Longform

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of four books, including Prozac Nation.

"It's not that hard to be a lawyer. Any fool can be a lawyer. It's really hard to be a writer. You have to be born with incredible amounts of talent. Then you have to work hard. Then you have to be able to handle tons of rejection and not mind it and just keep pushing away at it. You have to show up at people's doors. You can't just e-mail and text message people. You have to bang their doors down. You have to be interesting. You have to be fucking phenomenal to get a book published and then sell the book. When people think their writing career is not working out, it's not working out because it's so damn hard. It's not harder now than it was 20 years ago. It's just as hard. It was always hard."

Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14 for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@LizzieWurtzel

[16:00] Prozac Nation (1994)

[21:00] "The Return of the Replacements: Here Comes a Regular" (The Daily Beast • Sep 2013)

[31:00] "Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life" (New York • Jan 2013)

[45:30] "From Led Zeppelin to Breaking Bad: The Lamest Generation" (The Daily Beast • Sep 2013)

[46:15] "Fight the Power" (The New Yorker • Sep 1992)

[50:30] "Mitt Romney Is Likable Enough" (The Atlantic • Jan 2012)

[52:30] Thursday, Oct. 24: Wurtzel will be reading at No. 8 in New York. Details

[53:00] More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (2002)

[53:15] Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998)

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Gay Talese, who wrote for Esquire in the 1960s and currently contributes to The New Yorker, is the author of several books. His latest is A Writer's Life.

"I want to know how people did what they did. And I want to know how that compares with how I did what I did. That's my whole life. It's not really a life. It's a life of inquiry. It's a life of getting off your ass, knocking on a door, walking a few steps or a great distance to pursue a story. That's all it is: a life of boundless curiosity in which you indulge yourself and never miss an opportunity to talk to someone at length."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Warby Parker for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

[14:30] "The Crisis Manager: A profile of Joe Girardi" (The New Yorker • Sep 2012) [pdf]

[16:30] "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (Esquire • Apr 1966)

[22:30] "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold: Annotated" (with Elon Green • Nieman Storyboard • Oct 2013)

[16:30] "The Silent Season of a Hero" (Esquire • July 1966)

[24:00] "Mr. Bad News" (Esquire • Feb 1966)

[31:00] The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times, The Institution That Influences the World (1969)

[34:45] Honor Thy Father (1971)

[34:45] Thy Neighbor's Wife (1981)

[43:00] Talese's first story: "Times Square Anniversary" (The New York Times • Nov 1953)

[51:15] "Peter O'Toole on the Ould Sod" (Esquire • Aug 1963)

[104:15] Unto the Sons (1992)

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Jon Ronson, a contributor to This American Life, The Guardian and GQ, is the author of six books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest is Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries.

"The older you get, you realize that no uncomfortable fact makes your story worse. Contradictions are great. What's bad, what to me is the worst journalistic sin, is ridiculous polemicism. ... To me, the contradictions, the story not turning out the way you want—you have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the story."

Thanks to TinyLetter, EA SPORTS FIFA 14 and Learnvest for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@jonronson

jonronson.com

Ronson on Longform

Ronson's This American Life archive

Ronson's Guardian archive

Ronson's GQ archive

[7:15] "Who Takes the Class Out of Class Reunion" (This American Life • Jun 2006)

[21:30] Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001)

[26:30] The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004)

[47:00] The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011)

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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

"The categories are in motion. You turn into a Goliath, then you topple because of your bigness. You fall to the bottom again. And Davids, after a while, are no longer Davids. Facebook is no longer an underdog—it's now everything it once despised. I'm everything I once despised. When I was 25, I used to write these incredibly snotty, hostile articles attacking big-name, nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I'm like, 'Oh my God, they're doing a me on me!'"

Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14 for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@gladwell

gladwell.com

Gladwell on Longform

Gladwell's New Yorker archive

[6:30] "How David Beats Goliath" (New Yorker • May 2009)

[29:00] The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (Michael Lewis • 2006)

[32:15] Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (Janet Malcolm • 1981)

[32:15] The Journalist and the Murderer (Janet Malcolm • 1990)

[43:00] Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution

[56:30] "The Plauge of the Year" (New Republic • Jul 1995)

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Cord Jefferson is the West Coast Editor at Gawker.

"I consider myself to be a sincere human being. And I think that the way the internet carries itself, the way the internet has dialogues, is often insincere. That concerns me. I don't ever want to lose my sincerity. I don't ever want to lose my ability to feel emotional about things that I write about. I don't ever want to have a distance from everything that I write. I think that can be a danger of writing too much for the internet, that you develop this elitist distance from everything. That nothing really matters, you know?"

Thanks to TinyLetter and Hulu Plus for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@cordjefferson

Jefferson on Longform

Jefferson's Gawker archive

[4:00] Jefferson on MSNBC (MSNBC • Jul 2013)

[5:45] "Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness" (Gawker • Jul 2013)

[7:00] "Don Lemon: Bill O'Reilly's 'Got A Point' About Black People" (Huffington Post • Jul 2013)

[20:30] "Don't Stop Running" (The Awl • Dec 2012)

[20:30] "I Used to Love Her, But I Had to Flee Her" (Gawker • Jul 2012)

[31:45] "When People Write for Free, Who Pays?" (Gawker • Mar 2013)

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Hamilton Morris is the science editor for Vice and a contributor to Harper's.

