Lauren Hilgers is a journalist and the author of Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown.

“You just need to spend a lot of time with people. And it’s awkward. I read something when I was first starting out as a journalist in China, ‘Make a discipline out of being uncomfortable.’ I think that’s very helpful. You’re going to feel uncomfortable a lot of the time, and just decide to be okay with it and just keep going with it.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Substack, and Skillshare for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Lauren_HIlgers_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:15pm EDT

Charlie Warzel is a senior tech writer for BuzzFeed.

“Part of the big tech reckoning that we’re seeing since the election isn’t really about the election, it isn’t really about Trump or politics. It’s more about this idea that: Wow, these services have incredibly real consequences in our everyday lives. I think that realization is really profound and is going to shape how we try to figure out what it means to be online from here on out. To keep stories relevant, we have to keep that in mind and try to figure out how to speak to that audience and guide them through that reckoning.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Charlie_Warzel_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:16pm EDT

Michelle Dean is a journalist and critic. Her new book is Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.

“There isn’t one answer. I wish there was one answer. The answer is: You just have to wing it. And I’m learning that — I’m learning to be okay with the winging it. ... I guess the lesson to me of what went on with a lot of women in the book is: You have to be comfortable with the fact that some days are going to be good, and some days are going to not be good.”

Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Michelle_Dean_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:45pm EDT

Craig Mod is a writer and photographer. His podcast is On Margins.

“You pick up an iPad, you pick up an iPhone—what are you picking up? You’re picking up a chemical-driven casino that just plays on your most base desires for vanity and ego and our obsession with watching train wrecks happen. That’s what we’re picking up and it’s counted in pageviews, because—not to be reductive and say that it’s a capitalist issue, but when you take hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, and you’re building models predicated on advertising, you are gonna create fucked-up algorithms and shitty loops that take away your attention. And guess what? You need to engage with longform texts. You need control of your attention. And so I think part of what subverted our ability to find this utopian reading space is the fact that so much of what’s on these devices is actively working to destroy all of the qualities needed to create that space.”

Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @craigmod
  2. craigmod.com
  3. Criag Mod on Longform
  4. [01:15] Flipboard
  5. [01:26] On Margins
  6. [02:40] "Roden Explorer's Club," Craig Mod's Newsletter
  7. [09:30] McSweeney’s
  8. [20:30] "Embracing the Digital Book" (PRE/POST • April 2010)
  9. [22:25] Books in the Age of the iPad (PRE/POST • 2012)
  10. [25:30] Post Artifact Books & Publishing (PRE/POST • 2011)
  11. [43:10] Primitive Technology

 

Direct download: Craig_Mod_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:56pm EDT

Tom Bissell is a journalist, critic, video game writer, and author of The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. His latest book is Magic Hours.

“I kind of have come around to maybe not as monkish or fanatical devotion to sentence idolatry as I was when I was a younger writer, earlier in my career. I think I’m coming around to a place where a lot of middle-aged writers get to, which is: I tried to rewire and change the world with the beauty of language alone—it didn’t work. Now how about I try to write stuff that’s true, or that’s not determined to show people I am a Great Writer. Like a lot of young writers, you’re driven by that. Then at a certain point you realize A) you’re not going to be the Great Writer you wanted to be, and B) the determination of that is completely beyond your power to control, so best that you just write as best you can and as honestly as you can, and everything else just sort of becomes gravy.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Tom_Bissell_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:22am EDT

Will Mackin is a U.S. Navy veteran who served with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan. His debut book is Bring Out the Dog.

“I wanted to write nonfiction and I started writing nonfiction. And the reason I did that was — first of all, I felt all the people did all the hard work, and who was I to take liberties? And the second reason was, I just felt an obligation to the men and women who I served with not to misrepresent them, or what they’d been through, or what it had meant to them, or how they felt about it. I kept piling these requirements on to myself: Well, if I present this particular event in this light, this guy’s going to get his feelings hurt. Or, I don’t know how this guy’s family will feel about me talking about this. And it became debilitating, all those restrictions, I kind of kept layering on myself. I was talking to George Saunders at one point about this, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this book is going to happen. I’m just stuck’ And he pointed out, ‘You’re putting all these restrictions on yourself because it puts this perfect book off in the never-to-reach future. If you remove those and start fictionalizing things and getting at it a different way, maybe it’ll work for you.’”

Thanks to MailChimp and Breach for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Will_Mackin_Full_Episode_Edit_3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:11pm EDT

Nitasha Tiku is a senior writer at Wired.

“I’ve always been an incredibly nosy person—not nosy, curious. Curious about the world. It just gives you a license to ask any question, and hopefully if you have a willing editor, the freedom to see something fascinating and pursue it. It was just a natural fit from there. But that also means I don’t have the machismo, ‘breaking news’ sort of a thing. I feel like I can try on different hats, wherever I am.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Credible.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Nitasha_Tiku_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:07pm EDT

Chana Joffe-Walt is a producer and reporter at This American Life. Her latest story is "Five Women."

“I felt like there was more to learn from these stories, more than just which men are bad and shouldn’t have the Netflix special that they wanted to have. And I was interested, also, in that there were groups of women, and that somehow, in having a group of women, you would have variation of experience. There could be a unifying person who they all experienced, but they would inevitably experience that person differently. And that would raise the question of: Why? And I feel like there is this response: ‘Why did she stay?’ Or: ‘Why didn’t she say fuck you?’ Or: ‘I wouldn’t have been upset by that. I wouldn’t have been offended by that thing.’ Which I feel like is a natural response, but also has a lack of curiosity. There are actual answers to those questions that are interesting.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Credible.com.

Direct download: Chana_Joffe_Walt_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:44pm EDT

Joe Weisenthal is the executive editor of news for Bloomberg Digital and the co-host of What’d You Miss? and Odd Lots.

"If I don’t say yes to this, then I can never say yes to anything again. Because when else am I going to get a chance in life to co-host a tv show? Even if it’s terrible, and I’m terrible at it, and it’s cancelled after three months, and everyone thinks it’s awful, for the rest of my life, I’ll be able to say I co-hosted a cable TV show. And so I was like, you know what—I have to say yes to this."

Thanks to MailChimp, Big Questions, and Credible.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @TheStalwart
  2. [02:30] "Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle" (New York Times Magazine • May 2012)
  3. [04:40] What’d You Miss
  4. [05:15] "What Alaska Can Teach Us About Universal Basic Income" (New York • Feb 2018)
  5. [15:05] The Stalwart
  6. [18:55] Weisenthal’s Archive at Business Insider
  7. [54:55] "Annie Duke Explains How To Apply Poker Skills To Markets" (Odd Lots • Feb 2018)
  8. [54:05] "This Is What Stock Market Bubbles and Crashes Have in Common" (Odd Lots • Aug 2017)
Direct download: Joe_Weisenthal_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:27pm EDT

Sean Fennessy is the editor-in-chief of The Ringer and a former Grantland editor. He hosts The Big Picture.

"What I try to do is listen to people as much as I can. And try to be compassionate. I think it’s really hard to be on the internet. This is an internet company, in a lot of ways. We have a documentary coming out that’s going to be on linear television that’s really exciting. Maybe we’ll have more of those. But for the moment, podcast, writing, video: it’s internet. [The internet] is an unmediated space of angst and meanness and a willingness to tell people when they’re bad, even when they’ve worked hard on something. That’s like the number one anxiety that I feel like we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis with everybody, myself included."

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and "Dear Franklin Jones" for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Sean_Fennessey_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:07pm EDT

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a co-host of Still Processing.

“I feel like I’m still writing to let my 10-year-old self know it’s okay to be you. It’s okay to be a chubby androgynous weirdo. You know what I mean? Like this weird black kid. It’s okay. There are others like you.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, "Food: A Cultural Culinary History," and "Tales" for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Jenna_Wortham_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:31am EDT

Michael Idov is a screenwriter, journalist, and the former editor-in-chief of GQ Russia. His latest book is Dressed Up for a Riot.

"It just goes to show that the best thing you can possibly do as a journalist is to forget you’re a journalist, go out, have some authentic experiences, preferably fail at something really hard, and then write about that."

Thanks to MailChimp and Mubi for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Michael_Idov_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:22am EDT

Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept.

“My form of advocacy against the death penalty, frankly, has always been to tell those stories that other people aren’t seeing. And to humanize the people—not just the people facing execution, but everyone around them.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Liliana_Segura_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:50am EDT

Seth Wickersham is a senior writer for ESPN. His latest article is "For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, Is This the Beginning of the End?"

“You want to write about something real. I hate stories that are, the tension of the story is, talk radio perception versus the reality that I see when I’m with somebody. I can’t stand those stories because to me, you’re just writing about the ether versus a real person, and that’s not a real tension to me. The inner tensions are the best tensions. You can’t get to them with everybody, but you try.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Mubi for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Seth_Wickersham_Full_Episode_EDIT_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:50am EDT

Nathan Thornburgh is the co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms.

"You have to remain committed to the kind of irrational act of producing journalism for an uncaring world. You have to want to do that so bad, that you will never not be doing that. There’s so many ways to die in this business."

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and Rise and Grind for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Nathan_Thornburgh_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:44pm EDT

Kiera Feldman is an investigative reporter. Her latest article is "Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection."

"I used to have a lot of anxiety that I don’t seem like an investigative reporter. Utlimately, my reporting personality is just me. It’s just, I want to be real with people. And the number one rule of reporting is to be a human being to other people. Be decent. Be kind."

Thanks to MailChimp, RXBAR, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Kiera_Feldman_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:07pm EDT

Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

"For me, what matters most is systematic investigation, and I think that’s different than an investigative story that might explore one case. It’s about stepping back and understanding the big picture and getting to the heart of something. It doesn’t have to be a number’s game, but being able to say: Look, I looked at a wide enough sample of whatever this issue is, and here is what this tells us. That is what I crave and love the most."

Thanks to MailChimp and Barkbox for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Azmat_Khan_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:17pm EDT

Ben Taub is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Tripping for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @bentaub91
  2. Taub on Longform
  3. [01:45] David Remnick on the Longform Podcast
  4. [07:45] "Was U.S. Journalist Steven Sotloff a Marked Man?" (Daily Beast • Sep 2014)
  5. [27:00] Taub on The Voice (YouTube)
  6. [32:00] "Journey to Jihad" (New Yorker • Jun 2015)
  7. [48:00] Rukmini Callimachi on the Longform Podcast (Part 1)
  8. [48:00] Rukmini Callimachi on the Longform Podcast (Part 2)
  9. [49:30] "The Shadow Doctors" (New Yorker • Jun 2016)
  10. [49:30] "The Assad Files," funded in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Foundation (New Yorker • Apr 2016)
  11. [51:00] "’They were torturing to kill’: inside Syria’s death machine" (Guardian • Oct 2015)
Direct download: Ben_Taub_Full_Episode_Rerun_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:42pm EDT

Maggie Haberman covers the White House for The New York Times.

“If I start thinking about it, then I’m not going to be able to just keep doing my job. I'm being as honest as I can — I try not to think about it. If you’re flying a plane and you think about the fact that if the plane blows up in midair you’re gonna die, do you feel like you can really focus as well? So, I’m not thinking about [the stakes]. This is just my job. This is what we do. Ask me another question.”

Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @maggieNYT
  2. Haberman on Longform
  3. [01:45] "Manafort Talks With Senate Investigators About Meeting With Russians" (with Eileen Sullivan and Adam Goldman • New York Times • Jul 2017)
  4. [02:15] Haberman’s New York Times archive
  5. [02:30] Haberman’s New York Post archive
  6. [02:30] Haberman’s New York Daily News archive
  7. [03:15] readthissummer.com
  8. [03:15] "Paladino assails Cuomo’s parenting" (Politico • Oct 2010)
  9. [08:30] Harold and the Purple Crayon (Crockett Johnson • Harper Collins • 2015)
  10. [12:15] "Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance" (with Ashley Parker, Jeremy W. Peters, and Michael Barbaro • New York Times • Nov 2016)
  11. [19:15] Private Parts
  12. [21:30] "Excerpts From the Times’s Interview With Trump" (with Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt • New York Times • Jul 2017)
  13. [32:45] "Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles" (with Glenn Thrush • New York Times • Feb 2017)
  14. [35:15] Steve Dunleavy’s New York Post archive
  15. [44:15] Broadcast News

 

 

Direct download: New_Maggie_Haberman_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:49am EDT

Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is the founder of Women in the World. Her latest book is The Vanity Fair Diaries.

“I believed that my bravado had no limit, if you know what I mean. I see limits now, let’s put it that way. I do see limits. But you know, I’m still pretty reckless when I want something. That’s why I don’t tweet much. I’ll say something that will just cause me too much trouble.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @TinaBrownLM
  2. [00:00] Longform Best of 2017
  3. [03:00] Vanity Fair Diaries (Henry Holt and Co. • 2014)
  4. [05:35] Tatler
  5. [12:00] "Darkness Visible" (William Styron • Vanity Fair • Dec 1989)
  6. [14:40] "Guarding Sing Sing" (Ted Conover • New Yorker • April 2000)
  7. [14:40] Longform Podcast #38 Ted Conover
  8. [16:00] "Dominick Dunne on His Daughter’s Murder" (Dominick Dunne • Vanity Fair • March 1984)
  9. [28:10] "10 Years Ago, an Omen No One Saw" (David Carr • New York Times • Aug 2009)
  10. [31:50] The Diana Chronicles (Anchor • 2007)
  11. [38:40] "Bruna Papandrea Options Tina Brown’s ‘Vanity Fair Diaries’ For Limited TV Series" (Nellie Andreeva • Deadline • Sept 2017)
  12. [41:43] Women in the World

 

Direct download: Tina_Brown_Full_Episode_Cut_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:32pm EDT

Mara Shalhoup was until recently editor-in-chief of LA Weekly. She is the author of BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family.

“I’m so fearful about what it will look like for cities without an outlet for [alt-weekly] stories. And for young writers, who need and deserve the hands-on editing these kind of editors can give them and help really launch careers … it’s a tragedy for journalism. It’s a tragedy for young people, people of color. It’s a tragedy for the subjects of stories that won’t get written now. That’s just the reality.”

Thanks to Mail Chimp, Mubi, and Skillshare for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Mara_Shalhoup_Full_Episode_EDIT_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:27pm EDT

Zoe Chace is a reporter and producer at This American Life.

“Radio is a movie in your head. It’s a very visual thing. It’s a transporting thing—when it’s done well. And it’s louder than your thoughts. It is both of those things. It would just take me out of the place that I was, where I was lost and couldn’t figure things out. ... They had a very personal way of telling the story to you, so that you kind of felt like you’re there with them. Like it’s less lonely, it’s literally less lonely to have them there. And that felt really good.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, Squarespace, and Casper for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Zoe_Chace_Final.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:42am EDT

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for Buzzfeed and the author of News Junkie.

“I made the worst mistake that cost me my credibility and I could have done two things. I could have walked away, and said I’m done with this, no one wants me anymore. Or I could have—which I did—say, I’m going to learn how to do this differently, and be better. And that’s ultimately is what paved the way to this FOIA work. Because no one trusted me anymore.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Credible, Mubi, and Skillshare, for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Jason_Leopold_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:09pm EDT

Kara Swisher is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode.

“I do the work. I just work harder than other people. I really do. I work harder, I interview more people, I call more people, I text more people. And so I find out, and they can not talk to me — fine. I know anyway. I’d like to talk to you, I’d like to give you a chance. I’d like to be fair. I’d like to hear your side of the story. And the most important thing is, I think smart people – and these are very smart people — like smart questions. They don’t like the fawning questions. They don’t like being licked up and down all day. Some of the day they like it. They want someone who knew them before they were billionaires. Because when you’re a billionaire, every day you’re so smart. Everyone wants something from you.”

Thanks to Mubi, Findaway Voices, and Mail Chimp for sponsoring this week's episode. And thanks to Pop-Up Magazine for making our live show possible!

  1. @karaswisher
  2. [02:35] Longform Podcast #239: Brian Reed
  3. [02:50] Recode
  4. [02:55] Recode Decode
  5. [03:00] Code Conference
  6. [04:40] "Kara Swisher’s First Tech Article Was About Pay Phones in 1980" (Jesse Rifkin • A Step in the Write Direction • Nov 2017)
  7. [08:10] "McLaughlin Suit Settled" (Jim Naughton, Phil McCombs • Washington Post • Dec 1999)
  8. [10:00] "Pundit Power" (Eric Alterman • Washington Post • March 1989)
  9. [11:30] Longform Podcast #128: Jack Shafer
  10. [22:51] AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web (Crown Business • 1998)
  11. [35:25] Swisher’s Archive at Vanity Fair
  12. [41:20] "Uber CEO Kalanick Advised Employees on Sex Rules for a Company Celebration in 2013 ‘Miami Letter’" (Kara Swisher, Johana Bhuiyan • Recode • June 2017)
  13. [41:40] "A Top Uber Executive, Who Obtained the Medical Records of a Customer Who Was a Rape Victim, Has Been Fired’" (Kara Swisher, Johana Bhuiyan • Recode • June 2017)
  14. [41:40] "The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management" (Wall Street Journal • Aug 2007)
  15. [41:50] "The Men and No Women of Web 2.0 Boards" (Wall Street Journal • Dec 2010)
  16. [43:40] "Will Twitter Add a Woman Director Before the IPO?" (Wall Street Journal • Sept 2013)
  17. [48:40] " Missing Milly Dowler's Voicemail Was Hacked by News of the World" (Nick Davies, Amelia Hill • The Guardian • July 2011)
  18. [58:35] There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere (Crown Business • 2003)
  19. [61:35] Pop-Up Magazine
  20. [61:40] California Sunday
Direct download: Swisher_Full_Episode_Cut_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:10pm EDT

Tyler Cowen is an economist, the co-founder of Marginal Revolution, and the host of Conversations with Tyler. His latest book is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

“I think of my central contribution, or what I’m trying to have it be, is teaching people to think of counter arguments. I’m trying to teach a method: always push things one step further. What if, under what conditions, what would make this wrong? If I write something and people respond to it that way, then I feel very happy and successful. If people just agree with me, I’m a little disappointed.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Tyler_Cowen_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:13pm EDT

Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter and the author of The Obamas.

“Being a reporter really robs you of self-consciousness and shyness. You realize that it’s this great gift of being able to ask crazy questions, either really personal or very probing or especially with a powerful — to walk up to Harvey Weinstein, essentially and say, ‘What have you been doing to women all these years, and for how long? All of these other people may be afraid to confront you about it, but we are not.’ That is our job.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Eero for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Kantor_Full_Episode_Cut_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:18pm EDT

Jim Nelson is the editor-in-chief of GQ.

“One of the things that was initially a challenge was we would all think of ‘the print side’ and ‘the digital side.’ Now what we all think about is, ‘Okay, stop saying GQ.com and GQ the print edition. It’s just GQ!’ And once you cross that line, you don’t ever want to go back to it. I can’t imagine. The job has changed so much, even in the last three years, that when I look back, I think, ‘God, I was just such a quaint little fucker.’”

Thanks to MailChimp and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Jim_Nelson_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:15am EDT

Sarah Ellison is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of War at the Wall Street Journal.

“There’s no lack of stories. ... There’s always an element where you’re going to be parachuting into something that someone has likely written about, to some degree. You can’t shy away from going into something that’s a crowded field.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Quip, and BarkBox for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Ep267_SarahEllison.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:39am EDT

Patricia Bosworth is a journalist and biographer. Her latest book is The Men in My Life.

“The [acting] rejections are hellish and ghastly. At least they were to me. And I got tired of being rejected so much and also tired of not being able to control my life. And as soon as I became a writer, I had this control, I felt more active, more energized. But it was a decision that took a long time coming.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Heaven's Gate for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Patricia_Bosworth_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:44pm EDT

Michael Barbaro is the host of The Daily.

“I don’t think The Daily should ever be my therapy session. That’s not what it’s meant to be, but I’m a human being. I arrive at work on a random Tuesday, and I do an interview with a guy like that, and it just punched me right in the stomach.”

Thanks to MailChimp, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Blinkist for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Barbaro_Full_Episode_Cut_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:43pm EDT

Vanessa Grigoriadis writes for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine. Her new book is Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus.

“I’m a controversial writer. I’ve never shied away from controversy. I’ve only really courted it because I realized a lot earlier than a lot of other people who are involved in this whole depressing business that clicks are the way to go, right? Or eyeballs, as we used to call them, or readership. I come out of a Tom Wolfe-like, Hunter S. Thompson kind of tradition. You don’t mince any words, you just go for the jugular and you say as many things that can stir people up as possible.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Casper for sponsoring this week's episode.

