The Sunday Long Read Podcast

Edith Zimmerman rocketed to media stardom early in her career. Her editing of the influential and hilarious website The Hairpin got her a place on Forbes’ 30 under 30—at only twenty-eight, she was a “much sought after writer,” noted the magazine. Zimmerman hasn’t lost an ounce of her humor in the years since, but she has slowly rediscovered herself. In the last episode of Take a Joke, Zimmerman and host Don Van Natta Jr. share their respective experiences stopping drinking, reminisce about the glory days of Internet writing and chat about Zimmerman’s cartooning.

Award-winning radio reporter Matt Shearer is making Boston’s WBZ station—and by extension, local journalism—cool again. The thirty-six-year-old TikTok star’s success has breathed new life into the industry. In a wide-ranging conversation with host Jacob Feldman, Shearer shares his path to social media stardom. In the third episode of “Take a Joke,” an SLR series on the mixing of humor and reporting, we got deep into the process of producing short-form and talk about why the Massachusetts stereotype is alive and well. Take a Joke is sponsored by Funny Girls, a program from The Harnisch Foundation that uses improv exercises to help third through eighth graders to develop their leadership skills.

Dina Gusovsky was an award-winning investigative reporter before she put that career aside to pursue comedy in 2016, joining Late Night with Seth Meyers. Not because she wanted to move away from the news, but the opposite—she saw comedians doing deeper dives than journalists. In the second episode of “Take a Joke,” an SLR series on the mixing of humor and reporting, Jacob Feldman talked to Gusovsky about that decision and the adjustments she had to make in her new role. Gusovsky also discussed how her personal back story—her family fled Soviet Russia when she was a child—has influenced the perspective she brings to the show, to comedy, and to her stories. Take a Joke is sponsored by Funny Girls, a program from The Harnisch Foundation that helps third through eighth graders to develop their leadership skills.

Welcome to the first episode of Take a Joke, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the captivating world of humor. Our first guest, Maureen Dowd, has been thorn in the side of American politicians for decades. In her conversation with host Don Van Natta Jr., she explains where her sense of humor comes from and how the subjects of her stories have taken it. Take a Joke is sponsored by Funny Girls, a program from The Harnisch Foundation that helps third through eighth graders as they figure out all the changes they’re navigating by using improv exercises.

Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our fourth guest is magazine writer and author Garrett Graff. In early 2023, the prolific journalist was tasked with one of the toughest assignments of his career: writing the obituary of his friend, New York Times editor and reporter Blake Hounshell. In a conversation with Don Van Natta Jr., Graff describes his experience working on this emotional piece in a short amount of time. The Art of Remembering is sponsored by our friends at Air Mail, a weekly newsletter from former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley, formerly of The New York Times.

Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our third guest, James Hagerty, is the only fulltime obituary writer at The Wall Street Journal, where he has worked for nearly 40 years. He's also written a book, Yours Truly, on the value of telling your own story. He and Don discuss the value of humor in the face of grief and how thinking about what your own obituary will say could change your life.

Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our second guest, Kathleen McElroy, is a journalism professor at The University of Texas at Austin after spending nearly 30 years in the industry, including serving as Associate Managing Editor at The New York Times. Her 2013 article in the Journal of Black Studies focused particularly on obituaries, and the way they shape how civil rights leaders—and the entire movement—are remembered (or misremembered). The Art of Remembering is sponsored by our friends at Air Mail, the sophisticated digital weekly dispatch from Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley

Welcome to the first episode of The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our first guest, Margalit Fox, is a long-time obituaries writer whose brilliant articles still grace the pages of The New York Times five years after her retirement. Margalit dissects the ins and outs of the work, delivers memorable lines, and discusses some of her favorite obits with Don. The Art of Remembering is sponsored by our friends at Air Mail, a weekly newsletter from former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley, formerly of The New York Times.

