Longform

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Wild Ones and American Hippopotamus, the latest story from The Atavist. "I'm terrible at writing nut graphs. I never know why people should keep reading. That’s the menace of my professional existence, trying to figure that out. Because often you have to explain that to an editor before you even start, and I may not even know while I'm writing what the bigger point is." Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @jmooallem jonmooallem.com Mooallem on Longform [2:00] Longform Podcast #4: Jon Mooallem [3:00] American Hippopotamus (The Atavist • Dec 2013) [5:45] Wild Ones (Penguin • 2013) [11:00] Pop-Up Magazine [20:30] "Structure" (John McPhee • New Yorker • Jan 2013) [27:15] Burnham: King of Scouts (Peter van Wyk • Trafford Publishing • 2003) [32:15] Episode 91: Wild Ones Live (99% Invisible • Oct 2013) [40:00] "Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?" (New York Times Magazine • May 2013) [40:00] "There’s a Re

Joe Sexton is a senior editor at ProPublica and a former reporter and editor at the New York Times, where he led the team that produced "Snow Fall." "My experience in a newspaper newsroom over the years has been: The word you hear least often, the word that's hardest for people to say in that environment, is the word yes. It's safer to say no. You get second-guessed less often if you say no. Your job's not on the line if you say no. But if you're willing to say yes and you're willing to face the consequences of having said yes, then quite amazing things can happen." Thanks to Random House andTinyLetterfor sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: [6:00] "Snow Fall" (John Branch • New York Times • Dec 2012) [20:30] Longform Podcast #28: Joel Lovell [32:45] "Spitzer is Linked to Prostitution Ring" (Danny Hakim and William K. Rashbaum • New York Times • Mar 2008) [41:30] Jim Dwyer's Pulitzer Prize-winning columns [57:45] "Use Only as Directed" (Jeff Gerth and T. Christian Miller • ProPublica • Sep 2013) Lea

Andrew Leland is an editor at The Believer and hosts The Organist. "I think a good editor has a strong stomach for crazy assholes. Because often crazy assholes are really brilliant great writers." Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: Leland's archive at the Oakland Standard Leland's blog, "Good Jobbbbbbbbb" [4:00] "Web Dreams" (Josh Quittner • Wired • Nov 1996) [5:15] 826 Valencia [5:45] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (David Eggers • 2001) [6:45] "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction • Jun 1993) [15:30] Interview with Laura Owens (Rachel Kushner • The Believer • May 2003) [17:45] "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (Heidi Julavits • The Believer • Mar 2003) [48:00] Wholphin archive [50:00] Please Vote for Me [56:00] Joe Frank Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Fagone, a contributing editor at Wired and a writer-at-large for Philadelphia, is the author of Ingenious. "It seemed like all the big guys in American society had let us down, all the elites. And here was a contest that was explicitly looking to the little guy and saying, 'We don't care what you've done before or how much money you have in your pocket. If you solve this problem, you win the money.' There was something so optimistic and hopeful and cool about that to me." Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @jfagone jasonfagone.com Fagone on Longform [2:15] "The Dirtiest Player" (GQ • Feb 2010) [11:45] Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America (2013) [24:00] "High Times May Be the Most Influential Publication of Our Era" (The New Republic • Nov 2013) [24:45] "The Willy Wonka of Pot" (Grantland • Nov 2013) [25:30] Cultivating Exceptional Cannabis: An Expert Breeder Shares His Secrets (DJ Short • 2004) [48:30

Amy Wallace is an editor-at-large for Los Angeles and a correspondent for GQ . "I've written about the anti-vaccine movement. I love true crime. I've written a lot of murder stories. The thing that unites all of them—whether it's a celebrity profile or a biologist who murdered a bunch of people or Justin Timberlake—it's almost trite to say, but there's a humanity to each of these people. And figuring out what's making them tick in the moment, or in general, is interesting to me. In a way, that's my sweet spot." Thanks to TinyLetter and Warby Parker for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @msamywallace amy-wallace.com Wallace on Longform [7:00] "Justin Timberlake: #Hashtag of the Year" (GQ • Dec 2013) [12:15] "The Comedian's Comedian's Comedian" (GQ • Aug 2010) [20:30] "A Very Dangerous Boy" (GQ • Nov 2013) [35:15] "Mrs. Hughes Takes Her Leave" (Ron Suskind • Esquire • Jul 2002) [37:00] "Valley Girl Interrupted" (Los Angeles • Oct 2001) [44:30] "What Made This University Researcher Snap?" (Wired • F

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker. "If I'm writing about the criminal justice system, I wish I were a lawyer. If I'm writing about psychiatry, I wish I were a psychiatrist. I have often filled out half my application to get a Ph.D in clinical psychology. That is one area where I am constantly on the verge of jumping the fence. But even when I wrote about religion, I thought I wanted to be a priest." Thanks to TinyLetter and HostGator for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @RachelAviv rachelaviv.com Aviv on Longform Aviv's New Yorker archive [2:00] "Netherland" (The New Yorker • Dec 2012) [paywall] [14:15] "Hobson's Choice" (The Believer • Oct 2007) [16:00] Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Louis A. Sass • 1992) [16:00] The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Elyn R. Saks • 2007) [19:30] Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc • Nov 2003) [21:15] "The Imperial President" (

Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery are the co-editors of Mother Jones. "We probably pay more attention to our fact-checking and our research than almost everybody in our industry. By the time we publish stuff, we make sure it's unimpeachable because people would like to impeach it." Thanks to TinyLetter and HostGator for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @MonikaBauerlein @ClaraJeffery motherjones.com Mother Jones on Longform [16:45] Mac McClelland's Mother Jones archive [18:00] "Follow the Dark Money" (Andy Kroll • Mother Jones • Jul/Aug 2012) [19:00] "School of Shock" (Jennifer Gonnerman • Mother Jones • Aug 2007) [21:45] "Secrets of the Tax-Prep Business" (Gary Rivlin • Mother Jones • Mar/Apr 2011) [26:45] "WATCH: Full Secret Video of Private Romney Fundraiser" (David Corn • Mother Jones • Sep 2012) [43:00] "Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons." (Shane Bauer • Mother Jones • Nov/Dec 2012) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan Wright, a two-time National Magazine Award winner, is the author of Generation Kill. "When people were killed, civilians especially, I realized I was the only person there who would write it down. I was frantic about getting names, and in the book there are a few Arabic names, some of the victims. Not that anyone cares. But I thought, 'At least somewhere there's a record of this.'" Thanks to this week’s sponsors: TinyLetter and HostGator. Show notes: @evanscribe Wright on Longform [3:45] Generation Kill (2004) [10:00] "Scenes From My Life in Porn" (L.A. Weekly • Mar 2000) [12:15] A.J. Liebling’s New Yorker archive [14:15] "Big Red Son" (David Foster Wallace • Consider the Lobster • 1998) [pdf] [16:30] Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (D.T. Max • 2012) [18:15] Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe,Wingnut's War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America (2009) [28:00] "The Killer Elite" (Rolling Stone

Andy Ward, a former editor at Esquire and GQ, is the editorial director of nonfiction at Random House. "How you gain that trust is a hard thing to quantify. The way I try do it is by caring. If you don't care about every word and every sentence in the piece, writers pick up on that. ... Ultimately, it's their book or their magazine article. Their name is on it, not mine. I always try to keep that in mind." Thanks to this week's sponsors: TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14. Show notes: @AndyWard15 Andy Ward Picks His Favorite Articles [31:00] "The Perfect Fire" (Sean Flynn • Esquire • Jul 2000) [33:00] "He Came from Outer Space" (Chris Jones • Esquire • Oct 2002) [40:45] Jim Nelson's Memo to GQ staffers when Ward left [42:30] "The Book of Me" (Richard Powers • GQ • Oct 2008) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of four books, including Prozac Nation. "It's not that hard to be a lawyer. Any fool can be a lawyer. It's really hard to be a writer. You have to be born with incredible amounts of talent. Then you have to work hard. Then you have to be able to handle tons of rejection and not mind it and just keep pushing away at it. You have to show up at people's doors. You can't just e-mail and text message people. You have to bang their doors down. You have to be interesting. You have to be fucking phenomenal to get a book published and then sell the book. When people think their writing career is not working out, it's not working out because it's so damn hard. It's not harder now than it was 20 years ago. It's just as hard. It was always hard." Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14 for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @LizzieWurtzel [16:00] Prozac Nation (1994) [21:00] "The Return of the Replacements: Here Comes a Regular" (The Daily Beast • Sep 2013) [31:00] "Elizabet

Gay Talese, who wrote for Esquire in the 1960s and currently contributes to The New Yorker, is the author of several books. His latest is A Writer's Life. "I want to know how people did what they did. And I want to know how that compares with how I did what I did. That's my whole life. It's not really a life. It's a life of inquiry. It's a life of getting off your ass, knocking on a door, walking a few steps or a great distance to pursue a story. That's all it is: a life of boundless curiosity in which you indulge yourself and never miss an opportunity to talk to someone at length." Thanks to TinyLetter and Warby Parker for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: [14:30] "The Crisis Manager: A profile of Joe Girardi" (The New Yorker • Sep 2012) [pdf] [16:30] "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (Esquire • Apr 1966) [22:30] "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold: Annotated" (with Elon Green • Nieman Storyboard • Oct 2013) [16:30] "The Silent Season of a Hero" (Esquire • July 1966) [24:00] "Mr. Bad News" (Esquire • Feb 1966) [

Jon Ronson, a contributor to This American Life, The Guardian and GQ, is the author of six books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest is Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. "The older you get, you realize that no uncomfortable fact makes your story worse. Contradictions are great. What's bad, what to me is the worst journalistic sin, is ridiculous polemicism. ... To me, the contradictions, the story not turning out the way you want—you have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the story." Thanks to TinyLetter, EA SPORTS FIFA 14 and Learnvest for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @jonronson jonronson.com Ronson on Longform Ronson's This American Life archive Ronson's Guardian archive Ronson's GQ archive [7:15] "Who Takes the Class Out of Class Reunion" (This American Life • Jun 2006) [21:30] Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) [26:30] The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) [47:00] The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. "The categories are in motion. You turn into a Goliath, then you topple because of your bigness. You fall to the bottom again. And Davids, after a while, are no longer Davids. Facebook is no longer an underdog—it's now everything it once despised. I'm everything I once despised. When I was 25, I used to write these incredibly snotty, hostile articles attacking big-name, nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I'm like, 'Oh my God, they're doing a me on me!'" Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14 for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @gladwell gladwell.com Gladwell on Longform Gladwell's New Yorker archive [6:30] "How David Beats Goliath" (New Yorker • May 2009) [29:00] The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (Michael Lewis • 2006) [32:15] Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (Janet Malcolm • 1981) [32:15] The Journalist and the Murderer (Janet M

Cord Jefferson is the West Coast Editor at Gawker. "I consider myself to be a sincere human being. And I think that the way the internet carries itself, the way the internet has dialogues, is often insincere. That concerns me. I don't ever want to lose my sincerity. I don't ever want to lose my ability to feel emotional about things that I write about. I don't ever want to have a distance from everything that I write. I think that can be a danger of writing too much for the internet, that you develop this elitist distance from everything. That nothing really matters, you know?" Thanks to TinyLetter and Hulu Plus for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @cordjefferson Jefferson on Longform Jefferson's Gawker archive [4:00] Jefferson on MSNBC (MSNBC • Jul 2013) [5:45] "Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness" (Gawker • Jul 2013) [7:00] "Don Lemon: Bill O'Reilly's 'Got A Point' About Black People" (Huffington Post • Jul 2013) [20:30] "Don't Stop Running" (The Awl • Dec 2012