Direct download: Vanessa_Grigoriadis_Full_Episode_Edit_3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:50am EDT

Dr. Jelani Cobb is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of three books, including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.

“Ralph Wiley — the sports writer, late Ralph Wiley — told me something when I was 25 or so, and he was so right. He said I should never fall in love with anything I’ve written. … The second thing he told me was, ‘You won’t get there overnight, and believe me, you don’t want to.’ I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t get it when he told me that. I was like — why would I not want to get there overnight? Now I’m like: Thank God I didn’t get there overnight. Because there’s so much writing I would have to explain.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Quip, and Audible for sponsoring this week's episode.

 

Direct download: Jelani_Cobb_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:06pm EDT

PJ Vogt is the co-host of Reply All.

“Every radio story is broken. Everything is missing some piece it’s supposed to have. Everything has some weird interview that didn’t go the way you thought it was going to go, or you thought you had an answer but you were wrong.”

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Direct download: PJ_Vogt_Full_Episode_EDIT_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:41pm EDT

Alex Goldman is the co-host of Reply All.

“I am not the authority on the internet. I’m not an expert on particularly anything, except stuff that I like.”

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Direct download: Alex_Goldman_Full_Episode_EDIT_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:38pm EDT

Hillary Clinton is the former Democratic nominee for president. Her new book is What Happened.

“I hugged a lot of people after [my concession speech] was over. A lot of people cried … and then it was done. So Bill and I went out and got in the back of the van that we drive around in, and I just felt like all of the adrenaline was drained. I mean there was nothing left. It was like somebody had pulled the plug on a bathtub and everything just drained out. I just slumped over. Sat there. … And then we got home, and it was just us as it has been for so many years—in our little house, with our dogs. It was a really painful, exhausting time.”

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Direct download: Ep._261_-_Hillary_Clinton.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:10am EDT

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist. Her latest piece is “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof.”

“I remember feeling like ‘you’re playing chess with evil, and you gotta win.’ Because this is the most terrible thing I’d ever seen. And I was so mad. I still get so mad. Words aren’t enough. I’m angry about it. I can’t do anything to Dylann Roof, physically, so this is what I could do.”

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Direct download: Ep._260_-_Rachel_Kaadzi_Ghansah.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:38am EDT

Ellen Barry is the former New York Times bureau chief for South Asia.

“Every time you leave a beat—and this is something that I think as foreign correspondents we rarely communicate to our readers—you’re walking away from a story which has really been your whole life for four or five years. And it’s hard to walk away…The majority of us live a story for a certain number of years, and then we just turn our backs on it.”

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Direct download: Ep._259_-_Ellen_Barry.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:31pm EDT

Kate Fagan is a columnist and feature writer for ESPN. Her latest book is What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen.

“When I was professionally closeted, I was kind of bitter. I didn’t have a ton of empathy. And I don’t think I always asked the right question, because I wouldn’t ask people questions that I wouldn’t want to be asked…I had walls up. I wouldn’t even allow myself to be vulnerable in my writing. Because the whole point of my existence at that time was to circumvent any moment that could create vulnerability in a way that would frighten me. And I think you could that see in my writing.”

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Direct download: final_fagan_full_ep_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:59pm EDT

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer at large at The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Vice News Tonight.

“I make a pretty provocative argument about how Asian American identity doesn’t really exist—how it’s basically just an academic idea, and it’s not lived within the lives of anybody who’s Asian. Like you grow up, you’re Korean, you’re a minority. You don’t have any sort of kinship with, like, Indian kids. You know? And there’s no cultural sharedness where you’re just like, ‘oh yeah…Asia!’”

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Direct download: Ep._257_-_Jay_Kang.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:11pm EDT

David Gessner is the author of ten books. His latest is Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth.

“The ambition got in my way at first. Because I wanted my stuff to be great, and it froze me up. But later on it was really helpful. I’m startled by the way people don’t, you know, admit [they care] … it seems unlikely people wouldn’t want to be immortal.”

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Direct download: Ep._256_-_David_Gessner.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:18am EDT

Matthew Klam is a journalist and fiction writer. His new novel is Who Is Rich?.

“The New Yorker had hyped me with this “20 Under 40” thing…and when the tenth anniversary of that list [came], somebody wrote an article about it. And they found everybody in it, and I was the only one who hadn’t done anything since then, according to them. And the article, it was a little paragraph or two, it ended with ‘poor Matthew Klam.’”

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Direct download: Ep._255_-_Matthew_Klam.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:02pm EDT

Maggie Haberman covers the White House for The New York Times.

“If I start thinking about it, then I’m not going to be able to just keep doing my job. I'm being as honest as I can — I try not to think about it. If you’re flying a plane and you think about the fact that if the plane blows up in midair you’re gonna die, do you feel like you can really focus as well? So, I’m not thinking about [the stakes]. This is just my job. This is what we do. Ask me another question.”

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Direct download: Ep._254_-_Maggie_Haberman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:24am EDT

Steven Levy writes for Wired, where he is the editor of Backchannel.

“It’s about people. Travis Kalanick’s foibles aren’t because he’s a technology executive. It’s because he’s Travis Kalanick. That’s the way he is. There is a certain strain in Silicon Valley, which rewards totally driven people, but that is humanity. And advanced technology is no guarantee—and as a matter of fact I don’t think it’ll do anything—from stopping ill-intentioned people from doing ill-intentioned things.”

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Direct download: Steve_Levy_Full_Episode_EDIT_2_-_NO_POST.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:46pm EDT

Mark Bowden is a journalist and the author of 13 books, including Black Hawk Down and his latest, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.

“My goal is never to condemn someone that I’m writing about. It’s always to understand them. And that, to me, is far more interesting than passing judgment on them. I want you to read about Che Thi Mung, an 18-year-old village girl, who was selling hats on corners in Hue in the daytime and going home and sharpening spikes to go into booby traps to try and kill American soldiers and ARVN soldiers in the evening. I want to understand why she would do that, why she would be so motivated to do that. And I think I did.”

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Direct download: Mark_Bowden_Full_Episode_EDIT_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:22pm EDT

Brian Reed, a senior producer at This American Life, is the host of S-Town.

“It’s a story about the remarkableness of what could be called an unremarkable life.”

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Category:general -- posted at: 11:17pm EDT

Ginger Thompson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter at ProPublica. Her most recent article is "How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico."

“How many times have I written the phrase ‘a town that was controlled by drug traffickers?' I had no idea what that really meant. What does it mean to live in a town that’s controlled by drug traffickers? And how does it get that way? One of the things I was hoping that we could do by having the people who actually lived through that explain it to us was that—to bring you close to that and say, ‘No, here’s what that means.’”

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Direct download: Ginger_Thompson_Full_Episode_EDIT_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:56pm EDT

Patricia Lockwood is a poet and essayist. Her new book is Priestdaddy: A Memoir.

