Longform

Chip Kidd is a book designer and author. His most recent book is Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts. “The curious thing about doing a book cover is that you're creating a piece of art, but it is in service to a greater piece of art that is dictating what you're going to do. I may think I've come up with the greatest design in the world, but if the author doesn't like i...

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His latest book, Between the World and Me, just won the National Book Award. “When I first came to New York, I couldn't see any of this. I felt like a complete washout. I was in my little apartment, eating donuts and playing video games. The only thing I was doing good with my life was being a father and a husband. That was it. David [...

Kurt Andersen is the co-founder of Spy Magazine, the author of several books, and the host of Studio 360. “As a young person, I never thought of myself as a risk-taker. Then I did this risky thing that shouldn't have succeeded, I started this magazine. And it did encourage me to think, ‘Eh, how bad can it be if it fails? Sometimes these long shots work. So fuck it, try it.’” Thanks to MailChimp, M...

Ed Caesar is a freelance writer based in England whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, British GQ, and The Sunday Times Magazine. He is the author of Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon. “That was a really horrific situation. People were being killed in the street in front of us. People were firing weapons in all directions. It was really chaotic and quite scary. It freaked me...

Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Republic. “You hope that one day when you’re the editor-in-chief of Blah, Blah, Blah, that you’ll wake up and be like, ‘Okay, I deserve my job.’ But so far I haven’t met anyone who has told me that they feel that way. But, I will say, I don’t talk to whi...

Lena Dunham, the creator and star of HBO's Girls, is the co-founder of Lenny and the author of Not That Kind of Girl. A special episode hosted by Longform Podcast editor Jenna Weiss-Berman. “Writing across mediums can be a really healthy way to utilize your energy and stay productive while not feeling entrapped. But at the end of the day, the time when I feel like life is most just, like, flying b...

Matthew Shaer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and The Atavist Magazine. “I could not turn off the freelance switch in my head. I could not not be thinking about these different types of stories. My Google Alert list looks like a serial killer's.” Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, Howl, and MasterClass for sponsoring this week's episode. S...

John Seabrook is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. “Whether or not the piece succeeds or fails is not going to depend on whether I’m up to the minute on the latest social media spot to hang out or the latest slang words that are thrown around. It’s going to be the old eternal verities of structural integrity. So much of it is narrative and figuri...

Karina Longworth is a film writer and the creator/host of You Must Remember This, a podcast exploring the secret stories of Hollywood. “For me the thing that’s exciting about it is that it’s research, and it’s reportage, and it’s criticism. But it’s also art. It’s creatively done. It’s drama. It consciously tries to engage people on that emotional level.” Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Mast...

Jessica Hopper is editor-in-chief of the Pitchfork Review and the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. “I have an agenda. You can’t read my writing and not know that I have a staunch fucking agenda at all times.” Thanks to MailChimp, Blue Apron, and Fracture for sponsoring this week's episode. Show Notes: @jesshopp Hopper on Longform Hopper's Pitchfork archiv...

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of This American Life. “You can only have so many questions about feelings, I think. At some point people are just like alright, enough with the feelings.” Thanks to MailChimp, EA SPORTS FIFA 16, Fracture, and FRONTLINE's "My Brother's Bomber for sponsoring this week's episode. Show Notes: @iraglass Out on the Wire (Jessica Abel • Broadway Books • 2015)...

Peter Hessler is a staff writer for The New Yorker. “It may have helped that I didn’t have a lot of ideas about China. You know, it was sort of a blank slate in my mind. …I wasn’t a reporter when I went to Fuling, but I was thinking like a reporter or even like a sociologist: try to respond to what you see and what you hear, and not be too oriented by things you’ve heard from others or things you...

Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, and Harper's. Her latest book is Negroland: A Memoir. “One of the problems with—burdens of—‘race conversations’ in this country is certain ideological, political, sociological narratives keep getting imposed. This is where the conversation should go, these are the roles we need. In a way, this is the comfort le...

