Doug Bock Clark has written for GQ, Wired, and The New Yorker. His new book is The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life.

“I think for me the answer has always been you just find the people. You just listen to their stories. I think we're all microcosms, right? We're all fractals of the bigger world. Whether it's my own life or your life or the Lamalerans or other people I've encountered reporting. I think one of the things I'm constantly aware of is how these sort of greater world historical forces are working on us and shaping our lives. For more people than most people would assume, if you just followed their life and looked at it in the particulars but also in the broader circumstances, you could probably draw larger themes from them and their experiences. I never had any worries about whether I could expand the Lamaleran story. It was always just about getting those specific stories right, and I knew the rest of it would come.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests

@DougBockClark

Clark on Longform

[1:10] "The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage" (GQ • Jul 2018)

[1:20] "The Untold Story of Kim Jong-nam’s Assassination" (GQ • Sep 2018)

[2:10] The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life (Little, Brown and Company • 2019)

[2:10] "The Whalers' Odyssey" (The Atavist Magazine • Nov 2018)

[2:20] The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2019)

[8:00] Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Katherine Boo • Random House • 2014)

[16:40] "The Second Tsunami" (Glimpse • Oct 2011)

[22:20] "The Bot Bubble: How click farms have inflated social media currency" (The New Republic • Apr 2015)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices