Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads. His New York Times Magazine article "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" won the National Magazine Award. His new podcast is Almost There. “I felt like I had to own becoming something and intuitively understood that if I didn't lay claim to desiring to be something, that it would be too many other forces that would be pulling on me to dictate that I become something else. … When you s...
Sep 13, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Audie Cornish, the former host NPR’s All Things Considered, is an anchor and correspondent for CNN. Her podcast is The Assignment. “I think there is journalism inherent in an interview. Like the interview itself should be considered a piece of journalism. It isn't always. Sometimes the vibe is that it’s a little window dressing or that it's personality driven and I don't subscribe to that. I think that it has its own journalism. It's my journalism.” Show notes: @AudieCornish Cornish's NPR archiv...
Sep 06, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Susan Burton is an editor at This American Life, the author of the memoir Empty, and the host of the podcast The Retrievals. “I know I have much more anger than I reveal, and I don’t think that’s uncommon. Especially for women. There’s been a lot of attention to that in recent years—the anger of women, how it’s expressed and not expressed. But I think that among the things I’ve stifled for years are just my true feelings, and I’ve always wanted to be close to people and to be intimate with peopl...
Aug 30, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Podcast (iHeartRadio • 2020-21) 01:00 Aack Cast! (iHeartRadio • 2021) 01:00 My Year in Mensa (iHeartRa...
Aug 23, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.” Show notes: @jzsalvipoet javierzamora.net 03:00 “Reading Neruda and Learning to Heal My Diasporic W...
Aug 16, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right?...
Aug 09, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 come around.” KR: “We can revisit subjects and we do. We can change our minds. Print pieces feel so ...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast 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 expense of many other people—billions of people—on this planet. And I understand that’s a big thing...
Jul 26, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 coverage that is particularly lacking in those regards. And that's where we swoop in.” Show notes: @...
Jul 19, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 processing is not just something that you do in your head. That the information does go through you as you're...
Jul 12, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.” S...
Jul 05, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 I feel very driven by my own capacity for shock and outrage and genuinely feeling like this is unbe...
Jun 28, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 where money goes from absolutely being illegal to being legal.” Show notes: @mitchprothero Prothero o...
Jun 21, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast 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 feel too good and you can never feel too bad.” Show notes: @bmluse 02:00 "#497: Sam Sanders" (Longform...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy (Wiley • 2023) 09:00 Dale's Observer archive 09:00 Dale's CoinDesk archiv...
Jun 07, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 manipulate anything.” Show notes: @lisabelkin lisabelkin.com Lisa Belkin on Longform Belkin’s New York Time...
May 31, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 them because this is what their personality is like when you’re with them.” Show notes: @amychozick ...
May 24, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 they’re worth writing about.” Show notes: tracykidder.com Kidder on Longform Kidder’s Atlantic archive ...
May 17, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 g...
May 10, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 (Penguin Books • 2017) 14:00 Vanishing Asia (Publishers Group West • 2021) 22:00 @MrBeast on TikTok ...
May 03, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.” This is the last in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Award...
Apr 28, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 photograph because I want people to look. I want people to ask questions, to be engaged, to pay attention. A...
Apr 27, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 kind of thinking, well, that seems like a great place to be reporting.” This is the third in a week-lo...
Apr 26, 2023•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 with lives that were utterly ruined and they want to tell their stories. I mean, we’re not talking to ...
Apr 25, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 get going, this is something that keeps me up at night. … It’s the last thing I think about when I ...
Apr 24, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.” Show...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 marginalization in America have made and shaped the present. That’s it. That’s one story.” Show notes: Newkirk ...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusi...
Apr 05, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Roxanna Asgarian is the law and courts reporter for the Texas Tribune. Her new book is 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 a...
Mar 29, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mary Childs is a co-host of the podcast Planet Money and the author of The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All. “I love aberrations. I love when things go wrong. You get a high stress situation, you get all of the manifestations of personality. We're our most selves, if not our best selves, at those times. I like the [stories] that have embedded in them all of those conduits of power and that reveal the greater system.” Show notes: @mdc marychilds.com Planet Mo...
Mar 22, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
