As Told To

"Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods," podcast guest Samuel G. Freedman told his Columbia Journalism School graduate students on the first day of his final semester after 35 years of teaching. "That's all I'm asking of you. Not much."

No, not much. And yet what Sam Freedman asked of his students during his tenure as one of our leading journalism educators was everything. Before his retirement this spring, his popular book-writing seminar led to the publication of 95 books by his students.

"He's been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years," noted Grove Atlantic executive editor George Gibson, in a New York Times profile on Sam's career and his legacy in journalism and publishing.

Sam was named the nation's outstanding journalism professor in 1977 by the Society of Professional Journalists and was awarded Columbia University's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. A former staff reporter and columnist for The New York Times, his work as appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Tablet, Salon, and New York magazine.

He is the author of 10 acclaimed books, including The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, a 1997 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights; and, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life, which was reissued in a new edition earlier this year.

Learn more about Samuel Freedman:

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Jane Leavy is the New York Times best-selling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, and The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created. She is also the author of the comic novel Squeeze Play, hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "the best novel ever written about baseball."

A longtime sportswriter and feature writer for The Washington Post, Jane covered baseball, tennis and the Olympics during her tenure at the paper. She also wrote features for the Post's "Style" section on sports, politics and popular culture. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Grantland, The Los Angeles Times, and Tablet.

In her latest book—Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It—Jane waxes philosophic and not-quite-catastrophic about the game she has loved her entire life, and asks readers to join her in re-imagining the way that game is played, and all the ways we might play it better, or more meaningfully, or more relevantly. In the book, just published by Grand Central Publishing, she writes movingly and hilariously and insightfully on our national pastime, offering a thinking fan's take on what the game has become, and what the game has lost over the years.

Join us for our Season 5 opener, as we visit with one of baseball's biggest fans… and one of publishing's finest storytellers.

Learn more about Jane Leavy:

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• Threads

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Episode originally aired on Nov. 2, 2021.

"Don't make it out, make it better."

That's a line from podcast guest D. Watkins, offered in the book trailer for his book of essays We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America, in which he gives voice to the voiceless and shines meaningful light on what it means to come of age in East Baltimore, in one of America's poorest black neighborhoods.

It's a line you might hear as well from D.'s NBA legend Carmelo Anthony, himself a product of an uncertain, unforgiving environment–the housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Baltimore.

In the future Hall-of-Famer's just-published memoir, Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised: A Memoir of Survival and Hope, an immediate New York Times best-seller, D. helps his celebrated co-author share his story of finding a way out of no way at all, sounding the call for social justice and offering a guidepost for readers looking to pull success from struggle.

More than any other athlete's memoir in recent memory, the book offers a perfect pairing of author and subject, as D. brings his own perspective to Anthony's hard-won experience.

An editor-at-large for Salon, D.'s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He is the author of the New York Times best-sellers The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir and The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America.

Connect with D. Watkins:

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Episode originally aired on April 11, 2023

"Writing is not what you start," writes podcast guest Nell Scovell in her scathingly funny memoir Just the Funny Parts. "It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see."

Indeed, Nell offers this observation from a place of hard-won experience. A veteran television writer ("Newhart," "The Simpsons," "Late Night with David Letterman," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "Murphy Brown," "Coach," and on and on), Nell understands what it means to get an idea on its feet and out in front of an audience. As Sheryl Sandberg's collaborator on the #1 New York Times best-seller Lean In, she helped to create a guidepost for a generation of women looking for a shared compass point in their lives and careers—a book Nell says she wishes she'd read at twenty-five, as a woman working in the male-dominated field of television comedy, instead of helping to write at fifty-two.

Join us as Nell reflects on a lifetime working in collaboration with some of the brightest (and least accommodating!) minds in television, on what it was like to write jokes for President Obama at the White House Correspondent's Dinner ("Obama, out!"), and on what it was like to be Spy magazine's first staff writer, and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New York Times.

Learn more about Nell Scovell:

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• LinkedIn
• PostNews

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Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Visitation Street, These Women, Sing Her Down, and the just-published Ecstasy, a reimagined contemporary feminist horror story hailed by the Washington Post as a "stiletto-sharp remake of Euripides."

She is also the co-author of The New York Times best-selling middle-grade Epoca fantasy series, created by the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant and written under the name Ivy Claire.

Her books have been awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize, the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and she has been a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Award.

A former collegiate and professional squash player, Ivy has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program.

Writing fiction and playing squash are a lot alike, she says. "Both teach self-reliance and self-motivation. And both practice deception."

Learn more about Ivy Pochoda:

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• Pochoda's appearance on Writer's Bone

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Amy Silverberg is a comedian and writer based in Los Angeles. Her stand-up comedy has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, NPR, and Amazon Prime. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, Granta, and The New Yorker. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from USC, where she now teaches.

Prior to publication, Amy's debut novel First Time, Long Time was hailed by Oprah Daily as "a funny, high-spirited novel…the book humorously describes a lesser-seen side of Los Angeles: the unglamorous neighborhood of Van Nuys, the humiliations of fame, the agony of trying—and failing—to be someone else, and the thrill of discovering yourself along the way."

"Somebody is always going through something," she writes in the novel, just published by Grand Central Publishing. "Somebody is always reading a book and finding himself there."

