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Latest Episodes:

Episode 556: Jesse David Fox Nov 01, 2023

Show notes

Jesse David Fox covers comedy for Vulture, where he hosts the podcast Good One. His new book is Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work.

“There’s a complete lack of anyone who’s ever written about comedy seriously compared to any other art form. There’s just nothing. … So the challenge was, how do you start a conversation that no one has been participating in?”

Show notes:

@JesseDavidFox
Fox’s Vulture archive
3:00 Jason Zinoman’s New York Times archive
5:00 “What Is the Best Adam Sandler Movie?” (Vulture • April 2023)
6:00 Kathryn VanArendonk’s Vulture archive
8:00 “A Note About Splitsider” (Megh Wright• Vulture • Mar 2018)
11:00 “Jerry Seinfeld at Vulture Festival 2015” (Vulture • June 2015)
12:00 WTF with Marc Maron Podcast (Marc Maron • WTF • 2009)
14:00 “Jen Kirkman Turned Catcalling Into One of the Best Street Harassment Jokes Ever” (Vulture • April 2017)
23:00 “An Appreciation of the Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (Ramsey Ess • Vulture • Mar 2018)
23:00 “Maria Bamford Wants to Tell You How Much Money She Makes” (Vulture • Oct 2017)
23:00 “How Funny Does Comedy Need to Be?” (Vulture • Sep 2018)
23:00 “Michelle Wolf on Correspondents Dinner, Social Media” (Vulture • Mar 2020)
23:00 “Disgust is Tom Segura’s Love Language” (Vulture • Sept 2022)
23:00 “The Story Behind Bert Kreischer’s ‘Machine’ Joke” (Vulture • May 2023)
23:00 “Katt Williams Explains Jacksonville Florida” (Katt Williams • Netflix • Jan 2020)
36:00 “How the Internet and a New Generation of Superfans Helped Create the Second Comedy Boom” (Vulture • Mar 2015)
37:00 Las Culturistas (Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang • iHeartRadio • 2016)

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Episode 555: Evan Hughes Oct 25, 2023

Show notes

Evan Hughes is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The Atavist and many others. His book, just out in paperback, is Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup.

“It should be called slow-form journalism…. It is heavily edited. It’s heavily fact checked. And chances are, you’re not going to be the first. Maybe you’re going to be first to reveal some piece of it. I have made peace with like, I’m not the scoop guy. I’m the person who comes in and I’m good at telling the story in a thorough and deep way.”

Show notes:

evanhughes.co
Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup (Anchor • 2023)
03:00 "Longform Podcast #503: Evan Osnos" (Longform Podcast • Sep 2022)
03:00 "The Trials of White Boy Rick" (Atavist • Sep 2014)
04:00 "The Shocking True Tale of the Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys" (The Awl • Jun 2011)
06:00 "Just Kids" (New York Magazine • Oct 2011)
07:00 Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Holt • 2011)
12:00 "The Fugitive, His Dead Wife, and the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory That Explains Everything" (GQ • Jun 2016)
20:00 "Trial by Fire" (David Grann • New Yorker • Aug 2009)
25:00 Opioids, Inc. (Frontline • 2021)
25:00 The Crime of the Century (HBO • 2021)
47:00 Pain Hustlers (Netflix • 2023)
54:00 White Boy Rick (LBI Productions • 2018)
60:00 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Michael Lewis • W.W. Norton • 2004)
60:00 Moneyball (Columbia Pictures • 2011)
61:00 "The Man Who Moves Markets" (Atlantic • Mar 2023)
63:00 "Bringing Down the Hachette" (Slate • May 2014)

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Episode 554: Yepoka Yeebo Oct 18, 2023

Show notes

Yepoka Yeebo has written for The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Quartz. Her new book is Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World.

“Initially it was like, Why are you writing about a con man? He makes Ghana look bad. Nobody needs another crime story about an African person. I found that irritating, because isn't the whole point of being a complete person, complete people, is we contain multitudes? We too can be epic, world-leading con men! Also, it's a great story. Everybody should revel in the insanity of what happened.”

Show notes:

@yepoka
yepokayeebo.com
Yeebo on Longform
Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World
16:00 “The True Story of the Fake U.S. Embassy in Ghana” (The Guardian • Nov 2017)

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Episode 553: Clare Malone Oct 11, 2023

Show notes

Clare Malone is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest article is ”Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths.’”

