Longform

Bonnie Tsui is a journalist and author of the new book Why We Swim.

“I am a self-motivated person. I really don’t like being told what to do. I’ve thought about this many times over the last 16 years that I’ve been a full-time freelancer... even though I thought my dream was to always and forever be living in New York, working in publishing, working at a magazine, being an editor, writing. When I was an editor, I kind of hated it. I just didn’t like being chained to a desk.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@bonnietsui

bonnietsui.com

[02:34] Why We Swim (Algonquin • 2020)

[03:50] American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods (Tsui • Free Press • 2009)

[11:02] The Deep (2012)

[28:25] "With His Absence, My Artist Father Taught Me the Art of Vanishing" (Catapult • Feb 2019)

[42:11] "After Fires, Napa and Sonoma Tourism Industry Is Getting Back on Its Feet" (New York Times • Oct 2017)

[45:04] "Child Care: What — and Who — It Takes to Raise a Family" (California Sunday • July 2019)

[49:38] "The Break: Female Big-Wave Surfers Prepare to Compete on Mavericks’s 50-Foot Waves for the First Time" (California Sunday • Aug 2018)

[50:46] "Meet the Women Who Are Changing What it Means to be a Mom and a Professional Athlete" (Sports Illustrated • Dec 2019)

[54:03] "You Are Doing Something Important When You Aren’t Doing Anything" (New York Times • June 2019)

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Lulu Miller is a former producer at Radiolab and a co-founder of Invisibilia. Her new book is Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life.

“I think almost every radio story I’ve ever done comes down to the question of me trying to ask a person how they get through this life thing. How they get through this breakup. How they get through being disabled in a family that's crushing them. How they get through having a head that's poisonous. Every story is just, Oh, what's your trick?”

Thanks to Mailchimp, Literati, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@lmillernpr

lutimestwo.com

Miller's archive at NPR

Invisibilia

[04:57] Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (Simon & Schuster • 2020)

[15:18] "The Reluctant Immortalist" (Invisibilia • April 2020)

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Naomi Klein is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. Her most recent book is On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

“I have no idea whether we will do this. All I know is there is a slim chance, a very slim chance, that we could make things a lot better than if we do nothing and just let it burn. The stakes of that are so high that I’m not going to spend my time trying to figure out whether our chances are good or not. I’m just gonna try to enlarge those chances.”

Thanks to Mailchimp, Literati, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@NaomiAKlein

naomiklein.org

Klein on Longform

[20:09] "The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview." (The Nation • April 2016)

[23:46] On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. (Naomi Klein • Simon & Schuster • 2019)

[25:38] No Logo (Picador • 1999)

[25:39] The Shock Doctrine (Picador • 2007)

[25:40] This Changes Everything (Simon & Schuster • 2014)

[44:31] "In a Summer of Wildfires and Hurricanes, My Son Asks 'Why Is Everything Going Wrong?'" (The Intercept • Sep 2017)

[45:13] The Take (2004)

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Eva Holland is a freelance journalist and a correspondent for Outside. Her new book is Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.

“I'm less caught up in my freelance career anxieties every day that this goes on. Maybe I'll become a paramedic, who knows? Magazines I write for are already shutting down because of this. You can only freak out so much before you decide that if you end up having to find a new way to make a living, that's what you'll do.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@evaholland

Holland's archive at Outside Magazine

Holland on Longform

[07:31] Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear (Eva Holland • The Experiment • 2020)

[30:50] "No Sleep 'Till Fairbanks" (SB Nation • March 2013)

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Ed Yong is the author of I Contain Multitudes and a science writer at The Atlantic . His most recent article is "How the Pandemic Will End."

“Normally when I write things that are about a pressing societal issue, those pieces feel like they’re about things that need to get solved in timeframes of, say, months or years. ... But now I’m writing pieces that are affecting people’s choices and lives, and hopefully the direction of the entire country, on an hourly basis. The changes I hope to see, I hope to see immediately. Like right now. And that does create a massive sense of urgency, a sense of pressing, incredibly high stakes. And it’s a burden.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@edyong209

edyong.me

Yong on Longform

[01:08] "How the Pandemic Will End" (The Atlantic • March 2020)

[02:49] "The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?" (The Atlantic • July 2018)

[28:21] "How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump" (The Atlantic • Dec 2016)

[39:33] Flash Forward Podcast

[46:02] "The Last Giraffes on Earth" (The Atlantic • March 2020)

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Charlie Warzel is a writer-at-large for The New York Times opinion page.

“I’m relying on my morals more than I normally do, but less on my gut. The stakes are just so high.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@cwarzel

Warzel's archive at The New York Times

Longform Podcast #291: Charlie Warzel

Warzel on Longform

[05:08] "Please, Don’t Go Out to Brunch Today" (New York Times • March 2020)

[10:52] "Please, Listen to Experts About the Coronavirus. Then Step Up." (New York Times • March 2020)

[29:57] "They Went off the Grid. They Came Back to Coronavirus." (New York Times • March 2020)

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Jon Mooallem is a journalist, author, and host of The Walking Podcast. His latest book is This is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together.

