The Sunday Long Read Podcast
Pulitzer-winning reporter Don Van Natta Jr. and journalist Jacob Feldman chat with writers and editors from across the industry as an audio extension of The Sunday Long Read e-mail newsletter.
Episodes
November 9, 2023 • 39 mins
Edith Zimmerman rocketed to media stardom early in her career. Her editing of the influential and hilarious website The Hairpin got her a place on Forbes’ 30 under 30—at only twenty-eight, she was a “much sought after writer,” noted the magazine.
Zimmerman hasn’t lost an ounce of her humor in the years since, but she has slowly rediscovered herself. In the last episode of Take a Joke, Zimmerman and host Don Van Natta Jr. share th...
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November 4, 2023 • 44 mins
Award-winning radio reporter Matt Shearer is making Boston’s WBZ station—and by extension, local journalism—cool again. The thirty-six-year-old TikTok star’s success has breathed new life into the industry. In a wide-ranging conversation with host Jacob Feldman, Shearer shares his path to social media stardom.
In the third episode of “Take a Joke,” an SLR series on the mixing of humor and reporting, we got deep into the process of...
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October 28, 2023 • 30 mins
Dina Gusovsky was an award-winning investigative reporter before she put that career aside to pursue comedy in 2016, joining Late Night with Seth Meyers. Not because she wanted to move away from the news, but the opposite—she saw comedians doing deeper dives than journalists.
In the second episode of “Take a Joke,” an SLR series on the mixing of humor and reporting, Jacob Feldman talked to Gusovsky about that decision and the adju...
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October 21, 2023 • 53 mins
Welcome to the first episode of Take a Joke, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the captivating world of humor. Our first guest, Maureen Dowd, has been thorn in the side of American politicians for decades. In her conversation with host Don Van Natta Jr., she explains where her sense of humor comes from and how the subjects of her stories have taken it.
Take a Joke is sponsored by Funny Girls, a program from The Harnisch Founda...
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June 3, 2023 • 38 mins
Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our fourth guest is magazine writer and author Garrett Graff. In early 2023, the prolific journalist was tasked with one of the toughest assignments of his career: writing the obituary of his friend, New York Times editor and reporter Blake Hounshell. In a conversation with Don Van Natta Jr., Graff describes his experie...
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May 20, 2023 • 39 mins
Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our third guest, James Hagerty, is the only fulltime obituary writer at The Wall Street Journal, where he has worked for nearly 40 years.
He's also written a book, Yours Truly, on the value of telling your own story. He and Don discuss the value of humor in the face of grief and how thinking about what your own obitua...
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May 13, 2023 • 34 mins
Welcome back to The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our second guest, Kathleen McElroy, is a journalism professor at The University of Texas at Austin after spending nearly 30 years in the industry, including serving as Associate Managing Editor at The New York Times. Her 2013 article in the Journal of Black Studies focused particularly on obituaries, and the way they sh...
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April 29, 2023 • 48 mins
Welcome to the first episode of The Art of Remembering, a Sunday Long Read podcast series on the fascinating world of obituaries. Our first guest, Margalit Fox, is a long-time obituaries writer whose brilliant articles still grace the pages of The New York Times five years after her retirement. Margalit dissects the ins and outs of the work, delivers memorable lines, and discusses some of her favorite obits with Don.
The Art of R...
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December 9, 2022 • 23 mins
Welcome back to the long-dormant Sunday Long Read podcast! We're reviving our audio presence with a discussion between Don and Emily Kaplan, who wrote a piece copublished this week by the SLR and Pipe Wrench Magazine. It's about Mormons, Mexico, and the malleable nature of truth (among many other things). You can find it on sundaylongread.com and pipewrenchmag.com, where it is the centerpiece of their "road trip" issue.
The SLR po...
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December 8, 2019 • 57 mins
Tim Urban is a popular blogger and the co-founder of “Wait But Why,” a site that discusses a wide variety of topics including picking the right career path, SpaceX rockets, and love. His most recent mammoth work is “The Story of Us,” a re-tracing of how we got to this political moment.
