are together. After they make formal introductions, he tells her to call him Adam, in case her friend Anh is around. Later, when Olive talks to Anh again, Olive continues to pretend she’s dating Adam, and she once again encourages Anh to date Jeremy.

On campus, Olive starts to notice that people are treating her differently and with some level of curiosity. When her roommate, Malcom , demands to know why she didn’t tell him about dating Dr. Carlson, Olive realize that everyone know about her lie. Olive goes to Adam’s lab to tell him what’s going on, and she apologizes to him for it.

Olive notes that he seems very at ease with everyone believing that they’re dating, and she wonders why. Finally, he admits that Stanford considers him to be a “flight risk” (that he wants to leave them for another institution) and that they’ve frozen some of his research funds because of it. Part of the issue is that he’s recently gotten a large grant with one of his collaborator’s at another institution, and the department is worried he’s planning on moving there. He hopes that the dating rumors will make them think he’s more likely to stick around since he’s dating someone here.

A few days later, Olive goes to Adam’s office and tells him she wants to proceed with pretending that they’re dating. Olive notices that she’s been treated much better by everyone since the rumor started. (Apart from Malcom, who dislikes Adam Carlson, and has been shunning her.) Adam explains that he’s looked into it and there’s no issue with it, though he can’t serve in any supervisory capacity for her or serve on her thesis committee or be a part of any decisions if she’s nominated for a fellowship or other awards.

They decide to set some ground rules for their fake-dating arrangement. They decide to be fake-dating while on-campus only, so no personal engagements. Olive stipulates that there’ll be no sex. They also agree not to date others in the interim, since it will make things messy. And they agree that they should get coffee or something regularly to make things believable.

They plan to continue their fake-dating until September 29, roughly a month from now, which is the day after the department’s budget review. Their first coffee “date” is planned for Wednesday at 10 AM.

Later, Olive talks to Malcom, who is still upset with her. Malcom comes from a long line of well-known scientists, and he dislikes that Adam Carlson’s criticism of his research had made his life so difficult. Olive confides in Malcom that they’re merely fake-dating and that she barely knows Adam. She says that he’s just helping her out with the Anh/Jeremy situation (and she doesn’t mention Adam’s reasons for participating).

On Wednesday, Olive and Adam have their first fake-date at the coffee house. They ask each other some basic questions, and Adam pays for her order.

The next week, they meet up again, though Olive is running late since she was getting ready for a meeting she has with Tom Benton later that day. Meanwhile, Adam is a little moody because his department chair has still not agreed to release his research funds. They discuss attending the fall biosciences picnic together so that his department chair can see that they’re together.

They’re interrupted when a friend of Adam’s walks in and greets him warmly. Adam introduces the man to Olive as his friend and collaborator — who turns out to be Tom Benton.

Dr. Benton reveals that he’s heard about Adam’s romantic exploits all the way at Harvard, and he’s surprised to hear the rumors about Adam’s new girlfriend being true. Olive also awkwardly tells Dr. Benton that they have a meeting planned for later that day. Tom is delighted to find out that his meeting is with Adam’s new girlfriend.

The three of them sit down to chat. As Tom asks her about her research, Adam rephrases it to help Olive organize her thoughts when he sees that she’s struggling to come up with an answer. Olive then tells Tom about her research on biomarkers in order to more easily and cheaply diagnose pancreatic cancer. As Tom inquires about her reasons for doing her research, Olive reluctantly admits that it’s because her mother had pancreatic cancer.

Finally, Tom asks Olive to spend two weeks writing up a report on the current state of her research. He says that he’ll make a determination of whether to give her the lab space and cover her research expenses depending on what he reads in that report.

When Tom steps away, Olive and Adam discuss that if she decides to go to Harvard then she needs to keep it a secret until the end of their arrangement, otherwise it’ll make Adam look worse. They also agree not to tell Tom that they’re only fake-dating.

The next day, Olive attends a well-attended talk that Tom is giving on campus. The auditorium is so packed that there’s no space anywhere. Anh convinces Olive to sit in Adam’s lap for the duration of the talk.

Afterwards, Olive and Anh head back to the biology building. Olive talks about the report she’s preparing for Tom and the presentation she needs to work on for a conference (the “SBD Conference”) coming up in Boston. Meanwhile, Anh is working on organizing an outreach event for BIPOC women in STEM for the conference.

As they walk back, they see that there’s a traffic jam involving a stopped car blocking an exit. Then they see Cherie , the department secretary, talking to Adam. Adam then proceeds to physically push a car out of the way to relieve the jam. Anh encourages Olive to go over and give him a kiss for his efforts. After some awkward negotiation with Adam, they kiss.

Olive is working on her report for Tom when Greg Cohen , one of Dr. Aslan’s other Ph.D. candidates, barges in, clearly agitated. Chase , another one of their lab mates, walks in uneasily after him. When Olive asks Greg what’s wrong, he angrily responds that Carlson is on his dissertation committee and he failed his proposal. They ask Olive whether she knew he was going to fail Greg, and Olive insists she didn’t know. Greg then yells at Olive and calls her selfish for not caring how Adam makes everyone’s lives miserable. Greg then storms off.

Later that day, Olive texts Adam. She asks him about failing Greg. She argues that he should be nicer, but Adam is unapologetic. He insists that his job is to make sure that students produce useful research. Olive gets frustrated texts profanity at him, and he doesn’t respond.

A few days later, Olive is on her way to the biosciences picnic, where she’ll be seeing Adam after their tense exchange. She, Anh, Jeremy and Malcom go together and are quite late. When they arrive, they see Adam playing Ultimate Frisbee shirtless, showing off his six-pack. Olive is surprised to find herself “viscerally attracted” to Adam.

As they put on sunscreen, Anh gives Olive way too much sunscreen. Meanwhile, the frisbee from the game lands near her. When Adam comes over to retrieve the frisbee, Anh offers Olive’s excess sunscreen to Adam. He accepts, and Olive rubs the sunscreen on him. Olive also apologizes for what she texted him the other day.

Tom then comes over and brings up that Adam will be going to Boston soon for a few days.

Olive is in the break room at night when she runs into Adam next. Olive is working on her report for Tom, but there’s a section she’s having trouble with since her lab equipment seems to be messing up. They chat and share snacks. Olive finds herself wondering why he’s single.

Olive also finds herself telling him about her mother and her death. She describes how, when she was 15, her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer too late and only had a few weeks left to live by then. Olive also says that her father was never in the picture and her grandparents were deceased, so she was sent into the foster system until she was emancipated at 16.

When she mentions needing to get back to work, Adam offers to let her use his lab equipment if she needs it. He also gives her some advice on the Western blot she’s working with to make sure she’s doing it correctly. Before Olive leaves, she asks Adam why he’s single, but before he can really answer, Jeremy walks in and interrupts them.

On Saturday, Olive sends in her report to Tom. He responds by asking her to meet to talk about it at Adam’s house (where he’s staying) on Tuesday before he leaves for Boston. At Adam’s house, she and Tom chat about her report for about 20 minutes. Before she leaves, Tom offers her a spot at Harvard for the next year, and Olive is thrilled.

Adam gives her a ride back to campus. He talks about how excited he is about the research he and Tom are working on. As they chat, Adam says something that The Guy she’d met in the bathroom all those years ago had said to her. Olive realizes then that Adam was The Guy she’d met. She marvels at how she’d wondered about The Guy for years. Olive then suggests that go celebrate her lab spot and him and Tom’s grant.

They agree to get coffee. Before then, she convinces him to go with her to get flu shots at the setup on campus, all the while she teases him for his fear of needles.

On Wednesday, Olive and Adam are texting and teasing each other when Anh comes in and comments on how in love with Adam she is. Anh says that she feels better about dating Jeremy, since she sees how much Olive likes Adam. As Anh leaves, it dawns on Olive that Anh is right.

Olive soon texts Malcolm asking to talk. When they get together, she tells him about how she thinks she’s fallen for Adam. She also tells him that she thinks that Adam was The Guy that she met all those years ago. Malcolm suggests that perhaps Adam feels the same way. Olive doesn’t think that’s the case, but moreover, she says scared of being vulnerable and possibly giving up the friendship she and Adam currently have if she’s wrong. Olive also says that everyone she cares about ends up leaving her — citing her mother, father and grandparents.

Olive says she’s certain she doesn’t want to say anything to Adam about her feelings — but then she turns around and sees Adam standing there.

When Adam acknowledges that he overheard her, Olive quickly lies and said she was talking about some other guy she has a crush on. Their conversation is interrupted by Dr. Holden Rodriguez , who is going to Boston with Tom and Adam. Dr. Rodriguez knows Olive since he was on her graduate advisory committee her first year.

As they talk, Holden explains that he and Adam are old friends. They grew up together because their parents were all diplomats. Holden tells Olive about how his boyfriend dumped him just before prom, so Adam went as his date instead.

After Holden leaves, Adam comments that Holden speaks highly of Olive and her research. Adam also explains a comment Holden made about Tom, saying that the two don’t really get along. He then tells Olive that she should just tell Jeremy how she feels, incorrectly assuming that the mystery crush Olive was referring to is Jeremy.

Malcolm continues trying to convince Olive to admit her feelings to Adam, but Olive refuses. With Adam out of town, she feels his absence. When Adam finally texts her on Sunday, she feels even worse about her stupid lie about liking someone else.

On campus, she runs into Holden, who mentions how glad he is that Adam and Olive got together. Holden days that Adam had talked about someone he wanted to ask out for years, and he’s glad Adam finally did it. When he says that, Olive thinks about how there must be someone else out there that Adam likes, then, since they only really met a couple weeks ago.

Holden also warns her to watch out when it comes to Tom and to watch Adam’s back, since he doesn’t trust Tom.

A little later, Olive is informed that her research has been accepted for the SBD conference as a panel presentation with faculty. Olive feels overwhelmed, since graduate students very rarely are selected for oral presentations. She goes to her advisor, Dr. Aslan, and explains that she’s terrible at talking. Of course, Dr. Aslan just gives her some encouragement and tells Olive she’ll help her practice her presentation.

Afterwards, Olive tells Malcom and Anh, who also volunteer to help her practice. They also mention, however, that they each got invited to stay with people in Boston for the conference (Anh with Jeremy and Malcolm with some friends who had a spare room), so they won’t be rooming with Olive. Anh says she figured Olive would stay with Adam.

Olive is trying to sort out some living arrangements for Boston when Adam, who is back in town now, comes up to her. She tells him about having trouble finding accommodations in Boston. Adam comments that there’s probably not anything left in the vicinity by now, but she could stay in his room at the conference center. He adds that he has the room for the whole conference, but he will only be using the room two nights, so they’ll only overlap for one night most likely.

