Episode 29: Matthew Power, freelance writer and contributing editor at Harper's.

" The kind of stories I've gotten to do have involved fulfilling my childhood fantasies of having an adventurous life. Even though I don't make a ton of money doing it, I've never felt like I was missing out on something. I haven't worked in an office since a two-week stint as a fact checker at House and Garden magazine in 2001, so that's 12 years, and I haven't starved to death yet."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. matthewpower.net
2. @matthew_power
3. Power's Harper's archive
4. Power's complete archive
5. [2:00] "Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky" (GQ • March 2013)
6. [10:30] "Mississippi Drift" (Harper's • March 2008)
7. [18:00] "Immersion Journalism" [pdf] (Harper's • Dec 2005)
8. [22:30] "The Cherry Tree Garden" [pdf] (Granta • May 2008)
9. [24:00] "Guerrillas in the Mist" (Feed • 2000)
10. [26:15] "Train Hopping in Canada" (Blue • 2000)
11. [32:30] "The Poison Stream" [pdf] (Harper's • August 2004)
12. [32:45] Caravan magazine
13. [34:30] "Slipping Through the Net" [pdf] (Harper's • April 2012)
14. [37:30] John McPhee: The Art of Nonfiction No. 3 (The Paris Review • Summer 2010)

Episode 28: Joel Lovell, deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, interviewed live at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I think if you can make a writer feel like it's okay to not know what they're doing—they don't really know exactly what their story is, they're a little lost in their material—that's a fine place to be. If you can sort of talk it through, if you can minimize their anxiety a little bit, then I think you've done most of your job. After that it's just looking at the words and just figuring out which ones work."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. @lovelljoel
2. Lovell's New York Times archive
3. Lovell's GQ archive
4. Lovell's This American Life archive
5. [2:00] "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year" (Joel Lovell • New York Times Magazine • 2013)
6. [8:20] "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" (George Saunders • New Yorker • 2012)
7. [12:40] George Saunders on respect
8. [12:55] Twitter response to Lovell's profile of George Saunders
9. [14:50] The first time Lovell read Saunders
10. [19:40] Writer Paul Tough
11. [23:35] Saturday Night magazine
12. [25:00] GQ conversation between Lovell and John Jeremiah Sullivan
13. [27:45] "Upon This Rock" (John Jeremiah Sullivan • GQ • 2004)
14. [34:40] The New York Observer on Lovell's "Men + Money" column for GQ
15. [35:30] Lovell on money advisors (The Washington Post • 2009)
16. [42:30] "The Upside of the Downside" (Joel Lovell • New York • 2008)

Episode 27: Joshua Topolksy, editor-in-chief of The Verge.

"Sometimes you tell stories that people don't know they need to read yet. You have to keep telling those kinds of stories, and eventually people will wake up to them. Of course we look at traffic. But the main thing is, are we doing good work? At the end of the week or the end of the day, do I think, that was awesome, I'm really glad we wrote that?"

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. joshuatopolsky.com
2. @joshuatopolsky
3. The Verge
4. The Verge on Longform
5. [3:45] "Spacewar" (Stewart Brand • Rolling Stone • 1972)
6. [6:45] The Face magazine
7. [8:00] jasonsantamaria.com
8. [9:00] "Condo at the End of the World" (Joseph L. Flatley • The Verge • Nov 2011)
9. [9:30] "For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade" (Laura June • The Verge • Jan 2013)
10. [11:00] "Launch Party: A Crowdfunding Revolution Ignites the Next Space Race" (Adrianne Jeffries • The Verge • Jan 2013)
11. [12:30] Vox Media
12. [25:15] The Verge's ethics statement
13. [30:00] The Verge's coverage of CES 2013

Episode 26: Jennifer Gonnerman, contributing editor at New York and contributing writer for Mother Jones.

"How much do we really interact with people who are different from ourselves? We go to work, we go home, we go to a party — I feel like this is a fantastic opportunity to meet peope who are totally and completely different, from totally different worlds, backgrounds, interests, countries. It's almost like a passport to a different world with every story. Once you make that trip and go into someone's home and really listen to them, empathy is not that hard to come by."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. JenniferGonnerman.com
2. Gonnerman's Archive on Longform
3. [5:00] Wayne Barrett's Village Voice Archive
4. [10:30] "The House Where They Live: Inside the Sex-Offender Cluster of One Long Island Town (New York • Dec 2007
5. [16:00] "Blood Brothers: How Felix Aponte’s Kidney Transplant to Friend Robert Sanchez Saved Both Their Lives (New York • Nov 2009
6. [22:00] "Tuesdays With Judy: Battling Mental Illness With a Paintbrush (Village Voice • Dec 2005
7. [22:45] "The Man Who Charged Himself With Murder" (New York • Nov 20012
8. [27:30] Excerpt from G. Dep’s Memoir, The Autobiographical Rapping Dude: The Rhyme Book
9. [32:30] "A Beautiful Mind: On Susan Sheehan's Is There No Place on Earth for Me?" (Columbia Journalism Review • Jan 2013)
10. [41:00] Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Picador • 2004)
11. [45:00] There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America (Alex Kotlowitz • Anchor • 1992)

Episode 25: Susan Orlean, staff writer at The New Yorker.