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November 24, 2019 • 32 mins
Caity Weaver is a favorite of the Sunday Long Read, appearing in multiple newsletters every year, always giving us thoughtful, clever, and enjoyable stories to read. This week, the New York Times features writer joins Jacob to talk about how she interviews celebrities, to outline how she interacts with editors, and to perform a real-time dive into her search history on the Oxford English Dictionary. Along the way she provides a few...
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November 10, 2019 • 59 mins
There are few couples like Deborah and James Fallows, who have spent more than half a decade talking to people and visiting communities across America to produce "Our Towns," a New York Times bestseller, published last year, and an online series for The Atlantic. They're some of the smartest, most diligent people reporting on the state of the country today and they joined Jacob for a two-in-one SLR podcast to discuss their distinct...
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October 27, 2019 • 53 mins
Charles Duhigg is a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, the author of The Power of Habit, and a magazine writer who most recently published an in-depth look at Amazon's world-eating growth for The New Yorker.
“The first question I might ask is, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t know enough to know what question to ask you. What do you think is the most interesting thing I could ask you about x?’ It catches them off guard ... and they a...
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September 22, 2019 • 37 mins
"I kind of think of myself as a nature writer disguised as a food writer. Food is a great way to write about plants and animals because everyone has a built-in interest, "
Rowan Jacobsen is an award-winning author who writes about food, sustainability, and the environment. Jacob and Rowan discuss how the latter delved into the world of food writing and some of his work including "Is Sunscreen The New Margarine?" for Outside, whic...
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September 13, 2019 • 45 mins
"If you don’t want to tell me something it makes me very interested in what it is.” Jessica Pressler is a staff writer at New York magazine and joins Jacob this week to talk interesting stories, screen adaptations, and empathy. Her article "The Hustlers at Scores," is the basis for the new movie "Hustlers," and Jessica discusses the unique experiences of having a story adapted for the screen and being visited in your own home by a ...
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September 5, 2019 • 41 mins
Jessica Contrera covers a wide range of topics as a narrative reporter for the Washington Post and in this week's podcast she chats with Don about her happiest (and saddest) stories, taking care of her mental health while covering traumatic events, and the positive influence a good editor has on a young reporter. Jessica has been featured several times in the Sunday Long Read newsletter and the stories of hers that we've highlighte...
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May 26, 2019 • 45 mins
The best-selling author, GQ correspondent, and National Magazine Award Finalist is our latest guest. Laskas discusses her books and articles including To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope; her New York Times Magazine article "The Mailroom;" and her GQ article "Game Brain," which inspired the movie "Concussion."
[0:49] Jeanne Marie on her book tour for “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope”
[1:54] How she came up with the...
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April 27, 2019 • 65 mins
Will Leitch founded Deadspin nearly 14 years ago. Since 2008, Leitch has written and worked outside of the site, most recently as a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a national correspondent for MLB, and the host of “The Will Leitch Show” on Sports Illustrated TV.
“…During the years I actively ran [Deadspin] — now more than a decade in the past — I was ostensibly in charge of figuring out what was coming next on the sports...
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March 24, 2019 • 47 mins
Anne Helen Petersen, although she's a superb culture writer for BuzzFeed News, still gets a little nauseous at the prospect of talking to people for her stories. She talks about that and more with Jacob on this week's episode, where they touch on reporting attire, Beto O'Rourke, and Anne's viral story on burnout. Anne was an academic before becoming a reporter on the fly and has adjusted to sharing her work in different ways, inclu...
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January 27, 2019 • 43 mins
Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine, a contributing writer at WIRED, and a contributing editor at Harper’s. He’s the author of a travel memoir called A Sense of Direction, and he teaches nonfiction in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. Here, he talks with Jacob about ideal story length (100 pages, anyone?), why it took months to work out the structure of his latest NYT Magazine piece, how ...
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