When she tells him about her presentation, he offers to look over her slides. She also invites him to her talk, and she thinks about how one of the reasons she likes him is that she always feels like he’s on her side.

At the hotel in Boston, Olive takes the empty bed, and she rehearses the talk she’s about to give in a few hours. When Adam arrives, she thanks him for all the help he gave regarding her presentation.

He asks when her presentation is so he can attend, but it turns out it overlaps with the Keynote speech, which he is giving along with two other people. She offers to show him the recording of it afterwards.

When Olive goes to do her panel presentation, she sees that Tom is on the same panel. She gives her portion of the talk, and it goes well. Malcolm and Anh are there to cheer her on.

Afterwards, the room empties out, and it’s just her and Tom. As they talk, she notices him moving closer until he tries to kiss her. When she pushes him away, he keeps trying. Finally, he says that she’s clearly someone who sleeps around to get ahead, and so they both know she’ll sleep with him, too, for the same reason. He also says that she only got on this panel because someone wanted to kiss-up to Adam Carlson.

He also says that Adam is the reason he accepted Olive into his lab. When Olive threatens to tell Adam about this, he says that Adam won’t believe her word against his. Olive also says she won’t go work in his lab, but Tom says she knows it’s the best option for her, and if she doesn’t then he’ll just replicate her research since he already knows all about it.

When Adam gets back to the hotel, Olive is crying. She tries to pretend nothing is wrong, but fails at it. Finally, she lies and tells him that she’s upset because she overheard someone saying that her research was “derivative” and that she was only chosen because of Adam.

Adam comforts her, and then he says he has an idea for where they should go instead.

Holding her hand, they walk past all the people at the department social and instead head out to dinner. Adam asks what she wants to eat, and Olive sees an all-you-can-eat sushi place and wants to go.

After dinner, as they head back, Olive’s heels are hurting her, so Adam gamely picks her up and brings her to their room. She then suggests that they watch a movie. Olive goes to grab a quick shower, and Adam offers her a t-shirt since she forgot to pack pajamas.

When Olive’s mind wanders back to being called mediocre (by Tom, though she doesn’t tell Adam that), Adam tells her about how his advisor had once told him he wouldn’t amount to anything because of a mistake he made. He says that he had started preparing applications for law school as a result, since the comment shook his confidence. However, Holden and Tom (who also trained under the same advisor) convinced him to stick with science.

Adam says that later he realized that his advisor was abusive and a bad mentor who created a toxic environment. Comparatively, Adam says that he is critical since he wants students to be better, but it isn’t about belittling them as people or cutting down their self-worth. Adam also says that no one ever reported his advisor’s behavior because he was short-listed for a Nobel Prize, and they didn’t think anyone would listen. Adam also mentions how Tom had helped mediate thing with him and his advisor, so he was grateful to Tom for that.

Adam then tells Olive that the abstracts submitted to SBD go through a blind review process, so they definitely didn’t choose her because of him.

Finally, Olive moves to kiss Adam, but before anything can happen, he stops her. He points out that she’s upset and staying in his room and that the situation feels coercive to him. When Olive says she’s fine, he points out that she said she was in love with someone else and that he doesn’t want to regret this later.

Olive convinces him that she’s fine with the situation, and soon things get intimate.

They have sex.

Afterwards, Olive asks Adam about a book he’s reading. He says it’s in Dutch and that he learned it as a kid. He also says that his parents were busy all the time and that he was mostly raised by au pairs. They then talk more about their childhoods.

As they chat, Adam finally tells Olive that he might be going to Harvard. The reason he’s leaving the conference early is to go interview with them. He thinks that working together with Tom in the same lab would make them much more productive. He also mentions that he could show her around Boston when she’s there.

Olive wakes up to a barrage of texts from Anh and Malcolm. When she finally talks to them, it turns out the Malcolm hooked up with Holden at the department social. Malcolm also says that Holden mentioned that Adam’s funds had been released (though Adam hadn’t mentioned it to Olive).

That night, Olive meets up with Adam. He wants to go out and have dinner, but Olive breaks things off with him, since she doesn’t know what to do about the Tom situation. She thinks that taking herself out of the equation is the best thing for him.

As she starts to leave, they end up kissing, but he pulls away, and she leaves.

Olive spends the next day crying. Then, determined not to send up at Harvard, Olive takes Adam’s advice to reach out to people through her advisor and asks Dr. Aslan to e-mail various people she’d met at the conference to see if they’d be interested in her research.

Dr. Aslan agrees, and also asks to see her speech. As Olive edits the video recording, Malcolm talks about how he went on a first date with Holden, but they ended up running into his entire family (since they are all science junkies who attend science conferences).

As she’s editing, Olive realizes she recorded her upsetting conversation with Tom. Malcolm and Anh hear her listening to it. Once they’ve listened to the whole thing, they insist that Olive needs to tell Adam about it. Finally, Malcolm fills Anh in on what was really going on with Olive and Adam. However, they both agree it’s clear that Olive has feelings for Adam and that Adam would want to know about this. Still, Olive knows how important the collaboration with Tom is to Adam, and she is reluctant to complicate things for him.

They decide to call Holden to ask for advice. Olive asks Holden what he thinks about Adam moving to Boston and working with Tom. Holden says that he doesn’t trust Tom. He says he thinks there was a weird dynamic where Tom was secretly sabotaging Adam during grad school and then defending him. He thinks that Tom likes Adam’s loyalty towards him and having influence over him. Holden also tells them that he thinks Tom and Adam’s collaboration benefits Tom more than Adam. Finally, Holden implies that he thinks the only reason Adam is considering leaving Stanford is because Olive is going to Harvard.

Olive tracks down Adam’s location at a dinner with some Harvard people, including Tom. When he sees her, he gets up and asks what’s wrong. Tom comes over to try to get Adam to sit back down, but Adam insists on talking to Olive. Finally, Olive starts playing the video. Adam grows furious as he realizes what happened. He tells Tom that he’s going to kill him and goes after him, but Olive tells Adam that he’s not worth it.

As the Harvard people demand an explanation, Adam ignores them and kisses Olive. He then tells Olive to send him the recording immediately and then goes to talk to the Harvard people.

A few days later, Olive is back home, and Adam is on his way back to San Francisco. Meanwhile, Olive has received responses from four cancer researchers who are all interested in her research.

When Adam gets back, Holden insists on a double date. Adam reluctantly agrees. When they all sit down, they address the fact that Malcolm still has misgivings about Adam because of Adam’s harsh criticism of his work. Adam tells Malcolm that it wasn’t personal.

As they joke around about pumpkin spiced flavored foods, Holden mentions how Adam has liked Olive for years. Olive corrects him, saying they’ve only been dating for a few weeks, but Holden says that they met three years ago and that he’s liked Olive ever since. Olive then realizes that Adam was definitely the The Guy (from three years ago) and that he did remember her.

After dinner, Olive and Adam head home. Adam tells Olive that Harvard is going to fire Tom and that there will be other disciplinary actions. Olive then tells Adam that she remembered him, too, from all those years ago. But she didn’t piece it together until later, and she admits that she didn’t say anything once she figured it out.

Finally, she tells him that she loves him (in broken Dutch).

Ten months later, it’s the 1-year anniversary of their first kiss. Olive and Adam go to the lab and recreate and their kiss at precisely the same time as last year.

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As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees.

That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

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For Chapter 16, I think it’s important to include the part where Olive comes out to Adam as demisexual. But other than that this is a great summary.

this book is so good i couldn’t put it down. the only i wish is it was both POVS i would of loved to see what adam was thinking during all of this or have his thoughts on when they met each other during the bathroom scene. and i would of loved to see him actually hurting tom for saying that stuff to olive.

The Love Hypothesis

48 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-13

Chapters 14-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapter 20-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (2021) follows a female scientist’s comedic journey to true love that’s fraught with lies, tears, and awkward moments. The book was an instant NY Times bestseller, a BuzzFeed Best Summer Read of 2021, and Goodreads Choice Awards finalist. Born in Italy, Ali Hazelwood moved to the United States via Japan and Germany to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She currently works as a college professor and writes romance novels about women in STEM fields. The Love Hypothesis was her debut novel. This guide follows the 2021 Berkley edition.

Plot Summary

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The Love Hypothesis is set in modern-day America and follows Olive Smith , a 26-year-old graduate student of biology at Stanford University. Olive’s research focuses on pancreatic cancer, but each chapter begins with a hypothesis about Olive’s love life or choices as is relevant to the chapter’s contents.

Two years before the main events of the story, Olive’s expired contacts act up right before her interview for Ph.D. candidacy at Stanford. While she waits in the bathroom for her eyes to stop watering, she meets Adam Carlsen , one of the foremost biology researchers in the world—though she doesn’t learn it was him until the end of the book. His wise words convince Olive that grad school is the right path, and two weeks later, she accepts an offer to study at Stanford.

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Almost three years later, Olive is trying to convince her best friend that she’s over her ex-boyfriend so her friend, who is interested in her ex-boyfriend, will date him. Olive is working in the lab on a night she said she’d be on a date when she sees her friend walk by. Desperate to appear on a date, Olive kisses the first man she sees, who turns out to be Adam. Adam has a reputation for being mean and terrifying, and he demands an explanation. Olive haltingly explains her situation, apologizes for the kiss, and runs away, hoping she never sees him again.

A few days later, Olive’s friend corners her in the lab. Before Olive can spin an explanation, Adam arrives and acts warmly toward her, which convinces Olive’s friend their relationship is genuine. Olive wants to keep up the charade until her friends are solidly together, and Adam needs to convince Stanford he’s not leaving to get his research funds unfrozen. The two decide to pretend they’re dating for a month in hopes their fake relationship will be mutually beneficial.

Olive’s area of focus is early detection for pancreatic cancer. Her mother died from pancreatic cancer because it was found too late, and Olive dedicates her life to the disease so other people don’t lose loved ones to it. Needing a better equipped lab for the next phase of her research, Olive contacts several professors at other universities, but only one responds—Tom Benton from Harvard. He’ll be visiting Stanford in a couple of weeks, and Olive frantically works on her project in the hopes he’ll give her space in his lab.

Meanwhile, she keeps up appearances with Adam, meeting him at the campus coffee shop once a week. At their second fake date, Tom Benton joins them. It turns out that he’s a friend of Adam’s and wants to meet this girlfriend everyone’s been talking about. After listening to her research pitch, Tom requests a report by the end of the week, which Olive delivers. A few days later, Tom offers her a spot in his lab next year.

Olive receives an email regarding a paper she submitted to an upcoming conference in Boston. Her paper was accepted for a panel, which means she’ll need to give a speech. She’s terrified, but Adam helps her prepare until she feels more ready. Olive’s friends found other accommodations for the conference, which leaves Olive to share Adam’s hotel room. Olive’s panel overlaps with the keynote speech, and Adam is the keynote speaker, which means he won’t be able to attend as he promised he would.

After the panel, Tom approaches Olive and forces himself on her. When Olive pulls away and threatens to report him, Tom threatens to publish her research under his name and insults her, calling her mediocre and talentless. Adam finds Olive crying in their hotel room. Olive tells him what happened but not who insulted her. They spend the evening together. He shares a similar story from his grad school years, and they make love.

Olive spends the next few days dealing with her emotions, breaking things off with Adam because she feels it’s the right thing to do. When she finally meets up with her friends, they hear Tom’s insults, which Olive accidentally recorded after the panel. They convince Olive to tell Adam the truth and report Tom. Tom is fired from Harvard, and Olive and Adam get back together. Olive finds a new lab placement closer to Stanford, and the two stay in California together.

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Book Review: The Love Hypothesis

The Love Hypothesis is a cute romance novel that takes place in an academic setting. Olive, our protagonist, is a PhD STEM student attending Stanford, and Adam, her love interest is a professor at the college. I was initially a little hesitant about this book because while the age gap between Olive and Adam isn't concerning, their power dynamic is. Conveniently, however, it is revealed that Adam is not one of Olive's professors and manages another section of students. Even though Adam and Olive were never really "teacher-student," it still made me a little uneasy, especially since the two attend the same college. The novel basically establishes its plot through Olive and Adam having a fake relationship together. Adam needs this fake relationship to convince his higher-ups that he's not leaving Stanford and has put down roots, in order to unfreeze funds needed for his research projects. Olive, on the other hand, needs a fake relationship to convince her best friend Ahn, that she has no feelings for a boy she had gone out on a couple of dates with, after realizing Ahn is interested in the same boy herself. In order to persuade Ahn to pursue her feelings, Olive strikes up this fake-dating deal with Professor Adam Carlsen, thus leading the two of them into a real future together.

The Love Hypothesis, in my opinion, has everything critical for a good, cheesy, romance. The fake-dating trope, many sweet situations, and a love interest who seems cold and cruel on the outside, but turns out to be a softie just for Olive. While the novel may have the right ingredients for a swoon-worthy romance, however, there was something missing. Olive as a protagonist was a very 2d character and was someone I could not find myself relating to or even being interested in. While it was refreshing to see a female woman lead pursuing a career in STEM, there was nothing else all that interesting about Olive. I also didn't like the author's choice of using the topic of sexual assault only as a plot device, in order to bring the story forward and the characters closer.

On the other hand, Adam was a classically written love interest. Strong on the outside, and soft on the inside, he had all the criteria needed for a typical male lead in a romance novel, and while it may seem overdone to some, I think Adam was a great portrayal of such traits.

Overall, The Love Hypothesis was an interesting romance novel, and I enjoyed its academic setting and some of the scenes involved. However, there were a couple of aspects of the story that could have been tweaked to make the story more enjoyable. In my opinion, many romance-lovers would probably enjoy this novel, but I found myself wanting more.

THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS

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A BuzzFeed Best Summer Read of 2021

When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman’s carefully calculated theories on love into chaos.

As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn’t believe in lasting romantic relationships - but her best friend does, and that’s what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees.

That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor - and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford’s reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive’s career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.

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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Adam Moss

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Adam Moss. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor

The venerated editor adam moss walks through how to make good work great..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

One thing we’ve been exploring more on the show this year is taste. I have this view that the taste is becoming more and more important in this age of so much being algorithmic, so much being served up to you, A.I. moving to this world where creating a derivative version of anything is that much easier. Knowing what you like, what you think is good, what you think is bad, what you respond to, that really matters. That is a way to maintain both humanity and the capacity to do great things.

But after taste, there is this work of getting the thing to where you want it to be, right? If you know something is bad — you feel it’s not there yet — how do you get it to where it needs to go? The thing you are trying to do there is editing. I think we have an overly narrow description of what editing is.

We think of it as marking up the grammar of a sentence with a pen, but great editors — and I’ve worked with a lot of great editors — they’re mystics of a sort. They’re not technicians. They see something that isn’t there yet, whether of their own work or your work, and not really knowing how to get there, they help you get there. Not really knowing how to get there, they help themselves get there. So this is a thing I’ve been wanting to explore because it’s fuzzy. We don’t have very good, even, language for it. But there are really great editors out there. Adam Moss is one of them. He’s considered by many, considered by me, to be one of the truly great magazine editors of his generation.

In his 20s — this is back in 1988 — he begins this now very storied publication called 7 Days. It survives only two years and wins a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He comes to The New York Times, he remakes The New York Times Magazine. It becomes a key home for great narrative journalism, for great essayists. He goes to New York magazine, which he just turns into one of the truly great magazines it still is today under his successors.

In 2019, Moss steps down from New York magazine. He spends more time painting and becomes interested in how artists get from something fine to something great. So he begins asking them, and the result is his new book, “The Work of Art, How Something Comes From Nothing,” which tracks alongside 43 artists some great piece they did, be it a visual art, a piece of music, a piece of journalism, from where it began. And he gets them to turn over their drafts, their sketches and their notes, and tracks where it ultimately goes and how they get it to there.

So this is a conversation, really, about editing, about him as an editor, about these artists as editors, and about how we can all become better at editing, how we can all even understand when it is that we are editing. Obviously, in the conversation, we discuss some visual art. That doesn’t translate that well into audio, so we will link to images of those works in the show notes. They are very much worth following up on and checking out. As always, my email, [email protected].

Adam Moss, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ezra.

I heard a rumor that this book had an earlier title that was something like “On Editing.” Is that true?

Close. Just called “Editing.”

Just called “Editing.”

I’m so glad that was true because that was the thing I kept thinking about in the book, thinking about with your career. What does it mean to edit?

I think any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. I think you’re just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting or your heart is reacting. And it’s not just an intellectual thing — it’s also very much an emotional thing. Bob Gottlieb in that Caro documentary described editing as reacting. And that is a pretty good definition, I think.

But it’s not just reacting, right? It’s trusting the reaction.

Yeah, it’s trusting the reaction. And then there’s another part, which is kind of separate, which is figuring out what to do about it. I would write all over manuscripts, and sometimes I would have solutions, but often, it would just be a reaction. I spent a lot of time praising the stuff that I thought was good and kind of withholding when I didn’t think it was good.

So instead of saying this is bad, people could just read.

That you had just gone cold.

Exactly. Horrible, right?

You must be fun to be in a relationship with.

I was an editor for a long time. I was editor in chief of Vox. I’m still an editor on this show, in a way. And I think it took me at least a decade, maybe more, to even come to the idea that I should trust my own reaction. One thing that I think happened to media somewhat destructively in the same period is that editors stopped doing that and writers stopped doing that.

You began to look at social media for the reaction. You began to look outside, right? We knew what people cared about because they were reading it. We knew what — and one thing that I think held in New York magazine, and is held even since you’ve left, is, it feels like it is for somebody, not decided by everybody.

And I’ve started to understand that as more radical and more necessary, but it’s also a tremendous act of faith in yourself against the whole world, right? How do you come to trust yourself, your reaction, as valid?

It’s like trusting yourself in any context, which is that you get a little courageous, and you venture out, and you try something. And I do think just — if we’re going to get on the subject of journalism a little bit — one of the reasons that the thing that you’re describing is true is that magazines have been so — newspapers, everything — has been so disaggregated. It was much more necessary for the whole to be tied together with a single sensibility.

Now, many people, when they read, listen to anything, when they take in media, they don’t necessarily even know where it was from. So that I think that people have surrendered a little bit of that thing, which I also value a tremendous amount, the feeling that it came from somewhere, someone, something that I can feel and identify.

So you are considered by many, considered by me, to be one of maybe the great magazine editor of your generation. Yeah, I know. So you’re gonna do that. So I’ve listened to interviews with you. I know you don’t like that.

So what you then do is you say, well, I’ve just worked with a lot of great teams.

Well, it’s true.

I know. So it’s very hard for people to say why their judgment is good, but somehow the thing you did at 7 Days, which was the magazine you did in your late 20s to 30 — it won a National Magazine Award as it closed down — then did The New York Times Magazine at New York, these were different teams.

I have tried to hire editors. In fact, I have hired editors successfully. They have worked for me. It is extraordinarily hard to hire editors. Writers, you can see what they write.

So if it is just about your great teams, which I don’t fully believe, but is clearly somewhat true, you clearly hired great teams at a bunch of different places.

I’m a very good hirer. I will give myself credit for that.

What do you look for in editors? How do you find good editors?

You talk to them.

Well, we all do that. [LAUGHS]

But maybe you listen for different things than I do.

What are you listening for?

I listen for confidence, but not too much confidence. I listen for just an interesting mind. Usually, I’ll ask fairly banal questions and see where they take them. I would kind of just keep prodding them to see how the gears of their mind work. And if I was bored, I wouldn’t hire them.

If I was excited by the conversation, if I learned something from the conversation, and if they seemed like decent people, which is not small — a lot of people come in and they show signs of being the kind of editor that I think is destructive, rather than constructive, which is to say that they’ll run roughshod over the writer talent or the visual talent or whatever they’re in charge of. And there needs to be a certain humility in an editor. But also, they need to have a really interesting mind.

Did you have go-to interview questions?

I would ask them to try to form story ideas on the fly of whatever happened that day in either news or their own experience. And in part, that question was to see how alert and well-read they were, but also how fast their mind worked in formulating the raw data of experience into story, into narrative, into essay.

And then I listened to my own reaction. Was I excited by this person? Did I want to be in their company? It’s not really unlike you’re sitting in a dinner party and someone’s interesting to you, or they’re not.

But do you not worry about being misled by charisma?

I think charisma is a big part of it, actually. So, yeah, I could be misled by charisma, but I’m a pretty good charisma bullshit detector.

Because some people are great fun to talk to, but they’re not great at doing the thing. I’ve run into this. You get that. And the flip is, I’ve known people who are actually not great fun to talk to. They’re introverted. They’re nervous in the interview. But they’re amazing at doing the thing. And I’ve known editors like that, too.

Yeah, I have, too, although I think I’m pretty good at getting shy people to relax. They have to be able to have the conversation, no matter what their basic personality inhibitions are. And then in terms of doing the thing, there are tests and stuff like that that you give them, that you evaluate that. But also, I really think that can teach people how to do the thing, and you can’t teach people to think.

I agree, yeah. I think that is the hardest part of hiring. So I want to go back to something we were talking about a minute ago, about this theory that editing is about reading your own reaction and being able to work with that reaction.

