Longform

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, author, and host of the podcasts Work Life and Re: Thinking. His new book is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. “If you only focus on your own interest, you tend to develop novel ideas, but not necessarily useful ideas. And so for me, the audience is a filter. … I might have 30 ideas for a book. Let me hone in on the four or five that also might be relevant to other people. The goal there is to make a contribution.” Show notes: adamgrant.net Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (Penguin • 2014) Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Penguin • 2017) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things (Viking • 2023) Work Life with Adam Grant (TED Audio Collective) Re: Thinking with Adam Grant (TED Audio Collective) Grant's New York Times archive 17:00 "The Necessity of Others is The Mother of Invention: Intrinsic and Prosocial Motivations, Perspective Taking, and Creativity" (Adam Grant and James Be

Jesse David Fox covers comedy for Vulture, where he hosts the podcast Good One. His new book is Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work. “There’s a complete lack of anyone who’s ever written about comedy seriously compared to any other art form. There’s just nothing. … So the challenge was, how do you start a conversation that no one has been participating in?” Show notes: @JesseDavidFox Fox’s Vulture archive 3:00 Jason Zinoman’s New York Times archive 5:00 “What Is the Best Adam Sandler Movie?” (Vulture • April 2023) 6:00 Kathryn VanArendonk’s Vulture archive 8:00 “A Note About Splitsider” (Megh Wright• Vulture • Mar 2018) 11:00 “Jerry Seinfeld at Vulture Festival 2015” (Vulture • June 2015) 12:00 WTF with Marc Maron Podcast (Marc Maron • WTF • 2009) 14:00 “Jen Kirkman Turned Catcalling Into One of the Best Street Harassment Jokes Ever” (Vulture • April 2017) 23:00 “An Appreciation of the Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (Ramsey Ess • Vulture • Mar 2018) 23:00 

Evan Hughes is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The Atavist and many others. His book, just out in paperback, is Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup. “It should be called slow-form journalism…. It is heavily edited. It’s heavily fact checked. And chances are, you’re not going to be the first. Maybe you’re going to be first to reveal some piece of it. I have made peace with like, I’m not the scoop guy. I’m the person who comes in and I’m good at telling the story in a thorough and deep way.” Show notes: evanhughes.co Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup (Anchor • 2023) 03:00 "Longform Podcast #503: Evan Osnos" (Longform Podcast • Sep 2022) 03:00 "The Trials of White Boy Rick" (Atavist • Sep 2014) 04:00 "The Shocking True Tale of the Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys" (The Awl • Jun 2011) 06:00 "Just Kids" (New York Magazine • Oct 2011) 07:00 Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of Americ

Yepoka Yeebo has written for The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Quartz. Her new book is Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World. “Initially it was like, Why are you writing about a con man? He makes Ghana look bad. Nobody needs another crime story about an African person. I found that irritating, because isn't the whole point of being a complete person, complete people, is we contain multitudes? We too can be epic, world-leading con men! Also, it's a great story. Everybody should revel in the insanity of what happened.” Show notes: @yepoka yepokayeebo.com Yeebo on Longform Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World 16:00 “The True Story of the Fake U.S. Embassy in Ghana” (The Guardian • Nov 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Clare Malone is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest article is ”Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths.’” “You're going to work a lot of hours if you want to be successful, and you're probably not going to make as much money as your dumb friend from college does. You're choosing it for a different reason, but I do think we have to make efforts to have the [journalism] industry be a middle-class profession.” Show notes: Malone's New Yorker archive Malone's FiveThirtyEight archive 03:00 "CNN’s New White Knight" (New Yorker • Sep 2023) 08:00 "Ben Smith Can’t Say What His New Media Venture Is" (New Yorker • Jan 2022) 09:00 "How Trump Changed America" (FiveThirtyEight • Nov 2020) 18:00 Just Like Us (The Ringer • 2022) 25:00 Semafor (Newsletter) 25:00 Confider (Lachlan Cartwright • Daily Beast) 27:00 "Inside the Meltdown at CNN" (Tim Alberta • Atlantic • Jun 2023) 27:00 "What the Shakeup at CNN Says About the Future of Cable News" (New Yorker • Jun 2023) 28:00 "David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero" (New

Azam Ahmed is an international investigative correspondent for The New York Times. His new book is Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance. “I think the fundamental question I always ask when I go into a new place, whether I’m covering currencies, or hedge funds, or geopolitics in Afghanistan, or the war—it’s what does this mean to the world right now? What does the world need to know and how does it fit into that space?” Show notes: @azamsahmed Ahmed on Longform Ahmed’s New York Times archive 20:00 “For Afghan Officials, Prospect of Death Comes with Territory” (New York Times • Dec 2012) 21:00 “A Day’s Toil in the Suicide Bombers’ Graveyard” (New York Times • Aug 2013) 21:00 “2 Afghan Sisters, Swept Up in a Suicide Wave” (New York Times • March 2013) 25:00 “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One” (New York Times • Dec 2020) 46:00 “Using Texts as Lures, Government Spyware Targets Mexican Journalists and Their Families” (New Yo

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter for The New York Times. Her new book is Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It. “I often do feel like what my work is doing is preparing people for the way the world is going to change. With something like facial recognition technology, that's really important because if the world is changing such that every photo of you taken that's uploaded is going to be findable, it's going to change the decisions that you make.” Show notes: kashmirhill.com Hill on Longform Hill's New York Times archive Hill's Gizmodo archive Hill's Forbes archive 01:00 "Life Without the Tech Giants" (Gizmodo • Jan 2019) 01:00 "Living On Bitcoin for a Week: The Journey Begins" (Forbes • May 2013) 01:00 "Your Face Is Not Your Own" (New York Times • Mar 2021) 01:00 Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It (Random House • 2023) 03:00 "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened" (Wired • Nov 2009) 11:00

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His new book is Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. “I have a rule of thumb, which is that if somebody did one scam, they probably did another scam. If they did one scam in the past and now they have a new thing, odds are good it’s also a scam. That’s not always true, but that was definitely borne out sometimes in crypto-world.” Show notes: @ZekeFaux zekefaux.com Faux on Longform Faux’s Bloomberg archive 06:00 “Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans” (Bloomberg • Sept 2014) 08:00 “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?” (Bloomberg • Oct 2021) 21:00 Matt Levine’s Bloomberg archive 22:00 “‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text” (Bloomberg • Aug 2023) 32:00 “The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better.” (Alexandra Alter • New York Times • May 2023) 58:00 The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Penguin Random House • 2020) Learn more about your ad

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads. His New York Times Magazine article "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" won the National Magazine Award. His new podcast is Almost There. “I felt like I had to own becoming something and intuitively understood that if I didn't lay claim to desiring to be something, that it would be too many other forces that would be pulling on me to dictate that I become something else. … When you say you're a writer, if you know nothing else, then you know that you read. You pay attention to the world. … And prison became the metaphor by which I understood the world and poetry became the medium by which I understood what it meant to write about the world and what it meant to take seriously the responsibility to write about the world that I knew.” Show notes: dwaynebetts.com freedomreads.org 01:00 Almost There with Dwayne Betts (Emerson Collective) 05:00 The Black Poets (Dudley Randall • Bantam • 1985) 10:00

