The New Yorker's Evan Osnos on how his Biden biography came together

I asked Evan — a perceptive, mischievous writer — how it came together:

I first wrote about him when he visited Beijing in 2011. ... Biden made a point to eat at a local working-class restaurant near my house, throwing shade at Chinese leaders who were dealing with scandals about official privilege and corruption. As soon as Biden left town, Xi Jinping scrambled to go to a local dumpling place to show he was a man of the people.

That episode really piqued my interest, because Biden took an unusually personal approach to foreign affairs, as he does to domestic politics; he's always talking about trying to hear how the other side really thinks, not out of some gauzy belief that he can charm them, but out of a pragmatic desire to calculate their interests.

Osnos says he kept returning to Biden "simply because of the range and intensity of his experiences. I interviewed him four times between April 2014 and July 2020 — on Air Force Two, in the White House, and at his home during the pandemic."