We've got something a little different today, the trailer for co-host Evan Ratliff's brand-new podcast Persona: The French Deception. It's the story of Gilbert Chikli, one of the greatest con artists of all time. Over eight episodes, Evan investigates how Chikli duped some of the world’s most powerful people into handing over their fortunes, evaded the law for years, and became a Robin Hood-like hero to many in the process. More than just a tale of criminal genius, Persona is about the moment we...
Jun 06, 2022•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Molly Lambert is a writer and host of the new podcast HeidiWorld: The Heidi Fleiss Story. “I think as a writer I always had this thing: I don't want to be out front. I don't want the spotlight on me. I'm not an actor. I want to be lurking in the back with the cast accepting the applause, but I don't want to be the center of attention. And so I think kind of like making peace with like, Look man, it's fine to be the center of attention when you made something you're proud of.” Show notes: @mollyl...
Jun 01, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sam Knight is a London-based staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. “I had a kind of working definition of what a premonition was when I was writing this book, which is: It's not just a feeling. It's not just a hunch. It's just not like a sense in the air. It's like, you know. You know, and you don't even want to know because you can't know and no one's going to believe you that you know, but you know. And what are you going to...
May 25, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mitchell S. Jackson is a journalist and author. His profile of Ahmaud Arbery, ”Twelve Minutes and a Life,” won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. ”What is 'great'? 'Great' isn’t really sales, right? No one cares what James Baldwin sold. So: Are you doing the important work?” Show notes: @MitchSJackson mitchellsjackson.com Jackson on Longform 00:00 "Twelve Minutes and a Life" (Runner’s World • Jun 2020) 01:00 Pafko at the Wall (Don DeLillo • Scribner • 2001) 03:00 "Ahmaud Arbery’s Final...
May 18, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joe Bernstein is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News. “The question of disinformation is almost an attempt to create a new mythology around why people act the way they do. I don’t mean to say that it’s some kind of nefarious plot. ... It’s a natural, or a convenient explanation. And that’s why I think it caught on for some time anyway.” Show notes: @Bernstein Bernstein on Longform 02:00 "Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation" (Harper's • Aug 2021) 12:00 "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White F...
May 11, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Vauhini Vara is a contributing writer at Wired and author of the novel The Immortal King Rao. “With a magazine story, it might be like six months or a year or two, if it's something that took you a long time. With this [novel], it was 13 years for me, but the sort of emotional arc felt similar, where there were these periods of despair and a sense that like, this wasn't going anywhere, and then these periods where like, I'm a genius and this is going to be the best book ever written. You go back...
May 04, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter for the New York Times Magazine. She won the George Polk Award for uncovering intelligence failures and civilian deaths associated with U.S. air strikes. “I think what was really damning for me is that, when I obtained these 1,300 records, in not one of them was there a single instance in which they describe any disciplinary action for anyone involved, or any findings of wrongdoing. … When I was looking at this in totality, suddenly it’s really hard to say...
Apr 29, 2022•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Chang covers health care for the Miami Herald. Along with Carol Marbin Miller, he won the George Polk Award for "Birth & Betrayal," a series co-published with ProPublica that exposed the consequences of a 1988 law designed to shelter medical providers from lawsuits by funding lifelong care for children severely disabled by birth-related brain injuries. “I think that someone on the healthcare beat looks for stories from the perspective of patients, people who want or need to access the hea...
Apr 28, 2022•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She won the George Polk Award for "The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters." “I’m all about the Venn diagram where the individual meaningful stories of things people are up against intersect with the big systemic injustice issues of our day. It feels like climate is clearly an enormous domain where it’s been hard in some ways to tell ...
Apr 27, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Maria Abi-Habib is the bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for the New York Times. Along with her colleague Frances Robles, Abi-Habib won the George Polk Award for revealing concealed aspects of the murder of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse. “We’re not going to stop covering Haiti just because you don’t like us … at the end of the day you owe it to your citizens to talk to the media because if you can’t talk to the media and actually answer some questions, how are you goin...
Apr 26, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Clarissa Ward is the chief international correspondent for CNN. Along with field producer Brent Swails and photojournalists William Bonnett and Scott McWhinnie, Ward won the 2022 George Polk Award for her real-time coverage of the rapid rise of the Taliban as U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan last summer. “I used to come back from war zones and feel completely disconnected from my life—disconnected from my friends, from my family. I would look down on people about the conversations they were...
Apr 25, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jackie MacMullan is an NBA journalist who has written for The Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated and ESPN. She hosts the podcast Icons Club for The Ringer. “[Athletes] think they don't need journalists—and they're wrong. And I tell them all this. I'm like, ‘I know you think you've got your own production company, but we can tell your story better than you can.' That's just the truth. No one tells their own story the best. It's the people around them that tell the story the best. And nobody wants a...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Human beings, we are the same, right? Like when you come out of the womb, you need to eat, you need to sleep, you need to pee, you need to shit, and when it comes to emotional needs, you need to feel loved. You need to feel there's compassion, you know? You need to feel significant and of value. And when it comes to like the feeling of significance and feeling valued, I think that's where we start to get into trouble because the same things that you hold of value, I may not in the same way. […]...
Apr 13, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosopher and journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Verge, The Believer and many other publications. Her new book is Easy Beauty. ”I literally didn't talk to anyone in my life about disability until I was, like, 30. Ever. Not my husband, not my friends, as little as possible to my own mother. I had this very bad idea that what I needed to do in every single social situation was wait until people could unsee my body…. And it was all in service of trying to be tru...