Hamilton Morris is the science editor for Vice and a contributor to Harper's. "It's a shame that there isn't more of an interdisciplinary approach to a lot of scientific investigations, because often the result is that misinformation is produced. Again, there's misinformation in journalism and there's misinformation in science. And if you combine the best elements of both of those disciplines you can come a little bit closer to the truth. If you want to understand a drug phenomenon, you're going to need to look at it medically, chemically, anthropologically, you need to talk to people, you need to interview people, you need to look at the drug policy, the chemistry, the history—there's a lot of different factors that need to be examined in order to understand even the most simple, minute drug phenomenon. And if you're approaching something purely as a scientist, as an academic, there are huge limitations as to what you can do." Thanks to TinyLetter and Hulu Plus for sponsoring this week's episode. Show not

Nancy Jo Sales writes for Vanity Fair and is the author of The Bling Ring. "I'm a mom now, so my life's a little different. I can't do certain things that I used to do, and I won't, because they're dangerous or ridiculous or keep me out till five in the morning or whatever. But back in those days, I didn't even really have—I didn't even have a pet! This was everything I did. This was my whole life, this passion to find out these things, and do these things, and see these things, and have these adventures and be able to report about this street life that rarely gets talked about. I just didn't really have a lot of boundaries in those days. I don't think I had any, really. And if you really throw yourself into something, you can get a great story. You can also not have a life of your own." Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: Sales on Longform Sales's Vanity Fair archive [8:30] "A Star Is Bred" (New York • Jul 1996) [pdf] [11:00] "Leo, Prince of the City" (New

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "People don't really care about issues so much as they care about the stories and the characters that bring those issues to life. ... A story needs an engine or something to propel you forward and it can't just be a collection of like, 'Oh, hmm, this was interesting over here and this was interesting over there.' Realizing that helped me sit down with all my stuff on trafficking and labor abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan and say 'What are the five craziest things that I found here and how could I weave them together in a way that would actually have some forward motion?'" Thanks to TinyLetter and HuluPlus for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: Stillman on Longform Stillman's New Yorker archive [6:30] "The Throwaways" (New Yorker • Aug 2012) [15:00] "The Invisible Army" (New Yorker • Jun 2011) [31:00] "Taken by the State" (New Yorker • Aug 2013) [49:00] Soul Searching: A Girl's Guide to Finding Herself (2001) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine. It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet") and I got to leave it. And even when I was writing the story, I was only experiencing what they were experiencing in a super fractional way. The hard part is that it was a story where there are no breaks, there's no—it is this relentless, sort of bottomless pain and I struggled with that. … A story can only have so many crushing moments, otherwise they just all wash out. But the other truth is: it is what it is. It's an impossibly heartbreaking situation. And making the story anything other than relentlessly heartbreaking would've been doing an injustice to what they're dealing with. Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @elisaslow Saslow on Longform Saslow's Washington Post archive [14:45] "Life of a Salesm

Joshuah Bearman is the co-founder of Epic Magazine and a freelance writer. His latest story is "Coronado High." "People who know me well will realize that parts of this story are actually about me. … It's about loss of innocence and getting to a certain point in your life where you realize the excitement of youth is over. Life at a certain point gets complicated and there are consequences and things get hard. These are people who dealt with those consequences in a way that I never did — they had to go to prison or destroy their friends lives — but that's what I liked about this story. It's a true crime story, but it became universal when I realized that there is this emotional experience that these characters go through that anybody can relate to." Thanks to TinyLetter and Igloo Software for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @JoshBearman Bearman on Longform [2:45] "Coronado High" (The Atavist • Aug 2013) [3:30] Excerpt of the GQ version of "Coronado High" (GQ • Jun 2013) [6:00] "The Great Escape"

Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize winner, covers science and society for the New York Times. "I'm not looking to expose science as problematic and I'm not looking to celebrate it. But it can be double edged. Genetic knowledge can certainly be double edged. Often the science outpaces where our culture is in terms of grappling with it, with the implications of it. Part of the reason for this widespread fear about GMOs is people don't understand what it is. I'm looking for an emotional way or a vehicle through which to get people to read about it. It's an excuse to talk about the science, not just explain it. … My contribution, what I can do, is try to tell a story that will engage people in the story and then they'll realize at the end that they learned a little bit about the science." Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @Amy_Harmon Harmon's New York Times archive [5:45] "A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA" (New York Times • Jul 2013) [15:15] "Dispute Ov