The Interview Assassin

If Isaac Chotiner comes calling for an interview, is it best to just hang up? His Q&As for The New Yorker have been known to spark their own media-news cycles, often for reasons that aren’t flattering to the interview subject. That was the case on Monday, when Chotiner’s latest Q&A dropped—a lengthy interview with Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary under President Joe Biden, about her new book, Independent. The interview shows Chotiner at the height of his powers, relentlessly pressing Jean-Pierre on inconsistencies such as why she didn’t think Kamala Harris could win the 2024 election but was also mad at Democrats who called for an open convention.

The interview quickly became fodder for social media. “Congress must establish a hotline for people thinking about being interviewed by Isaac Chotiner so they can get the help they need before they are subjected to such mortification,” one person joked. Semafor’s Max Tani wrote: “i can partially understand when some kind of clueless public person walks into an isaac chotiner interview unprepared, but the individual stumbling through this interview was until very recently one of the highest-ranking government communications officials in the country.”

Since joining The New Yorker, in 2019, the forty-three-year-old Chotiner has conducted hundreds of Q&As with politicians, celebrities, academics, and others. He allows that some, like his latest with Jean-Pierre, make a splash online, but he says those are the minority. “Eighty-five percent of my Q&As are not at all combative,” Chotiner told me. But it is the combative ones that have earned Chotiner his reputation as an “interview assassin,” as one social media user put it following a 2019 interview with the author Bret Easton Ellis. Chotiner says he’s not too concerned about his reputation; he’s more focused on publishing good interviews. Yesterday I caught up with Chotiner, who is based in Oakland. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.