Apr 06, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host of A Slight Change of Plans. ”I am a type A person through and through. I love having the five-year plan and the ten-year plan, and mapping it all out. By nature, that's what I'm like. And I think the series of pivots that my life has naturally taken, or I've had to take, has kind of soured me on that whole way of thinking. […] Maybe it's also that I'm a more grateful person than I used to be. Like, I feel more gratitude, and so part of my orien...
Mar 30, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. His new book is A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance. “I learn from hearing my elders tell stories. There’s an inherent knowing of yourself as a vessel for narration who also has to—is required to—hold the attention of others at all costs. And that’s essentially what I’m trying to do. The broader project of my writing is almost ...
Mar 23, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine." “I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of hi...
Mar 16, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Heather Havrilesky writes the Ask Polly and Ask Molly newsletters. Her latest book is Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. “It’s not a good story when you're bullshitting people. I didn't want this book to feel like bullshit…. I wanted to show enough that you could feel reassured that it's normal to feel conflicted about your life and the people in it. It's normal to feel anxious about how much people love you. And it's normal to feel avoidant about how much people love you. It's norma...
Mar 09, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Laura Shin is a journalist covering cryptocurrency and hosts the podcast Unchained. Her new book is The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. “I was extremely well-acquainted with what the failings were with our traditional financial system. I was seeing through my other reporting how everything works now, and really understanding, whoa, this is not a good system. And then getting this education on what bitcoin is, I understood right away: wow,...
Mar 02, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tara Westover is the author of Educated. “I used to be so fearful. ... I was afraid of losing my family. Then, after I had lost them, I was afraid that I made the wrong decision. Then I wrote the book and I was afraid that was the wrong decision. Everything made me frightened back then, and I just—I don't have that feeling now.” Show notes: @tarawestover tarawestover.com 00:00 Educated (Random House • 2018) 09:00 "I Am Not Proof of the American Dream" (New York Times • Feb 2022) 21:00 A Visit fr...
Feb 23, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine who has reported on Afghanistan since 2008. His new book is The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees. “I think at some point you just say, screw it. I'm gonna act like a human being and help my friend. That's the most important thing. You actually realize, yeah, now that we're in it together, the only thing that matters is both of us staying alive and staying safe and getting where we need ...
Feb 16, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Reed and Hamza Syed are co-hosts of the new podcast The Trojan Horse Affair. “I had lost all faith in the reporting that already happened on the subject matter. And that was my mentality with each source and each interviewer. I wanted the debate ended in the room because I didn't want commentary beyond it. I didn't want any kind of interpretation beyond it. I wanted the situation to be resolved there and then…. And without certain answers, I thought we weren't going to be able to speak abo...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chuck Klosterman is a journalist and the author of eleven books, including his latest, The Nineties. ”Selling out… was very much injected into the way I understood the world…. And I am now supposed to do all of these interviews and all of these podcasts promoting this book. And because it's a book about the nineties… it feels incredibly uncomfortable to me…. I think young people assume that selling out is only about money: that if you try to do something to make money, that means you're selling ...
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer from northeastern Syria, and the winner of the 2021 Kurt Schork News Fixer Award. ”I can see from my experience that there is a gap between the editors, who are kind of elites in their luxury offices, and the amazing journalists who are in the field, who all sympathize with what they are seeing on the ground and want to cover [it], but they have to satisfy the editors. And this is how we end up having little gaps in the ways of coverin...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Michael Schulman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He recently profiled Jeremy Strong of Succession. ”There's an interesting moment that's part of this job where you’ve spent a lot of time with someone and it often feels very personal and very intimate. And then when you go to write the piece, you have to sort of take a breath and say to yourself, Okay, I'm not writing this for this person. I'm writing this for the reader.” Show notes: @MJSchulman michael-schulman.com Schulman on Longform Sc...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Marshall is a writer and hosts the podcast You're Wrong About. ”I love it when people tell me that listening to the way I talk about these people in the stories that we tell, and just about the world generally, has made them practice empathy more. I almost feel like I have preserved this a-little-bit-past version of myself, because I've been on this journey throughout the pandemic of becoming pretty cynical, and then deciding cynicism is a luxury and that it feels better, ultimately, to tr...
Jan 12, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Abe Streep is a journalist and contributing editor for Outside. His new book is Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana. ”The way journalists talk about, ‘Did you get the story?’—that's not how I see this. That would be extractive in this setting, I think. If someone shares something personal with me, that is a serious matter. It's a gift and you’ve got to treat it with great respect.” Show notes: @abestreep abestreep.com Streep on Longform 03:...
Jan 05, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Connie Walker is an investigative reporter and podcast host. Her latest show is Stolen: The Search for Jermain. “For so long, there has been this kind of history of journalists coming in and taking stories from Indigenous communities. And that kind of extractive, transactional kind of journalism really causes a lot of harm. And so much of our work is trying to undo and address that. There is a way to be a storyteller and help amplify and give people agency in their stories.” Show notes: @connie_...
Dec 29, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Parul Sehgal, a former a book critic for The New York Times, is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. “My job is I think to be honest with the reader and to keep surfacing new ways for me and for other people to think about books. New vocabularies of pleasure and disgust.” Show notes: parulsehgal.com @parul_sehgal Sehgal's New York Times archive “Mothers of Invention: A Group of Authors Finds New Narrative Possibilities in Parenthood” (Bookforum • 2015) “In Letters to the World, a New Wave of Me...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Saunders is the author of eleven books. His latest is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. ”I really have so much affection for being alive. I really enjoy it. And yet, I’m a little negative minded in a lot of ways too, like I really think things tend to be fucked up. ... To get that on the page—to sufficiently praise the loveliness of the world without being a sap, and also lacerate the world for being so goddamn mean—to ...
Dec 15, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
