Robert Krulwich ‘65, Tackling Fundamental Questions through Storytelling
The greatest learning experiences often manifest themselves in the most unexpected places. For Robert Krulwich this place was Mr. Bill Williams’ notoriously challenging course called Humanities at Riverdale: “It was such a crazily beautiful invitation… all of us were carried in the storm of the intellectual excitement of it.” In a two-year interdisciplinary exploration that seems like a precursor to the current ILS curriculum, the Humanities course covered centuries of art, philosophy, music, and science. By answering society’s most fundamental yet engaging questions—including why we die and what we celebrate when we explore the world in music— students encountered “a challenge within [themselves] that was both brutal and beautiful,” as Krulwich recalls. Thankfully, Krulwich’s natural inclination to tell stories that explore these tough questions served him well, and the course further instilled a curiosity in him that persisted during his work as Associate Editor of The Riverdale Review and beyond.
Krulwich was constantly looking to literature and current events to fuel his writing, and in 1965, he encountered the first person that would inspire his journalism: Jesse B. Semple. Semple was a Black, working-class man and the fictional protagonist of a column in the Chicago Tribune, and later in the New York Post, created by prolific poet Langston Hughes. Also known as “Simple,” this emblematic character was concerned with two subjects—women troubles and, more importantly, race in America. In his political ruminations with other strong-minded characters at a Harlem bar, Semple describes everything from his time in the NAACP to the Harlem Riots of 1943.
Hughes’s writing played an important role in developing Krulwich’s interest in politics and unique writing style. Inspired by Hughes’s model, Krulwich, in his column for The Review called “Just Rambling,” mirrored the celebrations, elections, and consequent tensions within the senior class to the political context of the time. “That kind of wisdom to look through what everyone else is seeing and find something that has a heartbeat to it,” as Krulwich explained, was fundamental in how he approached his journalism later on.
Following his time at Oberlin College and Columbia Law School, Krulwich began a career at NPR as an economics reporter in 1978. There, much to the horror—and amusement—of the Federal Reserve, he created “Ratto Interesso,” an original Italian opera to explain how the Federal Reserve regulates interest rates. He then joined CBS in 1985 as a science, economics, and foreign correspondent, before continuing this work at ABC in 1994. There, he pioneered the use of animation on ABC’s “Nightline” and “World News Tonight.” Krulwich had always wanted to imagine himself and the world “out of the ordinary and into something different.”
When most correspondents reported on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Krulwich occupied himself with this out-of-the-box puzzlement: if military vehicles could only carry limited gas due to their flammability, who refills the gas tanks at Baghdad? “My stakes were personal,” he says, “I wanted to know the answer, and I wasn’t going to find out what everyone else knew. I wanted to know what I wanted to know.” Sure, the importance of capturing important historical events cannot be overstated, but much like his Humanities class, Krulwich found himself digging not into “what just happened,” but rather “what always is.” He was interested in the timeless stories that sit right in front of the writer—the kind one has to reach for and grasp onto, despite all their ambiguity.
By experimenting with format and sound, he can create a more immersive experience for listeners. Instead of stripping the learning process to bare facts, he takes listeners through the swirling, unpredictable path to a possible theory for a scientific or philosophical question. For Krulwich, the portability of the audio format marks a relatively new and exciting frontier in journalism as a mode of storytelling.
As he reflects on the future of journalism, Krulwich urges young journalists to “fall in love with what you want to do. To not be embarrassed that you’re in love. Not be embarrassed that people don’t understand what that love is like…” He describes the profession as somewhat of a calling: “It’s almost like you’re being summoned to do something, and you don’t know how to put it away.” Overcoming one’s sense of doubt and fear of failure are the central challenges he says all aspiring journalists—all storytellers—are faced with today. Passion, and the discipline to nurture that passion, Krulwich explains, are the remedy: “That pact of commitment to the love, I don’t think there’s anything greater than that.”
