Longform
Interviews with writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters about how they do their work. Hosted by Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff.
Episodes
July 16, 2024 • 33 mins
This is the story of what happens when Evan Ratliff, co-host of Longform and a longtime tech journalist, makes a digital copy of himself, powered by AI, in order to understand how amazing and scary and utterly ridiculous the world is about to get.
In Episode 1, Evan clones his voice, hooks it up to ChatGPT and his phone line, and sends it off to tangle with customer service representatives.
New episodes drop on Tuesdays.
Visit shel...
Mark as Played
July 2, 2024 • 3 mins
What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Over the past six months, Evan Ratliff has been trying to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then he sent them out… as himself. They talked to sources and colleagues (including his fellow Longform co-hosts), friends and fam...
Mark as Played
June 26, 2024 • 66 mins
John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, and GQ. He is the author of Pulphead and the forthcoming The Prime Minister of Paradise: The True Story of a Lost American History.
“I love making pieces of writing and trying to find the right language to say what I mean. It's such a wonderful way of being alive in the world. I mean, your material is all aro...
Mark as Played
June 26, 2024 • 43 mins
The hosts answer a few listener questions.
Evan’s picks for some podcasts to try:
Creative Nonfiction
Press Box
The Stacks Podcast:
Sunday Long Read
True Stories
Question Everything
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mark as Played
June 19, 2024 • 50 mins
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author and journalist. His next book is The Message.
“I don’t think we have the luxury as journalists of avoiding things because people might say bad things about us. I don’t even think we have the luxury of avoiding things because we might get fired. I don’t think we have the luxury of avoiding them because somebody might cancel some sort of public speech that we have. I then have to ask you, what are you in...
Mark as Played
June 12, 2024 • 54 mins
Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a co-host of Time to Say Goodbye.
“At some point, you have to kick it out the door, and it’s never finished to the degree that you would finish a magazine piece. But it, in some ways, is more interesting because it is produced in a short amount of time, and it’s read as something that is not supposed to be complete. It’s just meant to provoke or to provide thought or whateve...
Mark as Played
June 5, 2024 • 56 mins
Joseph Cox is a cybersecurity journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. His new book is Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever.
“In the not too distant future, I will be a very old man, and maybe I won't be able to spend all day talking to drug traffickers. I will be mentally and physically exhausted. So I will doggedly pursue the story right now while I can.”
Show notes:
@josephfcox
Cox's 404 Medi...
Mark as Played
May 29, 2024 • 75 mins
Tavi Gevinson is a writer, actor, and the founder of Rookie. Her new zine is Fan Fiction.
“Stories are unstable, and memory is unstable, and identity is unstable. All of these things that I've tried to make permanent in writing, they're actually unstable. So even though it's tempting to go, Oh, that was fake, it's more like, No, it was just temporary.”
Show notes:
@tavitulle
tavigevinson.world
Gevinson on Longform
Gevinson on L...
Mark as Played
May 22, 2024 • 60 mins
Rachel Khong is a journalist and author whose latest novel is Real Americans.
“It's about the ways in which we miss each other as human beings and can't fully communicate what it is like to be ourselves. … And I think that's what makes it so interesting to me, to work on a novel and to spend so much time trying to get down on the page what it feels like to be a human being who's alive. … I think the effort itself is what human rela...
Mark as Played
May 15, 2024 • 68 mins
Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com. She hosts the podcast Normal Gossip and is the author of the upcoming book You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.
“I was always very interested in how you strategize a creative career. And I think that that is an unsexy thing to talk about, right? It's much sexier to be like, Oh, I love working on my sentence-level craft, which is not true for ...
Mark as Played
May 8, 2024 • 51 mins
Lissa Soep is an audio producer, editor and author whose latest book is Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End.
“I am so keenly aware of how much my own voice is a product of editing relationships and co-producing relationships with other people's words. … I will forever feel indebted to those then young people who are now writers and educators and therapists. … I feel like my voice is sort of ...
Mark as Played
May 1, 2024 • 52 mins
PJ Vogt is the host of Search Engine.
“One of our tests editorially is if we think we’ve got something good, but we haven’t started reporting or recording on it, I’ll just try asking the question at dinner and stuff. If it derails conversations, that’s a really good sign.”
Show notes:
@PJVogt
Vogt’s Substack
Vogt on Longform Podcast
03:00 “Why Are There So Many Illegal Weed Stores in New York City? (Part 1)” (Search Engine • Ma...
Mark as Played
April 24, 2024 • 54 mins
Lindsay Peoples is the editor-in-chief of The Cut.
“You see so many incredible people make one mistake and lose their job or they speak out about something and then the next day something blows up. And so I do think that I often feel like I have to be so careful. And that's hard to do because I'm just naturally curious and I want to know and I want to find and explore and do the things. But I'm aware that … people think I'm too you...
Mark as Played
April 19, 2024 • 40 mins
Jason Motlagh, a journalist and filmmaker, is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the founder of Blackbeard Films. He won the Polk's Sydney Schanberg Prize for “This Will End in Blood and Ashes,” an account of the collapse of order in Haiti.
“Once you've gotten used to this kind of metabolism, it can be hard to walk away from it. Ordinary life can be a little flat sometimes. And so that's always kind of built in. I accept th...
Mark as Played
April 18, 2024 • 29 mins
Brian Howey is a freelance journalist who won the Polk Award for Justice Reporting after exposing a deceptive police tactic widely used in California. He began the project, which was eventually published by the Los Angeles Times and Reveal, as a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
“It’s one thing to hear about this tactic and hear about parents being questioned in this way. It’s another thing entirely...
Mark as Played
April 17, 2024 • 44 mins
Meribah Knight is a reporter with Nashville Public Radio. She won the Polk Award for Podcasting for “The Kids of Rutherford County,” produced with ProPublica and Serial, which revealed a shocking approach to juvenile discipline in one Tennessee county.
“Where does it leave me? It leaves me with a searing anger that is going to propel me to the next thing. But we’ve made some real improvement. And that’s worth celebrating. That’s wo...
Mark as Played
April 16, 2024 • 34 mins
Jesse Coburn is an investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He won the Polk Award for Local Reporting for "Ghost Tags," his series on the black market for temporary license plates.
“You can imagine this having never become a problem, because it’s so weird. What a weird scam. I’m going to print and sell tens of thousands of paper license plates. But someone figured it out. And then a lot more people followed. It just exploded.”
This i...
Mark as Played
April 15, 2024 • 42 mins
Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers won this year's George Polk Award for Television Reporting for “Inside Wagner,” their Vice News investigation of Russian mercenaries on the Ukraine front and in the Central African Republic.
“One of the best takeaways I got from seven or eight years at Vice is that it’s not enough for something to be important when you’re figuring out how to make a story. It’s the intersection of important and inter...
Mark as Played
April 10, 2024 • 53 mins
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His novel, published in March 2024, is Great Expectations.
“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to thi...
Mark as Played
April 3, 2024 • 53 mins
Megan Kimble is the former executive editor of The Texas Observer and has written for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and The Guardian. Her new book is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.
“I have never lived in a city that was not wrapped in highways. It’s hard for me to imagine anything else. And I think that’s true for a lot of people today. ... [But] we have known since the origins o...
Mark as Played
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