Mat Honan is a senior writer at Wired.

"[The tech] industry—especially as it relates to a lot the silly apps and the silly websites and the silly shit that we put up with—is ridiculous. It's just such a hype fest, people living off of jargon and nonsense. There are entire conferences devoted to nonsense! ... I like to skewer that stuff, because I don't want to feel responsible for it. I don't want to feel like I'm making someone go out and buy some piece of shit they don't need."

Thanks to this week's sponsor, TinyLetter!

Show notes and links:

1. @mat
2. honan.net
3. [0:30] Pop-Up Magazine
4. [2:00] "How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking" (Wired • Aug 2012)
5. [6:00] "Yes, I Was Hacked. Hard." (Honan's Tumblr)
6. [17:15] "Liveblog: Get the Latest Updates From Google I/O 2013" (Wired • May 2013)
7. [17:30] "Welcome to Google Island" (Wired • May 2013)
8. [18:30] "Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter" (Gizmodo • Jan 2012)
9. [27:30] @RUSirius
10. [29:15] "I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle" (Wired • Jan 2009)
11. [31:30] "Stock and Flow" (Robin Sloan • Snarkmarket • Jan 2010)

Jonathan Shainin is senior editor at The Caravan in Delhi.

"Working in an environment that's foreign, where you have to kind of think through a lot of things from the ground up ... I find it to be really stimulating to have to interrogate the assumptions that you have as an editor about what's interesting and what's not interesting, what's a good story and what's a bad story, what's the story that's been done a million times already. When you get out of a place that is your place, you have to kind of think through some things in a fresh way. And that can be really productive."

Thanks to this week's sponsor, TinyLetter!

Show notes and links:

1. @jonathanshainin
2. The Caravan
3. The Caravan on Longform
4. [8:00] The National
5. [13:00] India: A Million Mutinies Now (V.S. Naipul • 1991) [pdf]
6. [23:45] "Burger Queen" A profile of April Bloomfield.
   (Lauren Collins • New Yorker • Nov 2010)
7. [29:00] "Falling Man"A profile of Manmohan Singh.
   (Vinod K Jose • The Caravan • Oct 2011)
8. [29:00] "The Confidence Man" The crumbled cricket empire of Lalit Modi.
   (Samanth Subramanian • The Caravan • Mar 2011)
9. [40:30] Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo • 2012)
10. [41:00] "Notes from the Undercity" Review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
    (Jonathan Shainin • Bookforum • Feb 2012)
11. [49:30] "The Departed" The return home of Kashmir's disillusioned militants.
    (Mehboob Jeelani • The Caravan • Sep 2012)

Vanessa Grigoriadis is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and New York.

On the art of the celebrity interview: "People are smart. Particularly these people. They're sitting there thinking, 'When is she going to drop that question?' They know what you're doing. So the way I think about it is: let's have an actual, genuine, human, interesting conversation. ... [Journalists] have all sorts of schemes of what they think works for them. My scheme is no scheme."

Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Audible!

Show notes and links:

1. vanessagrigoriadis.com
2. @thevanessag
3. Grigoriadis on Longform
4. [4:00] "Why Is Nancy Pelosi Always Smiling?" (New York • Nov 2009)
5. [13:00] "Can Shakira Conquer the World?" (Rolling Stone • Oct 2009) [pdf]
6. [16:30] "Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar" (New York • Apr 2013)
7. [23:30] "New York's Power-Girl Publicists" (New York • Dec 1998)
8. [38:00] "The Adventures of Super Boy" (Rolling Stone • Mar 2011)
9. [40:45] "Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass" (New York • Oct 2007)
10. [43:30] "The Tragedy of Britney Spears" (Rolling Stone • Feb 2008)

Natasha Vargas-Cooper has written for GQ, Spin and BuzzFeed.

"Writing is the worst part of this gig for me. I hate sitting down and writing; it's being with my worst self. … But then, when it's over, it's the best. I have no greater joy than reading what I've published—with the exception of some editors who have fucked up my shit."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. natashavc.com
2. @natashavc
3. Vargas-Cooper on Longform
4. [2:30] "Jesse James Hollywood: On Trial" (The Awl • May-July 2009)
5. [11:00] Mad Men Unbuttoned (2010)
6. [18:30] "The Day-Care Threat" (Brad Schrade, Jeremy Olson and Glenn Howatt • Minneapolis Star Tribune)
7. [19:30] "When A 10-Year-Old Kills His Nazi Father, Who's To Blame?" (BuzzFeed • Feb 2012)
8. [34:00] "Hard Core" (The Atlantic • Jan 2011)
9. [40:45] Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer • 1999)
10. [41:30] "Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America's New Drug Nightmare" (Spin • July 2012)
11. [42:30] "The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America" (David Felton • Rolling Stone • Dec 1971)

Ted Conover is the author of five books and the recent Harper's article "The Way of All Flesh."

"My identity is a rubber band. It can stretch that way and it can stretch this way. When I get home it goes mostly back into the shape it's been, but not completely. And it's that not completely that is interesting and makes me who I am."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. tedconover.com
2. Personal Archive
3. [1:00] "The Way of All Flesh" (Harper's • April 2013) (sub. required)
4. [3:30] "Power Steer" (Michael Pollan • New York Times Magazine • March 2002)
5. [15:00] Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Migrants (1987)
6. [33:30] "Enter the Chicken" (Burkhard Bilger • Harper's • March 1999)
7. [34:00] Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000)
8. [36:15] The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World (2011)
9. [42:30] "A Snitch's Dilemma" (New York Times Magazine • July 2012)
10. [49:00] Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes (1984)

Ann Friedman is a writer, editor and co-founder of Tomorrow.

"The notion of kissing up is super weird to me. You should always be kissing down and sideways, to the people who are going to be working alongside you and coming up behind you. I'm really aware of my impending irrelevance. ... I'm waiting for that day when I'm in dire need of work and 65 years old—because none of us are retiring, obviously—and I don't understand how to write on Google Glass or whatever we're composing on then. I want there to be some journalist who remembers when I got on the phone with her in 2013 and helped her negotiate for her first salary and throws me a fucking bone. I think about that moment a lot."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. annfriedman.com
2. @annfriedman
3. Personal Archive
4. [5:45] Pie Charts Archive (The Hairpin)
5. [7:15] #realtalk Column (CJR)
6. [15:00] "The Ann Friedman Weekly"
7. [22:00] "Minimum Rage" (Nona Willis Aronowitz • GOOD • March 2012)
8. [23:00] "What Women Want" A profile of James Deen (Amanda Hess • GOOD • Nov 2011)
9. [34:45] Tomorrow
10. [39:00] Tomorrow Budget Breakdown
11. [43:00] 2013 National Magazine Awards Finalists

Patrick Symmes is a foreign correspondent and contributor to Outside and Harper's.

"They rolled us up like a cheap carpet. We were locked in a room for 14 hours. And for the first six hours that was okay. Everything was nice; there was coffee. But then the nightshift came on. You could hear gunshots in the street, and these guys were scared. And they were thugs. And they were thugs with a mission: to get rid of every foreigner who might witness what was happening."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. patricksymmes.com
2. @patricksymmes
3. Symmes's Outside archive
4. Symmes's Harper's archive
5. [2:30] Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend (2000)
6. [7:00] The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Schoolmates from Revolution to Exile (2008)
7. [21:45] "Taking the Measure of Castro, Ounce by Ounce" (Harper's • Jan 1996) (subscription required)
8. [22:00] "Ten Thousand Revolutions" (Harper's • June 1997) (subscription required)
9. [23:00] "The Generals in Their Labyrinth" (Outside • July 2008)
10. [24:30] "Miraculous Fishing" (Harper's • Dec 2000) (subscription required)
11. [35:00] "Sand Storm" (Outside • May 2011)
12. [39:00] "The Beautiful Game" (Outside • Oct 2012)
13. [42:00] Among the Thugs (Bill Buford • 1993)
14. [49:30] "A Wild Country Grows in South Sudan" (Outside • May 2013)

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer and editor at Grantland.

"That's one of the things I've been learning: sometimes if you just sit there, they forget that you're there, so they forget to get rid of you. I'm very quiet and I try not to ask them a lot of questions. ... Generally I just observe. I feel like because I'm a fiction writer, the story will tell itself through the narrative of the person's movement through their daily life."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. @jaycaspiankang
2. [2:00] "Online Poker's Big Winner" (New York Times Magazine • 2011)
3. [4:30] The Dead Do Not Improve (2012)
4. [8:00] "The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High" (The Morning News • 2010)
5. [11:30] "Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro" (Grantland • 2011)
6. [15:00] "The White Album" A profile of Royce White (Chuck Klosterman • Grantland • 2012)
7. [21:00] Bill Simmons's Grantland archive

Molly Young is a freelance writer for GQ and New York.

"Writing a celebrity profile puts you in a position that no human being wants to be in: you are speaking with somebody, you know that they're lying to you, and you know that they know that they're lying to you. That's just the most humiliating position—it violates any human instinct for maintaining dignity."

Thanks toTinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. @magicmolly
2. Personal site
3. [3:30] Warby Parker
4. [9:00] "How Did Susan Miller Become the Go-To Astrologer for the New York Fashion Set?" (New York • 2013)
5. [14:15] From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E.L. Konigsburg • 1967)
6. [16:45] "Kickstart My Heart" (n+1 • 2008)
7. [22:45] "Leading Mannequins" (GQ • 2012)
8. [31:30] "Sweatpants in Paradise" (The Believer • 2010)

Rolf Potts is a veteran travel writer.

"Instead of seeking out the stories, the stories sort of found me. I miss those days. I mean, I make more money from my writing now and I'm probably a better journalist. But having seven-day weeks to wander, month after month, for two years, was a great way to find real and spontaneous and human travel stories."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. rolfpotts.com
2. @rolfpotts
3. [2:00] Murder of football player in Kansas shakes town (Sports Illustrated • Feb 2013)
4. [15:00] Salon travel column (1999-2000)
5. [16:30] "Storming the Beach" (Salon • Jan 1999)
6. [19:30] "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel" (2002)
7. [21:00] "My Beirut Hostage Crisis" (Salon • June 2000)
8. [25:00] Wikipedia: Flaneur
9. [35:30] 'No Baggage' web series

Jake Silverstein is editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly.

"Texas is not a frontier in the same way it was 150 years ago, but it still has a frontier mentality. And that's definitely true from a journalistic standpoint. ... You have more of a feeling that you're figuring things out for yourself. Which means that you make more mistakes, but you also have a little bit more leeway and freedom to find a certain path down here than you would if you were surrouded by other magazines and media companies."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. @jakesilverstein
2. Silverstein's Texas Monthly archive
3. [5:00] Welcome to the New National Homepage of Texas (Texas Monthly • Jan 2013)
4. [14:00] "The Innocent Man, Part 1" (Pamela Colloff • Texas Monthly • Nov 2012)
5. [14:30] Colloff's ongoing coverage of the Michael Morton case
6. [19:30] "Walking the Border" (Luke Dittrich • Esquire • April 2011)
7. [20:00] Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle of Fact and Fiction
8. [27:00] "The Devil and Ambrose Bierce" (Harper's • Feb 2002) (sub req)
9. [28:30] "The Small Boys' Unit: Searching for Charles Taylor in a Liberian civil war" (Denis Johnson • Harper's • Oct 2000) (sub req)
10. [30:30] "What Is Poetry? And Does It Pay?" (Harper's • August 2002)
11. [42:00] "Still Life" (Skip Hollandsworth • Texas Monthly • May 2009)

Emily Nussbaum is a television critic at The New Yorker.

"I actually feel this kind of crazy cause ... because TV is condescended to, has been put down and treated like it's junk, and TV deserves to have the kind of criticism that expects it to be great. To me it's a really engaging and satisfying cause, no matter whether I'm praising or criticizing something."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. emilynussbaum.com
2. @emilynussbaum
3. Nussbaum's New Yorker archive
4. Nussbaum's New York archive
5. [1:30] Tina Fey at the Paley Center for Media
6. [5:45] "Shark Week: House of Cards, Scandal, and the political game" (The New Yorker • Feb 2013)
7. [8:00] "My Strange Addiction: The sleazy wisdom of Big Brother" (The New Yorker • Aug 2012)
8. [8:40] "My Breaking Bad Bender" (New York • July 2011)
9. [8:40] "Child's Play: Breaking Bad's Bad Dad" (The New Yorker • Aug 2012)
10. [11:15] "Reconsidering Two and a Half Men" (New York • Nov 2010)
11. [14:00] "Primary Colors: Shonda Rhimes's Scandal and the diversity debate" (The New Yorker • May 2012)
12. [16:00] "It's Different for Girls" (New York • March 2012)
13. [17:30] "Girls Is Brilliant Gem For HBO" (Tim Goodman • The Hollywood Reporter • March 2012)
14. [20:25] "One-Man Show: Louis C.K.'s unique experiment in television making" (New York • May 2011)
15. [20:25] "Black and Blue: The bruised hilarity of Louie and Episodes" (The New Yorker • July 2012)
16. [24:50] Clive Thompson
17. [25:40] "The Hummingbird Theory'" (The New Yorker • March 2013)
18. [30:20] Lingua Franca archive
19. [32:40] "Analyze This Guy; review of Ronald Hayman's A Life of Jung" (New York Times Book Review • April 2001)
20. [32:40] "Defending Dr. B.: On Theron Raines's Rising to The Light" (New York Times Book Review • Nov 2002)
21. [36:20] "Confessions of a Spoiler Whore" (Slate • April 2002)
22. [38:40] Television Without Pity
23. [39:40] Approval Matrix