"It's a shame that there isn't more of an interdisciplinary approach to a lot of scientific investigations, because often the result is that misinformation is produced. Again, there's misinformation in journalism and there's misinformation in science. And if you combine the best elements of both of those disciplines you can come a little bit closer to the truth. If you want to understand a drug phenomenon, you're going to need to look at it medically, chemically, anthropologically, you need to talk to people, you need to interview people, you need to look at the drug policy, the chemistry, the history—there's a lot of different factors that need to be examined in order to understand even the most simple, minute drug phenomenon. And if you're approaching something purely as a scientist, as an academic, there are huge limitations as to what you can do."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Hulu Plus for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@HamiltonMorris

Morris's Vice archive

[29:30] "Blood Spore" (Harper's • Jul 2013)

[46:00] "Excerpt: I Walked With a Zombie" (Harper's • Oct 2011)

[56:45] "The Magic Jews" (Vice • Sep 2008)

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Nancy Jo Sales writes for Vanity Fair and is the author of The Bling Ring.

"I'm a mom now, so my life's a little different. I can't do certain things that I used to do, and I won't, because they're dangerous or ridiculous or keep me out till five in the morning or whatever. But back in those days, I didn't even really have—I didn't even have a pet! This was everything I did. This was my whole life, this passion to find out these things, and do these things, and see these things, and have these adventures and be able to report about this street life that rarely gets talked about. I just didn't really have a lot of boundaries in those days. I don't think I had any, really. And if you really throw yourself into something, you can get a great story. You can also not have a life of your own."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

Sales on Longform

Sales's Vanity Fair archive

[8:30] "A Star Is Bred" (New York • Jul 1996) [pdf]

[11:00] "Leo, Prince of the City" (New York • Jun 1998)

[14:45] "Prep-School Gangsters" (New York • Dec 1996)

[21:00] "The Crack-Up" (New York • Sep 1997) [pdf]

[30:45] "Hip Hop Debs" (Vanity Fair • Sep 2000)

[37:30] "Courtney Love in a Cold Climate" (Vanity Fair • Nov 2011)

[41:30] "Money Boss Player: Donald Trump" (Vibe • May 1999) [pdf]

[42:30] "The Suspects Wore Louboutins" (Vanity Fair • Mar 2010)

[51:45] "The Baby Dinner" (New York • Nov 1999)

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Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

"People don't really care about issues so much as they care about the stories and the characters that bring those issues to life. ... A story needs an engine or something to propel you forward and it can't just be a collection of like, 'Oh, hmm, this was interesting over here and this was interesting over there.' Realizing that helped me sit down with all my stuff on trafficking and labor abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan and say 'What are the five craziest things that I found here and how could I weave them together in a way that would actually have some forward motion?'"

Thanks to TinyLetter and HuluPlus for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

Stillman on Longform

Stillman's New Yorker archive

[6:30] "The Throwaways" (New Yorker • Aug 2012)

[15:00] "The Invisible Army" (New Yorker • Jun 2011)

[31:00] "Taken by the State" (New Yorker • Aug 2013)

[49:00] Soul Searching: A Girl's Guide to Finding Herself (2001)

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Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine.

It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet") and I got to leave it. And even when I was writing the story, I was only experiencing what they were experiencing in a super fractional way. The hard part is that it was a story where there are no breaks, there's no—it is this relentless, sort of bottomless pain and I struggled with that. … A story can only have so many crushing moments, otherwise they just all wash out. But the other truth is: it is what it is. It's an impossibly heartbreaking situation. And making the story anything other than relentlessly heartbreaking would've been doing an injustice to what they're dealing with.

Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@elisaslow

Saslow on Longform

Saslow's Washington Post archive

[14:45] "Life of a Salesman" (Washington Post • Oct 2012)

[23:30] "In Florida, a Food-stamp Recruiter Deals With Wrenching Choices" (Washington Post • Apr 2013)

[30:30] "After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet" (Washington Post • Jun 2013)

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Joshuah Bearman is the co-founder of Epic Magazine and a freelance writer. His latest story is "Coronado High."

"People who know me well will realize that parts of this story are actually about me. … It's about loss of innocence and getting to a certain point in your life where you realize the excitement of youth is over. Life at a certain point gets complicated and there are consequences and things get hard. These are people who dealt with those consequences in a way that I never did — they had to go to prison or destroy their friends lives — but that's what I liked about this story. It's a true crime story, but it became universal when I realized that there is this emotional experience that these characters go through that anybody can relate to."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Igloo Software for sponsoring this week's episode.

Show notes:

@JoshBearman

Bearman on Longform

[2:45] "Coronado High" (The Atavist • Aug 2013)

[3:30] Excerpt of the GQ version of "Coronado High" (GQ • Jun 2013)

[6:00] "The Great Escape" (Wired • Apr 2007)

[14:00] Longform Podcast #11: Bearman discusses Argo

[20:00] "Baghdad Country Club" (The Atavist • Jan 2012)

[24:30] Epic Magazine

[25:15] Longform Podcast #17: Joshua Davis

[42:00] "The Gold Heist: A Third Interview with a Nuclear Physicist" (McSweeney's • Mar 2001)

[43:15] "The Perfect Game" (Harper's • Jul 2008) [subscription required]

[44:30] "It's Always a Good Idea to Get Some Manure on Your Boots" (The Believer • April 2004)

[46:30] "Heaven's Gate: The Sequel" (L.A. Weekly • Mar 2007)

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