Cover Story

In this episode, we are talking to writer and editor Chris Lehmann, an editor of The Baffler, a former managing editor of The New Republic and a former editor of In These Times. He was described by the TNR’s owner as someone, who “who was able to restore stability of The New Republic after a decade of incessant turmoil.” Chris is an author of political and cultural thought long-form journalism himself and the author of two books about money – Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class (Haymarket, 2011) and The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville, 2017) – about the influence of Christianity on American capitalism. He is working on another book proposal.

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What's it like to cover Donald Trump? In this episode, veteran American journalist Allen Salkin explains. 

For over three decades, Salkin has written about many things for many high-profile publications, including The New York Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and others. He is also the author of a number of well-received books:  Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2008); From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (2014); and most recently The Method to the Madness: How Donald Trump Went from Penthouse to White House in Fifteen Years--An Oral History written with political reporter Aaron Short in 2018.

In this episode, we are discussing his 2019 Los Angeles Magazine piece The Biggest Loser: Why Donald Trump Couldn’t Hack It in Hollywood.

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David Schmalz is a staff writer at the Monterey County Weekly, where his longform pieces have won numerous awards from the California News Publishers Association, including a first place for enterprise reporting in 2014 for an expose he wrote about a local church's attempt to evict residents from 98 federally subsidized apartments from a property it managed. Those residents were able to keep their homes, and the property remains the largest affordable housing complex on the Monterey Peninsula.

His reporting also helped lead to the closure of the last remaining coastal sand mine in America, as well as overturning the approvals for one of the largest proposed developments in Monterey County history, which would have razed tens of thousands of coast live oaks to build single family homes and a horse-racing track.

Other than the four years he's spent working or traveling abroad, Schmalz has lived and worked his entire life in California.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications.

In this episode, we are talking about his coverage of New York Politics – the resignation of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and likely next mayor of the NYC, Eric Adams.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Welcome to Cover Story, a podcast by New Books Network devoted to long form journalism. Today, we are talking to Texas-based writer Sarah Hepola. Hepola is most known from her brave writing about drinking and the 2015 bestselling memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.

She's appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, Salon and Texas Monthly, where she is a writer-at-large. Today we are talking about her recent story “In Mobile City Everybody Knows Your Name” from August 2021 Texas Monthly. A very fresh piece.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Today we are talking to a New Yorker staff writer Carrie Battan about her piece from March of this year "How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community" – about how a quote unquote “nice website about yarn” got involved in radical politics.

Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018. She has contributed to the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, and the Web site Pitchfork, where she worked as a staff writer from 2011 to 2014. She lives in Brooklyn.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. The piece we are discussing here is Child’s Play. What can Wittgenstein teach us about raising kids published in June 2021 in The Believer.

His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books. It has subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.

He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books.

A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Today we are talking with Becca Andrews, a journalist at Mother Jones, where she writes about reproductive rights and gender. The story we discuss is “When Choice is 221 Miles Away: The Nightmare of Getting an Abortion in the South” and its follow up.

Becca’s debut work of nonfiction, No Choice, based on her Mother Jones cover story about the past, present, and future of Roe v. Wade, will be published by in 2022.

Andrews is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and wrote for newspapers in her home state of Tennessee.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013.

The piece we are talking about is The Politics of a Second Gilded Age, published in February 2021 in The Jacobin.

His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard UP, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. Karp is now at work on a book about the emergence of anti-slavery mass politics in the United States, and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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In this episode, we are talking to ProPublica investigative journalist Justin Elliott.

Justin has been with ProPublica since 2012 and writes about business and economics, as well as money and influence in politics. He has produced stories for the New York Times and NPR. His work on TurboTax maker Intuit – a story we are discussing today -- won a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism.

The story of how 70% of Americans are eligible to file their taxes for free, but no one can pull it off has many chapters. Read about it here, here, and here. 

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with “moral force.”

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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