“[Prose writing is] strange to me as a poet. I’m like, ‘Well I guess I’ll tell you just what happened then.’ But the humor has to be there as well. Because in my family household…the absurdity or the surrealism that we have is in reaction to the craziness of the household. So something like your underwear-clad father with his hand in a vat of pickles, sitting in a room full of $10,000 guitars and telling you that he can’t afford to send you to college—that’s bad. That’s a sad scene. But it’s also totally a lunatic scene. It’s, just the very fact of it, all these accoutrements, all the elements of the scene—they are funny.”

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Direct download: Ep._250_-_Patricia_Lockwood_-_2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:30pm EDT

John Grisham is the author of 38 books, including his latest novel, Camino Island.

A Time to Kill didn’t sell. It just didn’t sell. There was never any talk of going back for a second printing. No talk of paper back. No foreign deal. It was a flop. And I told my wife, I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna do it one more time. I’m gonna write one more book…hopefully something more commercial, more accessible, more popular. If this doesn’t work, forget this career. Forget this hobby. I’m just gonna be a lawyer and get on with it.”

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Direct download: Ep._249_-_John_Grisham.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:37am EDT

Erin Lee Carr is a documentary filmmaker and writer. Her new film is Mommy Dead and Dearest.

“I feel like I’ve always had the story down—that’s not been really difficult for me. So the difficult thing, I think, for me, has always been access. Can I get the access? Can I withstand the pressure? You know, there’s been so many times where I wasn’t being paid to do the job, and I had to wait on the access. And it’s not for the faint of heart. You know, I could have spent a year and a half of my life doing [Mommy Dead and Dearest] and I could’ve not gotten the access to Gypsy, and it kind of would’ve been a wash.”

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Direct download: Ep._248_-_Erin_Lee_Carr.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:27pm EDT

Ariel Levy, a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of The Rules Do Not Apply.

“I don’t believe in ‘would this’ and ‘would that.’ There’s no ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Everything happens, and then you just fucking deal. I mean we could play that game with everything, but time only moves in one direction. That’s a bad game. You shouldn’t play that game—you’ll break your own heart.”

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Direct download: Ep._247_-_Ariel_Levy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:26pm EDT

Jeffrey Gettleman is the East Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times and the author of Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival.

“I’m not an adventure-seeking adrenaline junky. I like to explore new worlds, but I’m not one of these chain-smoking, hard-drinking, partying types that just wants thrills all the time. And unfortunately that’s an aspect of the job. And as I get older and I’ve been through more and more, the question gets louder. Which is: Why do you keep doing this? Because you feel like you only have so many points, and eventually the points are going to run out.”

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Direct download: Ep._246_-_Jeffrey_Gettleman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:18pm EDT

Rafe Bartholomew is the former features editor at Grantland and the author of Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.

“I never saw it as something negative because [my dad] comes out, to me, at the end, extremely heroic. … He becomes this dad who I idolized as a bartender, a guy who would hang out with me and make me laugh, a guy I just adored almost every step of the way. I mean, of course, everybody gets into fights. But to me it was always so obvious that he had overcome the problems in his childhood, he’d overcome his own drinking problem, he’d done all these things, and by the time I was older, he’d even found a way to get back into writing and self-publish a couple of books of poems about the bar. So he’s sort of managed to tick off all those goals, just maybe not on the same schedule, maybe not in the most normal way.”

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Direct download: Ep._245_-_Rafe_Bartholomew.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:32pm EDT

Nick Bilton is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road.

“I’ve been covering tech for a long, long time. And the thing I’ve always tried to do is cover the people of the tech culture, not the tech itself. … I've always been interested in the good and bad side of technology. A lot of times the problem in Silicon Valley is that people come up with a good idea that’s supposed to do a good thing—you know, to change the world and make it a better place. And it ends up inevitably having a recourse that they don’t imagine.”

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Direct download: Ep._244_-_Nick_Bilton.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:19pm EDT

Samin Nosrat is a food writer, educator, and chef. Her new book is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking.

“I kind of couldn’t exist as just a cook or a writer. I kind of need to be both. Because they fulfill these two totally different parts of myself and my brain. Cooking is really social, it’s very physical, and also you don’t have any time to become attached to your product. You hand it off and somebody eats it, and literally tomorrow it’s shit. … Whereas with writing, it’s the exact opposite. It’s super solitary. It’s super cerebral. And you have all the time in the world to get attached to your thing and freak out about it.”

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Direct download: Ep._243_-_Samin_Nosrat.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:21pm EDT

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer and the founder of Vela. Her upcoming book is Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm.

“I’d been rejected a ton of times—I had that 400-page thing that never became a book. So there were plenty of epic rejections that felt catastrophic. And I’d sort of arrived at this point where I was like: I’m living in my parents' cabin, and I’m pregnant, so whatever. Fuck it. I’m gonna write whatever I want to write.”

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Direct download: Ep._242_-_Sarah_Menkedick.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:36pm EDT

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

“The more stories I reported over time, the more I just realized there are parts of the story I can’t always get to. You know, unless this is a reality show and there’s 18 cameras in every room, and people [talk] before they sleep, and maybe you have some mind-bug in their brain for their unconscious, there are just parts you’re just not gonna know. You get as close as you can. And so the struggle to me is to get as close as I can, to peel it back as close as I can, but understanding that there will be elements, there will be pieces, that will remain lingering doubts.”

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Direct download: Ep._241_-_David_Grann.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:54pm EDT

Alex Kotlowitz is a journalist whose work has appeared in print, radio, and film. He’s the author of three books, including There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America.

“The truth of the matter is, given what we do, we’re always outsiders. If it’s not by race or class, it’s by gender, religion, politics. It’s just the nature of being a nonfiction writer—going into communities that, at some level, feel unfamiliar. If you’re writing about stuff you already know about, where’s the joy in that? Where’s the sense of discovery? Why bother?”

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Direct download: Ep._240_-_Alex_Kotlowitz.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:12pm EDT

Brian Reed, a senior producer at This American Life, is the host of S-Town.

“It’s a story about the remarkableness of what could be called an unremarkable life.”

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Direct download: Ep._239_-_Brian_H._Reed.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:11pm EDT

Hrishikesh Hirway is the host of Song Exploder.

“I love the idea that somebody would listen to an episode [of Song Exploder] and then the feeling that they would have afterwards is, ‘Now I want to make something.’ That’s the best possible reaction. Whether it’s music or not, just that idea: ‘I want to make something.’ Because that is the thing that I love most, getting that feeling.”

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Direct download: Ep._238_-_Hrishikesh_Hirway.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:11pm EDT

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.

“Suddenly the financial crisis happened and all this stuff that had been hidden from view came out into the open. It was like, ‘Oh, this was actually all kind of a big façade.’ And there was all this fraud and stealing and manipulation and corruption, and all these other things going on underneath the whole shiny rock star surface. And that really also demonstrated to people how connected business stories, or anything to do with money, are to everything else going on. I mean, really almost everything that happens in our world, if you trace it back to its source, it’s money at the root of it.”