So you have this great interview with David Mandel, showrunner of “Veep,” a show that I love. And the two of you talk through a single joke on that show and the way Mandel hears all these alternatives and uses his own reaction to guide to the final form of the joke. So can you just talk through that joke first?

One of the impetuses for the book was that I went to the set of “Veep.” I was invited by Frank Rich, who was both a friend of mine and an executive producer of the show. And he just, as a lark, said, hey — I was in Los Angeles — come visit. So I did. And I sat there, behind Dave, and watched him. It was just some stupid joke that landed on a Jewish holiday.

And Moses led his people to the land of?

Canaan, Rabbi.

Shut up. That stupid hat is too small for my head.

Fine. That stupid hat is too small for my yarmulke.

It’s OK, Jonah. Conversion to Judaism is about a commitment to the Jewish lifestyle.

Oh, good. ‘Cause all this learning is giving me a “yama-ache.”

So you don’t even focus on that whole routine, right? You might think of that routine as an object, but no, just that first —

Just one word.

Just one word. Tell me about it.

It really is. There’s only one changed variable in it. So there’s this thing — OK, there’s this thing that they do called alts where they actually take most jokes, and they try to squeeze them as much as possible to get the most juice as they can get. That’s one of the things when I was beginning to think about the book that I watched with such awe, admiration — I don’t know. This moment is like three seconds in the show. And they take hours on it, even though it just zips right past. Most viewers wouldn’t even pay any attention to it.

So what were some of the alts?

So the alts in this case — so it’s scripted and shot — Jonah saying that land is called — New York? Hanukkah? That’s the one they used. They also wrote — Egypt? [LAUGHS] Milkenzhonee? [LAUGHS] — It’s like a Yiddish name. Anyway, these were the various ones. They did shoot New York and Hanukkah, and Hanukkah is the one that they finally used.

New York would be kind of funny, too.

Yes, it would.

So tell me about what Mandel is doing there. What is the edit happening? How does he make the decision between them?

He describes making the decision purely by reading his own reaction, and that it happens in the editing room. It also happens on the set because they only shoot some of them. He fusses around himself with the joke, and then people feed him various other alternatives. And he is just evaluating, and he’s evaluating not in a way that feels conscious at all, but he’s trying to understand what makes him laugh.

There are, in my view, three stages of making art. One of them is the imagining, and the final one is the shaping. But in between, there is the judging, which is kind of what we’re talking about here, the editing. And imagining gets a lot of space on YouTube videos and books that help you free up your imagination, which is very important.

And then the shaping gets a lot of attention because it’s about craft and technique and how you make the thing that is at least close to something in your head. What kind of never gets any love is this middle ground, which is the judging.

And after your imagination has spewed whatever it is that it has spewed, there has to be a kind of functioning intelligence that is not intellectual necessarily, but is, nevertheless, your mind operating keenly, making sense of what you’ve done, and then figuring out how you can best put it to use.

And all of this is so subjective. Everything is so subjective. There is no objective explanation of this word will work better than that word. But in his case, he just sits in the editing room and he laughs or he doesn’t.

We should say here that the book is, in some ways, motivated by you have gotten more deeply into painting. And the distance between what you think is good and what you’re able to do is vast and seems to fascinate you.

Yeah, it fascinates me and frustrates me and did actually motivate my — I felt like, well, OK, artists may look at the world differently than I do. And there was a way of thinking that I didn’t seem to have, so I went to talk to other people about how they thought. And that’s kind of what the motivating thing in the book is.

A number of the artists in your book talk about this idea of listening to the body. Twyla Tharp says that when she’s drafting a piece — and she’s a great choreographer — she says, OK, brain, catch up with the body. Kara Walker, who made the sugar baby sculpture in the Domino Sugar refinery, said she had to, quote, “put some paper on the floor and let my body do the work.” Tell me a bit about the sense of the tension between the cerebral and embodied.

And the physical. It happens, actually, really, an unbelievable number of places in the book, and also, there’s this other very strange thing that happens in the book, which is, over and over again, people describe being most creative when they’re in motion. So whether they put themselves in motion when they’re running or swimming or something like that or biking or even just on a train or an airplane, just moving, the body physically in space moving seems to unleash something in them.

But I feel this way — I don’t know. Do you do things, other than your sort of journalism life? Because I do find that in my own painting, it’s a physical sensation. It’s a physical high. And it’s one of the really satisfying aspects of it.

I’m considering this. First, do I anything aside from my journalism? I do. I like to think that I have a full life.

Well, I didn’t mean that in a pejorative way.

No, I’m joking. I miss that state, which I think I used to achieve more often. And I think one reason I used to achieve it more often is that when I started out as a blogger, there weren’t that many notifications competing for your attention. You didn’t have Slack, and not that many people emailed me. And I find I break concentration much more now.

The place where my body leapt up when you were talking was the plane. I find I achieve completely different mental states on planes. And I think it’s because there is so little distraction. And so when you’re talking about painting, I mean, I assume you don’t paint on a screen. I assume you paint on canvas.

And I do think there is a tension between the body, that kind of embodied flow state, and distraction and interruption. It takes time to get there. And I think it is difficult to stay there sometimes. And at least for me, I remember being there more often when I was younger.

Yeah, interesting. Well, people describe it as one of the rewards of creating, is, to get themselves into this thing that we’ve all come to know as the flow state, this sort of period of utter absorption, where all of the distractions in life just disappear. And I think that is real. I’ve even as a terrible painter, I’ve even experienced it.

But people actually seek a kind of physical sensation, as well as a total absorption. I mean, I have this one chapter in the book of Ian Edelman, who is this crazy, magnificent sand castle maker. And that’s why I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to talk to him about making this thing that he has one day to do and then perishes at the end of the day. I thought that was something quite beautiful.

And he describes making sand castles not just in terms of the kind of crazy, almost supernatural focus, but also in terms of its physical sensation and describes it, compares it, to the feeling he has on a bicycle riding in traffic in New York City, dodging cars. And that just seemed like a fantastic metaphor because he’s moving forward in motion. He’s dodging cars.

When you make something, in a way, it’s like — this is just totally not true, but I’ll say it anyway — it’s like a video game. Things are coming at you. You have to deal quickly with them. You have to make decisions about what you’re going to do with them on the way to something else.

What do you think about the relationship here between speed and this kind of creativity or intuition? Because there are people here working very slowly. And then something that comes up again and again is the power of the deadline, the thing they did very quickly.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that people are different, right? Bob Dylan, for instance, famously said — he wrote all his songs in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. I have a piece of stationery in the book. The book is filled with process artifacts of all kinds. It’s a very visual book. And this is just a written record of him writing “Blowing in the Wind” and inverting a stanza or a verse.

And some people do their best work really fast, and some people take forever doing it. But it’s important to remember that those people who do it very fast, they’re able to do it very fast because they have, just getting back to the body, like an athlete, they have kind of body memory. They have skills so ingrained in them that their impulsive decisions are informed by a lifetime of experience.

I think another example of this just spitting the work out, at least at the beginning, is that — the chapter with Stephen Sondheim. So can you talk a bit about that process for him?

There was a situation that it’s from the musical company, and there was a situation that the playwright wrote in which a bride is flipping out, having a full-blown anxiety attack. And it starts — and I have it in the book. It starts as this monologue of her having a kind of nervous breakdown. It’s a great little monologue.

And he thinks of this as a song, and he writes a song called “The Wedding Is Off,” and its function is to recreate this nervous breakdown in music. And it’s kind of a disaster. The singer can’t sing the song. The rhythm is all wrong. It’s jaggedy. It doesn’t build the — he’s made a bunch of mistakes. And it becomes absolutely clear that the thing has to go. And just ruthlessly, just ruthlessly, he goes, boing, and just ejects the song right out of the show.

And because he is Stephen Sondheim, the new song had different rules. And so the new song would have to be started essentially from scratch. And he was able to write the song, which was called “Getting Married Today” in a week, which is crazy.

(SINGING) Listen, everybody

Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for

A wedding, what’s a wedding?

It’s a prehistoric ritual where everybody promises fidelity forever

Which is maybe the most horrifying word I’ve ever heard of

Which is followed by a honeymoon, where suddenly he’ll realize

He’s saddled with a nut and want to kill me, which he should.

Thanks a bunch, but I’m not getting married

So go have lunch because I’m not getting married

You’ve been grand, but I’m not getting married

And don’t just stand there, I’m not getting married And don’t tell Paul, but I’m not getting married today

When you listen to this song, which it’s well-known to be maybe the most dense, fastest song in all of musical theater and also one of the most difficult to sing, you will see its incredible complexity. It’s really one of the great theater songs of all time. And he was able to do it in a week because he had solved all the problems the first time.

The Amy Sillman chapter is the one that sticks with me most. And it is worth the price of admission on the book, just for that. So to give a little bit of background, abstract painter. And you have 36 or 37 —

39, 39 of the iterations this one painting went through. And it transforms utterly, but it is never clear to me exactly why. And you have some of her reasoning, but she is also very honest in saying —

It’s not very convincing, her reasoning, right?

Not at all, but she says in ways that others don’t.

Absolutely.

It’s not clear that this would have been any worse if I’d stopped at number seven or number 12, whichever.

Yeah, the chapter starts with saying, the first one was the best. I shouldn’t have changed anything. And I actually could have done — she has about over 100 iterations of this. I could have basically devoted the entire book to the path of this painting.

And so there is this question, then, is what you’re listening to editorial intuition or neurosis?

Well, they might be the same thing. I mean, it’s part of her — I don’t know what you call it — I guess her own self-description that it doesn’t actually matter where she stops, that the important thing in the making of the painting is the making and destroying and making and destroying, that that’s actually what the whole thing is about.

I use this phrase. It’s almost like “a game of musical chairs” where she decides to stop in that what I think is a fairly neurotic process, but I don’t mean neurotic in a bad way. She is performing a kind of artistic ritual, and it happens to be that a great painting usually is the thing that she ends up with.

But also, let me just tell you — because you can’t really fully grok it until you see it. There’s so many beautiful paintings on the way that she just ruthlessly erases. She doesn’t really even think twice about it. And she doesn’t have a particular regret about it. In fact, as she puts it at one point, regret is kind of what the work is all about.

One of my very favorite chapters is Cheryl Pope using felt in this absolutely gutting piece of art, “Mother and Child on a Blue Mat.” I found it extraordinarily moving. Can you say who she is and what that work is?

She’s a Chicago-based artist. She works in lots of different media. She had been deeply upset while making this work, which, of course, interested me. And she was just an absolutely wonderful person.