Join us for a funny, thoughtful look at the ways Amy's comedy informs her writing, the ways her writing fuels her comedy, and the many ways she finds herself in her work.

Learn more about Amy Silverberg:

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Veteran journalist Carla Sosenko has written for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, People, Self, Newsweek, and numerous other publications. Her work has also appeared in Time Out New York (where she was editor-in-chief), Entertainment Weekly (where she was executive editor), In Touch (where she was managing editor) and Us Weely (where she is currently executive editor at large).

She is also the co-author of A Dirty Guide to a Clean Home: Housekeeping Hacks You Can't Live Without, written with TikTok star Melissa Dilkes Pateras.

In her just-published collection of essays entitled I'll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body, Carla writes with candor and great good cheer about growing up with a rare congenital vascular disorder known as Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome—a disorder that shaped the way she looked out at the world, and the ways the world looked back in turn.

"If you are thin, even if you are too thin, life is inherently safer," she writes. "The world order puts thin people at the top, with the rest of us below struggling for air. Many of us have been gasping for decades."

In her new book—hailed by Harper's Bazaar prior to publication as "raw, vulnerable, and utterly hilarious—she breathes deep and sounds a clarion call for anyone who has ever been made to feel like an outsider or told they should take up less space.

Learn more about Carla Sosenko:

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• Threads
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Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future—a collection of inspiring profiles of individuals working to make a difference with the help of their faith communities—is podcast host Daniel Paisner's fifth collaboration with former Ohio governor John Kasich.

The collaboration goes back to the very first book the two wrote together—the 2006 New York Times best-seller Stand for Something: The Battle for America's Soul—as Gov. Kasich was completing his ninth term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 12th district. They would go on to write about the governor's long-time Bible study group, about his 2016 presidential campaign, and a primer on what it takes to live a life of purpose and meaning, encouraging readers to be the change they wanted to see in this world.

In Heaven Help Us, Gov. Kasich continues to explore the themes that have defined his public life, as he shines a powerful light on a group of extraordinary people who are working selflessly to transform their communities—work that is being magnified by their churches, synagogues and mosques.

"My goal here is to get readers to think outside themselves for a bit, to think bigger than themselves," he writes. "To open their hearts to what's possible instead of what's impossible."

Learn more about John Kasich:

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• It's Up to Us
• Every Other Monday
• Two Paths
• Courage Is Contagious

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"I never thought I would have a career in the television business," writes podcast guest Art Bell, the founding father of the Comedy Central network and the longtime president of Court TV.

While at Comedy Central, which had its origins at HBO as "The Comedy Channel," Art helped to launch the careers of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, and to provide a platform for up-and-coming comedians. He also found the time to co-author a humor book with his network colleagues—Web Sightings: A Collection of Websites We'd Like to See.

At Court TV, he oversaw the network's daily live courtroom coverage and the production of hundreds of hours of original true-crime television series, documentaries, and movies, becoming a guiding force behind one of the most successful brand evolutions in cable television. He credits his time at Court TV with helping him to master the mechanics of storytelling. "The challenge," he said in a recent interview, "was to find the pacing that worked for the story, to include twists, exploit red herrings, and most of all, to make sure the audience stayed riveted and came back after the commercial break."

Art's first novel, What She's Hiding, was just published by Ulysses Press, which had previously published his memoir, Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lose My Sense of Humor. In addition to his books, he has published short stories, non-fiction and satire in several journals, including Lowestoft Chronicle, The Ocotillo Review, and Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature.

Learn more about Art Bell:

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• Threads

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"Comedy writers learn early on that we have a high degree of anonymity," writes podcast guest Alan Zweibel in his memoir Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier. "Our words are spoken publicly by others who often have famous faces. Or by unknown people on their way to having famous faces."

As one of the founding writers on Saturday Night Live, Alan's words were given voice by a cast of virtual unknowns, all on their way to becoming famous faces, eventually earning worldwide acclaim as some of the most iconic comic performers of their generation. Over the course of his 50-year career, he has penned jokes for dozens of Borscht Belt comedians and written for some of SNL's most memorable characters (such as Gilda Radner's "Roseanne Rosannadanna," John Belushi's "Samurai," and Garrett Morris's "Chico Escuela"), and helped to craft SNL producer Lorne Michaels's now-legendary appeal to invite the Beatles to appear on the show for the standard artist fee of $3,000.

Alan is the recipient of five Emmy Awards for his work in television, which in addition to SNL also includes "It's Garry Shandling's Show" (which he co-created and produced), "The Late Show with David Letterman," and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." He is the author of 11 books, including the 2006 Thurber Prize-winning novel The Other Shulman, and Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner—A Sort of Romantic Comedy, and six off-Broadway plays. He also collaborated with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award-winning play "700 Sundays," and with Martin Short on his Broadway hit "Fame Becomes Me," and co-wrote the screenplays for the films "Dragnet," "North," "The Story of Us," and "Here Today."

He joins us on the podcast to reflect on a singular career as one of our leading comedy writers and humorists—and a wickedly funny body of work that has earned him an honorary Ph.D. from the State University of New York, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America, East.

Learn more about Alan Zweibel:

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• Facebook
• Instagram
• Bluesky

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