The way we view complex, occasionally sinister, culture-defining institutions is largely shaped by one man: Aaron Sorkin. A Few Good Men (the military), The American President and The West Wing (the White House), and The Newsroom (TV news) are all products of Sorkin’s keyboard. Since the late eighties, he’s written eleven movies, four TV series, and four Broadway plays and directed four movies. And yet, a century from now, his legacy will be defined by his depiction of one institution in particular: Facebook.
In 2011, Sorkin won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for The Social Network, which depicts Mark Zuckerberg’s fevered, single-minded spinning up of Facebook. Though Zuckerberg disputed many of the details, the film colored how most people see him. Now Sorkin has written and directed a follow-up, The Social Reckoning, in theaters October 9. It is the true story of Frances Haugen, a product engineer at Facebook, played by Mikey Madison, who enlists the help of Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. Together they uncover the heavily guarded secrets of Facebook and its algorithm. The world has changed dramatically since 2011—thanks in large part to Zuckerberg’s social-media empire—and Sorkin is betting the Hollywood treatment will help audiences understand the profound extent to which Facebook has changed their lives.
An erudite man of sixty-five, Sorkin wears blazers and chinos and speaks like a character on The West Wing. He’s also a recovering drug addict who has a nearly unshakable belief in the promise of America. When we met for our interview in Los Angeles this summer, he was thoughtful and polite but didn’t hesitate to share his strong opinions on all manner of topics, including AI, CBS News, and the corrosive effects of social media.
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Greek, for a non-native speaker, isn’t the easiest language to hear over the phone and then spell out phonetically. Still, NBA superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo is doing his best to recommend his favorite restaurants for when I visit Athens later this year. Ithaki, I believe he says, is a bit expensive, but it has an incredible seaside view. There’s also a neighborhood, Penteli, that has exceptional cuisine. “I go there once a week—get a souvlaki, get a gyro,” he tells me. “They’ll fill you up.”
Here’s another word I look up later: kalanta. It’s a kind of carol that children sing during Christmas and New Year’s in the streets of Athens, Antetokounmpo says, and it makes for one of his favorite times to be back in the city. He and his brothers—Francis, Thanasis, Kostas, and Alex—would sing the carols for tips from seven in the morning until seven at night. Every year, they would rake in around $300 to $500 and then beg their father for a PlayStation.
“When life wasn’t easy for us, we used to take that money and pay for the rent, or the groceries, or the light bill,” he recalls. “But one year my dad came back with a console, and me and my brothers were ecstatic. This day was probably the happiest moment of my childhood. And now, as a father, I realize what my dad had to deal with to make that decision.”
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Robert Redford was fifty-five and already a legend when he directed Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It in 1992. (They also made Spy Game together in 2001, directed by Tony Scott—“There’s another fucker I really miss! He was such an original.”) Today Pitt doesn’t love his performance in River as Paul Maclean, the daredevil little brother, the kid who rode the rapids and dated Indians and gambled too much and died young. But he stole the movie, and three years later he received his first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
“God, I want my fifties back,” he says, locking in on me a second. “I would do more. Your fifties are just—man, anything that’s on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.”
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It was just after 5:00 a.m., and I was wide-awake in a hotel in Rome. Jet lag, certainly. I grabbed my phone, responded to a few messages, then opened Instagram—and scrolled through it for the next hour. The slop had hypnotized me. After watching a video of a guy eating leftover Domino’s pizza and orange soda for breakfast and making himself a cheese sandwich with potato chips for lunch, I snapped out of it.
What was I doing?! I could’ve been attempting to sleep or working out in the hotel gym. My laptop with its to-do list of work tasks was nearby. For fuck’s sake, right outside my window was the Eternal City! Worse yet, the book I was reading was right next to me. At any moment, I could’ve put down my phone, picked up the book, and engaged with material far more fulfilling than videos of a guy’s shitty diet. Instead, I scrolled.
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Think about how few people know anything concrete about specific design periods. Could you, for example, explain the art deco ethos to me? Could you—quickly, please, because this is a test—give me one example of an iconic object that came out of the period? The average man could not. An intelligent man would say the Chrysler or Empire State Building. But a genius, a wino savant, would stand up from his barstool and hold out his martini glass. This, he would say, is what the period was all about.
When the martini glass debuted in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, it was considered the modern glass—a new-age man’s answer to the Champagne coupe. The postwar boom was in full swing. The worst conflict the world had ever seen was over, the ’20s were roaring, and easy money was flowing. Art deco celebrated that. It was obsessed with machines and progress but in a very commercial way. It was all about geometric perfection with symmetry, straight lines, and angularity. Look at a martini glass and you see that clearly. It’s V-shaped and masculine, like a man in a suit with sharp, straight peak lapels. It gives a cocktail, especially a fragrant gin martini, a lovely bloom. The stem lets you hold it without warming the drink with your hand. It’s sexy! But again, it was conceived in the 1920s; famously, no one was too concerned with details at the time.
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Looking back, I have to be completely honest about how we started. I was a successful business owner in my 40s. She was a 23-year-old hostess. That kind of age and power gap creates an inherent instability, a skewed foundation that I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time. I wanted to protect her, but I see now how overwhelming that dynamic must have been for a young woman trying to find her footing while dating her boss.
At first, I never looked at her as dating material. But one slow night, I gave her a ride home and suddenly felt a profound impulse to kiss her. We ended up dating on and off for 11 years. I tried to break it off a few times because she was struggling deeply with her mental health—eventually diagnosed as a form of bipolar disorder—and had left college. But she never wanted to part ways, so for long stretches, we simply lived together almost like roommates.
Then, I noticed Margot.
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