Longform Podcast

Episode 19: Choire Sicha

Choire Sicha, co-founder of The Awl, interviewed by Aaron Lammer.

“People come to me pretty much every week…and say ‘I’m starting a website about… say… Canadian… candy makers’ and they’re like 'What’s the secret?’ And I say, the secret is when we launched there were three of us. Two of us were doing editorial. And one of was doing business. And guess what? We had a new product and he had nothing to do all day so he had to make himself a job that was about revenue. So, who is this dedicated person at your company? And they’re like 'we’re both editorial’ and I’m like 'you’re hosed, you’re done, forget about it.’”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. The Awl
2. The Awl on Longform
3. @choire
4. choiresicha.com
5. Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. 2009 A.D.) in a Large City (Amazon pre-order)

Episode 18: Mike Sager

Mike Sager, writer-at-large for Esquire and founder of The Sager Group, interviewed by Max Linsky.

“I was instilled with this thing by my parents who loved me — they fucked me up plenty but they loved the shit out of me — where I can go with people who are different and I don’t feel bad about myself. I’ve had 13-year-old pit-bull fighting kids shame me horribly…throw pebbles at my head, and it doesn’t bother me. Because when I’m a reporter, I’m not me. I’m just there to get the job done and learn stuff. I don’t take it personally. Plus, I know I’m going to get the last word.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. Sager’s latest collection: The Someone You’re Not
2. The Sager Group’s first anthology: Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists (Featuring Justin Heckert, Pamela Colloff, Chris Jones and more)
3. “The Devil and John Holmes” (Rolling Stone • May 1989)
4. “The Man Who Never Was”  (Esquire • May 2009)
   National Magazine Award-winning profile of Todd Marinovich.
5. “Last Tango in Tahiti” (Washington Post • July 1987)
   Searching for Marlon Brando.
6. “A Day at Gore Vidal’s Place” (Esquire • May 2008)
7. thesagergroup.net
8. @therealsager
9. Sager on Longform

Episode 17: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis, contributing editor at Wired and author of the new ebook John McAfee’s Last Stand, interviewed by Aaron Lammer.

“This is a pretty unique situation [for me]. Never has a multimillionaire tech pioneer gone on the lam for a murder and called me from hiding. Yeah, this is a first.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. John McAfee’s Last Stand (Kindle Single)
2. Read an excerpt from John McAfee’s Last Stand
3. @joshuadavisnow: On Twitter, Davis continues to report the McAfee story as it unfolds
4. “The Hinterland”: McAfee’s blog, which he is updating while on the run
5. “The World’s Biggest Diamond Heist” (Wired • Mar 2009)
6. “High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas” (Wired • Feb 2008)
7. joshuadavis.net
8. Davis on Longform

Episode 16: Pamela Colloff

Pamela Colloff, executive editor and staff writer at Texas Monthly.

“There are many, many people who write and they have tragic stories, but they’re not necessarily compelling magazine articles. Figuring out what is a compelling magazine article and what isn’t is one of the more painful things about this. You can’t look into every case. But your job is to be a storyteller.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “The Innocent Man” (Texas Monthly • Nov-Dec 2012)
2. “Innocence Lost” (Texas Monthly • Oct 2010)
3. “Innocence Found” (Texas Monthly • Jan 2011)
4. “Lip Shtick” (Texas Monthly • Sep 2003)
5. “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch (Texas Monthly • Nov 2002)
6. @pamelacolloff
7. Colloff on Longform

Episode 15: Jonah Weiner

Jonah Weiner, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, pop critic at Slate, and contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, interviewed by Aaron Lammer.

“The thing that I’ve found useful is really actually to delete everything that I’ve written and go at it fresh, and re-envision it again: this is going to be my new lede now. That’s really the best way to do it, because if there are these vestigial sentences, and vestigial sequences or paragraphs that are in the draft, for me, that’s just going to snap me back to where my head was at, in an unproductive way… Often, I’ll find that that is just this great cure-all. Just delete it all, go for a walk or whatever, and then sit down and start writing an entirely different feature about the exact same subject.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “Prying Eyes” (New Yorker • Oct 2012)
2. “Kanye West Has a Goblet” (Slate • Aug 2010)
3. “The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress” (New York Times Magazine • Dec 2008)
4. Interview: Vanessa Grigoriadis (The Writearound • Sep 2011)
5. jonahweiner.com
6. The Writearound
7. @jonahweiner
8. Weiner on Longform

Episode 14: David Samuels

David Samuels, contributing editor at Harper’s and contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, interviewed by Evan Ratliff.