Welcome back to the long-dormant Sunday Long Read podcast! We're reviving our audio presence with a discussion between Don and Emily Kaplan, who wrote a piece copublished this week by the SLR and Pipe Wrench Magazine. It's about Mormons, Mexico, and the malleable nature of truth (among many other things). You can find it on sundaylongread.com and pipewrenchmag.com, where it is the centerpiece of their "road trip" issue. The SLR pod will return in 2023! We encourage you to stay tuned for more conversations about writing, reporting, and storytelling. If there are guests you'd like us to talk to, you can reach out to editors@sundaylongread.com and if you're a writer who'd like to work with us, you can reach out to originals@sundaylongread.com.

Tim Urban is a popular blogger and the co-founder of “Wait But Why,” a site that discusses a wide variety of topics including picking the right career path, SpaceX rockets, and love. His most recent mammoth work is “The Story of Us,” a re-tracing of how we got to this political moment.

Caity Weaver is a favorite of the Sunday Long Read, appearing in multiple newsletters every year, always giving us thoughtful, clever, and enjoyable stories to read. This week, the New York Times features writer joins Jacob to talk about how she interviews celebrities, to outline how she interacts with editors, and to perform a real-time dive into her search history on the Oxford English Dictionary. Along the way she provides a few tips for writers and talks about how she discovers new stories. Due to some technical difficulties, we had some trouble with the audio quality of our interview with Caity. So if you'd prefer to read this conversation instead of listening to it, we've published a transcript of this episode on our website, sundaylongread.com.

There are few couples like Deborah and James Fallows, who have spent more than half a decade talking to people and visiting communities across America to produce "Our Towns," a New York Times bestseller, published last year, and an online series for The Atlantic. They're some of the smartest, most diligent people reporting on the state of the country today and they joined Jacob for a two-in-one SLR podcast to discuss their distinct reporting styles, the power of positive reporting, and the lessons they've learned from their travels.

Charles Duhigg is a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, the author of The Power of Habit, and a magazine writer who most recently published an in-depth look at Amazon's world-eating growth for The New Yorker. “The first question I might ask is, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t know enough to know what question to ask you. What do you think is the most interesting thing I could ask you about x?’ It catches them off guard ... and they always come up with some suggested question that never would have occurred to me — because they know their own brain better than I could ever know it by asking them questions to get at it.” Jacob and Charles discuss how every corporate job at Amazon is really the same, how longform and books allow a conversation around a subject to linger, and reporting style and tips for podcasts, print and books — including using LinkedIn to find sources and stories. Charles can be found on Twitter @cduhigg and emailed at charles@charlesduhigg.com (he promises to get back to anyone who reaches out). [0:57] Is Amazon Unstoppable? (New Yorker, 10.10.19) [1:09] Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property? (New Yorker, 10.15.18) [9:52] The iEconomy (New York Times, 2012) [10:41] Covering the Cops (New Yorker, 2.9.86) [14:31] Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame (BuzzFeed News, 8.31.19) [14:32] His Mother Was Killed by a Van Making Amazon Deliveries. Here’s the Letter He Wrote to Jeff Bezos. (ProPublica, 9.5.19) [14:40] Amazon Has Ceded Control of Its Site. The Result: Thousands of Banned, Unsafe or Mislabeled Products (Wall Street Journal, 8.23.19) [14:50] Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan (The Atlantic, 10.10.19) [16:39] “On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane” (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) [18:23] Emily Guendelsberger’s Twitter thread (10.18.19) [23:01] “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business” (Random House, 2012 [23:01] “Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business” (Random House, 2016) [28:58] “How To!” Podcast (Slate, 2019) [51:30] Zuckerberg: Standing For Voice and Free Expression (Washington Post, 10.17.19)

