Joshua Hunt is a correspondent for GQ and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. He previously worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, reporting from across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. His latest piece, “ What Ozempic Taught Me About Style and Self-Worth ,” documents his decision to start taking the weight loss drug and the ways that experience reshaped his sense of identity, style, and self-perception....
Apr 15, 2026•30 min•Ep. 37
Julie Cohn is a journalist, screenwriter, and Tony Award–winning theater producer whose work spans film, stage, and audio. Her reporting has appeared in outlets like The New York Times and The Daily, and on Broadway she and her sister Marion co-founded The Cohn Sisters , a Tony-winning production company behind shows including Stereophonic, Suffs, Cabaret, John Proctor Is the Villain, and Just For Us. Her latest project is The Redefector , a ten-part investigative podcast about the strange Cold ...
Apr 09, 2026•33 min•Ep. 36
Delaney Hall is a veteran producer and editor who got her start in audio journalism at Chicago Public Radio’s Third Coast International Audio Festival. She later worked on State of the Re:Union , the NPR documentary show hosted by Al Letson, and helped launch the investigative journalism program Reveal , where she was part of a team that won an Emmy Award for New Approaches in News. Today she is a senior producer at 99% Invisible and the host of Service Request , a new podcast collaboration betw...
Apr 08, 2026•32 min•Ep. 35
Adam Rapp is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose work spans theater, film, and fiction. His plays include The Sound Inside and Red Light Winter , and his novels include The Year of Endless Sorrows . He also wrote and directed the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell. In recent years, Rapp took on a very different kind of challenge: adapting S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2023 and went on to win multiple Tony...
Apr 01, 2026•32 min•Ep. 34
Shaun Raviv is an Atlanta-based journalist and a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. In 2024, he reported and hosted “ Noble ,” which was named the best podcast of the year by the New Yorker. But in this episode of Origin Stories, he talks to Matthew about the story that got him started in longform nonfiction: “ The Killers of Swaziland ,” which explores a tragic string of murders in the African country. “Even though I had very little experience,” Shaun says of his early efforts, “I still fel...
Mar 25, 2026•29 min•Ep. 33
Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui and Salman Ahad Khan are behind More Muslim , a narrative podcast that explores the diversity of Muslim life through personal stories, history, and culture. The project grew out of a relationship that began more than a decade ago, when Khan took an Islamic law class with Siddiqui at Georgetown’s Doha campus and found himself having the kind of complex conversations about religion, ethics, and identity he’d been waiting his whole life to have. Years later, he returned to the ...
Mar 18, 2026•35 min•Ep. 32
Gus Van Sant is an Academy Award–nominated filmmaker whose work spans four decades of American cinema, from independent classics like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho to mainstream hits like Good Will Hunting and Milk . In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Dead Man’s Wire , his new film about a bizarre and largely forgotten 1977 standoff in Indianapolis, when a struggling businessman walked into a mortgage office, wired a shotgun to his hostage’s neck with a so-called “dead man’s ...
Mar 11, 2026•30 min•Ep. 31
Caleb Gayle is a historian and journalist whose work bridges narrative nonfiction and the academy. A professor at Northeastern and a longtime magazine writer, he has built a reputation for excavating overlooked Black histories and rendering them with literary force. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Black Moses , his National Book Award–longlisted book about Edward McCabe — the 19th-century lawyer, newspaper publisher, and politician who envisioned Oklahoma as a Black-governed state. Ga...
Mar 04, 2026•36 min•Ep. 30
PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni helped make Reply All , the rare show that made the internet feel legible. Created and hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, and produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, the podcast took strange online mysteries and trends and reported the hell out of them. It was funny, accessible, occasionally anxious, and for a certain generation of listeners, it became the way the internet explained itself. When Reply All ended, it left behind not just a devoted audience, but a real absen...
Feb 25, 2026•35 min•Ep. 29
Mo Amer is a stand-up comedian, actor, and writer whose work blends raucous humor with serious conversations about borders, identity, and belonging. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents and raised in Houston, Amer began performing as a teenager before channeling his own family’s experience in the U.S. asylum system into Mo , the hit Netflix series he co-created, wrote, and starred in. Spanning two wildly funny and deeply moving seasons, Mo follows a lightly fictionalized version of Amer navigat...