But the story here is that she had three consecutive miscarriages. And she really very much wanted to be a mother and wanted to give birth to a child. And she said she felt almost deranged to, in a sense, create the child in an artwork, to have the artwork be the motherhood that she couldn’t have physically. And so she created a work on felt in which she visualized the child, in fact, at one point, two children, then one child. At one point, the child and the mother had no faces because she was afraid giving them faces would be too, well, specific for an artwork, but also too painful for her. And eventually, she decided she needed to give them faces. And after the work was finished, she regretted that decision.

It’s possible this is actually said in the chapter, but just while we were talking about it, the reason the felt is so affecting is, it’s something children make artwork out of.

Yeah, it’s not said in the chapter, but I think that’s true. The other thing that I felt about the felt was that —

It looks like yarn, I should say.

Yeah, it does. It’s that she has to punch through it. So the physical act, we talked before about the way that physical action factors into the making of the art, but in this case, the punching through, since this was built on so much anger and upset, also moved me.

One thing the book is very interested in is tools. And something I noticed was how seldom a digital tool was mentioned. I feel like the only people who used a digital tool were the musicians recording into the voice memos app of their iPhone.

Almost everybody else was using paper of some sort or another. The notebooks were paper. The sketching was paper. It felt like people were really pushing themselves, particularly in the editing process, in the idea generation process onto paper. First, is that right? And second, why?

Well it’s not entirely right. There’s a whole chapter that’s the exception to that, which is about a guy named Tyler Hobbs, who’s a generative artist. And why I liked that chapter so much is that the machine is super important. It becomes the hand. He creates algorithms, gives it to the computer. The computer spits stuff out. He reacts to it, the same way that a painter might react to whatever they’ve painted with their hands. And then he changes the algorithm and just keeps going that way.

Well, he’s, in a way, become the editor of the machine —

— which I think I have a thing that A.I. is going to turn us much more into editors, because we’re going to have to know if the thing it is spitting at us is correct.

Yeah, and evaluate it, yes.

The generative artist you mentioned whose work is very cool, he has to be working in code because he is trying to get the computer to create more interesting work. But the people for whom the question is, how do they get themselves to create more interesting work, felt to me almost ostentatiously oriented towards paper.

Towards paper, yeah.

And that included the young ones. I didn’t notice a large age gap here. It wasn’t like the young people were all typing away on an iPad. And so, what is it about paper? Why are they doing that?

Well, paper, for one thing, is something you can throw away. So there is a thing that a lot of artists and writers do, which is they create a first pass that is perishable, that is meant to be disposed of. So they write in longhand, as opposed to type something. They paint, like in the Amy Sillman example, and mean to paint it over.

George Saunders — who did such a great episode with you that I listened to actually all the time — George Saunders gives himself six months to just totally screw around as the way to make the thing. So there is a kind of built-in failure stage. Very important, I think, and pretty universally expressed.

Well, my theory, the thing —

Yeah, I’m glad you have a theory. [LAUGHS]

— the hypothesis I am testing here to see if it comes out is that it is easier to achieve certain kinds of states with paper. So I did an episode some time ago now with Maryanne Wolf, who’s a great scholar of how people read and the reading mind, and the point of a lot of her work is that different things happen in your mind — reading on paper, reading on a screen, reading on different kinds of screens, what is happening with distraction. I mean, it just changes. Form does change content. It certainly changes the reception of content.

Yeah. I think you’re more focused when you’re working with paper. I mean, I find, at least in my own experience — and I’m a focus group of one — that my mind wanders more when I’m reading on a screen. I mean, even just thinking about the smoothness of a computer screen versus the texture of a page, one has a kind of scratchiness.

In art, there’s a lot of preoccupation with what the surface feels like, the toothiness of the surface. In fact, my book is sort of smoother than I would have wanted. It was the smoothness was a compromise in order to get the imagery production to be so good. So —

And the imagery production is really good, but I would have rather it had a kind of almost mountainous kind of texture.

Which the cover does.

Yeah, the cover does.

The book is a — I really want to say this, and I want people to hear it. It’s a piece of art. It’s a beautiful object. I mean, I enjoyed its physical form more than I’ve enjoyed the physical form of a book in a long time.

Oh, that’s nice.

And that was clearly highly intentional.

Yes. Yeah, the cover is a — the image on it is a Proust manuscript in which he had crossed the whole thing out with these giant blue X’s, and then to actually get Penguin to agree to do the book in this cloth cover reproducing those X’s, it just felt like, OK, that really is the book I’m trying to make here. And they were generous enough to do that.

I like this topic of the way the feel of a thing or your relationship to a material or a tool changes the way you think. You have a great chapter with the musician Rostam. And I want to play a bit of the song you talk about, “In a River.”

(SINGING) In the faint light of the stars

So you wade out across the marsh

So he starts off playing the mandoline there, and then he switches to the guitar, which is such an unusual transition. And it just changes the tone of the song completely. And what’s wild to me in your interview with him is that Rostam didn’t know how to play the mandoline before composing that song at all.

And this just comes up repeatedly, where people are using new materials for work that becomes really important, like Kara Walker using sugar to make that massive sculpture.

What’s going on in this confrontation with new tools and materials and approaches? What does it unlock for these artists who really know something really well, to then move into using something they don’t know that well?

Well, I think the artist is drawn to things that will excite them. And I think that artists, like anyone, get bored doing the same thing over and over again. And so they seek new adventure.

One of my incredible frustrations as a painter, even today, and my painting is just very, very tight and conservative. And I just decided about two weeks ago that I would just put away all the brushes I had, wouldn’t touch them. And then I would just make paintings using whatever materials I have around — palette knives, sure, but scissors, any ruler, anything that I had — so that I could smear the paint so that it wouldn’t have the kind of fastidious relationship to the thing that it really is in real life. And I wanted to just allow myself a little bit of berserk.

So I’m, myself, trying new materials in order to produce something different. And actually, it’s kind of working.

I was really struck by all that, too, that how many times in the Cheryl Pope chapter, for instance, she just keeps changing media. And she doesn’t know — she tells me that she goes into Home Depot and she asks the salesperson, how do you actually do that? How do you use glue this way, or how do you use felt this way? What is the device I should buy? And they just continue to do it.

The point I would emphasize here — because I found it both reassuring and frustrating to hear this over and over again — was that the reason they’re able to do this, the reason they’re able to work in a different medium that they don’t know is because of their training.

And one of the things that training does, the Rostam example, Rostam, I mean, as he describes, playing the mandoline is just playing the guitar upside down. And he has gotten a really rigorous early musical education, which enables him to be able to do the thing that I couldn’t do. I don’t know how to play the guitar. I would certainly not know how to play the mandoline. So anyway, just, it’s a basic thing that kind of has to be said that the training really helps. There’s not a lot of shortcutting that goes on.

But the other thing is, just — we had talked about this a little bit earlier — is faith, is that once they learn they can actually succeed using new materials, they’re moved to use new materials again and again.

It made me think of Steven Johnson’s book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.” And one of his arguments in that book is that great ideas often come from adjacency. Somebody knows a lot about a domain and then looks over into the next domain and applies it. And that’s what I see happening often here, which is adjacency. Rostam knows a lot about, I assume, the guitar and other things, looks over into the mandoline and can feel something.

Yeah, well, I would say that this whole book is exactly that. I never wrote before. I hate writing, and I have been a terrible writer for most of my life because I had this idea of how to write — that there was a way to write. And so that way to write was pretentious, and I couldn’t stand it.

And so, the draft process was really teaching me how to write. It was like using my editor skills that I had honed in a lot of years and applying it to myself. And I kind of found I was a pretty good editor of myself. And I was able to strip this thing down, strip this thing down, strip this thing down into something I could stand. I still didn’t like doing it, but I’m not horrified by what I produced.

As a writer, I functionally cannot start writing until I can see the entire thing. So many of the writers I know, they write a little piece for here, they start in the middle, they go to the end —

Nonfiction writers or fiction?

Nonfiction writers. I know tons of nonfiction writers who, they’re very able to put together the pieces where they know what the scene, they have this argument, and then they begin stitching. For me, I will just be stuck until the entire structure reveals. Now, that might not be the final structure that the piece has. Things can change in the edit. But I need the whole thing there.

Yeah, I think I’m more like you. But people are different. That’s the point here. There’s 43 chapters in the book, and there’s 43 different ways that people make art. That’s not to say there isn’t anything that unites them. I mean, I do think that they are a little bit unusually a collection of freaks. And that is that they have a kind of superhuman drive that enables them — there’s a great quote that I found early on by James Baldwin saying, talent is insignificant. What matters are love, discipline, luck and, most of all, endurance. And —

That’s what people who are really talented at things say.

Really talented. But I think it’s really — I mean, having done a kind of data set of these 43, that seems to be true. These things take a long time. They’re hard work. Ultimately, they need to go the distance. They need to not give up when pretty much everyone else would give up.

So we’ve been talking a bunch here about artists who edit a lot, but I want to think about the other side of that, too, those who go out more raw. So let’s hear a clip by this performance artist Grady West, who invented a character named Dina Martina.

Do you have good salads?

Oh, good. Then I’d like a small Caesarian. Oh, but does it have glu-ten? I really don’t want glu-ten.

I’ll have your glu-ten. I’ll have your glu-ten.

Yeah, just get it on the side.

Oh, that’s great. Yeah, just have them put the glu-ten on the side. And Doreen, I think I’ll hand things off to you.

Is your Red Bull in a can, or is it fresh?

Oh, that’s a shame. Do you have any breakfast wines?

So Grady West is voicing the Caesarian lady there. That’s Dina Martina. How did that act, that persona, come together?

OK, so he goes to this cabaret, and he doesn’t think about it for one second. The night before, he finds a wig, I think, and he smears this makeup on his face, and he goes out with nothing scripted and just starts to talk and calls himself Dina Martina. This all happens without any forethought whatsoever.

And he does have a very particular sense of humor. We were talking before about taste. Sense of humor seems to me the same, operates under the same wavelength. He has now written Dina Martina for decades — I think three decades — into an international stage act in lots of different places. I know him from Provincetown, where he’s kind of in residence over the summers, but it is an hour of a character completely oblivious to how anyone else would see him.

It has a bunch of characters. One of them — you heard Doreen. Doreen is the heir to the Kotex fortune. He has a child named Phoebe, which is a puppet. The thing is insane. It’s just completely unhinged, and it’s perfectly intact in terms of a bizarro world that he has created. There’s no cracks in it. And he developed it in one second in 19-what-have-you, into a sort of alternative cabaret context. It’s amazing. And now, yeah, he writes it. Now it’s honed to a 55 minutes. But basically, it’s still anarchy.