"I kind of think of myself as a nature writer disguised as a food writer. Food is a great way to write about plants and animals because everyone has a built-in interest, " Rowan Jacobsen is an award-winning author who writes about food, sustainability, and the environment. Jacob and Rowan discuss how the latter delved into the world of food writing and some of his work including "Is Sunscreen The New Margarine?" for Outside, which became the most popular article in their website's history. [1:09] How does one become a food writer? [4:41] Rowan on "Is Sunscreen The New Margarine" [8:17] On Rowan equating lack of sun to smoking [12:25] Rowan on "What Happens When the World’s Top Plastics Executives and Environmentalists Go Snorkeling Together in the Atlantic Garbage Patch?" [21:40] Rowan on Alt Meat Is Turning Cattle into Stranded Assets [28:38] On reading content that doesn’t take into account certain factors that endanger the environment [32:09] On not reading any fiction

"If you don’t want to tell me something it makes me very interested in what it is.” Jessica Pressler is a staff writer at New York magazine and joins Jacob this week to talk interesting stories, screen adaptations, and empathy. Her article "The Hustlers at Scores," is the basis for the new movie "Hustlers," and Jessica discusses the unique experiences of having a story adapted for the screen and being visited in your own home by a movie star assigned to portray you (Hello, Julia Stiles!).

Jessica Contrera covers a wide range of topics as a narrative reporter for the Washington Post and in this week's podcast she chats with Don about her happiest (and saddest) stories, taking care of her mental health while covering traumatic events, and the positive influence a good editor has on a young reporter. Jessica has been featured several times in the Sunday Long Read newsletter and the stories of hers that we've highlighted include a deep dive about sexting teenagers, a piece about the ongoing recovery of mass shooting victims, and a delightful tale about one particularly controversial dog park.

The best-selling author, GQ correspondent, and National Magazine Award Finalist is our latest guest. Laskas discusses her books and articles including To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope; her New York Times Magazine article "The Mailroom;" and her GQ article "Game Brain," which inspired the movie "Concussion." [0:49] Jeanne Marie on her book tour for “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” [1:54] How she came up with the idea for the book, based off “Ten Letters A Day: To Obama With Love, and Hate, and Desperation” for New York Times Magazine [8:07] Jeanne Marie on Joe Biden: The Most Misunderstood Man in Washington for GQ [18:32] Writing Bennet Omalu, Concussions, and the NFL: How One Doctor Changed Football Forever [26:50] Jeanne Marie on her writing craft, characters, and narrative arc/Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns [38:43] Jeanne Marie on advising students Produced by Julian McKenzie

Will Leitch founded Deadspin nearly 14 years ago. Since 2008, Leitch has written and worked outside of the site, most recently as a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a national correspondent for MLB, and the host of “The Will Leitch Show” on Sports Illustrated TV. “…During the years I actively ran [Deadspin] — now more than a decade in the past — I was ostensibly in charge of figuring out what was coming next on the sports internet; I was the supposed leader of the blog-barbarians at the gate, all those bulls (and we were all bulls) running roughshod over the Traditional Sports Media…” Don and Will discuss how Blacktable.com led to Deadspin.com, the Deadspin of today, Will's writing of today, and revisit the infamous and “rather festive” 2008 Costas NOW (HBO) discussion where Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights,” berated Will as being “…sort of like Jimmy Olsen on Percocet," and the sports blogosphere of the early aughts being “dedicated to cruelty … journalistic dishonesty, and … speed.” They’ve both come around since then. Will lives in Athens, GA, has written four books (with a fifth on the way), and can be found on Twitter @williamfleitch.

Anne Helen Petersen, although she's a superb culture writer for BuzzFeed News, still gets a little nauseous at the prospect of talking to people for her stories. She talks about that and more with Jacob on this week's episode, where they touch on reporting attire, Beto O'Rourke, and Anne's viral story on burnout. Anne was an academic before becoming a reporter on the fly and has adjusted to sharing her work in different ways, including in her newsletter, "the collected ahp."

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine, a contributing writer at WIRED, and a contributing editor at Harper’s. He’s the author of a travel memoir called A Sense of Direction, and he teaches nonfiction in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. Here, he talks with Jacob about ideal story length (100 pages, anyone?), why it took months to work out the structure of his latest NYT Magazine piece, how he uses detail, and more.