Feb 18, 2026•35 min•Ep. 28
David Greene is a veteran journalist best known for his years as the co-host of All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Before taking the co-host's chair, he served as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, during which time he reported widely from regions as varied as Siberia and Chechnya. After leaving NPR, David co-founded Fearless Media, a production company focused on narrative journalism and audio storytelling. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new Campside show, " David Greene is...
Feb 17, 2026•43 min•Ep. 27
Lizzy Goodman is a longtime music journalist whose work has helped shape how the early-2000s indie rock era is understood and remembered. Over the past two decades, she’s written for Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Magazine, Nylon, and The New York Times Magazine, profiling artists from MIA to Conor Oberst to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She writes incisively about individual musicians and albums while situating them inside a larger cultural moment — part journalist, part historian. In this episode, she t...
Feb 11, 2026•39 min•Ep. 26
Brad Lichtenstein is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has traced the human cost of American systems, from economic upheaval and gun violence to the ways history keeps resurfacing in the present. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about American Reckoning , his Frontline documentary about the 1967 car-bombing of civil rights activist Wharlest Jackson Sr. and the decades-long fight to understand why justice never came. Lichtenstein breaks down how the film’s extraord...
Feb 04, 2026•38 min•Ep. 25
Alexis Coe is a historian, TV commentator, curator, and columnist whose work examines how power, myth, and repetition shape the way American history gets told. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book You Never Forget Your First , a sharp, funny, and rigorously researched biography of George Washington that challenges centuries of received wisdom about America’s first president. In this episode, Coe talks to Matthew about how she discovered that no woman had written a full biogra...
Jan 28, 2026•34 min•Ep. 23
Tommy Andres is an audio journalist whose work has spanned This American Life, CNN, and Marketplace, where he spent years as a senior producer. More recently, he’s focused on deeply reported, limited-run narratives, including Third Squad After Afghanistan , which was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. He also served as executive producer on We Came to the Forest . In this episode, Andres talks to Matthew about The Eyes of the Fighter , a two-part story h...
Jan 21, 2026•31 min•Ep. 24
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is a screenwriter, journalist, and creator whose work spans music, comics, and television. He was once the editor in chief of The Source , co-created the comic series Dominique Laveau: Voodoo Child , and has written for Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Washington Black, the Hulu adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s novel, developed in collaboration with Sterling K. Brown. He breaks down how the project came together, why he connected to Wash’...
Jan 14, 2026•33 min•Ep. 23
Mandy Matney is a journalist and the creator of the Murdaugh Murders podcast, the hit true-crime series that followed the unraveling of the Murdaugh family long before Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 murder conviction. Reporting from South Carolina, Matney broke major stories by leaning on deep local knowledge and a willingness to dig into details others overlooked. She is also the founder of the audio company LunaShark and the author of the bestselling book Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and th...
Jan 07, 2026•34 min•Ep. 22
David DiGilio is one of the most prolific genre producers and writers working in Hollywood today. In addition to credits on films like “ Tron: Ares ” and hit shows like “ Crossbones ” and “ Strange Angel ,” he is the showrunner of the Amazon Prime blockbuster “ The Terminal List ,” as well as a spin-off/prequel called “ The Terminal List: Dark Wolf .” In this episode, he talks to Matthew about structuring each season for maximum tension and emotional impact. "We start with a storyboard of episod...
Dec 31, 2025•33 min•Ep. 23
Dana Fox is a veteran screenwriter and producer. The showrunner of the Apple TV series “ Home Before Dark ,” and the creator of the sitcom “ Ben and Kate ,” she is best known as the co-writer of “ Wicked ” and “Wicked: For Good,” two of the highest-grossing (and most popular) movies in American history. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about the art of bringing a beloved franchise to the screen and the expectations that followed the release of the first film. “I was so proud that it touched...
Dec 24, 2025•33 min•Ep. 22
Janet Reitman is a fellow at New America and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine . A former longtime correspondent for Rolling Stone , she is a two-time finalist for a National Magazine Award and the author of some of the most influential journalism of the past two decades. In this episode, she talks with Matthew about " A Disaster of the US Military's Own Making ," her 2024 Times Magazine expose on the Army suicide crisis. All good writing, Reitman says, necessarily involves le...