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the age range of the artists profiled. Generalizing wildly, what is different? What are the hallmarks of great art produced early in a career and late in a career?

For the most part, I think that one very important quality of an artist is that they have faith that they can make the thing. There’s a great line that Michael Cunningham, who wrote “The Hours,” said to me at one point. I didn’t even realize he was saying it, but I was asking him how it was possible that when he — he’d written a draft of the book. He had to throw away the draft, and I kind of probed him about that, and didn’t that feel just really awful? He said, nah, there’s plenty more where that came from.

And he just said it like that. And that is a one-sentence description of a thing that is absolutely essential to an artist, which is the faith that they can keep doing it. And those people, as they got older, people had more and more faith.

The flip side of that, and one thing I know from my own experience is that you make kind of wonderful things when you’re young, when you don’t know any better. There was a magazine I did called 7 Days when I was starting out. It was really — it broke every rule in the book. It just was like — it didn’t have a middle. It was just all sidebars. It was just — it was nutty. That from the perspective of someone who understands how to build magazines, it broke every rule and for no good reason.

And I would never make that in my life now or in the last 25 years. I would have just looked at it and thought, it’s kind of amateurish and stupid. And yeah, it kind of worked. [LAUGHS] It was exactly the right thing for then, and I did something that I wouldn’t be able to do later. Look at “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman. He wrote that book throughout his life. There’s the young man’s version, and there’s the old man’s version. And some of the language changes as he gets closer to death, and that’s interesting. And the poem is, in some ways, better at the end, but not in all ways. In some ways, it was best at the beginning.

I know writers — and primarily I know political writers and nonfiction writers. And my gloss on this would be that particularly in politics, young writers are arrogant and overconfident and don’t know what they don’t know and don’t know what’s going to fail. And old writers are way too cautious and know too much what’s going to fail and are too locked in to what the rules have been. And both sides are completely right in what they’re annoyed at in the other. And the balance of that in any given career is really hard.

It is, and it’s not necessarily true that the middle-aged person has it all together.

No, and I really mean this, and everybody is right. I’ve come to think of this kind of thing. And I think there are many dynamics like this, that you have to think of it like an ecosystem. We always want people to be the right balance, but ecosystems need to be in balance. You need young political thinking that is kind of wild and doesn’t know that we tried this and it completely failed.

And you actually need that just as you need the old thinking. And one is not better than the other. They need to both be there. And asking one person to embody it all is not reasonable.

Yeah, it’s not possible. Yeah, no, that’s true. I mean, I’ll make — I mean, I just think balance is correct in almost every context. And just to pull back to artists for one second, the essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to get the equilibrium right.

You’re too childish, and you can make a glorious mess, but it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult and the thing has no fire. There’s nothing animating it.

So this crazy middle ground in all of these cases that we’re talking about is somehow where you have to live. And it’s very hard to be there.

One thing that comes up a bunch in the book is you’ll note that people will find a much earlier version of a piece for you than they realize they had.

Right, a jotting, a draft, something else. And it’s far before they realize they were working on the thing they were working on. And you often — you keep repeating, it was there. It was already there. It made me think years ago, my story of myself as a journalist.

So the whole thing about how I sort of learned to be a policy journalist, writing about health care at a certain point in time, and somebody brought me some columns I had done for the alternative school newspaper when I was at UC Santa Cruz. And this was before all that. And it turned out I just sounded like myself. Right? I was writing about John Kerry’s tax plan. And I was shocked to find out that I was writing about John Kerry’s tax plan. I didn’t think I had that interest at that point.

And there is something that may come out or it may not come out, but there is often a sensibility buried somewhere that is trying to come out for a long time. Whether you can let it out is a question and socially dependent and a million other things. But there is something buried in people that for better or for worse, it’s often hard to get away from.

Yeah, well, OK, so just two responses to that. One is, one of the really fun things about the method of this book was to actually show the various artists the early work or the early version of the thing, which would usually amaze them. And it would get them to speak truthfully and to remember exactly how it went in a way different than their memory has distorted it over time.

Second thing is that, yes, people have a sensibility that is theirs that they can’t escape. And again, this is a refrain. Oh, my god. How many people have said, you can’t run away from yourself? You are yourself. That’s it. I mean, Gregory Crewdson, who’s a photographer who makes these very unusual photographs which are kind of like film stills, and they’re giant and very beautiful, he was just apologizing, in a sense over, and over again for the fact that all of them inhabit a certain kind of common sensibility, which I thought was marvelous, but he says you’re just constantly trying to escape it.

Kara Walker, when she was making the sugar sculpture called “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” she was tired of the antebellum silhouettes that had kind of made her famous — or not tired, but she felt she had exhausted them. And she was trying to do something different, but how different? She says at one point, you, Kara, who are you? And that is kind of a question they’re all asking.

I kept talking to Thomas Bartlett, who was a music producer. And we were talking about this record, which was people doing covers, Martha Wainwright or Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, their own versions of covers of Neil Young’s “Harvest,” I think.

And no matter what their intention was, the song would sound like them. It would not sound like Neil Young. It would sound like them. And they were not trying. This was just something they couldn’t get away from. So this, I think, obvious, but still impossible not to marvel at fact is that you are who you are.

I want to end with something very related to this, which is this distinction or question of whether you’re editing for yourself or editing for the audience. I found myself pulling a bunch of my media diet back to magazines over the past year.

One, I think they remain, in many ways, my favorite form. They’re just remarkable acts of curation, almost every single one of them. And I found myself, once again, in a way I haven’t been for some time, just sort of desperate to feel like somebody actually liked this. Maybe I wouldn’t, but somebody somewhere did. They chose it. They made an intentional decision.

And I want to bring it back to New York magazine, the magazine you edited. I love New York magazine. Longtime subscriber. It’s my favorite magazine. And the thing that has always amazed me about it is that I cannot describe why it all goes together, but the sensibility is very coherent. And it has survived you, which is more impressive, right? It has been great since you’ve left, which means that what you did was not just you sitting there, telling everybody what to do, that there was something that emerged.

You guys do all or did do all kinds of Washington, D.C., profiles, but I know you would not really profile Jake Sullivan. But there’s another kind of profile you would do. I cannot extract out of it the description of it. So how were you figuring out what went with what? Was it an idea of the audience? Was it just you? You were just editing for yourself and you are the audience? Who is on the other end of that process?

Certainly the latter. I was always editing for myself, and the reason I left the magazine is that I felt like I was no longer the audience for it. And the audience needed to be younger than I was. And they needed to have a certain way of looking at the world that I didn’t have anymore. So I left.

It’s very poignant to me that the curator, the editor, the decider, has become of less importance in these times. But I don’t know how. I never knew, in all of my years as an editor, I never knew how to edit for somebody else. I had to edit for myself. I had to have this thing that we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, this thing that you trust. And the only way to trust it is to feel it.

I think that’s a nice place to end. So then, always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

OK, there are three kind of related to this project, but they are all three books I really like. One of them is a book of interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester. I think there’s nine of them. I learned more about art from reading these interviews. I’m not a wild fan of Francis Bacon’s art. I am a wild fan of Francis Bacon as a thinker about how art gets made. And I learned so much from that book that went into this book that I wrote. So that’s one.

Another book written by one of the subjects of the book, Amy Sillman, has a book called “Faux Pas.” She’s a great painter. She is an amazing writer. And this book is so much fun, filled with her own erudition absolutely, but also illustrations, chartlets. It’s just a fun object and also really smart and wonderful. And then — because nobody talks about these when they come here — I want to throw in a purely visual book. It’s “The Sketchbooks of Richard Diebenkorn.” It’s just pages and pages and pages of years and years and years of his sketchbooks, his drawings of his wife, himself, some in pencil, some in ink. I can just sit and live in those pages, imagining him as the drawer, which is kind of was what my project was all about. So there you go.

Adam Moss, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, and Aman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero, Rachel Baker and James Burnett.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

We think of it as marking up the grammar of a sentence with a pen, but great editors — and I’ve worked with a lot of great editors — they’re mystics of a sort. They’re not technicians. They see something that isn’t there yet, whether of their own work or your work, and not really knowing how to get there, they help you get there. Not really knowing how to get there, they help themselves get there.

So this is a thing I’ve been wanting to explore because it’s fuzzy. We don’t have very good, even, language for it. But there are really great editors out there. Adam Moss is one of them. He’s considered by many, considered by me, to be one of the truly great magazine editors of his generation.

ADAM MOSS: Thank you, Ezra.

EZRA KLEIN: I heard a rumor that this book had an earlier title that was something like “On Editing.” Is that true?

ADAM MOSS: Close. Just called “Editing.”

EZRA KLEIN: Just called “Editing.”

ADAM MOSS: Yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m so glad that was true because that was the thing I kept thinking about in the book, thinking about with your career. What does it mean to edit?

ADAM MOSS: I think any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. I think you’re just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting or your heart is reacting. And it’s not just an intellectual thing — it’s also very much an emotional thing. Bob Gottlieb in that Caro documentary described editing as reacting. And that is a pretty good definition, I think.

EZRA KLEIN: But it’s not just reacting, right? It’s trusting the reaction.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, it’s trusting the reaction. And then there’s another part, which is kind of separate, which is figuring out what to do about it. I would write all over manuscripts, and sometimes I would have solutions, but often, it would just be a reaction. I spent a lot of time praising the stuff that I thought was good and kind of withholding when I didn’t think it was good.

EZRA KLEIN: So instead of saying this is bad, people could just read.

EZRA KLEIN: That you had just gone cold.

ADAM MOSS: Exactly. Horrible, right?

EZRA KLEIN: You must be fun to be in a relationship with.

ADAM MOSS: [LAUGHS]

EZRA KLEIN: I was an editor for a long time. I was editor in chief of Vox. I’m still an editor on this show, in a way. And I think it took me at least a decade, maybe more, to even come to the idea that I should trust my own reaction. One thing that I think happened to media somewhat destructively in the same period is that editors stopped doing that and writers stopped doing that.

ADAM MOSS: It’s like trusting yourself in any context, which is that you get a little courageous, and you venture out, and you try something. And I do think just — if we’re going to get on the subject of journalism a little bit — one of the reasons that the thing that you’re describing is true is that magazines have been so — newspapers, everything — has been so disaggregated. It was much more necessary for the whole to be tied together with a single sensibility.

EZRA KLEIN: So you are considered by many, considered by me, to be one of maybe the great magazine editor of your generation. Yeah, I know. So you’re gonna do that. So I’ve listened to interviews with you. I know you don’t like that.

ADAM MOSS: OK.

EZRA KLEIN: So what you then do is you say, well, I’ve just worked with a lot of great teams.

ADAM MOSS: Well, it’s true.