“You start by doing the thing you want to do, at whatever level you can. There’s this idea that you work your way up by writing captions, and then capsule film reviews or whatever, and I don’t think it works that way. I think you learn to master a form, and you start by doing the thing you want to do. At first you’re not going to do it as well as you wish you could, and then you learn. At the same time, I think, there’s so much dreck, and there’s so many people who don’t care about doing the thing well, that when that kid walks in your door and they want to do the thing, you say ‘Sure,’ because it doesn’t cost you anything, you look at it, and there’s actually some energy on the page, like, yeah, it’s bad, but it’s bad in a different way. It’s bad in the way of someone who might eventually be good.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Anthology)
2. “Wild Things” (Harper’s • June 2012)
3. “Atomic John” (The New Yorker • Dec 2008)
4. “Let’s Die Together” (The Atlantic • May 2007)
5. “Dr. Kush” (The New Yorker • Jul 2008)
6. “Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure” (Harper’s • Jul 2010)
7. Samuels on Longform

Episode 13: Adrian Chen

Adrian Chen, staff writer at Gawker and editor at The New Inquiry, interviewed by Max Linsky.

“I’ve never written a magazine feature. [My writing is] similar, in that I try to bring in the bigger issues, and not just, you know, be funny or tell a sensational story. But I think it’s also kind of rough and sketchy in the way that blog posts are. Longform blog writing is like, I don’t spend a long time editing or looking it over. It’s like, just type as fast as you can and try to cram all of your research in, and then it goes up.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web” (Gawker • Oct 2012)
2. “The Long, Fake Life of J.S. Dirr” (Gawker • Jun 2012)
3. “Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History” (Gawker • Apr 2012)
4. “The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers” (Gawker • Jan 2012)
5. @adrianchen
6. The New Inquiry

Episode 12: Mina Kimes

Mina Kimes, writer for Fortune, interviewed by Aaron Lammer.

“A lot of people have asked me about my attitudes towards capitalism, or Wall Street in general. You know, there are companies on Wall Street that are doing good things, and there are companies on Wall Street that are doing bad things. At Fortune, our job is to look at both, and to explain why. I think in many cases, when it comes to the ones that are doing bad things, it takes people like us and other financial journalists to expose and question them.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “Bad to the Bone: A Medical Horror Story” (Fortune • Sep 2012)
2. “America’s Hottest Export: Weapons” (Fortune • Feb 2011)
3. “Why J&J’s Headache Won’t Go Away” (Fortune • Mar 2008)
4. “Railroads: Cartel or Free Market Success Story?” (Fortune • Sep 2011)
5. Kimes on Longform
6. @minakimes

Episode 11: Joshuah Bearman

Joshuah Bearman discusses “The Great Escape,” his article about a CIA operation in Iran that became the basis for the new film Argo.

“We were sitting there and we were like, ‘This would be perfect for George Clooney.’ And it very quickly in fact turned out that George Clooney wanted it. So not long after David and I had been having our daydream, we had this project that Clooney had taken quickly into the empyrean heights of Hollywood.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “The Great Escape” (Wired • Apr 2007)
2. Official Argo site
3. “An Investigation Into Xinjiang’s Growing Swarm of Great Gerbils” (McSweeney’s • Jan 2005)
4. “Art of the Steal” (Wired • Mar 2010)
5. @joshbearman

Episode 10: Chris Jones (Live in Romania)

Before a live audience in Bucharest hosted by the Romanian magazine Decât o Revistă, Evan Ratliff interviews Chris Jones.

“It just feels good to fucking win… If you want to say ‘Let’s get rid of [journalism awards],’ no problem. But if they exist, I want to win them. Just because I won two—I know Gary Smith has won four. I want five. Unless Gary Smith wins five, and then I want six. That’s just how I work. And maybe that’s a terrible, competitive, creepy thing. But journalism is competitive.”

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week’s episode!

Show notes and links:

1. “The Honor System” (Esquire • Sep 2012)
2. “Animals” (Esquire • Mar 2012)
3. “The Things That Carried Him” (Esquire • Mar 2008)
4. “TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome” (Esquire • Jul 2010)
5. “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man” (Esquire • Mar 2010)
6. Jones on Longform
7. @mysecondempire
8. Decât o Revistă magazine