Longform

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 Po...

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.”...

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 bond...

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...

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...

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...

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 processin...

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,...

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...

Mitchell Prothero covers intelligence and crime for Vice News. His new podcast with Project Brazen is Gateway: Cocaine, Murder, and Dirty Money in Europe. “I’m really interested in transnational networks—crime, intelligence. I’m fascinated by the gray. Like, when is something legal and when is something illegal? One thing with this Gateway project [was that] nobody could ever tell me that moment w...

Brittany Luse is the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. “One of the things I love about this job is everything is practice. I love it. It's like if a show is great and everyone loves it, you gotta put on another one. You just gotta do it again. And if the show didn't quite do what you'd hoped or set out to do in your mind and in your heart, you gotta do another one. I just love it. You can never fe...

Brady Dale covers cryptocurrency for Axios. His new book is SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy. “I am a fast writer. I’ve always been fast. I just sat down and did the math on it and I was like, If I can write 1,500 words a day, I can write this book. And I can do that.” Show notes: @BradyDale bradydale.com Dale's Axios archive 00:00 SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound...

Lisa Belkin is a journalist and the author of four books. Her latest is Genealogy of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night. “I didn’t experience it as luck. It—and this is going to be a little woo woo—but it really felt like these people had been sitting there for 100 years saying, Well, it took you long enough, because everything just fit together. I didn’t have to manipul...

Amy Chozick is an author, journalist, executive producer, and showrunner. Her latest feature for The New York Times is ”Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth.” “The subject thought it was a hit job. Twitter thought it was a puff piece. I don’t know, guys. … I want to explain to people what it feels like to be around someone who you know you shouldn’t believe, but you can’t help believing...

Tracy Kidder is the author of eleven books, including The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains. His latest is Rough Sleepers. “I do think it’s an interesting challenge to try to write about virtue, with all that’s always mixed with it. Some writers have said it’s virtually impossible … but it’s not impossible. … People who are really trying, struggling against the odds, I think the...

Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for memoir. “I've worked as a journalist … for quite a while. … But this [book] was the thing that was always in the back of my mind. Like, this was the thing that a lot of that was in service of. Just becoming better at describing a song or describing the look of someone's face—these were all things that...

Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired, where his current title is Senior Maverick. His new book is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I'd Known Earlier. “I never wrote a book because I wanted to do a good deed. I just wanted to tell a good story.” Show notes: @kevin2kelly kk.org Kelly on Longform Longform Podcast #376: Kevin Kelly Kelly’s Wired Magazine archive 13:00 The Inevitable ...

Terrence McCoy is The Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief. He won the George Polk award for his series "The Amazon, Undone" on the illegal and often violent exploitation of the rainforest. “When I first got to Brazil, the Amazon was an arena of mystique. But after you spend a fair amount of time in the Amazon, it becomes quite clear what the struggle is—and how human that struggle is.” T...

Lynsey Addario is a photojournalist for The New York Times and National Geographic. She won the George Polk award for her photograph of the bodies of a woman and her two children alongside a friend who lay dying moments after a mortar struck them as they sought to flee Ukraine. "If I have time to compose a photo—even if it's of a horrific topic—I will always try to make the most beautiful photogra...

Tracy Wang and Nick Baker of CoinDesk, along with their colleague Ian Allison, won the George Polk award for reporting that led to the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. “Crypto had been kind of a backwater of reporting. It was kind of like nobody took it seriously. People didn’t know if it was a joke and they thought it was all drug dealers and fraudsters. And I was ki...

Lori Hinnant is a reporter for the Associated Press. Along with videojournalist Mstyslav Chernov, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, and video producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, she won the George Polk Award for war reporting for covering the siege of Mariupol. “It’s really easy when you see raw footage flash by on the television to just see it as war as hell and this is very abstract. These are people wi...

Theo Baker is the investigations editor at The Stanford Daily. The first college student ever to win a George Polk Award, Baker received a special recognition for uncovering allegations that pioneering research co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, was supported in part by manipulated imagery. “It’s useful to intellectualize it because when you actually...

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new 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, be...

Vann Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of Floodlines: The Story of an Unnatural Disaster. His new podcast is Holy Week: The Story of a Revolution Undone. “I’m often toggling between environmental justice, between the history of race and racial organization in America. And to me, they’re all one story, and I’m trying to tell the story about how the conditions of marginaliza...

Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink. “I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and expl...