Renata Adler is a journalist, critic, and novelist. Her latest collection of nonfiction is After the Tall Timber. “Unless you're going to be fairly definite, what's the point of writing?” Thanks to MailChimp, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. Show Notes: Adler on Longform Adler's New Yorker archive [7:00] I, Libertine (Theodore Sturgeon • Ballantine Books • 1956) [8:00] After Tal...

S.L. Price is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. “The fact is, if you write about sports and people think they're just reading about sports, they'll read about drug use. They'll read about sex. They'll read about sex change. They'll read about communism. They'll read about issues they couldn't possibly care about, issues that if they saw them in any other part of the paper they would just glos...

William Finnegan is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. “I suppose in retrospect I was just trying to find out what the world held that nobody could tell me about until I got there. I was a big reader and had a couple of degrees by that point, but there was something not well over the horizon that I wanted to get near and record and understand, and I even fe...

Tim Ferriss is the author of The Four Hour Workweek and The Four Hour Body. “If you have a fitness magazine, you can’t just write one issue, ‘Here are the rules!’ ... My job, conversely, is to make myself obsolete. The last thing I want to be is a guru, someone people come to for answers. I want to be the person people come to for better questions.” Thanks to TinyLetter and The Great Courses for s...

Carol Loomis retired last summer after 60 years at Fortune. She continues to edit Warren Buffett's annual report. “Writing itself makes you realize where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I believe that, even though you’re an optimist, the analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down to construct a story or a paragraph or a sentence. You thi...

Noreen Malone wrote "Cosby: The Women — An Unwanted Sisterhood," this week's cover story in New York. “We interviewed them all separately, and that was what was so striking: they all kept saying the same thing, down to the details of what they say Cosby did and how they processed it. Those echoes were what helped us know how to shape the story.” Thanks to our sponsor, TinyLetter. Show Notes: @nore...

Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, just published "The Outlaw Ocean," a four-part series on crime in international waters. “It is a tribe. It has its norms, its language, and its jealousies. I approached it almost as a foreign country that happened to be disparate, almost a nomadic or exiled population. And one that has extremely strict hierarchies—you know when you’re o...

Margaret Sullivan is the public editor of The New York Times. “Jill Abramson said to me early on, ‘What will happen here is you’ll stick around and eventually you’ll alienate everybody, and then no one will be talking to you, and you’ll have to leave.’ I’m about three-quarters of the way there.” Thanks to TinyLetter and Netflix for sponsoring this week's episode. Show Notes: @Sulliview [5:00] "One...

Tavi Gevinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rookie. "I just want our readers to know that they are already smart enough and cool enough." Thanks to our sponsor, TinyLetter. Show notes: @tavitulle Rookie thestylerookie.com [4:00] "Tavi Says" (Lizze Widdicombe • New Yorker • Sep 2010) [30:00] "A Teen Just Trying to Figure It Out" (TED • Mar 2012) [33:00] Rookie Yearbook Two (Drawn and Quarte...

Ross Andersen is the deputy editor of Aeon Magazine. “One of the things that’s been really refreshing in dealing with scientists—as opposed to say politicians or most business people—is that scientists are wonderfully candid, they’ll talk shit on their colleagues. They’re just firing on all cylinders all the time because they traffic in ideas, and that’s what’s important to them.” Thanks to TinyLe...

Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, writes for The New York Times and is the editorial director of Fusion. “I think that Jezebel contributed to what I now call ‘outrage culture,’ but outrage culture has no sense of humor. We had a hell of a sense of humor, that's where it splits off. ... The fact that people who are incredibly intelligent and have interesting things to say aren't given th...

James Verini, a freelance writer based out of Nairobi, won the 2015 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. “That is probably the most alien, jarring thing about working in Africa: life is much cheaper. More to the point, death is very close to you. We're very removed from death here. Someone can die at 89 in their sleep here and it's called a tragedy. In Africa, I find that I'm often exposed...