In his new collection, Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, David Remnick, author, reporter, and editor of The New Yorker, profiles some of the most important, complex—and, in many cases, reclusive—people of our time.

The book includes character studies of figures as varied as Al Gore, Katharine Graham, Philip Roth, Mike Tyson, Václav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Benjamin Netanyahu. "They are figures in the public arena," writes Remnick, "people who are in the midst of a crisis, passing out of one, or anticipating one on the horizon. They are, with some exceptions, people obsessed with altering the history of their era or recording it."

This conversation will present an opportunity for one of the country's most passionate journalists and editors to reveal why he finds himself particularly attracted to the "loser's lockers room," as well as address what reporting means to our culture at this moment in time, when the medium of print journalism is facing intense criticism and an uncertain future.