Longform

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.” Show notes: @The_Law_Boy 5-4 (Prologue Projects) 02:00 "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here's What Happened" (Evan Ratliff • Wired • Nov 2009) 04:00 Mic Dicta 14:00 "Bush v. Gore" (Prologue Projects • Feb 2020) 14:00 "Emergency Episode: RNC v. DNC" (Prologue Projects • Apr 2020) 15:00 "Emergency Episode: Roe Is Overturned" (Prologue Projects • Jun 2022) 16:00 "The Thomas/Crow Affair" (Prologue Projects • Apr 2023) 25:00 "The Hosts of ‘5-4’ Never Trusted the Supreme Court" (Reggie Ugwu • New York Times • Jul 2022)

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. That the information does go through you as you're trying to make sense of it. And it's not happening to you, right? It's not like a direct form of PTSD that you have, but you do experience some trauma when you open up your imagination in that way.” Show notes: @donovanxramsey donovanxramsey.com Ramsey on Longform Podcast When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era (One World • 2023) 02:00 Ramsey's Los Angeles Times archive 05:00 The Warmth of Other Suns (Isabel Wilkerson • Vintage • 2011) 35:00 "America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicara

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.” Show notes: @DavidGrann davidgrann.com Grann on Longform Grann on Longform Podcast #3 Grann on Longform Podcast #241 Grann on Longform Podcast #329 Grann's New Yorker archive 01:00 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday • 2023) 02:00 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday • 2017) 28:00 The White Darkness (Doubleday • 2018) 61:00 Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese • Appian Way, Apple Studios • 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

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.” “I definitely feel as an investigative reporter that I feel very driven by my own capacity for shock and outrage and genuinely feeling like this is unbelievable. And that kind of makes me want to keep digging. And once I stop feeling that on any given topic, I lose interest. And so I’ve always been a generalist, and I just kind of rove from one topic to the next. I’m always finding myself in new territory where I know absolutely nothing about the thing I’m starting to dig into and have to try and play catch up and get my head around something new.” Show notes: @heidiblake 24:00 From Russia with Blood (Mulholland Books • 2020) 24:00 Once Upon a Time in Londongrad (B

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.” Show notes: @mitchprothero Prothero on Longform Prothero’s Vice archive 01:00 “Paintballing with Hezbollah” (Vice • March 2012) 01:00 “Inside the World of ISIS Investigations in Europe” (Buzzfeed News • Aug 2016) 36:00 “The Wild Story of the Psychic, the Sheikh and the $90 Million Diamond Heist” (Vice • June 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brittany Luse is the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. “One of the things I love about this job is everything is practice. I love it. It's like if a show is great and everyone loves it, you gotta put on another one. You just gotta do it again. And if the show didn't quite do what you'd hoped or set out to do in your mind and in your heart, you gotta do another one. I just love it. You can never feel too good and you can never feel too bad.” Show notes: @bmluse 02:00 "#497: Sam Sanders" (Longform Podcast • Aug 2022) 02:00 "Kale-flavored Cheez-Its" (Sampler • Gimlet • Jun 2016) 03:00 It’s Been a Minute (NPR) 04:00 "Brittany goes to 'Couples Therapy;' Plus, why Hollywood might strike" (It’s Been a Minute • NPR • Apr 2023) 04:00 "Tina Turner's happy ending" (It’s Been a Minute • NPR • May 2023) 05:00 "Relationship Goals" (Sampler • Gimlet • Mar 2016) 12:00 Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (Working Title Films • 2022) 24:00 The Nod (Gimlet) 25:00 "Whole Hog" (The Nod • Gimlet • Sep 2017) 27:00 "The Hair