“There is this impulse that we have, this very clearly documented impulse that people everywhere have, to help. It sounds tacky, but when the bottom drops out, when ordinary life is overturned and there’s this upheaval or this disruption—if it’s a natural disaster or even something like this, that there’s ... in the book I call it a ‘civic immune response.’ People do spontaneously help each other, they work together, they collaborate. This whole idea that society falls apart and everyone descends into madness and violence is just not true. And we know that. We have science that shows it.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@jmooallem

jonmooallem.com

Mooallem on Longform

Longform Podcast #74: Jon Mooallem

[08:29] This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together (Random House • 2020)

[11:26] "The Senseless Logic of the Wild" (New York Times Magazine • March 2019)

[11:32] "Neanderthals Were People, Too" (New York Times Magazine • Jan 2017)

[11:35] "We Have Fire Everywhere" (New York Times Magazine • July 2019)

[34:45] Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (Penguin • 2013)

[34:58] Black Prairie's soundtrack album to Wild Ones

[35:39] "Wild Ones Live" (99% Invisible • Oct 2013)

[36:47] "Death, Redesigned" (California Sunday • April 2015)

[37:46] "One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die" (New York Times Magazine • Jan 2017)

[44:10] Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Thornton Wilder • 1938)

[53:45] The Walking Podcast

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Jad Abumrad is the co-creator and host of Radiolab. His new podcast is Dolly Parton's America.

“There’s a way in which, I think, it felt more honest to be more confused in our stories. So that’s where we went.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@JadAbumrad

jadabumrad.com

[03:27] "Patient Zero" (Radiolab • Nov 2011)

[04:34] Dolly Parton's America

[17:32] 9 to 5 (1980)

[19:00] "Dixie Disappearance" (Dolly Parton's America • Dec 2017)

[17:32] "My Tennessee Mountain Home" (1973)

[33:10] More Perfect

[33:19] "The Architect" (More Perfect • Dec 2017)

[36:12] Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville • 1835)

[40:05] "Where Does the Term Redneck Come From?" (Slate • Dec 2019)

[40:58] "Race" (Radiolab • Dec 2008)

[42:10] "Yellow Rain" (Radiolab • Sep 2012)

[1:05:47] "Playing God" (Radiolab • Aug 2016)

[1:06:21] "Words" (Radiolab • Aug 2010)

[1:07:31] "Musical Language" (Radiolab • Sep 2007)

[1:08:07] "Lucy" (Radiolab • Feb 2010)

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Mara Hvistendahl is a freelance reporter and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her first book, Unnatural Selection. Her new book is The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage.

“In times of tension, Cold War historians believe that there’s this mirroring that goes on, that we start to behave like the enemy, and that that is the big risk. And I feel like that’s the moment we’re in now.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@MaraHvistendahl

marahvistendahl.com

Hvistendahl on Longform

The Scientist and the Spy excerpt

[00:45] The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage (Mara Hvistendahl • Riverhead • 2020)

[04:20] "Some People Just Smell Like Republicans" (Village Voice • Sep 2004)

[09:36] "Rich Pickings" (Financial Times • Nov 2007)

[10:42] Hvistendahl's archive at Science

[15:20] "Half the Sky: How China’s Gender Imbalance Threatens Its Future" (Virginia Quarterly Review • Fall 2008)

[15:20] "Can AI Escape Our Control and Destroy Us?" (Popular Science • May 2019)

[16:42] "Meet the Flat-Earthers of the Modern Era" (Popular Science • Oct 2019)

[16:44] "Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking" (Wired • Dec 2017)

[22:33] "The FBI’s China Obsession" (The Intercept • Feb 2020)

[25:37] North by Northwest (1959)

[30:20] "Some True Information is Impossible to Censor" (Matter • Oct 2014)

[41:12] "‘If You Want to Kill Someone, We Are the Right Guys’" (Wired • April 2019)

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Hannah Dreier is a reporter at The Washington Post and the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

“You can’t come up with a good story idea in the office. I’ve never had a good idea that I just came up with out of thin air. It always comes from being on the ground.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

@hannahdreier

hannahdreier.com

Dreier on Longform

[01:49] "Former MS-13 Member Who Secretly Helped Police is Deported" (ProPublica • Jan 2019)

[02:05] "Trust and Consequences" (Washington Post • Jan 2020)

[02:33] Dreier's archive at New York

[02:35] Dreier on This American Life

[02:37] "How a Crackdown on MS-13 Caught Up Innocent High School Students" (New York Times Magazine • Dec 2019)

[07:52] "A Child's Scraped Knee a Life or Death Matter in Venezuela" (Associated Press • Oct 2016)

[08:50] "Life on the Line in Venezuela as Economic Crisis Worsens" (Associated Press • July 2016)

[15:55] "Venezuela's Newest Shortage: Breast Implants" (Hartford Courant • Sep 2014)

[17:52] "No Food, No Teachers, Violence in Failing Venezuela Schools" (Hartford Courant • Jun 2016)

[30:29] "How a Crackdown on MS-13 Caught Up Innocent High School Students" (New York Times Magazine • Jan 2019)

[30:34] "The Disappeared" (ProPublica • Sep 2018)

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