Episodes
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Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers won this year's George Polk Award for Television Reporting for “Inside Wagner,” their Vice News investigation of Russian mercenaries on the Ukraine front and in the Central African Republic.
“One of the best takeaways I got from seven or eight years at Vice is that it’s not enough for something to be important when you’re figuring out how to make a story. It’s the intersection of important and interesting. And that has taught me that people will watch anything, anywhere, as long as it’s interesting. Nobody owes us their time. The onus is on us to explain things in an interesting, compelling way. I’m hoping that a landscape opens up somewhere else that sees that and understands that can be done anywhere in the world.”
This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His novel, published in March 2024, is Great Expectations.
“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to this one thing. That, to me, is a great joy.”
Show notes:
@vcunningham
vinson.nyc
Cunningham on Longform
Cunningham's New Yorker archive
04:00 "’The Suit’ at BAM" (Brooklyn Paper • Jan 2013)
04:00 "Label Maker: Edward Buchanan" (Nylon Guys • Mar 2015)
09:00 circlejerk.live
11:00 Jeremy O. Harris’ plays
11:00 "How Are Audiences Adapting to the Age of Virtual Theatre?" (New Yorker • Oct 2020)
18:00 "The Season of Russell Westbrook and a New Era in N.B.A. Fandom" (New Yorker • Apr 2017)
25:00 Cunningham's McSweeney’s archive
25:00 "The Flies in Kehinde Wiley’s Milk" (The Awl • Jun 2015)
25:00 "Can Black Art Ever Escape the Politics of Race?" (New York Times Magazine • Aug 2015)
25:00 "How Chris Jackson is Building a Black Literary Movement" (New York Times Magazine • Feb 2016)
27:00 "Stephon Marbury Has His Own Story to Tell" (New Yorker • Apr 2020)
28:00 "The Playful, Political Art of Sanford Biggers" (New Yorker • Jan 2018)
29:00 WTF with Marc Maron
32:00 "Tracy Morgan Turns the Drama of His Life into Comedy" (New Yorker • May 2019)
36:00 Redd Foxx party albums
38:00 Alexandra Schwartz’ New Yorker archive
41:00 Simon Parkin on Longform
41:00 Adrian Chen on Longform
42:00 "The Many Lives of Steven Yeun" (Jay Caspian Kang • New York Times Magazine • Feb 2021)
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Megan Kimble is the former executive editor of The Texas Observer and has written for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and The Guardian. Her new book is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.
“I have never lived in a city that was not wrapped in highways. It’s hard for me to imagine anything else. And I think that’s true for a lot of people today. ... [But] we have known since the origins of the interstate highways program that building highways through cities doesn’t fix traffic. And yet we keep doing it. To me, that really fueled a lot of the book. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Show notes:
@megankimble
megankimble.com
Kimble on Longform
Kimble’s Texas Observer archive
11:00 Kimble’s Austin Monthly archive
13:00 “Austin’s Not-So-Fair Housing Market” (Austin Monthly • Sept 2018)
49:00 “The Road Home” (Texas Observer • July 2021)
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Zach Harris is a journalist whose latest article for Rolling Stone is "Meet the Gen Z Hothead Burning Up Pro Bowling."
“I'm not like a staff writer who has … status and access. But if I come up with something fun that you've never heard of that might connect to the larger culture, then it kind of hits a nerve and a sweet spot for me. Someone like a pro skateboarder or a pro bowler, you guys have never heard of. And so being able to present a person and a culture and a world to a wider audience, I think suits me well and has been really a fun way to do profiles.”