Audie Cornish, the former host NPR’s All Things Considered, is an anchor and correspondent for CNN. Her podcast is The Assignment. “I think there is journalism inherent in an interview. Like the interview itself should be considered a piece of journalism. It isn't always. Sometimes the vibe is that it’s a little window dressing or that it's personality driven and I don't subscribe to that. I think that it has its own journalism. It's my journalism.” Show notes: @AudieCornish Cornish's NPR archive 01:00 The Assignment (CNN Audio • 2022) 25:00 "Letters: 'Music Curator' Diplo" (NPR • Jun 2012) 36:00 Cornish’s Twitter thread (Jan 2022) 43:00 Serial (Serial Productions) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Susan Burton is an editor at This American Life, the author of the memoir Empty, and the host of the podcast The Retrievals. “I know I have much more anger than I reveal, and I don’t think that’s uncommon. Especially for women. There’s been a lot of attention to that in recent years—the anger of women, how it’s expressed and not expressed. But I think that among the things I’ve stifled for years are just my true feelings, and I’ve always wanted to be close to people and to be intimate with people, and have often felt that I have trouble making myself known or being known or being understood. And so...it felt good to be known.” Show notes: @burtonsusan susanburton.net Burton on Longform Burton’s This American Life archive 01:00 “In The Event of an Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position” (Ira Glass • This American Life • Jan 2001) 05:00 Empty (Random House • 2020) 06:00 “Secrets” (This American Life • Feb 2021) 39:00 “Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up” (New York Times • Oct 2015) 42:00 “

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster. Her new book is Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. “Comedy has been super helpful to me because it's so based on failing every night sometimes that I wasn't afraid of failure in the same way because it's just like, Well, that's going to happen to me at some point this week. Why not in this format?” Show notes: jamieloftus.xyz 00:00 Lolita Podcast (iHeartRadio • 2020-21) 01:00 Aack Cast! (iHeartRadio • 2021) 01:00 My Year in Mensa (iHeartRadio • 2020) 01:00 Ghost Church (iHeartRadio • 2022) 01:00 Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs (Forge Books • 2023) 10:00 Sarah Marshall on Longform Podcast 14:00 "Dolores Onstage" (iHeartRadio • Dec 2020) 19:00 The Bechdel Cast (Caitlin Durante and Jamie Loftus • iHeartRadio) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Javier Zamora is the author of Unaccompanied, a poetry collection, and Solito, a memoir. “There was something that I felt eating away at me, which made me a very angry and volatile teenager. And I think I was an angry teenager because I had this trauma that nobody around me could talk about, and that I didn't have the right therapist to help me unpack. So the cheapest thing that I had was poetry.” Show notes: @jzsalvipoet javierzamora.net 03:00 “Reading Neruda and Learning to Heal My Diasporic Wounds” (Lit Hub • April 2019) 18:00 Krik? Krak! (Edwidge Danticat • Soho Press • 2015) 31:00 franciscocantu.us 37:00 The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (Óscar Martínez • Verso Books • 2013) 42:00 “Zamora: It’s time for the Pulitzer Prize for literature to accept noncitizens” (Los Angeles Times • July 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her article ”What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Her most recent article is ”The Ones We Sent Away.” “I'm at the point where I'm only thinking about the big questions and the difficulty of being a human as what matter most. That's what I want to keep focusing on. Our common frailties, our common bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right? … But we can bond over our kids with disabilities. About the fact that we grieve, that we love, that we lose people. That we have friends that we love, friends that we hate. We have friendships that we miss, we have friendships that we can't live without.” Show notes: jennifersenior.net Jennifer Senior on Longform Jennifer Senior on Longform Podcast 00:00 "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind" (Atlantic • Aug 2021) 01:00 On Grief (Atlantic Editions • 2023) 01:00 "The Ones We Sent Away" (Atlantic • Aug 2023) 02:00 A

Casey Newton writes the Platformer newsletter. Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times. Together they co-host the podcast Hard Fork. CN: “People actually like to be a little bit confused. They like listening to things where people are talking about things they don’t quite understand, which was very counterintuitive to me. I think a lot of editor-types would scoff at, but I’ve come around.” KR: “We can revisit subjects and we do. We can change our minds. Print pieces feel so permanent, they feel so definitive. Podcasts, we can just sort of say, ‘I don't know what to make of this, ask me again in a month.’” Show notes: @CaseyNewton @kevinroose cnewton.org kevinroose.com Newton on Longform Roose on Longform Longorm Podcast #337: Casey Newton Longform Podcast #81: Kevin Roose Newton and Roose’s Hard Fork archive Newton’s Platformer archive Roose’s New York Times archive 3:00 Newton’s Verge archive 7:00 “Elon’s X Machina, Crypto Orbs, and a Visit to Google’s Robot Lab” (Newton an

