Longform

Elif Batuman is a novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry.” “I hear novelists say things sometimes like the character does something they don’t expect. It’s like talking to people who have done ayahuasca or belong to some cult. That’s how I felt about it until extremely recently. All of these people have drunk some kind of Kool Aid where they’re like, ‘I’m in this trippy zone where characters are doing things.’ And I would think to myself, if they were men—Wow, this person has devised this really ingenious way to avoid self-knowledge. If they were women, I would think—Wow, this woman has found an ingenious way to become complicit in her own bullying and silencing. It’s only kind of recently—and with a lot of therapy actually—that I’ve come to see that there is a mode of fiction that I can imagine participating in where, once I’ve freed myself of a certain amount of stuff I feel like I have to write about, which has gotten quite large by this point,

Leon Neyfakh is a writer and the host of Slow Burn. “We didn’t want to be coy about why we were doing the show. We wanted to be up front. We’re interested in this era because it seems like the last time in our nation’s history where things were this wild and the news was this rapid fire and the outcome was this uncertain. That was the main parallel we were thinking about when we started. It was only when we started learning the story and identified the turning points we kept running into these obvious parallels. We mostly didn’t lean into them. We didn’t chase them. There wasn’t a quota of parallels per episode.” Thanks to MailChimp, MUBI, and Thermacell for sponsoring this week's episode. Also: Longform Podcast t-shirts are now available for a limited time only! @leoncrawl Leon Neyfakh on Longform Longform Podcast t-shirts [02:05] Slow Burn [03:00] The Next Next Level (Melville House • 2015) [20:55] All the President's Men (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein • Simon & Schuster • 1974) [22:05] Nightmare:

James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and Deborah Fallows, a linguist and writer, are the co-authors of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America. “The credo of reporting—you know, what you don’t know till you show it—that’s my 'this-I-believe.' That’s the reason I’ve stayed in this line of work for this many decades because there’s nothing more fascinating that you can do but to serially satisfy your curiosity about things. What’s it like on an aircraft carrier? What’s it like in a Chinese coalmine? What’s it like in a giant data center in Wyoming? What is it like in all of these things? And journalism gives you a structural excuse to go do those.” Thanks to MailChimp, MUBI, Best Self Journal, and Thermacell for sponsoring this week's episode. Also: Longform Podcast t-shirts are now available! @JamesFallows @FallowsDeb James Fallows on Longform Longform Podcast t-shirts [02:15] Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (Pantheon • 2018) [09:25] Th

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books. Her latest is Motherhood: A Novel. “[My parents] were afraid for me. As anybody who has a kid who wants to be a writer. I think they understood it was a hard life. It was a life in which you wouldn’t necessarily make enough money. It was a life in which you might be setting yourself up for a great amount of disappointment. My dad’s father was a painter, so there was in him this idea that it wasn’t so crazy to him. It wasn’t so outside his understanding. And, yeah, my mom thought it was a bad idea. And it probably is a bad idea in a lot of ways, but my dad was supportive but also cautioning. I think the book really moved [my mom] and really had an effect on her, so maybe you understand that it’s not necessarily a frivolous thing to be doing. Maybe it’s not just playing. I think my mom always had this idea that writing is playing, and it is playing, but it’s a serious kind of playing.” Thanks to MailChimp, MUBI, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode. @

Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. “I am as shocked this moment that Trump was elected as I was the moment he was elected. That fundamental state of shock. It’s like there’s a pile of putrid, rotting human feces on a table and like six of the people around the table are like, ‘That is disgusting.’ And four are like ‘Oh it’s so delicious. Oh, I love it. It’s delicious.’ And I keep saying, ‘Well, why do you like it?’ ... Trump is not a very interesting person in my mind. He’s a very simple, one of the most simple public figures ever. And his business is complex that in that it’s lots of people doing lots of things, but the fundamental nature of it is not that mysterious. So, it is a challenge to keep me engaged, but I’m engaged. And then as a citizen, I’ve never been more engaged.” Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode. @adamdavidson [0:21] Adam Davidson's archive at The New Yorker [00:35] The Big Short (Paramount• 2015) [00:43] Surprisingly Awesome podcast archive at Gimlet M

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. @lehilgers Hilgers on Longform [01:10] "The Kitchen Network" (The New Yorker • Oct 2014) [02:00] Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown (Crown • 2018) [39:55] "The Unraveling of Bo Xilai" (Harper’s Magazine • March 2013)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. @cwarzel Warzel on Longform [01:45] Stoner [01:45] Coin Talk [06:25] Warzel’s BuzzFeed Archive [10:20] "Pornhub Banned Deepfake Celebrity Sex Videos, But The Site Is Still Full Of Them" (BuzzFeed • April 2018) [11:50] "The Disturbing Misogynist History Of GamerGate's Goodwill Ambassadors" (Joseph Berstein • BuzzFeed • Oct 2014) [13:05] "Here's How Breitbart

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. @michelledean michelledean.tumblr.com Dean on Longform [00:45] Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Press • 2018) [01:35] "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered" (Buzzfeed • Aug 2016) [08:10] annefriedman.com [08:50] "The Daily Show's Woman Problem" (Irin Carmon • Jezebel • June 2010) [09:20] "Someone Got 'The Daily Show' in My Jezebel and Together They Taste A Little Weird" (The Awl • July 2010) [15:20] "Waterworld Review

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. @craigmod craigmod.co

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 sponsori

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 restriction

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. @nitashatiku Nitasha on Longform [04:25] "My Life With the Thrill Clit Cult" (Gawker • Oct 2013) [15:50] "Facebook Battles New Criticism After U.S. Indictment Against Russians" (Georgia Wells, Robert McMillan • The Wall Street Journal • Feb 2018) [16:30] "WeWork Used These Documents to Convince Investors It's Worth Billions" (Gawker • Oct 2013) [16:50] "Living in the Disneyland Version of Startup Life" (BuzzFeed • Aug 2016) [16:50] "Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco" (Ne

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. @chanajoffewalt Joffe-Walt on Longform [01:10] "Five Women" (This American Life • March 2

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. @TheStalwart [02:30] "Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle" (New York Times Magazine • May 2012) [04:40] What’d You Miss [05:15] "What Alaska Can Teach Us About Universal Basic Income" (New York • Feb 2018) [15:05] The Stalwart [18:55] Weisenthal’s Archive at Business Insider [54:55] "Annie Duke Explains How To Apply Poker Skills To Markets" (Odd Lots • Feb 2018) [54:05] "This Is What Stock Market Bubble

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. @SeanFennessey Fennessey on Longform [01:45] On Air Fest 2018 [02:20] The Big Picture [02:40] Fennessey’s Archive at The Ringer [03:10] The Bill Simmons Podcast [03:45] Long

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. @jennydeluxe www.jennydeluxe.com Wortham on Longform [02:00] Wortham’s New York Times archive [02:00] Still Processing [02:00] Longform Podcast #95: Wesley Moris [02:00] Longform Podcast #218: Wesley Morris [05:35] "Long-Form Journalism Finds a Home" (David Carr • New York Times • March 2011) [06:40] "We Sink Our Claws Into Black Panther with Ta-Nehisi Coates" (Still Processing • Feb 2018) [20:40] Wortham’s Wired archive [25:15] "Meet the Mario Maestros Who Have Video Game Music Rocking Concert Halls" (Joel Stein • Wired • Nov 2007) [26:05] The Underwire [27:08] "Early-Bird Buzz Mounts f

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. @michaelidov Idov on Longform [01:15] "The Movie Set That Ate Itself" (GQ • Oct 2011) [02:00] Idov’s Archive at NY Mag [02:25] Dressed Up for a Riot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2018) [06:35] “Samizdat” [14:00] "Bitter Brew" (Slate • Dec 2009) [16:55] Ground Up (Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2009) [19:30] Adam Moss on the Longform Podcast [19:35] Jim Nelson on the Longform Podcast [21:40] "Georgia’s Next Leader May Be a Billionaire Zookeeper with Albino Rapper Children" (The New Republic • Sep 2012) [22:20] "Dosvedanie to All That" (Julia Ioffe • The New Republic • Feb 2014) [24:30] 4 (Magnolia Ho

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. @LilianaSegura Segura on Longform [01:50] "Dispatch From Angola: Faith-Based Slavery in a Louisiana Prison" (Colorlines • Aug 2011) [02:10] "What Happened to Rachel Gray" (The Intercept • Oct 2017) [02:15] "The Fire on Howard Avenue" (The Intercept • March 2017) [05:30] Bolton’s [06:10] Segura’s Archive at The Intercept [07:05] "Arkansas Plans to Execute Seven People This Month, Continuing Long Tradition of Assembly-Line" (The Intercept • April 2017) [11:00] "Playing With Fire" (The Intercept • Feb 2015) [25:30] "As Families in Charleston Share Stories and Pain, Dylann Roof Shows No Remorse" (The Intercept • Jan 2017) [25:30] "Will Dylann Roof’s Execution Bring Justice? F

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. @SethWickersham Wickersham on Longform [02:10] "For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, Is This the Beginning of the End?" (ESPN • Jan 2018) [05:35] "Spygate to Deflategate: Inside What Split the NFL and Patriots Apart " (Don Van Natta Jr., Seth Wickersham • ESPN • Sep 2015) [05:35] "The Secret Life of Tiger Woods" (Wright Thompson • ESPN • April 2016) [15:05] "Why Richard Sherman Can't Let Go of Seattle's Super Bowl Loss"

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. @thornburgh Thornburgh on Longform [01:45] Roads & Kingdoms [02:50] Pico Iyer [01:45] Coin Talk [05:35] "SATW Foundation Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition Awards for Works Published in 2014 - 2015" [07:40] "The Prawn War" (Michael Snyder • Roads & Kingdoms • Sep 2016) [17:40] "The Mysterious Demise of Lucky Peach Magazine and Its Uncertain Future" (Tim Carman • Washington Post • March 2017) [20:15] "The Sound of Change: Can Music Save Cuba?" (Time • Nov 2008) [27:10] “Myanmar Unsanctioned" (Roads & Kingdoms • March 2012) [27:20] “Three Keys to Eating Well in Burma" (Matt Goulding • Roads & Kingdoms • May 2012) [28:10] "PRO MOVES by Bre