"There's always the fear, which comes with having done it for a long time, that you're repeating yourself. That's actually a genuine concern — you worry that you're becoming an imitiation of yourself... The funny thing is that you spend the first half of your career wanting desperately to have a voice that's distinctive and recognizable, then you go to the other side of that and think oh my god, all my stories sound the same."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Digg for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. Interview Transcript
2. Orlean's archive on Longform
3. @susanorlean
4. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (Amazon)
5. "Orchid Fever" (New Yorker • 1995)
6. "Meet the Shaggs" (New Yorker • 1995)
7. "Life's Swell" (New Yorker • 1995)
8. "Thinking in the Rain" (New Yorker • 2008)
9. "I Want This Apartment" (New Yorker • 1999)
10. Rin Tin Tin (Published 2012)
11. Animalish (Kindle Single)

Episode 24: A special episode with Stephen Rodrick, contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and contributing editor at Men's Journal, to discuss his recent story "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie."

"Publicists don't want to give you access because they're afraid of what you're going to see. But if you spend enough time with anybody, short of Mussolini or Ghengis Kahn, they're going to humanize themselves. Because they're human beings, like you are. And they have whatever demented battles they're fighting, their version of crazy, but if you get to spend some time with them as flesh and blood, they're going to come across as flesh and blood in the story."

Show notes and links:

1. "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie" (New York Times Magazine • Jan 2013)
2. The Magical Stranger: A Son's Journey into His Father's Life (Due out May 2013)
3. @stephenrodrick

Episode 23: Starlee Kine, contributor to This American Life and the New York Times Magazine.

"There's a fearlessness I had when I was younger that I don't have now... It threw me into a crisis, the Internet in general. You're more cautious about what you kind of have out there. There's that, that I just don't want people to know every single thing anymore, but there's [also] an inner fear that did not exist before, an inner censoring that was not there."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. Kine's archive on This American Life
2. "Dr. Phil" (This American Life • August 2007)
3. "Where's Walter?" (This American Life • February 2005)
4. Kine's archive at the New York Times
5. @StarleeKine
6. Journalism Is Not Narcissism (Hamilton Nolan • Gawker • January 2013)
7. Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life (Elizabeth Wurtzel • New York • January 2013)

Episode 22: Charles Duhigg, New York Times reporter and author of The Power of Habit.

"The stuff that gets cut out gets cut out for a reason. The discipline of space is always a good discipline. If it deserves to be read, it shouldn't be on the cutting room floor... If it ends up on the cutting room floor, there's usually a reason why."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" (Random House • Feb 2012)
2. The iEconomy Series
3. "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work" (Duhigg and Kieth Bradsher • January 2012)
4. "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad " (Duhigg and David Barboza • January 2012)
5. The Golden Opporunities Series
6. "How Companies Learn Your Secrets" (New York Times Magazine • Feb 2012)
7. @cduhigg
8. charlesduhigg.com

Episode 21: Eli Sanders, associate editor at The Stranger and 2012 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

"There was one particular moment in the trial, which I described, where... there was just not any human ability to be detached from what was happening in front of you, what was being shared. It was so painful, you could not help but cry, and there was no reason to deny that that moment had happened."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. "The Bravest Woman in Seattle" (The Stranger • June 2011)
2. "The Great West Coast Newspaper War" (The Stranger • Mar 2010)
3. "Gay Marriage's Jewish Pioneer" (Tablet • June 2012)
4. @elijsanders
5. elisanders.com

Episode 20: Patrick Radden Keefe, staff writer at The New Yorker.

"I tend not to like really prescriptive writing, and as often as not what I want to do is kind of get in and find the stories and the narratives almost as a delivery mechanism to just get people to sit up and think about it. Honestly, the areas that I'm interested in are so obscure, often, that the thing that I want is for people just to understand and care a little bit more than they did before."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Show notes and links:

1. Patrick Radden Keefe's books, Chatter and The Snakehead
2. "Cocaine Incorporated" (New York Times Magazine • June 2012)
3. "Revearsal of Fortune" (New Yorker • Jan 2012)
4. "The Trafficker" (New Yorker • Feb 2010)
5. "Welcome to Newburgh, Murder Capital of New York" (New York • Sep 2011)
6. @praddenkeefe
7. patrickraddenkeefe.com
8. Patrick Radden Keefe on Longform

Episode 19: Choire Sicha, co-founder of The Awl.

"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, writer-at-large for Esquire and founder of The Sager Group.

"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