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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...