Jeff Goodell is a climate change writer for Rolling Stone and the author of seven books. His new book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. “I would not have said this even five years ago, but I have really come to see this now as a crime story. This is a kind of looting of the atmosphere of the earth, siphoning off resources and grossly profiting off of that at the expense of many other people—billions of people—on this planet. And I understand that’s a big thing to say, but I think it’s just pretty obviously true. … I don’t mean that personally that each one of them personally is a criminal. We are all complicit in this.” Show notes: @jeffgoodell jeffgoodellwriter.com Goodell on Longform Goodell’s Rolling Stone archive 11:00 “Who’s a Hero Now?” (New York Times Magazine • July 2003) 15:00 The Water Will Come (Back Bay Books • 2018) 15:00 Big Coal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt • 2006) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peter Shamshiri is a lawyer and co-host of the podcast 5-4. “Because of the nature of law, I think a lot of journalists find it hard to take a position—or to sort of tip their hand about what they actually believe—because so much of the discourse around how law should operate is about neutrality and the general perspective that the law is non-partisan, non-ideological. I think the result is media coverage that is particularly lacking in those regards. And that's where we swoop in.” Show notes: @The_Law_Boy 5-4 (Prologue Projects) 02:00 "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here's What Happened" (Evan Ratliff • Wired • Nov 2009) 04:00 Mic Dicta 14:00 "Bush v. Gore" (Prologue Projects • Feb 2020) 14:00 "Emergency Episode: RNC v. DNC" (Prologue Projects • Apr 2020) 15:00 "Emergency Episode: Roe Is Overturned" (Prologue Projects • Jun 2022) 16:00 "The Thomas/Crow Affair" (Prologue Projects • Apr 2023) 25:00 "The Hosts of ‘5-4’ Never Trusted the Supreme Court" (Reggie Ugwu • New York Times • Jul 2022)

Donovan X. Ramsey is a journalist and author of the new book When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era. “I've only ever wanted to write about Black people—and that includes the elements of our lives that are difficult. I’ve always prided myself on being able to metabolize that information and not really be harmed by it. And this book really taught me that writing and processing is not just something that you do in your head. That the information does go through you as you're trying to make sense of it. And it's not happening to you, right? It's not like a direct form of PTSD that you have, but you do experience some trauma when you open up your imagination in that way.” Show notes: @donovanxramsey donovanxramsey.com Ramsey on Longform Podcast When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era (One World • 2023) 02:00 Ramsey's Los Angeles Times archive 05:00 The Warmth of Other Suns (Isabel Wilkerson • Vintage • 2011) 35:00 "America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicara

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. “I became very haunted by the stories that [nations] don't tell. Nations and empires preserve their powers not only by the stories they tell, but also by the stories they leave out. … Early in my career, if I came across the silences in a story, I might not have highlighted them, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.” Show notes: @DavidGrann davidgrann.com Grann on Longform Grann on Longform Podcast #3 Grann on Longform Podcast #241 Grann on Longform Podcast #329 Grann's New Yorker archive 01:00 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday • 2023) 02:00 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday • 2017) 28:00 The White Darkness (Doubleday • 2018) 61:00 Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese • Appian Way, Apple Studios • 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

Heidi Blake is a writer for The New Yorker and the author of two books, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West and The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, with Jonathan Calvert. Her latest article is “The Fugitive Princess of Dubai.” “I definitely feel as an investigative reporter that I feel very driven by my own capacity for shock and outrage and genuinely feeling like this is unbelievable. And that kind of makes me want to keep digging. And once I stop feeling that on any given topic, I lose interest. And so I’ve always been a generalist, and I just kind of rove from one topic to the next. I’m always finding myself in new territory where I know absolutely nothing about the thing I’m starting to dig into and have to try and play catch up and get my head around something new.” Show notes: @heidiblake 24:00 From Russia with Blood (Mulholland Books • 2020) 24:00 Once Upon a Time in Londongrad (B