“You're going to work a lot of hours if you want to be successful, and you're probably not going to make as much money as your dumb friend from college does. You're choosing it for a different reason, but I do think we have to make efforts to have the [journalism] industry be a middle-class profession.”

Show notes:

Malone's New Yorker archive
Malone's FiveThirtyEight archive
03:00 "CNN’s New White Knight" (New Yorker • Sep 2023)
08:00 "Ben Smith Can’t Say What His New Media Venture Is" (New Yorker • Jan 2022)
09:00 "How Trump Changed America" (FiveThirtyEight • Nov 2020)
18:00 Just Like Us (The Ringer • 2022)
25:00 Semafor (Newsletter)
25:00 Confider (Lachlan Cartwright • Daily Beast)
27:00 "Inside the Meltdown at CNN" (Tim Alberta • Atlantic • Jun 2023)
27:00 "What the Shakeup at CNN Says About the Future of Cable News" (New Yorker • Jun 2023)
28:00 "David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero" (New Yorker • Aug 2023)
37:00 "Ann Selzer Is the Best Pollster in American Politics" (FiveThirtyEight • Jan 2016)
39:00 Politics Podcast (FiveThirtyEight)
48:00 The Ankler (Newsletter)
49:00 "The E-Mail Newsletter for the Mogul Set" (New Yorker • Dec 2022)
57:00 ”Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths’” (New Yorker • Sep 2023)
58:00 Patriot Act (Hasan Minhaj • Netflix • 2020)
61:00 "Hasan Minhaj Eyed For ‘Daily Show’ Host" (Brian Steinberg • Variety • Aug 2023)
65:00 "Episode 1273 - Hasan Minhaj" (WTF with Marc Maron • Oct 2021)

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Episode 552: Azam Ahmed Oct 04, 2023

Show notes

Azam Ahmed is an international investigative correspondent for The New York Times. His new book is Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance.

“I think the fundamental question I always ask when I go into a new place, whether I’m covering currencies, or hedge funds, or geopolitics in Afghanistan, or the war—it’s what does this mean to the world right now? What does the world need to know and how does it fit into that space?”

Show notes:

@azamsahmed
Ahmed on Longform
Ahmed’s New York Times archive
20:00 “For Afghan Officials, Prospect of Death Comes with Territory” (New York Times • Dec 2012)
21:00 “A Day’s Toil in the Suicide Bombers’ Graveyard” (New York Times • Aug 2013)
21:00 “2 Afghan Sisters, Swept Up in a Suicide Wave” (New York Times • March 2013)
25:00 “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One” (New York Times • Dec 2020)
46:00 “Using Texts as Lures, Government Spyware Targets Mexican Journalists and Their Families” (New York Times • June 2017)
48:00 “In Mexico, ‘It’s Easy to Kill a Journalist’” (New York Times • April 2017)
54:00 “Kill, or Be Killed: Latin America’s Homicide Crisis” (New York Times • May 2019–Feb 2020)

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Episode 551: Kashmir Hill Sep 27, 2023

Show notes

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter for The New York Times. Her new book is Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It.

“I often do feel like what my work is doing is preparing people for the way the world is going to change. With something like facial recognition technology, that's really important because if the world is changing such that every photo of you taken that's uploaded is going to be findable, it's going to change the decisions that you make.”

Show notes:

kashmirhill.com
Hill on Longform
Hill's New York Times archive
Hill's Gizmodo archive
Hill's Forbes archive
01:00 "Life Without the Tech Giants" (Gizmodo • Jan 2019)
01:00 "Living On Bitcoin for a Week: The Journey Begins" (Forbes • May 2013)
01:00 "Your Face Is Not Your Own" (New York Times • Mar 2021)
01:00 Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It (Random House • 2023)
03:00 "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened" (Wired • Nov 2009)
11:00 Hill's Above the Law archive
16:00 Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep (Ted Conover • University of Chicago Press • 2016)
19:00 "The House That Spied on Me" (Gizmodo • Feb 2018)
23:00 "I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker to Watch My Husband’s Every Move" (New York Times • Feb 2022)
25:00 "Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive’" (Kevin Roose • New York Times • Feb 2023)
26:00 "What Our Reporter Learned Delivering Burritos to New Yorkers" (Andy Newman • New York Times • July 2019)
27:00 "A Vast Web of Vengeance" (New York Times • Jun 2023)
27:00 "The Slander Industry" (Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill • New York Times • Apr 2021)
55:00 Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa • 1950)
59:00 "Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match" (New York Times • Aug 2023)
68:00 "Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Has Been Used By The Justice Department, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, And The NBA" (Ryan Mac, Caroline Haskins, Logan McDonald • Buzzfeed • Feb 2020)

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Episode 550: Zeke Faux Sep 20, 2023

Show notes

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His new book is Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

“I have a rule of thumb, which is that if somebody did one scam, they probably did another scam. If they did one scam in the past and now they have a new thing, odds are good it’s also a scam. That’s not always true, but that was definitely borne out sometimes in crypto-world.”