Brady Dale covers cryptocurrency for Axios. His new book is SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy. “I am a fast writer. I’ve always been fast. I just sat down and did the math on it and I was like, If I can write 1,500 words a day, I can write this book. And I can do that.” Show notes: @BradyDale bradydale.com Dale's Axios archive 00:00 SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy (Wiley • 2023) 09:00 Dale's Observer archive 09:00 Dale's CoinDesk archive 14:00 Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing (Jacob Goldstein • Hachette • 2020) 16:00 Coin Talk (Aaron Lammer and Jay Caspian Kang) 16:00 Techmeme Ride Home (Ride Home Media) 24:00 "#127: Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good" (80,000 Hours • Apr 2022) 28:00 Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis • Norton • 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lisa Belkin is a journalist and the author of four books. Her latest is Genealogy of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night. “I didn’t experience it as luck. It—and this is going to be a little woo woo—but it really felt like these people had been sitting there for 100 years saying, Well, it took you long enough, because everything just fit together. I didn’t have to manipulate anything.” Show notes: @lisabelkin lisabelkin.com Lisa Belkin on Longform Belkin’s New York Times archive Belkin’s Yahoo News archive Belkin’s HuffPost archive 02:00 “The Odds of That” (The New York Times Magazine • Aug 2002) 09:00 Show Me a Hero (Hachette Book Group • 1999) 09:00 Show Me a Hero (David Simon • HBO • 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amy Chozick is an author, journalist, executive producer, and showrunner. Her latest feature for The New York Times is ”Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth.” “The subject thought it was a hit job. Twitter thought it was a puff piece. I don’t know, guys. … I want to explain to people what it feels like to be around someone who you know you shouldn’t believe, but you can’t help believing them because this is what their personality is like when you’re with them.” Show notes: @amychozick amychozick.com Chozick on Longform Chozick's New York Times archive 00:00 "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth" (New York Times • May 2023) 02:00 The Dropout (ABC Audio • 2019) 06:00 "You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It." (New York Times • Jan 2019) 24:00 Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyou • Vintage • 2020) 49:00 The Dropout (Hulu • 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tracy Kidder is the author of eleven books, including The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains. His latest is Rough Sleepers. “I do think it’s an interesting challenge to try to write about virtue, with all that’s always mixed with it. Some writers have said it’s virtually impossible … but it’s not impossible. … People who are really trying, struggling against the odds, I think they’re worth writing about.” Show notes: tracykidder.com Kidder on Longform Kidder’s Atlantic archive 01:00 “‘You Have to Learn to Listen’: How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless” (The New York Times • Jan 2023) 06:00 “The Good Doctor” (New Yorker • July 2000) 06:00 Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House • 2009) 19:00 Good Prose (Kidder and Richard Todd • Random House • 2013) 21:00 House (Houghton Mifflin • 1985) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hua Hsu is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for memoir. “I've worked as a journalist … for quite a while. … But this [book] was the thing that was always in the back of my mind. Like, this was the thing that a lot of that was in service of. Just becoming better at describing a song or describing the look of someone's face—these were all things that I implicitly understood as skills I needed to acquire. ... It is sort of an origin story for why I got so obsessive about writing.” Show notes: @huahsu byhuahsu.com Hsu on Longform Hsu on Longform Podcast Hsu's New Yorker archive 03:00 A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press • 2016) 30:00 "Randall Park Breaks Out of Character" (New Yorker • Feb 2023) 33:00 Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine • Drawn & Quarterly • 2007) 39:00 "What Conversation Can Do For Us" (New Yorker • Mar 2023) 39:00 "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep" (New Yorker • Mar 2023) 39:00 "The Many Afterl

Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired, where his current title is Senior Maverick. His new book is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I'd Known Earlier. “I never wrote a book because I wanted to do a good deed. I just wanted to tell a good story.” Show notes: @kevin2kelly kk.org Kelly on Longform Longform Podcast #376: Kevin Kelly Kelly’s Wired Magazine archive 13:00 The Inevitable (Penguin Books • 2017) 14:00 Vanishing Asia (Publishers Group West • 2021) 22:00 @MrBeast on TikTok 26:00 @KevinKelly on YouTube 31:00 @PessimistsArc on Twitter 39:00 “John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets” (Lex Fridman • Lex Fridman Podcast • Aug 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Terrence McCoy is The Washington Post's Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief. He won the George Polk award for his series "The Amazon, Undone" on the illegal and often violent exploitation of the rainforest. “When I first got to Brazil, the Amazon was an arena of mystique. But after you spend a fair amount of time in the Amazon, it becomes quite clear what the struggle is—and how human that struggle is.” This is the last in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lynsey Addario is a photojournalist for The New York Times and National Geographic. She won the George Polk award for her photograph of the bodies of a woman and her two children alongside a friend who lay dying moments after a mortar struck them as they sought to flee Ukraine. "If I have time to compose a photo—even if it's of a horrific topic—I will always try to make the most beautiful photograph because I want people to look. I want people to ask questions, to be engaged, to pay attention. And often, that does mean the intersection of beauty and horror." This is the fourth in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tracy Wang and Nick Baker of CoinDesk, along with their colleague Ian Allison, won the George Polk award for reporting that led to the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. “Crypto had been kind of a backwater of reporting. It was kind of like nobody took it seriously. People didn’t know if it was a joke and they thought it was all drug dealers and fraudsters. And I was kind of thinking, well, that seems like a great place to be reporting.” This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lori Hinnant is a reporter for the Associated Press. Along with videojournalist Mstyslav Chernov, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, and video producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, she won the George Polk Award for war reporting for covering the siege of Mariupol. “It’s really easy when you see raw footage flash by on the television to just see it as war as hell and this is very abstract. These are people with lives that were utterly ruined and they want to tell their stories. I mean, we’re not talking to people who don’t want to talk to us. And when you find out what happened the day their lives were changed, it really changes it.” This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Theo Baker is the investigations editor at The Stanford Daily. The first college student ever to win a George Polk Award, Baker received a special recognition for uncovering allegations that pioneering research co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, was supported in part by manipulated imagery. “It’s useful to intellectualize it because when you actually get going, this is something that keeps me up at night. … It’s the last thing I think about when I go to sleep, and the first thing on my mind when I wake up.” This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new 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.” Show notes: @DavidGrann davidgrann.com Grann on Longform Grann on Longform Podcast #3 Grann on Longform Podcast #241 Grann on Longform Podcast #329 Grann's New Yorker archive 01:00 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday • 2023) 02:00 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday • 2017) 28:00 The White Darkness (Doubleday • 2018) 61:00 Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese • Appian Way, Apple Studios • 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Vann Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of Floodlines: The Story of an Unnatural Disaster. His new podcast is Holy Week: The Story of a Revolution Undone. “I’m often toggling between environmental justice, between the history of race and racial organization in America. And to me, they’re all one story, and I’m trying to tell the story about how the conditions of marginalization in America have made and shaped the present. That’s it. That’s one story.” Show notes: Newkirk II on Longform Newkirk II’s Atlantic archive 04:00 Floodlines (The Atlantic • 2020) 08:00 “The New Coretta Scott King: Emerging From the Legacy” (Jaqueline Trescott • The Washington Post • Jan 1978) 17:00 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” transcript (Martin Luther King Jr. • April 1968) 42:00 “The Battle for North Carolina” (The Atlantic • Oct 2016) 43:00 “Puerto Rico’s Environmental Catastrophe” (The Atlantic • Oct 2017) 53:00 “The Case for a Voting-Rights Amendment” (The Atlantic • Feb 2021) 53:00 “The Great La

Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink. “I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusions about the morality of the whole thing — that's where I’m most comfortable.” Show notes: @lizrhoffman Hoffman’s Semafor archive Hoffman’s Wall Street Journal archive 30:00 Ben Smith on Longform Podcast 37:00 "Microsoft eyes $10 billion bet on ChatGPT" (Hoffman and Reed Albergotti • Semafor • Jan 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices