"We ain't doin' none of this Tuesdays with Morrie shit," baseball great Dave Parker once told his collaborator Dave Jordan, as they worked together on the soon-to-be-Hall-of-Famer's memoir. "We goin' out poetic and wild."

As Told To podcast guest Dave Jordan is a writer and filmmaker and founder of Instream Sports, a pioneering athlete-author writing platform. He is the co-author of the acclaimed memoir Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood, with the late Dave Parker, who was inducted into Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame just weeks after his death in June 2025, following a decade-long struggle with Parkinson's Disease.

Upon publication, Cobra was hailed by Tyler Kepner of The New York Times as "one of the most gripping and revealing baseball memoirs I've ever read." The book was nominated for a prestigious Casey Award, as one of the best books of the year, and stands as one of the wildest, most poetic memoirs on the baseball bookshelf.

Prior to his work with Parker, Dave Jordan was a regular contributor to the Sporting News, SB Nation, and the Hardball Times, and the co-author of Fastball John, written with former San Francisco Giants pitcher John D'Acquisto.

Dave Jordan's short film, "The Paper Mache Chase," starring Jim Gaffigan, Cynthia Nixon, and Spalding Gray, was featured at South by Southwest, the Brooklyn Film Festival, and several major film festivals. The film focuses on the crazy, stressful, and wildly competitive admissions process facing parents of New York City pre-schoolers.

At the time of Parker's death, author and subject were completing work on a follow-up collaboration to Cobra—King's Island, a look back at the Hall of Famer's rookie season with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the racial and political climate that surrounded the game in the summer of 1974.

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Upon publication, acclaimed chef and restaurateur Beejhy Barhany's Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond was hailed by The New York Times as "a work of extraordinary scope and ambition."

In the hands of As Told To podcast guest Elisa Ung, the award-winning book collaborator and food writer, her story leaps off the page and invites readers to taste the full flavor of a life purposefully lived, as well as the full flavors on offer at Beejhy Barhany's Tsion Café in Harlem.

Join us as Elisa Ung shares an excerpt from her collaboration with the celebrated chef.

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Best-selling ghostwriter Elisa Ung credits her lifelong love of musicals with gifting her the tools she relies on in her collaborative work. "They've taught me to listen for rhythms and cadences in authors' voices," she writes. "They help me understand how to respect readers by telling the most powerful story in the least amount of time."

Elisa's path to this type of storytelling might seem familiar to As Told To listeners, but she has walked it with a song in her heart… and an appetite for the stories we share at the family table, and in our family kitchens. A former news reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered the city's Oxycontin epidemic in the early 2000s and reported from New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, she traded her nose for hard news for a decade-long gig as a restaurant critic for the Bergen Record.

From there, she discovered a passion for writing about food—and about people who live their lives surrounded by food.

She is the co-author of the memoir-driven cookbook Mango and Peppercorns, with noted American chef Tung Nguyen, winner of the 2022 IACP award for Literary or Historical Food Writing; and, Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond, a 2025 New York Times "Best Cookbook of 2025" selection, with Beejhy Barhany, chef and owner of Harlem's celebrated Tsion Café.

Her 2024 collaboration with food and wellness blogger Monique Volz, The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook, was a New York Times best-seller.

Join us for a delicious reflection on what it takes for a journalist to empower her subjects, from diverse backgrounds, to sit down to table and share their own stories.

Learn more about Elisa Ung:

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• Threads
• Facebook

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"Sometimes my memories feel like a dream," writes Brandy, the Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, and actress, in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author and As Told To podcast guest Gerrick Kennedy.

In this "Between the Lines" episode, we revisit a passage from Brandy's just-published memoir Phases, in which she reflects on the inspiration for her title.

As you listen, consider what it takes for an accomplished journalist to help give singular voice to such a singular voice, while working to stitch a lifetime of dream-like memories into a compelling narrative.

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"You're a co-pilot, you are a therapist, you are an archivist," reflects journalist and cultural critic Gerrick Kennedy of his role as a ghostwriter.

Kennedy is the co-author of the just-published memoir Phases, from singer, songwriter and actress Brandy—an immediate #1 New York Times best-seller.

He is the author of two previous books, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ, Men's Health, Spin, and Playboy. A former staff writer for The Los Angeles Times, where he covered pop music and culture, Kennedy was honored in 2012 with an Emerging Journalist of the Year award by the National Association of Black Journalists. Regarding his current collaboration with Brandy, he had known the multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning artist for several years before they decided to work together on her memoir—and after his first few ghostwriting assignments, he's still getting used to his emerging role as the caretaker of someone else's story.

"You wear so many hats when you are doing a collaborative project," he says. "There are so many conversations that you have with a person, and so much of it is going to be, 'This is me releasing it, and I don't want to hold this myself anymore… and now you can carry it with you, but it's not for the book.' It gives you context. It gives you ideas. It gives you understanding. But it ultimately just ends up becoming another secret."