Show notes:

@ZekeFaux
zekefaux.com
Faux on Longform
Faux’s Bloomberg archive
06:00 “Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans” (Bloomberg • Sept 2014)
08:00 “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?” (Bloomberg • Oct 2021)
21:00 Matt Levine’s Bloomberg archive
22:00 “‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text” (Bloomberg • Aug 2023)
32:00 “The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better.” (Alexandra Alter • New York Times • May 2023)
58:00 The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Penguin Random House • 2020)

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Episode 549: Reginald Dwayne Betts Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads. His New York Times Magazine article "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" won the National Magazine Award. His new podcast is Almost There.

“I felt like I had to own becoming something and intuitively understood that if I didn't lay claim to desiring to be something, that it would be too many other forces that would be pulling on me to dictate that I become something else. … When you say you're a writer, if you know nothing else, then you know that you read. You pay attention to the world. … And prison became the metaphor by which I understood the world and poetry became the medium by which I understood what it meant to write about the world and what it meant to take seriously the responsibility to write about the world that I knew.”

Show notes:

dwaynebetts.com
freedomreads.org
01:00 Almost There with Dwayne Betts (Emerson Collective)
05:00 The Black Poets (Dudley Randall • Bantam • 1985)
10:00 Married… with Children (Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt • Fox • 1987-1997)
21:00 "Scientists and Engineers" (Killer Mike • Michael • 2023)
24:00 "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" (New York Times Magazine • Oct 2018)
26:00 "The Language of Birds" (Anselm Kiefer • 2018)
28:00 A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery • 2010)
31:00 Felon: An American Washi Tale
32:00 "Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me" (New York Times Magazine • Oct 2020)
33:00 Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books • 2010)
33:00 Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books • 2015)
33:00 Felon (Norton • 2019)
33:00 Redaction: A Project by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts (MoMA PS1 • 2019)
33:00 Redaction (Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts • Norton • 2023)
44:00 Creative Nonfiction

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Rerun: #512 Audie Cornish (Nov 2022) Sep 06, 2023

Show notes

Audie Cornish, the former host NPR’s All Things Considered, is an anchor and correspondent for CNN. Her podcast is The Assignment.

“I think there is journalism inherent in an interview. Like the interview itself should be considered a piece of journalism. It isn't always. Sometimes the vibe is that it’s a little window dressing or that it's personality driven and I don't subscribe to that. I think that it has its own journalism. It's my journalism.”

Show notes:

@AudieCornish
Cornish's NPR archive
01:00 The Assignment (CNN Audio • 2022)
25:00 "Letters: 'Music Curator' Diplo" (NPR • Jun 2012)
36:00 Cornish’s Twitter thread (Jan 2022)
43:00 Serial (Serial Productions)

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Episode 548: Susan Burton Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Susan Burton is an editor at This American Life, the author of the memoir Empty, and the host of the podcast The Retrievals.

“I know I have much more anger than I reveal, and I don’t think that’s uncommon. Especially for women. There’s been a lot of attention to that in recent years—the anger of women, how it’s expressed and not expressed. But I think that among the things I’ve stifled for years are just my true feelings, and I’ve always wanted to be close to people and to be intimate with people, and have often felt that I have trouble making myself known or being known or being understood. And so...it felt good to be known.”

Show notes:

@burtonsusan
susanburton.net
Burton on Longform
Burton’s This American Life archive
01:00 “In The Event of an Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position” (Ira Glass • This American Life • Jan 2001)
05:00 Empty (Random House • 2020)
06:00 “Secrets” (This American Life • Feb 2021)
39:00 “Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up” (New York Times • Oct 2015)
42:00 “From 'Empty' To 'Satisfied': Author Traces A Hunger That Food Can't Fix” (Terry Gross • NPR • June 2020)

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