Show notes:
00:00 "Meet the Gen Z Hothead Burning Up Pro Bowling" (Rolling Stone • Jan 2024)
01:00 "The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever" (Michael J. Mooney • D Magazine • Jan 2000)
02:00 Longform's bowling archive
13:00 Harris’s Vice archive
26:00 Thrasher Magazine
28:00 Harris’s High Times archive
29:00 amandachicagolewis.com
31:00 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Malcolm Harris • Little, Brown and Company • 2023)
33:00 firstwefeast.com
36:00 "Pandora’s Bag: Rap Snacks Are Proof that Time Is a Flat Circle" (Vice • Jun 2012)
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Rozina Ali is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the winner of the 2023 National Magazine Award for Reporting. Her latest article is “Raised in the West Bank, Shot in Vermont.”
“I think it’s very, very important to speak to people as people. To speak to sources—even if you have the juiciest story—to really give them the grace. I think everyone deserves it, especially people who are going through such a difficult time.”
Show notes:
@rozina_ali
rozina-ali.com
Ali’s New York Times archive
16:00 “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi” (New Yorker • Jan 2017)
17:00 “The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t” (New York Times Magazine • April 2021)
25:00 “Marijuana Comes to Coalinga” (The Nation • Nov 2018)
29:00 “‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’” (New York Times Magazine • Nov 2022)
43:00 “The Afghan Women Left Behind” (New Yorker • Aug 2022)
46:00 “What Rashida Tlaib Represents” (New York Times Magazine • March 2022)
61:00 “The ISIS Beat” (The Drift • April 2021)
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Derek Thompson is a staff writer for The Atlantic and host of the podcast Plain English.
“I am an inveterate dilettante. I lose interest in subjects all the time. Because what I find interesting about my job is the invitation to solve mysteries. And once you solve one, two, three mysteries in a space, then the meta-mystery of that space begins to dim. And all these other subjects—that's the new unlit space that needs the flashlight. And that's the part of the job that I love the most: that there are so many dark corners in the world. And I've just got this flashlight, and I can just shine it wherever the hell I want.”
Show notes:
@DKThomp
Thompson's Atlantic archive
00:00 Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction (Penguin • 2018)
00:00 Plain English with Derek Thompson (The Ringer)
05:00 "Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out" (The Atlantic • Feb 2024)
18:00 "The Americans Who Need Chaos" (The Atlantic • Feb 2024)
23:00 "America’s Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant" (The Atlantic • Mar 2024)
35:00 "Stop Trying to Ask 'Smart Questions'" (The Atlantic • Jan 2023)
39:00 "The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson" (The Bill Simmons Podcast • Feb 2024)
40:00 "What Many Economists (and I) Got Wrong About This Economy" (Plain English • Mar 2024)
43:00 "How Hollywood’s Hit Formula Flopped—and What Could Come Next" (Plain English • Mar 2024)
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Tessa Hulls is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and The Capitol Hill Times. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is Feeding Ghosts.
“This project is the thing I have spent my entire life running from. I was incredibly determined to never touch this, either personally or professionally. … It was more an eventual act of resignation than a desire.”
Show notes:
@tessahulls
tessahulls.com
17:00 Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi • Pantheon • 2004)
19:00 richardscarry.com
32:00 The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency
36:00 “Longform Podcast #144: Cheryl Strayed”
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Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and several other books. Her new memoir is Grief Is for People.
“You take a little sliver of yourself and you offer it up to be spun around in perpetuity in the public imagination. That is the sacrifice you make. And it makes everything just a little bit worse. So it's the opposite of catharsis, but it's worth it. It's worth it for what you get in return: a book.”
Show notes:
sloanecrosley.com
@askanyone
Longform Podcast #343: Sloane Crosley
01:00 Grief Is for People (MCD • 2024)
14:00 Heartburn (Nora Ephron • Vintage • 1996)
25:00 "Patchett: In Bad Relationships, 'There Comes A Day When You Gotta Go.'" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Jan 2014)
25:00 Joan Didion on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
25:00 "Long COVID, Chronic Illness & Searching For Answers" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Feb 2022)
32:00 "Obituary: Russell Perreault, V-P at Vintage Anchor, 52" (Rachel Deahl • Publishers Weekly • Jul 2019)
37:00 The Clasp (Picador • 2016)
49:00 How Did You Get This Number (Riverhead Books • 2011)
51:00 "Five O’Clock Somewhere" (Gary Indiana • Granta • Feb 2024)
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Lauren Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and VQR. Her new book is A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.
“It took me a while to figure out that this is actually a book about storytelling, about journalistic storytelling, about the kind of myths we spin culturally and politically, about history, about current events, and the role of journalism within all of that, and my role as a journalist.”
Show notes:
@LaurenMarkham_
laurenmarkham.info
Markham on Longform
01:00 The Far Away Brothers (Crown • 2018)
03:00oaklandinternational.org
28:00 How the Word Is Passed (Clint Smith • Little, Brown and Company • 2021)
38:00 “How Greece Secretly Adopted the World’s Most Brazen—and Brutal—Way of Keeping Out Refugees” (Mother Jones • March 2022)
44:00 “For Me, With Love and Squalor” (Longreads • June 2018)
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Zoë Schiffer is the managing editor for Platformer. Her new book is Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter.
“Being the person where it's a fireable offense to leak to you … is kind of a badge of honor.”
Show notes:
zoeschiffer.com
Schiffer's Platformer archive
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter (Portfolio • 2024)
03:00 Schiffer's Verge archive
08:00 "How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor" (Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton • Verge • Aug 2022)
16:00 Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis • W. W. Norton • 2023)
36:00 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance • Ecco • 2017)
41:00 Ask a Swole Woman (Casey Johnston)
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Chris Ryan is the editorial director for The Ringer, where he co-hosts The Watch and The Rewatchables.
“There is a point where there’s just too much stuff. I can’t read a 5,000-word feature, 10 blog posts, and listen to three podcasts, and then do it all again the next day. So that is the line you walk in digital publishing, whether it’s for editorial stuff or for podcasting. You have to accept the fact that there is not going to be a single person out there who listens to it all, and who can read it all, and who can watch it all. But you can imbue everything you do with a certain quality—both like a personality, characteristic quality, but also like a quality of production—that hopefully anybody who does like this kind of thing will find some value in it.”
Show notes:
@ChrisRyan77
Ryan’s Ringer archive
3:00Andy Greenwald on Longform Podcast
3:00 Ryan’s Grantland archive
05:00 Ryan’s Spin archive
05:00 Ryan’s Fader archive
05:00 Ryan’s Village Voice archive
06:00 chaunceybillups.blogspot.com
27:00 The Ringer’s Philly Special (The Ringer • 2022)
45:00 Fairway Rollin’ (The Ringer • 2017)
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Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.
“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”
Show notes:
Evangelista's Rappler archive
Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Random House • 2023)
01:00 The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2020)
11:00 Evangelista's Philippine Daily Inquirer archive
21:00 "The Rapture of Rodrigo Duterte" (Patricia Evangelista and Nicole Curato • Rappler • May 2016)
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Susan Glasser, the former editor of Politico and Foreign Policy, writes the "Letter from Washington" column for the The New Yorker. Her most recent book, written with Peter Baker, is The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
“There’s a great benefit to leaving Washington and then coming back, or frankly leaving anywhere and then coming back. I think you have much wider open eyes. Washington, like a lot of company towns, takes on a logic of its own, and things that can seem crazy to the rest of the country, to the rest of the world, somehow end up making more sense than they should when you’re just doing that all day long, every day.”
Show notes:
@sbg1
Glasser on Longform
Glasser’s New Yorker archive
05:00 “The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump” (New Yorker • Dec 2023)
16:00 Glasser’s Politico archive
20:00 The Man Who Ran Washington (Glasser and Peter Baker • Anchor • 2021)
28:00 Peter Baker's New York Times archive
29:00 Kremlin Rising (Glasser and Peter Baker • Scribner • 2005)
37:00Theo Baker on the Longform Podcast
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Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The New York Times. His recent book is The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend.
“If I stab you, I'm going to stab you in the chest, not the back. You're going to see it coming. ... But if you're going to tell me something's wrong, you have to keep talking. I'm not going to take your word for it. I have a reason for why I believe my reporting to be true, and I'm going to present it to you as best I can. But just because you say something's wrong doesn't make it so.”
Show notes:
@realrobcopeland
Copeland's New York Times archive
Copeland’s Wall Street Journal archive
02:00 The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend (St. Martin’s Press • 2023)
20:00 The Vow (HBO)
27:00 Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyou • Vintage • 2020)
29:00 "#557: Adam Grant" (Longform Podcast • Nov 2023)
29:00 Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Adam Grant • Penguin Books • 2017)
31:00 "Elon Musk Says He Lives in a $50,000 House. He Doesn’t Talk About the Austin Mansion." (Wall Street Journal • Dec 2021)
37:00 Principles: Life and Work (Ray Dalio • Avid Reader Press • 2017)
46:00 Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis • W. W. Norton & Company • 2023)
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Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the Financial Times. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Drugs, War and the Secret World of International Crime and the host of Hot Money: The New Narcos.
“I’m really fascinated always by the ways in which people just have to do really boring parts of running a crime organization … I love the banalities of this stuff. We have a fictionalized version of crime groups and it’s obviously glamorous, and they’re really smart, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s bumbling incompetence as well or just quite unglamorous.”
Show notes:
@MilesMJohnson
Johnson’s Financial Times archive
06:00 Johnson’s Guardian archive
07:00 Paul Murphy’s Financial Times archive
9:00 “How the Mafia Infiltrated Italy’s Hospitals and Laundered the Profits Globally” (Financial Times • July 2020)
14:00 “The Mystery of the Mogul, the Casino and the Heist that Rocked Mayfair” (Financial Times • May 2022)
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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 I implicitly understood as skills I needed to acquire. ... It is sort of an origin story for why I got so obsessive about writing.”
Show notes:
@huahsu
byhuahsu.com
Hsu on Longform
Hsu on Longform Podcast
Hsu's New Yorker archive
03:00 A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press • 2016)
30:00 "Randall Park Breaks Out of Character" (New Yorker • Feb 2023)
33:00 Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine • Drawn & Quarterly • 2007)
39:00 "What Conversation Can Do For Us" (New Yorker • Mar 2023)
39:00 "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep" (New Yorker • Mar 2023)
39:00 "The Many Afterlives of Vincent Chin" (New Yorker • Jun 2022)
39:00 "How Wayne Wang Faces Failure" (New Yorker • Jun 2022)
39:00 "Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work" (New Yorker • Jun 2020)
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Roxanna Asgarian is the author of We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.
“Every once in a while, I'll have someone just freak out at me. And it keeps you honest, in a way, because they don't owe you anything. People don't owe you anything as a journalist. ... But everyone reacts to trauma differently and some people really do want to talk about it. And I think the families in this book really wanted to talk about it and it felt like no one was even paying attention to them.”
Show notes:
@strawburriez
Asgarian's Texas Tribune archive
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2023)
12:00 "Child in viral Portland police hug photo missing, 5 family members dead after California cliff crash" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Mar 2018)
12:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: Sarah Hart sent alarming 3 a.m. text to friend ... then silence" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
13:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: 'It's just devastating,' says aunt who fought for custody" (Roxanna Asgarian and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
34:00 "Devonte Hart's biological mom: They gave my kids 'to monsters'" (The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
45:00 "Before Children’s Grisly Deaths, A Family Fought for Them and Lost" (The Appeal • Jul 2018)
45:00 "A Mother Grapples with an Adoption that Led to Deaths" (The Appeal • Feb 2019)
45:00 "His siblings were killed by their adoptive mother. He was left in foster care to suffer a more common fate." (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
46:00 Broken Harts (Glamour and HowStuffWorks • 2018)
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Daisy Alioto is a journalist and the CEO of Dirt Media.
“I don't think I was ever super precious about my writing, but if I was, I'm zero percent precious about it now. Every time I write for Dirt, it saves the company money. ... Nothing will make you sit down and write 800 words in 20 minutes than just needing to get it done. And that is a change that I've seen in myself. I would encourage everyone to be less precious about their writing.”
Show notes:
daisyalioto.com
00:00 Dirt
09:00 "Marie Colvin’s Private War" (Marie Brenner • Vanity Fair • Jul 2012)
09:00 A Private War (Acacia Filmed Entertainment, Savvy Media Holdings, Thunder Road Pictures • 2018)
05:00 Airmail
11:00 "Pretend it’s a living" (Dirt • Jan 2021)
15:00 Prune
16:00 Hung Up (Hunter Harris)
16:00 Maybe Baby (Hayley Nahman)
16:00 Today in Tabs (Rusty Foster)
16:00 Blackbird Spyplane (Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie)
16:00 Singal-Minded (Jesse Singal)
17:00 "The Complete History & Strategy of LVMH" (Acquired • Feb 2023)
24:00 "Grizzly man" (Amelia K. • Dirt • Jun 2023)
24:00 "The Question of U" (Amelia K. • Dirt • Nov 2023)
25:00 "Diary of a chess tournament" (Akram Herrak • Dirt • Nov 2023)
25:00 "The sound of your voice" (Joann Plockova • Dirt • Nov 2023)
25:00 "For the love of chickens" (Tove Danovich • Dirt • Sep 2023)
26:00 "Bad waitress" (Becca Schuh • Dirt • Jun 2023)
28:00 "Užupis Utopia" (Playboy • Dec 2019)
35:00 Someone Who Isn’t Me (Geoff Rickly • Rose Books • 2023)
37:00 Fragantica
37:00 "Bottle Elizabeth Taylor" (Daisy Alioto • Dirt • Jun 2023)
39:00 The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption (Katy Kelleher • Simon & Schuster • 2023)
41:00 Scent + Song (Vivian Medithi)
44:00 Axios
44:00 The Information
44:00 Punchbowl News
44:00 The Ankler
44:00 Semafor
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Ian Coss is a journalist, audio producer, and composer. He is the host of Forever is a Long Time and The Big Dig.
“One thing that I really carried with me in making the show is a belief that bureaucracy is interesting. And that once you get through the jargon and wonky sounding stuff … beyond that it’s all just human drama.”
Show notes:
@ian_coss
iancoss.com
32:00 Isabel Hibbard’s website
33:00 Forever is a Long Time (PRX • 2021)
37:00 Lacy Roberts’ website
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Mosi Secret has written for ProPublica, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ. His new podcast is Radical.
“I think this story made me call on parts of myself that are not journalistic because I don’t really think that’s the way we’re going to get out of this at this point in my life. I think that it takes a more radical reimagining of who we are as human beings, the ways in which we’re connected, and what we owe to each other. And that’s not a reporting thing—that’s a ‘who are you’ kind of thing.”
Show notes:
mosisecret.com
Secret on Longform
Secret’s New York Times archive
10:00 “Stolen Youth: How Durham's Criminal Justice System Sent Erick Daniels to Prison Based on the Shape of His Eyebrows” (INDYWeek • May 2007)
18:00 “On the Brink in Brownsville” (New York Times Magazine • May 2014)
21:00 “‘The Way to Survive It Was to Make A’s’” (New York Times Magazine • September 2017)
23:00 Johnny Kauffman’s website
28:00 “Having a Drink With Mosi Secret, the New York Times’ First-Ever Sin and Vice Reporter” (Joe Coscarelli • New York Magazine • June 2014)
29:00 “Behind the Red Door” (New York Times • May 2014)
38:00 “The Real 'CSI': How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk” (A.C. Thompson • ProPublica • Feb 2011)
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