EZRA KLEIN: I know. So it’s very hard for people to say why their judgment is good, but somehow the thing you did at 7 Days, which was the magazine you did in your late 20s to 30 — it won a National Magazine Award as it closed down — then did The New York Times Magazine at New York, these were different teams.

ADAM MOSS: I’m a very good hirer. I will give myself credit for that.

EZRA KLEIN: What do you look for in editors? How do you find good editors?

ADAM MOSS: You talk to them.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, we all do that. [LAUGHS]

ADAM MOSS: But maybe you listen for different things than I do.

EZRA KLEIN: What are you listening for?

ADAM MOSS: I listen for confidence, but not too much confidence. I listen for just an interesting mind. Usually, I’ll ask fairly banal questions and see where they take them. I would kind of just keep prodding them to see how the gears of their mind work. And if I was bored, I wouldn’t hire them.

EZRA KLEIN: Did you have go-to interview questions?

ADAM MOSS: I would ask them to try to form story ideas on the fly of whatever happened that day in either news or their own experience. And in part, that question was to see how alert and well-read they were, but also how fast their mind worked in formulating the raw data of experience into story, into narrative, into essay.

EZRA KLEIN: But do you not worry about being misled by charisma?

ADAM MOSS: I think charisma is a big part of it, actually. So, yeah, I could be misled by charisma, but I’m a pretty good charisma bullshit detector.

EZRA KLEIN: Because some people are great fun to talk to, but they’re not great at doing the thing. I’ve run into this. You get that. And the flip is, I’ve known people who are actually not great fun to talk to. They’re introverted. They’re nervous in the interview. But they’re amazing at doing the thing. And I’ve known editors like that, too.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, I have, too, although I think I’m pretty good at getting shy people to relax. They have to be able to have the conversation, no matter what their basic personality inhibitions are. And then in terms of doing the thing, there are tests and stuff like that that you give them, that you evaluate that. But also, I really think that can teach people how to do the thing, and you can’t teach people to think.

EZRA KLEIN: I agree, yeah. I think that is the hardest part of hiring. So I want to go back to something we were talking about a minute ago, about this theory that editing is about reading your own reaction and being able to work with that reaction.

ADAM MOSS: One of the impetuses for the book was that I went to the set of “Veep.” I was invited by Frank Rich, who was both a friend of mine and an executive producer of the show. And he just, as a lark, said, hey — I was in Los Angeles — come visit. So I did. And I sat there, behind Dave, and watched him. It was just some stupid joke that landed on a Jewish holiday.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 1^: And Moses led his people to the land of?

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (JONAH)^: Hanukkah.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 2^: Canaan, Rabbi.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (JONAH)^: Shut up. That stupid hat is too small for my head.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 3^: Yarmulke.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (JONAH)^: Fine. That stupid hat is too small for my yarmulke.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 1^: It’s OK, Jonah. Conversion to Judaism is about a commitment to the Jewish lifestyle.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (JONAH)^: Oh, good. ‘Cause all this learning is giving me a “yama-ache.”

EZRA KLEIN: So you don’t even focus on that whole routine, right? You might think of that routine as an object, but no, just that first —

ADAM MOSS: Just one word.

EZRA KLEIN: Just one word. Tell me about it.

ADAM MOSS: It really is. There’s only one changed variable in it. So there’s this thing — OK, there’s this thing that they do called alts where they actually take most jokes, and they try to squeeze them as much as possible to get the most juice as they can get. That’s one of the things when I was beginning to think about the book that I watched with such awe, admiration — I don’t know. This moment is like three seconds in the show. And they take hours on it, even though it just zips right past. Most viewers wouldn’t even pay any attention to it.

EZRA KLEIN: So what were some of the alts?

ADAM MOSS: So the alts in this case — so it’s scripted and shot — Jonah saying that land is called — New York? Hanukkah? That’s the one they used. They also wrote — Egypt? [LAUGHS] Milkenzhonee? [LAUGHS] — It’s like a Yiddish name. Anyway, these were the various ones. They did shoot New York and Hanukkah, and Hanukkah is the one that they finally used.

EZRA KLEIN: New York would be kind of funny, too.

ADAM MOSS: Yes, it would.

EZRA KLEIN: So tell me about what Mandel is doing there. What is the edit happening? How does he make the decision between them?

ADAM MOSS: He describes making the decision purely by reading his own reaction, and that it happens in the editing room. It also happens on the set because they only shoot some of them. He fusses around himself with the joke, and then people feed him various other alternatives. And he is just evaluating, and he’s evaluating not in a way that feels conscious at all, but he’s trying to understand what makes him laugh.

EZRA KLEIN: We should say here that the book is, in some ways, motivated by you have gotten more deeply into painting. And the distance between what you think is good and what you’re able to do is vast and seems to fascinate you.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, it fascinates me and frustrates me and did actually motivate my — I felt like, well, OK, artists may look at the world differently than I do. And there was a way of thinking that I didn’t seem to have, so I went to talk to other people about how they thought. And that’s kind of what the motivating thing in the book is.

EZRA KLEIN: A number of the artists in your book talk about this idea of listening to the body. Twyla Tharp says that when she’s drafting a piece — and she’s a great choreographer — she says, OK, brain, catch up with the body. Kara Walker, who made the sugar baby sculpture in the Domino Sugar refinery, said she had to, quote, “put some paper on the floor and let my body do the work.” Tell me a bit about the sense of the tension between the cerebral and embodied.

ADAM MOSS: And the physical. It happens, actually, really, an unbelievable number of places in the book, and also, there’s this other very strange thing that happens in the book, which is, over and over again, people describe being most creative when they’re in motion. So whether they put themselves in motion when they’re running or swimming or something like that or biking or even just on a train or an airplane, just moving, the body physically in space moving seems to unleash something in them.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m considering this. First, do I anything aside from my journalism? I do. I like to think that I have a full life.

ADAM MOSS: Well, I didn’t mean that in a pejorative way.

EZRA KLEIN: No, I’m joking. I miss that state, which I think I used to achieve more often. And I think one reason I used to achieve it more often is that when I started out as a blogger, there weren’t that many notifications competing for your attention. You didn’t have Slack, and not that many people emailed me. And I find I break concentration much more now.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, interesting. Well, people describe it as one of the rewards of creating, is, to get themselves into this thing that we’ve all come to know as the flow state, this sort of period of utter absorption, where all of the distractions in life just disappear. And I think that is real. I’ve even as a terrible painter, I’ve even experienced it.

EZRA KLEIN: What do you think about the relationship here between speed and this kind of creativity or intuition? Because there are people here working very slowly. And then something that comes up again and again is the power of the deadline, the thing they did very quickly.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that people are different, right? Bob Dylan, for instance, famously said — he wrote all his songs in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. I have a piece of stationery in the book. The book is filled with process artifacts of all kinds. It’s a very visual book. And this is just a written record of him writing “Blowing in the Wind” and inverting a stanza or a verse.

EZRA KLEIN: I think another example of this just spitting the work out, at least at the beginning, is that — the chapter with Stephen Sondheim. So can you talk a bit about that process for him?

ADAM MOSS: There was a situation that it’s from the musical company, and there was a situation that the playwright wrote in which a bride is flipping out, having a full-blown anxiety attack. And it starts — and I have it in the book. It starts as this monologue of her having a kind of nervous breakdown. It’s a great little monologue.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 4^: (SINGING) Listen, everybody

And don’t just stand there, I’m not getting married

And don’t tell Paul, but I’m not getting married today

ADAM MOSS: When you listen to this song, which it’s well-known to be maybe the most dense, fastest song in all of musical theater and also one of the most difficult to sing, you will see its incredible complexity. It’s really one of the great theater songs of all time. And he was able to do it in a week because he had solved all the problems the first time.

EZRA KLEIN: The Amy Sillman chapter is the one that sticks with me most. And it is worth the price of admission on the book, just for that. So to give a little bit of background, abstract painter. And you have 36 or 37 —

ADAM MOSS: 39.

EZRA KLEIN: 39, 39 of the iterations this one painting went through. And it transforms utterly, but it is never clear to me exactly why. And you have some of her reasoning, but she is also very honest in saying —

ADAM MOSS: It’s not very convincing, her reasoning, right?

EZRA KLEIN: Not at all, but she says in ways that others don’t.

ADAM MOSS: Absolutely.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s not clear that this would have been any worse if I’d stopped at number seven or number 12, whichever.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, the chapter starts with saying, the first one was the best. I shouldn’t have changed anything. And I actually could have done — she has about over 100 iterations of this. I could have basically devoted the entire book to the path of this painting.

EZRA KLEIN: And so there is this question, then, is what you’re listening to editorial intuition or neurosis?

ADAM MOSS: Well, they might be the same thing. I mean, it’s part of her — I don’t know what you call it — I guess her own self-description that it doesn’t actually matter where she stops, that the important thing in the making of the painting is the making and destroying and making and destroying, that that’s actually what the whole thing is about.

EZRA KLEIN: One of my very favorite chapters is Cheryl Pope using felt in this absolutely gutting piece of art, “Mother and Child on a Blue Mat.” I found it extraordinarily moving. Can you say who she is and what that work is?

ADAM MOSS: She’s a Chicago-based artist. She works in lots of different media. She had been deeply upset while making this work, which, of course, interested me. And she was just an absolutely wonderful person.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s possible this is actually said in the chapter, but just while we were talking about it, the reason the felt is so affecting is, it’s something children make artwork out of.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, it’s not said in the chapter, but I think that’s true. The other thing that I felt about the felt was that —

EZRA KLEIN: It looks like yarn, I should say.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, it does. It’s that she has to punch through it. So the physical act, we talked before about the way that physical action factors into the making of the art, but in this case, the punching through, since this was built on so much anger and upset, also moved me.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing the book is very interested in is tools. And something I noticed was how seldom a digital tool was mentioned. I feel like the only people who used a digital tool were the musicians recording into the voice memos app of their iPhone.

ADAM MOSS: Well it’s not entirely right. There’s a whole chapter that’s the exception to that, which is about a guy named Tyler Hobbs, who’s a generative artist. And why I liked that chapter so much is that the machine is super important. It becomes the hand. He creates algorithms, gives it to the computer. The computer spits stuff out. He reacts to it, the same way that a painter might react to whatever they’ve painted with their hands. And then he changes the algorithm and just keeps going that way.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, he’s, in a way, become the editor of the machine —

EZRA KLEIN: — which I think I have a thing that A.I. is going to turn us much more into editors, because we’re going to have to know if the thing it is spitting at us is correct.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, and evaluate it, yes.

