I’m Darren Samuelsohn and this is The love, journalism Show. First time visiting? Please sign up for my love letter from the beat.

This is an episode I’ve been looking forward to since my Substack started. Meet my friend, Rob Schwartz.

Thirty years ago, a dying professor at Brandeis changed how the world talks about aging and death.

Tuesdays with Morrie made Mitch Albom a different kind of writer. What almost nobody knew: Morrie wrote his own version first — finished before he ever got sick, rejected by mainstream publishers, and left in a drawer in his Newton, Massachusetts study for a decade after his death.

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His son found it there in 2002. Rob Schwartz — a journalist working in Tokyo at the time — recognized it. He’d talked to his father about it while it was being written. It took another two decades of editing, alongside his own career, before The Wisdom of Morrie finally reached print in 2023.

This episode is about that manuscript, and about a friendship that started a year after Tuesdays with Morrie was published. Rob and I met at the 1998 Nagano Olympics — I introduced myself to Mitch Albom first, inquiring about Morrie’s son because I knew about him being a journalist in Japan from reading the book. Turned out Rob was right there in the media village, working as a translator and fixer for Mitch’s live radio show broadcasting on Detroit time.

We became fast friends. A few months later, we traveled to Tibet: a self-made film that never got finished, a mountain we didn’t reach, a bond that’s held.

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Rob Schwartz (left) and the author in Tibet, 1998.

I’ve been excited about taping this episode of The love, journalism Show. Over about 80 minutes, we talk about the drawer, and about my own copy of TWM — a 1997 graduation gift from grandparents who never doubted I’d win a Pulitzer (still working on that).

We also talked about Morrie’s “tension of opposites,” his four questions for a meaningful life, the passage on marriage that I had read at my own wedding, and the one about the bird on your shoulder asking, every day: is today the day?

And we talk about what drove Rob craziest about a father the rest of the world only knows as a saint. Thirty years on: one book the world got, one book it almost didn’t, and a friendship that’s been around for a while.

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Episode 36: The Wisdom of Rob and Morrie