I'm very inspired by the success of Lucky Peach [McSweeney's new food magazine]. It was daylight madness: It went absolutely against the current thinking, which is print is dead, particularly glossy magazines. They do a 200-page periodical with no advertising, and it sold like crazy. There is a reading public, just as there is a television public out there, that's smarter than they're given credit for. There are a lot of people out there with an appetite for good, cool stuff. That's encouraging.
Where else do you expect to look for stories?
There are [writers] who I adore, who I think are really important and who will be important down the road but have not been identified as such by publishers here. Exciting work, stuff that has never been translated, underpublished or unpublished authors. I come across a very interesting group of people in my travels. Not that anything will necessarily come of this — [on the show] we've worked with a really interesting group of security people, all of whom are from the more secret divisions of the British military. When they're not looking after us in hot zones, they are off doing very interesting odd jobs, often at really interesting points in history. As Special Forces tend to be, they are highly literate, really intelligent, with a lot of interesting friends. Just sitting around a campfire with those guys, you hear about 10 people with incredible stories, maybe one of them will have an incredible voice too.