EZRA KLEIN: The generative artist you mentioned whose work is very cool, he has to be working in code because he is trying to get the computer to create more interesting work. But the people for whom the question is, how do they get themselves to create more interesting work, felt to me almost ostentatiously oriented towards paper.

ADAM MOSS: Towards paper, yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: And that included the young ones. I didn’t notice a large age gap here. It wasn’t like the young people were all typing away on an iPad. And so, what is it about paper? Why are they doing that?

ADAM MOSS: Well, paper, for one thing, is something you can throw away. So there is a thing that a lot of artists and writers do, which is they create a first pass that is perishable, that is meant to be disposed of. So they write in longhand, as opposed to type something. They paint, like in the Amy Sillman example, and mean to paint it over.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, my theory, the thing —

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, I’m glad you have a theory. [LAUGHS]

EZRA KLEIN: — the hypothesis I am testing here to see if it comes out is that it is easier to achieve certain kinds of states with paper. So I did an episode some time ago now with Maryanne Wolf, who’s a great scholar of how people read and the reading mind, and the point of a lot of her work is that different things happen in your mind — reading on paper, reading on a screen, reading on different kinds of screens, what is happening with distraction. I mean, it just changes. Form does change content. It certainly changes the reception of content.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah. I think you’re more focused when you’re working with paper. I mean, I find, at least in my own experience — and I’m a focus group of one — that my mind wanders more when I’m reading on a screen. I mean, even just thinking about the smoothness of a computer screen versus the texture of a page, one has a kind of scratchiness.

EZRA KLEIN: Huh.

ADAM MOSS: And the imagery production is really good, but I would have rather it had a kind of almost mountainous kind of texture.

EZRA KLEIN: Which the cover does.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, the cover does.

EZRA KLEIN: The book is a — I really want to say this, and I want people to hear it. It’s a piece of art. It’s a beautiful object. I mean, I enjoyed its physical form more than I’ve enjoyed the physical form of a book in a long time.

ADAM MOSS: Oh, that’s nice.

EZRA KLEIN: And that was clearly highly intentional.

ADAM MOSS: Yes. Yeah, the cover is a — the image on it is a Proust manuscript in which he had crossed the whole thing out with these giant blue X’s, and then to actually get Penguin to agree to do the book in this cloth cover reproducing those X’s, it just felt like, OK, that really is the book I’m trying to make here. And they were generous enough to do that.

EZRA KLEIN: I like this topic of the way the feel of a thing or your relationship to a material or a tool changes the way you think. You have a great chapter with the musician Rostam. And I want to play a bit of the song you talk about, “In a River.”

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (ROSTAM BATMANGLIJ)^: (SINGING) In the faint light of the stars

EZRA KLEIN: So he starts off playing the mandoline there, and then he switches to the guitar, which is such an unusual transition. And it just changes the tone of the song completely. And what’s wild to me in your interview with him is that Rostam didn’t know how to play the mandoline before composing that song at all.

ADAM MOSS: Well, I think the artist is drawn to things that will excite them. And I think that artists, like anyone, get bored doing the same thing over and over again. And so they seek new adventure.

And one of the things that training does, the Rostam example, Rostam, I mean, as he describes, playing the mandoline is just playing the guitar upside down. And he has gotten a really rigorous early musical education, which enables him to be able to do the thing that I couldn’t do. I don’t know how to play the guitar. I would certainly not know how to play the mandoline.

So anyway, just, it’s a basic thing that kind of has to be said that the training really helps. There’s not a lot of shortcutting that goes on.

EZRA KLEIN: It made me think of Steven Johnson’s book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.” And one of his arguments in that book is that great ideas often come from adjacency. Somebody knows a lot about a domain and then looks over into the next domain and applies it. And that’s what I see happening often here, which is adjacency. Rostam knows a lot about, I assume, the guitar and other things, looks over into the mandoline and can feel something.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, well, I would say that this whole book is exactly that. I never wrote before. I hate writing, and I have been a terrible writer for most of my life because I had this idea of how to write — that there was a way to write. And so that way to write was pretentious, and I couldn’t stand it.

EZRA KLEIN: As a writer, I functionally cannot start writing until I can see the entire thing. So many of the writers I know, they write a little piece for here, they start in the middle, they go to the end —

ADAM MOSS: Nonfiction writers or fiction?

EZRA KLEIN: Nonfiction writers. I know tons of nonfiction writers who, they’re very able to put together the pieces where they know what the scene, they have this argument, and then they begin stitching. For me, I will just be stuck until the entire structure reveals. Now, that might not be the final structure that the piece has. Things can change in the edit. But I need the whole thing there.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, I think I’m more like you. But people are different. That’s the point here. There’s 43 chapters in the book, and there’s 43 different ways that people make art. That’s not to say there isn’t anything that unites them. I mean, I do think that they are a little bit unusually a collection of freaks. And that is that they have a kind of superhuman drive that enables them — there’s a great quote that I found early on by James Baldwin saying, talent is insignificant. What matters are love, discipline, luck and, most of all, endurance. And —

EZRA KLEIN: That’s what people who are really talented at things say.

ADAM MOSS: Really talented. But I think it’s really — I mean, having done a kind of data set of these 43, that seems to be true. These things take a long time. They’re hard work. Ultimately, they need to go the distance. They need to not give up when pretty much everyone else would give up.

EZRA KLEIN: So we’ve been talking a bunch here about artists who edit a lot, but I want to think about the other side of that, too, those who go out more raw. So let’s hear a clip by this performance artist Grady West, who invented a character named Dina Martina.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (DINA MARTINA)^: Do you have good salads?

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 5^: Very good.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (DINA MARTINA)^: Oh, good. Then I’d like a small Caesarian. Oh, but does it have glu-ten? I really don’t want glu-ten.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 6^: I’ll have your glu-ten. I’ll have your glu-ten.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (DINA MARTINA)^: You will?

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 6^: Yeah, just get it on the side.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (DINA MARTINA)^: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, just have them put the glu-ten on the side. And Doreen, I think I’ll hand things off to you.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 6^: Is your Red Bull in a can, or is it fresh?

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 5^: In a can.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 6^: Oh, that’s a shame. Do you have any breakfast wines?

EZRA KLEIN: So Grady West is voicing the Caesarian lady there. That’s Dina Martina. How did that act, that persona, come together?

ADAM MOSS: OK, so he goes to this cabaret, and he doesn’t think about it for one second. The night before, he finds a wig, I think, and he smears this makeup on his face, and he goes out with nothing scripted and just starts to talk and calls himself Dina Martina. This all happens without any forethought whatsoever.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing I enjoyed about the book is the age range of the artists profiled. Generalizing wildly, what is different? What are the hallmarks of great art produced early in a career and late in a career?

ADAM MOSS: For the most part, I think that one very important quality of an artist is that they have faith that they can make the thing. There’s a great line that Michael Cunningham, who wrote “The Hours,” said to me at one point. I didn’t even realize he was saying it, but I was asking him how it was possible that when he — he’d written a draft of the book. He had to throw away the draft, and I kind of probed him about that, and didn’t that feel just really awful?

He said, nah, there’s plenty more where that came from.

EZRA KLEIN: I know writers — and primarily I know political writers and nonfiction writers. And my gloss on this would be that particularly in politics, young writers are arrogant and overconfident and don’t know what they don’t know and don’t know what’s going to fail. And old writers are way too cautious and know too much what’s going to fail and are too locked in to what the rules have been. And both sides are completely right in what they’re annoyed at in the other. And the balance of that in any given career is really hard.

ADAM MOSS: It is, and it’s not necessarily true that the middle-aged person has it all together.

EZRA KLEIN: No, and I really mean this, and everybody is right. I’ve come to think of this kind of thing. And I think there are many dynamics like this, that you have to think of it like an ecosystem. We always want people to be the right balance, but ecosystems need to be in balance. You need young political thinking that is kind of wild and doesn’t know that we tried this and it completely failed.

EZRA KLEIN: And you actually need that just as you need the old thinking. And one is not better than the other. They need to both be there. And asking one person to embody it all is not reasonable.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, it’s not possible. Yeah, no, that’s true. I mean, I’ll make — I mean, I just think balance is correct in almost every context. And just to pull back to artists for one second, the essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to get the equilibrium right.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that comes up a bunch in the book is you’ll note that people will find a much earlier version of a piece for you than they realize they had.

ADAM MOSS: Right.

EZRA KLEIN: Right, a jotting, a draft, something else. And it’s far before they realize they were working on the thing they were working on. And you often — you keep repeating, it was there. It was already there. It made me think years ago, my story of myself as a journalist.

ADAM MOSS: Yeah, well, OK, so just two responses to that. One is, one of the really fun things about the method of this book was to actually show the various artists the early work or the early version of the thing, which would usually amaze them. And it would get them to speak truthfully and to remember exactly how it went in a way different than their memory has distorted it over time.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to end with something very related to this, which is this distinction or question of whether you’re editing for yourself or editing for the audience. I found myself pulling a bunch of my media diet back to magazines over the past year.

ADAM MOSS: Huh.

EZRA KLEIN: One, I think they remain, in many ways, my favorite form. They’re just remarkable acts of curation, almost every single one of them. And I found myself, once again, in a way I haven’t been for some time, just sort of desperate to feel like somebody actually liked this. Maybe I wouldn’t, but somebody somewhere did. They chose it. They made an intentional decision.

ADAM MOSS: Certainly the latter. I was always editing for myself, and the reason I left the magazine is that I felt like I was no longer the audience for it. And the audience needed to be younger than I was. And they needed to have a certain way of looking at the world that I didn’t have anymore. So I left.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a nice place to end. So then, always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

ADAM MOSS: OK, there are three kind of related to this project, but they are all three books I really like. One of them is a book of interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester. I think there’s nine of them. I learned more about art from reading these interviews. I’m not a wild fan of Francis Bacon’s art. I am a wild fan of Francis Bacon as a thinker about how art gets made. And I learned so much from that book that went into this book that I wrote. So that’s one.

Another book written by one of the subjects of the book, Amy Sillman, has a book called “Faux Pas.” She’s a great painter. She is an amazing writer. And this book is so much fun, filled with her own erudition absolutely, but also illustrations, chartlets. It’s just a fun object and also really smart and wonderful.

And then — because nobody talks about these when they come here — I want to throw in a purely visual book. It’s “The Sketchbooks of Richard Diebenkorn.” It’s just pages and pages and pages of years and years and years of his sketchbooks, his drawings of his wife, himself, some in pencil, some in ink. I can just sit and live in those pages, imagining him as the drawer, which is kind of was what my project was all about. So there you go.

EZRA KLEIN: Adam Moss, thank you very much.

ADAM MOSS: Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, and Aman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero, Rachel Baker and James Burnett.

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