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Direct download: Ep._237_-_Sheelah_Kolhatkar.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:15pm EDT

Al Baker is a crime reporter at The New York Times, where he writes the series “Murder in the 4-0.”

“When there’s a murder in a public housing high rise, there’s a body on the floor. Jessica White in a playground, on a hot summer night. Her children saw it. Her body fell by a bench by a slide. You look up and there’s hundreds of windows, representing potentially thousands of eyes, looking down on that like a fishbowl. …They’re seeing it through the window and they can see that there’s a scarcity of response. And then they measure that against the police shooting that happened in February when there were three helicopters in the air and spotlights shining down on them all night and hundreds of officers with heavy armor going door to door to door to find out who shot a police officer. They can see the difference between a civilian death and an officer death.”

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Direct download: Ep._236_-_Al_Baker.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:20pm EDT

Caity Weaver is a staff writer at GQ.

“I always try to remember: you don’t have to tell people what you’re not good at. You don’t have to remind them of what you’re not doing well or what your weak points are. Don’t apologize for things immediately. Always give a little less information than they need. Don’t overshare.”

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Direct download: Ep._235_-_Caity_Weaver.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:36pm EDT

Matthew Cole is an investigative reporter at The Intercept, where he recently published “The Crimes of Seal Team 6.”

“I’ve gotten very polite and very impolite versions of ‘go fuck yourself.’ I used to have a little sheet of paper where I wrote down those responses just as the vernacular that was given to me: ‘You’re a shitty reporter, and I don’t talk to shitty reporters.’ You know, I’ve had some very polite ones, [but] I’ve had people threaten me with their dogs. Some of it is absolutely cold.”

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Direct download: Ep._234_-_Matthew_Cole.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:23pm EDT

Alexis C. Madrigal is an editor-at-large for Fusion, where he’s producing the upcoming podcast, Containers.

“Sometimes you think like, 'Man the media business is the worst. This is so hard.' When you spend time with all these other business people, you probably are going to say, ‘Capitalism is the worst. This is hard.’ Competition that’s linked to global things is so hard because global companies are locked in this incredible efficiency battle that just drives all of the slack out of the system. Like media, there’s no slack left, and I don’t know where things go after that.”

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Direct download: Ep._233_-_Alexis_Madrigal.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:58pm EDT

Ana Marie Cox is the senior political correspondent for MTV News, conducts the “Talk” interviews in The New York Times Magazine, and founded Wonkette.

“When people are sending me hate mail or threats, one defense I have against that is ‘you don’t know me.’ You know? That wasn’t something I always was able to say. As I’ve become a stronger person, it’s been easier for me to be like, ‘The person they’re attacking, it’s not me.’”

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Direct download: Ep._232_-_Ana_Marie_Cox.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:26pm EDT

Brooke Gladstone is the host of On the Media.

“I’ve learned so much about how easy it is to redefine reality in this era of billions of filter bubbles. How easy it is to cast doubt on what is undeniably true. And I think that that’s what frightens me the most. I actually think that’s what frightens most people the most. How do we make sure that we all live in the same world? Or do we?”

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Direct download: Ep._231_-_Brooke_Gladstone.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:41pm EDT

Ezra Edelman is the director of O.J.: Made in America.

“When I say what I learned is that America is even more fucked up than I had previously thought, it’s that—the superficiality of it. How we are willingly seduced by these shiny people and these shiny things. And, again, when I looked at O.J.’s trajectory, that was an operating principle.”

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Direct download: Ep._230_-_Ezra_Edelman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:32pm EDT

Alexey Kovalev is a Moscow-based journalist and the author of the recent article, “A Message to My Doomed Colleagues in the American Media."

“It’s really disheartening to see how little it takes for people to start believing in something that directly contradicts the empirical facts that they are directly confronting. The Russian TV channel tells you that the pill is red, but the pill in front of you is blue. It completely alters the perception of reality. You don’t know what’s real anymore.”

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Direct download: Ep._229_-_Alexey_Kovalev.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:10pm EDT

Jeff Sharlet writes about politics and religion for Esquire, GQ, New York Times Magazine, and more.

“I like the stories with difficult people. I like the stories about people who are dismissed as monsters. I hate the term ‘monster.’ ‘Monster’ is a safe term for us, right? Trump’s a monster. Great, we don’t need to wrestle with, ‘Uh oh, he’s not a monster. He’s in this human family with us.’ I’m not normalizing him. I’m acknowledging the fact. Now, what’s wrong with us? If Trump is human, what’s wrong with you?”

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Direct download: Ep._228_-_Jeff_Sharlet.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:38am EDT

Jace Clayton is a music writer and musician who records as DJ /rupture. His book is Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture.

“What does it mean to be young and have some sound inside your head? Or to be in a scene that you want to broadcast to the world? That notion of the world is changing, who you’re broadcasting to is changing, all these different things—the tool sets. But there’s this very fundamental joy of music making. I was like, ‘Ok. Let’s find flashpoints where interesting things are happening and can be unpacked that shed different little spotlights on it, but do fall into this wider view of how we articulate what’s thrilling to be alive right now.’”

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Direct download: Ep._227_-_Jace_Clayton.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:52pm EDT

Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air.

“Part of my philosophy of life is that you have to live with a certain amount of delusion. And part of the delusion I live with is that maybe, from experience, I’m getting a little bit better. But then the other part of me, the more overpowering part of me, is the pessimistic part that says, ‘It’s going to be downhill from here.’ I try not to judge myself too much because I’m so self-judgmental that I don’t want to over-judge and get into too much of ‘Am I better than I was yesterday, or not?’”

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Direct download: Ep._226_-_Terry_Gross.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:21pm EDT

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of Between the World and Me and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His latest cover story is “My President Was Black."

“[People] have come to see me as somebody with answers, but I don’t actually have answers. I’ve never had answers. The questions are the enthralling thing for me. Not necessarily at the end of the thing getting somewhere that’s complete—it’s the asking and repeated asking. I don’t know how that happened, but I felt like after a while it got to the point where I was seen as having unique answers, and I just didn’t. I really, really didn’t.”

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Direct download: Ep._225_-_Ta-Nehisi_Coates.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:31pm EDT

Hua Hsu writes for The New Yorker and is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.

“I remember, as a kid, my dad telling me that when he moved to the United States he subscribed to The New Yorker, and then he canceled it after a month because he had no idea what any of it was about. You know, at the time, it certainly wasn’t a magazine for a Chinese immigrant fresh off the boat—or off the plane, rather—in the early 70s. And I always think about that. I always think, ‘I want my dad to understand even though he’s not that interested in Dr.Dre.’ I still think, ‘I want him to be able to glean something from this.’”

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Direct download: Ep._224_-_Hua_Hsu.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:44pm EDT

Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times and a national correspondent at STAT, writes about science.

“[Criticism] doesn’t change the truth. You know? Global warming is still happening. Vaccines still work. Evolution is still true. No matter what someone on Twitter or someone in an administration is going to say, it’s still true. So, we science writers have to still be letting people know about what science has discovered, what we with our minds have discovered about the world—to the best of our abilities. That’s our duty as science writers, and we can’t let these things scare us off.”