Dec 17, 2025•33 min•Ep. 21
Lorelei Lee is a writer, activist, porn performer, and activist. A graduate of Cornell Law School and New York University’s MFA program, they write regularly for a range of publications, including N+1, Buzzfeed, and Wired. In this episode, Lorelei talks to Matthew about their groundbreaking essay “ Cash/Consent, ” which is both a memoir of Lorelei’s time in the porn industry and a reflection on the complicated relationship between their career and their “civilian” life. “I often have to write th...
Dec 10, 2025•33 min•Ep. 20
James Vanderbilt is a screenwriter, producer, and director whose work includes some of the most acclaimed films of the last two decades. He’s perhaps best known for writing Zodiac, David Fincher’s modern classic thriller. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Nuremberg , his new film as both writer and director, set just after World War II as the Allies prepared to put high-ranking Nazi officials on trial. Vanderbilt explains that one of the biggest challenges was finding a way to tell such...
Dec 05, 2025•33 min•Ep. 17
Clint Smith is a celebrated poet, essayist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. In addition to his two poetry collections, Counting Descent and Above Ground, he is the author of the award-winning nonfiction bestseller How the Word Is Passed. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the reporting of How the Word is Passed, and how he made it accessible without losing rigor. “When I was writing the book, I wrote about eight places, but I could have written about 1,008, because the scars of slavery...
Dec 03, 2025•36 min•Ep. 18
Gilbert King is a writer, photographer, and author of several books, including Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America , which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the creation of Bone Valley , his hit podcast about the 1987 murder of Michelle Schofield. You can preorder the novel about his experience here Working in audio was a new experience for King, who relied on his producer, Kelsey Decker,...
Nov 26, 2025•35 min•Ep. 17
Evan Ratliff is a magazine writer, podcaster, and author of Mastermind: Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal , which was released in 2019 by Random House. In addition to co-founding Longform and The Atavist Magazine, Evan was also one of the founding editors of Pop-Up Magazine. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Shell Game , a hit narrative podcast Evan funded, created, and distributed independently, working with a small team that included Evan's wife, Samantha Henig, and the independent prod...
Nov 19, 2025•37 min•Ep. 16
Bonnie Tsui is a veteran journalist and the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including On Muscle , American Chinatown , and Why We Swim , which was published in 2020 by Algonquin Books. In this episode, she talks with Matthew about the challenges of writing Why We Swim, which mixes rigorous scientific reporting, history, and long passages of essayistic exploration. “It’s an instinctive way of writing," Bonnie says of the latter. "I mean, you know you have to come back to the points ...
Nov 12, 2025•35 min•Ep. 13
Roy Wood Jr. is a comedian, actor, and former correspondent for The Daily Show. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new book, " The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir ," which is structured as an extended letter to his young son. Early drafts, Wood recalls, were composed by voice note, while walking to the set of The Daily Show – a process that helped give the book its emotional power and irreverent humor. "I don't believe you type the way you talk because you're ...
Nov 05, 2025•35 min•Ep. 14
Mitch Albom is a journalist, playwright, and the author, most famously, of " The Five People You Meet in Heaven. " Before scoring his breakout hit with " Tuesdays With Morrie ," Mitch was a longtime sports reporter for The Detroit Free Press , where his column still appears every week. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new novel, Twice , and the importance of putting theme first. "The ideas always come before the characters and even the plot," he says of his creative process. "So I ...
Oct 30, 2025•37 min•Ep. 13
Steve Burns is best known as the first host of the groundbreaking kids TV show Blue's Clues , which debuted nearly three decades ago, in 1996. After leaving Blue's Clues , Steve worked as a voiceover actor and a musician; his song " Mighty Little Man " became the theme song for "Young Sheldon." In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the creation of his new hit podcast, " Alive With Steve Burns ," and the learning curve involved in experimenting with a new medium. "I watched like 40 hours of ...
Oct 29, 2025•37 min•Ep. 12
Debora Cahn is a television writer, producer, and showrunner. Debora launched her career as a scribe on The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy; later, she served as a writer and executive producer on Homeland. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about The Diplomat , the hit drama series she created for Netflix. “The game that we're trying to win is to stay in a viewer's life for years,” she says of The Diplomat, which is now entering its third season. “Make this story interesting to people for years...
Oct 23, 2025•31 min•Ep. 9