Join us as we consider what it takes to honor your subject's privacy while finding a way to attach those "secrets" to a public-facing narrative.

Learn more about Gerrick Kennedy:

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• Didn't We Almost Have It All
• Parental Discretion is Advised

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In this "Between the Lines" episode, we look back at Harvey Araton's 2011 classic When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks.

In any other NBA post-season, Harvey's latest book, The Goal of the Game, a soccer novel for young adults about a seventh-grader who discovers the power of the beautiful game to hurt and to heal, would be spotlighted here. But as the 2025-26 Knicks continue to fight for an NBA championship, we turn our attention to Harvey's thrilling reflection on the franchise's championship teams from the early 1970s.

As many basketball fans know, When the Garden Was Eden was later adapted for an ESPN "30 for 30" documentary, which Harvey co-produced.

Join us as As Told To host Daniel Paisner reads from the book's prologue—and then, dip into our show archives and listen to our full interview with Harvey Araton, a veteran sportswriter whose work continues to remind us that some of the most vibrant, most moving writing can be found in and around the sports pages.

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Harvey Araton is not quite ready to set down his pen. After covering sports for more than 40 years for the Staten Island Advance, the New York Post, the New York Daily News and The New York Times, where he served as a "Sports of the Times" columnist for more than 15 years, he continues to write.

His latest book, The Goal of the Game, a soccer novel for young adults about a seventh-grader who discovers the power of the beautiful game to hurt and to heal, was just published by Koehler Books.

The book takes its place on Harvey's ever-expanding bookshelf alongside one of his best-known books, When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks, which was later adapted for an ESPN "30 for 30" documentary, and now appears especially relevant as the Knicks are once again captivating Madison Square Garden crowds in pursuit of another championship.

Throughout his career, Harvey has written mostly about basketball, but he's also written about baseball—never more compellingly than in his New York Times best-selling book, Driving Mr. Yogi, about the unlikely friendship between Yankee legend Yogi Berra and then Yankee ace Ron Guidry. He's also covered 10 Olympic games, the Super Bowl, and virtually every major tennis tournament, and contributed regularly to every section of the newspaper, including the obituary section, where he continues to write advance obits for many of the athletes he used to cover.

Join us for a conversation on what it takes to report on the athletes who roam our fields of play, and to be on the constant lookout for ways to write about sports that transcend the game and speak into the human condition.

Learn more about Harvey Araton:

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• Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship

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Join us for our "Between the Lines" feature, as we shine an extra shaft of light on the work of our podcast guest. In this installment, we're highlighting a memoir entitled The Maple Crew, by pioneering filmmaker Jessie Maple, written in collaboration with As Told To podcast guest E. Danielle Butler.

The book stands on Danielle's bookshelf as a compelling example of her work, and her commitment to capturing the voices of men and women who inspire her and crafting those voices into stories that can inspire others.

For more on the life and career of Jessie Maple, you can check out her New York Times obituary, and visit the Criterion Channel to screen two of her best-known films—including "Will", the first independent feature-length film directed by an African-American woman.

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Narratives that matter.

That's the lane currently occupied by "collaborative storyteller" E. Danielle Butler, co-author of more than two dozen books, many of them written with business executives, pioneering artists, and faith leaders, helping to translate lived experience into lasting legacy.

It's a path she didn't know she was meant to walk. In fact, she didn't even know what a ghostwriter was until she became one. "But what I can trace throughout my life are threads of Black writers and storytellers weaving humanity and justice together," she writes. "Our words are creation. For centuries, we've used them to ignite movements, capture legacies, and cement ideas."

Over the course of her ghostwriting career, Danielle has given voice to men and women who inspire her, and she has made it her mission to ensure that their lives and careers can inspire others—as she set out to do in the book she co-authored with the trailblazing camerawoman Jessie Maple.

Her forthcoming collaboration, Finding God Every Day, written with child star and "Kid Pastor" Luke Tillman, will be published this fall by Zonderkids, the children's division of Zondervan Publishing.

Join us for an inspiring conversation on what it takes to shine meaningful light on lives well and purposefully lived… through story.

Learn more about E. Danielle Butler:

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• "The Maple Crew"
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In our latest "Between the Lines" installment, we shine a light on the best-selling collection of inspirational profiles by former "CBS Evening News" anchor Norah O'Donnell – the New York Times best-seller We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America, written with journalist and author Kate Andersen Brower.

Brower, our current podcast guest, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg News, has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, and The Washington Post. She is also the author of several books of her own, including the #1 New York Times best-seller The Residence, which was adapted into the hit Netflix series of the same name by producer Shonda Rhimes, as well as numerous other books, including First Women, First in Line, and Team of Five.

As she shares in our As Told To conversation, We the Women is her first collaboration, but it is not so very far removed from her work as a political reporter, and as a seasoned chronicler of lives lived in and around our seats of power.

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