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Direct download: LF161204_Zimmer_V2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:43pm EDT

Wesley Lowery is a national reporter at the Washington Post, where he worked on the Pulitzer-winning project, "Fatal Force." His new book is They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.

“I think that we decided at some point that either you are a journalist or you are an activist. And I identify as a journalist, to be clear, but one of the reasons I often don’t engage in that conversation—when someone throws that back at me I kind of deflect a little bit—is that I think there’s some real fallacy in there. I think that every journalist should be an activist for transparency, for accountability—certainly amongst our government, for first amendment rights. There are things that by our nature of what we do we should be extremely activist.”

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Direct download: Ep._222_-_Wesley_Lowery.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:14pm EDT

Adam Moss is the editor of New York Magazine.

“I think [change] is good for journalism—it’s what journalism is about. You can’t write about something static. News is about what is new. So there’s plenty of new right now. I’m not saying it’s good for the citizenry or anything like that, but, yeah, for journalists it’s an extremely interesting time. There’s no denying that.”

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Direct download: LF161123_Moss_v7.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:57pm EDT

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer who writes for Businessweek, The Verge, Racked, The New Yorker, and more.

“I love that idea of form and content being the same. I want to write about lifestyle in a lifestyle magazine. I want to critique technology in the form of technology, and kind of have the piece be this infiltrating force that explodes from within or whatever. You want something that gets into the space, and sneaks in, and then blows up.”

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Direct download: Ep._220_-_Kyle_Chayka.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:25pm EDT

Susan Casey is the former editor of O and the author of three New York Times bestselling books. Her latest is Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins.

“The funny thing is people often say, ‘You must be fearless.’ I’m always afraid of whatever it is. But for whatever reason—I think it’s partly naïvety, partly just overwhelming curiosity—I am also not going to let fear stop me from doing things even if I feel it. Unless it’s that pure …you do have to listen to your body sometimes if it tells you not to do something that could result in you really never coming up from falling on that 70-foot wave.”

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Direct download: LF161110_Casey_v3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:32am EDT

Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the co-host of Still Processing. His latest article is "Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality."

“You learn a lot of things about your sexuality at an early age. You know, I learned that your penis is a problem for white people, that you can’t be too openly sexual in general because that could get you in trouble because someone could misconstrue what you’re doing, and, in my case, I also knew I was gay. So I had to deal with, ‘Ok so my dick is a problem in general, and I’m not even interested in putting my penis where it’s supposed to go. This is going to be bad.’”

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Direct download: Ep._218_-_Wesley_Morris_-_Final.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:23pm EDT

Doreen St. Félix is a writer at MTV News.

“It feels like there are images of black utopias that are arising. And you can’t—even if you’re not as superstitious as me—you can’t possibly think that that doesn’t have to do with the decline, the final, to me, last gasp of white supremacy. It really does feel like we’re approaching that, [but] that approach might be a thousand years.”

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Direct download: Ep._217_-_Doreen_St._Felix.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:18pm EDT

Emily Witt is a freelance writer and the author of Future Sex.

“I think I had always thought that—maybe this is coming from a WASPy, protestant background—if I presented myself as overtly sexual in any way, it would be a huge turnoff. That they would see me as a certain type of person. They wouldn’t have respect for me. And I thought this both professionally—I thought maybe writing this book was going to be really bad for my career, that nobody would take me seriously anymore—and also that nobody would want to date me if I was too honest. In both counts the opposite happened.”

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Direct download: Ep._216_-_Emily_Witt.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:15pm EDT

Krista Tippett is the host of On Being and the author of Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.

“Good journalists in newsrooms hold themselves to primitive standards when they’re covering religious ideas and people. They’re sloppy and simplistic in a way that they would never be with a political or economic person or idea. I mean they get facts wrong. They generalize. Because they don’t take it seriously, and they don’t know how to take it seriously.”

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Direct download: Ep._215_-_Krista_Tippett.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:11pm EDT

Luke Dittrich is a contributing editor at Esquire. His new book is Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets.

“As soon as I told [my mom] that I got my first book deal for this story about Patient H.M., her first words were, ‘Oh no.’ That was sort of her gut reaction to it because, I think, she knew at a certain level that I was going to be dredging up very painful stories. And I think at that point even she didn’t know the depth of the pain that some of the stories that I was going to find were going to lay out there.”

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Direct download: Ep._214_-_Luke_Dittrich.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:55pm EDT

A.J. Daulerio is the former editor-in-chief of Gawker.

“The choices they’ve given me are take back everything that you loved about Nick [Denton], Gawker, and your job, and we’ll give you your $1,000 back or your ability to make money. You can walk away from this, but you just can’t talk about it ever again. I don’t see there’s any question for me. I definitely thought long and hard about it, and I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. It’s just not in me. Some days I absolutely wish I could say, ‘Is there a phone call I could make to make this all go away?’ Because I want my life back. That’s happened. But for the most part I just think I would regret doing that.”

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Direct download: Ep._213_-_A.J._Daulerio.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:47pm EDT

Julia Turner is editor-in-chief of Slate.

“That’s what we’ve been focused on: trying to double down on the stuff that feels distinctive and original. Because if you spend all your time on a social platform, and a bunch of media brands are optimizing all their content for that social platform, all those media brands’ headlines say the same, all the content is pretty interchangeable. It turns media into this commodity where then what is the point of developing a media company for 20 years? You might as well take the Silicon Valley approach and just make a new one every three years for whatever that moment is.”

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Direct download: Ep._212_-_Julia_Turner.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:07pm EDT

Naomi Zeichner is editor-in-chief of The Fader.

“Right now in rap there’s kind of a huge tired idea that kids are trying to kill their idols, and kids have no respect for history, and kids are making bastardized crazy music, and how dare they? I just don’t even know why we still care about this false dichotomy. Kids are coming from where they come from, they’re going where they’re going. And it’s like, do you want to try to learn about where they’re coming from and where they’re going, or do you not?”

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Direct download: Ep._211_-_Naomi_Zeichner.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:51pm EDT

Ben Taub is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”

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Direct download: Ep._210_-_Ben_Taub.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:20pm EDT

Sarah Schweitzer is a former feature writer for the Boston Globe.

“I just am drawn, I think, to the notion that we start out as these creatures that just want love and were programmed that way—to try to find it and to make our lives whole. We are, as humans, so strong in that way. We get knocked down, and adults do some horrible things to us because adults have had horrible things done to [them]. There are some terrible cycles in this world. But there’s always this opportunity to stop that cycle. And there are people who come along who do try that in their own flawed ways.”

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Direct download: Ep._209_-_Sarah_Schweitzer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:06pm EDT

Rachel Monroe is a freelance writer based in Texas.

“I will totally go emotionally deep with people. If I can find a subject who is into that then it will probably be a good story. Whether that person is a victim of a crime, or a committer of a crime, or a woman who spends a lot of time on the internet looking for hoaxes, or whatever it may be—I guess I just think people are interesting. Particularly when those people have gone through some sort of extreme situation.”

