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22.05.
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Longform
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Episode 580: Rachel Khong
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 relationships are.”
Show notes:
rachelkhong.com
01:00 Real American
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15.05.
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Longform
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Episode 579: Kelsey McKinney
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 me. But I think that a lot of a creative career is understanding
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08.05.
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Longform
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Episode 578: Lissa Soep
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 a product of that time.”
Show notes:
00:00 Other People’s Words:
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01.05.
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Longform
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Episode 577: PJ Vogt
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 • Mar 2024)
03:00 “Why Are There So Many Illegal Weed Stores in New
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24.04.
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Longform
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Episode 576: Lindsay Peoples
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 young. I'm too Black. I'm aware of all those things and I'm still go
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19.04.
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Longform
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Polk Award Winners: Jason Motlagh
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 that. I think I've just tried to be more honest about like, [am I t
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18.04.
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Longform
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Polk Award Winners: Brian Howey
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 to hear the change in a parent’s voice when they realize for the
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17.04.
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Longform
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Polk Award Winners: Meribah Knight
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 worth recognizing and saying, This work matters, people are paying
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16.04.
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Longform
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Polk Award Winners: Jesse Coburn
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 is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners
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15.04.
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Longform
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Polk Award Winners: Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers
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 interesting. And that has taught me that people will watch anything, a