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Direct download: Ep._208_-_Rachel_Monroe.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:02am EDT

McKay Coppins is a senior political writer for Buzzfeed News and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

“I am part of the problem. Not in the sense that it’s my fault Trump ran, but in the sense that I’m one of many who for his entire life have mocked him and ridiculed him. He’s a billionaire—I don’t feel any moral guilt about it. But if being I’m honest with myself that same part of me can also, when not checked, be projected onto vast swathes of people. It’s easy to have a lazy classism about the type of people who would vote for Donald Trump.”

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Show Notes:

Direct download: Ep_207_-_McKay_Coppins.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:59pm EDT

<p>Gabriel Sherman is the national affairs editor at <em>New York</em> and the author of the <em>New York Times</em> best-seller <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Loudest-Voice-Room-Brilliant-News/dp/0812992857?tag=longform-20" target="_blank">The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country</a></em>.</p>

<p><blockquote>“There was a time when we got death threats at home. Some crank called and said, ‘We’re gonna come after you. You’re coming after the right, we’re gonna get you.’ That was scary because, again, you don’t know if it’s just a crank when you have right wing websites that are turning you into a target. You know, it’s one thing if they do it with a politician. They have security or handlers—I don’t have any of that.”</blockquote></p>

<p><em>Thanks to <a href="http://mailchimp.com/" target="_blank">MailChimp</a> and <a href="http://www.audiblepodcast.com/longform" target="_blank">Audible</a> for sponsoring this week's episode.</em></p>

Direct download: Ep._206_-_Gabriel_Sherman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:09pm EDT

Jon Mooallem is the author of "American Hippopotamus," a story included in Love and Ruin, the new Atavist Magazine collection. Buy your copy today.

Direct download: Ep._74_-_Jon_Mooallem_-_Love_and_Ruin.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:00am EDT

Ezra Klein the editor-in-chief of Vox.

“I think that if any of these big players collapse, when their obits are written, it’ll be because they did too much. I’m not saying I think any of them in particular are doing too much. But I do think, when I look around and I think, ‘What is the danger here? What is the danger for Vox?’ I think it is losing too much focus because you’re trying to do too many things.”

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Direct download: Ep._205_-_Ezra_Klein.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:42pm EDT

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new podcast is Revisionist History.

“The amount of criticism you get is a constant function of the size of your audience. So if you think that, generously speaking, 80% of the people who read your work like it, that means if you sell ten books you have two enemies. And if you sell a million books you have 200,000 enemies. So be careful what you wish for. The volume of critics grows linearly with the size of your audience.”

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Direct download: Ep._204_-_Malcolm_Gladwell.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:49pm EDT

Ellis Jones is the editor-in-chief of VICE Magazine.

“I’m just not an edgy person. You know what I mean? I think I am a nice person. I think VICE Magazine reflects the qualities that I want to have or think that I have or that my team has. The magazine would be terrible if I tried to make edgy content ... people would just see right through it. It wouldn’t be good.

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Direct download: Ep._203_-_Ellis_Jones.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:40pm EDT

David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker.

“I think it’s important — not just for me, but for the readers — that this thing exists at the highest possible level in 2016, in 2017, and on. That there’s a continuity to it. I know, because I’m not entirely stupid, that these institutions, no matter how good they are, all institutions are innately fragile. Innately fragile.”

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Direct download: Ep._202_-_David_Remnick.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:56am EDT

T. Christian Miller, senior investigative reporter at ProPublica, and Ken Armstrong, staff writer at The Marshall Project, co-wrote the Pulitzer-winning article, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”

“I won’t forget this: when T. and I talked on the phone and agreed that we were going to work on [“An Unbelievable Story of Rape”] together, T. created a Google Drive site, and we decided we’d both dump all our documents in it. And I remember seeing all the records that T. had gathered in Colorado, and then I dumped all the records that I had gathered in Washington, and it was like each of us had half of a phenomenal story. And in one day, by dumping our notes into a common file, we suddenly had a whole story.”

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Direct download: Ep._201_-_T._Christian_Miller_and_Ken_Armstrong.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:19pm EDT

Jack Hitt contributes to Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and This American Life.

“I’ve always lived more or less unemployed in these markets, and happily so. I think being unemployed keeps you a little more sharp in terms of looking for stories. It never gets any easier. That motivation and that desperation, whatever you want to call that, is still very much behind many of the conversations I have all day long trying to find those threads, those strings, that are going to pull together and turn into something.”

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  1. @JackHitt
  2. Hitt on Longform
  3. [1:15] Episode #157: Margo Jefferson
  4. [1:30] Episode #129: Rukmini Callimachi
  5. [1:30] Episode #156: Renata Adler
  6. [3:15] "This Is Your Brain on God" (Wired • Nov 1999)
  7. [3:45] "61: Fiasco!" (This American Life • Apr 1997)
  8. [4:00] Hitt's This American Life Archive
  9. [4:30] "323: The Super" (This American Life • Jan 2007)
  10. [6:15] "The Billion-Dollar Shack" (New York Times Magazine • Dec 2000)
  11. [6:30] "Slumlord" (The Moth • Apr 2006)
  12. [25:30] "The $19,000 press pass: A former journalism school dean asks, is it work it?" (Carolyn Lewis • Washington Monthly • 1986)
  13. [32:00] The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks • Alfred A. Knopf • 1974)
  14. [37:00] "What Did Noah Do With the Manure?" (Washington Monthly • Feb 1987) [pdf]
  15. [38:00] "Terminal Delinquents" (with Paul Tough • Esquire • Dec 1990)
  16. [41:30] "Toxic Dreams" (Harper’s • Jul 1995) [sub req’d]
  17. [46:30] White Noise (Don DeLillo • Penguin Books • 1984)
  18. [55:30] "15: Dawn" (This American Life • Feb 1996)

 

Direct download: Ep._200_-_Jack_Hitt.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:32pm EDT

Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "The Really Big One," her article about the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

“I can tell you in absolute sincerity: I didn't realize I was writing a scary story. Obviously I know the earthquake is going to be terrifying, and that our lack of preparedness is genuinely really scary. But, as I think often happens as a reporter, you toggle between professional happiness, which is sometimes, frankly, even professional glee—you’re just so thrilled you’re getting what you’re getting—and then the sort of more human and humane response, which comes every time you really set down your pen and think about what it is you’re actually reporting about.”

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Direct download: Ep._199_-_Kathryn_Schulz.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:21pm EDT

Shane Bauer, a senior reporter for Mother Jones, spent four months working undercover as a guard in a private prison.

“The thing that I grappled with the most afterward was a feeling of shame about who I was as a guard and some of the things that I had done. Sending people to solitary confinement is hard to come to terms with even though, in that situation, I don't know what else I could have done. ... I had to do what I could to keep myself safe.”

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Direct download: Bonus_Episode_-_Shane_Bauer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:18pm EDT